Authors: Eric Rickstad
The Silent Girls (12 page)
“I’d see you did.”
“You can’t just appoint me Senior Detective. There’s a process, and—”
“It’s a fucking board of farmers and insurance salesman. I think I know the process, and saved up a lifetime of favors to negotiate road bumps.”
“No.”
“Look. The ground’s shifting. The world is finding its way into the Kingdom. South from Montreal. North from Boston.”
“You sound like an old man.”
“I’m telling you. The Montreal strip joints, the pole dancers aren’t just McGill University nursing coeds anymore, looking to make a buck by rubbing their wares against a stainless-steel pole to the tune of “Pour Some Sugar On Me,” then marrying an MBA. Those places are linked to hard-core-porn rings now, Eastern European sex trafficking. That’s
fifty
minutes away, and they’re reaching their tentacles into
our homes
to groom new
talent.
”
“You think that’s where Mandy is?”
“I don’t
think
anything. My head is still marinated with Bacardi. But we’re seeing that bath-salts shit. Heroin. I thought
that
shit went out when Cobain gave a BJ to his shotgun.”
“I like how things are.”
“You’ve never liked how things are. That’s why I put it out there. Think about it.”
“I’ll think about thinking about it.”
“You’re pretty good at the asshole shtick yourself.”
“That’s why you like me so much.”
“Probably.” Barrons comported his bulk. “I heard about Preacher.
Whatever
happens with him, don’t let it get to you.”
Whatever happens.
“You hear me?” Barrons said.
Rath shrugged.
“Then do me a favor,” Barrons said. “I don’t want to see you fucked up by this. Going after that scum. Nothing good can come of it.”
R
ATH SAT IN
Rankin’s waiting room, his empty stomach groaning as he ate half a Snickers in a bite. The receptionist had told him he hadn’t needed to fast. He popped the other half of the Snickers in his mouth. A nurse entered. “Mr. Rath?”
Rath followed the nurse, a soft, amorphous, middle-aged woman with frizzy hair so unnaturally blond she ought to just let it go gray. She had runs in her nylons, just above the heel of her white sneakers. She pushed her hip into a bar in the middle of a door, and the door opened to the outside of the building, what looked like a loading zone.
Rath raised an eyebrow. “You kicking me out?”
“We have a temporary setup out here.”
A temporary
MRI machine? Rath followed her to a trailer a few feet away.
“Go on in,” she said.
Rath climbed the metal folding stairs up into the trailer, the nurse close behind, shutting them inside with the swing of the metal door.
The trailer was as tight as a coffin, immediately in front of him was a panel of gadgetry. To his left was, apparently, the MRI machine. It took up the width of the trailer. A cylindrical apparatus made of cream-colored plastic, a cushioned bed he’d lie on before he was shoved into the machine like a loaf of bread into an oven on a baker’s paddle. It looked like something out of
Star Trek.
“It looks more ominous than it is,” the nurse said. “I swear it doesn’t hurt.”
“Can’t hurt more than my back does.”
“Won’t hurt at all. I’ll slide you in, and all you have to do is lie still and relax. I’ll speak to you through an intercom. You’ll hear a few noises, and that’s it.”
Rath took a breath, wondered what they might find inside his body. His liver. His pancreas. There was nothing that could be done for the pancreas. If Steve Jobs couldn’t buy his way out of it, no one could.
“Don’t worry,” the nurse said. “If you’d take off your belt and anything else that is metal. Coins, keys—in this basket.” She handed him a plastic basket that looked like something fried clams would be served in up in a Maine seafood shack.
He did as asked, and she guided him to the MRI machine and helped him rest back on it, her cold palm flat on his chest. “Some of the noises will be a bit loud, so you can wear these.”
She handed him a pair of foam earplugs like those he used when sighting in his .30-06. He wedged them in his ears.
As the foam expanded in his ear canal, the world grew muted and remote, while the sounds of his own body grew pronounced: his heartbeat, swallowing and breathing and blinking.
The nurse slid him in and shut the door to leave him in the silent, claustrophobic tube. A distant whir rose, then a sound like a lug-nut gun in a mechanic’s garage.
Clackclack clack
. Silence again.
“OK,” a faraway, gauzy voice said, “I’m going to move you farther back.”
He slid back with the padding beneath him.
He closed his eyes and breathed. A clicking sound arose around him. The sound of a camera shooting pictures rapid fire.
“Turn on your left side please,” the voice said.
He struggled to turn, pain shooting from his back down his leg.
Clickclick clack.
“Your right side please.”
His palms were sticky. His heart skipping.
The machine whirred, a soft, low, pleasant hum. He drifted on the sound.
“OK,” the voice said.
Rath jolted.
Had he fallen asleep?
The door to the MRI machine opened, and he was slid out.
“Fall asleep?” the nurse said.
“Hmm, no,” he lied. Embarrassed somehow.
“A lot of people do,” she said kindly.
He gathered his belongings from the fried-clam basket. Saw images of the internal workings of a body on a computer screen, each muscle as distinct as a poster of a steer in a butcher shop. “Is that me?” he said.
“That’s you.”
“Can you tell if there’s anything wrong?”
“I just take the pictures. I’m sure your doctor will be in touch. It’ll be all right.”
Rath left unconvinced.
He was pulling out of the parking lot as his cell phone buzzed on the seat. He picked it up. The Dress Shoppe. A current of electricity sang in him. The phone buzzed again. He stared at it, picked it up, and answered.
“Is Frank there?” a woman’s voice said.
“Speaking,” Rath said.
Speaking?
Who spoke so formally?
The woman was saying something.
“What? I lost you for a moment,” he said, lying.
“It’s Madeline.” Her voice was bright and musical, and his tension from thinking about the MRI subsided to hear it. “I was calling to see how your daughter liked the jumper and to remind you that you can always return it for an exchange. We don’t do full returns for worn clothes, but . . .” She paused. “Anyway, did she like it?” Was this business?
“She loved it,” Rath lied again, wanting Madeline to feel as good about her choice of jumpers as he surprisingly felt at hearing her voice.
“Well,” she said. “Great.” He knew he’d messed up. She’d tossed him a big fat easy softball that hung up belt high over the plate, and he’d look it into the glove. She didn’t care about the jumper; she was calling for him. Or was she? Damn it. He couldn’t tell. What did it matter anyway?
“Hello,” Madeline said. “You there?”
“Sorry, I’m in a bad place, a bad section of road.”
“I’ll let you go. I’m glad your daughter liked it.”
“Maybe I’ll stop in sometime, get her another one.” He sucked a breath through teeth. He sounded desperate.
“Great.” Her voice had lost its warmth, grown distracted. “I have a customer—”
“Of course. Sorry.”
“No need to apologize.” Her voice cool now. “Good-bye.”
He ended the call and looked at himself in the rearview mirror. “Idiot.”
T
HAT NIGHT,
R
ATH
watched Barrons’s presser on WKDM, unsurprised by the reporters asking how the police could possibly have waited more than seventy-two hours to have made public a missing
sixteen-year-old girl
. Barrons had tried to impress upon them that it was a matter of the law. Miss Wilks had won her right to emancipation, adulthood. But since the logic of the law flew in the face of common sense, the reporters hammered away: “She’s
sixteen.
”
The deer carcass had frozen solid to the barn’s dirt floor, and Rath had called Grout to help with it. But Grout was too busy with running down files on old crimes involving Satanists and sadists and other assorted twisted fucks, and attending his son’s basketball game to be bothered with such a nuisance. Or so he’d said. Rath knew Grout had taken exception when Rath hadn’t backed him in front of Barrons. Grout probably wondered why Barrons had kept Rath back in his office, too. Rath wanted nothing to do with politics or a legitimate role in the force, especially now with Preacher having a chance to enter society a free man. If Preacher were released, Rath did not want to be bound by the law.
A raw northeast blow and sleet storm swept the last of autumn’s leaves from the trees and kept Rath inside with his Lagavulin and his case notes.
Halloween would soon be here. No trick-or-treaters came to his house — they never ventured down his dead-end road — but the thought of Halloween made him think of Rachel. He’d called her several times only to get her full-voice-mail message. He’d texted, to no avail. At least he had her text to refer to, and knew she was OK. He knew how it was: midterms, first year of college. His first semester, he’d had every intention of calling his mother; he had just never gotten around to it. It was part and parcel of college life.
So, he decided to surrender to his own new independence, relax into the silence of the house, and try to take a break from details of the case and from stewing about Preacher.
He spread out deer hunting gear in the living room to prepare for the upcoming rifle season. He hung his Johnson hunting jacket out on the back porch to air it out and get traces of human scent off of it. He broke out a box of grunt calls and compasses, sharpened his knife, and laid out his topo maps. He’d considered buying a GPS, a technology he’d sworn he’d never cave in to, and in the end hadn’t. If a man could not get by in the woods with a compass and topo map, what kind of outdoorsman was he?
The next day, he took a day trip across New Hampshire to Kittery, Maine Trading Post, where he bought a Zeiss scope that cost nearly a grand, without a hint of buyer’s remorse. Afterward, in Portsmouth, he indulged in fresh, deep-fried, whole-belly clams dipped in melted butter and washed them down with a couple Narragansett pints.
Back home, he broke out his old Lee reloader press and knocked out fifty rounds of hand-pressed superhot 190 grain, round-nose .30-06 rifle cartridges. He took his Springfield pump out back along Ice Pond and sighted in the Zeiss with his hand-loaded rounds, dialed the rifle in until it drove tacks at two hundred yards.
He plinked cans with the .22 revolver he kept in the Scout’s glove box.
Still. Thoughts of Preacher and the missing girls crawled into the back of his mind like a burglar slipping in through a cellar window. Snatches of each missing girl’s circumstances plagued him, and he returned to the files again and again. Much as he tried not too, he obsessed about Preacher’s parole hearing. He didn’t know if he could bring himself to go. During a late-afternoon nap, he dreamt of Laura at the bottom of the stairs, her face turned away in shame. And when he leaned at her side, he saw that her face was Rachel’s face. In his dream, Rath would jump back as the sound of Preacher’s cruel laughter broke around him. When he looked up the staircase, he’d see Preacher standing at the top, laughing, his lecherous eyes gleaming. In his arms, he held baby Rachel. What disturbed Rath most was that Rachel wasn’t squirming to escape Preacher’s grasp, but was calm and quiet; at peace in this monster’s arms. He awoke with a jolt to the sadistic laughter echoing in his head, icy sweat soaking him.
What good would it do for him to show at the hearing? To be subjected to a person with such a filthy soul and watch as that person was treated with respect and due process. What respect had he shown Laura and Daniel, or the young girls before them? But. If Rath didn’t go. What would his absence say? That he didn’t care? If he didn’t care, why should anyone else? He didn’t know what he could say that would convey his sense of loss. He worried his anger would get the best of him.
He was pondering what to do the next morning while out at the barn, standing over the dead deer with a Saws All to cut it up into chunks when his cell buzzed.
“Yeah,” he said, distracted.
“We found something. Lou did. The girl’s feet were bruised and cut.” It was Sonja.
“So our psycho’s a foot fetishist, too.”
“Cut up from running. Barefoot. She wasn’t dumped. She escaped
.
Her feet suffered so many cuts no one in their right mind could have kept running like she did. The St. J. force and staties have scoured the area. They found a cabin near where she was found. Nothing obvious that anyone was kept there. We’ll see. They figure she either came from there or escaped from a car on the road below. She died of exposure. She wasn’t murdered. Then, when the flood came—” She paused. “And—”
“And what?”
“She was pregnant.”
“How did Lou miss that in the initial?”
“The condition of the body, for one. And, there was no fetus.”
“What? How? Animals?” Rath felt ill.
“So to speak. Lou thinks someone took it.”
Took it.
Rath swallowed hard. “How far along was she?”
“Impossible to say. No one close to her so far has claimed they knew about it. “
Rath slumped and sat, a hand resting on the frozen deer. Jesus, what was
this
?
“We need to meet. First chance. Grout’s got something, too.”
R
ATH LOBBED A
dart over Detective Test’s head to hit the triple 12 on the dartboard behind her.
“Watch it,” she said.
“Before we get to our pregnant dead girl,” Grout said, brusquely, “I have two things. First, I admit I may have been wrong. Maybe the girls are connected. And maybe it is something other than a straight-out rape killing. Second. A Mandy update. Larkin vacuumed all of her e-mails, interactions on Facebook, social-media crap. Zip. She only has six friends on Facebook, all girls, and has not posted anything since August. All her friends were girls. Plenty of guys sent friend requests. Larkin’s looking into them. But Mandy wasn’t active online. She had no computer. Good for her. That online shit’s pathetic. The older you are, the more so.”
“I’m on Facebook,” Sonja said.
“Right,” Grout said. “Anyway. She’s a loner. No close friends. Maybe because of the upheaval in her family life.”
“Anything there?” Rath said, “The coke-dealing dad?”
“A real winner, as you know,” Grout said. “Landscaper in the summer. Ski-lift operator in the winters. Not a sign of coke dealing when I stopped by to interview him. Your visit must have put him on high alert. He claims he was razzing you about pimping the girl because
you
, as he put it, were
fucking her with your eyes.
”
“I—” Rath said.
“Forget it. He’s a fucktard,” Grout said. “I grilled him like a sirloin about Mandy. He tried to come off as genuinely baffled why we’re even looking for her. Said she took off. That’s why she got emancipated after all. Called her a
little bitch.
She’s always done just what she wanted, according to him. Apparently, he doesn’t like people doing what they want unless it’s him. I think the girl, Porkchop, Abby Land, was covering for him though, as far as an alibi. There was definitely something there. She was scared.”
“I wonder why,” Rath said.
“I don’t,” Grout said. “Guy’s a fucking animal. His new wife, she’s been in Arizona the past two weeks because her mother’s dying. I don’t think Abby’s covering because she thinks he did something to Mandy. I asked her in private if she thought he did it. She looked me dead in the eyes and said no. She was telling the truth. But, I think she’s covering for him for something else. Maybe an affair. Or the coke dealing. It’s a fucked-up situation in that house. Much as I’d like to fuck this guy up, regarding Mandy, I think he’s a nonstarter, especially if the girls are all connected.”
Grout took a breath. Smiled. He handed a folder each to Sonja and Rath. He was taking control. Rath and Sonja had pissed him off in Barrons’s office, and it was fueling him to find focus and command. About time. Grout smiled again. “I ran down recent activity involving Satanic graffiti, sadism, the like,” he said. “I dug up these two model citizens.”
Rath opened the folder and looked at the mug shots from nineteen months prior of George Waters and Jeff Barber, both eighteen years old. Waters had the pale skin of a drowning victim pocked with acne craters and a nose that looked like a malformed tuber. His long hair was black and oily as hot tar and was plastered to his caved cheeks. His narrow eyes were black, the irises as dark as the pupils, reptilian. Peach fuzz traced his upper lip like a child’s scribble, and his left earlobe sported an earring: a silver pentagram.
The other mug shot showed a kid who looked somewhat normal in comparison, which wasn’t saying much. His hair was buzz cut; the first impression Rath had was
skinhead.
Odd how the same cut on another person might have made Rath think
military
or
monk.
The kid’s bulging eyes gave him a startled, anxious look if you didn’t recognize symptoms of drug use. The kid’s eyes were jaundiced and set in a squeezed face that, paired with his sharp teeth, gave him a Nosferatu look. A sinister smile slashed his face, as if he thought getting a mug shot was a joke. Which he probably did.
“Real studs,” Sonja said.
“They were arrested for vandalism of a construction site. May of 2009. Along with—” Grout flipped a page of the report. “Desecration of a cemetery and animal cruelty.”
“Shit,” Sonja said. “These are the two lowlifes that killed that dog and left it on a headstone.”
Grout nodded. “
Gutted
the dog. And knocked over headstones with their pickup.”
“I should have thought of them. I missed the connection because I mostly remember the dog. Poisoned with hamburger laced with crystal Drano.”
Rath vaguely remembered something about the case now.
“But it didn’t die from that,” Grout said, “They sliced it open along its belly and pulled out all its insides while it was still alive.”
“They killed the puppies with a hammer,” Sonja said.
“Puppies?” Rath said.
“All five puppies,” Grout said. “Smashed to pulp with a hammer on headstones.”
“Practice for babies?” Sonja said, pale-faced.
“The graffiti they sprayed was of swastikas and pentagrams and
goats’ heads
,” Grout admitted, not without some regret. “It’s not as much
that
they painted the headstones as it is
what
they
painted the headstones with
.”
Rath read down the page. “They drained the dog’s blood into spray bottles?”
“Rust-Oleum red wasn’t good enough for these clowns,” Grout said.
This sort of viciousness wasn’t found in your average rebellious teen. It wasn’t even rebellion. It was an ecstatic pleasure taken from the debasement of other living creatures. Pure sadism. “So where are our two celebrated-citizen youths these days?” Rath said.
“Not in jail, where they should be,” Grout said. “They did Juvie. Community service. Same old shit. Blame it on their losing the parent lottery. Being minors. Give them a break.”
“No crimes committed since then?” Sonja asked.
“No arrests,” Grout said.
“Which isn’t the same thing,” Sonja said.
“Sick kids like these, how long do you think they still get their kicks from animal cruelty before they graduate to something
better
?” Grout said.
“They still in the area?” Rath asked.
“You’ll love this. Barber is in Afghanistan. Joined the fucking army. They’ll take anyone these days, apparently.” Grout said. “Waters is a house painter and is working on a construction site down in Bloomfield. I got a line on his address. But I might try to catch him off guard at work, first thing in the morning. I spoke to the general contractor, and he said the painters are in first this week, the electricians and plumbers done. I told him to have the other painters arrive about twenty minutes later than usual, so I can nab Waters alone. Brush up on how to remain neutral in the face of life’s shit.”