The Silent Girls (13 page)
Authors: Eric Rickstad
G
ROUT WAITED I
N
his Outback at the construction site, listening to CHOM FM out of Montreal and eating a fresh Clear Brook Farm cider donut. If there was one thing about fall he looked forward to, it was these donuts. That, and good sleeping weather. Every August he put AC units in the bedroom windows. The AC put Jen into a catatonic state, but the meat-locker clamminess kept Grout awake. The AC was a wash when it came to the kids; with the AC off, they swam in their own sweat. With the AC on, they were comfortable but kept awake by the AC’s racket. And sleepless children were demonic children. Autumn always came just as it seemed the family would implode into mutual homicide against one another. Now, with the cold nights, and the windows cracked a hair the family slept like victims of a carbon-monoxide leak.
Grout had awoken this morning invigorated instead of feeling like a slab of leftover meat loaf. He and Jen had fallen asleep in bed while watching a
Columbo
DVD. Jen liked
Columbo
for the seventies’ fashion. Grout watched it for the classic cars and the banter. The investigations themselves were ridiculous. The episode the previous night had starred Robert Culp as a blackmailing and murdering private eye. It seemed Robert Culp was in half the episodes. Grout liked him. Jen had fallen asleep a half-hour into the show. So tonight, as usual, they’d rewind to where she’d drifted off. It usually took three nights to watch an episode.
Grout pulled a second cider donut from the paper bag, the donut warm and smelling pleasantly of yeasty dough and warm sugar. The donuts were the only junk food in which he indulged; otherwise, sweets had no grip on him as they did the kids, who could stand to lose a few pounds by playing outside. Liam’s basketball and Jill’s gymnastics did not make up for running your brains out in the yard, something he and his brother had done growing up but which was apparently stripped from today’s kids’ genes. Grout and his brother had fought like cats dragged to water to stay outside. Summers, they’d roamed the woods behind the house until the mosquitoes drove them inside; winters, they’d sledded until they couldn’t feel their fingers. The whole world was weakening. He wondered if in two hundred years, humans would be reduced to gelatinous blobs hooked up to feeding tubes.
Grout ate his second donut. They were made from scratch at dawn, September through November only. This morning, he’d arrived at six
A.M
., the farm shrouded in fog, to watch the girl roll and cut the dough, then drop it in hot, foaming oil. She’d scooped each donut out, rolled them in sugar then tonged five into his bag, handing him the sixth. When he took that first bite, sugar clung to his lips and melted, and the donut’s crisp golden skin gave way to a hot, doughy inside. He was lucky Clear Brook only made donuts in the fall. He’d weigh three hundred pounds and have arteries as clogged as old sewer pipes if they had them year-round. Shit. He’d be dead by now.
He tore a third donut in two; the sugar melted to a sweet film, and popped half in his mouth. He licked his fingers as he watched through the windshield.
A clunker Chevy Suburban out of a
Starsky & Hutch
episode rattled into the site, the radio blasting death metal. George Waters.
Waters stepped from the truck wearing painter’s overalls and carrying a canvas tool bag. From fifty feet away, the eruptions of pustules on his cheeks were plainly visible. Greasy black hair like rotted kelp pasted to his ugly mug.
Grout opened his car door slowly and got out.
Waters dropped his bag and bolted across the lot toward the fields behind the site.
Grout stood frozen for a moment. Then he took pursuit.
The kid sprang across the lot, weaved between parked dozers and bucket loaders, then leapt a barbed-wire fence and broke across a cow pasture. He had two hundred feet on Grout when Grout had to stop at the fence, unable to hurdle it. As he swung a leg over the fence, his pant cuff tore as he fell over the fence onto his face. He jumped up and started across the field, pushing hard. He was in reasonable shape, but the pale and sickly-looking kid had two things going for him: youth and fear.
Grout kept pace across a knobby field that tortured his ankles. His lungs burned as the kid leapt another fence, putting more distance between them.
Grout trudged on, climbed the next fence. When he looked up, the field was empty. The kid was gone. Then, Grout saw him. The kid popped up from the grass. He’d fallen and now hobbled lamely. Grout took off. Slowly, he closed, shouting, “Stop! Police!” like an imbecile. As if a fleeing criminal had ever stopped because a cop had yelled after him. Grout sucked breath between his teeth, a stitch in his side slowing him. But he was gaining. The kid was hurt.
Grout was nearly within reach. He lunged at the kid’s legs and found only air, then frozen mud. The kid kicked Grout’s hand, and Grout felt the knuckles of two fingers pop and break. He gritted his teeth.
Motherfucker.
He scrambled after the limping kid and dove again, wrapping the kid’s ankles in his arms as the kid hit the ground hard.
“Fucker,” the kid shouted, kicking. But Grout was too strong for the scrawny youth. He cranked the kid’s foot, and Waters wailed in pain. Grout cranked some more.
Then reefed the kids hands behind his back, cuffed him, and slammed his face into the frozen ground, growling as adrenaline raged in him, “You piece of shit!”
“S
IT,”
G
ROUT ORDERED
Waters in the interrogation room, with Officer Larkin watching from behind the two-way. The kid glowered, his face muddied and bruised. “I’m going to tell them you abused me,” the kid sneered.
“Tell who? My boss? He could use a laugh.”
Grout sat opposite, taking an aloof posture, his legs out and crossed leisurely at the ankles, as if he were on a park bench enjoying the sun. He took a donut from his bag. They were cold but still good. He took a bite. His throbbing knuckles were swollen three times their normal size, broken for sure. He held them up to the kid. “Assault of a police officer,” Grout said absently. He looked up at the video camera in the corner. “Lead Detective Harland Grout interviewing one George Henry Waters, October 27, 2011.”
The kid made a snoring sound.
“Assault’s small potatoes.” Grout held up his hand. “Compared to murder.”
The kid cracked his back. “What the fuck are you jabbering about?”
“You tell me, you little sadist.” Grout fished another donut from the bag.
“You’re a walking, fucking cliché,” the kid snapped. “
Donuts?
”
Grout held up the donut. “Not just any donut, you twat. A Clear Brook Farm donut. And look at you, speaking of clichés. Mister Satanist. With your dyed black hair and your black-painted fingernails filed sharp, your repulsive cadaver skin and pentagram tattoos. You look like a
Twilight
extra. I bet you got Aleister Crowley books at home.”
“Kafka and Camus actually.”
Grout had never heard of them. “Maybe a pet python?”
“You don’t know shit.”
“I know you like gutting dogs.”
The kid cackled.
“Desecrating gravesites of the dead who’ve rested in peace for two centuries,” Grout pressed.
The kid yawned, picked at a loose thumb cuticle. “Who says they rest in peace?”
Grout took out a photo of Mandy, the good one, slid toward the kid.
The kid looked at it. “Hot bitch. Who is she?”
“Don’t you know?”
“I think I’d remember a piece of ass like that.”
“I think you do remember.”
“You don’t know shit.” The kid stared, eyes blazing with hatred.
“I guess a high-school dropout knows more than anyone, right?”
“Ooh, you’ve been in my file. School don’t mean squat when it comes to smarts. Bill Gates dropped out.”
“Yeah, you’re a real Bill Gates.”
The kid stared at Grout. “I guess I should aspire to be a civil servant who risks his life for shit pay and can’t even afford to take the family to Six Flags. A real genius, like you.”
Grout felt his blood lather. If the knuckles of his right hand weren’t busted, he’d hammer the punk in the face. “Where were you on March 11 this past spring?”
The kid laughed. “
March?
You shitting me? Where were
you
?”
“In bed watching
Columbo.
”
The kid stared, baffled.
“Maybe you were abducting
her
?” Grout slid a photo of Julia alive to the kid. “Dogs weren’t fun anymore. So you decide you’d like carving goats’ heads into girls instead to hear them scream, or was she unconscious when you did it?”
“Never seen her,” the kid said.
“How about her?” Grout slid a photo of Julia’s corpse. The kid flinched. Then, a smile, disturbingly gleeful, broke on his face. “That shit for real?”
Grout sat stone-faced.
The kid fell back in his seat. “Wow. Sick. What’s it got to do with me?”
“I thought you’d like to know what she looked like after you were done with her.”
“Me?” The kid snapped his posture so straight, his chair skidded backward. “No fucking way. That’s sick shit.”
“Whereas gutting a dog while it’s alive isn’t? Using its blood to paint pentagrams on headstones.” Grout perked up, fixed his eyes on the kid. “Smashing fucking puppies with a ball-peen hammer. That’s just a run-of-the-fucking-mill good time. You got bored with dogs. Maybe they didn’t struggle enough. Plead enough.”
The kid sprang up from his chair, eyeing the door.
“Sit the fuck down!” Grout roared, and shot up to standing, his muscles twitching to hurt the kid.
The kid sat. “I’m not into that shit anymore,” he said.
“Turned over a new leaf, did you?”
“I’m clean. And sober. For a year. I got a job. Or had one till you ran after me.”
“
You
ran
from
me.”
“I run from cops, so?”
“How’d you know I was a cop?”
The kid grunted and sniffed. “I could smell your pussy.”
This kid was begging for it. A fucking masochist and a sadist. Worst of the nuts to crack: the ones who didn’t care what happened to themselves. “Why’d you run? Who’d you think I was?” Grout let the question hang, the silence bloom. Silence was a key tactic to get someone to talk. Most people couldn’t stand it. It was like a big invisible finger of accusation.
“I thought you were sent by this other guy I know,” the kid finally said.
“Who?”
“I can’t say.”
“You better. Otherwise, I’m liable to think you were running because you knew we’d tied you to kidnapping, torture, murder. That’s life behind bars. With fellow rapists.”
“He’s just a guy after me to do some work. Break-ins. But I’m not doing it.”
“Then why run? Why not tell him?”
“You don’t
tell
guys like him anything. They
tell
you. What day did that hottie disappear?”
“Late night October the twenty-second or early in the morning the twenty-third.”
The kid muttered, wedged his bony hands between his knees, rocked in place.
“I was home. Sick. I was supposed to be at AA earlier in the evening on the twenty-second. But, I felt like shit.”
“Anybody home with you?”
“I live alone.”
“Right.” Grout tapped the photo of dead Julia. “You see that? Look at it.”
The kid moved his eyes over the photo.
“See that carving there.” Grout tapped the photo. “That’s a goat’s head.”
“Looks like bullshit to me.”
It was true. Grout still didn’t see the supposed goat’s head Test claimed to see so plainly.
“Your signature work. If you were me, and you were looking for someone sick enough to do something like that, you’d have to think it was pretty select company.”
The kid wrinkled his lip.
“Now, if you had these two kids who’d done similar things to a dog,” Grout said. “And only one kid was in the States, and he had no alibi, what would you think?” The kid’s eyes locked on Julia’s corpse, his left eye twitching.
“You got off mutilating some kid’s pet,” Grout said. “You’re way into the Satanism.”
The kid mumbled something unintelligible.
“What?” Grout said. “What the fuck did you say? Get the cock out of your mouth.”
“I don’t
believe
in that shit,” the kid said, chuckling. “I never did.” He looked up from under his brow and gave Grout a cold, mischievous stare as if he’d studied that sicko movie. What was it?
A Clockwork Orange
?
“We did it for fun,” Waters said. “And it
was
fun. At the time. To get at old fucks like you. How easily you sheep fall for stupid fucking symbols. We carved goats’ heads and pentagrams because it was fun to watch people go all crazy.”
Grout ground his teeth. This kid had no place walking around in society.
“Pentagrams, swastikas, nooses, crosses. All that shit. It means fuck-all to
me,
” Waters sneered. “
You
old superstitious fucks give symbols power. Not me.” He smiled, his eyes black, depthless. “Do you believe in the devil? Because I sure as fuck
don’t.
”
Grout didn’t know if he believed. Neither he nor Jen had stepped inside a church since they’d been kids. Then, their own kids had started asking about God, and Grout had felt
why not
expose them to church, let them decide for themselves?
Besides, if this kid wasn’t spawned from the devil, who was?
The kid was rambling, “ . . . we carved goats heads and pentagrams because it was fun to watch people go all crazy.”
Grout leaned in, close enough to Waters’s face to taste the kid’s foul breath.
“What
do
you believe in?” Grout said.
“Nothing,” the kid said. He nodded at the photos of Julia. “It wasn’t me. And what’s some girl who disappeared in March got to do with the hot chick?”
The kid was right. There was no real proof of a connection between Mandy and the others. He’d been going on gut. And it could come back to bite him in the ass.
“We done?” the kid said. “Cuz, unless you’re going to arrest me, I—”
“I am arresting you.”
“What the fuck for?”
“Assault of a police officer.” Grout held up his injured hand and gave the kid the finger.