The Silent Girls (7 page)
Authors: Eric Rickstad
“Y
OU CAN’T LET
anyone know I leaked this to you,” Sonja said. She sat across from Rath in a dark booth at the rear of The Wilderness, the booth replete with forest green plastic cushions that squeaked like a gerbil wheel every time she or Rath blinked. The two perused plastic menus the size of billboards and tattooed with countless greasy fingerprints: a forensic nightmare.
Being 2:30 on a Monday, and The Wilderness was dead except for two waitresses rolling up utensils in green napkins and consolidating ketchup in ketchup bottles. The
clack
of billiard balls rose from the establishment’s lone pool table in the back bar. Country music played. Johnny Cash sang his rendition of “Hurt,” which Rath preferred to the original.
“I don’t have sway in Victory,” Sonja said, “but we pool depressing resources. And Lou’s my neighbor. But if he knew I was passing incomplete reports to an unofficial—”
“I get it,” Rath said. “Why not loop in Grout? It’s his investigation. He’s your superior. If this girl is Mandy, the state police will contact him anyway. As of midnight last night, Mandy was officially missing.”
“Because this has nothing to do with Mandy. Unless we,
you,
find something. My hands are tied, the girl being found outside my jurisdiction, and, well—”
Rath sipped his chocolate shake. Here he was, The Great PI, fifteen-hundred-calorie milk shake in hand, puzzled by The Mystery of His Middle-Age Flab.
Sonja slid a manila folder to Rath. He lifted the cover with his pinkie and glimpsed a ghastly photo, then let the folder fall shut.
“She’s not our girl,” Sonja said. “The body is partly decomposed.”
“I see that.”
“It was found in Sugar Brook, a tributary to the Connecticut. Wedged under a blow down.” She leaned on her elbows. “Here’s the thing—”
Rath pushed his shake aside as a stout waitress in her fifties clonked over, blowing a wisp of gray hair out of her weary eyes. “Decided?” she said, as if peeved customers would have the gall to come in during her dead time. Rath wondered if his mother had ever showed such irritation with customers. No, he decided. Never. “Well?” the waitress said.
“Chicken tenders,” Sonja said.
“You?” The waitress bobbed her head at Rath as if accusing him of a crime, perhaps something lecherous.
“A Barnburner Burger, rare, with chipotle sauce, onion rings. And a Molson.” Mystery of the Middle-Aged Flab solved.
They sent her on her way.
“Chipotle on a burger?” Sonja said.
“Salsa of the not-so-new millennium.”
Rath pushed a fist into his lower back, wishing he’d stopped to get his prescription filled on the way. “Go on,” he said.
“She wasn’t killed there. She wasn’t even
left
there. The way she was crammed up under the logjam looks like she was dumped upstream, maybe in a shallow grave near the brook. Then, along came the flooding we had to unearth her and carry her downstream. There are broken bones, her left zygomatic is crushed, right ulna and radius both shattered, and deep lacerations to the body suffered postmortem. Likely from the body’s being washed down the creek, getting stuck, then tearing free again.”
“Cause of death?”
“It will be awhile. The abdomen was ripped open, too. By very sharp rocks looks like. Animals had been at her organs and viscera.” Sonja twisted her wedding band absentmindedly. “Could be natural causes. Maybe she was hiking, got caught in a storm, and—”
“You don’t believe that.”
The waitress dropped their plates and walked away in a huff.
Rath stared at his still-sizzling onion rings, deciding to let them cool before he launched into them and burned his mouth as he always did. The burger was the size of a trash-can lid. “How old do we think this girl is?” he said.
“Sixteen to twenty.” Sonja peeled the fried breading from a chicken finger to lay bare a hunk of pale meat.
Is she really going to eat that?
Rath wondered.
“Any idea on ID?” he asked.
“None.” Sonja took a bite of chicken, set it down, and pushed her plate to the side. She leaned in again, and Rath caught a scent of shampoo: faint and fresh, strawberry? He took a gulp of his shake.
“If this doesn’t have anything to do with Mandy, why am I here?” Rath asked.
“I did some digging. Looking for MP reports for girls roughly her and Mandy’s age, the last six months or so. Just. To see.”
“And?” Rath bit an onion ring. “
Fuck,
” he hissed, and spit out his onion ring. “
Hot.
” He ran his tongue along the roof of his napalmed mouth, tickling the tender spot of ruined flesh, knowing in the next few days that strands of dead skin would dangle down and distract him to the edge of insanity. He popped the lid off his shake and chugged what was left, waved his hand, “Sorry, go on.”
“You gonna make it?” She smiled, and there was nothing Rath could do to stop the blush that shot through his face.
“Go on,” he said.
“I came up with zip, within fifty square miles. But.” Sonja straightened. Rath knew the proud posture. A bomb was about to be dropped. “When I looked back over sixteen months and expanded the range to a thousand square miles. It sounds like a lot, but isn’t when you consider it being just twenty by fifty miles.” Sonja took a breath.
A country song played from the bar, the tremulous voice of a girl, all bubble-gum flirtation, singing
If you wanna pick me up, you better drive a pickup truck.
The girl didn’t sound a day over nine years old; probably wasn’t.
Sonja looked Rath in the eye, her pupils large in the dim amber lighting. Beautiful. She paused, savoring her private information for a moment. “
Three
girls in the greater region have gone missing in the past sixteen months and not been found.”
“Is that high?”
“It
is
for this region. In the ten years prior, only seven girls went missing and have never been located. In ten years. Before that, we had—”
“The Connecticut River Valley Killer.”
The song on the jukebox ended, and a silence fell on the place. Sonja shifted, and the booth’s vinyl seat squeaked.
Rath knew what Sonja was thinking. The CRVK had never been found even though the killings had stopped. To this day, Rath knew, Barrons returned to the case file again and again. At times, Barrons called Rath in the middle of the night to posit a theory.
That there’d been no prime suspect, let alone charges filed, had been Barrons’s greatest regret and career failure; the man had aged ten years and gotten divorced in the twenty months of the official investigation. And as much as Rath had wanted to stay on the case, on the force itself, in the aftermath of Laura’s death, his need to care for Rachel had left him depleted, scattered. He’d resigned.
That the killings had stopped had meant one of four scenarios: The killer was serving time on other charges; the killer had died; the killer had moved to a new territory, or, for some reason, the killer had been lying in wait to strike again.
“We’re talking
girls
here,” Sonja said. “Gone. I dove into the reports. The copies are in your folder. A cursory glance, and I could determine only one thing they had in common besides age. No one interviewed thought any of the girls had any reason whatsoever to run away.”
“Which means squat.”
“Sure, yeah. Nobody knows what’s going on in a teenager’s life. But none have ever used her cell phone or Facebook or other Internet pages again.”
“So why no investigation?”
“There was, for each. Separately. In the end, there was nothing to find. Zero.”
Rath’s mind wandered to Rachel, her silence.
“Dig into those reports,” Sonja said. “Each girl might be an outlier. A runaway. Who knows. But compare them to our dead girl and to Mandy. For any connection.”
“We know our dead girl isn’t one of these three?”
“Based on dental records and times of death. Yes.”
“So that makes four girls.”
Sonja nodded.
“You think they’re connected,” Rath said.
“I don’t think one way or the other.”
Sonja was treating Rath like he was a parent of a missing child, playing it tight.
I don’t have a theory one way or another, Mr. Rath. We must keep an open mind.
She was eager, ambitious, and she wanted a case to get her to the next level. Rath didn’t understand what she was doing in northern Vermont instead of Boston or Chicago. But the new industrial park and big box-store wasteland planned for the southern part of the county meant a stronger tax base. The force would get a piece of the pie, and Sonja was fierce. Her digging up old missing-person reports was not a whim. Most young detectives would never think to do it. And while she wouldn’t directly fuck over Grout, she’d give herself an edge over him; Rath saw that plainly.
“The flurry of missing girls might just be a random spike,” she said, covering her bases, playing a preemptive devil’s advocate before Rath could do it. “Like spikes in teen suicide. And sometimes runaways want to run away from everything and everyone, not just parents. Start clean. Explaining the lack of cell-phone and social-media use. Besides, Mandy might show any second. But. I don’t like it.”
“Why wouldn’t four missing girls get on the radar of Vermont State Police as possibly connected?” Rath was playing devil’s advocate now, poking at her theory to make her clarify her logic. The fact was, he didn’t like it either.
“They weren’t all from Vermont. Two were in New Hampshire. Poor communication. New Hampshire and Vermont State Police did make one effort to connect the dots. They even had the FBI look into it, since two states would make it federal. But, the Bureau said
nada.
”
Rath knew that scenario intimately. The Bureau had believed the CRVK was bullshit, too. Told Vermont and New Hampshire there was no solid evidence the crimes were committed by the same killer. Barrons had gone ape-shit:
So, you want me to believe there are several perps out there who each decided to rape and strangle a girl on a whim, as a one-off, using the same MO, and it’s coincidence the girls have similar physical profiles?
The Bureau had taken exception to his claim that the MO was exactly the same, and to his tone.
“I’ll dig into the reports tonight, before my dart game,” Rath said.
“Ah. The big night out.” Her eyes glimmered, teasing.
O
UTSIDE, THE D
AY
had turned gray and mean, a north wind shrieking out of Canada. Rath pulled up the collar of his jacket and tugged his knit cap over his ears. He took out his cell and dialed Rachel. It stopped ringing on the second ring.
“Rachel—” He was cut off by a cold, automated voice:
The voice mail for the number you have dialed is full. Please try back at another time.
What the hell? He fumbled typing a short text message.
Are you OK? Let me know. Please. xxoo
R
ATH WEDGED A
sawed-off hockey stick sideways into the deer’s frozen rib cage and propped open the cavity so he could work the knife at the inner tenderloins.
He sliced between the muscle and the spine, the knife razor-sharp, wedging his fingers behind it as he peeled an inner loin from the backbone. He freed it, then the one on the other side of the spine, his fingers stiff with cold. Tomorrow, he’d cut through the hide and get the outer tenderloins. It was the least he could do.
In the kitchen, he drank a Lagavulin as he sliced the tenderloin into medallions, set them in a cast-iron frying pan sizzling with butter, searing them. He forked the medallions onto a ceramic plate.
Grout was supposed to have come over for a face-to-face update of his visit to the Double Black Diamond the day before, but Rath had wanted to dig into Sonja’s files and had begged off seeing Grout in person. He told him his back was killing him, which it was, and he needed to bathe in ice water before they played darts. They’d catch up at the tavern.
Rath gazed out the window at the darkening woods beyond Ice Pond, the setting sun’s mirror image drowning in the pond’s silvery dead surface. During the winters of the late 1800s, farmers had harvested ripe ice from the pond, cut massive blocks, using saws as tall as a man, with rows of nasty teeth. The ice blocks were hauled in oxen-drawn sleighs to sheds, where they were packed in sawdust to refrigerate perishables summer long.
Rath picked up a hot piece of tenderloin, took a bite, and scorched the raw flesh of his mouth’s roof.
Idiot.
He took a belt of scotch, sluicing it around in his mouth. It worsened the pain. He drank cold water from the spigot, cursed his stupidity.
He called Rachel, was kicked to the same mailbox-full message. Where was she? If she did not respond soon, he’d drive to campus even if it meant humiliating himself.
As he sipped his scotch, he looked out at the deer carcass. He had to get it hung. He’d been known to hang a deer for two weeks, until the muscle tissue crusted black and hard as enzymes broke down the muscles’ strings to naturally tenderize the meat. Dry aging. Foodies paid north of $50 a rib eye for it at real steak joints.
The sun had set, and the kitchen was sinking into blue shadow. He killed his scotch and took the files into the living room, where he flipped on his desk light, sending shadows scurrying to the corners. He spread out at his desk. Stared at the first name.
Rebecca Thompson. She’d just turned seventeen, lived at home with her parents, a plumber and a grade-school teacher, and two younger brothers. The interviews indicated she was well liked and respected by teachers, family, coaches, friends, and fellow employees at Bob’s Sporting Goods. A solid, hardworking student, she was a regional star athlete who’d lettered in soccer and lacrosse. “She’s always been gifted in sports,” her mother said. “She’s been offered scholarships to good colleges.”
Several photos of Rebecca were paper-clipped to the file, many of her in action, blue polyester shorts and jerseys riffling in the breeze as she dribbled a ball, long brown pigtails wrapped at the ends by navy blue rubber bands.
Her milk-carton photo was a yearbook headshot. The blunt nose and thin lips framed by cheeks that still carried girlhood chubbiness. She smiled with her mouth closed, restrained, as though she were trying not to laugh at a joke or didn’t like her teeth. Or, for some reason, didn’t feel like smiling.
Rebecca had last been seen at soccer practice, October 31, 2010. Halloween. Friends said they’d expected her to show up at a party at Lake Francis. She never had.
The police report was filed by Detective Major Harold Jenks of the New Hampshire State Police. He’d determined there was no evidence to cast anyone close to her under suspicion. He and a team of floaters had interviewed Rebecca’s family and friends extensively. Rebecca’s boyfriend, Caleb Francis, was described as “in shock and desperate to locate his girlfriend, pleading alongside Rebecca’s parents for her return.” He’d been interviewed and cleared. Caleb seemed more distraught than even Rebecca’s parents. He was
in love.
He and Rebecca planned to go to the same college. He’d given her a pre-engagement ring she’d worn around her neck.
Caleb said in his interview: “She wouldn’t just run off. Especially with the girls’ state soccer championship coming up.”
But. Here. A teammate of Rebecca’s dissented on the rosy picture of Rebecca.
It’s nothing I could put my finger on, exactly. As friends and co-captains, we share a lot. Everything. I thought anyways. But there was something off with her the last few weeks. She had the University of Virginia and Syracuse and Maryland offering scholarships, but she seemed, um. Blue. Ornostalgic? I don’t know. I saw her once after a game, like, just sitting on the bench in front of her locker. She was holding the ring Caleb gave her, squeezing it. She was usually ecstatic after a win. And we crushed the Otters. But she seemed bummed. I think Caleb was scared. He wasn’t getting any scholarship offers. He’s the best quarterback our high school’s ever seen. But that doesn’t mean anything to colleges, a great QB from New Hampshire? Like, where’s New Hampshire? I think Rebecca wanted to go her own way. Start fresh in college. And she didn’t know how to tell Caleb. Because all Caleb talked about was how they were going to be together. Forever.”
Forever.
Forever.
That was someone of a very immature mind; which, at seventeen, Caleb possessed. Rath would have thought more about Caleb if the kid hadn’t been cleared.
Rath snatched a pillow from his couch and set it behind his back and opened the file on Sally Lawrence. No matter how he sat, he could not get comfortable. His back was stiff and sore, a lacerating pain slicing through him.
Sally could not have been more different than Rebecca. She grew up fifty miles north of Rebecca, in the paper-mill town of Granton, New Hampshire on the Pentoscott River, a single child raised by a single mother who had been in a wheelchair since a car accident with a drunk driver in 2001.
Rath had driven through Granton many times on his way to deer hunt in Maine. It was a town he could recognize with his eyes closed by the gagging, sulfuric odor of the paper mills.
Sally and her mother lived in an apartment in the “upscale” part of the town, meaning upwind of the paper plant, in one of hundreds of houses built in the 1870s, when the mills first sprang up. Houses that had dwindled into disrepair since the 1950s, their once-white clapboard now the sullen color of soot from decades of exhaust belched by logging trucks. The slate roofs covered by sheets of blue tarpaulin where shingles had shed. The yards polluted with junk cars up on blocks, ATVs and bass boats perpetually up for sale but never sold, and blow-up Santa and snow-globe lawn decorations left out year-round, their deflated skins looking like monstrous spent condoms January to November. None of the houses were owned by the people who lived in them but by slumlords. They were the same style of house as showcased in magazines and found in affluent towns like Woodstock, Vermont, where money beat back the scourge of time with fresh paint, landscaped flowerbeds, and fertilized lawns.
Sally’s photo showed a grotesquely obese girl. To be so overweight had to be torture. If so, she dumped her anguish into getting stellar grades, topping her school’s honor roll. And she gave back. She was, as one teacher commented, “an exemplary citizen.” She had a small circle of close friends, and a boyfriend. A shy kid named Shawn Plant, so devastated by her disappearance he’d attempted suicide with prescription pills. This had alerted cops to his potential as a suspect. But he’d been with his family in Florida at the time of Sally’s disappearance.
Sally was a “serious but cheerful girl, smart as a whip, caring, and kind. We want her found,” said a woman who helped run the Boys and Girls Club where Sally had volunteered, right up to the day she’d disappeared. May 2, 2010.
Rath opened the third file.
Fiona Lemieux. Seventeen. From St. Johnsbury, Vermont. Fifteen miles southwest of Rebecca, sixty-five miles south of Sally. Twenty-five miles southeast of Mandy. Last seen Friday, April 22, 2011, coming out of River Road Market, where she’d purchased cigarettes. The owner had said: “She was rare. A lot of kids distrust adults, but she was bubbly. ‘Hello, Mr. L!’ she’d shout, and give a big smile, especially after she got her braces off.” The store owner recalled looking out the window to see Fiona walking down the sidewalk. “Just before she reached Elm, a car pulled up. She chatted with someone inside, then got in.” He couldn’t say what model or make the car was. It was too far away. And a customer had come in, and his attention was divided by then.
Fiona was a petite girl, 4’ 11”, ninety-five pounds soaked. She wore kohl on her eyes and preferred black clothes and army boots. She was an exceptional musician, trained classically on the piano and violin since age six. She’d rebelled as a teen by starting a band called F U, in which she sang and played upright acoustic bass.
Her mother had called the police at 9
A.M.
the next morning, the day before Easter. “Straight off,” her mother, a stay-at-home mom, said, “I knew something was wrong. She wasn’t in bed, and the bed was still made from the housekeeper. Fiona never made her bed, ever. So I knew.”
Police interviewed the family, her classmates and boyfriend, and came up with nothing. As the investigation progressed, it was deemed that Fiona had left on her own. Run away. Her parents were outraged though a few friends thought it was possible.
Fiona was unlike Sally and Rebecca. Her family was wealthy, her father a successful intellectual-property attorney who had done smashingly well during the dot-com boom and cashed out just before the bubble burst.
A girlfriend stated that Fiona had called her father a tyrant, with his rules and curfew, and Fiona had wanted to run away. But the friend had not thought she was serious. “Who doesn’t bitch about their parents? Dream about getting out of this town? Nothing happens here. I hope she left. I hope she went to try out for
American Idol,
like we kept telling her to do, though the thought of doing that made her puke.”
Her boyfriend, Hank Sewal, who played guitar in F U, seemed more angry than upset. “We were going to lay down new tracks on her iMac. Then she skips out? So not cool.”
Fiona’s bank account had seen no recent withdrawals, all of her clothes, except the black sweatshirt, Diesel jeans, and army boots she’d worn that day, still hung in her closet. All the toiletries a girl might take with her remained on her bathroom sink. Unless she’d
wanted
it to look like an abduction, or had left on an utter whim, it did not exactly seem like a girl who planned to leave.
They were all young girls similar in age, all girls everybody knows. But their family, school lives, and interests were not at all alike. Most markedly, they looked nothing like one another, and there was no evidence that they were anything more than missing. Perhaps they had all run off. For Fiona, it wasn’t a huge stretch. But for none of them to ever contact a friend again? Not a single cell-phone call made since they’d disappeared. No ATM withdrawals. And they’d all had a lot to look forward to. They had nothing to run from. Nothing in the files, anyway.
If someone had
done something
to them, odds were it was the same perpetrator. The probability that five girls had each been taken by five different people was as likely as snow in July. But it confused Rath. Usually, there was a physical resemblance among victims. With rape, that wasn’t the case. But with murder and torture itself as the intent, which is what the dead girl’s corpse found in Victory suggested, more often than not there was a common look among victims, surrogates who represented a woman who had betrayed the murderer in his past. Here, the girls had nothing in common: obese, prepubescently petite, athletic. And
if
Mandy had been taken by the same person, her looks further made the physical link improbable. She was leagues beyond the others. A genetic specimen, if ever there was one.
Still, there had to be something between them, a single trait that made them stand out to whoever had taken them. They had been taken. Rath felt it. But he needed motive. Find the why, and you’ll find the who, he thought. But he could not see a
why.
It was six o’clock. Time to shut down and throw darts.