The Girl in the Motel

by Chris Culver

  “You did this for me,” he said, his voice low and incredulous. “You found her and took care of her for me.”

  “Yeah,” said Sherlock. “That’s what friends do. I know you didn’t kill her, so I’ve had a private detective on my staff looking for her for twelve years.”

  Hughes put the picture down. “How’d he find her?”

  “We tracked down her sister and paid her a visit. Emily gave us everything we needed.”

  Hughes nodded and then reached across the table to shake Sherlock’s hand.

  “You’re a friend. I won’t forget this. My wife persuaded me to hire that schmuck lawyer, but I should have gone with you.”

  Sherlock squeezed the convict’s hand before dropping it. Then he looked around.

  “If you had, I sure as hell wouldn’t have advised you to confess.”

  “They had my balls in a vise,” he said. “I told my lawyer it was all bullshit, but he didn’t care. He told me a plea deal was the only way to save my life. I didn’t know what I was doing. I trusted him, but once I signed the papers, he disappeared.”

  “It will cheer you to know he’s dead now.”

  Hughes raised his eyebrows. “You do that, too?”

  Sherlock chuckled and shook his head. “That was all God and grease. He had a massive heart attack while giving the closing arguments in a negligent homicide case.”

  “Fucker deserved it,” said Hughes, sitting straighter. He shook his head and looked at the picture in front of him. “I’ve sat in chains for twelve years because of this bitch.”

  “It won’t be too much longer.”

  “If you’re right, it won’t,” he said, leaning forward again. He exhaled a slow breath. “Megan’s not the only one who screwed me. I’ve got a list of names if you’re willing to work. I’ll make it worth your while.”

  Sherlock crossed his arms. “How worth my while?”

  Hughes thought for a moment. “Fifty each, starting with my wife. The money’s in my house. A quarter-million cash. It’s inside the wall in my master closet.”

  “That’s a big thing to ask of your attorney.”

  “You’re not just a lawyer,” said Hughes, grinning. “If it’s not enough money, you can fuck my wife before you kill her. That was about the only thing she did right. Either way, I want her to die screaming. She’s the reason I’m here.”

  Sherlock snorted as he gathered his files and put them in his briefcase.

  “For fifty a head, I’d take out my mom. Consider it done. Get your bags together and make your goodbyes, Mr. Hughes, because you’re going home. Nobody in the world can stop that now.”

  8

  On a normal day, I drove a red 1982 Dodge Ram pickup truck I had purchased at a used-car lot after college for eight hundred dollars cash. At the time I bought it, the engine had over four hundred thousand miles, the transmission didn’t work, and the headlights dimmed whenever somebody pushed on the brake pedal. The car dealer thought he was getting something over on me when I bought it, but I had done my research. I liked the truck, and I knew I could fix it.

  Back then, I was a cadet in the police academy, and I lived with my adoptive parents in Glendale, Missouri. My adoptive father—Doug Green—found my choice of vehicle amusing. My adoptive mom—Captain Julia Green of the St. Louis County Police Department—understood.

  I spent every moment of free time I had for an entire summer on that truck. When I had questions or came across something I didn’t know how to fix, I watched videos on the internet, read books at the library, and once even visited a retired mechanic who had worked on my truck back when it was new. There were days I felt as if I were wasting my time, and sometimes I felt like an idiot, but I rebuilt the engine, patched the electrical system, cleaned up the transmission, replaced the brakes, installed a new exhaust, and reupholstered the interior.

  For the money I put into that truck, I could have bought a reliable used one, but I didn’t care. I had an affinity for broken things. The world would be a better place if more people recognized that a lot of broken things could be fixed again.

  Since I was driving to St. Louis on a case, though, I needed something more official than my pickup truck, so I went by my station and signed out one of our marked SUVs. It was big and comfortable, but even more important than that, it had a laptop with an unlimited 4G data connection similar to the one on my cell phone. That would come in handy today.

  My victim’s driver’s license told me her name was Kiera Williams and that she lived on Manchester Road in Rock Hill, a suburb west of St. Louis. Even at a glance, though, I knew that was bullshit. Manchester was a major commercial thoroughfare. I doubted my vic lived in a grocery store’s parking lot. Still, I had to check it out.

  I headed northwest and drove for about an hour before I hit the suburbs south of the city. Within another half hour, I pulled to a stop in the parking lot of a small strip mall in Rock Hill. If I could believe Kiera Williams’s license, she lived in the lobby of Postal HQ. That was a problem.

  I parked in the fire lane out front and pulled the SUV’s laptop toward me. Time to earn my paycheck. I called up the license bureau’s database and searched for other women named Kiera Williams in the area. That gave me nine results, none of whom looked at all like my victim.

  Kiera—or Megan—was young enough that she had grown up with social media, which meant she should have had a presence somewhere. I looked her up on Facebook and then Twitter. Both websites had hundreds of users named Kiera Williams, but none matched my victim.

  Then, I Googled her name, hoping she would have shown up somewhere in the paper in the past twenty-six years. Again, though, I found nothing that matched my victim. After striking out once more, I searched the Missouri court system for cases involving women named Kiera Williams. I got fourteen results there, most of which involved a woman who loved speeding and driving while intoxicated.

  The world had all kinds of people. Some liked to live under the radar while others loved the spotlight. Everyone, though, left footprints in his or her wake. Even a hermit who refused to grace civilized society with his presence would have left a record somewhere. My victim hadn’t, though. Travis might have been right—the woman killed in St. Augustine might not have been Megan Young—but she sure as hell wasn’t Kiera Williams.

  Unlike me, Megan Young wasn’t an only child. She had an older sister and a half brother. If she had been alive and in hiding for the past twelve years, she had help. Unsurprisingly, Emily Young, Megan’s older sister, didn’t have a license in her own name, so I looked up names Emily had used on fake IDs when we were in high school.

  For most of us who grew up in the foster care system, it was hard to escape our pasts. I considered changing my name and joining the Navy. Others ran to a new city. Some killed themselves. Emily became Jessica Martin, a twenty-nine-year-old woman who lived half a block from Lafayette Park in south St. Louis. I recognized her picture in the license bureau’s database. Though her hair had changed, and she no longer had the angry, haughty smirk she wore when we were teenagers, it was Emily. Some people were hard to forget.

  I put her address into the GPS on my phone and headed out. St. Louis had changed since I had left. With a high crime rate and poor schools, the north side of town was still an unpleasant place to live, but the south side of town was gentrifying.

  When I reached Emily’s neighborhood, I found dumpsters in front of at least one house on each block. There were vans for plumbers and trucks for carpenters and handymen on each corner. Based on the upscale housing and the well-dressed people walking the sidewalks, this neighborhood wasn’t just up and coming; it had arrived, and Emily owned a very nice French Tudor row house facing Lafayette Park.

  I parked about a block away and walked to the home. It was three stories tall and had a wrought-iron fence and a well-landscaped garden out front. Her neighbors had well-maintained gardens and neat front doors. I didn’t know much about the local real estate market, but the cars that lined t
he street were pricey. This was a neighborhood for doctors and lawyers and accountants—professionals with money to spend.

  Of course, even as a kid in foster care, Emily had money to spend. Intelligent, ambitious drug dealers did well for themselves.

  I unlatched the wrought-iron gate, walked up a brick pathway to her front door, and knocked hard. Immediately, the heavy oak door swung open. It looked as if someone had shut it tight, but the lock must not have engaged. Oak parquet floors led down a long hallway to the rear of the house while a doorway opened to a dining room on the right. A carved staircase led to the second floor. The house’s woodwork was gorgeous and looked original.

  “Hello?” I called.

  No one answered, so I knocked hard and then called out again. Still, nobody answered. As much as I wanted to walk in there and search for signs that Emily knew her sister had been alive, I had no cause to search the house. I took a pen from the inner pocket of my jacket and a business card from my back pocket and wrote a quick note.

  Emily—call me.

  I’d come by later, but I slipped the card into her mailbox and reached into the house to shut the front door. I stopped when I saw the dining room. There were two chairs overturned and papers on the ground. Someone had fought in there.

  I slipped my firearm from its holster and crept inside, staying close to the walls so I wouldn’t cause the hardwood floor to creak. The front hallway led to the kitchen and backyard. The kitchen was immaculate save a broken white coffee mug and a puddle of coffee on the ground. The butler’s pantry had glass panels in the cabinetry. Someone had broken one, so glass littered the ground.

  The second floor had five bedrooms and three bathrooms. All were clean. Someone had even made the beds. I checked out the basement next. It was an open space with a bar, a giant TV, and a pool table. Emily must have been a baseball fan because there were St. Louis Cardinals decorations on the walls.

  Blood spatter stained the carpet.

  My heart beat faster as I crossed the room to one of two closed doors on the far wall. The first led to a bedroom with an attached bathroom, but the second led to an unfinished room that held the furnace and water heater. Someone had tied Emily to a chair in the center of that room. She was nude, and there were burns up and down her arms and legs. The room smelled like excrement and blood.

  My chest felt tight, and bile crept up in my throat. I didn’t need to check Emily’s neck for a pulse. The moment I saw her, I had known she was dead; anyone still alive with those burns would have been screaming.

  9

  October 2005

  The house was one of the biggest I had ever seen. Thick columns held the front portico aloft while the red brick facade stretched all the way to the tree line. Leaves littered the yard and skittered in the afternoon breeze while the squeal of a school bus’s brakes carried through a thin copse of trees near the road. Two kids got off and walked across the street to an equally impressive home.

  I looked at Mr. Ballard, my social worker.

  “Is this the right place?”

  He smiled and nodded. “This is it. You’ll be living with Christopher and Diana Hughes. They don’t have kids of their own, but they’ve been foster parents for years. They understand how things work. We’ve got one girl here at the moment. Her name is Emily, and she’s seventeen, so she’s a little older than you, but you’ve got a lot in common. Her younger sister, Megan, will join the house soon from what I’m told. A lot of young women have thrived here.”

  I hoped he hadn’t lied to me. At fifteen, I couldn’t move out on my own for three more years. Foster care had been hard, but I had dealt with it for years as a child. Then, I hit puberty and grew boobs. My foster fathers watched me as I tied my shoes or bent down to pick things up. A few times they “accidentally” walked in on me while I was in the shower. One guy even kept trying to persuade me to go bathing suit shopping with him. He thought it’d be fun. Even the thought creeped me the fuck out.

  My foster mothers were even worse. Most of them wanted a baby to hold and then give back when the baby got too old. Other foster moms, though, wanted a servant who let them sit on their asses. I didn’t have a problem doing the dishes or folding laundry, but I wasn’t Cinderella, which they learned quickly.

  Mr. Ballard and I walked to the front door. Mrs. Shapiro, my previous social worker, had retired two years ago. I didn’t know her well, but she gave me a hug when she left. Mr. Ballard was okay. I called him every couple of weeks to tell him how things were going, and he listened when I spoke. When I had problems, he took care of them. Most of the time, he didn’t bother me. That was nice.

  He knocked on the door, and I turned around to look at the yard. The grass looked like a golf course, and the shrubs were all trimmed and neat. I had lived in some nice foster houses, but none were like this. The governor should have lived here, and if not him, then somebody else important.

  The door opened, and I turned around. A girl stood in the entryway. She had light brown skin, brown eyes, and brown hair down to her shoulders. A big dimple dominated the center of her chin. It looked like a butt. Her lips were thick and red, and she wore an angry smirk on her face. She looked at me up and down.

  “What the fuck you smiling at, Cinderella?”

  So that was how we’d start. Fine by me.

  “Your face looks like a gym teacher’s ass,” I said. “It made me laugh.”

  “Whoa, ladies,” said Mr. Ballard, holding up his hands and stepping between us. “You will live together, so you need to be polite.”

  “So you’re the new girl,” she said, looking at me again. “Christopher said we were getting somebody new. You better watch yourself around here.”

  “Is this where you tell me that snitches get stitches?” I asked. “Because if you are, don’t waste your time. I’ve heard it all. My last foster home had cable, and I’ve seen every episode of Scared Straight.”

  “You think you’re funny,” said the girl, standing straighter and glaring down at me. “We’ll see how funny you are tonight.”

  “That’s enough, Emily,” said a voice from deeper within the house. Mr. Ballard turned his attention to the new arrival. Emily drew in a sharp breath, and her shoulders slumped. She seemed to shrink, making her look like a dog fearful that its master would strike. Good. She deserved it.

  The man joined us at the front door. He was a little under six feet tall, and he had a thin build and pockmarked face. He was ugly, but ugly in a way a lot of women might find attractive. My mom had taken a lot of men like him home.

  “I’m Christopher Hughes,” he said, looking at me and holding out his hand. I took it and squeezed hard, just as one of my foster fathers had taught me years ago. He looked down and tilted our hands to the side. My fingers were tiny compared to his. “That’s a good grip. You must be Mary Joe.”

  “Just Joe,” I said. “After Joe Montana.”

  “Ahh,” he said, nodding. “I read your file. You were born in 1990, the same year he won his second MVP title. Was your dad a 49ers fan?”

  “My mom was,” I said. “She told me Joe Montana was my father, but I’m pretty sure that was bullshit. She probably just fucked a guy who looked like him.”

  Mr. Ballard gasped, while Emily laughed. Christopher looked at me appraisingly.

  “Young ladies don’t use language like that, Joe,” said Mr. Ballard, looking down his nose at me. “It’s inappropriate.”

  “Mr. Ballard’s right,” said Christopher, a crooked smile forming on his lips. “But that’s okay. I like this one. I think she’ll fit in here pretty well. You have a bag?”

  “It’s in my car,” said Mr. Ballard.

  “I’ll get that and fill out the paperwork,” said Christopher, looking to Emily. “How about you show Joe around and tell her the rules?”

  “Okay, Christopher,” said Emily, her voice almost meek now. It was a sharp contrast to the young woman who had greeted me earlier. She knew how to play to a crowd. She looked at me and sm
iled. “Since you’ll be staying with us, I’ll show you the house.”

  “I’ll see you before I leave,” said Mr. Ballard, patting me on the shoulder. He and Christopher turned to walk outside while Emily shut the front door. Her nostrils flared as she glared at me. The meek young woman had disappeared.

  “Seems like you’re making friends,” she said.

  I drew in a breath. “Sorry. Sometimes my mouth goes off before I give it permission. Can we start over? I’m Joe. I’ll be living with you for a while.”

  Emily crossed her arms. “There ain’t no starting over.”

  “Okay,” I said, taking a step back. “Can you show me the house?”

  She gestured around the entryway. “This is the house. See it?”

  I looked around for a moment. The entryway was oval shaped with a curved staircase that led to the second floor. There was a big dining room to the left and a living room to the right. Someone had painted the walls beige and the trim white. I couldn’t see far, but even the rooms I saw were bigger than the apartment my mom and I used to live in.

  “I like the hardwood floors,” I said, looking down. “Are they original?”

  “How the fuck should I know, Susie Homemaker?”

  I ignored her and then walked into the dining room. The table had eight white chairs around it. A hutch along the far wall held silver-rimmed plates and crystal glasses. It looked like something from a magazine. I couldn’t believe a family who could afford that would house strays like me and Emily.

  “So what’s the story with this place?” I asked, walking through the dining room to the kitchen. There was a breakfast room with a small table to the south and a big, two-story living room to the west. Everything seemed to have its own neat place. Someone had pushed a stainless-steel coffee maker against the wall beside the refrigerator while an immaculate red KitchenAid mixer sat beside the stove.