by Chris Culver
“The people who hurt us make us who we are,” she said. “They don’t realize that when they hurt us, but they do it all the same. We can’t change our past, and we can’t change the people we once were, but we can change our future and our present.”
I handed her the filter and coffee.
“I don’t know who I want to be,” I said.
“That’s a fine answer,” she said, stepping away from the machine as it brewed. Then she turned. “A couple of days ago, you were working another case involving two young women. They were your foster sisters. Did Christopher Hughes hurt them, too?”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“Do you want to be this man’s victim, or do you want to be the woman who remade her life after a tragedy?”
I raised my eyebrows and shook my head. “It’s not that easy.”
“I never said it would be easy,” she said. “Every day of your life will be a struggle. Then, one day, it won’t be anymore. That’s how it is.”
“What do you think I should do?”
“You find out who killed your sisters. If it was the man you shot, then he won’t hurt anyone again. If it was someone else, you’ll put him in prison.”
I looked down and smiled as I imagined Megan and Emily’s reaction to being told that we were sisters.
“We weren’t sisters.”
Susanne poured herself a cup of coffee and then sat down at the table near me. “Every woman who has experienced what we have is our sister. Never forget that. You’re strong enough to watch out for the others. That’s your job. I couldn’t do that.”
I let that sink in for a moment and then swallowed hard. For a moment, neither of us said anything. Then I leaned forward and crossed my arms.
“Do you believe that?”
“I’m eighty-one years old. I’ve lived a long time, and I’ve done a lot of things. My biggest regret has nothing to do with the people I’ve hurt, although there have been a few of those. I’ve tried to make amends. My regrets, the things that keep me up at night, are the opportunities I’ve missed to help those who needed me most. Don’t do what I did. Help these girls out.”
I couldn’t look at her, but I nodded. Susanne was my friend. More than that, she was my sister—and she was right.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll do it. I’ll find out who killed Megan and Emily. And then I’ll make him pay.”
41
Saying I’d find out who killed Megan and Emily was a lot easier than actually doing it. Susanne and I finished our cups of coffee, and then I walked her back to her house. I had five murders to think about, not just two. Megan and Emily, Christopher Hughes, Sherlock, and Warren—the mechanic whom Christopher had visited.
Emily died first and then Megan. Warren, Sherlock, and Christopher followed. Every law enforcement officer on this case was looking at it as if it had started just a week ago, but this case was far older than that. This case started twelve years ago when Christopher went to prison. I wouldn’t find the answers I wanted in the present. I needed to look at the past.
After walking Susanne back to her house, I grabbed my keys, locked my front door, and got in my truck. Julia and Doug Green lived in Kirkwood, an upper-middle-class, inner-ring suburb west of St. Louis. The taxes were a bitch—as Dad complained about often—but it was a good place to raise a family.
I drove for about an hour before hitting the outskirts of the city. Within another half hour, I had parked in front of Dad and Julia’s sprawling brick ranch home. Neither Julia’s unmarked police cruiser nor my dad’s truck were in the driveway. Instead, I found an old Toyota Camry with a sticker from a sorority on the rear window and a giant pile of clothes on the backseat. Audrey, my sister, must have come home from college for the weekend.
I shut my door and walked up the brick walkway to the front. Normally, I would have just used my key to get in, but I didn’t want to scare Audrey, so I knocked and waited for her to open it. My sister had long, flowing brown hair, brown eyes, and tanned skin. Audrey had all of her mom’s best features and a few from our dad, too. She was smart and gorgeous, and she had a great sense of humor. The first time I met her, she was eight years old and had asked whether I wanted her to braid my hair. I had liked her from the start.
“Hey, Audrey,” I said. “I didn’t expect to see you.”
“Me, either,” she said. “I wish you had told me you were coming. I would have waited to have lunch.”
She let go of her hug and ushered me into the entryway. The house had changed little from my last visit a year ago. The hardwood floors gleamed, the front room was immaculate, and the pictures all hung perfectly even and level on the walls. Somehow, just stepping foot into that home lifted some weight off my shoulders.
“I’m here for work. Have you talked to your mom and dad today?”
“No. I texted Mom this morning, but you know how she is. She doesn’t check her messages.”
I nodded. “Have you seen the news lately?”
“Too depressing,” she said. “Why?”
So she didn’t know about the shooting at my house. I loved Audrey, and I’d sit down and talk to her, but I was tired of people looking at me as if I were some fragile doll that could break at any moment. For now, when she looked at me, she saw her big sister. I needed that.
“I was wondering if you had seen the weather,” I said, looking down so I wouldn’t have to look her in the eye as I lied to her. “And sorry Julia doesn’t respond to your text messages. That stinks. I can text her on your behalf. She always responds to mine right away. The other day, I sent her a message at three in the morning, and she got back to me before I could even turn off my light. Guess that means I’m the favorite, huh?”
“Favorite butthead, maybe,” she said, walking into the kitchen and smiling. I followed a few steps behind. “How’s work?”
“Work is work. It’s no fun,” I said. “You’ll find that out in a year when you graduate. I don’t want to talk about work. Are you here for the free laundry service, or was this a planned visit?”
“Free laundry,” she said, nodding and pouring herself a mug of coffee. “And I planned to steal Dad’s booze and get drunk. You want coffee?”
“No, thanks,” I said. “I can’t stay long. I just need to pick up something from Julia’s office.”
She nodded and put the coffee pot back on its burner.
“I was thinking about going by St. Augustine this evening. Spring Fair still going on?”
I nodded and grunted. “Tonight’s the last night, though. If you go, have a sober driver. There are drunks everywhere. The fireworks display is at nine, and then tomorrow is the big hot-air balloon race. I’ll be glad once it’s over. It’s the most stressful week of the year.”
She laughed. “Yeah, right. Like anything happens in St. Augustine.”
I forced myself to smile. “It’s practically Mayberry.”
“What’s Mayberry?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.
“It’s the small town from The Andy Griffith Show. Nothing exciting ever happened there, either,” I said, straightening and turning so my hips pointed down the home’s main hallway. “Will you be around for a few days, or are you going back to school soon?”
“I’ll be here until Monday,” she said. “Call me. We’ll hang out.”
“I will,” I said. I squeezed her forearm and then headed down the hall to Julia’s home office. Like the rest of the house, everything in the office had a place, including the case file outlining her investigation into my sexual assault twelve years ago. I had never looked through that file before, and I didn’t want to see it now, but it was the best record I had access to of Christopher Hughes’s life twelve years ago. I hesitated and then opened her filing cabinet. My file was in the back, and for a moment, I couldn’t do anything but stare at it.
“He’s gone, Joe,” I said to myself. “He can’t hurt you.”
I didn’t know whether I believed myself, but I took out the file and carried it to the
kitchen table while Audrey did laundry downstairs.
Julia’s notes were professional, organized, and thorough. It was surreal to see my assault—and the assaults of other young women—described in such frank, almost clinical prose. Back then, I didn’t realize how much work Julia and Travis had put into my case, but they must have put in hundred-hour weeks for at least three weeks. They interviewed well over a hundred people and investigated the accounts of almost a dozen young women. It made my stomach turn.
I read the file from front to back and almost closed it without having found anything until I came across a report Julia had written toward the end of her investigation. She had gone to interview Christopher at his home and found him in some kind of business meeting in his garage with four men and his ex-wife. One of those four men was Warren Nichols. The others were Randy Shepard, Steven Zimmerman, and Neil Wilcox.
Aside from Warren, I didn’t recognize the names, but now I knew why Christopher had visited Warren’s garage in the middle of the night: They were business partners.
I looked up each man on my phone. Google returned few results for Randy Shepard or Neil Wilcox, but Steven Zimmerman’s body had just been found floating in the Missouri River near a bicycle trail about forty miles west of here. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch had picked up the story, but, in isolation, it looked like a simple murder. The metropolitan area got a couple hundred a year, so a quiet murder west of the city didn’t get a lot of attention.
It should have, though. It was part of a pattern.
I called Julia. She picked up on the second ring.
“Hey, it’s Joe. I’m at your house. We need to talk. I need help.”
“I’m at the office, but I can be there in fifteen minutes. Everything all right?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Stay at work. I’ve been reading an old file involving Christopher Hughes. On January 19th, 2006, you interviewed Christopher Hughes at his house. When you arrived, he was with four people: Randy Shepard, Neil Wilcox, Steven Zimmerman, and Warren Nichols. Your notes described it as some kind of business meeting. Warren Nichols was the mechanic killed at the garage in north St. Louis.”
She paused for a moment as she put that together.
“And now Hughes and Nichols are dead. What’s your theory?”
“Zimmerman’s dead, too. Someone dumped his body forty miles west of town. These guys were business partners. Not only are they dead, so is their lawyer, James Holmes. Someone’s cleaning house and dumping the bodies far enough apart that they’re being investigated by different departments. We didn’t see the pattern because no one knew to look for it.”
She went quiet for a moment. “We need to find Randy Shepard and Neil Wilcox. They might be the next targets.”
“Someone needs to check out Diana Hughes, too. If she played a role in the business, she could be a target.”
“I’ll send somebody by the house, but I don’t think she’s involved,” said Julia. “Thank you for sharing this.”
Julia rarely handed out compliments, so hearing her compliment me now for my police work was a big deal. I smiled without wanting to.
“What should I do?” I asked.
“You’re home now?”
“I’m at your house,” I said. “I’m in the kitchen. Audrey’s doing laundry in the basement.”
“Great. I didn’t know she was coming in. Your father’s got money in a cigar box in the pantry, so take two twenties and take your sister out to lunch. Go to Big Sky Cafe. It’s near Webster University in Webster Groves. You’ll like it. You guys should catch up while she’s in town.”
The smile left my face as I shook my head.
“You’ve got to be kidding. This is my case, and this is my find. You’re not kicking me off it.”
“You kicked yourself off it, sweetheart. Travis called me this morning. He told me about your change of career. You’re not a police officer anymore. Because of that, you will stay home. We can talk about your future later.”
“I won’t sit around while other people work.”
“Yes, you will,” said Julia, her voice hard. “You’re a civilian now. Get used to sitting around. I’ll talk to you tonight. Okay?”
I wasn’t about to go along with that, but I nodded anyway as if she were near me.
“Sure. Fine.”
I hung up before she could say anything else. For a moment, I didn’t move as I considered my options, but then I heard Audrey’s phone buzz from the counter nearby. I had no business looking at it, but she had just gotten a text message from Julia.
Take Joe out to lunch. Don’t let her out of your sight. We’ll talk later.
I swiped my finger across the phone to wake it up. Audrey and I hadn’t lived together for years, but I knew my sister. Her passcode wasn’t hard to guess.
2014
It was the year she turned eighteen and, in her words, became a real woman. I was glad she hadn’t become a pregnant woman, too.
I deleted the message and plugged the phone back in before walking to the top of the basement steps.
“Hey, Audrey, I’ve got to go. Call me before you leave town.”
“Okay,” she said. “See you later.”
I walked to the front door and knelt down. The Missouri Highway Patrol had confiscated my primary weapon—a Glock 19—after I shot Christopher Hughes, but they hadn’t taken my backup piece. I transferred it from the holster on my ankle to my purse for easier access. Julia may not have been concerned about Diana Hughes, but I knew her better than Julia did. Maybe they couldn’t prosecute her, but her ex-husband wouldn’t have gotten away with half the shit he did without her knowledge.
She was involved, and I needed to find out everything she knew.
42
The drive from Kirkwood to Chesterfield took half an hour with traffic, and with each passing moment, the knot in my stomach grew tighter. The file in Julia’s office had brought back a lot of memories I wished I could forget, and almost all of them had taken place in Christopher’s home. I was glad I had shot him. I should have felt bad, but I didn’t. He deserved everything that happened to him.
As I turned onto his street, my entire body trembled, and my throat grew so tight I had to pull off to the side of the road and force myself to breathe. For a split second, I was fifteen years old again. I lived in his house. I could feel his breath on my cheek, and I could taste the tropical drink he had drugged me with before raping me. A shudder passed through me, and I gripped my steering wheel as hard as I could so my hands wouldn’t tremble.
“He’s dead.”
In my mind, I knew it was true. I could close my eyes and see his body on the ground in the woods near my house, I could smell the stink of his fresh blood intermingled with the earthy odor of clean soil, and I could hear his dying breath as the life left him. Even knowing that, seeing his street made every awful memory I had of him fresh.
“You killed him, Joe,” I told myself. “He can’t hurt you anymore.”
As I stayed there, my heart slowed, and my breath came easier. I was okay. I could do this. I put my foot on the gas and crept forward until I reached the circular driveway in front of his gaudy mansion. Everything looked just as it had when I lived there, save one detail: There was a white paneled van from a carpet cleaning service out front.
I parked behind the cleaners and walked to the open front door on wobbly legs. The van hummed with some kind of machinery, and a pair of hoses snaked out and into the house. Even though the house’s front door was open, I rang the bell.
“Diana Hughes?” I called. Nobody answered, so I walked inside. Diana had changed the dining room furniture, and she had added a table in the front entryway, but it looked just as I remembered it. I walked through the front hallway to the kitchen, calling out again. As before, nobody answered, so I walked back to the entryway and then followed the carpet cleaners’ hoses to the master bedroom.
There, I found two men in coveralls. One held a normal vacuum, while the other had a com
mercial steam wand that left steaming patches on the carpet.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I called out, walking toward the man with the steam wand. He was running it over red stains on the carpet. Though I was far from an expert, I had seen a lot of blood spatter over the years, and this was arterial spray. The man with the steam wand pulled a handle on his device to turn it off. Then he raised his eyebrows at me. The man with the vacuum stopped what he was doing.
“Can we help you?” asked the steamer.
“Did Diana hire you for this job?”
“Mrs. Hughes did, yeah,” said the steamer. “Can I help you?”
If she called in the cleaning crew, this wasn’t her blood. It wasn’t Christopher’s or Warren Nichols’s blood, either, because they had died elsewhere. If I had to guess, that spot on the carpet belonged to James Holmes.
“What did she tell you that you were cleaning?” I asked.
“Cranberry juice,” he said. “She tried to bleach it, but she couldn’t get the stain out. It’s well set now, so we’re having a hard time lifting it ourselves.”
I looked around the room for anything else out of place. The dresser and chest of drawers looked closed and blood free, the laundry hamper was closed, and there were no coffee cups or paperbacks on the end table beside the bed. It could have been a room from a magazine shoot, save one thing: Someone had taken all the pillows off the bed. I pulled back the floral-print cover to reveal a mattress with a massive blood stain in the center.
The two carpet cleaners froze. One cocked his head to the other and shrugged, confused.
“Everybody out,” I said. “Leave your equipment, but go back to your truck. You weren’t cleaning up cranberry juice. That’s blood. That’s why you were having a hard time removing the stain. This house is a crime scene.”
Their dumbfounded stares continued, but I got them out of the room and back to their van, where I took their keys so they couldn’t leave with evidence inside their vacuum cleaner. That done, I called Julia.
“Joe, I’m busy. I’ll call you back.”