Girl, 11

by Amy Suiter Clarke

  Stevens didn’t have social media accounts, but he did have a full profile on the university’s website. It was pretty dry, full of abstracts from papers he’d written or cowritten, with equations and language that went over her head. But it also provided a more detailed overview of his résumé. When she got to the dates of his PhD, she paused: 1995–99.

  If his PhD started in August 1995, he had moved back to Minnesota six months before the first Countdown Killer victim was killed.

  The air in the room felt thin.

  Swiveling in her desk chair, Elle looked at the Wall of Grief, at the victims carefully pasted in two rows of five.

  Kerry Presley. Beverly Anderson. Jillian Thompson. They were all college students.

  Taking shallow breaths through her nose, Elle looked at the notes she had under each victim. Kerry and Beverly were University of Minnesota students, Jillian from Bethel. Despite Minneapolis’s wealth of colleges and universities, the academic communities weren’t insular. There were plenty of reasons why students from different universities might meet one another: sporting events, musicals, debates, math clubs.

  The first victim often told you the most about a serial killer. That was where he was learning, honing his craft, and most likely to make mistakes. It was also often the person who sent him over the edge, the one who triggered an instinct that had been dormant for years.

  Elle opened her file on Kerry. He was studying physics, getting ready to graduate in just a few months. He had just broken up with his girlfriend the night he disappeared. Walked out of the restaurant where they were eating together, leaving her with the car to get home. He would have been upset, wandering. Cold. Police were confident he accepted a ride from someone. Men were more likely than women to get into a car with a stranger, but Kerry’s mom had seemed confident he wouldn’t have. He was cautious and small compared with the towering Nordic types that made up most of the men in the area.

  Then Elle saw it, the simple dot point on the young man’s résumé she’d rushed past so many times before.

  Audited thermodynamics class at Mitchell University—1996

  She covered her mouth with both hands, staring at the screen. Stevens would have been in the graduate program at Mitchell the same semester Kerry audited a class in the physics department. Like most doctoral students, he was probably assisting professors as part of his funding agreement with the university. Acting as a teaching assistant for undergraduate classes. This was it, the reason TCK didn’t want credit for Kerry’s murder. He had made a mistake, killing someone he had a connection to.

  With shaking hands, Elle picked up her phone and left the studio.

  42

  DJ

  January 20, 2020

  Douglas sat at his window in the gray light of an early morning, drinking a cup of tea.

  He still remembered the first time his father taught him about sacrifices. The Bible outlined the practice, the way they were to pray and bestow all of their sins and failures and shortcomings onto something else before cutting it open, offering it up to God. Every blemish wiped clean with the blood of another. More than half the years in his life had been reclaimed this way, every second he had wasted controlled by Loretta, by his father, since the moment his brothers had died.

  And then, so close to completion, the clock froze. The girl escaped.

  For twenty years, he had waited. One day, Eleanor would have a child, and that child would replace her. A lamb instead of a goat. Just when he was losing hope, Natalie appeared, and he watched their bond grow. Today, she would fulfill her purpose, dying on the day Amanda was meant to. He could not wait another moment.

  Amanda was not the first girl to die too early, but she was the first he had revealed before her time. Douglas tapped his teacup with a fingernail. He had brought her to the abandoned house, prepared to leave her in the cold garage until the seventh day. But police had been outside, taking pictures of a car he’d thought would go ignored in the driveway. It was too risky to bring her back to his house, and the only other option was nearly an hour away—too far to drive with a dead body.

  That left one location, only minutes away. It provided a mild satisfaction, like trying to quench a deep thirst with a single drop of water.

  He had planned to wait until Natalie’s six days of work were complete, but when he awoke this morning, the need was too strong. It was the seventh day since he took Amanda, and he could not let it pass. The girl would get her day of rest early. Today, he would continue what he had started more than two decades ago with Kerry Presley.

  After strangling Kerry, Douglas had driven to his father’s house—the only place he knew would be safe. He brought the body to the barn, locked the door behind him. A few days later, he saw a girl challenging her boyfriend out in the street. No regard for his pride. He followed her, offered a ride, showing his university ID. The rest was easy.

  When he learned her age, everything fell into place. There was a reason killing that boy, destroying the naive and lovestruck version of himself, had not been enough. The numbers sorted themselves into a formula; the Scriptures came alive for him again. He knew what he needed to do. After that, the hunger to finish the countdown was insatiable.

  Now, after years of patience, he would get satisfaction. His world would right itself. He had waited long enough.

  On his phone, Douglas swiped to the camera footage from the basement. Natalie was still bent over the side of the bed, her bare back gleaming bluish white in the dim light. Her body tensed and shuddered as she vomited into the bucket he had left for her. The poison was taking hold fast. He had only started feeding it to her last night, but there were ways to make sure she died today.

  Douglas went to see her. He slid the lock back and walked down the stairs, ignoring the sour smells of her bodily waste. She was on the bed, hunched into a tight ball with her back to him. He sat next to her and began to stroke her back like a father would his daughter, but she heaved herself off the bed, collapsing in the farthest corner of the room. Her attempt at a scream came out a harsh croak. With her knees pulled to cover her chest, she wrapped her arms around her shins and tried to make herself as small as possible.

  “You’re sick, Natalie.” He made his voice sound kind, a gentle lie. “You should be in bed.”

  “My bed is covered in shit.” She spat the last word out.

  Wicked girl. He stood and took a step toward her, but she lifted her chin and did not look away. She was so like Eleanor; the Lord had clearly brought them together for a reason, ordained her for this purpose.

  “A mouth like that is unbecoming of a young woman,” he said. “‘Do not withhold correction from a child. For if you beat him with a rod, he will not die. You shall beat him with a rod and deliver his soul from hell.’”

  She glared at him in the dark. “That’s not what that verse means. I know the Bible too, asshole.”

  Rage exploded through him, and in one long stride, he was close enough to grab her shoulders, lifting her off the ground. Natalie cried out, all her bravado lost as he slammed her back against the wall. “Yours is not the first sharp tongue that I have threatened to cut out, but the others had the good sense to keep their mouths shut after a warning.” His face pressed closer to hers. “Do you need more than a warning?”

  She dropped her gaze at last, hands coming to cover her chest as the fight leached from her body like sweat. After another moment, he set her down on her feet. Still looking at the ground, she whispered, “I’m sick. Please”—she swallowed—“please take me to the hospital. I’ll say whatever you want. I just . . . I don’t want to die.”

  How quickly she could be humbled by him. Douglas laughed, one shoulder leaning against the wall as he watched her. “You really are a stupid child.”

  Natalie stared at him for a moment. Then, straightening up with her hands still covering herself, she said, “‘But whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him to have a heavy millstone
hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.’”

  Douglas froze, staring at her.

  She spoke again. “‘Do not provoke your children to anger.’”

  “Shut up.”

  She moved around him until her back was to the bed frame, and his body shifted with her, keeping her in his sight. She reached down to grab her shirt off the floor and pulled it over her head, then held her arms out wide, as if challenging him to run at her. Douglas’s pulse ticked with anger and excitement. Such fire in this girl, even after everything he had done to break her.

  “You think I’m scared of you?” she asked, inching backward. Yes, he thought, even as she kept talking. “You’re using the Bible to justify torturing little girls, you monster. You can only kill me, but you—” She let out a loud laugh, on the edge of wildness, and pointed a finger at him. “You will burn in hell for what you’ve done.”

  A switch flicked inside him for the second time in as many days. First with Amanda, and now her. His vision turned red, narrowed in on only her small, panting body. He lunged for her, leapt to tackle. At the last minute, she moved out of the way and he saw the sharp metal pole jutting up from the bed frame.

  43

  Elle

  January 20, 2020

  The shades on Douglas Stevens’s house were drawn, blocking out the first rays of sunlight. It was impossible to tell if anyone was home. Elle watched the house for a moment, waiting for a sign of movement or life. None came.

  Martín would be waking up any minute, wondering where she was. She had turned off her phone as soon as she sent the information she found to Ayaan. Elle couldn’t remember making a decision to come here, but in the moments since finding the connection between Douglas and Kerry, she had gotten in her car and arrived at his door.

  All that mattered was getting Natalie out. Douglas had evaded police capture for decades; he would have a plan in place if they showed up at his door. The girl was next on his list to kill. Elle couldn’t afford to wait.

  When another minute passed with no movements in the house, Elle checked her handgun was loaded, got out of the car, and rushed up the sidewalk.

  There was no answer to her knock, and she could hear nothing inside. The door was locked with a deadbolt. Douglas had made it a habit to leave the house early every morning back when Elle was his captive; perhaps he did the same thing even now. If she could get Natalie when the girl was in the house alone, no one would have to get hurt at all.

  In search of a back door, Elle went down the front steps and started around the side of the house. A quick glance around the neighborhood revealed no nosy onlookers, but there was every chance some old crank would see what was going on and call the police. It was the kind of place that housed a lot of retirees fighting the inevitable move to an assisted living home—folks with nothing better to do than stand at the window and watch the world go by. She had to hurry.

  She jogged gingerly through the backyard until she reached the spot where she’d seen the snow angel. It was mostly covered after the snowfall overnight, but Elle could still see its outline. It wasn’t as clean as she remembered it being, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Kids were unpredictable in the winter. Back when Natalie was six or seven, they used to play outside after every blizzard. She remembered the girl waddling around in thick snow pants and oversized boots that tripped her up every third step—how she would collapse in the drifts and giggle at the soft poof of a landing that sent fresh powder floating into the sky.

  It could be that Douglas did have a child of his own, someone who’d come out here to play and simply fallen or been clumsy while trying to make a snow angel. But the more she stared at it, the less it looked like an intentional design. It looked like the results of a struggle. An icy gust of wind stole her breath.

  Elle glanced to her left and right. The footsteps she had walked in were large, the size of a grown man’s. Had he carried Natalie here, dumped her in the snow? That made no sense. She looked up, wondering if the girl had climbed down from an upstairs window, just as Elle had done in a different house more than twenty years ago. But there was nothing for her to hold on to, no drainpipe or nearby tree branch.

  When Elle looked back at the house, she noticed something she’d missed before. A smooth piece of wood was poorly blended into the siding with a fresh coat of paint. She reached out and ran her fingertips over it. The wood stuck out half an inch from the side of the house, as if it was covering something. She put her head as close to the wall as possible, looking down into the crack between the wood and the siding. It was difficult to see, but she could just make out the black grate underneath.

  Her hands shook as she stepped back, looking around again to see if anyone was watching her. She wanted to cry out, call Natalie’s name, but if Douglas was inside she couldn’t afford to give herself away. She reached into her pocket and pulled out her father’s Swiss Army knife, the one he’d given her for protection after she was brought home from the hospital in 1999. It was the only thing she had kept of her parents’ after she left home at eighteen. Unfolding the Phillips head screwdriver, she set about unscrewing the plywood. It was tedious work; the screws were wound in tight by an electric drill, and she was sweating by the time she quietly pulled the wood away and placed it in the snow. Cringing in anticipation of the noise, she wrapped her fingers around the grate and yanked it loose from the frame. It came out with a metallic sound that seemed to reverberate around the neighborhood.

  Heart racing, Elle crawled into the ventilation system. It was pitch-dark, but she could feel her way easily enough for a while. She hesitated only when she felt blank nothingness in front of her, realizing she would have to go headfirst into a drop with no idea how far it was to the floor. She took a few deep breaths, whispered Natalie’s name, and dove. The landing jolted up her wrists and forearms. She crawled forward another few feet before her hands came up against another grate. She had to punch it a few times before it finally fell inside the house.

  If Douglas was here, he definitely knew she was too. She crawled to the edge of the vent and looked inside.

  It was a small, dingy room with a hard-packed dirt floor, a single bed frame and dirty mattress, on top of which was the huddled outline of a person. Elle’s whole body ignited, and a sob escaped her lips. “Natalie!”

  Before she could think, she scrambled forward and made the eight-foot drop into the room, somersaulting when she got to the bottom. Her right shoulder screamed with pain, but she shook it off and ran to the bed.

  Douglas’s girlfriend stared up at Elle, eyes dull but alive.

  Elle’s legs buckled, and she gave in, letting herself fall to the floor. She pulled her knees in and buried her face between them. She was too late.

  Natalie was gone.

  * * *

  Activity happened in a blur around Elle.

  She had called 911 as soon as she realized it was Douglas’s girlfriend on the bed, and they were there within ten minutes. The woman was loaded onto a stretcher and rushed to the ambulance. Crime scene technicians started to fill the tiny basement room, trying to kick everyone else out. One of the first responding officers helped Elle to her feet and the next thing she knew, she was sitting on Douglas Stevens’s perfectly neat sofa with a bottle of water in her hands that she couldn’t bring herself to drink. The thought of anything touching her mouth turned her stomach.

  One of the paramedics tried to check her over; Elle waved him off. Her right shoulder throbbed, but the pain was keeping her mind focused. She’d deal with it later.

  After the ambulance took off, she looked around the room in a daze. The wood floors were buffed and waxed, covered in a clean, richly colored Oriental rug. Every cushion on the sofa was plush, corners snapped tight. The lamps, shelves, tables, and books didn’t have a speck of dust. It looked like a midrange hotel room—soulless and cold. Natalie and Amanda had cleaned these rooms, worked themselves into exhaustion around this sofa. It made bile sting the
back of Elle’s throat.

  She was out of time. She should have gotten here sooner. There was no trace of Douglas or Natalie, and the one person who might have information for them was drugged, nearly catatonic when they rushed her to the hospital. Elle had felt hopelessness on this case before, but never at this level, this crushing weight.

  Her brain churned as she stared at the bottle in her hands, working at the corner of the label with her thumbnail. It was a picture of a spring flowing from the top of a wooded mountain. Nestled among the evergreen trees was a tiny, raisin-sized sketch of a cabin. It was peaceful, a remote refuge. There might not be mountains and springs, but Minnesota had dozens of cabins like that. Maybe when all this was over, she and Martín could go away to one together.

  Martín. She looked at her phone, and sure enough, there were half a dozen missed calls from him. She sent a quick text, promising to explain everything later. The thought of even trying to talk about it made her feel sick with exhaustion.

  Elle heard Ayaan’s voice before she saw her burst into the room, a bright orange hijab framing her fiery eyes. The woman dropped her bag and ran to Elle, gathering her in her arms. Elle froze in shock before surrendering to the commander’s embrace, ignoring the pain in her shoulder. She had expected a furious lecture, possibly even a breaking-and-entering charge—not the first hug of their entire friendship.

  After a moment, she pulled away and met Ayaan’s gaze. “What are you doing here?”