She grabbed his outstretched hand with both of hers and shook them up and down much too hard and much too long until she must have realized what she was doing and turned an even brighter shade of red. She dropped his hand. “I’m sorry, I’m a bit of an idiot sometimes,” she laughed self-deprecatingly. “I’m Emily Rovey.”
“Not at all,” he said, noticing the twinkle in her large brown eyes and showing her his charming smile. He reached out to touch her shoulder. “You’re nothing of the sort, you’re quite beautiful, actually, Miss Rovey.”
“I hate to keep saying oh my god but OMG,” she answered as she swooned beneath his attentive stare. “Umm, would you mind a selfie with me? No one is going to believe this,” she said, as the blush returned to her face.
“I have a better idea. I value my privacy, it’s so hard to maintain a life of Zen when you’re in the public eye. So, in exchange for not taking a selfie, I’ll invite you to lunch, at a very exclusive place.”
“What? Now? Oh, I couldn’t, I have to…” and her voice trailed off. Jimmy thought it was because there really was nothing else she had to do, but he stepped in to save her.
“No, it certainly does not have to be now. I’ll be back here same time next Thursday if that works better for you. You can be more prepared,” he said, with an emphasis on the last word but inside he was really thinking that he could be more prepared.
He watched her as she emphatically nodded her head up and down with a smile on her face that left him unsure of what emotion she was trying to convey, it was somewhere between blithering idiot and sultry seduction. He imagined she was one of the million girls here just waiting for their big break and that perhaps, she thought she had found hers and didn’t want to blow it.
That first encounter was a week ago and now here they were flying up Wilshire Boulevard and screeching the tires as they fishtailed onto North Roxbury Drive. From what he had already learned about her simple country life, the next five minutes would be the most exhilarating and frightening experience of Emily’s young life. She had grown up on a dairy farm in Glendale, Arizona, the second youngest of seven siblings. At nineteen-years-old, the family’s college fund exhausted, she left home to find fame and fortune in sunny L.A. She had hardly been missed and never looked back.
Now, here she was, sitting beside a rock star in a ridiculously short denim skirt and a white tee shirt through which he could see her lacy black bra barely veiled beneath. Jimmy licked his lips and kept pulling his focus from the road to watch her through sideways glances. Emily was gripping the armrest with white knuckles and watching through squinted blue eyes, as the mansions flew by outside the window. The look on her face, laughing through gritted teeth as they parried with death, told him that she could not believe how exhilaratingly alive she felt.
Jimmy reached his right arm over and rested it on her bare thigh, patting it reassuringly and at the same time, letting the spark flow from his hand to her. It ignited him and the combination of the thrill of the ride and the touch of her satin thigh created an erotic stirring in him and he hoped in her as well. As he slowed and turned off Lexington into his driveway, she gasped, it took her breath away. The drive was a tree-lined brick road that went on for nearly a mile before ending at what was probably the biggest and most beautiful house she had ever seen. The courtyard in front, where he parked, could have held a hundred cars and in its center, was a mammoth fountain of cascading water topped by a brass sculpture composed of dozens of guitars.
“You live here?” she asked, disbelievingly, wide-eyed and mouth agape.
“Yup,” he answered, as he killed the engine.
She leaned back in the seat, closed her eyes. “Oh my god. Alone?”
“Just me,” he said, not quite the truth but he had told the groundskeeper to disappear for a few days.
Her head was spinning and the smile on her face was so broad and constant, that it must have hurt. “Why?” she asked, with eyes as wide as the Pacific Ocean.
“Why what?”
“Why would you want to live in a big ol’ beautiful house like this all by yourself?” she asked, and she opened the door to get out. Jimmy could see her thoughts clearly in the expression on her face, in her head, she was already moving in, becoming Mrs. Jimmy Vale.
“Why not?” He answered smiling, and she burst into hysterical laughter. He stepped from the car and inhaled deeply. He was home. Home, where he could have his way with no repercussions. Home, where the things he did no longer brought regrets. He had learned to revel in the horror, the evil in the air tasted like wine, it got him drunk.
Chapter V
Special Agent Kimberly Watson sat staring at the screen on her MacBook, scrolling up and down the same page, over and over. There was something there, she sensed it, but she just could not find the connection. Every time she went through the data, every trip to the endless evidence rooms around the country, either physically or virtually, yielded more heretofore undiscovered clues, but none of them brought her any closer to a breakthrough or even a suspect than she had been before. Yet, she knew they were all connected in some way beyond their collective discovery, she knew it. But the real world was not Hogan’s Alley, the fictitious town at the Academy where clues always led to suspects. In the real world, they always seemed to lead to dead ends.
In 2006, at a spot where the Wisconsin River takes a 90-degree turn, a man who had just bought a piece of river-front property that included a small home and a large boat house, made a startling discovery. He was pulling out old pilings from a long-gone dock when a shovel full of silt and dirt pulled up a bone. Just one at first, and he tossed it to the side, but when one became two then five then twenty-five, he called the police. Their official excavation of the property lasted two years and eventually uncovered 1177 human bones. Over the next six years, lab work by FBI forensic experts assisted by a team of archaeologists and archaeology students from Marquette University, resulted in the construction of partial skeletons of thirty-four people and positive DNA identification from twenty-seven of them, they were all female.
Kim was given the task of investigating the lives of the twenty-seven identified women, girls and women, in the hope that something there would lead to clues about their deaths. On the surface, the victims shared a great many similarities, but still, there was nothing that was strong enough for her to focus on. Their age range was sixteen to twenty-one at disappearance, marital status single, social status middle-class, body type including average height and weight, were a 100% match. Last week she had found a completely new stat, but it too did nothing for her case, every single girl had their natural hair color, no tinting, no bleach blonds.
Perhaps the most unique characteristic that all the cases shared, every one of them, was that not a shred of evidence or remains had ever been found beyond the boneyard in the Dells. There were additional factors as well that for many, would have fallen within the center of a Venn diagram: twenty-one of them were brunettes, nineteen of them had shoulder length or longer hair, twenty of them had brown eyes, twenty-one of them had no siblings. These stats were not in accordance with their ratios in the general public, not even close.
While the similarities were the aspects that Kimberly concentrated on, it was the differences, however, that were the most striking. The time from the first disappearance to the last spanned twenty-six years, and the twenty-seven disappearances had occurred in twenty-four states, with no single state having more than two; those states were New York, California and oddly enough, Wisconsin. There was roughly one of them a year and almost all of them had disappeared between May and September. In only one case, was there a direct link between two of the victims, two of the girls had been together when they disappeared. In her private world, when she was alone and thinking of them collectively, the name she gave them was the dead girls. In fact, the file on her laptop into which everything associated with the case was dragged or downloaded, was titled, Dead Girls.
Kimberly had no illusions that
expediency could mean a life saved, or lives saved. She always acted like she was working under the gun to solve even one of these, to bridge two stories, to tie one knot. While no lives that she knew of were hanging in the balance, girls kept disappearing. Since taking the case, Kimberly had added six more names to the group. All the new names were cases of girls whose disappearance post-dated the original bone find and yet, shared characteristics that put them squarely in the center of the Venn diagram. She did at least asterisk them, they were not officially dead.
Kimberly’s auburn curls were tied back in a tight ponytail, and the black-rimmed glasses she occasionally wore to give her eyes a break from her contacts, gave her a school teacher look when combined with her crisp white cotton, button-down shirt. The buttons were done nearly up to her neck and gave little hint of the body beneath. Her sleeves were rolled, exposing a tattoo on her left inside forearm, it was a simple dark green one, a V lying on its side. She leaned back with a sigh and lifted her glasses up on top of her head as she rubbed first her left eye, then her right. When she put them back on there was a lab tech standing right in front of her and she jumped involuntarily, momentarily startled.
“Jesus Mark, are you fucking kidding me sneaking up like that,” she said.
Mark looked around as though she must be talking to someone else. “Sneaking up? I just walked in normal. I think I was even whistling. Were you sleeping or something?”
“Oh god, no, I’m sorry Mark. Guess I was just wrapped up so tight inside my own head that I didn’t even realize you were there,” she said, and her features softened, wiping the scowl and creased forehead away.
“Ah, that’s better Kim,” Mark answered. “Besides, I think you’re going to be so happy to see me, you might just want to kiss me.”
“Oh really, well I’ll reserve judgment on that, cute as you are.” She glanced up briefly to see Mark beam.
He was one of the graduate students from Marquette, interning in the lab for the summer, and had been assigned exclusively, to Kim. Although they had worked very closely together for several weeks, their relationship remained unclear, mostly owing to his youth and her constantly shifting personality. At times, she was aloof and snobby and other times approachable and, yes, even consciously flirtatious, sexy in an older woman kind of way. She’d have no part of Miss Watson or Special Agent Watson, ‘call me Kim,’ it had been.
“You know how you’re always talking about there being no evidence on any of your girls other than the mother lode?” He asked, wide-eyed.
“Yes…” She did not look up from her screen, still distracted, not giving him her complete attention.
“Well, do you know those bones that were uncovered by the campers up in the State Park last week?”
“Yes, yes, whatever, what about them?” Kimberly asked, finally realizing where this might be going, beginning to sense the potential watershed moment that was approaching. He had her attention now.
“Quantico got a hit,” he said, and she turned her face up to him, their eyes met, “positive match for Amy Reed.” She kept her eyes locked on his, but her mind was somewhere else, she had left Mark now and was looking right through him, right through and all the way to that campsite.
For the first time in her office, since she began this assignment over a year ago, the whisper of a smile turned up the corners of her mouth. Amy Reed, she thought and tried to recall everything she could about the girl and her case. Her genius, combined with her crazy hours and single-minded dedication, had enabled her to remember minute details about every case. This one, however, was the first one, the oldest one, and she knew perhaps the most about this one. The moment she heard the name, details rushed into her brain like water through a broken dam.
“Wow, that’s been a long time coming, Mark. She disappeared with her best friend from a small town near Madison, Wisconsin, twenty-eight years ago,” Kimberly said, continuing to look far-off, as though she were now trying to see back through the years as well. “Just Amy, huh, nothing on the Walker girl?” she asked.
“Nope sorry, there were a dozen bones all together and one tooth, a maxillary canine. Of them, five bones yielded sufficient DNA to identify Amy Reed; the 1st distal phalange, the first rib, the 4th metacarpal and the canine had very high concentrations, admissible level. It was the smaller bones that showed the best yield: in fact, there was a tibia and a femur that tested inconclusive. All the bones were from the same side of her body, that’s weird, as though someone cut her in half vertically and deposited one-half here. Interestingly, four bones showed canine teeth marks and, here’s the crazy part, possibly human teeth marks as well; right pelvis, right femur, right humerus and right tibia,” he said, detailing the find for her.
“Any way to tell whether the bite marks were post-mortem? Did they say?” Amy asked, pushing her chair back and standing up. Her eyes were fixed on the intern.
“Didn’t say, you mean like scavengers, right? I guess an animal attack is a real possibility too, then, right?”
“Yeah, true,” Kimberly said, knowing that wasn’t the case. She closed her eyes to focus her thoughts. “But just the one girl, that’s interesting. And human teeth marks too, you said, right?”
“Yeah, weird, I know,” Mark said.
Kimberly kept her eyes closed a bit longer before finally opening them, and when she did, she said, “Come here.”
Mark walked over to her and she leaned into him, kissing his cheek. “You were right, I do want to kiss you.”
He blushed, and a big grin spread across his face.
“I’m going to the Dells. Do me a favor, find out who’s in charge there and text me his info, okay?”
“You do know today’s the Fourth of July, right?”
“Yeah, yeah, of course, I don’t like fireworks much. You’ll get me the name, right?”
Mark said he would and wished her luck as she hurriedly passed through the office door. Two years, she thought, two years of fourteen-hour days and seven-day weeks, two years of theories shot down and sleepless nights, two years and finally a break. That whisper of a smile that had begun on the corners of her mouth now spread across her entire face and she felt a sense of renewal and rebirth.
Chapter VI
One, two, landing, he counted as he began his way up the familiar stairs. One, two, three, four, five, landing, he continued, looking up at the marble statues above the portico and the words, THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY. He paused and glanced at the lion to his right, then the one on his left, old friends, patience and fortitude. He continued up, counting each of the next fourteen steps as he touched them. It was the same every time he climbed them. Only once had he lost count and on that occasion, he had to return to the bottom to start again. The noon summer sun, bright above, burned into his face and head and created a longing in him for the cool comfort of the research rooms that had become his haven, his solace, his womb.
It was an oppressively hot day and the nation was just finding its way back from a long holiday weekend, for Chris that meant his public places were open again. He missed the quiet of this one, it was a comfortable quiet, a library quiet, and he loved the smells, especially in the research rooms: The leather bindings, the ancient paper, the wax that was used on the shiny wooden floors. It’s daunting fifty million research volumes were, for him, a comfort in their vastness, the answers he sought were contained somewhere within, it had become a question of how much time he spent looking for them. He usually did not give up on the job search at Home Depot until well past noon, which meant that his time to do this work, was limited by three factors: the amount of time he spent on jobs, the amount of time he spent waiting for jobs and the hours the library or museums were open. On average, he probably spent ten hours a week in the library.
He had worked with, and secured appointments with, many of the curators of the library’s specific collections: Manuscripts and Archives, Rare Book Division, Photographs and Prints Division, and today’s appointment, The Irma and Paul Milstei
n Division of United States History, Local History, and Genealogy. Most everyone on staff at the library knew Chris Carter and what his areas of interest were. Most of them thought he was an eccentric reclusive academic doing research for a book, a scholarly work on ancient myths and legends of the north woods. He said nothing to dissuade them. None of them would have guessed that he lived on the streets. He had volumes of work saved in his Gmail account. He wrote all his research notes as emails to himself. When he started, he didn’t know if he would ever find the answers he was looking for, but he did know that he would never stop looking.
He did his reading in the Rose Main Reading Room and all his writing across the hall in the Bill Blass Catalog Room. If his writing had been edited and formalized, it would have been a two-thousand-page work. Today, Chris was focusing his attention on a creature that was older than written history in the North Woods of the Great Lakes Region, the Wendigo. This creature appears as far back as the ancient mound builders, the Mississippian culture, and its Algonquin name translates to something like "the evil spirit that devours mankind." There are Wendigos in the legends of many Algonquin speaking tribes: the Ojibwa, Salteaux, Cree, Naskapi, and the Innu people, among others. Chris’s research had begun with the casting of a big net over a broad set of data. He had spent years compiling it and now, finally, was in the process of narrowing that data back down by creating subsets from the results. Overlapping the subsets, things like location and traits had led him to today’s subject.
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