by Leslie Wolfe
Elliot had shown the smiling receptionist his badge, and she’d quickly disappeared with swaying hips to get the doctor. Kay threw him a quick glance, to check his reaction to the return of the smiling beauty who couldn’t’ve been more than twenty-three, but he didn’t seem to care, absorbed in reviewing his email.
“Dr. Labarre will see you now,” she chirped, making eye contact with only one of the detectives, her preference in the matter as crystal clear as her melodious voice. Before entering the dentist’s back office, Kay had to refrain herself from scowling at the young woman who deliberately ignored her.
“Detectives, what can I do for you?” Dr. Labarre was tall and a little hunched, probably from leaning over all those open mouths. He looked more like an accountant than a dentist, although Kay couldn’t immediately visualize what a dentist was supposed to look like. This one had thin-rimmed glasses lending class to a round face that warned of a tendency to become overweight, and a nice smile that touched his rather small eyes. “I’m guessing this has to do with Cheryl.”
“Yes,” Kay replied, refusing to take a seat, her back still feeling sore after two Motrin washed down with half a cup of black coffee. “Do you know if she was seeing someone?”
“Romantically, you mean?” the doctor asked, scratching his forehead. “Yes, she was seeing a man.” He frowned slightly, parallel lines running across his tall brow. “I don’t believe she’d dated much since the death of her husband. She was devastated when that happened. I remember when she got the call here, at the office.” He paused for a moment, looking absentmindedly out the window, seemingly lost in thought. “I was actually concerned for her, for a few months after Calvin, her husband, passed. It was just her and three girls, all alone, struggling to make ends meet.”
“Aren’t the Montgomerys well off?” Elliot asked. “Were they at odds, or something?”
Dr. Labarre pressed his lips together for a moment, probably wondering how much he should share. “She kept her distance from the family. One time—when she was still grieving, and I used to find her crying in the supply closet every time she had a free moment—she told me she wanted nothing to do with that viper pit; her words, not mine.” He cleared his throat as his frown deepened. “I don’t believe she meant that literally, Detective. She suspected there was some foul play involved in her husband’s death. She even made some calls to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, asking them to investigate.”
“And?” Elliot leaned against the door and plunged his hands into his pockets.
“They cleared the company of any wrongdoing. She was frantic for a while, saying the family must’ve paid OSHA off, but she had no evidence, nothing. It was just her grief talking.”
“What did you think at the time?” Kay asked, taking a step forward. “I bet people talk in your office just like they do everywhere else they go. Do you recall hearing anything?”
“Less, Detective.” He smiled, probably noticing how confused she seemed. “People talk less here because I work in their mouths. But no, no one said anything nor mentioned foul play in any way. Like I said, I knew Cheryl really well as my employee; it was just her grief talking.”
“How long had she been working for you?” Elliot probed.
“She was my first employee after I bought the practice, so that’s, um, eleven years now.”
“Tell me about the man she was seeing,” Kay asked. “Do you know his name?”
“No, I’m afraid I don’t.”
Elliot brought up John Doe’s photo on his phone and showed it to the doctor. “Is this him?”
“No,” the answer came immediately, tinged with an unspoken question, probably because he’d seen the man in the photo was also dead. “But I believe I recall she told me once her boyfriend was, or used to be, a teacher at her daughters’ school.”
Elliot sifted through images until he brought up the neighbor’s, Frank Livingston. “Him?”
“Yes, that’s him,” the doctor confirmed.
“And you’re sure they were involved?” Kay asked.
“As far as I can tell, yes. He brought her flowers one night. Then they sat out there in the waiting room after closing, their heads together, holding hands, whispering, you know, like they were close.”
The lying son of a bitch, Kay thought. I knew it. “When was that?”
“About six months ago.”
“One more question, Doctor.”
“Sure.”
“Do you know if she was planning to leave, and, if so, where was she going?”
He sighed, hesitating for a beat. “She requested an extended leave of absence. She said she was going to take the girls away for a while.” He leaned forward and steepled his hands together in front of him, on a patient’s chart lying open on his desk. “My gut is telling me she was running away from something. I even called her on it and offered my help, but she didn’t share what it was that was driving her to run.” His eyes blinked away sadness. “In retrospect, I wish I’d said something, done something.” He lowered his gaze.
“Thank you, Dr. Labarre, you’ve been very helpful.”
She turned to leave, but he caught up with her and touched her arm briefly. An expression of concern was written on his face. “Tell me, Detective, do you think you’re going to find Julie?”
“We’re doing everything we can,” she replied, then left the building with one thought at the center of her mind.
Finally, someone had asked about Julie.
29
Points on a Map
Elliot drove in silence, every now and then glancing at Kay, wondering where her mind was at. She seemed tense, upset about something. She also looked tired, which was no surprise, but he knew better than to tell her that, or ask her why she popped Motrin like breath mints. This entire case had gone completely cuckoo on them, and it must’ve been driving her up the wall. And Julie had been missing for almost three days; he didn’t have to ask to know that’s what his partner was thinking about almost all the time. Would they still find her alive, and when? How, when they hadn’t uncovered a single viable lead in all that time?
She’d been staring out the window, thinking intensely. He knew her tell; a deep ridge across her brow and slight movement in her lips occasionally, as if words wanted to gush out of her mouth but she kept them locked inside.
And the stupid rain that would not let go already. The entire precinct, soaked and miserable, was tied up with traffic collisions and safety assignments, dispatch calls rolling in faster than anyone could handle them, especially since the landslides had started popping left and right. Through the blurriness of the windshield wipers set in high gear, he gave Ash Brook Hill a concerned look, seeing how the ground had started splitting on the side, threatening to take a section of the interstate down with it. And if that went, they’d be screwed, left isolated without access to Redding’s hospitals and emergency services.
But Kay didn’t seem to notice.
“At least, we know who offed my vic,” he spoke, his own voice sounding tense, almost strangled despite his lame attempt at sounding lighthearted.
“Uh-huh.”
“We don’t know why, or who he was, but I’d call that a decent outcome for a John Doe.”
Silence, heavy and taut except for the sound of the engine and the whirring of the wiper blades against wet glass. Every now and then, lightning hit the ground in the distance, the accompanying thunder distant and rumbling, barely discernible.
“What do you think of Cheryl’s killer?” he asked. She always saw more in witness statements and evidence than anyone he’d ever worked with.
After a long moment, she replied, turning forward and looking at the deserted road ahead. “There’s something off about this entire case, Elliot. It’s as if we all went down the rabbit hole, and landed in a parallel universe. People act normally, totally unfazed, about things that are miles and miles from normal.” She lowered her gaze for a moment, that frown deepening still. “I’ve never f
elt so helpless about a case.” Her voice trailed off. “Did Cheryl shoot your vic in cold blood? Or self-defense? Truth is, we might never know.”
“Talk me through everything,” he offered. “I wasn’t here for the best parts or so it seems.”
“First, the nine-one-one call. The weirdest things were said, you heard it yourself. As if Cheryl and the unsub were sharing a common delusion. Then—what’s the likelihood of such a call to not get units dispatched? Zilch. I searched the databases, looking to draw blood.” She glanced at him quickly, as if apologizing for her statement. “It’s never happened for as long as the Redding emergency communications center has been operational.”
“I’m reading something in the statements Heather made on the call. She said something like, ‘He will take Julie,’ right? Because that’s why the operator thought it was a prank.”
“Keep going.”
“Seems that was true, and that Cheryl and the girls somehow knew that Julie was in danger of being abducted. Then why not call for help? Why not run?”
“She was going to, remember? There were packed suitcases in the hallway, and you heard Dr. Labarre.”
“But then, why was she still there?” He cranked up the air conditioning; the windshield was starting to fog up. “If I knew someone was coming for one of my kids, I’d run outta there faster than a scalded cat, guns blazing.”
“Well, that’s exactly it,” she replied, rubbing her hands in excitement. He loved seeing that spark in her eyes, when that fantastic and terrifying mind of hers started to put things together. “Her gun did blaze, right? She killed your John Doe.”
“You’re saying—”
“I’m saying, it might be she was still there because she thought she’d taken care of the threat against Julie. Maybe she’d already packed her bags when John Doe happened by and stopped her from leaving. Then she shot him and got rid of the body. Why run?” She crinkled her nose. “Nah… still sounds a little delusional to me. I’d still run; I’d just killed a man, and for some reason, I can’t claim self-defense, can’t call for help. I’m killing myself hauling two-hundred-and-sixty pounds of John Doe to the interstate instead of calling the cops.” She bit her lip in another one of her tells; now she was building scenarios and playing with them in her mind. “Then it’s the weirdness of the Montgomerys, and how they didn’t bother to ask about Julie. Do they know something, or are they part of the same craziness that’s making people delusional around here?”
“Good point.” All that talk about delusions had reminded him of Dr. Edgell. “John Doe’s shrink said he was being delusional, by the way. Makes me wonder if—”
“And so was Frank Livingston’s mother.”
“Was she? I wasn’t there for that part.”
“For when Frank Livingston lied to my face?”
He smiled. “Can’t blame the man for not admitting his affair in front of his wife, Kay. Maybe he wants to live to see tomorrow’s daylight.”
“Yeah, okay,” she conceded, seeming a little entertained by his comment. “In any case, the old Mrs. Livingston kept saying stuff that didn’t make sense, and her son said she was delusional because of her Alzheimer’s. Now I wonder…”
“What?”
“You see, a person can appear to be delusional herself if she describes the actions or words of delusional people. The one thing that threw me off badly and sold me on the Alzheimer’s explanation was her mentioning the spirits of the valley.”
“The what?”
“She claimed the spirits of the valley had visited Cheryl and were responsible for Julie’s abduction, and that Frank had known of their intention ahead of time and had done nothing.”
He laughed. “Now, see, I would’ve bought the Alzheimer’s theory too, at that point. What—”
She had fired up the laptop and was running a database search. “It was something she said. What if—spirits or no spirits—she was on to something?”
“What did she say?”
“That only the firstborn daughters had been taken from the area, ever since she can remember, and none of the girls have ever been found.” She typed quickly, her nimble fingers dancing on top of the keyboard. “I find that hard to believe, though; I grew up in this area and I’ve never heard of any spirits of the valley taking firstborn daughters—” She fell silent for a beat. “I’ll be damned,” she muttered.
“Seriously?” This case was getting crazier by the minute. “You found others?”
“Thirty-seven others, Elliot.” Her excitement had waned, replaced by a somber tension he knew well from other cases they’d worked together. His partner had smelled blood. “Says here, in the past fifty years, there were thirty-seven girls reported missing or abducted in the area, and all cases are still open. Five of these cases were murder-kidnappings, just like ours.”
He braked forcefully and muttered a curse under his breath. Engulfed in the conversation, he’d almost missed the exit. The SUV swerved, skidding onto the accumulated layer of water, then regained its traction the moment Elliot stepped on the gas. “Any closed cases with the same parameters?”
“First thing I checked, and there are none. I would’ve expected at least some, at least coincidentally, but there are none.” She clicked a few keys, then turned the screen sideways. “Elliot, look at the map. All these cases, they’re centered here, in Mount Chester, within a twenty-five-mile radius or so.” She stopped talking for a loaded beat. “Girls taken like Julie were never heard from again, not in fifty years.”
He took his eyes off the road for a split second, enough to catch a glimpse of the cluster of red dots surrounding the area. The odd red dot appeared in other areas of the state, several in LA, a couple in San Francisco, both cities known hubs of kidnappings and open missing persons cases. Out of the many open missing persons cases, only some had been first daughters. “Why fifty years?”
“Good point. Let’s go back a hundred.” The map caught a few more colored pins. “There are forty-three now, here, in this area.” She switched screens and squinted a little to read the fine print in the dates report. “The oldest one goes back to fifty-seven years ago.”
Elliot turned into Angel Creek Pointe, sending a wave of puddled water up in the air, splashing the empty sidewalk.
“This is no longer a murder-kidnapping,” she said, typing an email at the same time. “We’ll treat this as a serial killer case. I’m bringing Logan up to speed.” She stopped typing for a moment, as if gathering her thoughts. “It could, potentially, be cult-related after all. Otherwise, who keeps on kidnapping and killing for fifty-seven years?”
30
Whispers
Julie hadn’t slept in a while, not deeply. She hadn’t been awake either; she’d been slipping in and out of consciousness, lying on the floor with her back against the door, wrapped in the comforter she’d stripped from the bed but not still feeling warm. Not feeling cold either; just numb and faint and sleepy.
She’d stopped drinking water, too weak to get up and walk to the bathroom, where the small sink could quench her thirst. She wasn’t feeling thirsty either; just floating away, distanced from her own agonizing body while her mother was right there, by her side.
She wasn’t bleeding anymore. Her mother’s face was serene and kind, smiling gently as she caressed her hair the way she always did, running her fingers through it while her thumb swiped across her eyebrow, straightening its rebellious strands.
“Are you angry with me, Mom?” she whispered, words only she could hear as they left her parched lips.
She wasn’t. She smiled and told her she loved her. Julie couldn’t hear her voice, but could read the words in the movement of her pale lips. Was she really there? She didn’t know… she couldn’t be sure.
Her consciousness slipped again into nothingness, then came back, and her mother was still there. The memory of her body lying on the kitchen floor in a pool of blood had faded away, as if millennia had passed, as if it never really happened.
She must’ve fallen asleep for a while, because she startled awake, but then wondered if she was really awake or not. She’d felt her mother’s warm hand caressing her frozen face, but now she was gone.
“Mom?” she called, but no one answered. “Are you here?”
She wasn’t, but her words, fainter than a sigh, couldn’t’ve reached too far. Maybe she would return. She’d just wait there for her, grateful she felt sleepy instead of cold, and falling asleep seemed easy, easier than it had ever been.
Startling awake again, she listened for sounds, any proof she was still alive, any promise she could survive her ordeal. Only rain drumming against metal gutters, and distant thunder ominous, as if the earth itself was looking back in anger.
The future no longer scared her. She wished her fate would meet her already, while she still had an ounce of energy rushing through her veins. She wanted to have a chance and fight her captor, the man who’d taken her, while she could still stand. But could she, really?
As if to test herself, she propped herself against the floor, lifting her weak body slowly, painfully, as her arms trembled with the effort. Dizzy and nauseated, she had to stop, leaning onto her right arm, her legs folded underneath her trembling body. Yet she’d rather die fighting, trying to free herself, than to die a slow death in that basement, where probably other girls had before her.
HELP ME
Those two words she’d found scratched into the masonry right by the door came into her mind vividly, spreading terror and angst, but she still couldn’t raise herself up to her feet, not even if she reached for the door handle and grabbed onto that.
“Shhh, baby,” her mother said, caressing her cheek.
She let herself fall back onto the concrete floor and managed a weak smile, her dry lips cracking open. “Mom.” She was there, and she wasn’t angry. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered, “for everything I’ve done.” She wanted to shift a little, to remove her numb arm from underneath her, but couldn’t find the strength. As darkness fell around her, she wasn’t afraid anymore, only sad. “Oh, Mom, you were right to cry the day I was born.”