by Grant Pies
“Ha, Robert.” Mike shook his head. There it was! A glimpse of something in Mike’s face. A brief tightening of the lips and squinting of the eyes. Something was there. Something to pursue. Carter looked at Sam, who nodded discretely.
“Yeah, Robert…” Carter said, hoping to lead Mike to keep talking. Let the witness ramble. “Did Rose run away because of her father?”
Mike looked down and shook his head. “She planned on it, but she never got that far. She didn’t have enough money. She was selling pregnancy tests to girls.”
“You knew she was selling them?” Sam asked. The two men took one gentle step towards Mike.
“Yeah, I was the one who set up her online profile in the chatrooms. She sold them for two hundred dollars a pop. Once she got to two thousand, she was gonna run.”
“How many did she sell?” Carter asked.
“Three.”
“You tell the cops that?” Sam flipped a cigarette in his mouth.
Carter noticed the slightest shuffle in Mike’s left foot, like the thought of running shot through his mind at the mention of cops.
Interrupting, he said, “We aren’t looking to put anyone in jail. We just want to solve this thing. Tell Claire and Robert so they can sleep at night. That’s it.” Pulling his raincoat away from his waist with both hands, Carter said, “See, no badge. No gun or handcuffs. We’re just looking for Rose. Now just because you got her pregnant doesn’t mean you had anything to do with whatever happened to her.”
“You think it’s me?” Mike cut him off.
Shit, Carter thought.
“So, then she told you about the pregnancy?” Mike smiled and shook his head. “And all this time I thought you might actually know something useful. Something I don’t already know. Don’t listen to anything she told you. She only knows what Rose and I told her.”
“She?” Carter asked. “Who’s she?”
“Claire!” Mike threw his hands in the air. “She’s the only other one that knew Rose was pregnant.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Sam said, blowing a puff of smoke from his mouth. Carter held his hand out towards Sam, hoping to silence him. Leland’s rule number two: the only thing worse than giving away what you know, is giving away what you don’t know, and Carter had done enough of that already.
“So, if Claire doesn’t know anything, give us your version of the facts.” He stepped towards Mike. Now more than ever, he didn’t want the kid to try and run.
“She thinks I had something to do with Rose disappearing?” Mike said. His eyes wide, almost scared. “She’s trying to blame me?”
“No, no, no. Not at all.” Carter stayed calm. “In fact, she didn’t think we even needed to talk to you.”
“But you’re here?”
“Well, we wouldn’t be doing our job if we just took Claire’s word for everything,” Sam said. “Gotta follow every lead.”
“Why would Claire think you’re the father?” The drooling dog still barked in the distance.
“Like I said, everything she knows, she knows because it’s what Rose and I told her.”
“Okay,” Carter said, pulling his notepad out. “So why did you tell her that?”
“Rose was scared. She had to tell her mom. Had to tell someone.”
“Scared of what?” Carter glanced around to see if anyone else was watching them. He knew they would eventually draw someone’s attention, especially standing in a random backyard.
“Scared of being pregnant. Scared of what her father would do when he found out. Take your pick.”
“He hit her?” Sam asked. The wind was picking up, rustling the leaves and twisting a windchime hanging from a nearby house.
Shaking his head, Mike said, “No, but he pretty much did everything else.”
“He … touch her?” Sam cringed. Carter had never seen Sam shy away from asking a tough question.
“No.” Mike narrowed his eyes and scrunched his face. “Other stuff. Like, he locked her in her room for an entire weekend once. Only left her a bucket. Another time he woke her up at three a.m. and made her scrub the bathtub for four hours, yelling at her, like screaming. Right in her ear, like a drill sergeant, while he drank a twelve pack. For no reason! That’s why we told Claire. She knows what Robert can and can’t handle. She knows how to keep things from him. She’s a pro. Been doing it for years.”
“What’s that mean?” Carter asked, cocking his head to the side.
“Nothing.”
“No, you know something.” Sam pointed at Mike.
“If you know anything that could help—" Carter said.
“I told you everything that would help!” Mike snapped. Thunder boomed in the distance. “I’m just saying that Claire’s not the most truthful person you’ll ever meet. Rose was always talking about how Claire kept things from Robert. Stuff about the family or something. That’s all she ever told me!” Mike started walking back to his house. Carter and Sam followed.
Tossing his cigarette butt on the ground and stomping it out, Sam said, “So here’s the hundred-thousand-dollar question, if you aren’t the father of Rose’s kid, who the fuck is?”
“Hell if I know.” Mike shrugged and looked down. The three of them made it out from the row of backyards and back out to the street. “She wouldn’t tell me.”
“You don’t even know?” Carter asked.
Mike shook his head, and his eyes began to fill with tears. His face turned red. “No,” he said, letting words out, but trying to keep everything else in. He wiped his eyes. “She just said it was someone from school. But – if … if I had pushed more, made her tell me, maybe I’d be more help. Maybe they could’ve found her.” He sniffled and wiped at his nose, kept his eyes on the ground. “I should have been walking with her. I walked her home every day.”
“Why didn’t you?” Carter asked.
Mike walked over to the sidewalk in front of his house and picked up the mail he dropped when he took off. “I had detention. First time since I got to St. Mary’s.” His eyes pooled with tears. “First fucking time I wasn’t with her.” He clenched his jaw and swallowed.
“It’s not your fault, kid,” Sam said, and the two of them stepped closer to Mike. “You have any ideas who it could be?”
Mike just shook his head and sniffled. He wiped his eyes and blinked rapidly.
Nodding, Carter squeezed Mike’s shoulder. “Thanks. You’ve helped us a lot.”
Mike rolled his eyes. “Whatever.”
“We’ll find her,” Carter said.
“No, you won’t.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I’m not stupid. She’s been gone over two months.”
“We’ll be in touch.” Carter gave the boy one last pat on the back before they walked back to their car.
“See, even the fifteen-year-old knows this isn’t gonna go anywhere good,” Sam said as they climbed in.
“You’re the only person I know who would use the fact a fifteen-year-old agrees with you as some support for your belief that Rose is dead.”
“Well, to be fair, you don’t really know a lot of people.” Sam popped the glove compartment to find his bottle of prescription cough syrup with Codeine. He twisted the top off and took two large swigs.
“You haven’t had a cough for months now, you know that, right?”
“It’s prescription, you’re supposed to finish it out even if you feel better, right?” Sam smiled, baring his purple-coated teeth.
“Pretty sure that’s just antibiotics.”
“So, where’re we going?” Sam asked. “Talk to Claire? Get her side of things?”
“Back to the office for now. If Claire’s withholding information from us, I don’t want to let her know we’re onto her just yet.” A single rain drop dripped onto the windshield and rolled down. Sam started the car just as more rain thudded down around them.”
Live Young, Die Fast
Carter stood over his desk, looking at the pictures of missing girls. None of t
hem knew what would happen to them. No one can ward off evil. No one can see it coming. He turned to look at Rose’s picture hanging on the wall. Her eyes staring back at him.
“You think our lives are set?” Carter asked Sam, but really, he was just talking out loud.
“Shit,” Sam said, leaning back in his chair. “Like destiny?”
“Yeah. A purpose you were born for, but had no say in?”
“I suppose if you believe in a purpose, you believe in a plan to get you there. And if you believe in a plan, you believe in a planner. Someone who chose that purpose for you.”
“God?”
“I didn’t say that.” Sam shrugged. “Don’t know what you’d call it.”
“You think this was their purpose?” Carter pointed at the photos of the missing girls on his desk. “You think Rose was always supposed to go missing? Like born to die?”
“We’re all born to die.” Sam propped his feet up on his desk. Carter stood with his back to Sam, his eyes locked on Rose’s picture. “I think people look for a purpose in things, parents create a reason for their child going missing. Makes the grieving easier. I worked a case at the CPD, few years back.” Sam leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling, rolled his head from side to side, stretching his neck. “A boy was killed. Shot. Only twelve years old. Killed by a shop owner shooting at some guy in a ski mask.”
Carter listened but kept his eyes on Rose’s picture.
“I talked with the boy’s dad at the station a few days after it happened. He came to pick up some of the kid’s things we collected at the crime scene. He was a pastor. Never seen a man take things so well. Don’t get me wrong, the man sobbed when I gave him the kid’s stuff back. But he held no ill feelings towards the shop owner. Not even the fucker in the ski mask. He told me God has a purpose for everything.”
Carter rolled his eyes at the notion.
“Even if it seems horrible in the moment, there is a reason for that pain. He said, it’s like an animal stuck in a bear trap. You know, those traps with the metal teeth, biting down on your leg, crushing the bone, ripping the skin.” Sam clamped his hands together, interweaving his fingers to mimic the teeth of a bear trap. “He said to get an animal unstuck, you have to push their leg further into the trap, tearing even more skin from the bone. But eventually,” Sam opened his hands, “the animal is free. Injured, but free to limp away in the forest. The animal doesn’t realize that pain is necessary to get free, but the person helping the animal does. You have to trust the pain will lead to something good.”
“That’s what this is? That’s what his boy dying was?” Carter shook his head. “The pain before the freedom? I bet that pastor would rather be stuck in a trap with his son by his side.”
“That was his outlook is all I’m saying.” Sam shrugged. “Maybe he’s onto something.”
“It seems to me the man rescuing the animals is the same man setting the traps in the first place. That’s who I’d like to have a word with.”
“God?” Sam turned Carter’s question around on him.
“Whoever, God, the universe, Gaia.” Carter finally looked away from Rose’s picture and turned to Sam. “If this is part of a plan,” he pointed at Rose’s picture then at the other pictures spread over his desk, “then I want to know whose plan it is. I want to talk to the man setting the goddamn bear traps.”
“It’s a coping mechanism. That’s all. If there’s no purpose in things, no reason, then all that’s left is chaos. And, to most, that’s scarier than any alternative.”
Carter let out a deep sigh and dropped into his desk chair. The fluorescent lights overhead hummed. One flickered. “You call your cop friend?”
“Mm-hmm. Detective Shaker. Left him a message. But I don’t think they’re going to reopen this case. Once the missing persons task force takes over, it’s there for good. You know, unless someone actually sees the person, or they escape from whatever basement they’ve been trapped in … or a body’s found.”
“They really don’t have any interest in solving these cases, do they? Is it laziness? Corruption? What?”
“I know you hate it, want to blame someone, but it’s a numbers game with the cops. Every day I worked there, every fucking day, I wrote reports of people getting killed, kidnapped, beat up by people who are supposed to love them. So, we gravitate to the cases that are solvable. We want our efforts to mean something.”
“So, you get what I mean,” Carter said. “I want this to mean something too, more than just catching cheaters. I told you that, and you acted like it was absurd.”
Sam shook his head. “I tried doing something that matters for over a decade. Let’s just say chasing cheaters is a nice break from trying to make a difference.” Sam glanced at the stack of intake forms from potential clients sitting in the corner. “Something like two thousand people go missing every day in this country.” Sam dropped his feet to the floor and sat up. He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “How many people you think have gone missing in Chicago since they dropped Rose’s case? You think they’re looking to go back to an old case? You got a case that is a day old, fresh leads, fresh evidence. Or you got this case. Dead in the water, two months missing. Which are you going to look into? Hm?”
Carter turned to Sam. “If there’s evidence to support following a lead, I’d follow a lead, no matter how old a case is.”
“You tell that to a cop, that’s like telling them to dig down to get out of an avalanche.”
“You know, after an avalanche, sometimes the best way out is to dig down.”
“It was just an analogy, Carter.” Sam shook his head, exasperated. He rubbed his eyes and yawned. “Leave it to you to take it literally. The cops aren’t going back to old cases, not cases like this.”
“Fuck,” Carter muttered. “You know she was alive? Beth Freidman, she was alive when your beloved cops gave up on her.”
Sam locked eyes with Carter, likely trying to read him, see if he was bullshitting. “No,” he shook his head. “I saw the report from the medical examiner. She died weeks before the cops stopped looking. Weeks.” Sam kept nodding his head.
“It’s true. Leland found her. Tracked her down to that guy’s property. He was the first to see her. Found her locked in a shipping container. He said she wasn’t dead for more than a couple days. The cops could have found her alive if they’d just kept looking.”
“Carter, the old man was … well, old! He had a tumor growing on his brain. And he sure as shit wasn’t a trained medical examiner.”
“They lied, Sam. They lied because it was bad press for them to have given up on a girl who was still alive. I never told you because I figured you wouldn’t believe me.”
“Goddamn right I don’t believe you!” Sam shouted. “What about the autopsy? The medical examiner?”
“She was in on it. They probably wrote the report for her. Had her sign off.”
Sam threw his head back and laughed. “Leland tell you this? He come up with this conspiracy theory? This is why you constantly bash my co-workers? My friends? Because some old man thought a dead girl was less dead than the medical examiner said she was? Fuck, Carter, you’re a smart guy. Think about this.”
“I have thought about it.” Carter’s eyes were red, a sadness welled inside him thinking of Leland’s final case and the impact it left on him. “And just like you trust your friends at the CPD, I trust Leland.”
“Is that what this case is? You want to make Leland proud by catching the cops in another conspiracy to cover up their shoddy work?” Sam rolled his eyes.
“No. I want to find Rose. Give her parents answers. Maybe find enough evidence to get your cop buddies to reopen the case and use their resources to find Rose. Figure you feel the same way?”
Sam sighed and looked away. “Fine.” Sam gave in. “What’s the next step, boss?”
“We gotta at least try to track down the father of Rose’s child. That’s the suspect. That’s the only thing that
changed in her life before she went missing.” Carter grabbed his coat and threw it over his shoulders. “We find him, and the cops surely have to reopen the case.”
“So that’s it? We find the father, and you agree to walk away, take another job?” Sam pointed to the stack of client files.
“Sure.” Carter nodded.
“Then where do you propose we start?”
“St. Mary’s. Mike said it was someone from school. So, we find out who was in her classes. Someone had to have seen her hanging out with a boy.”
Sam stood from his desk. “Lead the way.”
After a short drive, they ended up at Rose’s school. St. Mary of the Lake was an ornate structure. A large building made of white stone, with a staircase leading up to an arched entryway. Mature oak trees sat out front, casting shade across a cobblestone common area.
“Where you gonna start?” Sam asked, walking quickly to keep up with Carter.
“I guess I’ll start with her teachers. See if they saw who she hung out with. They probably know more about her than her parents. But that’s not saying much.”
They marched down the hall and made their way to the administration offices. The first person they saw was a woman sitting at the front desk, her glasses teetering on the tip of her nose.
She looked up and, after a short nod, Carter said, “We are investigating the disappearance of Rose Bishop.”
“They’re still looking into that?” the woman asked, her face sagging and the skin around her neck dangling with each word she spoke.
“Well, we are here aren’t we,” Carter said. “We need a list of her teachers and any clubs she may have been a part of.”
The woman nodded. “Just one moment, sir.” She picked up the phone and spoke quietly to whoever was on the other end. “I have two gentlemen here investigating the Rose Bishop thing … mm-hmm … he said he needs her schedule … no …” Carter leaned forward, trying to listen in. She placed her hand over the end of the phone. “Are you with Chicago PD? The task force?”
Carter looked back at Sam, who just shrugged. “No,” he said softly, “But—"