The Fort

by Aric Davis

  34

  Van Endel was sitting at his desk, contemplating another cup of coffee, when the phone rang. “Van Endel,” he said. There was a moment of silence, then a clicking sound, and Tracy was on the line.

  “What’s shaking, Mr. Detective?”

  “Nothing, Tracy,” said Van Endel, and he meant it. Since the body had been found, he hadn’t been able to put his hands on one shred of evidence. It was beyond frustrating, but Tracy calling could mean that there had been a breakthrough at the coroner’s office. “What do you have for me?”

  “A little bit of interesting news—maybe good; not my call—and a big old chunk of frustrating news. You got a preference?”

  “I’ll take frustrating.”

  “I’ve got nothing on dental so far,” said Tracy. “Big fat zilcho, and I don’t see that changing.”

  “So you still can’t say with any certainty that this actually is Molly?”

  “Nope, sure can’t. I took a bunch of pictures to share with my old professor. He has some contacts in New York, said he can see if they can help. I’m good, but these teeth are something else. If the guy was deliberately trying to disguise who she was, he couldn’t have done a better job of it. I’m guessing that’s exactly what his goal was. I’ve heard of Mob guys doing stuff like that, burying Jimmy Hoffa with no head, hands, or feet, that sort of thing. Whoever did this knew that fire would destroy her fingerprints and footprints, and that hammer he used, I’m damn sure on that, plain old claw hammer, you can tell by the impre—”

  “I’ll take your word for it, Tracy.”

  “All right, whatever,” Tracy said, sounding a little miffed that Van Endel didn’t share his enthusiasm for the bloody nuts and bolts of his trade. “Anyways, I got the teeth thing headed out of state, so we’ll see what those guys have to say.

  “Now the other thing, though. The interesting one. She had a leather wallet in a back pocket, it was basically seared into her. At first I thought it was just more skin. You want to guess what was in there?” The line was silent for a minute, and Tracy sighed. “Won’t even try. You just know you can’t get it right, so you won’t even play.”

  “Tracy.”

  “All right, all right. Latex residue, along with some ruined foil. I got them under the microscope, confirmed on both.”

  “Condoms.”

  “My man gets the assist, anyway,” said Tracy. “So here’s how I see it. You either accept that Molly might have been planning on having a little safe fun, and things got out of hand, or that something else is going on.”

  “Like what?”

  “Shit, I don’t know,” said Tracy. “You’re the detective, I’m the lab rat. I can tell you what, where, and when it was done to her. You’re the one who figures out the who and why. One thing, though: I can’t think of any reason for anyone to kill Molly Peterson and go to all this effort to keep her identity a secret, can you?”

  “No,” admitted Van Endel. “There has to be some explanation, though. You’re right: disguising the body like this took time, and he ran a hell of a risk burning it like he did, too. I can’t see why anyone would do it just to do it.”

  “Is the mom clean?”

  “Stick to the what, where, and when, Tracy. That was one of the first things I looked into. Mom works a steady job, drinks a little, doesn’t date.”

  “So no Mob ties or gambling debts?”

  “Let me know what you hear on the teeth, all right?” Van Endel hung up the phone, frowning at nothing, and looking at and through his desk. There has to be a reason. The problem was that one of the truths he’d learned as a detective was that there didn’t have to be a good reason. Husbands beating wives to death for the hell of it, kids putting shotguns in their mouths because of heavy-metal songs, moms drowning infants in shallow bathtubs. Bad things happened often and never needed to schedule an appointment before they dropped on in.

  And still he kept grinding at the why. Could the guy—it had to be a guy, anything else was impossible to Van Endel—who did it have been so ashamed by what he’d done that he’d needed to try his hardest to destroy the evidence? Van Endel didn’t believe it. There had to be more to why someone would murder a teenage girl and then destroy the corpse beyond recognition.

  35

  Tim walked quietly down the hall toward Becca’s room. He wasn’t sure what the rules were concerning him and his sister fraternizing during their respective groundings, but he figured the less his folks knew at this point, the better. He tapped twice on the door, waited for a response, and then tapped twice again. “What?” Becca called from inside the room. “I’m just in here reading.”

  “It’s Tim. Can I come in?”

  “Why?”

  “I need to ask you something.”

  “You’re lucky I’m bored.”

  “So I can come in?”

  “Yes, hurry up.”

  He’d rarely seen the inside of his sister’s room in the past few years, and he took in the sights the same way a traveler voyaging to forbidden lands would. The walls were covered in posters for bands like Mötley Crüe and Guns N’ Roses, and all the people on the posters looked as though they were going insane. Men dressed like women, with big, teased-out, dyed hair. They wore very little clothing—what there was was mostly leather and spiky—and were covered in tattoos. As Tim lived in a household sans MTV, it was a small culture shock.

  “Stop staring at everything,” Becca said from atop her covers. “What do you want?”

  “I want to ask you some questions about what happened the night Molly got taken.”

  “Nope,” said Becca, her eyes returning to the hardcover book she was reading. “I already told Mom, Dad, and the cops everything that happened. Not that it’s any of your business, and not that anything I could tell you is going to help you out of the hole you’ve lied yourself into. Trust me, if you go to Mom with any more stories, you’re just going to get in more trouble.” She turned a page in her book violently. “If that’s even possible.”

  “Maybe I can get in more trouble, maybe I can’t,” said Tim. “But I do know one thing. You could get in way more trouble if I tell Mom what you were really doing.”

  “I was at the movies, duh. Best of luck. Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.”

  Tim gave her a look that she met and matched. He knew that he needed to get her attention, and do it fast, or he was never going to hear the truth. “Aren’t you even worried about Molly?”

  She threw herself upright against the headboard, the book closed, forgotten on her lap. “That’s a shitty thing to ask me, you little turd. Of course I’m worried about Molly. Not that it’s doing any good. The cops think she’s dead.”

  “I don’t think you are,” said Tim, treading in shark-infested water. “In fact, I think you and your friends are sort of hoping maybe she won’t come back, and then none of you will get busted for what really happened.”

  “You shut up. You can’t just barge in here saying all this awful shit. My friend got kidnapped, and you and your stupid friends got jealous and made up some dumb lie that you immediately got caught telling, and now you want to bring me down to your level.”

  Tim took a deep breath. It was time to go for the kill. Becca was teed up for it. “You aren’t even considering one thing,” he said in a measured tone. “My friends are telling the truth, and so am I. I’m telling you, we saw Molly with a dark-haired guy in the woods. He had a gun to her back. A black gun, and Molly was scared out of her mind.”

  Becca grimaced slightly at that. It was barely there, but Tim saw it.

  “Well, good job, Becca. You and all your friends lied, and now one of your best friends is going to die. That detective might think he caught the real liar, but he’s wrong. You haven’t told anyone the truth.”

  “Shut up, would you?” Her face was paling by the second, and her eyes were sparkling with greasy-looking tears. “Just shut up!”

  “You need to tell the truth, Becca. She’ll
die if you don’t.”

  “I can’t,” she said, backhanding the tears from her eyes and glaring at him. “I can’t. It’s terrible…we’d be in so much trouble. Mom and Dad would, like, I don’t know, disown me, or send me off somewhere.”

  “You guys weren’t at the movies at all, were you?”

  Becca shook her head back and forth, tears streaming down her face. Tim knew that now that she was started she’d tell him the whole thing, she’d be desperate to blurt out every sordid detail of what had really happened Monday night. For better or for worse, Tim was going to get the truth.

  “They threatened me, said that if I told anyone, I was done at the high school. If I was lucky they’d just kick my ass, or maybe even something worse would happen.”

  “Why did they not want Molly found?”

  “Tim, you don’t get it,” said Becca, exasperated with him. “That happened before we went out. All the threats, the don’t tell anyone, ever—all that happened before Molly was gone, before we were even there.”

  “What are you talking about? What were you doing?”

  Becca adjusted herself on the bed, managing to look both comfortable and miserable at the same time. “Go check the door,” she said. “Make sure Mom’s not out there, and if she’s not, shut it quietly.” Tim did, and when he came back, he sat at the foot of the bed. “The older guys called it fishing. A bunch of girls dress up really skanky, and then they drive us down to South Division Street, the bad part. The girls get dropped off, and the guys go to a couple of motel rooms, except for a couple of them, who stay in the alley to protect us.”

  “But what were you doing?”

  “We were pretending to be hookers,” said Becca matter-of-factly. “And when a guy picked one of us up, we’d tell him to go to the motel because we have a room. The customer or whatever comes up with the girl, and once he’s in the room, a bunch of the guys jump him and take all of his money. He can’t call the cops because he was breaking the law, and we all split the money up.

  “I did it, like, once. My shirt got ripped when the guy I brought up grabbed me. He was super pissed and really scary. Anyways, Molly got picked up and never showed up. Then we heard that cops were coming on the police scanner that Tyler brought, and we all had to leave. I figured she just got to the motel after we had to leave and got arrested, or had to do, well, what the guy wanted.”

  “Becca, what is a hooker, exactly?”

  “Jesus,” she said. “You’re such a baby. It’s someone who has sex for money. That’s how we knew all the guys would have cash. They were going shopping, just not for groceries.”

  Tim let it all sink in. He understood most of it but didn’t want to feel stupid by asking too many questions. “So this guy could be anyone?”

  “Yep,” said Becca. “And whether that’s Molly by the drive-in or not, there’s no way she’s still OK.”

  “Unless we can find who took her,” Tim said. “It’s someone from this neighborhood. You guys might have been downtown, but he came back here. You know how I can prove it? When we saw his gun, Luke shot him in the leg with Scott’s stepdad’s rifle.”

  Becca snapped to attention. “You really did see them—like, for real?”

  “That’s what I’ve been saying. Why the hell would we make it up? Not only did we see them, we hurt him. Now we just need to find out who he is.”

  They were both quiet for a long minute, staring at each other without really seeing each other. Then Becca said, “Well, it’s been raining a lot. Everybody’s lawn is going to grow a ton. If he really did got shot in the leg, there’s no way he’s mowing his lawn.”

  Tim’s mouth dropped open, and then a banging on the door made them both jump. “Tim, get out of your sister’s room and go pick up everything outside,” said their dad. “Storm’s coming.”

  “One more thing,” said Tim, quietly. “You said there were people watching to make sure you guys were safe, right?” She nodded. “You need to see if they can tell you the type of car Molly got into. We know he lives around here.”

  “I’ll try, but I’m grounded from the phone.”

  “Just try,” pleaded Tim. He stood and waved to his sister, smiling sadly. She gave the same look back, because Molly really was in trouble, and Becca had to know that it was her and her friends’ fault.

  36

  The wild beeping of Scott’s watch alarm shocked him awake and sent him scrambling to silence it. His mom and Carl were just across the hall but, impossibly, didn’t stir. Heart hammering, he eased out of bed, pulled on dirty clothes as Tim had suggested, removed his window screen, and slid to the earth, thankful that he didn’t have a second-floor bedroom.

  The air was cooler than it had been the night before, and Scott was briefly sorry he hadn’t brought a sweatshirt with him. He reached the fort in no time, though. He threw his Coke cap down, noticing that tonight he was the third man to the party. He scrambled up the ladder and threw himself over the threshold at the top to find his friends grinning and waiting for him. “Glad you could make it, slowpoke,” Tim teased, and Scott faked a punch at him before sitting. “Any news?”

  “Nothing on my end,” said Luke. “I sat in the fort all day and didn’t see anything.”

  “I talked to my sister,” Tim said, and then began to relay what she’d told him. The fake-prostitution trick, the way Molly had really been taken, the tip about looking for little signs in the suburban neighborhood, like unkempt lawns, and finally, the idea to have her try to figure out the make and model of the car the man who took Molly had been driving. He went through it breathlessly, racing to relay the information.

  “OK, that’s some really messed-up shit,” said Luke. “Like really messed up. You guys are under house arrest and I had to run away from home for a little bit, but your sister and her friends have gotten away with robbing people? It’s no wonder that Van Endel dude didn’t believe us. I’ll bet he knew they were lying to him too.” Luke shook his head and frowned. “That’s messed up, like, big-time.”

  “I know,” said Tim. “It is messed up, but at least we know the truth now. We know more than anyone else about what’s happening, and if anyone is going to save Molly, it’s going to be us.”

  “Are you sure we can’t just go to the police?” Scott asked. “I know they don’t believe us, but it seems like it would be worth a try. After all, we’re grounded. How are we supposed to go looking for this guy?”

  “That’s just it,” Tim said. “We’re grounded. So how are we supposed to have figured out all this stuff we’re going to tell the police? Our folks’ll send us to military school or something if they find out what we’ve been up to.”

  Scott rolled his eyes at the military-school part, but he had to admit Tim had a point. “I suppose,” he said. “But that lawn thing—it’s neat and all, but we just shot that guy. It will be two weeks, minimum, before we’ll be able to notice who isn’t mowing their lawn. For all we know, he could even be better by then.” He shook his head. “I just don’t see this plan working, unless your sister can come through with more information on the car, and that doesn’t seem very likely.”

  The three boys brooded in silence for a few minutes, until Tim broke the spell. “Look, we knew this was going to be hard. We can’t get discouraged by that. We just need to do what we can and hope that it’s enough.” Scott and Luke were both nodding at that, and Luke said, “So what’s the game plan for tomorrow?”

  Tim said, “I’m going to find some way to distract my parents so that Becca can make a quick phone call.”

  “I can try and borrow a pistol from Carl’s stash tomorrow,” Scott said. “It won’t be easy, and I’d really hate to be caught with it, but damn, we’re going to need something. Hey, I forgot to tell you guys, Carl actually believes us.”

  “Seriously?” Luke asked. “Then why are you grounded?”

  Scott grinned. “Because my mom is so gung ho about me being punished that Carl just kind of had to be like, ‘Fuck it, she wants t
he kid punished, I’ll punish him.’ It put him in a pretty bad spot, and I actually felt bad for him. It still sucks, but at least one adult believes us. It’s better than nothing.”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” said Luke. “I’ll just walk around and see if anything looks out of place, I guess. I’m going to need to go home soon too, though. My mom will clear her head out eventually and come looking for me, and if I’m not at either of your two houses, there’s really only one place to go.” He rapped twice on one of the walls. “Aside from the mosquitoes, it’s been pretty nice staying up here. Better a few mosquito bites than hanging out with my sisters.”

  “So are we good, then?” Tim asked. “The sooner we’re home, the less likely it is that we get caught.”

  The three boys stood, and Tim and Scott left by ladder, taking their bottle caps with them and leaving one lonely Sprite cap all by itself.

  37

  Hooper was alone. He was running through the jungle with his M16, and the VC were everywhere. Explosions were going off left and right, and all he could hear around him was the crackling of AK fire, along with Charlie screaming at him. Hooper didn’t know where he was running, only that he was alone and that he was in the middle of a death trap. They’d fallen for one of the VC’s favorite tricks: set up a patrol to look like it was lost, and when the good guys went after them, spring a trap of tiger pits and snipers. Hooper had been in a few ambushes before, but nothing like this.

  It was almost impossible to believe he’d lived this long in the shit. He had no idea where the good guys were, or even if there were any left. He felt like he was behind enemy lines, but he had no idea who was bombing whom. Not that it was impossible for some general to have given wrong coordinates to some gunner or pilot, but there was an insane amount of shit going off. Hooper just wanted to be away from the killing, away from this hell on earth.