The Art of Fear (The Little Things That Kill Series Book 1)

by Pamela Crane

  He had never asked questions when George Battan offered a large sum of money to recruit Sophia for his services. Just one year of her life, that’s all.

  “Some light housework and cleaning, but otherwise she’ll live a normal life. Have friends, go to school, play with other children. She’ll just be helping our customers do things they need done around the house,” George had assured him.

  And without hesitation Josef accepted it. No questions asked. No follow-up needed.

  Until the year was up. When Josef threatened to tip off the police, another exchange was made. Another lump payment for another year. Hell, Josef even offered to help recruit more girls for George when needed.

  And so it went. An unconventional arrangement, George had explained, but he was a fair man.

  Josef didn’t want details, not then nor every time he received his payment for Sophia’s continued service. And yet somehow in his subconscious he knew why he asked no questions, hadn’t bothered with details.

  Because of this. Because of what he innately knew she would become.

  Yes, he knew, and never stopped it.

  Until today. Seeing it for himself, her fate was suddenly real. His love and fidelity for his daughter took over.

  Not my mija, no. Not my nieto.

  Pausing the video, he found his address book with George’s number and pounded in each number on his cell phone, nearly cracking the screen with each jab. It rang, eventually going to voicemail.

  “George, I just saw my daughter in a porn—and her unborn baby. You promised me she’d be taken care of. Call me back or I’m coming to find you myself.”

  Hanging up, he breathed a little frantically—both from residual shock and unleashed anger. He needed to kick someone’s ass.

  George’s, in particular.

  But how could he find him? He was in the States somewhere, probably hiding out. But maybe the film had answers. Unfortunately the filth he watched didn’t feature credits full of names and locations, but there had to be something. There just had to.

  He replayed it from the beginning, turning off the volume and blinding himself to his daughter’s nude body with an imaginary censor bar. The scene took place in a warehouse of some sort. Bare brick walls, exposed vents hanging crookedly from the ceiling, naked lightbulbs dangling precariously from thick wires. A stained mattress offered the only comfort in the room. The typically squalid setting for the XXX porn Josef liked to wallow in.

  Behind the figures was a two-person-tall window looking down on a sports stadium. Pressing his face closer to his computer screen, he looked for something in the scenery beyond. Any visual that could help. It was there. If it took him until his last breath to find, it was there.

  A perfect close-up angle widened his view.

  Pause.

  A two-story brown cow stood in the left-field corner of the stadium, and from there his eyes wandered … until he found the words “Durham Bulls Athletic Park.”

  Toggling to another screen, he typed in the name of the stadium and traced it to Durham, North Carolina. He already had a valid visa—a little thank you from a friend at the U.S. Consulate who owed him. And plenty of cash—ironically, thanks to George. If the movie had been filmed recently, perhaps Sophia would still be there. And if Josef was lucky, George Battan would be too.

  Until Josef killed him.

  Chapter 23

  Tina

  Her eyes were a pleasing mix of brown and blue as Tina gazed adoringly at the infant in her arms. She’d always wanted a little girl, even as a little girl. Dressing up her dolls in rags she managed to pin together into mismatched outfits, then cradling them and soothing them and feeding them … but for young Tina, it wasn’t just a childish pastime. It was a life she dreamed of, down to the boy who would become her beau: Arturo, her best friend. He was handsome enough, in a dirt-and-spit kind of way. He knew the games she liked to play and how to let her win without it being obvious, which was all that counted in her little world.

  Plus he always shared his treats with her. There was no better criteria for a husband than that.

  Her fantasy life clung to her index finger with a baby-sized fist. Dimples dotted each meaty brown knuckle as she counted one, two, three, four, five tiny fingers wrapping around hers, squeezing with a force that said, “Mine!”

  Yet in this dream there was no Arturo. Only a blur of a face—or many faces, all blank and empty like a cantaloupe skin. There was nothing warm about them in this dream. The only tenderness came from the wriggling sack she carried, the puckered lips searching for nourishment—just a few sips to fill the baby’s belly.

  She watched a line of men pass by, searching their faces for recognition, but they were far too old. Far too white. Far too horrifying. The haze masked the demon behind each one.

  In a blink the scene grew cloudy, and as Tina consciously tried to force it back into alignment—mentally grasping for the pixels to coalesce—the moment faded into a dark oblivion, and the baby in her arms slipped into shadow.

  Yet the weight of the bundle remained. She searched for her baby, growing frantic as her surroundings drifted off into the void. Then a face came into focus. A man’s face. A nice enough face. A trustworthy face. The face of a father, but not her father. Not her baby’s father.

  He stepped into a spotlight, and that’s when Tina noticed his arms carrying something. A whimpering something. Her baby! She ran to him, grabbing the infant from his arms, but when she gazed down at the face, it was a child’s face.

  A young girl’s face.

  Marla’s face.

  Her green eyes pleaded with Tina. “Help me!” she sobbed into Tina’s chest. Tina clutched her firmly, but the heat of Marla’s body became intense. Too hot to touch. Until she melted away.

  “Marla! Please come back,” Tina shrieked into the emptiness.

  But all was nothing. And all was lost.

  **

  A squeezing sensation on her shoulders shook Tina awake. Except that she was literally already shaking.

  “Ma’am, wake up.” Tina’s eyelids sprang open like two retractable blinds and she stared at the too-close face staring down at her.

  “You okay, honey?” the lady asked.

  Tina glanced around, the confusion still potent. Nothing looked familiar. Where was she? How did she get here? All she could remember was Marla. She had to get to Marla. “Marla?”

  “No, honey, I’m Delores.”

  But the woman’s words fell in a jumble. “Marla?” Tina called louder. “Where’s Marla?”

  “Is Marla one of the nurses?”

  “No, I need Marla!” Tina felt her lips moving, but she couldn’t recognize the sound of her own voice, and it was terrifying.

  Cold—her body shivered with a clammy chill. Her hospital gown was drenched in sweat, her hair slick to her scalp.

  She saw her arms swinging, her fists punching, and heard her screams rising, but she couldn’t control it. She couldn’t control anything—not herself, not her nightmares, not even what happened to Marla.

  Another face materialized beside the lady’s, this one instructing her sternly. “I’m going to give you something to calm you, Tina. You need to relax.”

  A sharp pinch later, a tranquility oozed through her like ice melting into her bloodstream. Of their own accord her arms flopped down at her sides and her fists unclenched. She felt her body relax into the mattress and her breathing normalize.

  “You’re okay now, Tina,” the nurse said, patting her arm.

  “What happened?” Tina wondered aloud. Her fit felt like an out-of-body experience.

  “You had one heck of a nightmare. You were screaming and carrying on about some Marla. I was afraid you were gonna go into shock or something.”

  Marla. Another nightmare. She had to get her subconscious under control before … before what? Before she went crazy? She was already in the psych ward. As the nurse advised her to get some rest, Tina wondered if she was ever going to be allowed to leave
—this hospital, or the nightmare.

  Chapter 24

  Ari

  Seven days until dead

  Some people never change. Star-Trek-loving nerd, virgin-for-life, pimple-faced Benny Salinger was one of them. He was the kind of geek that the mathletes and brainiacs felt sorry for because he had nothing to show for it.

  Poor Benny—still the same loser.

  Not that my aspirations had been any nobler. My back ached from a pinched nerve hauling a vacuum down a set of warehouse steps today—despite my temptation to just roll it down and let gravity do the work—because the conveyer belt was broken yet again. If I was lucky I could move up in retail, but given that I wasn’t the motivated type, I’d probably never make it to a floor supervisor.

  Guess I’d be living off of generic mac ’n’ cheese for a long time.

  Sitting across from me, Benny’s tubby belly poured over his drawstring sweatpants, quivering with each breath. At least he was eating well. Maybe next time he wouldn’t buy a Mr. Spock T-shirt two sizes too small for his fat Kirk body.

  After Benny dragged his yapping, snapping rat-dog Sprocket—what kind of name was that, anyways?—into a bedroom and closed the door, we got reacquainted on his mother’s floral couch, in his mother’s mothball-ridden living room, in his mother’s prim home. I discovered Benny was just as lost as I was.

  Dog whines and the clatter of pots and pans provided ambience as his mother cooked something that smelled like fried chicken. Even the air felt sticky with oil. “You just have to taste my chicken!” Mrs. Salinger yelled from the kitchen, at least twice during our conversation.

  We caught up on school and jobs, whined about my parents’ disappearing act, tiptoed around my relationship status, and avoided the topic of future dreams altogether. I patted myself on the back for navigating the conversation perfectly without a single anxiety attack.

  “I’m so glad you stopped by. It’s good seeing you, Ari,” Benny said after we covered the basics and entered a gawky stranger silence.

  “You too, Benny. I actually had something I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “Yeah, Mom told me. You wanted to know what I saw … that day.” His voice was high and thin.

  Anything more than a generic reference to that day was like uttering a curse. Everybody avoided the words the day your sister died, as if saying them aloud brought the curse upon themselves. Those words were the Lord Voldemort of my life.

  “I’m looking for anything you can remember. Anything at all.”

  “It was so long ago, and we were just kids. I don’t remember much from my childhood, except the other kids picking on me—and my crush on you.” He chuckled shyly, clearly hoping I’d take the bait, but I sat stoic and unsmiling, waiting for something. Anything. “Uh, yeah, but I do remember that day. Nothing huge, but I remember the car swerving into the yard. I remember thinking how odd it was, that it was going so straight and fast, then suddenly swerving off the road like that. And then Carli flying toward the house in slow motion—not really, it was just a perception thing, know what I mean?—at a crazy angle.”

  He stopped. His piggish little eyes looked moist. Even for him the memory was crippling.

  I hadn’t thought the angle of Carli’s trajectory that weird as a ten-year-old, but now as a reasonably rational adult, it made a huge difference. Benny testified to what I had deduced from the picture—the driver had to have jerked the wheel pretty damn drastically. It wasn’t an accident, and I now had eyewitness testimony. Once I found this guy, he wouldn’t know what hit him.

  “What about the make or model or color—anything?”

  “Orange. It was definitely throwback 1970’s orange. And a hatchback. A Chevy Vega, maybe? Or a Ford Festiva? I’m not much of a car guy, but one of those types. I remember it looking like a clown car to me back then.”

  An orange hatchback. Exactly what I saw during my session with Dr. Weaver. So it wasn’t a creation of my mind. It was real. How many people owned hideous orange hatchbacks in 2002? There couldn’t be many people that would willingly drive a rolling eyesore like that around in public.

  My first real, official lead.

  “I really appreciate this, Benny.”

  “No problem. I’m sorry I wasn’t much help back then. I guess I was scared, shocked …”

  “It’s okay. We were kids. Besides, you’re helping now. I’m gonna find who did it—who killed Carli. I’m going to bring her justice, give her peace.”

  “I hope so.” Benny sighed as I rose and grabbed my overloaded hobo bag, my pinched back nerve seizing as I bent down. I desperately needed a new job. Anything but retail or annoying customers or demanding bosses. Did such a job exist? Doubtful.

  “Oh, before you go,” he said as I took my first step toward the door, then stopped and turned. “You may want to talk to your parents about the night before. It was late, because I was looking outside from my bedroom window, supposed to be sleeping. Your dad was talking to some guy in the front yard, and they started yelling when the guy kicked him in the knee and stomach a few times. It looked real badass.”

  The limp. Yes, now I remembered my father was limping for almost a week. Too much had happened for it register at the time, but my unathletic, couch potato father hurting his knee? It’s not like watching TV was an extreme sport.

  “You get a look at the guy?”

  “Not really. White. About the same height as your dad. Not much else I could distinguish about him in the dark.”

  I hugged him and planted a kiss on his fat cheek where a splotch of red suddenly pooled and spread down his neck.

  “Thanks, Benny.”

  “Sure you can’t stay for dinner? Mom’s making homemade fried chicken.”

  “Not tonight.” I smiled and touched his arm. “But let’s keep in touch, okay?”

  “I’d love that.”

  And I hurried out of there before giving his mom a chance to chase me down with a drumstick.

  Chapter 25

  Ari

  2002

  The soundless scream a dog whistle makes—that is my mother. I admit that the rebel in me snuck out to play more often than it should have, but I’m lost. I’m a kid abandoned by her best friend. I’m coping the best I can. But I can tell by the way Mom gawks at me—the way her lips curl in disgust, the way her brow crinkles and her eyes narrow to slits as she watches me, as if calculating my next move—that she will never, ever forgive me for Carli’s death.

  It’s been a handful of days since it happened, and the policeman and Mom have been discussing a group home as a temporary option for me. There’s too much tension at home. I’m acting out. It’s not good for anyone. Just something temporary until things cool down.

  This is what I overhear them saying. But foster homes are for good kids in bad situations. According to Mom, I’m a bad kid causing a bad situation, thus not worthy of foster care criteria. So it’s a group home for me.

  I know I’ve been reckless. I throw tantrums. I break things. I run away for hours. I unleash a side of me I never met before. But Mom is no help. Because she fights back. She breaks my will. She doesn’t come looking for me when I’m gone. And she’s unleashed a side of her I’ve never met before, either.

  Accident or not, I don’t feel safe at home. I don’t even feel safe in my own skin. Mom subjects me to what feel like round-the-clock verbal assaults, and Dad does little more than hold the punching bag for Mom to hit—that being me. I can’t go to school, because the kids will stare and whisper. I’m the girl who pushed her sister into an oncoming car. I’m the girl who killed. So it’s me and Mom at home—two strangers made of the same flesh and blood, unable to find common ground.

  Compared to what I don’t really know about group homes—but have gleaned from Mom’s Lifetime movies and tabloid TV talk shows—home feels like heaven. God only knows what the kids would do to me in those places. The only self-defense I know was eight weeks worth of karate lessons when I was six.

  I can’
t leave the protection of these four walls. I’ll die if I’m tossed into a roomful of kids who had stolen cars, stabbed people, or beat up old ladies for their change purses. My signature fighting move is spinning in circles with my arms out. I’ll be dead within a day. Though maybe that’s what I deserve.

  The brief discussions between my parents about sending me away keep growing into full-blown conversations.

  “Do you think she’s safe here at home?” I hear Dad pose to Mom.

  “Her sister was murdered, Burt—murdered by someone! You tell me if safe is ever going to be a possibility.”

  I wince, unsure what exactly Mom means by that. Does she think I’m out to kill them too?

  Knowing my doomsday is coming, I don’t know why I did it, especially since it was a surefire way to incite Mom’s fury … yet again. I can’t explain why I decided to knock over Mom’s most cherished vase, scattering dear old Gram all over the living room carpet. Mom broke down trying to vacuum up the ashes while I fled to my bedroom in a fit of tears and screaming sobs.

  That’s the last straw for Mom.

  One call from Mom and DFCS shows up—just until things calm down at home, they assure me, but it’s no assurance. My only certainty is that I don’t want to live anymore. The caseworker tells me the tension is too intense, and with my unchecked anger and Mom’s grief boiling over, it isn’t healthy for me to remain at home anymore, so off I go.

  With a heavy duffel bag strap carrying all the possessions I could fit inside pinching my shoulder, I’m led to an unknown car, with an unknown lady, to an unknown destination. As the caseworker pulls out of my driveway, I stare at my home where I hope to see my parents, arms around each other, crying at my departure. Maybe even running after me with a change of heart. But the front porch is as empty as my soul as the car bumps down the street.