by Matthew Iden
“Runaways,” Tom said.
“Except Tonya sees Tiffany again a week later and a mile away in a strange truck before she disappears for good?”
“Hooking.”
“What if she was? We’re supposed to throw her away, like she’s trash?” she asked, her voice scornful. The older trooper raised his head with a hound-dog look on his face and she waved an apology. “Sorry, Tom. I know you don’t believe it, either.”
“So, what’s the problem?” Jimmy asked. “Follow up.”
“The problem, Einstein,” she said, with a look of wonder, “is that my barracks commander told me to drop this or I’m going to be directing traffic for schoolkids for the rest of my career.”
“You do everything you’re told?”
“Yes,” she said, exasperated. “It’s how you keep your job. What do you want me to do, Jimmy?”
He glanced at the door, then came over and sat on the corner of her desk, leaning in. “You’re at the barracks three hours a day. You respond to calls maybe four hours a day. Sometimes less. That’s seven hours out of shift, which leaves one.”
“So?”
“So . . . shave off a wee bit more and you’ll have two hours a day to look into this. Run down a lead or two, knock on some doors. I could help out here or there.” He pivoted on the corner of his desk. “What about you, Tom? Want to pitch in?”
Tom shot him a look, popped a seed, and turned back to his monitor.
“He’s got the right idea,” Sarah said. She squinted at Jimmy. “Why do you want me to do this so badly, anyway?”
Jimmy shrugged. “It’s something exciting. A real case. I’m tired of fixing flats and scraping cars off the highway.”
“So you do it.”
“Not my case, chiefette,” he said, sliding off her desk and walking back to his chair. “And I don’t poach. It’s against the rules. Besides, you’re the hotshot.”
“Hotshot,” Tom echoed.
“Yeah, Kline gave me that impression,” Sarah said, sour.
“What’s he going to say when you find there’s a serial killer out there?” Jimmy asked, spreading his arms wide.
“He’s going to say I’ve got ten minutes to clean my desk out,” she said. But she leaned forward and opened the manila folder. Halfway through the stack of papers she’d compiled over the past three weeks was a photocopy of a map of the north-central slice of Maryland. On it, she’d circled the locations of the three abductions—alleged abductions, she corrected herself. To that, she’d added color-coded points for any other leads she’d gathered and to which case they belonged. She traced the locations with her index finger. The three described a neat triangle.
Stop it, she chided herself, no assumptions. Any three arbitrary locations connected by lines always made a triangle. The shape wasn’t conclusive by itself; the locations were just a component of the whole, a data point. Important, critical maybe, but far from conclusive. It was the accumulation of data that mattered. Times sticking to places, facts slotting into testimony, lies butting up against the truth.
The coincidences of the three disappearances had bothered her immediately. By the time Tonya Beckworth had approached her at the FastGas—shy, afraid, determined—Sarah had already been on the lookout for the black Mustang or girls fitting the description she’d gotten from the friends and teachers of the first two assumed runaways. Finding Tiffany Chilton’s body at Kevin Handley’s home had simply sealed the deal. Not an isolated murder, not a random teen prostitute with a bad ending. These are related.
But getting the data to prove it took effort and took time. Maybe more importantly, it took permission. Don’t go off the grid, an instructor had told her at Sykesville. You’re part of a team. Teams solve crimes. Start freelancing and the bad guys win. But what if it wasn’t taking away from any of her regular duties? What if she did this on weekends and after hours? She was single, young, and had the time. And . . . maybe she could put in an hour here or there during a regular shift. Instead of sitting in a highway median, having the same effect on speeders as an empty cruiser parked in the same spot, she could save the next young girl from getting killed.
She raised her head from the map, her decision made, then looked across her desk. Jimmy was looking at her with a knowing smile on his face.
And he quirked an eyebrow.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Steve Torbett ended the short call and put the phone down on the desk. The phone had a piece of masking tape with “#3” written in blue ink on the back. The tape was peeling and he idly smoothed it back down with a thumbnail, working to control his excitement as his mind raced. In eight hours, maybe less, he’d have his birthday present. Not quite gift-wrapped with a bow on top, certainly, but young and unblemished. And all his.
Eddie hadn’t sent him a picture, so he was left with nothing but speculation about what she looked like. Tall? Thin? Too thin? He’d demanded an Asian girl, so one could assume the black hair and dark eyes, but was the hair long or short? Had she dyed it or did it have the copper streaks that sometimes happened naturally? She’d be small-breasted, probably, but . . . what if she wasn’t? Wouldn’t that be wonderful? The world of possibilities excited him and made him dizzy.
“Not yet, Steve-o,” he said out loud. His anticipation was like a guitar string stretched close to snapping. “You have formalities to observe first.”
He opened a notebook sitting on the desk and flipped several pages to the one with #3 listed at the top, then read down the lines. There were nine entries, each meticulously recording the time and duration of a phone call. If he wrote down tonight’s, it would be the tenth. But that was against the rules. With a swift, sure motion, he ripped the page out of the book, folded it, and slipped it into a pocket.
He grabbed the phone and proceeded from his office with its mahogany desk and leather guest chairs that had never been sat upon and to the kitchen where he’d never cooked a meal. The phone went into a plastic bag and thence into the freezer, then he took the piece of notebook paper and dropped it into a blender along with a banana, a cup of orange juice, and some peanut butter. He blended the contents smooth, then poured the result down the garbage disposal, leaving the motor on for a full five minutes. In another hour, he’d take the phone out of the freezer and smash it to bits on his back porch with a ball-peen hammer he kept in the kitchen for that purpose. He’d give them to Danny to distribute around the city until God himself couldn’t put the phone back together.
Then he’d move on to phone #4. It should last him quite a while, since he wouldn’t be making many phone calls—his gift would keep him busy for several weeks, at least. On the other hand, the rules stated that all phones were to be destroyed after a month, regardless of the number of calls. He always had trouble with that one. It offended his sense of economy to destroy a perfectly good phone, but rules were rules. And it was rules that had kept him alive and out of trouble so far.
Speaking of rules, it was time to shed some DNA.
One hundred strokes with a hairbrush, even though he had precious few hairs left these days. A thorough trim and buff of the nails (no sense in accumulating anything untoward under one’s nails if there happened to be a struggle) preceded a quick body check to make sure he didn’t have any cuts or scrapes that might leave a pesky blood sample behind. By the time he’d completed the DNA purge with a brisk shower, he was feeling like a new, and much less traceable, man. In reality, as precautions went, the ritual was borderline ineffective. But it made him feel in control and organized.
As he toweled off, his stomach gurgled. The suppressed sound reminded him of another task he had to take care of before he left to accept delivery of his gift. He dressed quickly, then headed to the first floor. The garage door was just off the kitchen and he went out to his black Lexus. He popped the trunk and gazed down at his Christmas present to himself, wrapped in yards of six mil clear plasti
c and black tape. There wasn’t any movement, not now, but for some time the gift had writhed and moaned and—near the end—burbled a bit, like his stomach had. He called Danny on his cell, who came from his quarters at the rear of the house.
Torbett’s records told him that this was Danny’s eighth year of employment. He counted himself lucky to have found someone so sympathetic to his . . . habits. And with almost no scruples or goals of his own. At least, the blank face and unruffled black hair had never betrayed any. Torbett had his suspicions that Danny helped himself to the gifts when Torbett was done with them. He didn’t mind. It was an easy perk to offer in exchange for his silence.
“Drop this in the back,” Torbett said, pointing at the limp figure in his trunk. “Like the others.”
Danny nodded and lifted the body out of the trunk. It was small and, with the life gone from it, seemingly light. On the way out of the back door of the garage, his servant grabbed a spade hanging on a wall and then he was gone. Torbett’s property was nearly twenty acres and Danny could and would carry . . . it . . . the length of the plot without anyone noticing. It would disappear, like the others, never to be found. At least, not until Torbett was long gone. His property was fenced, electrified, and above suspicion. A mass grave was the last thing anyone would expect to find on the property of Steve Torbett, Internet millionaire. Not that anyone would be searching for the girls that were buried there. They’d already been lost to society—dead, you might say—before he’d gotten to them and no one had even noticed their absence, let alone come looking for them.
“Out of sight, out of mind,” Torbett said idly. He gazed at the door for a long moment. He wondered from time to time why he did what he did and why he enjoyed it so much. He’d researched the issue in the past, attempting to analyze himself like a laboratory specimen. Poring over books and articles, he tried to understand the likes of Bundy and Jamelske and Garrido, to corner some parallel behavior to his own, to examine the evidence and make a judgment.
Did he have mommy issues? No, he loved his mother and father both. He’d never had problems of dependency or delayed maturity. Was it because he’d never had a real relationship with a woman? He had and, while they’d never developed into anything substantial, if that was an indication of insanity, half the country would’ve been locked up by now. Was it the media? Television was thick with news reports and docudramas about the abductions of young girls, but he hadn’t found himself titillated by the reports as he was disgusted by the inefficiency and sloppiness of the kidnappers.
In a quest to find what was “wrong” with people like himself, he began with the fundamental question society always asked, which was why are you broken? The question had been put to other great men, but the answers had always been vague, inaccurate, and, in the end, insufficient. Jefferson owned slaves, Gauguin slept with little girls, and Burroughs killed his wife, but they were all simply “misunderstood” or “victims of their time” or, well . . . there simply wasn’t an answer. Their proclivities and passions were integral to who they were and that was the end of the matter.
So, in the absence of any convincing counterargument, Torbett decided that the answer to why are you broken? was simply, I’m not.
And that had been good enough for him.
His phone beeped in his pocket, shaking him out of his reverie. Glancing at it, he was surprised to see that the noise had been his reminder to start his preparations for the night. An alarm set three hours ago, already gone. Time really did slip by sometimes.
He hurried to the door, as anxious as a puppy—he only had a few hours to get the house ready and then make the drive east to get his package. He didn’t want to be late.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Patrol officer Terry Graham was heading back to the station, ready to be done with this bitch of a night.
It was cold. Cold enough for his breath to catch in his throat, cold enough to turn his skin to paper. Nine cars in five wrecks had decorated his stretch of the Beltway, the first one not fifteen minutes into the start of his shift at two o’clock. Each highway catastrophe had meant standing in the biting wind for an hour, taking down names and birth dates and complaints about the other driver.
Earmuffs, thick gloves, and a balaclava protected him against the freezing temperatures, but they also added a fuzzy layer over his senses, making him feel sluggish and removed from the situation. The accidents were almost identical to each other—a careless driver, a speeding car, and ice—which did little to relieve the unreal sense of déjà vu each time he pulled off the road to help. In one of the wrecks, blood had mixed with roadside ice, creating what one of the EMTs had called a strawberry snow cone. It was on the downhill side of the shift and Terry couldn’t even laugh at the morbid joke. Being on patrol was exhausting, depressing work and there’d be just as many wrecks tomorrow. By the time he’d finished documenting the last accident, the outer part of his body felt as if it had been scoured away, leaving nothing but a scarecrow with a gun belt and a badge.
With the sun disappearing at five thirty, he spent most of his hours in the dark as well as the cold. Dark enough, in fact, that he nearly missed the Mustang that had pulled onto a shoulder north of Woodbridge. Only when he checked his rearview mirror did he see the running lights—no headlights—fading in the distance behind him. He grimaced. It was the end of his shift and he felt every minute of the previous nine hours. For once, he gave himself permission to imagine what it would be like to ignore the car and keep driving. Oops, guess I missed one. Guilt brought him back to reality and he sighed as he threw on his lights to turn around.
Then again, while he couldn’t ignore a car by the side of the road, there was nothing wrong with hoping that the Mustang would be gone by the time he made the second U-turn. How great would it be if the driver had solved his problem on his own in less than a minute, climbed back in his car, and gone on his merry way . . .
No luck. The Mustang was still there. Terry slowed and pulled in behind the muscle car, angling the cruiser so that it would give him some slight protection from the traffic hurtling by at seventy miles an hour a few feet to his left. As his lights hit the car, however, he saw that the driver wasn’t behind the wheel; he was squatting next to the passenger’s side. The door was open and he looked like he was busy with his hands, like he was folding laundry. He raised his head, the face pale and oval in the bright cruiser lights, the reds and blues flashing over him like he was a sign at a carnival. He stood, but stayed where he was with his hands visible.
The guy was tall and angular, at least what Terry could make out in a quick glance. A swimmer or a junior college baseball pitcher. He wore a black peacoat, a black baseball cap, and jeans. Terry got out of the car slowly, with one hand on his utility belt, hovering near his gun, and walked to the back right corner of the Mustang.
“Having some trouble, sir?”
The guy grimaced. This close, he was older than Terry had thought, maybe mid- or late twenties. “Kind of. My girlfriend is sick as a dog and . . . well, she puked in the car. I was trying to clean her up.”
Terry shuffled to his right, keeping the guy in a forty-five-degree arc to the front as he tilted his head to look in the passenger’s side. There was a girl, a slim little thing with long black hair, lying back in the seat. Her head rolled from side to side in pain or delirium.
“Is she drunk, sir?”
A shake of the head. “The flu. She was staying at a friend’s house and they asked me to come get her. I thought we could make it home before anything happened, but . . .”
Terry gestured to the highway thundering next to them. “No hazard lights in a black Mustang?”
The guy looked chagrined. “Sorry. It happened really fast. One second I was holding her hand, telling her to hang on, next thing I know she’s yakking all over the place. I pulled over and started wiping.”
Terry nodded. “Would you mind getting back in the driver�
�s seat, sir?”
“Can I at least close the door? She’s going to freeze to death.”
“In a second. Sit in the driver’s seat, please.”
The guy complied, walking around the car and flopping down in the car seat. He watched anxiously as Terry knelt by the girl’s side, wrinkling his nose at the unmistakable stink of vomit. He pulled a small penlight from his belt, then peeled back the girl’s eyes, checking the irises. The girl moaned once or twice, then curled into a ball.
Terry stood, closed the door, then came around to the driver’s side. “Can I see your license and registration, please?”
The guy’s face rippled, but he handed over both pieces of ID without a word. Terry took them back to the cruiser and sat with the heat on high, snorting to get the smell of the girl’s stomach out of his nose while he waited for the computer to run the plates, license, and registration.
Everything came back clean. Eddie Molter had priors for criminal mischief and trespassing, but they were ancient history and nothing to get worked up about anyway. Terry had possessed a bigger record than Molter’s when he’d applied to the academy. The only odd thing was that all of the paperwork was for Maryland, but it wasn’t a crime to date a girl across state lines. It was a crime to sleep with the girl if she was as young as she looked.
He walked back to the car and handed the items through the window. Molter looked at him with a curious lack of nerves. Most people who got pulled over either couldn’t stop talking or grabbed the steering wheel with both hands like it was going to fly away.
“You seem pretty calm about this,” Terry said, fishing.