by J. D. Barker
Poole shook his head and turned to the two guards standing in the hallway. “Other than bathroom breaks, neither of these men are to leave these rooms, understand? Get them both some lunch, something to burn time.” He reached into his pocket and took out two business cards, handed one to each man. “If anyone tries to get in to speak to them, anyone, you call me first to clear it. We’ll be back in an hour.”
Both officers nodded and took the cards.
“We? Where are we going?” Nash asked.
38
Diary
“What is August 29th?”
I found Libby in the loft, as I had on each previous night during the past week, curled up in our corner under a blanket. I called it our corner because on the third night, we moved her wooden crate and lamp from where I had found her on that first night to a corner on the opposite side of the loft—this one near a window where we could watch the house. We had several books—I was reading Of Mice and Men and she had a scary book by some guy named Thad McAlister. We didn’t read when we were together; the books were for the waiting—me waiting for her and her waiting for me. When we were together, we talked, and I found it very easy to talk to her.
I found her to be very pretty.
I can admit that now, although I don’t think Father would be pleased. He would say her beauty clouded my judgment. Several years ago he told me beauty had a way of draining the blood from the brain and reason went with it. “Why did the man try to cross the road?” he asked me. “To get to a beautiful woman,” he replied before I could answer. “That same man watched her smile as a Mack truck cut him in half because he was too stupid from beauty to bother to look right, left, then right again before hopping out into that road. Beauty has started many wars, but it has yet to end one. Beauty has a taste unlike any other. It’s the sweetest of poisons. You’ll crave more even as it snatches the life from you.”
I thought he was silly when he said all that, but he hadn’t been smiling. And I never understood it until I saw Libby standing in that hayloft wearing a short flowered dress with the moonlight on her back. Most of her bruises were gone now. Only a couple stubborn ones held on, but even before they faded I saw through them to the girl beneath. To say I was attracted to her would have been a serious understatement. She became my last thought as I drifted off to sleep and my first when I awoke. My hand felt empty without hers.
“August 29th?” she repeated. “I have no idea, why? Should I?”
I told her the date had been marked on both Dr. Oglesby’s calendar and the one in Finicky’s kitchen.
“Maybe it’s somebody’s birthday?”
I didn’t think it was. Who could both Dr. Oglesby and Ms. Finicky possibly know other than Detectives Welderman and Stocks? I couldn’t imagine anyone celebrating their birthdays.
“Or possibly the day the state fair arrives in town?”
Libby had turned back around and was leaning on the windowsill looking out. She stood balanced on one leg while her other was bent behind her, her white tennis shoe dangling precariously from her toes. In the light of the almost full moon, her dress appeared nearly translucent, tracing every curve of her body. Her legs were highlighted, and I couldn’t turn away if I wanted to. I knew at that moment Father had been right about what he said. I also knew I didn’t care.
“Does the state fair even come here?” I heard myself ask. The farmhouse was remote. I had gathered that much from my twice-weekly visits back to Camden to talk with Dr. Oglesby. There was very little of anything but farm country and open fields.
Her shoulders shrugged. Her locket dangled from her neck. “I don’t know. But I’ve always wanted to go to a state fair.”
Libby’s backside swayed from side to side as she stood there, and I found it maddening. I wondered if this was a conscious effort on her part or just a feature built into the machinery at the factory as involuntary as breathing or the beat of a heart.
“They’re back!” she said in a loud whisper, and she ducked down even though I knew nobody could see us from the house as long as the lamp wasn’t burning.
I crawled over from my spot against the wall and I peered out the window. Libby nestled in beside me and looked back out, too. I hadn’t kissed her yet, but I most certainly wanted to. The warmth of her felt so good, I never wanted to leave. Foolish, I know. All good things eventually ended, and I knew this good thing would one day end as well, but I wanted to do everything in my power to make it last as long as possible.
Detective Welderman’s Malibu was in the driveway, still running, doors closed.
“Who’s in there? Can you tell?” she asked.
I shook my head.
Most nights it was Kristina or Tegan, sometimes both. Welderman drove me to and from Oglesby’s office, but those trips were always during the day. It was nearly three in the morning now, and I knew enough to understand they hadn’t been visiting Camden. Libby had asked Tegan where they went, and all the other girl would tell her is “you’ll know soon enough.” Paul had taken that ride last week, and he wouldn’t talk about it, either. In fact, he didn’t talk for nearly two full days after he got back.
Welderman stepped out of the driver side, and Stocks got out, too, a cigarette burning between his fingers. Welderman opened the back door, spoke to someone, then reached inside.
“Get your fucking hands off me!” Vincent Weidner shouted back at him. “Don’t you fucking touch me!”
I noticed Stocks’s free hand drift down to the butt of the gun on his belt, and Libby must have noticed it too, because she let out a thin gasp and leaned in closer to me.
From inside the car, Vince shrugged off Welderman’s hand and pushed past him out of the car. He was a big kid, nearly as tall as Welderman, and when his shoulder crashed into the older man, he nearly knocked him off balance. Stocks’s grip on his gun tightened, but he didn’t take it out. Vince stormed up the driveway and into the house without another word to either of them. The two men stood there long enough for Stocks to finish up his cigarette. Then they got back in the Malibu and drove off.
Libby took my hand and pulled me back from the window. “Come on.”
39
Poole
Day 5 • 12:40 PM
Paul Upchurch’s house was blue with white trim and sat about midway down the block. A CSI van was parked in front along with a single patrol car. A van from Channel Ten was across the street, engine running, a tail of white smoke pluming up from the exhaust. As Poole pulled his Jeep up behind the patrol car and shifted into park, a hand in the news van wiped the condensation from the passenger window and a face peered out.
“They’re like herpes. You think they’re gone, and a new rash creeps up on your other ass-cheek,” Nash said.
“I don’t think herpes works that way,” Poole said flatly, looking up at the house.
“I’m just trying to lighten the mood,” Nash replied. “You haven’t said anything since we left Metro.”
“Sorry, I tend to get quiet when I’m thinking.”
“Porter and I usually try to talk through the problem. It helps sometimes. Throw all the facts out there, mix it up, come up with a theory. Most things don’t stick, but every once in a while we stumble into an angle we might not have considered.”
“Could Porter have been running some kind of secondary undercover op without you knowing?”
“No way.”
“That’s a knee-jerk reaction. Would it have been physically possible for him to run an op without you catching on?”
Nash tapped his index finger against his lip. “I don’t see how. I’ve worked with the guy for years, and sure, he can be a little secretive at times, but I don’t see how he could keep something like that from me.”
“When we raided his apartment, you said you had no idea he was still chasing Bishop. You seemed as surprised as the rest of us.”
“If we’re being honest here, I had my suspicions, but I didn’t see the harm in it. Sam’s not the kind of guy to let some
thing go, so I figured he was still digging. If he found something worthwhile, he would have brought the rest of us in.”
“Did he call you before he ran off to New Orleans?”
“No, but—”
Poole waved him off. “My point is, we think we know the people we work with, particularly when we spend a lot of time with a partner, but that doesn’t mean we really do.”
Nash turned to him. “He didn’t tell us about New Orleans because he wanted to protect us.”
“So if he was running an undercover operation, he might have cut you out of that, too. To protect you,” Poole countered.
“Sam is a good cop.”
“Everyone keeps telling me that.” Poole opened his door and stepped out into the frigid cold, started up the walk to the house. Nash followed. They kicked the snow off their shoes against a concrete step as best they could before going in.
A uniformed officer was stationed just inside the front door. He nodded at them both. “Detective Nash.”
Nash pointed his thumb at Poole. “This is Special Agent Frank Poole with the FBI. Who’s here?”
“Most of the team went out for lunch. Rolfes is upstairs.”
“Lindsy Rolfes?”
He nodded.
Poole asked, “You know her?”
“She was there when we found the Reynolds girl under the ice at Jackson Park. Seemed sharp.”
Poole’s eyes went to a bloodstain on the floor just inside the door, then glanced down the hallway.
“We found one girl unconscious on the kitchen table,” Nash told him. “Another in a cage down in the basement. That’s where the deprivation tank is. He made it out of an old chest freezer. Upchurch was in one of the bedrooms upstairs, just kneeling there when we came in.”
“Waiting for you.”
“Yeah.”
“Show me.”
Poole followed Nash past the kitchen, into the living room, and up the staircase to a little girl’s room. Pink and bright. Stuffed animals sat atop a Hello Kitty quilt on the small bed. Drawings covered the walls—some appeared to be drawn by a child, others clearly by a more experienced artist. There was a mannequin in the corner of the room, small, child-size. It was dressed in little girl’s clothing—a red sweater, blue shorts.
A reasonable facsimile of the girl in the pictures. Under the only window stood a desk, the drawers all open and the contents spread out on the floor. Sitting in the middle was a woman in her thirties with short blonde hair and glasses. She looked up at Nash as they entered. “Detective.”
“Special Agent Frank Poole, this is CSI Rolfes.”
She reached out a gloved hand and shook his, then offered a pleasant smile. “What can I do for you?”
“I need to understand Upchurch,” Poole said, then realized just how odd that probably sounded out of context. “He may be involved in more than one aspect of this investigation, something beyond his victims.”
“Do you mean the forgeries?”
Poole exchanged a glance with Nash. “Forgeries?”
Rolfes nodded. “Looks like he had quite an operation going here. Tough to make a living teaching teens to drive, and he certainly wasn’t pulling in enough from his art, so he got creative with his skills to pay the bills. Driver’s licenses, passports, that kind of thing.”
From under a stack of sketchpads, she pulled out a laptop and set it on the desk. “He was a wiz with Photoshop. In the other bedroom, we’ve got a professional grade scanner, photo equipment, three different printers. I’d be willing to bet he could get you a driver’s license in under an hour without leaving this house.”
She clicked the spacebar, and the screen came to life with a template and several photos of two different women. The white background indicated they were probably meant for passports. Driver’s licenses tended to use a blue background for people over the age of twenty-one, yellow for under.
“Holy shit,” Nash muttered beside him, leaning in closer.
“Yeah…” Poole recognized both, same as Nash. One was the woman found in the cemetery earlier today. The other was the woman found on the subway tracks at the station off Lake Street.
40
Diary
Libby and I were halfway back to the house when we heard shouting. Well, that was wrong—first there was a loud bang, then several more loud bangs, then shouting. A couple lights came on, both upstairs and down, and as silly as it may sound, the only worry I had was whether or not Libby and I would get in trouble for being outside at such a late hour.
Vincent had left the front door open, and the first bang we heard must have been the round table just inside the entrance, because when we stepped into the house, we found that table on its side up against the wall. The vase and flowers, the small plate for car keys, those were on the floor, shattered into about a million pieces. The carpet was soaked from the vase water, and I knew Ms. Finicky would be angry when she saw it. I didn’t get much time to think about that, because Libby was tugging my hand toward the stairs, toward the angry voices on the second floor.
We took the steps quickly—no need to worry about creaking boards now—and found Vincent Weidner standing in the middle of the hallway with his arms outstretched, his face flaming red, and blood on his shirt. There were a couple holes in the walls—one on his left and two more on the right—and judging by the cuts on his hands, he’d punched his way through the plaster and lath beneath. The blood on his shirt wasn’t his, though. It was Paul’s, who was on the floor in front of him with one hand pinching his nose shut to stem the flow from what must have been another punch. He tried to scramble back to his feet, slipped, then fell back on his butt.
“Stay down!” Vincent shouted at Paul. “Stay the fuck down!”
Tegan was standing at her doorway wearing a T-shirt and panties. Weasel and The Kid peeked around the corner of their own door, but neither dared step out. Kristina was in the hallway, reaching for Vincent, trying to calm him down. When her hand found his forearm, he shrugged her off, nearly elbowing her. She looked like she was about to cry. “Vince, it’s okay! Come in my room. Let’s talk about it. Everything will be all right!”
“I just wanted to help, that’s all,” Paul said. And I realized his lip was bleeding, too. Vincent must have hit him a few times.
I tried to go to him, to help him up, but Libby’s hand tightened in mine and she wouldn’t let me go. Tegan must have noticed that too, since she was staring at both of us.
“What the hell is going on here?”
This came from behind us and I turned to find Ms. Finicky standing there in a long, yellow nightgown and a shotgun in her hands. Her eyes jumped from Libby and me to Paul on the floor, the holes in the walls, and finally to Vincent. She leveled the barrel of the gun on him. “What is this?”
Vincent’s face somehow managed to grow even redder. “All of you just leave me the hell alone!” I thought he might kick Paul, but instead, he stepped over him. He crossed the hallway to his room and slammed the door.
Everyone just stood there for a moment. I don’t think any of us knew what to do.
Tegan’s look had gone from a gaze to an outright glare, and Libby’s hand fell from mine. I felt her inch away toward her own door.
“Get up,” Finicky said to Paul, lowering the shotgun. “Oh, your face! What has he done to your face?”
Paul was still pinching his nose shut with one hand. With his other, he touched his lip, winced, then got to his feet on wobbly legs.
Finicky stepped toward him. “Christ, you children will be the death of me. Tilt your head back—you’re bleeding all over the floor.” She looked up. “Kristina, get me a rag from the bathroom. The rest of you, get in your rooms. Now.”
Weasel and The Kid disappeared like two mice caught in the kitchen when the light turns on. Tegan remained in her doorway for a moment, but she wasn’t looking at Paul, her eyes still on me. When I turned to look for Libby, she was gone. Her bedroom door had closed so softly I hadn’t even heard it.
“In your room, Anson,” Ms. Finicky said, nodding toward my open door. Then her eyes narrowed. “Why are you dressed?”
I didn’t answer her. Instead, I slipped inside and shut the door.
I was still awake when Paul finally came in nearly an hour later. The light was off, but I could see well enough. He had a bag of ice wrapped in a green towel pressed to his nose. He didn’t say a word as he crossed the room and climbed the ladder to the top bunk. He lay there in silence for nearly ten minutes before saying anything at all. “They’ll take you next. You know that, don’t you?” His voice sounded nasal.
“Take me where?”
He didn’t answer that. And I wasn’t sure I wanted him to.
“Everyone goes. It will be Libby’s turn after that. Maybe even Weasel and The Kid…” His voice trailed off as he said this. I heard the ice jingle in his bag. “It’s different for Tegan and Kristina, even me and Vince—we lived on the streets. They’re just kids, though.”
I wanted to point out we were all just kids, but I didn’t.
Another minute or two passed, then he said, “You were out in the barn, right? With Libby?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you see the truck? I heard there’s a truck out there,” he told me. “We need to see if it runs.”
41
Poole
Day 5 • 1:00 PM
“Those photos are recent. Haircuts haven’t changed.” Nash said, looking down at Upchurch’s laptop.
Poole glanced at Rolfes. “May I?”
She nodded.
He slid into the desk chair and right-clicked on one of the photographs, bringing up the metadata on the first image, then the other. “These were both taken in the last week.”
Rolfes reached over and clicked several buttons. “He took about a dozen shots of each woman in different outfits. Some with their hair up, others with it down. I’m not sure if that meant he planned to create more than one ID, or if they were just going for the right image.”