by David Archer
“This call came in hours after Wanda Sparks disappeared,” Alicia said, “but that doesn’t rule out the possibility that he was referring to her when he talked about teaching you a lesson. He may have already had her, there’s just no way to know. Is there any way to give me a copy of that recording?”
Angie nodded and quickly burned the recording onto a CD. Alicia took it and headed back to her own office, and I started for home once again.
Normally, Critter can cheer me up when I’m in a funk, but not that evening. All I could think about was that I should have taken the threat more seriously. Now it was two days later and two women were missing who could possibly be connected to it. I was really going to be upset with myself if it turned out the caller was snatching my clients.
Alicia called me one more time that evening, just about six p.m., to tell me that Emilio had a genuine and airtight alibi. He’d actually been in jail when she had gone missing, picked up that morning on a warrant for failing to appear in court. Bernice had been seen by several people after he was arrested, so it was not possible for him to have personally been involved in her disappearance. The police considered the possibility that he might have arranged for something to happen to her, but they were convinced that he was genuinely surprised when he was questioned.
“Thanks for letting me know,” I said, “but it really isn’t helping a lot right now. I feel like an idiot.”
“You should,” Alicia said. “You should’ve called me as soon as you got that call. Even if it’s not related to these situations at all, Cassie, someone in your line of work should never take a threat like that flippantly. Even if it was just the husband of one of your clients, he might decide to direct his violence toward you.”
“In which case,” I said, “he’ll find out that I carry a gun about the time I blow his nuts off. I’m not worried about me, but I’d hate to think that if I had gotten that to you soon enough, these women might still be safe.”
“Well, I’m having some doubts that it’s connected,” Alicia said, “simply because you haven’t had another call like that. If this was the guy behind the women disappearing, I’d personally expect him to want to call you and brag about it. Since he isn’t doing that, it may be completely unrelated. Don’t beat yourself up over it, Cassie, but don’t be silly enough to blow it off if you have another situation like this, either.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Let me tell you something, you’re only preaching to the choir, now. I get another call like that, I guarantee I’ll be calling you within seconds after it ends. I won’t take that chance again; guilt is not something I handle well.”
Just ask Abby.
We finished the call and I sat there on my couch with Critter in my lap. Her purring was loud and soothing, and exactly what I needed at that moment.
Well, that and the TV. My favorite show was on, the one about the vigilante with the bow and arrow. I loved it because it showed that the good guy always wins in the end, but I’ll confess that part of the reason I watched it might have something to do with the guy in the green suit. Just because I’m ugly doesn’t mean I can’t recognize hot when I see it.
I tend to go to bed fairly early on weeknights, so I was already there when my phone rang again at nine thirty. A chill went down my spine as I reached for it, and it got even worse when I saw that it was Alicia’s cell phone calling. I answered and put it to my ear.
“Cassie, I hate to bother you this late,” she said, “but do you know a woman named Connie Kirby?”
My heart sank. “Yes,” I said. “I placed her in a shelter about a week ago. Her husband had threatened to kill her, even stuck a gun against her face. He’s supposed to be in jail.”
I expected her to tell me that he had been released, and that Connie was either dead or badly hurt, but the words that came out of her mouth next startled me.
“Oh, he’s still in jail,” she said. “The problem is that Connie has disappeared. The shelter called just a little while ago, because she left her kids in their daycare while she went out looking for a job, and she’s never come back. Patrol officers just found her car parked in a city parking lot near downtown. She was supposed to be putting in applications in that part of town today.”
“And that makes three,” I said.
“What? Three, what do you mean?”
“Three women missing,” I said. “My mother always told me that bad things always come in threes. I’m beginning to think she was right.”
“Cassie, Jerry Niles wants you to come by his office tomorrow morning. So far, the only thing connecting these three women is the fact that they’ve all had dealings with you. He wants to talk to you about each of them, to see if maybe he can pick up on something else that might help. Can you make it about nine?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Tell him I’ll be there.”
Getting to sleep that night took a while. I finally managed it sometime after midnight.
I didn’t bother to go to the office the next morning, but I did call and leave Angie and Marsha each a message explaining why. I promised to let them know what was going on when I came in later, then took my time in the shower before getting dressed.
When I got to the main police building downtown, Alicia was waiting for me in the lobby. She caught me as I came through the door and pulled me aside into an empty office, and I felt a knot in the pit of my stomach.
“What’s wrong?” I asked her, nervous. I was afraid she was going to say they’d found Wanda’s body or something.
She bit her lip before she answered. “Another woman has been reported missing,” she said. “This one wasn’t a client of yours, but she was talking to another women’s crisis center here in town. Like the others, her man has an airtight alibi, and Niles is starting to think there’s something organized in all this.”
I lowered my lonely eyebrow. “Organized? What’s that supposed to mean?”
She took a deep breath. “It means they’re looking at the possibility that someone is approaching these men and offering to get rid of the women for them. It would have to be someone who knows about the abuse situations, and who would know enough to be able to take them without a fuss. In at least two cases, now, it would have to be someone who knows where all the shelters are, including the ones you guys don’t talk about.”
I shook my head, confused for a second, but then it all came clear and I think my eye almost became bigger than my head. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Are you saying I’m a suspect?”
Alicia grimaced. “Niles is calling you a ‘person of interest,’ not a suspect,” she said, “but it amounts to the same thing. The only solid link between all of these women is you, Cassie.”
I stared at her. “You just told me the last one wasn’t one of my clients,” I said, “so how could she be connected to me?”
“Because you met her before, and it was part of something big. Her name is Carolyn Stern, remember her?”
A face snapped into place in my mind, a small, meek-looking woman with brown hair that had a white streak in it. “Of course I do,” I said. “She helped me find Sabrina Moss a few months ago. What was she doing talking to an abuse center? Last I knew she was single.”
Alicia shook her head. “Not anymore, apparently. She’s been living with a guy named Arlo Minnich, but two weeks ago she went to Harvest of Hope and asked about getting into a shelter. She was pretty banged up, and said she was afraid he would kill her if she didn’t get away from him, so they sent her to one out by Bixby. She was supposed to have a protective order hearing this morning, but she seems to have disappeared last night after going to get something to eat. Her car was found at three this morning, sitting in the back parking lot at Applebee’s.”
I was dumbfounded. Carolyn had been terribly depressed over something that had happened a few years earlier, but she seemed to be getting better once the truth had come out. I hadn’t seen her since then, and to be honest, I wasn’t even sure I’d notice her on the street. “And Minnich
has an alibi?”
“Yep. He was at a sports bar all evening and way late, and security video confirms it.”
I shook my head. “Well, I don’t know anything I haven’t told you,” I said. “Let’s get this over with. Where do I go?”
She led me down along the hall to an interview room, and I went in and took a seat at the table there. I wasn’t comforted by the fact that there were places to hook a set of handcuffs to it, so a suspect couldn’t make a sudden mad lunge for a cop’s gun…
Crap! I hadn’t thought about the fact that I had my gun on me! I was pretty sure it wasn’t supposed to be in this room, and probably shouldn’t have come into the building with me, but I wasn’t expecting to be questioned as a suspect that morning when I’d put it in its holster. If they were to arrest me, that would look very, very bad!
Oh, well, there was nothing I could do about it at that point. The gun was under my coat at the back, the holster clipped to the belt on my casual-Friday jeans. I made a mental note to sit very still in my chair, and whispered a prayer that no one would notice it there.
Jerry Niles walked into the room, a chubby, balding man in his fifties, if I had to guess. He entered from my right and I caught the beginning of a smile, but it vanished as soon as I turned to look straight at him. His eyes went wide and he actually froze mid-step for a second when he got a look at the scars on my face. It took him a second to recover, and then he forced the smile to reappear as he sat down across from me.
“Ms. McGraw? I’m Detective Jerry Niles with TPD. I want to thank you for coming in this morning.”
“No problem,” I said. “I hope I can help.” I was doing my best to look and sound innocent, which was ridiculous since I knew that I actually was innocent. Human nature is so frustrating at times. Here I was, absolutely certain that I had done nothing wrong, and I was automatically trying to project an air of innocence toward the cop who wanted to think I was guilty.
“Yes, I hope so, too,” he said. “Can you tell me a little bit about what it is you do at the…” He took a look at some notes. “At the St. Mary’s Outreach?”
“Sure. I’m a women’s crisis counselor. I help women who are being abused by showing them different resources they can use to get out of the situation and start rebuilding their lives.”
“Right, that’s what I’d heard. Now, you know that there are some women missing, right?”
“Wanda Sparks, Bernice Montoya, Connie Kirby and Carolyn Stern,” I said, listing them off. “I just heard about Carolyn this morning, and Connie last night.”
“Yeah, right, and you know all of those women, is that correct?”
“Wanda, Bernice and Connie are all clients that I’ve worked with. Carolyn Stern was somebody I met a few months ago, while I was tracking down someone else who was missing. She was never a client, and I don’t really know her personally.”
“I read about that case,” Niles said. “That was the case about the girl who killed the guy who was stalking her, then ran off and hid for a couple of years. That right?”
I nodded. “That’s right. She was afraid she would be charged with murder, so she ran away. As it turned out, she was only charged with concealing a homicide because it was a pretty clear case of self-defense.”
“How was Ms. Stern involved in that case?”
“Sabrina Moss, the woman who actually killed the stalker, was her best friend. The night it happened, she had enlisted Carolyn Stern to help her hide the body and get away. Carolyn was eaten up by guilt over it, so when I happened to ask the right questions, she gave me the information I needed to track Sabrina down. The DA decided not to charge her.”
“Yeah, I read about that, too. Now, was she with Arlo Minnich at that time?”
“Not that I’m aware of,” I said. “I never heard of him, at least. If she was dating him or anybody else, she never mentioned it to me.”
“And she never came to you about the fact that he was beating her up?”
“I’m afraid not. I actually wish she had, I might’ve been able to get her out of that situation. It’s not a good place for anyone to be.” I pointed at my scarred left side. “I know from personal experience.”
That got Niles’ attention. “Those scars are the result of domestic abuse?”
“Domestic abuse on steroids,” I replied. “My fiancé was an abuser, but I wasn’t his only victim. When I learned about some others who didn’t survive, he and a friend of his decided to silence me. I was doused in gasoline and lit on fire.”
“Damn,” Niles said. “That why you went into this line of work?”
“You bet it is. Not only did I get burned, but my best friend lost her life in that fire. Once I recovered as much as I could, I went back to college to get my degree in psychology, and here I am. If I can prevent one woman from being killed or badly hurt, it will at least make what happened to me worthwhile, you know what I mean?”
Niles dropped the papers that were in his hand onto the table and leaned back in his chair. “Do you know anything about what happened to these missing women?”
“No,” I said as I shook my head. “The only thing I know is that I got a strange phone call last Tuesday evening, and I gave that to Alicia Perkins yesterday, just in case it might be connected. Other than that, I don’t have a clue what could have happened to them.”
He looked at me for a moment, then slowly nodded his head. “I’ve always been the kind of cop that felt like I could trust my gut,” he said. “My gut says you’re telling the truth. I’ll be honest, since you’re the only connecting thread between all of these women, I was starting to wonder if maybe you could be involved. Now that I’ve met you, though, I don’t believe you could do such a thing.”
I raised my eyebrow and gave him a little bit of my “pretty side” smile, where I try to smile with just the right side of my face. “Well, thank you,” I said. “Is there anything I can do to…”
“Hold on,” he said, holding up a hand to stop me. “I still think you’re connected, but I don’t think you’re aware of it. It’s just too much of a coincidence that all of these women have somehow been connected to you in the past, and now they’re all missing. We can’t find anything else that links them together, so I need you to really think hard about who might conceivably have a way to find out who you know and don’t know. Right at this moment, Ms. McGraw, it looks like just about any woman who knows you could be in danger.”
I stared at him for a moment, then shook my head. “You’re not looking at it the right way,” I said. “It isn’t just any woman who knows me, that isn’t true. Whoever is doing this seems to be targeting women who are being abused. If it was just the ones on my client list, I’d say they had to be connected to St. Mary’s, but throwing Carolyn Stern into the mix really throws that off. She was never a client of mine, and I’ve never really gotten to know her at all. If she was taken because of her slim little connection to me, then we’d have to be dealing with someone who knows me pretty intimately.”
Niles had half a grin on his face. “Those are good points,” he said. “I’ve got a feeling the list of people who know you that intimately is pretty small, am I right?”
“It’s nonexistent,” I said. “Nobody knows me that well. And I keep it that way.”
FIVE
The interview only lasted a short time longer, and I managed to make it out of the building without anyone realizing I was armed. Mental note to self: don’t pack a gun when you’re being interviewed as a potential suspect in a crime. Could get messy.
Alicia was waiting in the lobby when I came out, and we went down the street to the coffee shop. Over a double espresso Irish cream, I told her about the interview and Niles’ theory that I was somehow at the center of the perpetrator’s plans. Of course, I also explained how I had modified that theory for him.
“Good for you,” she said. “Jerry is a little cocky, sometimes, but he’s a good cop. I had already told him there was no way I could believe you would be inv
olved in something like this, but he had to speak to you for himself. I’m just glad he wasn’t wearing blinders.”
I squinted at her. “Blinders?”
She shrugged. “Jerry can be a bit sticky when it comes to women,” she said. “His wife ran out on him a few years ago, ran away with his former partner. Jerry hasn’t trusted women much since then. I was half afraid he might look at you and…”
My eye went wide with sudden realization. “You thought one look at Freda Krueger would be enough to convict me in his eyes?”
She made a meh kind of face and shrugged. “I was afraid the scars might make him wonder about your sanity, okay? Serious trauma can do some nasty things to the mind, everybody knows that.”
I snorted. “Trust me, you have no idea. I went through months and months of nightmares, and they weren’t all about me getting burned. Sometimes they were about me burning the men who did this to me, and then that evolved into nightmares about me burning people I love and care about. It’s all about the mind trying to reject what happened to the body, so it tries to project its pain-and-suffering outward. There’s a name for it, I just never can remember it.”
“It’s called PTSD, Cassie,” Alicia said. “Although, you do seem to be pretty well-adjusted to me. Can I make a little confession?”
“Sure, go ahead.”
“When I first met you, when I first got a good look at you, I wondered a little bit about whether you could possibly be completely sane after going through what you did. The more we talked, though, and then the way you handled it when you had to kill Roger McCoy, I figured you were probably a lot saner than most people I know. I still think so, but I also worry that you put yourself at risk an awful lot.”
I smiled at her. “Only when necessary,” I said. “Alicia, there isn’t a whole lot that scares me anymore, but that doesn’t mean I have a death wish. Believe it or not, even with everything that happened and even when I have to look in the mirror, I’m still grateful to be alive.”