Another message followed: Yes, this door. Garrett’s door.
I walked to the door, looked through the peep hole and saw Jill’s smiling face so I opened it.
“You are one cunning little sneak, aren’t you?” She bustled past me carrying two grocery bags and a large pizza.
“I-I’m sorry,” I stammered as I locked the door behind her and followed her into the kitchen. “I know I was supposed to stay in the room and that may have got you into trouble because you were supposed to be watching me.”
“Oh my dear, I was watching you.” She pointed to the phone in my hand. “You don’t really think the Bureau would give you a phone that wasn’t equipped with a tracking device, do you?”
I stared at the phone in my hand and she shook her head and laughed.
“Once I saw you were on the move and where you were headed, I thought you were making your way directly to the site Garrett and the others were looking for that girl so I didn’t hurry. I didn’t know that you were headed to a different area nearby and by the time I figured it out...” She shrugged. “Oh well, what’s done is done and it worked out awesome, right? One more dead girl found and checked off the list.”
I cringed at her flippant description. Finding Kari Burke’s destroyed body was a tick on a horrific to-do list?
Jill put the pizza box down on the granite counter and started emptying her grocery bags. She opened the fridge and removed three beer bottles and replaced them with a sack of oranges and a package of sandwich meat. Then pulled out a few cans of soup and a loaf of bread from her sack and left them on the counter. “Where’s our boy?”
“Um. Sleeping.”
“Guess he’s earned it,” she said over her shoulder.
She opened and closed random cupboards that held nothing but a few plates and cups and she stopped when she got to a supply of liquor. One by one she bagged a couple bottles of wine, the three beers she pulled from the fridge, and a half-empty bottle of whiskey. When I realized why she was cleaning out Pierce’s liquor supply, a blanket of shame washed over me.
“So the rules here are the same as at the motel, not that you listened...” She offered me an eye roll. “No leaving here unless you’re with Garrett or me. No opening the door unless you get a text first from either of us. Oh and here’s a new one...” She leaned in close and I could smell spearmint gum on her breath as she whispered, “No climbing into Garrett’s bed. I know he’s got that whole sexy, rakish thing going on and those serious tortured-soul eyes, but he’s off your bucket list, got it? He’s what? Twenty-five years older than you? Besides the ick factor involved, it would be a big no-no for you to contaminate our investigation by trying to fuck him.”
“I-I-I...” I stammered, my jaw gaping as a rush of heat probably turned me into a giant tomato. “I wouldn’t even, you know...”
I snapped my mouth shut and swallowed in mortified silence then turned around to come face-to-face with Pierce.
“Well, good morning, Garrett,” Jill quipped. “Just taking care of biz.”
“Right. Thanks. You can go now,” he replied coolly.
“Sure.” She gathered up the sacks of liquor bottles and they clanked noisily together as she walked to the door. “The pizza’s still hot so dig in. Your favorite.”
He thanked her again and locked the door behind her as she left.
“Sorry about that,” he said with a frown. “Jill can be a bit...”
“Of an elitist bitch waffle?” I offered. “Yeah, I get that.”
He laughed loudly and shook his head then grabbed the pizza box and two bottles of water and brought them to the couch.
“C’mon.” He opened the box of pizza and grabbed a slice. “You must be as hungry as I am.”
The smell of melted cheese and meat wafted over to me, and my stomach growled in reply but there was no denying it felt weird being in his apartment.
“That’s okay. I should probably just leave you to...um...you have work to do and stuff so...” I didn’t know what to say. “I should probably just go to bed.”
“Sit. Eat.”
He patted the cushion next to him on the couch and I walked over and dutifully sat.
“Have you ever had pizza from Serious Pie before?”
I shook my head and he lifted out a section of the strangely oval pizza with the puffed blackened edges and handed it to me.
“Sweet fennel sausage, roasted peppers and provolone,” he said. “It’s as close to heaven as you can get.”
It was definitely the fanciest-sounding pizza I’d ever tried and, after I gingerly took a bite, I nodded.
“Really good.”
“Good?” He looked at me with mock horror as he devoured his second slice. “I know I probably spoiled you with my gourmet spaghetti but you have to admit that it’s a helluva lot better than ‘good.’”
I laughed around a second bite.
“Delicious.”
“That’s closer.” He grabbed his third slice and took a bite. “I was beginning to wonder if all the excitement had caused you to lose your taste buds.”
The pizza and his casual conversation helped assuage the embarrassment and horror of my conversation with Jill.
“So you never tried Serious Pie even a few years ago when you lived just a little ways from here?”
“No.” I looked at him sideways. “You know where I used to live?”
“Yeah, sure, I checked you out thoroughly before I visited you and dragged you into this fucked-up situation.” He drank from his water bottle and reached for a fourth slice of pizza. “Of course I couldn’t find out everything based on just searches and talking to random people. Even the Bureau has its limitations on what we can uncover.” He paused before taking a bite of the pizza poised at his mouth. “By the way, I’m sorry about what happened with the reporters. It wasn’t me and I don’t think it was anyone at the Bureau, but I’m sorry just the same.”
“Thanks. I think it was Katie,” I admitted and let out a sigh. “It was a real shit show.”
“Scary as hell, I’m sure.”
We ate in silence until the rest of the pizza was gone. I got up with the box and dumped it into a recycle box in his kitchen. When I got back he had my map sprawled out on the coffee table.
“Been doing your own research, have you?” he asked.
“Kind of,” I admitted sheepishly as I sat back down on the sofa. “I know you’ve got all kinds of technical tools and profilers and dozens of agents so it’s not like anything I come up with could help. I guess I just wanted to see if anything came to me.”
“Don’t knock what you’ve accomplished so far. Who knows how long it would’ve taken us to find these girls without you.” He tapped the map with his finger. “And did it? Did anything come to you tonight?”
“Not really.” I shrugged a single shoulder.
“Know why I had you brought here instead of keep you in a motel?”
“No idea.” And that was the truth.
“After today I realized you are a valuable tool in this investigation and all we’ve done is try to hold you back with rules. I want you to work with me on this. I want to know your thoughts, no matter how crazy you might think they are. Tell me what you know, Julie.”
And so I talked. He put his feet up on the coffee table and leaned back with his fingers locked behind his head and his eyes closed as he listened.
“Every girl has been found about a half hour from the place she was taken. They’ve been found in or near water and bridges,” I began.
I pointed out other obvious things we knew about the girls, listing what was already common knowledge about the individual victims: where they worked, went to school and lived and their obvious physical attributes. I expected him to rush me or interrupt or ask me to skip the part we already know
but he let me ramble, and I could put on a long-winded gabfest if encouraged.
“They each had part-time jobs but I’m guessing none of these girls knew each other or that would’ve been too big a detail to keep quiet. It would’ve been all over social media for sure.” I took a long drink from my water bottle then added, “There’s a casino almost within walking distance of where every girl was abducted and—”
“Is that true?” He sat up then and looked at me sharply.
“Yes, but it probably doesn’t mean much because there’s gotta be, like, forty casinos in Washington State. You can’t swing a cat without hitting one.”
“There’s something you’re not telling me.” His eyes were shrewd and I just shook my head. “Then it’s a good thing we’re not swinging cats here,” he joked. He pointed to my laptop. “Can we use yours or do you want me to get mine from my room?”
“Help yourself. I didn’t know your Wi-Fi password.”
He logged my computer into his internet and then Google searched the casino locations.
“Fifty. There are fifty casinos in the state and, you’re right, there was one within a mile of each girl’s abducted location.” He patted me on the leg. “Good job.”
“It probably means nothing.”
“Investigative work is like wading through a lake filled with shit to find a diamond.”
He dug out his phone and made a call so I got up to give him space. I opened the sliding doors and walked onto the balcony. I heard him talking to someone on the other end of the line asking for lists of employees at the casinos near the abduction sites and a list of suppliers that delivered to all three.
The concrete balcony froze my stocking-clad feet. I put my arms on the icy metal railing and leaned forward to check out the view thirty floors below. Strange enough, a balcony never elicited the same fear in me as a bridge.
A breeze kicked up and coiled around my bare neck. Just like that, the quicksand sucked me in. I closed my eyes and remembered another night of cold. Locked out of the house by Grandma for some infraction or another. Temperature had dipped to freezing and she locked me in the garden shed wearing nothing but thin pajamas. I was only about eleven at the time.
At first I piled the bags of soil and mulch around me to keep warm but it only helped for a while. In the corner of the shed there’d been a bucket of rusted gardening tools and some old fishing lures. Somehow I figured out that I could pop the cover off the plate on the double dead bolt so that the screws were visible and, using a metal fishing lure, I began to turn the screws holding the dead bolt on the door. The screws were rusted on tight and it took me forever. I had to keep stopping to warm my fingers under my armpits or blow on them to get the feeling back but finally it worked. When I got back to the house everyone was asleep and I slid my bedroom window open and crawled inside. I slept in the closet until the sun came up and then dressed and ran off to school. When I returned home after school, whatever had crawled up Grandma’s backside had subsided and no mention was made of my escape or subsequent return.
A siren on the streets below snapped me out of my memory. An ambulance whizzed down the street and, once it was gone, the city noises resumed the normal clamor. I found it funny that all those people below just went on about their lives. They’d heard about a serial killer in Washington taking teen girls but it didn’t affect their everyday meanderings. It probably just made good watercooler talk.
I didn’t hear Pierce come up behind me until he spoke.
“It’s freezing out here. Do you want me to grab a sweater?”
“No.”
But even as I said the words I thought again of Grandma and shivered visibly so he grabbed the fleece throw off the back of the couch and put it around my shoulders.
I thanked him even though he had no way of knowing the shiver had more to do with PTSD than the icy breeze blowing in off the Pacific.
Silently Pierce stood there next to me and we stared out at the world below. The wind picked up and I reveled in its bite. I felt like I’d been slogging through a tepid swamp for years. I wanted the cold to clear my head and wake me up.
“What are you thinking about?”
He stood next to me, our shoulders pressed together, and it felt wrong to just brush him off so I told him the truth.
“How most people will go their entire lives without knowing how much evil there is in the world.”
“Because it doesn’t touch them.”
“Evil touches everyone. Most people just sleepwalk right past it,” I murmured.
I’ve always known how to lighten the mood in a room.
We walked back inside and I excused myself for bed. I knew what I had to do. I brought my laptop and map to my room, then went into the bathroom where I examined the sink faucet. Thankfully it wasn’t a more modern kind. I unscrewed the end piece and brought the small cylinder to my room, where I popped out the filter, leaving me with a piece of chrome in the shape of a heavy ring. I took it to my room and fished the long string out of my hoodie and tied the end of the string to the metal ring.
I sat cross-legged on the floor with the ring dangling off the string, waited for it to become still, and then I quieted my mind as best I could.
“Show me your yes,” I whispered.
Slowly the pendulum began to swing left to right, east to west, in a deliberate sway. I stopped the movement with my free hand and waited for it to become motionless.
“Show me your no,” I whispered.
The ring swung north away from me and then south toward me, back and forth, back and forth, gaining momentum with every sway.
“Thank you,” I said and stilled it with my hand.
Then I got out the map.
Chapter Seven
For hours I tried pendulum dowsing but could not get beyond yes or no. Whenever I asked a question regarding the map I got zero response. It would remain motionless and my hopes were dashed. Not that I thought I would magically be shown where the killer was hiding the last victim, Sue Torres but, admittedly, there’d been a spark of hope there. After all, I was facing the demons that good ol’ Grandma had nearly beaten out of me. I wanted a reward.
I fell into a fitful quicksand sleep and dreamt of dark times. I fought so many battles in my sleep that when the sun came up, I pulled the covers over my head and slept some more.
When I finally woke up it was after nine and there was a text from Pierce: Gone out. Stay here. The alarm is set and will go off if you leave.
“Fuck you,” I groaned.
After a quick shower I called Gramps. He let me talk to Wookie but I don’t think the dog missed me nearly as much as I missed him. Gramps sounded chipper and I think he liked the challenge and celebrity that came with a flock of reporters constantly trying to talk to him. He regaled me with stories of how he’d only gone to get gas and a loaf of bread, and two of the reporters had followed him even into the store.
“But I held firm,” he said. “They’re not getting anything out of me. Not even a ‘no comment.’”
“Good for you.” I smiled. He was treating this like an adventure or a challenge but, still, I missed my low-key gas-jockey life.
He went on to say that his hot-water tank decided to die and he’d had to go into town for a new one and installed it himself.
“I hope you got help hauling that inside the house. Those things are damn heavy.”
“I’m not exactly a flyweight.” He laughed.
That might be true but he wasn’t young and there was bound to come a day when lifting hundred-pound tanks like it was nothing would become a problem for his aging body.
After the call I went into the kitchen and there was a note propped up against a Starbucks coffee cup telling me the latte was for me and I could microwave it to heat it up. I’d tried an instant latte mix before and
found it too sweet and chemical for my tastes so I was prepared to hate it. After I heated it a few seconds and took a sip I reluctantly admitted it was probably the best coffee I ever had. Huh. Before you knew it I’d be trying to juice lemongrass.
I dragged the map out to the coffee table and my pendulum dowsing string as well as the ring from the faucet too.
If you poke the devil you’ll get jabbed back.
I shook my head of Grandma’s voice then began a computer search. After watching a few videos on YouTube I tried again. Maybe my head wasn’t in the right place or perhaps my questions were improperly worded. Or maybe I needed to summon a demon, an angel or the spirit of famous psychic Jeane Dixon. Didn’t seem to matter what I tried, the answer was the same. Nothing. Zilch.
“Argh! This is so-o-o frustrating,” I called out to the empty apartment.
There was a website listing professional dowsers that I didn’t even know existed. One woman’s bio stated that her area of expertise was pendulum dowsing. Her email was given so I decided to send her a few questions. Maybe she’d answer or maybe my questions would sit in cyberspace forever. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?
Afterward, I went through my emails and was happy to see another from Jonas with yet another picture. This one was a selfie taken at the casino where I’d seen him that night when I was out with Katie.
I tried to win myself some new teeth and maybe even a haircut but I was only up by ten bucks at the end of the night.
I replied telling him he’d have far better luck making money at the gas station than he would at those casinos.
Almost immediately he emailed back asking if I felt like Skyping so we could chat in real time. I hesitated. It would be nice to talk to a familiar face but what if Pierce returned in the middle. It felt like a betrayal. I just told him that maybe another time. He replied with a simple ok.
Then I sorted all the other emails. Today wasn’t a good day. There were far more nasty mean crazies who wanted me dead than wanted me to find their loved ones. It made my stomach clench. I shut down the computer and looked around the apartment.
A Grave Calling Page 14