by Helga Zeiner
“Why didn’t you take her back to Canada then?”
“I was still in love with Mike, although he was dead, and I just felt it was the right thing to do to let his daughter grow up in his home town. Surely people understand that.”
“Of course.”
“We had a lovely home. We lived in Galveston. A great place for a holiday. Before Katrina, I mean. After the big storm, it didn’t look so good. There was so much damage to the city, you can’t imagine. Before the storm hit, my Tiara had never been scared of anything. After Katrina, I had to keep a light on in her room every single night, that’s how afraid she was of the dark. She was a lot more timid after that. It’s, really, it’s inconceivable that she’d even touch a weapon, let alone use one—”
Melissa started to weep quietly. She didn’t want to, she had to.
Andy gave her a moment, didn’t pressure her and didn’t switch the camera off.
“How could my Tiara change so much in such a short time? Maybe somebody slipped something in her drink when she was at that coffee shop. That happens, doesn’t it? There are drugs like that, mind-altering ones. Something like that must have happened, don’t you think?”
Chapter 21
Seems I’m slowly easing into the daily routine of jail existence. Mornings at school—where I make it abundantly clear that I need to be left alone—lunch in my Living Unit, and an hour at the gym, scheduled around the doc’s visit.
That hour in the gym is my favorite time of day. I do the full sixty minutes on the stationary bike, working up a lather of sweat while sifting through the debris of memories that are swept onshore by continuous rolling waves. It’s amazing how the brain starts working when the body does repetitive movements. The first ten minutes are excruciatingly painful—I hit the pedals hard and fast, and I count the seconds to make sure I don’t give up too soon. I have no time to think of anything, but when I reach six hundred, my synapses begin to fire up. Soon after, I am journeying through my thought process like a wanderer without a destination. The trip takes me around twists and turns and along ups and downs, never on a straight line, and I connect the scenic points of the memory-vista until the path I’m on becomes clearer.
That’s an excellent exercise, the bike-pedaling as well as the mind-wandering, it structures my past, which makes it that much easier to write it down in my journal later on.
Birthday Six
Not long after my fifth birthday Gracie announced the sponsor had arranged for another photo session.
“This time, I’m coming along,” Mom said.
“Why’s that?” Gracie asked.
“You said those photo shoots can further her career. I need to be involved in everything my girl is doing.”
My girl? Gracie threw her car key at Melissa.
“You drive her there then. I’m fed up being your chauffeur anyway. No need for both of us to go.”
Mom had not applied for her American driver’s license and depended on Gracie to take us to all the pageant towns from Arizona to Texas, New Mexico, Mississippi, all the way to South Carolina, practically all over the Southern States.
“You know I can’t drive.”
“Take the bus.”
Mom realized she had pushed it too far.
“Come on, Gracie, that’s not what I meant. I don’t want to go without you.”
“And I don’t want you to come along. It’ll make the photographer nervous and then the pictures won’t turn out good. I’m doing all this for us, you know, for Tiara and you, so you can have a good life. God knows, I’m doing all I can, and that’s the thanks I get for it.”
Gracie’s voice quivered, which made me run to her.
“Gracie, Tiara wants a love-hug,” I said to make her happy again.
“Come here, my mija. Come to your auntie. There you are. That’s it. A big hug full of love for my most favorite girl in the world.”
Mom pulled a face as if she had bitten on a lemon, which made me laugh.
Then Gracie laughed too, and now both of us were happy again. Gracie grabbed my current glitz outfit and the make-up and hair-kit, and took me to the studio to do that special shoot the sponsor had arranged for me.
On the way, she explained a few facts of my life to me.
“What we do there is our little secret. You mom mustn’t know. She doesn’t love you like I do. She’s always so mean to me. Always angry with me. If she hears that we take such nice pictures of you, she’ll get jealous and make me stop. She’ll take you away from me. You’ll never be able to be with your Gracie again. Do you understand?”
I tried, but I didn’t really. Gracie could see it in my face.
“Your mom mustn’t know, and if you tell her, the good Lord will make me sick. Then you have no more Gracie to take care of you. Just think, nobody to love you like I do.”
That scared me. Now I understood.
While she did my hair and make-up, she told me that she was very proud of me.
“That’s my mija. Such a good girl, and so pretty. We’ll do some nice pictures for all the fans you got. They want to see more of you. Just let the photographer do his art and he’ll make you into the most beautiful girl in the whole world.”
She talked non-stop and fiddled with my pageant outfit, pulling the shoulders down and the skirt up as if she couldn’t decide what was right.
“Art is very important and his pictures will make you famous,” she said. “And everybody will be so proud of you and just… love you to pieces.”
She promised me Disneyland again.
The photographer took a few test shots, then turned to Gracie who leaned against the studio wall.
“I won’t need you here. Come back in two hours.”
Before she left the room, she gave me a big hug and whispered in my ear.
“Be a good girl now. Remember, if you aren’t, the angels won’t protect us and bad things will happen then.”
Soon after, somebody else came into the studio. Somebody without a face. I was very scared. This was the person who would tell the angels if I didn’t behave.
The photographer said: “Now, let’s get rid of her dress.”
The somebody without a face did what he ordered. I let it happen, way too scared to object. Many different poses he wanted, while the other person, the shadowy ghost-like somebody who didn’t say a word, arranged my body in some sheer material. Some of the art pictures had me partly covered, some not at all. I had to sit still for a long time, the camera staring at me until the picture was art.
I have a very clear memory of feeling out of place, feeling not me. Not wanting to be me. Although it wasn’t really cold in the room, something made me shiver. I started to cry again, very quietly, because I wanted my Gracie back.
The photographer friend clapped his hands together in delight.
“This is perfect! She looks so sad and lost. Those pics will sell like goddamn hotcakes.”
“I don’t want to go to Gracie’s photographer friend anymore,” I told Mom when we got back to our square house
“Why not?”
I didn’t really know how to explain it because I didn’t understand it, so I said, “he always takes so long with his pictures and I get so cold and I still haven’t been to Disneyland.”
Gracie said: “If we don’t let him take pictures of you, we’ll all be very poor and we can’t move to this wonderful house where each of us has their own room.”
Mom looked sad and said, “she was soooo looking forward to this house”, and I said, “but I’m always soooo cold.”
And then Mom said to Gracie: “Why the hell doesn’t that idiot turn the air-conditioner down, if she’s cold!”
“I’ll make sure he does, next time.”
From this session onwards, I started feeling like two kids. One that hated artsy picture taking, and the other who wanted to do it right to make sure Gracie continued to love me and wouldn’t die.
A few weeks after that photo session, we moved. The house was p
erfect for us. A detached bungalow at the end of a cul-de-sac, in a good neighborhood called La Marque, with a covered porch in front where one could sit in the shade, and flowerbeds on either side of the driveway. Such a perfectly perfect house.
My room was fit for a princess, but right next to it was a larger room which was reserved for my practicing.
“We have to take it up a notch,” Gracie announced when we moved in, “the sponsor said, with the extra money coming in from the pictures, we can afford to hire a choreographer to come to the house and do routines with her.”
The practice room became my hate room. Mornings, Mom homeschooled me in this large empty room with the wooden floor. Texas law requires kids to go to school or be homeschooled from age six, but Mom had decided that it would be better to start a bit early as we would lose so many days when preparing for and attending the pageants.
I didn’t miss going to school. I had no contact with the outside world beyond the borders of my family nucleus, so the concept of having peer friends was not on my radar. My world was Gracie, and to some extent Mom, and the crowns I was supposed to win for them, and the pictures I was posing for to make sure the three of us could afford the house.
Gracie kept telling me how lucky I was to have all this, but I didn’t think it was fun, at least not in the afternoons. The choreographer came and tortured me in the hate-room, and there was no escaping him. He poked me with a wooden stick when he wanted me to do a new step sequence and made me practice for hours on end. I had to learn my routine. Dancing steps, posture, different routines for different contests. I was now in the all-important age group 4 to 6—the one that would catapult me into the pre-teen category—and there the judges looked for personality, poise and confidence, not only appearance.
My stage name was Princess Tia. The other mothers and their daughters always shunned us, jealous of my unbelievable feat of having won the Grand Supreme and the Ultimate Supreme four times in the last five pageants before I even turned six.
On my sixth birthday we finally went to Disneyland. Gracie joined me on all the rides. We stayed in a suite with a princess theme, of course, and Princess Tia wore her sparkling tiara all day long. Every picture Gracie took on this trip shows me grinning from one ear to the other, eating hot dogs and ice cream, carrying a larger-than-Tia Mickey Mouse, having the time of my life!
It made up for the photo sessions, which I did nearly every week now.
Chapter 22
“She can’t be serious! She gives an interview without talking to us or consulting with her lawyer first?” Macintosh was more surprised than annoyed. “What’s the matter with that dumb bitch?”
He and Harding stood around the computer, watching a replay of last night’s news clip, containing snippets of Melissa’s interview, to be aired in full on one of the afternoon talk shows.
Harding shrugged. “They have run those teasers for days now, it keeps the interest alive.”
“Great, that’s all we need. We are running in circles here, chasing our own tail, and the press has a field day with the mother, who is whitewashing herself like the inside of a church.”
Harding put his hands behind his neck and stretched. “We don’t have a lot to go on.”
“Don’t just stand there. Relax, Harding, take the weight off your legs, it might help you think. Sit down.” Macintosh said while slumping into his own chair. “Let’s talk. What have we got so far?”
Harding did as he was told. “Suspect or victim?” he asked.
“Let’s start with the victim.”
“Still comatose.” Harding glanced at his notebook. “The docs told me she had her appendix out and she’s diabetic. Aside from that and guessing her heritage, we got nothing. Nobody is missing anybody of her description.”
“What have we done to establish her identity?”
“We can’t fingerprint without her or a close relative’s consent, but we gave the data as we know it to all hotels as well as the cruise ship currently in the harbor. We have supplied the TV stations with it and they have been good about it and mentioned it three days in a row.”
“And still nothing. That’s odd.”
“Yeah, it’s really weird, considering she was right in the center of busy Metro Vancouver when she was attacked, so she wasn’t exactly hiding. Which just about eliminates her being a courier of sorts. We alerted the border crossings, thought maybe she was noticed coming over.”
“What are the chances she’ll come out of it so we can question her?”
“Slim, nobody can say for sure.”
“Damn it.” Macintosh shook his head and kept going to sum up their existing knowledge. “The girl. What about her?”
“Not much there either.” Harding was still tense. He was sitting on a wooden chair designed by a torture expert, which didn’t exactly relax his back.
“Did you check her mother’s comments that she was a famous, sought-after child model?”
“Patience, my friend. We checked with all major ad agencies down south, but no Tiara Brown has been registered with any of them. We keep at it.”
“What about the drug test?”
Harding’s notebook was on his lap but he didn’t need to consult it.
“Surprisingly, the drug test came back negative.”
“Really? Maybe she was on something we don’t know yet. They come up with new crap all the time,” Macintosh said.
“Stop being so paranoid.”
“Oh yeah? What do you know about drugs?”
“If she was using, she hasn’t been for a long time. We must assume that she’s as clean as a whistle. She refuses to cooperate with us, but apparently talks to the shrink at the Youth Custody Center in Burnaby, a Dr. Stanley Eaton. That’s the guy who called us after his first interview with her and asked for her full name because she repeatedly called herself Princess Tia. Anyway, he must have managed to sneak into her brain. Court has asked for a more comprehensive assessment of her mental health, and from what I understand she wants to keep the same shrink. Maybe he’ll crack her.”
Macintosh stated the obvious: “And a fat lot of good that’ll do us.”
“I know, he isn’t allowed to give us anything until he has finalized his report,” Harding replied. “Unless he cracks her so bad that she spills the beans all by herself to anybody who wants to listen.” It had happened before.
“So we’re looking at another month, at least,” Macintosh said. “Where are we with the eye-witness accounts?”
“Most have been to the station for their statements.” Now Harding looked at his notes. “Twelve so far, ten customers and the two employees, so we only got two to go. Nothing new there, and frankly, I don’t expect any spectacular insight from those remaining two either. What we’ve seen on the video clips taken by five of them is what we have to go on. Those clips show what happened a lot more accurately than any of their verbal descriptions.”
“Everything, except the victim’s face.”
“Yes, that’s too bad.”
“Any discrepancies?”
“None whatsoever. It’s all smooth and clear cut. None of them had noticed anything suspicious leading up to the attack, and several of them confirmed that the victim was sitting at table four, reading a newspaper, drinking coffee and eating a muffin when the alleged suspect came through the door, looked around and walked straight up to her. All of them confirm that she yelled something nobody could understand, just some blood-curling war cry I guess, and started slicing the victim without any provocation. All the customers present at that time watched, stunned at first, for a few seconds. Five of them were talking on their iPhones at that precise moment and were quick-minded enough to direct those devices toward the commotion.”
“Anybody recorded the war cry?”
“Sure, you can hear it in the background on several of the clips.”
“Did she say anything while attacking?”
“No. One high-pitched cry and then only serious grunting. She worked
it hard.”
Pete Macintosh had seen the clips, but it was always good to summarize. Talking it over again gave him an idea.
“Have we sent the recordings to voice analysis? What sounds like a war cry to us, could be the victim’s name.”
Harding shuffled his notes. “Already done. It’s just an angry cry.”
"What about the three guys who manhandled her? What are they saying?”
“They all agreed that she was a tough cookie. Took a bit of strength, but three against one and her being so tiny, it took only a few seconds. That’s on the clips as well.”
Macintosh sighed. Everything was recorded, everything was obvious, except the victim’s identity and the suspect’s motive. They had to be connected. As long as they were in the dark on the ID, they should concentrate on the motive. There had to be one. Of course he had come across cases where the suspect had been clearly deranged, had been guided by voices from outer-space or was a psychopath who loved killing for the sake of it, but those were extremely rare. Usually there was motive.
“We have to dig into the suspect’s background.”
Harding shook his head.
“That freaks me out most. There is no information available. Not for her or her mother. Word came back from the Texans that there is no birth certificate made out to a Tiara Brown. However, as we knew from the mother that she was born in August 1998 we checked the records of that month. On 21. August 1998 a certain Tiara Rodriguez-Brown was born at Houston General Hospital. Other than that, they have checked into all sorts of government departments, there is no record of a Melissa Brown or a Tiara Brown anywhere. The address Melissa had given us, Caroline Road in Galveston, is a bit odd. Number 357 doesn’t exist, and she hasn’t been registered under any other number in that street. There’s also no school registration of Tiara Brown, no driver license for Melissa Brown, no nothing of anything. Those two didn’t live in Galveston, and if they did, they were flying so much under the radar, it was practically illegal. I don’t know why, but I wonder if Melissa gave us the correct address.”