by Lis Wiehl
“It’s dark,” Lorena whimpered. “I’m scared.” She whimpered again. “Mommy? Mommy?”
Then it was like the older woman had touched a live wire. Her body jerked upright, and her arms and legs stiffened, breaking contact with Valerie. Her eyes snapped open.
“What did you see?” Wayne’s voice broke. “Tell me. Is she alive?”
Lorena’s voice was soft and slurred, as if she was only slowly coming back from where she had been. “I saw Katie laughing and smiling.”
Nic stiffened. This was cruel. This was downright cruel. Katie laughing and smiling? Why give these poor people false hope?
Valerie’s hand shot out and gripped Lorena’s forearm, her fingers digging in. “She’s alive, then?” Her voice was ragged.
“Sometimes I see the future and sometimes I see the past.” Lorena sounded exhausted. “And sometimes I see the present.”
“Was she with someone?” Wayne asked. His hand closed on Lorena’s other wrist. “What was she wearing? Was it this time of year?”
“Did she look older or younger?” Valerie asked.
The three of them were in a tight knot. Only Nic leaned away from what was going on. At some point, although she didn’t remember doing it, she had crossed her arms.
“I don’t know,” Lorena murmured. “I don’t know. The spirits didn’t reveal that to me.”
“At the end, she sounded so scared,” Valerie said. Her eyes shone with tears—the first time Nic had seen her close to crying. “Was she scared where she was?”
“I couldn’t see anything at that point.” Lorena covered her eyes with her fingers. “It was like I went blind.”
“Katie calls you Mom,” Wayne said to Valerie. “Not Mommy. Never Mommy.”
Valerie blinked, and a single tear ran down her perfectly made-up face. “No. That’s what she called Cindy.”
“Who’s Cindy?” Nic asked.
Wayne turned to her with a look of surprise, as if he had forgotten she was there. “My first wife. Katie’s mom. She died when Katie was eighteen months old.” His wet eyes implored Lorena. “Do you think”—his voice broke—“do you think she’s with Cindy? Do you think Katie’s dead?”
“What I think,” Nic said, pushing herself away from the table and getting to her feet, “is that Lorena is using your personal nightmare to make money.” She leaned over the table, getting within a foot of the psychic’s face.
Lorena’s eyes widened.
“Let me ask you something. If I start checking up on you, what am I going to find? Is everything squeaky clean and aboveboard? Or is something going to come crawling out from under a rock?”
Lorena opened her mouth, but no words came out. Wayne and Valerie looked nervously back and forth between the two of them.
“That’s what I thought,” Nic said, finally straightening up. “When you leave, I suggest you keep your head down and not say one word to any-one. And if I find out that you have defrauded the Converses in any way, or if you try to use this to make some kind of profit, then so help me, I will start digging. And I have a feeling you won’t like what I will do when I find something.”
RANGEL RESIDENCE
December 20
After the vigil, Allison went to her boss and asked to be assigned to Katie’s case. Assuming it was a case. But it was, she was sure of it. She could feel it in her bones. “This one really speaks to me, Dan,” she had said. “And you know I’ve done homicides.”
“We don’t know that it’s a homicide.” Dan picked up a pen on his desk, fiddled with it, put it down. Then added, when Allison wouldn’t look away, “Yet.”
“I know I’m not out of line,” she said, working Dan as hard as she had ever worked any jury. “I deserve this.”
It was sure to be a high-profile case, with all the potential for success—as well as failure—that entailed. Big cases made big names for prosecutors—which could lead to big bucks if they ever decided to jump the fence and become defense attorneys. Even if they stayed put, big cases also led to promotions. And good publicity if they ever decided they wanted to run for district attorney.
But that wasn’t why Allison wanted this case. She only wanted to do right by this girl. If someone had hurt Katie, Allison wanted to bring that person to justice.
Dan closed his eyes and rested his chin on his thumbs and his fore-head on his steepled fingers.
Finally, he took a deep breath, opened his eyes, and said one word. “Okay.”
Now Allison had teamed up with Nicole to question Lily Rangel, Katie’s old best friend. Lily was a plump girl who Allison thought was trying a little too hard to look dangerous. She had skin as white as a vampire’s, and there was a silver stud just underneath her black-lipsticked lips. Her hair had been dyed black, straightened, and then brushed for-ward so that it covered her forehead and cheeks in long spikes. A streak of electric blue hung over her left eye. Her clothes were all layers of black, except for black-and-red-striped socks that stretched above her knees.
“You just let me know if you girls need anything. It’s no trouble to make coffee.” With a little wave, Lily’s mom left the room. She was a plain, sweet, and essentially colorless woman.
It wasn’t too hard to guess what Lily was rebelling against.
Lily sighed. “My mom is clueless. She thinks Katie and me are still friends. She keeps asking me if I know where Katie really is.”
Allison and Nicole exchanged a look. Allison said, “Katie’s mom told us you were Katie’s oldest friend.”
Lily made a dismissive sound and shook her head. “We’ve known each other since we were like, in diapers.” She looked down, fingering the black choker that cut into the soft flesh of her neck. “But that’s not the same thing as being tight.”
Allison decided to start with the big picture. “Tell me, what was Katie like?”
Lily’s head jerked up, and her startled eyes, rimmed with black liner a quarter inch wide, met Allison’s. “You mean, what is she like? You said was. ”
This girl was more perceptive than she looked.
“Is,” Allison said, mentally kicking herself. “Sorry. What is Katie like?”
“She’s nice.”
Nicole made a skeptical sound in the back of her throat, half question mark and half laugh. “Nice? That sounds like what you say when you really don’t like someone.”
Lily shifted, and when she spoke again, it was to her knees. “Katie and me, we were friends when we were really little. Our moms met in some kind of ‘mommy and me’ class when we were like two. But we got older and we got different.”
Nicole said, “Translate that for me.”
Lily twisted the silver ring on her left thumb. “To be honest, Katie’s kind of a suck-up. Adults like her more than kids do.”
“A suck-up?”
“You know, an overachiever. She wants to get straight A’s, she wants to go to Harvard, she wants to be a lawyer. She has this whole plan. She says she’s going to be president someday.”
A thought occurred to Allison. “So did she run for office at Lincoln High?”
A roll of the eyes. “Last year. Ran—and lost. I tried to warn her. It’s like everything else at school. It’s not how good your ideas are, it’s a popularity contest. Katie kept saying she had a great, what’d she call it, a great platform. Only it’s not about your platform. It’s about how many friends you have.”
“Are you saying Katie didn’t—” Allison corrected herself. “Doesn’t have any friends?”
“She has friends,” Lily admitted reluctantly. “Friends like her. So of course there aren’t a lot.”
Allison couldn’t imagine that Lily herself had that many friends.
“Have you been in touch since she left for the program?” Allison asked.
“Sometimes Katie texted me if she saw someone famous. You know, like an actor or something came to the Senate. It was like she was trying to impress me. Which is stupid. She’s the one that gets to go off to DC and live on her own. And I’m stu
ck in Puddletown.” She sighed. “I can’t wait until I can move out on my own.”
“So Katie just texts you, then,” Nicole said patiently. “She doesn’t call you.”
“She called me once in October. It was like, right before Halloween. And she said she had a boyfriend.”
Allison straightened up. “Who was he? Do you know?”
“She wouldn’t tell me his name. But she did say he was somebody important. Somebody everyone’s heard of.” Lily shrugged. “At first I kind of thought she was lying.”
Lying? Allison thought of Katie’s blog. Katie had known that others might read it. Which meant she might have shaded the truth. Allison had known that. But until now, Allison had never considered that Katie’s hints of a boyfriend could have been conjured up from her imagination. At that age, you might be tempted to mimic the drama you saw all your friends going through.
“Why did you think she might be lying?”
“I wasn’t there, was I? In DC, I mean. She could say anything she wanted about what it was like there, and how would I know? I mean, if it were me, I would come back and tell the best stories about what I had done there. You know, like about how I had eaten dinner with the president and his family. And no one would know they weren’t true.”
“So what did Katie tell you about this guy? Her boyfriend?”
“She mostly just bragged about having one. She’d never really had a boyfriend before. Not a serious one. And when I asked her who he was, she said that all she could tell me was that he was famous. And I was like—famous? You know, ’cause we’re juniors in high school, not like rock stars or anything. But she said he took her to expensive restaurants and he drove an expensive car and he bought her a bracelet.”
Nicole and Allison exchanged glances. Someone rich and famous. Was it true? Or was the whole thing like Lily thought—an elaborate lie to make Katie feel better?
“So is that when you thought she might be lying?” Nicole asked.
Lily nodded. “I figured she was probably just staying in her room and doing her homework. You know how sometimes you say something and it’s not true, but to make people believe it’s true you have to tell more and more lies?”
Allison nodded. As a prosecutor, she had met a lot of people who did exactly that.
“You said ‘at first,’” Nicole said. “At first you thought Katie was lying. So did something change to make you think she was telling the truth?”
Lily nodded. “I saw her the second day after she came back home for Christmas break. The day before she disappeared. Her mom came over to have coffee with my mom and brought Katie with her. We went up to my room, but we really didn’t have that much to talk about. She didn’t care what was happening at Lincoln, even though she’s coming back in February. She just kept wanting to talk about this guy. But it wasn’t like it was in October, when she was bragging about how wonderful he was. She kept saying it was complicated, but that it was true love, and that was all that mattered.”
“Oh?” Allison asked.
True love. Kids were the only ones innocent enough to believe in that idea. That two people, no matter how mismatched, were fated to be together despite any obstacles.
“And how did Katie act when she was telling you this?” Nicole asked.
“She just seemed sad, you know. She was thin, but it wasn’t pretty thin. It was like, bony. And then she showed me that gold bracelet he had given her. And how it had a 24K stamped on the inside, which means it’s the best kind.”
“Is there anything you’re not telling us, Lily?” Allison asked gently.
Chances were faint, but if this girl knew if Katie was hiding out, or that Katie was in some kind of trouble, they had to make sure she told them.
“Whatever you say can’t get you in trouble, and it can’t get Katie in trouble. We just need to find her. And nothing you say could surprise us. So if there’s something you’re holding back, please don’t.”
Lily hesitated, then said in a rush, “Well, who would it be that had an expensive car and took her expensive places and gave her expensive gifts? Who was famous? No one our age, that’s for sure. So I figured it was some old guy. And since she wouldn’t tell me who it was, I figured it was some old guy who’s married.”
“Did you ask Katie if that were true?” Allison asked.
Lily looked down at the toes of her high-top Converse. “Not exactly.”
“What did you say?” Nicole asked.
“Nothing really. Just that she better be careful.”
“And . . . ,” Nicole pressed.
“And I told her one thing I knew that she didn’t.”
“What’s that?”
Lily turned her head toward the doorway, listening for her mom. After hearing nothing, she spoke in a voice not much louder than a whisper. “A long time ago, I heard my mom talking to my dad about her mom. Katie’s mom. Only she’s not her real mom. Valerie’s her stepmom. Her real mom died from cancer when she was a baby. Everybody knows that. But what Katie didn’t know—what hardly anyone knows—is that her stepmom started out as her babysitter. Katie’s babysitter. And she ended up having sex with Katie’s dad after Katie’s mom died. Which is just so messed up. And she got pregnant and had to get married, and then had the baby, and that’s Whitney.”
Allison looked at Nicole. Even Nic, whose face rarely betrayed emotion, looked shocked. Allison was pretty sure her own mouth was hanging open.
“So I told Katie she had to be careful. I told her she didn’t want to screw up her life like Valerie had. I mean, my mom said something about her having to get married while she was still in high school. She didn’t even graduate. I don’t want to get married until I’m like thirty or something.” Lily said the word thirty as if it were synonymous with dead.
Allison asked, “How did Katie react when you told her this?”
“She was really mad. She says Valerie is always lecturing her about waiting until she gets married. She couldn’t believe Valerie was such a hypocrite.”
“So,” Nicole said, “what do you think happened to Katie?”
Lily took a deep breath, let it out. “Something bad. I think something bad happened.”
“You said Katie was sad, that she had lost weight,” Allison said. “Do you think she was depressed enough to kill herself?”
Lily pursed her lips and blew her bangs out of her eyes. “I keep thinking about that, but no. Not unless she thought she was going to lose everything.”
CITY CENTRAL HOTEL
December 20
It was hard to believe that it had been less than a week since she had first heard Katie’s name, Nic thought. Now she was more than just a missing girl—she was a project that had taken on a weight and momentum of its own. The Katie Converse task force had set up a command post in a hotel ballroom downtown. The huge room was filled with people from every branch of law enforcement as well as database experts, stenographers, dog handlers, search-and-rescue teams, topography experts, reconnaissance pilots, and media reps.
Half of the room was set up theater-style, with rows of chairs facing a head table and a whiteboard. At the rear of the room a table was piled with reports, documents, and copies of Katie’s photograph for investigators to take as needed. The walls were lined with photocopiers, computers, printers, and boxes of paper. Timelines, maps, photographs, and lists were tacked above. Nicole was at the back of the room, part of a group of FBI agents and cops at a table fielding telephoned tips.
“If you find her, send me something of hers, like her watch or a shoe. The murder weapon would be perfect,” a hotline caller told Nic.
The woman was a psychic, or so she had said. The same claim had been made by the last three people Nic had spoken with.
“I’m sure I could tell you who did it then.”
“We’ll keep that in mind. Thank you very much for your call,” Nic said.
She hung up and pulled the headset from her head. Her ear itched. Her head itched. Her whole body felt irri
tated. She wanted to be out doing something, not answering the phone.
Fielding anonymous tips on a hotline was considered too important to be done by civilians. Yet everyone knew 99 percent of it was a waste of time. The lonely, crazy, and vengeful came out of the woodwork for this kind of case. The hotline had had more than a thousand tips. Unfortunately, more than eight hundred had come from psychics or people who had had a dream about Katie. But just in case a real tip did sneak through, the agents all put in time answering calls.
Next to her, Leif Larson took off his own headset and looked at her sympathetically. “Another crazy?”
“She says she’s a psychic.” Nic sighed and tried to stretch the kinks out of her neck. She couldn’t turn her head without wincing. “You should have seen the charlatan the Converses made me talk to. After I left, I did a little online search of her ‘revelations.’ One boy she said was dead turned out to be alive and part of a cult. So of course she now says she saw his ‘spiritual death.’ The closest she’s come to being right is when she told the parents of a three-year-old that their daughter was submerged in water, trapped beneath a metal grate. There had been a lot of rain, and everyone thought the girl had wandered away and fallen into a drainage ditch. It was probably just her best guess.”
“So what really happened?”
“She had been raped and strangled by her neighbor, and then he stuffed her under his waterbed. So now this lady says on her Web site that she was right—it was just the spirits who were a little vague about the whole water and grate business.”
“Well, my last caller had a dream about a man in a house next to trees and a road,” Leif said. “And she’s sure it’s something to do with Katie.”
“Now we’ve finally got something we can act on!” Nic pumped her fist in mock excitement. “Trees and a road! That certainly narrows it down.” She was so frustrated she was getting giddy.
Neither of them saw John Drood, the special agent in charge of Portland’s FBI, standing behind them until it was too late. He was a pale man with graying hair and less than six months to go until he bumped up against the FBI’s rule that forced agents to retire at fifty-seven. It was clear that he was having trouble even contemplating letting go, which had the unfortunate effect of making him more officious.