“I don’t want to go out to eat!” J.D. shouted. “I want to stay home!”
Ollie’s face hardened. “Well, I’m not giving you that option, young man. Let’s go.”
J.D. slammed the door open as he left the house, smacked his schoolbag against the porch railing and kicked the police car’s tire as he passed it. From the porch, Ollie watched him as he closed and locked the front door. Ollie unhooked his car keys from his police belt as he made his way down the steps. “What the hell’s gotten into you tonight? I thought you liked spending time with me.”
“I do,” J.D. said, folding his arms across his chest in a huff. “It’s not that, okay? I just had something to do.”
They both got into the car. Ollie started it and backed up, rolling the wheel to turn toward the street. “Something here at home?” Ollie asked.
“No,” J.D. muttered. “Not here. Back at my friend’s house after dinner.”
“That Adam kid with the glasses?”
“No.”
“Another friend? I didn’t know you hung out with anyone else. What’s his name?”
When J.D. didn’t answer, Ollie watched him from the corner of his eye. A smile widened across his face, and he poked the boy in the side. “Holy shit, a girl?”
J.D. laughed despite himself and smacked Ollie’s hand away. “Stop, it’s nothing.”
“What’s her name, you big stud?”
“Hope.”
“Hope?” Ollie said. “That is a beautiful name. I hope you treat her like a lady, that’s what I hope. And her parents were okay with you coming back over so late?”
“Sure,” J.D. said, trying to sound confident. “Yep.”
“I’ve been a cop long enough to know when somebody is full of it, and kid, that was the most full of it response I’ve ever heard. Okay, listen, because this is important. Never, ever get found inside another man’s house when he doesn’t know you’re there, especially when you’re with one of his daughters. And most definitely with his wife.”
“Why would I hang out with Mrs. Pugh?” J.D. said.
“Disregard that last part,” Ollie said. “But seriously, if you want to spend time with this girl, be a man about it, and don’t go sneaking around, okay? Sit down with their family and have dinner and act like a gentleman, so they know you’re not some scumbag.”
“All right,” J.D. said. He was crushed that he wouldn’t get to see Hope again that night, but it all made sense the way Ollie was explaining it. He could see himself going over to her house, shaking hands with her father, even laying a napkin across his lap when they ate. He’d tell her what happened at school the next day, and it would all make sense to her then.
“So tonight, we go out and get some food. Then maybe we’ll pick out a special date night outfit for you. Something you can wear over to her house, or when you take her to the movie or arcade or something. How’s that sound?”
“That sounds great,” J.D. said, smiling, because it did. He couldn’t wait to see Hope the next day.
Except he wouldn’t. As J.D. sat with his uncle, eating pizza, laughing and joking with one another, talking about Hope, she was being raped in the clearing behind her parent’s house. She’d gone out to meet him, as she said she would. She’d been eager to see him again too. She brought her stuffed bear with her, intending on giving it to him. She was going to tell him it was his for nights when he was having trouble with his father, just in case. Childish, she knew, but it was her favorite thing, and she thought he might appreciate it. In fact, when she heard someone coming up behind her, from around the chimney, she’d thought it was him, and laughed because of how much he’d scared her. In the time it took her to realize who it was, she was already being thrown onto her back on the thin army blanket.
She died struggling, clutching her bear, suffocated by the gloved hand keeping her from screaming, tears running down the sides of her face. Unable to fight. Unable to move at all, except to scrape her feet against the blanket. A little girl, gasping for breath, as her innocence was stolen. Not innocence in the physical, sexual way. Innocence in the idea that the world is fair, and good will win. That God, or her parents, would protect her. That her first true love would rescue her, believing he would come until her eyes fluttered shut and her heart stopped and all the light and life drained out of her into the infinite nothingness.
III
LOCKED DOORS
CHAPTER 14
Everything happens in shit weather. In November, there’s nice days, when the sky is clear and it might be cool, but a sweatshirt and jeans will suffice. Nothing happens on those days. It waits to hit until there’s a freezing rain. Steve Auburn lifted the wooly collar of his patrol jacket to cover the back of his neck. His cowboy hat was like a shingle, pooling stinging cold water in its brim until he lowered his head to spill it out.
The sloped mountainside was slippery enough to send a man tumbling down the steep incline. He could picture himself rolling ass over tin cups all the way down, until he smacked into a tree thick enough to smash his brains out. He gripped the roots sticking up through the ground above him, taking it slow. He was a hundred feet above where the bones of the little girl’s foot had been found, searching for the place they’d slid down from. They were searching in sectors, each man taking a small piece of each area. Ahead of him, he could see Officer Paul waving his hands in the air. “I got something, Chief! Over here!” Paul cried. “Come on!”
“I see you, for God’s sake. Stop hollering,” Auburn shouted back, gripping a handful of tree roots and making his way toward the next. “You see me coming right toward you, don’t you?”
“I know, but,” Paul huffed, clutching his chest like he was afraid his heart might burst through it, “I got something.”
Auburn came up alongside him and looked down at a small pile of what looked like black dirt covered by wet leaves. There was a scrape of mud going through the center of it, etched with the pattern of department-issued police boots. At the slash’s center was a narrow bone, brown with age, the length of a child’s forearm.
“I stepped on something, and it rolled my ankle,” Paul said.
Auburn pulled out his phone to take a quick photograph of the bone and the mudslide. He could see what looked like more bones sticking out of the debris pile. It was easy to tell what had happened. The body had lain there for decades until it grew brittle enough that the rain eventually washed pieces of it down the hillside. Whatever they couldn’t find here, they’d find somewhere below, Auburn thought.
He pulled out his police radio and pressed it close to his mouth. “Chief Auburn to all search units. I think we found it.” He gave them his location and said, “Everybody meet me up here. Somebody bring all the crime scene stuff from the back of my car, and don’t forget the camera and tape. Somebody get ahold of that girl detective from the county. She’s gonna want to know about this.”
* * *
By the time Carrie arrived, they’d recovered most of the skeleton, laying it out on a large blue tarp spread across the flattest part of the incline they could find. The majority of Hope Pugh’s bones were intact. It looked like only the extremities had come apart. Only a few fingerbones and pieces of the right leg were missing. The men were spread out across the hill, combing through the dirt with their gloved hands, looking for them.
Steve Auburn came up beside her and looked down at the remains. He was holding a sealed coffee can in his hands, the large kind they sold in bulk stores. He set it down on the tarp by the skeleton’s feet, and stood, taking off his cowboy hat to wipe his forearm through his sweaty hair, so he didn’t touch himself with his rubber glove. “I guess that’s that,” he said. “Probably for the best. I never was a fan of mysteries.”
Carrie slid on a pair of gloves and bent over the skull, peering at it from every angle. No cracks. No bullet holes. No chunks missing. She looked over the rest of the skeleton. No visible signs of damage to any of the bones.
“It’s funny, I remember my parents talking a
bout this case when it happened,” Auburn said. “My mother said she probably ran off and was hitchhiking on the highway. She said the girl’s father was probably doing things he shouldn’t have been doing, because that’s the only reason a little girl would run off like that. My dad said it was more likely she was playing up in the mountains and she slipped and fell and broke her neck. Either that or a bear got her.” He smirked and said, “Can you believe that? The old man was right.”
Carrie looked up at him. “What do you mean?”
“She’s exactly where he said she’d be. Poor kid. I hope it wasn’t a bear.”
“You see any teeth marks on any of these bones?” Carrie asked. “There’s not a single scratch. She didn’t fall and break her neck, either. There’s a thousand scavengers in these woods, and they’d have torn a rotting body to pieces. She’d be scattered all over the place. She had to be buried right after she was killed. She decomposed in the ground and got washed out of her grave over time. It’s the only explanation.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were some kind of expert in exhuming bodies, Miss Santero. Is that something they teach you at first-year county detective school?” Auburn hiked up his gun belt. “What, you thought I wasn’t gonna ask around about you? They might have sent you out here to keep you out of their hair for a little while, but don’t you think for one second I’m gonna let you turn this into some kind of freak show.”
“Look, I’m not trying to make this a freak show. I’m just trying to figure out what happened to her.”
“We figured out what happened to her! She came out here, got dead, and now forty years later I’m stuck dealing with the cleanup. You’re dismissed.”
Carrie watched him walk away, planting his ridiculous cowboy hat on his head as he headed back up the incline. She heard hollering from up the hill. One of the searchers had found a finger bone. She waited for Auburn to get far enough up the hill that she lost sight of him in the trees and bent down to the coffee can and popped the lid off. It was filled with the tattered remains of sopping wet cloth. Most of it had turned black, but as she spread it out and unfolded it, she could see small indications of colorful patterns. Underwear, with balloons on it, Carrie realized. She found another clump of cloth at the bottom of the can and dumped it onto the tarp. It was thick and fuzzy, and as she peeled it apart, she saw the faint traces of its light blue fabric. The matching sock to the one back in her hotel room.
None of it was any good for recovering trace evidence, she thought. Too wet, too damaged, too exposed to the elements. In books, crime scene experts can compare grains of sand to imaginary databases that list distinguishable grains from all the beaches in the world, and all sorts of other fantastical bullshit. That’s not reality. She’d found entire strands of hair at crime scenes and been told they were useless, because they didn’t have the root attached.
In the real world, putting a big case together is a pain in the ass, and the people you rely on for help don’t want to do jack shit. Nobody cares. The labs don’t care. The courts don’t care. You were lucky if the victim cared, six to eight months down the road when it finally went to court and they had to keep taking off work and coming back to testify. That was the reality of police work they don’t tell you in the police academy, she thought. No wonder Auburn wanted to put this case to bed as quickly as possible. Missing person. Found body. No cause determined. Parents notified. Case closed.
Go home, she thought. They don’t want you here. Tell that dickhead Harv Bender you helped out, didn’t cause a fuss, and most certainly didn’t hook up a bug zapper in a hotel room to base the entirety of your investigative suspicion on. Because nobody else cares, and neither should you.
She looked at the skeleton of the little girl spread out on the tarp. The caverns in her skull where her eyes had been. The crooked teeth in the jawbone, not yet fitted for braces. The tiny bones of her ribs, and narrow bones of her hips. Some asshole had ground down on top of those same hips, doing the unthinkable, and then he killed her.
“Fuck that,” Carrie said aloud.
She looked to make sure no one was watching, then slid her cell phone out of her pocket and took a quick photograph of the clothing items all together. She picked up the sock in her gloved hand, hiding it there, and took it all the way back to her car, needing a bag to put it in.
CHAPTER 15
The only person working at the front desk of the Vieira County district attorney’s office was Miss Mabel, the staff secretary. Mabel was seated behind the glass window at the entrance, doing a crossword puzzle. Past her, Carrie could see everyone else in the office had crowded at the rear of the main room, back where the county detectives worked. Some of them were standing on chairs to look over the heads of their colleagues.
“What’s going on back there?” Carrie asked.
“They caught that police impersonator who went after that poor girl,” Mabel said.
“You’re kidding me.”
“Chief Bender has him in the interrogation room now,” Mabel replied, filling in one of the words.
“He getting a confession in there, or what?” Carrie asked.
“So far all I heard was him screaming and yelling. There might have been some tears, but knowing Harv Bender, that was him too.”
Carrie stifled a laugh. “Do you have access to the old records room?”
“Why? Don’t you have a key?”
“I can’t get into any of the records rooms or supply closets,” Carrie said.
Mabel opened her desk drawer and searched through a pile of keys. “They trust you detectives with guns, but they’re afraid you’re going to run off with all the paper towels and toilet paper.”
“That’s because they know how little they pay us,” Carrie said.
Mabel handed her the keys. “Now you be careful in there. Everything’s a mess, and there’re boxes stacked all the way to the ceiling that look ready to come down any second. Last time someone was in there, they saw a rat and screamed so loud everybody came running.”
Carrie took the ring of keys and tapped the gun against her hip. “I’m ready for any rats, trust me.”
“Just try not to accidentally shoot anybody through the walls,” Mabel said, then leaned forward to whisper, “not unless it’s somebody I don’t like.”
“I’ll do my best, Miss Mabel,” Carrie said, walking down the hall. “If you hear me scream, make sure you duck.”
She worked the key into the door to the records room and pushed it open, groaning at the sight of towering columns of cardboard boxes stuffed full of loose papers. The lower boxes had buckled, crushed beneath each tower’s weight, but all of the stacks leaned together at the top, somehow supporting each other enough to stay upright.
Rusted filing cabinets lined the walls, with a few scattered throughout the middle of the room. Boxes were stacked on top of them, too. Carrie stared at this strange interconnected labyrinth of columns and boxes and cabinets. The danger wasn’t rodents. The danger was bumping into a load-bearing tower and having it collapse on top of you.
“God damn, I hate Jenga,” she muttered, sidestepping her way inside the room. She clipped one of the oddly angled boxes with her shoulder and cringed when it swayed, but it didn’t fall.
Many of the boxes were covered in ancient water stains and split open along the seams. They were held together with duct tape, bursting with papers that had been stuffed inside. Everywhere she stepped was littered with containers that had fallen apart and vomited their contents across the floor.
Case numbers were printed on yellowed labels that peeled away from their box’s surface, or had been scrawled across the front of the folder in Magic Marker. Each tower seemed to be stacked by year, and as she reached the back of the room, they grew shorter. She reached the last tower and realized they only covered until the midnineties. All the years beyond that were stored in the filing cabinets.
She found the cabinet for the 1981 cases. Everything was organized by blue index c
ards, going by type of incident, and the date. She searched for the February cases and had to bend down to the lowest drawer. She pulled it, but it was stuck. “Oh, shit,” she whispered, looking up at the towering stack of case files piled on top of it.
Carrie covered her head with her hand and yanked. The files above her swayed back and forth, but held. She gently pulled the drawer the rest of the way out. Toward the back, she found a file marked Hope Pugh, Missing Juvenile. She pulled it free, disappointed at how thin a case file it was. Most of it had nothing to do with Hope at all. Someone had collected articles related to Oliver Rein’s suicide and Walt Auburn’s heroic last stand as well as correspondence from that time.
Someone, Carrie thought. It had to be Jacob Rein.
She sat down on the floor and leaned back against one of the filing cabinets. She spread the file across her lap and picked up the first page. It was a letter from Chief Walt Auburn, written to the county detectives on February 16, 1981. The same day Auburn died.
Dear District Attorney and Chief of County Detectives:
It is my sad duty to report that Chief Oliver Rein has died as a result of suicide, and I am temporarily assuming command of the Patterson Borough Police Department’s jurisdiction.
Beneath the letter was a newspaper article showing a picture of Walt Auburn. The headline above his photo read, THE HERO OF LISTON.
Liston Police Chief Walter C. Auburn was killed last night as a result of his duties. Auburn was investigating a local motorcycle gang and had tracked the bandits to their hideout. In confronting the suspects, Auburn engaged them in a gunfight and killed all five by himself. In doing so, he received fatal wounds and succumbed to them at the scene.
The newspaper article showed two photographs of each motorcycle member. A military photo taken when they were younger and fresh out of boot camp, and mug shots taken years later for various crimes. Each one of them had aged hard, Carrie thought. Whether that was from the war, or drugs, or just bad living, she couldn’t tell, but if she’d seen any of them in a dark alley, she’d have put her hand on her gun and been ready to pull it.
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