Jimmy did his best to write an article his editor, Tadd Crosby, would print on the front-page. These girls had family somewhere, someone who loved and missed them and would want to know what had happened in the end. He worried, too, about other young women working the streets, climbing into strangers’ cars, driving to dark and secluded areas, every night wondering if this would be the night they didn’t make it home alive. Jimmy thought if he could warn people about a possible serial murderer preying on vulnerable women, maybe he could keep it from happening again.
It took Tadd all of fifteen seconds to scan Jimmy’s article before he crumpled it up and tossed it in the trash can beside his desk. “No one cares about dead girls who don’t have names, Jimmy,” he said, cracking his knuckles. “And no one cares about dead prostitutes either.”
Jimmy went back to writing about burglaries and drug busts and a mother of three who went missing while on a trip to the Oregon Coast, but always in the back of his mind were the three dead girls no one else cared about.
* * *
Now it’s August again, and there’s a fourth body, and Jimmy is kicking himself for not pushing harder to tell the dead girls’ stories when he had a chance. If he’d insisted the article went to print, maybe this new girl would still be alive.
“It’s just a theory,” Jimmy says to Rausch. “But yes, I think if you went back and took a look at those old files, you’d find similarities too striking to be a coincidence. And as for why you haven’t heard about them? I don’t know. Maybe you haven’t been paying attention.”
Rausch sputters a protest, but Jimmy ignores him and checks his watch. He promised his girlfriend, Melissa, that he’d meet her downtown for lunch. If he leaves now, he’ll have time to swing by his apartment and change out of his sweat-drenched, dust-covered clothes, but then the coroner’s silver van arrives. Two men pull a stretcher from the back and carry it through the field toward the trees.
Jimmy follows them, continuing to ignore Rausch, who’s calling him a vulture and telling him to get lost. Jimmy’s not going anywhere until this is done. Until he knows for sure. He stands close enough to see, but not close enough to be in the way, as the coroner kneels and reaches to open the dead girl’s mouth.
Chapter 3
“You’re late.” Melissa sits stiffly at the diner’s lunch counter with her eyes fixed on a television in the corner that’s tuned to a local news station.
Jimmy leans in to kiss her cheek.
“And you stink.” She finally turns to look at him, her dark brown eyes roaming over his windswept hair, the grass seeds clinging to his jacket, the dusty pant cuffs, and muddy boots. “You’re filthy. Where have you been?” But before he can answer, she holds up her hand. “Don’t tell me. You were working on a big story that couldn’t possibly wait until later.”
He’s been dating Melissa since the end of February, but even in these six short months, he’s been late for their dates more than he’s been on time. And he’s never once been early. She thought it was interesting at first. How he swept in at the last second with some harried and gruesome explanation for where he’d been. Ten car pile-up on the freeway. Bomb threat at the Capitol building. Suicide jumper off the Union Street Bridge. For a few weeks, she was in awe of him, of what he did and the words he wrote. Once, after spending the night at his place, she dragged the morning newspaper into bed and, naked and dappled in pink sunrise, read aloud an article he’d written about a double homicide. When she was finished, she gave a little shiver and asked him how he did it? How could he be around all that death and tragedy and not become tragic himself?
Without thinking, he said the first thing that came to mind. You get used to it after a while.
It wasn’t the whole truth, but it was a lot of it.
She gave him a strange look after he said it. Her pert nose crinkled. Her smooth forehead folded into worried lines, and her full lips dragged into a pinched frown. He thinks this was when she realized he was no comic book hero, just a regular man doing a job that needed to be done. A job he was good at, by the way, and one he enjoyed most of the time despite the painful realities of meeting people on the worst days of their lives. He thinks this was when she decided to leave him.
She pretended for a few more weeks, then five days ago, she called him an ambulance chaser. Isn’t there anyone else who can write those horrible stories? Why don’t you write about something nice once in a while? Something that doesn’t end in someone dying.
He knew it was over between them as soon as the words came out of her mouth. He doesn’t want to be with someone who doesn’t understand that his work is important to him and to the community he serves. He doesn’t need this kind of contempt, but some cruel part of him clings to hope that she will change her mind and decide his work doesn’t bother her that much after all. He’s turning thirty in a few weeks, and he’s tired of being alone on his birthday. He’s tired of being alone. Period.
Besides that, he likes Melissa. He really does. She’s smart. She works as a receptionist for one of the state senators, though Jimmy can never remember which one. She snorts a little when she laughs, and she laughs a lot. She is a bright spot in his dark days and always buys the beer he likes and reads books about plants so that when they go on walks, she’s able to identify the flowers and weeds and trees and bushes. She likes orange cats and big dogs. She spent a summer in France and even still speaks the language a little.
Jimmy was starting to imagine a future with her. He introduced her to his mother. Maybe that’s when the trouble started. Maybe it has nothing to do with his work. Maybe he rushed things, and that’s when she started to pull away.
The reason doesn’t matter now. She’s leaving, and there’s nothing Jimmy can do to stop her.
He slides onto the barstool next to Melissa and points at the empty wine glass near her elbow. “What are you drinking?”
“Is that your apology?”
“Come on, I was only ten minutes late.”
“Thirteen minutes, according to my watch.”
“Don’t get upset.”
“I’ll get upset if I want to,” she says. “The very least you could have done was call me so I didn’t end up sitting here like an idiot wondering if I should order or not.”
“Tony doesn’t mind the company. Do you, Tony?” Jimmy smiles at the server who’s here every weekday for the lunch rush.
The man’s a couple decades older than Jimmy, and though he’s never asked, Jimmy’s pretty sure Tony owns the place. Tony shakes his head like he doesn’t want to get involved and turns his attention to the television that’s playing footage of Crocker Creek from earlier this morning.
The video was taken after the coroner arrived but before they removed the body. The field is dotted with officers. The television news crews hang back, staying on the road behind the yellow tape Clodfelter finally managed to set up properly.
“I couldn’t call, Mel.” Jimmy points at the television. “I was out there. And there aren’t any phones that far out of town.”
Melissa frowns at the screen. “You know I don’t like that nickname.”
This is news to him. She’s never complained when he’s called her Mel before. He decides this is another nail in their coffin. He reaches for her hand anyway because he has never been the one to quit on anything, even when he knows it’s hopeless.
“I’m sorry, Melissa. I really am. I had every intention of being here on time. Of course I didn’t want you to be sitting here waiting for me, but they found another girl.”
He told her about the first three a couple of weeks ago after he accidentally fell asleep at her place. He usually didn’t spend the night because her roommates, two other single women in their twenties, wouldn’t approve, but he’d been up late the night before, trying to meet a tight deadline. Melissa’s queen bed was so much softer than his lonely twin, and her sheets smelled of lavender. He couldn’t help it. He fell asleep fast and hard. The next thing
he knew, he was screaming himself awake, and Melissa was there rubbing his back, telling him everything was going to be all right. It was a nightmare, that was all, nothing to worry about.
She asked him what he’d been dreaming about, what he remembered. A girl screaming in the distance. Jimmy trying to get to her, running, but his legs get stuck in quicksand or break into a thousand pieces. The screaming grows louder, but no matter how fast he runs, Jimmy finds himself farther away. He knows he won’t reach her in time, but still, he tries. Then the screaming stops.
It wasn’t the first time he had a dream like this. He knows it won’t be the last. In the quiet dark and soothing warmth of Melissa’s lavender-scented sheets, Jimmy told her about the girls with no tongues and no names, the girls who haunt him now because there is no one else who cares as much as he does.
Melissa pulls her hand from Jimmy’s grasp and slides off the vinyl stool.
He stands, too, reaching for his wallet to pay Tony for the wine and inconvenience, but Melissa waves him off. “Don’t bother walking me out. We’re done, Jimmy. I’m tired of playing mistress to your dead girls.”
She fumbles in her purse a moment, pulls out a crumpled five-dollar bill, tosses it on the counter, and leaves. Her heels click across the worn linoleum floor.
Jimmy sinks back down onto the stool and orders pastrami and Swiss on rye.
Tony grunts like he thinks Jimmy’s an idiot for letting Melissa storm off like that. Maybe he’s right, but Jimmy can’t be with a woman who’s going to get upset every time he chooses a story over her.
Reporting is more than a job. It’s in his blood. He’d do this work even if he didn’t get paid. Because it’s exciting. Because when he finds that missing piece and it starts to click together, he feels invincible. There’s power in weaving a narrative, a deep satisfaction in telling stories that would otherwise be ignored, in giving voice to the voiceless.
* * *
Jimmy Eagan didn't always want to be a reporter.
Like most boys growing up, he dreamed about being a firefighter or a pilot or a heart surgeon or the President of the United States. He wanted to save lives and be the Grand Marshall of his hometown parade. He wanted the other boys in his class to envy him and the girls to blush when he walked past. But he was a scrawny kid with a wheezing chest, allergic to everything the same as his mother, with a bad case of acne and a tendency to stammer whenever the teacher called on him. The boys tripped him and called him names. The girls treated him like he didn’t even exist.
Books became his refuge. Jimmy spent most of his junior high years hiding in the library, reading Jules Vern and Isaac Asimov, Patricia Highsmith and Ed McBain. He read history books, too. The rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the legacy of the English monarchy, the trenches of WWI, the horrors of WWII—he read anything and everything he could get his hands on until the librarian told him he’d go blind reading so much. But he was happy with books. They never expected anything of him. They never called him names. They existed for him, but also, he felt in many ways that he existed for them.
He joined the high school newspaper his freshman year on a whim because he needed extracurricular credits. He had been reading about Ambrose Bierce, a journalist who disappeared while investigating a story in Mexico, and thought that kind of life could be an exciting one. Traveling around the world, chasing stories and adventure—minus the disappearing part. He might not be able to save lives, but perhaps he could write about people who did.
It turned out writing suited him. He enjoyed it in the same way he enjoyed reading, in that it filled out the spaces of himself. Over time, he found he could write his way into existence. People who didn’t know him at all would read his stories, and suddenly he was walking down the school hallways, listening to them talk about his front-page story. That was when he realized he could throw his words into the air and people would catch them and, if for a passing moment, he could feel known.
He worked hard and became his high school’s youngest editor. Later, he applied and was accepted to Harvard, and even though his mother cried when he told her he was moving from Oregon to Massachusetts, her eyes glinted with pride.
Two days before Jimmy was set to leave, Betsy Eagan took her son out to his favorite shrimp and steak restaurant. While they waited for their meals to come, she said, “Your father was a writer, you know.”
Betsy Eagan didn’t talk much about Jimmy’s father. The only thing Jimmy knew about the man was that his name was Walter, and he’d died three months before Jimmy was born. There were no pictures of him anywhere in the house, and the one time Jimmy asked about his father, Betsy had locked herself in her room for two whole days. Jimmy never spoke his father’s name again.
When he was alone, he made up stories about how his father had died. Walter Eagan was an investment banker who got hit by a bus as he crossed a busy street. Walter Eagan was a cowboy who was gored by a bull in a rodeo show. Walter Eagan died saving someone’s life. Now, over a plate of buttered shrimp and medium-rare steak, his mother told him that Walter Eagan was none of those things. Walter Eagan was a writer, a newspaperman just like Jimmy was going to be. He was also a poet.
“Oh, he wrote me the most beautiful poems.” Betsy smiled the coyest of smiles, and Jimmy knew that no one would ever read those poems but her.
“Is that how he died?” Jimmy asked. “Was he investigating a story?”
He was thinking again of Ambrose Bierce, of how one theory claimed Bierce had been shot to death by a firing squad after accusations of being a traitor and spy.
Betsy’s smile sloped to a frown, and her eyes darted around the restaurant in a way that made Jimmy think his father’s death was a state secret. So maybe his father stumbled upon a political scandal, a CIA investigation gone wrong, the truth about Area 51.
But no, his mother said, no, it was nothing as grand as all that. Walter Eagan was stabbed in a dark alley when he was walking home from work, mugged over the ten dollars he had in his wallet and the fake gold watch he wore on his wrist. By the time someone found him, he’d already bled out, and there was nothing to be done but send someone to tell his six-month pregnant wife to start planning a funeral.
Jimmy pushed his surf-and-turf around on his plate, unable to eat any more.
His mother reached across the table and brushed her warm fingers across his cheek. “You look just like him. You have his eyes.”
A deep blue, the bluest of blues, so blue they were almost black. The kind of eyes that noticed everything, even what other people missed. Like how the man at the table next to them was wearing two different colored socks and unpolished shoes; and how the server had a scar behind her left ear, only visible when she tilted her head a certain way; and how the woman near the door kept twisting her wedding ring and biting her lip, so nervous about something that when a man arrived with a bouquet of roses, Jimmy was pretty sure he wasn’t the woman’s husband.
“He would be so proud of you,” Betsy said, lifting her hand to ask for the check.
Jimmy grabbed the bill before his mother could. It was the first time he paid for dinner like that, like a grown man. His mother blushed and beamed and dabbed a single tear from the corner of her eye. And it was there, as Jimmy was counting out the correct dollars and change, that he realized he hadn’t simply stumbled into journalism. Without knowing it, his entire life, he’d been following in his father’s footsteps. He was always going to end up a writer.
Stories were his legacy, and now they were his destiny, too. It was on that day, walking across the restaurant parking lot, a fine mist glittering on the windshield, that Jimmy made a promise to himself and to the memory of his father. He would carry on the tradition, live the life Walter Eagan had barely started. He would uncover secrets, seek out truths, expose the lies. He would write stories that mattered. He would make his father proud.
* * *
Tony brings Jimmy the pastrami and Swiss on rye, sets it on the counter,
and asks if he wants anything else.
“Bring me whatever’s on tap,” Jimmy says.
It’s barely noon, but the way this day has been, it feels closer to five o’clock.
While Tony fills a pint, Jimmy takes a notebook and pen from his messenger bag, flips to an empty page in the middle, and writes down everything he knows about girl number four, which admittedly isn’t much.
There was nothing in that field to help identify her, and Jimmy can only hope this time someone is looking for her, someone who will step forward and claim her as their own. Otherwise, she’ll end up as forgotten as the others.
Before leaving the scene, Jimmy gave Detective Rausch his business card.
“You’ll call me if you ID her?” Jimmy asked.
Rausch gave him a look like calling Jimmy was the last thing he would ever do but tucked the business card in his pocket anyway.
Beer spills over the edge of the glass when Tony sets it down on the counter. Jimmy wipes it up with a napkin. On the television screen, Detective Rausch talks to a reporter. He confirms that a homicide is being investigated, but says there is no danger to the public at this time.
Jimmy snorts.
Tony shoots a glance over to him. “They lying about that?”
“You got a daughter, Tony?”
Tony shakes his head. “Two boys.”
“Then I’d say you’ve got nothing to worry about.” Jimmy reaches for his beer.
Chapter 4
It’s late afternoon when Jimmy gets back to the Statesman Journal offices. He shoves aside his disappointment over Melissa as he sits down at his desk to type out an article describing his morning at Crocker Creek. Each letter is a hammer strike inside his temple, the typewriter a soundtrack to his anger. There should have never been a fourth girl. If the police did their job from the beginning. If the public bothered to pay any attention. If his editor cared about more than just the bottom line.
The Ophelia Killer Page 2