by Ruth Parker
“It’s been fifteen years. The guy has lost his hair, put on weight. Twenty extra pounds can change a person’s face.”
Laurel had been almost positive that it wasn’t Greg Pratt, but after watching the surveillance video, there was no doubt. Pratt never offered the girls anything to drink. If Pratt was the killer, if he had them alone in the photo studio, he most definitely would have given the girls something to drink… something that would have made them silly, then slurry, then sleepy.
That had been his strategy fifteen years ago.
“It’s not him,” she said again. But she couldn’t explain about the spiked drink, how all those years ago, she’d watched as he poured a packet of powder into two matching cups. If she told them about the spiked drinks, she’d have to tell them everything.
There were things she had never told anyone. For good reason.
“You’re not helping,” Underwood said. “I know that you’re just trying to help. I know that you want to catch him more than all of us put together. But you’re not helping. You’re hindering.”
“She’s eliminating a suspect,” Fletcher said. He’d been standing a little farther away, arms crossed over his chest. “That’s always helpful.”
“She’s not eliminating anything,” Underwood said. “She’s an unreliable witness. Too many factors at play.”
“I’m telling you,” Laurel said. It took all of her will to summon the strength to speak in a voice higher than a whisper. “It’s not him. I can tell.”
“Let’s cut him loose,” Fletcher said. “We’re wasting time on him.”
“Laurel’s not telling me anything useful, anything concrete that I can use,” Underwood said. “You know what I heard today that was good? I heard that a convicted sex offender—with a taste for pre-teen girls—runs a photography studio and had confirmed contact with the victims. In fact, the victims had concealed the encounter from their parents. What more do you want? We usually get a lot less than that and you know it.” Underwood jammed a finger in Fletcher’s direction for emphasis. “All she’s saying is ‘it’s not him.’” He pivoted and faced Laurel. “You gotta give me something more substantial than ‘it’s not him.’ Give me something to hang my hat on.”
“It’s not him,” Laurel said.
“If you say ‘it’s not him’ one more time, I’m going to puke my guts,” Underwood said. “I can’t release a suspect—a convicted child molester—because you feel like it’s not him. You’re a scientist, for Christ’s sake; you should know that we work with facts. You got to give me something I can write in my report. Because if I let this guy go and it turns out…” He didn’t bother finishing his sentence.
Everyone knew what was at stake. If they didn’t find the killer—whoever he was—soon, then Madison and Melissa Webb were dead.
Sixteen
He adjusted his spotting scope; it was always tricky to get the proper focus when he was this far away. He was sitting in his car, half way down the street, the scope trained on the employee parking lot. The lot was fenced in chain-link with a card-activated gate. The crime lab was open around the clock, but he had called earlier in the day posing as a sales representative and found out that she worked until six. It was now six-thirty and she hadn’t emerged from the back exit. She was dedicated to her job. She cared about helping others.
She would make the perfect mommy.
It was dark and hard to see, his arm was getting stiff from holding up the heavy spotting scope, and his left eye ached from being squeezed shut so he could look through the scope with his right eye. His vigilance never flagged and he was rewarded at six forty-five when he saw the glow of light from the building as someone opened the door.
It was her. It was Laurel.
She walked through the light rain, pulling up the hood of her jacket to cover her hair. Her hair was wrong. She used to have the wild, curly hair that he loved to touch. Now she kept it straight and pulled back.
He would make her change it.
He watched as she got into her car and pulled out. He waited for her to get out onto the main street, and then he pulled out and followed from a long, leisurely distance behind.
He already knew how to get to her house.
When she pulled into her driveway, he slowed down and parked four houses back. He grabbed the spotting scope from the passenger seat and trained it on her front yard. A smile crept over his face as he watched her pull a gun and clear the perimeter of her house, like she was still a spunky twelve-year-old girl playing cops and robbers.
She’d be hard to get, but he’d get her. He already knew her weakness.
He set down the spotting scope and took his camera out of its carrying case. He screwed on the long-distance lens and twisted it back and forth, bringing Laurel into focus. Through the lens, she looked close enough to touch. He wanted to reach out and yank her hair out of that tight ponytail, tousle it with his fingers… kiss those lips.
He looked at the digital images he just took, scrolling through the small screen on the back of his camera. It was hard to see her cold beauty from the thumbnail pictures, but he knew that once he got the pictures on his computer screen at home, the larger screen would do her justice. He didn’t need the pictures of her—she’d be his soon enough. But he wanted them. He wanted to see Laurel in person, even if it was through the opposite end of a camera lens.
She was self-reliant, strong, and beautiful. Would Susie and Samantha have grown up to be this sort of woman? He would never know, but he thought that they would have. Even as children, his sisters had been clever, able to take care of themselves. And when they couldn’t, it had been his job as their older brother to protect them.
But he couldn’t. He’d failed them.
That night in their small, drafty bedroom—the night he’d made them take their special ‘vitamin’—had only been the beginning.
Once his worthless tweeker mother realized how easy it was to get quick cash from the losers she hung around with, she started giving the girls ‘vitamins’ every night before bedtime. She stopped going out to smoke meth and instead brought the men to the house. They’d invade the living room, the dirty brown glass pipes on the table where other families kept mugs of hot chocolate and paperback novels.
“Go to sleep,” his mother would order from her post on the couch, rocking back and forth, itching the back of her neck. The girls would already be dead on their feet by then, their special vitamin pill pulling them under the thick veil of sleep.
Once he’d protested that it was too early for him to go to sleep, that he still had homework to do. His mother had gotten up off the couch with shocking speed and grabbed him by the hood of his sweatshirt. She rushed him towards the door and threw him outside into the cold. “Then stay out as late as you want,” she told him. “And if you think of going down the road and calling the cops, remember that you’re going to get arrested too. I’ll tell them you’ve been touching your sisters and they’ll have your ass in juvenile hall before the sun comes up and the older boys will bend you over and butt-fuck you.”
Before he even realized what was going on, she’d closed the door and thumbed the bolt. He wasn’t even wearing shoes. He’d hammered on the front door for a few minutes before giving up. She wouldn’t let him back in that night. One of the loser guys had left his car door unlocked and he crawled inside the backseat and huddled into a small ball, trying to stay warm. It was spring, but the night temperature dipped down into the forties and he didn’t sleep at all. He unhooked the dusty, grimy seat cover off the passenger seat and wrapped the foul cloth around his body, spilling ancient crumbs all over, but he still shivered until his bones ached.
In the morning, he peered in through the windows and could see his mother and her drug buddy passed out in the living room. He knocked on the bedroom window until he woke up his sisters. They were groggy and confused, but they got out of bed and unlocked the front door for him, holding hands as they walked to the door. As he walked through the liv
ing room, he looked at his mom asleep on the couch and the man passed out on the floor.
He had so many conflicting thoughts, but before he did anything, he was going to take a long shower until all the hot water ran out. It was Saturday, so he went back into the bedroom to tuck the girls back into the bed that they shared. When he pulled back the blankets, his heart sank. Shakes wracked his entire body that had nothing to do with the cold.
There was a used condom in the bed.
He didn’t know what to do. His sisters hadn’t seen it; they were still half-asleep. He grabbed it before they could notice and he put them back in bed. Any thoughts of languishing in a hot shower were gone. His blood was boiling and his head was spinning and he knew then, deep in the chambers of his pounding heart, that he could commit murder. Easily.
He sprinted into the living room, falling to his knees at the man’s side. He lifted up the man’s head. The disgusting, vile man who deserved a fate much worse than this. He wrapped a plastic bag around his head and taped it tight around his neck. He didn’t know exactly what would happen, but he stood waiting with a knife. Just in case.
After about two minutes, as the oxygen in the bag was depleted, the man’s chest started to hitch and hiccup. The man shifted, but he did not quite wake up. The killer did not know, exactly, what to do. He was scared and tired and angry. The only thing he knew for sure was that this pathetic waste of flesh lying on the floor was never going to get up again.
The killer straddled the man, grabbing a couch pillow and pushing it over the man’s face. The man started thrashing, clawing at his face. Even at fifteen, the killer was strong—especially when determined. The man left bruises on the killer’s arms, a long scratch on the wrist, but he did not manage to fight him off. The man’s body was weakened by his drug use and his heart gave out quickly.
That had been the easy part.
Getting rid of the body was harder. The clichéd phrase ‘dead weight’ came from truth. The dead man couldn’t have been more than a hundred-sixty pounds, but the killer could not lift him, could not even drag him.
He needed help.
The killer looked at his mother, passed out on the couch. “Hey,” he yelled. She didn’t move. Her skin was white, blotchy with blue-gray patches. The only color came from the red scabs where she’d itched through the skin. She looked dead. He pushed her arm, trying to shake her awake. She murmured and turned over, but did not wake up. This enraged him. How could she do such a horrible thing and just roll over, snoring, resting peacefully? She had prostituted her own daughters, gotten high, and passed out. Like there was nothing wrong with it.
He got the feeling he had killed the wrong person.
He pulled back his hand and smacked her on the face. “Wake up,” he shouted. He grabbed her by both shoulders and shook her violently, her head bobbing and slamming on the couch. “Wake up!”
She shook her head back and forth, pinching her eyes shut harder, as if she could escape back into sleep and not have to face her actions. “Hold on,” she said. Her voice hoarse, the words slurred.
“No,” he said. He belted her across her face again. It felt good. Almost as good as squeezing the life out of the worthless pervert now lying limp on their living room floor. “Get up now. We have a problem.”
“What?” she whined. She rubbed her eyes. Pathetic.
“We need to clean up your mess,” he said. “Take a look. He’s dead.”
“Dead?” she said, a little more alertness creeping into her voice. She was out of it, bogged down so far that even the idea of a dead man in the living room wasn’t enough to jar her from her confused mental state.
“Dead,” he repeated. “I know what you let him do. You’re fucking disgusting. Get your ass up and help me get rid of him. Unless you want the girls to see him.”
His mother rolled off the couch, rubbing the back of her neck. She sat up, reaching for the dirty glass pipe on the coffee table. He swiped his hand, batting it away. It shattered against the wall.
“I need something to get me going,” she said.
“You need to shut the fuck up and help me,” he said.
She yawned and stretched, but there was still that glazed look in her eye that never seemed to go away anymore. “Why’d you kill him? That was stupid,” she said, but offered no other comment.
“Don’t speak to me,” he said. “Get his legs.” They dragged him out of the house, cramming him into his car. His mom just stood there, dumbfounded, while the killer went to the backyard. He came back with a shovel. He tossed it in the backseat and reached into the man’s pants pocket and found the keys. He told his mother to get in.
He got behind the wheel. He knew how to drive; his mother had been sending him on errands when she was too drunk to drive ever since he was tall enough to reach the pedals. His mother sat silently in the passenger seat as they pulled out onto the small road that would lead them into town if they turned left and further into the woods if they turned right. He turned right.
He drove for a while, not caring that the body was in plain sight, the plastic bag still duct-taped over his head. If the police pulled the car over, then so be it—that future couldn’t be any worse than this. After twenty minutes, he saw the turn off for a small unmarked dirt road. He took it, driving the dead man’s rickety old car slowly over the bumpy road. When the trees grew so thick that he could no longer see the main road, he stopped the car. “Get out,” he told his mother.
They worked the next four hours, taking turns digging. It was hard work. His back ached and the palm of his hand was split open raw. His mother was not able to contribute much physical labor. She was drenched in sweat, her baggy t-shirt dark and sticking to her body. Her arms trembled when she tried to heave a spadeful of dirt out of the ground. She had to pause more than once to retch a thin orange stream of stomach acid onto the dirt.
When the hole was deep enough, the killer checked the man’s pockets for his wallet, but he had no identification on him. They dragged him into the hole, the body landing in the soft wet dirt with a squelching sound. As he saw the clumps of dark earth spray on the man’s face, the killer felt nothing but hatred and exhaustion.
They drove the man’s car up to Portland, ditching it in a scummy neighborhood. They left the car keys on the passenger seat and walked away towards the rail station.
He hated to think about those times, because that one split-second decision to kill the man had sealed his sisters’ fate. After that, he could no longer go to the police.
Watching Laurel through his spotting scope had brought a flood of those memories back. He watched as she made her way along the sides of her house, finally disappearing into the backyard. A light turned on inside. Her routine had the ironclad look of an unholy ritual, obsessive and unyielding. He would not be able to take her at the house. It had felt good to see her anyway.
His heart had swelled with something he thought might have been love.
This morning when the man brought down their tray of food, there had been two little white pills on the tray. “They’re your vitamins,” he said. “Take them.” He waited while each girl put their pill in their mouth and then washed it down with a long drink of orange juice. Melissa did what he said because she still had hope: if she followed his rules, then nothing bad would happen and someone would come and save them. Melissa welcomed her pill and languished in the foggy calm that soon after enveloped her.
Madison had no hope. She knew if they were going to get out of this basement, they’d have to get out on their own.
Instead of swallowing the pill, Madison tucked it between her cheek and her gums, up top way back by her molars. It had started to dissolve, the grainy, sour medicine spilling onto her tongue. But she did not flinch and she did not swallow it. When the man finally went back upstairs, she ran to the little basement bathroom and hooked the pill out with her finger, rinsing her mouth and spitting several times. She then ate as much of the food as she could, knowing that drugs had more o
f an effect on you if you had an empty stomach. Melissa drank a little juice and nibbled on a piece of bread, but she didn’t say anything; she put a video cassette inside the VCR and watched the old shows, not even bothering to fast-forward past the commercials. Usually at home, Melissa was the first one to grab the DVR remote out of your hand if you didn’t skip past the commercials fast enough. Melissa liked to record her favorite shows and watch them, but Madison didn’t like most of the things Melissa watched.
Which was good. Because one Saturday afternoon when Melissa was watching a TV marathon, their father had conscripted Madison into his service. The closet door in the guest bedroom had always stuck and their father finally decided to take it off the hinges, put it on the sawhorse outside, and plane a little off the bottom so that it would close smoothly. Madison had held the door steady while her father used a big metal punch and hammer to tap the pins out of place. Once the pins were free, the teeth on the hinge popped apart and you could walk away with the door.
The hinges were on their side of the basement door and Madison was going to get them off.
A butter knife would have been perfect to pry the pins out from the top, but the man never gave them any silverware with their trays of food. While Melissa sat watching TV in a state that could not be clearly defined as either sleeping or waking, Madison got to work. She scoured the basement room looking for something to pop the hinge pins. She tore up the room, desperately looking for anything that would work. As she was about to give up, she sat on the couch to rest. Her gaze rested on the closet and there she saw it. How had she missed it? It was the perfect size. If it didn’t break, she could have the pins out in a half hour and they could squeeze through.
Madison felt herself smiling for the first time in days. She was going to get the both of them out of here.