by Meg Gardiner
Caitlin felt certain that there were people in the Bay Area who had narrowly escaped being targeted by the Prophet—people living their lives unaware how close they came to death. People, maybe women like Giselle Fraser, who drew his eye but escaped disaster when a bystander walked into view at the right moment.
But there was only one person who had faced the Prophet head-on and lived to tell. Caitlin studied the photo.
March 20, 1998. Kelly Smolenski. Age sixteen. Eyes wild with fear. Duct tape in her hair. Face cut by branches as she ran for her life.
She had given the police a bare-bones statement. Now Fletcher claimed that Smolenski knew more than she had ever let on.
The sheriff’s office had been trying to reach her since the Prophet’s return. They were still trying, harder now. Smolenski had a current California driver’s license but no longer lived at the address listed on it. While another police department checked on her purported job, Caitlin sat at the conference table and read through Kelly’s file. A couple of speeding tickets within the past ten years. For going extremely fast. No major criminal record. No next of kin.
The statement Kelly gave to the police when she was sixteen sounded like snapshot observations, recounted by a young girl a breath away from complete breakdown.
UNSUB was a white male, witness thinks. Because he was masked and wore gloves, she cannot be sure. Average height, average weight.
At his desk, Martinez ended a phone call, tore a piece of paper from a notepad, and swiveled in his desk chair.
“Found her.”
“Where?”
“She lives outside Tassajara, in Contra Costa County.”
“You spoke to her?” Caitlin said.
“For about fifteen seconds. She’s terse.”
“What does that mean?”
He handed her the piece of paper. “It means she agreed to talk about the Prophet. But only to a woman. Call her.”
22
Dusty’s was a wooden shack in the coastal hills between Palo Alto and Half Moon Bay. A neon MILLER BEER sign winked crazily in the front window. Outside the entrance a rank of motorcycles gleamed in the afternoon sun, mostly Harley-Davidsons. Caitlin pulled into the packed-dirt parking lot and dust blew from beneath her tires.
This was the only place Kelly Smolenski would agree to meet.
Caitlin parked and got out. Her jacket was buttoned over her holster and badge. She didn’t need to hide who she was. The boots and jeans and long-sleeve black Henley T-shirt weren’t camouflage. They were her. She didn’t wear them to fit in at a biker bar, but they didn’t hurt. She pushed through the door.
The bar was dark, the sunlight browned by windows that might not have been washed since the seventies. Stevie Ray Vaughan on the jukebox. As she stood in a square of light in the doorway, a dozen men, feet on the brass rail at the bar, turned from their drinks to stare at her.
She let the door swing closed behind her and strolled in. Beneath the music came the percussive sound of billiard balls striking one another. The bartender paused, both hands on the counter, watching her as she walked. She raised her chin in greeting.
Kelly was sitting in a wooden-backed booth, picking at her nails. Foot jittering. Caitlin slid in across from her and extended her hand.
“Thanks for meeting me.”
Kelly’s handshake was brief, her fingers icy. “This is the only time. I’m gonna talk today, and that’s it.”
Tattoos rode her bare arms. A weeping rose, a savage angel, a sharp-winged butterfly. Her hair was dyed scorpion black. With her ink and Marlboro voice, Kelly was hard years from her teenage photo.
Caitlin said, “I want to take notes.”
“No notes.” Kelly didn’t look around. “The people who matter know why I’m talking to a cop. Nobody else needs to think you’re taking down names.”
“Then I’ll record it.” She set her phone on the table and casually touched buttons, as though checking her messages.
Kelly didn’t object. “Did you read the police report before you came?”
“Yes.”
A caustic smile came and went. “Want to tell me what’s in it?”
At the back of the room, under hanging lamps, men in bandannas eyed them from the pool tables. At the bar, eyes watched them in the mirror.
Kelly said, “I talked to the cops that day, and I figure I signed the report, but I don’t remember doing it. Maybe you can fill me in.”
“The report was very brief. You managed to give the investigating officers a basic description of your attacker.”
At the word attacker Kelly’s gaze flicked away. She took a pack of cigarettes from a slumping purse on the bench seat. She started to tap one out, caught herself, and instead began turning the pack in her hands, over and over.
“Whatever you can tell me—that’s all I want,” Caitlin said softly.
Kelly shut her eyes. She set down the cigarettes, spread her hands flat on the table, and seemed to turn off a light inside. She opened her eyes and looked evenly at Caitlin.
“I was late for choir. Home alone, rushing. I didn’t see him in the garage, bolt still against the wall, wearing a plastic face mask,” she said. “Then he breathed. And was on me. Like a rattler striking.”
Her flat tone unsettled Caitlin. “Did he say anything?”
“‘Sullen bitch.’ And head-punched me.”
She said it dully. Removed. The disconnect, Caitlin suspected, had taken a massive toll.
“That’s the word he used?” she said.
“Yeah. ‘Sullen.’ Like I was a character in a Regency romance.”
Caitlin thought, Yet another archaic literary term used by the Prophet. “What did his voice sound like?”
“White boy. Young, I mean. A man, but hadn’t been for long. Hoarse. Don’t know if he always sounded that way, or he was putting on a disguise to impress me. Which he did.”
“Did you see any part of his face?”
Kelly shook her head. “Mask, with sports sunglasses over the eye holes. Wearing a hoodie cinched tight so I couldn’t tell what color hair he had, if he had any. Gloves. I didn’t see any scars or tats or other distinguishing marks.”
“His teeth?”
“The mask covered his mouth. He was there, but not a recognizable person. Like I said, blending into the wall. He was an it.”
Caitlin gave her a second. “You said you were home alone. After school?”
“My dad worked at a semiconductor factory. Mom was secretary at our church.” She toyed with the cigarette pack. “The punch knocked me out. I woke up in the back of a pickup with a camper shell, duct-taped. Ankles, wrists, mouth. He was outside at the pond, prepping. I heard a chain rattling. But I knew a trick—slam your arms against your hips, duct tape snaps off.” She shrugged. “Church camp game. I got free and ran. If I hadn’t, I would have gone in the water with Lisa Chu.”
The smooth surface of her voice couldn’t eliminate the glass horror at the back of her gaze.
“Did you know Lisa?” Caitlin said.
“No. No connection except we spent an hour lying beside each other unconscious in the bed of a pickup truck driven by a serial killer, and I’ve spent two decades being the one who got to keep on breathing.”
Kelly’s hands lay flat on the table. Her foot started to jitter again. The music switched from blues to shitkicker country. Jerry Jeff Walker, “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother.”
“Can you tell me about the inside of his camper?” Caitlin said.
“Dark. No windows. Plastic cargo-bed liner. The kind you can hose off if you need to.”
“Did you see him after you escaped?”
“No.”
“Did you hear his voice?”
A pause. “Yeah. The pond was through some trees. I heard him grunting. Dragging the parking bumper to the
water, I guess.”
“Did you see Lisa?”
Kelly shook her head. “Never saw her. Never heard her. Maybe she was unconscious when he rolled her into the pond. Maybe she never knew what was happening.”
Behind the flat affect of her voice, the glass shards in her gaze sharpened.
This was what hope looked like, when it dealt with the Prophet. Wishing desperately that a girl she’d never met, who had literally touched her at the last moments of her life—wishing that the long-lost teenage babysitter died without pain or fear, oblivious.
Caitlin had read Lisa Chu’s autopsy report. She suffered a subdural hematoma, evidence of being battered in the head. Possibly hard enough to cause loss of consciousness. But the medical examiner found water in her lungs. She had drowned. She was alive when she went into the water.
Caitlin said, “You were close enough to hear him. If Lisa was conscious, you would have heard her too. She wouldn’t have gone quietly.”
Kelly licked her lips. Looked at the pool tables, and at her hands. Tossed her black hair over her shoulder.
“She could have been whispering in my ear the whole drive. Sometimes I wonder that. In my nightmares she talks to me. From under the water. Her voice is a whisper that’s coming from inside me.” She put a clawed hand to her chest. “But I never saw her.”
Her eyes welled. She blinked furiously, refusing to let tears fall.
“Afterward I smelled her perfume. Lavender and vanilla. It was Love’s Baby Soft. I could smell it on my clothes. Because she’d been lying beside me. We were curled together on that ride. And I didn’t put two and two together. I didn’t figure it out.”
The flat tone was rising, the edges fraying. This was not part of the script Kelly had planed to a monotone over the years.
“The cops took my clothes,” she said. “When I got to the police station, they took my shirt for forensic tests. I still didn’t add it up. It was only when they told me there was another girl missing . . . that’s when it hit me. That the scent didn’t come from the camper, but from another girl. But I didn’t tell them before that, because I . . .”
“You were in shock.”
Kelly looked at her like, Yeah, right.
Caitlin saw her as she must have been that day: sixteen, badly injured, kidnapped. Yet she’d managed to free herself and flee to safety, in utter fight-or-flight mode. There was no way, physically or cognitively, she could have had any space left over in her head.
“That day you couldn’t have put two and two together,” Caitlin said. “Now? It sounds like it. But then? It was life or death and a fleeting scent in the air.”
Kelly stared at her. Her foot jittered like a jackhammer.
“How far did you run?” Caitlin said.
“Two miles.”
“How long did it take for the police to arrive at the gas station after you got there?”
“Maybe twenty minutes.”
Caitlin’s shoulders dropped. “Lisa was gone before the cops rolled. You couldn’t have saved her. God’s honest shitty truth.”
Kelly’s chest rose and fell. After a minute, she stood up.
“I’ll be right back.”
She walked briskly on stacked-heel boots to the women’s room, her T-shirt sliding off one shoulder to reveal a red bra strap. Caitlin didn’t know if what she’d said was the God’s honest shitty truth, but it was the best approximation she could assemble at short notice. She looked at her hands. When she held her fingers out, they were shaking. She pressed them against the table.
Chill. Compartmentalize. For God’s sake, keep it under control.
The toilets at a biker bar were one of the last places on earth Caitlin ever wanted to enter, but Kelly came out looking better. She’d splashed water on her face and pulled her hair back into a ponytail. She leaned on the bar, spoke to the bartender, and a minute later returned to the booth carrying two shot glasses shining with whiskey. She set them on the table and slid into the booth.
“If you’re on duty, I’ll drink on your behalf,” she said.
“I’m on duty.”
Kelly hoisted her glass. “Na zdrowie.” Naz-droh-vee-ay. She downed the shot, pulled the second glass close, and said, “What else?”
Caitlin considered her words. “After you escaped from the truck. Did he pursue you?”
“No idea. At the time, I thought he was right on my heels. I pissed myself running. I ran through the woods until I came out on a road and saw the gas station. I went inside the mini-mart screaming and didn’t stop for about an hour.”
Caitlin was grave. “You asked to speak to a woman. Because . . .”
“I don’t need another leering male cop imagining what the Prophet did,” she said. “But he didn’t touch me. Not sexually. He seemed—repelled by contact. He stank of lye soap. I still smell it.”
Caitlin’s pulse ticked up. That detail was not in the police report.
A man sauntered past the booth. “Ladies. Or should I say, lady and narc.”
His voice had a crack at the edge, like he’d once been punched or cut in the throat. Caitlin glared coolly. He gave her the side-eye, skinny young guy, heels of his boots scuffing on the wood. Kelly ignored him.
Caitlin said, “The message. Dripping blood . . .”
Kelly glanced after the man. He strolled to the bar, looking like he had a wad of spit in his mouth he wanted to hawk at Caitlin’s feet.
Kelly said, “Did you park an unmarked Caprice outside?”
“Dodge.”
“My friends know why I’m talking to you. Some random asshole won’t be a problem.”
The skinny young heckler watched her in the mirror behind the bar, then—to Caitlin’s relief—paid for his beer and headed out the door.
She leaned forward, gently. “Kelly, tell me about the message.”
Kelly downed the second shot of whiskey. “He wrote that on my arm.” She turned her left hand over on the table, exposing the inside of her forearm. She ran a finger along it. The skin was covered by a sinuous tattoo of a tigress. “Didn’t have this then.”
Both her arms were covered with images. Bright, dark, big. Caitlin understood that she wanted to claim her body for herself.
“I washed it off before the cops saw it,” Kelly said.
Caitlin nodded. That explained a major gap in the record. Nothing in the files mentioned a message written on Kelly’s arm.
“I had to get rid of it. Had to. The old couple who ran the gas station tried to calm me down; I was drooling and screaming, shaking like a broken washing machine. And it took forever for the cops to get there,” she said. “I didn’t know about preserving forensic evidence. It’s not like now, when every five minutes there’s a new TV crime show about collecting pubic hairs with tweezers. Nobody stopped me.”
She was rolling now. “I went in the gas station bathroom and scrubbed my skin raw. My face, my neck, my hands, my arms. I had to.”
Caitlin simply nodded.
“The cops, the uniforms who came, they never asked me about it. At the hospital where they took me, a CSI woman did ask about my hands. I told her I’d washed them, but she didn’t ask about anything else,” she said. “Then . . .” She leaned back. “That reporter showed up.”
“Bart Fletcher,” Caitlin said.
“He caught me in the parking lot at the high school.”
“It felt like an ambush?”
“I guess. I just froze. It was my first day back at school after . . . maybe a week? He totally surprised me. Very forward, confident man. He talked like he was my best friend, with my best interests at heart. He smelled like beer.”
“And . . .”
“I said I didn’t want to talk. When I backed away, he said I was unique. I had escaped. And I could save others. I was a miracle and I had no right to hold back on how I’d
done it.”
“He guilt-tripped you into talking.”
“I tried to walk away. That’s when he dropped the news that a message was inked on Lisa Chu’s arm.” She shook her head. “I think I peed myself again, in the school parking lot. And man, did he pick up on it. ‘What’s wrong? You look so frightened. Please let me help you. What do you know about the writing?’” she said. “I got scared and told him. He didn’t print it, but . . . There was more to the message.” She shut her eyes. “‘The dripping blood our only drink, the bloody flesh our only food.’”
Caitlin held perfectly still. She checked that her phone was still recording.
Kelly turned her forearms over again. “The first line was written on my left arm, the second on my right. I didn’t tell anybody else. I don’t know why the reporter never printed it. Maybe because there was no evidence. I mean . . .”
“I believe you.”
Kelly nodded. Leaned back. “I gotta go.”
“Thank you. You’ve made a big difference.” Caitlin got out her card. On the back she wrote the number for Victim Witness Assistance. She handed it to Kelly.
“You won’t hear from me again. And I won’t be around for a while. Road trip,” Kelly said.
“Still, if you need me, or to talk to someone, call.” Rising to leave, she glanced around Dusty’s. “Can I ask you something?”
“What’s a choirgirl doing in a biker bar?”
Caitlin raised an eyebrow. “Yeah.”
Kelly’s eyes were dark. She glanced at the men who stood at the bar. A bearded guy with a ponytail, wearing his leather cut, caught her gaze. She raised her chin in acknowledgment and looked back at Caitlin.
“Because I’m safe. Nobody’s gonna get through them to me.”
* * *
Outside in the dusty lot, with a lineup of bikes shining chrome in her eyes, Caitlin hurriedly searched online. When she found it, she phoned Guthrie.
“It’s a poem. ‘East Coker’ by T. S. Eliot,” she said. “‘The dripping blood our only drink, the bloody flesh our only food.’”
“Sounds right up his alley,” he said.
“There’s more. ‘The bloody flesh our only food, in spite of which we like to think that we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—’” She took a breath. “‘Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.’”