I understood what Riley meant—sexual predators’ crimes were notoriously hard to prove and much more rampant in the American culture than the average person imagined. At least this case would be an easy one—Ava admitted to it, Allard didn’t deny it, and we had Harvey’s photographs. Allard was looking at prison time or a hefty fine or both. And he’d blown his expensive education—he’d never work with children again.
I still couldn’t determine why Ava would have set up an email account for Heart to Heart. There was no record of her having any sort of addiction issues, and other than her relationship with Allard and friendship with Sadie, I couldn’t determine her connection with Joan Marco.
“Are there any medical records to show Allard might have had drug treatment at some point in his life? Any hospital visits for overdoses?” I asked.
“I’ll have Richardson look into it, but nothing has popped so far.”
“It is possible Allard met Joan Marco if he needed treatment for a drug addiction. She definitely took a liking to him, and she was instrumental in getting him the job at the high school,” I said. “There’s no way she didn’t know what was going on between Allard and Ava. Why didn’t Marco report it?”
“I’ll ask him about Marco and their relationship. And we can question Ava on it as well. But,” Riley cautioned, “Joan Marco is a respected member of this community and has worked with generations of our local kids at the high school. I have a hard time believing she and her husband would be into anything illegal, let alone killing women.”
“I understand,” I said. “We need to check them out, though.”
“Tread lightly, Hansen. That’s all I’m asking.”
Harvey, who had surprised me by remaining so quiet, jumped in. “Ava runs with this crowd, and she didn’t tell us everything when we first interviewed her. Maybe she’s the one we should be looking at.”
“But,” I cautioned, “we could have misread her secrecy as a cover for her relationship with Allard. And she knows her best friend isn’t supposed to have a lot of contact with her mother. All of her suspicious behavior might be about covering for other people she cares about like Allard, and Sadie’s meetings with Wilma.”
“Well,” Riley said, hitching his sheriff-gray pants up by the belt loop, “there’s only one way to find out. Feed me any questions to my earbud.”
Riley pushed into the first interview room and introduced himself to Ava and her mother. The recording light was already blinking red, and the sound of the microphones blipped on in the room.
For the next three hours, we observed Captain Riley questioning Ava carefully and hitting Allard hard, but little came from the interviews other than the two had been sleeping together since the school year began. Ava met Allard when he’d come to interview in June and then offered to help him get acclimated. According to Allard, the move had been significant, and he couldn’t have done it without Ava’s help. He rarely mentioned Sadie in his answers, and when directly questioned about Sadie and Joan Marco, Allard referred to them as friends. It was obvious that Ava and Allard had been aware of the dangers of their relationship when they both adamantly declared Joan and Sadie innocent of any knowledge.
He fit the profile of a seasoned sexual predator with a well-rehearsed excuse. He’d chosen Ava, most likely due to what her mother called a low self-esteem, and he worked it in his favor by grooming her with compliments and sexual innuendos. He’d taken time every day with Ava, seducing her until he was sure she wouldn’t tell anyone. Once Ava began coming to his home, she was his—hook, line, and sinker. I wondered if Joan Marco used this secret about Allard to manipulate him into helping her with Heart to Heart.
Ava denied setting up the email for Heart to Heart. When she was confronted with the IP address that linked back to her laptop, she said Sadie and some of her other friends sometimes used her computer. It was possible someone else had set it up on her laptop, but Ava’s behavior during this portion of the questioning drew my attention. She grew fidgety and couldn’t hold Riley’s eye contact. That could have been because Ava’s mother had once again launched into a lecture about how she’d told Ava a hundred times to stay away from Sadie. There were multiple variables to consider, but my brain was tired. Exhaustion took its hold on me again, and I struggled to stay awake once Riley let Ava Washington and her mother go. He continued a little longer with Allard, pressing him for details of Heart to Heart.
Allard denied all knowledge of any recovery center or sober-living residence named Heart to Heart and claimed to have never seen the tattoo. He also claimed to have been clean his entire life. We were getting nowhere with him, but Riley railed on another twenty minutes before he finally booked Allard and delayed the bail hearing until Monday. I was willing to bet Joan Marco would be there bright and early with the bondsman to get Allard out.
“You okay?” Harvey asked me.
“I need to sleep.”
She nodded. “Me, too.” She’d also spent the night before in a car. “Looks like we might have a little downtime.”
“Let’s get some sleep and then get back to it. I’d like to head to Gary’s later and interview any employees or patrons willing to talk about Wilma Henderson,” I told her. “Most have been interviewed, but it’s Friday night, and if the alcohol is flowing, we might get a little more from them.”
Harvey agreed to meet me there. As we parted ways, I recognized that she’d become more tolerable, a change in her behavior that I welcomed.
Chapter Twelve
Day Three: 11 p.m.
After a long swim and hot shower, I slipped on a pair of worn blue jeans and pulled a white cotton V-neck over my head. I braided my wet hair and let the heavy length of it fall down my back. My muscles were beginning to fill out again, and I felt stronger. It probably was all those cups of yogurt, bananas, and granola bars the hotel provided for breakfast. I loaded my bag with them every morning and snacked all day, a relief to my body since I hadn’t eaten enough food for a few months. The color had come back in my face, and I was beginning to look like my old self again. That was a good thing, especially since Bennett would be joining Harvey and me at Gary’s Girls tonight to help with interviews. I found myself anxious to see Bennett again, even though Gary’s wasn’t exactly the kind of place I pictured getting to know her better. Then again, neither was the inside of a serial murder case.
Since I’d left the station, Detective Richardson had sent me information on the regulation of private recovery facilities. Apparently, if local zoning permitted it, virtually anyone could open his or her home to people in recovery and designate it a sober living residence, as long as no actual medical treatment was offered on the premises. Joan Marco could have easily set up and used her home as the Heart to Heart Sober Living Residence.
The growing epidemic of drug addiction in America set the stage for this kind of scam to occur. Desperation left a person wide open to fraud. Had that been the case for our four victims? Had they reached the end of their proverbial ropes with nowhere else to turn?
Still, that theory left a very real question looming in my mind—who paid for Heart to Heart? I doubted Joan Marco would have taken these women in out of the kindness of her heart, but these also were women who had little to no funds. If they had health insurance at all, it was probably high deductible. So where did the money come from?
The chain around my neck caught the bathroom light. I examined the glint of the pendant as I brushed my teeth—Marci’s Irish cross—and the picture of her twirling the cross back and forth along the chain was suddenly so clear, it felt like I could reach out and touch her. Since the Willow’s Ridge case had closed, my memories of Marci had slowly dissipated. There were still moments when her presence came on so strong, it felt like I’d been hit by a wave—a Marci wave that had the power to knock the wind out of me.
I thought about how Heart to Heart might have some very real similarities to the One True Path ex-gay ministry. I twirled Marci’s necklace around my fingers and saw
the women seeking recovery as much the same as the members of One True Path. Most were there to find recovery from homosexuality, or because a parent or partner demanded it. Either way, we were promised we would be healed. And our fearless leader, Pastor Charles Jameson, was in the business out of more than just the kindness of his heart. He had a personal mission to rid his family of homosexuality. What exactly, then, was Joan Marco’s personal mission with addicts?
*
A hot pink neon sign lit up the sky along the highway. Its huge arrow pointed at the long, flat building that rambled on and on. Clearly, Gary had added multiple additions to the original building as his business grew. The bar sat on a large plot of land, at least two acres, and had the capacity to grow larger. The parking lot was filled mostly with trucks of all different sizes, with the freights lined up behind the bar like long hash marks.
“Our officers spend most of our weekends patrolling this place,” Harvey said as we stood by her truck waiting for Bennett. “A lot of truckers stop here regularly. Some even sleep in their rigs for the weekend to avoid hotel costs. Since it’s private property, we can’t do much about it.”
“That certainly helps the prostitution business here. Have you found any evidence that Gary gets a cut?”
“Not yet, but not for lack of trying. We’ve spent many hours investigating this place.”
“Gary has himself quite an enterprise here,” I said.
I leaned against Harvey’s truck, which glittered under the neon lights. I tried to ignore her eyes on me rounding over my shoulders down my torso. I couldn’t really fault Harvey for looking; I’d done the same to her when she stepped out of her truck. While we didn’t wear uniforms for work, seeing each other in street clothes was a different experience. Harvey liked to show off her body, and she wore a black leather jacket over a tight tank top. She was attractive, and she knew it. Harvey’s attractiveness, though, was too reckless for me. I didn’t need the bravado, just a woman with the confidence to be herself. Where was Bennett, anyway?
“What exactly are we looking for here?” Harvey asked.
“Anyone who is willing to talk to us about Wilma or our victims,” I said. “Our main job is to listen. Most likely what we’re looking for won’t be said aloud—it will be in the context of the answers. Stay sober and alert. Ask clarification questions. Eventually, we will find the ones who are willing to engage with us.”
I saw Bennett making her way toward us across the lot. She looked fantastic, even in worn jeans and a Chicago Cubs T-shirt. The dark hair that usually fell in curls around her face was pulled back in a small ponytail. I couldn’t stop from smiling as she approached.
“Let’s do this,” Harvey said, after our greetings.
Harvey gave me a quick wink as she pulled open the door of the thumping bar. Music and bright lights spilled out.
Harvey immediately filtered in through the crowd, which, surprisingly, wasn’t all men. Most of those women, however, were there to find johns. Our clothing helped us blend in, and the lack of revealed skin told johns we weren’t interested. We’d prepped for the possibility that they might not take no for an answer from us. After all, we were at least ten years younger than most of the women in the bar and much more fit. We had a signal on our cells, something to alert the others that one of us might be in trouble.
Bennett clearly hated everything about Gary’s Girls. She hooded her eyes against the bright light, shrugged against the loud music and the cheers of the men lined along the runway. She turned her eyes away from the stage where women wearing pencil-thin heels gyrated against silver poles and each other. I didn’t want to leave Bennett on her own while she was so uncomfortable, but standing on the outskirts of the action wouldn’t work. I stood with her a while longer, scanning the crowd, looking for the person who might talk to us, the one who also looked uncomfortable. Then it became clear to me: we needed to get into the thickest mix of it all—the bar.
I leaned into Bennett so she could hear me over the music. “Follow me.” I motioned to the bar, and then I did something I hadn’t planned. I wrapped my hand around Bennett’s. It happened so fast and naturally, I didn’t completely realize we were walking hand-in-hand until we were almost to the bar. I felt the warmth of Bennett’s body leaning into mine.
The bar area was slightly quieter, and we sidled up to it. The same woman who had been tending when Harvey and I had been in was working. I noticed the pert swing of her ponytail. She gave me a quick wave.
“Rhonda, right?”
She nodded. “What can I get you two?”
I ordered two beers, though I planned for the liquid to do nothing more than sit in front of us. We sat for a while, engaging men to the sides of us who regularly filtered over for drinks. We didn’t get far. Most showed great interest, particularly in Bennett, until they realized we only wanted to talk. Harvey eventually texted she’d found a table of locals, but they only wanted to talk about what we knew.
After almost two hours of dead ends, the crowd began to thin, and I finally drank my beer. Complete sobriety didn’t seem so imperative any longer.
“Finally loosening up a bit, huh?” Rhonda took my empty and replaced it with a fresh cold bottle. “On the house.”
“Thanks.” I took a sip. She caught me looking at her scar, a smooth hairless mass that ran along her neck and down into her shoulder blades.
“I got it when I was a kid,” she said. “A fire.”
“I’m sorry.”
Rhonda shrugged. “Such is life. The scar has lost its red coloring over the years, so I don’t get as many stares as I used to.”
“What’s your take on what happened to Wilma?”
Rhonda shrugged. “Everyone here believes she ran into a bad john and will end up in the river soon. There are a lot of bad johns, but we’ve been lucky for the most part—our guys are mostly softies at heart.”
I didn’t press her to find out what constituted a bad john. The truth was, I didn’t want to know. “Is that what you think?”
Rhonda leaned over the bar. Her soft breasts fell into unstoppable cleavage, a tool she no doubt used to get better tips. She looked around, and when she was sure no one else could hear us said, “I think Wilma got into something over her head.”
“But it might not have been a john?”
Rhonda shook her head.
Bennett took Rhonda’s silence as a hint and excused herself for the bathroom. With Bennett gone, we had an empty bubble around the bar, a place where the two of us could talk somewhat confidentially.
“There are secrets here, Agent.”
I leaned in to better hear Rhonda. “What kind of secrets?”
“Ones that have been around for a while. Ones that are a part of our town.”
I took a sip of beer. “Such as?”
“There’s a reason the serial killer picked here to work, you know. He picked Wallace Lake, Ohio, not a big town like Chicago or Columbus or Indianapolis.”
I agreed. “It’s a deliberate choice. But why?”
“Haven’t we shown you? We know how to keep secrets and how to take care of our own.”
“Like Wilma Henderson?”
Rhonda reached for her ponytail and wound it round her fist. She watched me closely, as if deciding whether or not to talk to me. I drank my beer and waited her out.
Finally, Rhonda leaned in closer. “The secrets at Wallace Lake aren’t always buried so deep,” she said. “Neither are some of the hearts.”
“What do you know about Heart to Heart?”
“I know they’ve helped a lot of girls in our community.”
“Including Wilma?”
Rhonda nodded. “And Sadie.”
“Sadie?” I asked.
“And me.” She held up her wrist for me to see: a faded double-hearted tattoo.
“What were your experiences with Heart to Heart? And with Joan Marco?”
The mention of Joan’s name stopped the easy banter between us. I asked again, “What do
you know about Joan Marco?”
“I know I don’t want to get mixed up in any of this. I know that Joan Marco doesn’t play, and I don’t want to be the next woman found in the river.”
“Wait, Rhonda!”
But I was cut off from Rhonda’s attention by a group of drunken men demanding a slew of drinks. She moved away from me quickly, as though we’d never spoken.
Someone came to my side, but it wasn’t Bennett. Harvey said, “It’s after two,” she said. “Call the night a bust?”
*
I walked Bennett to her truck. Once we got there, I climbed in so Bennett could drop me back at my truck.
“Safety first,” I teased her. Cops are always on high alert—you can’t turn off that part of us. We sat for a few minutes in her truck, the heater blowing off the chill of the crisp fall night. “What do you make of what Rhonda said?”
“The bartender? She’s been around here for some time,” Bennett said. “Her uncle worked for the police station as dispatch. He’s retired now. I remember how torn up he was when she started working at Gary’s. It’s not exactly the place of employment you want for your niece.”
I had been wondering why Rhonda was willing to talk to me and in such a public place. Now it made sense—her uncle had been in law enforcement. On some level, anyway, she trusted us. She wanted to help. “Secrets not buried very deep. I don’t know what to make of that.”
“Maybe she means we’re close, that we don’t have much farther to dig.”
“Possibly. I’m wondering if Marco uses people’s addictions to get them to do what she wants. She seems to have this strong need to control the people and situations in her life. And think of all the people we’ve met that she’s involved with—Allard, Ava, Sadie. They avoid any discussion of Marco. Her position as a counselor gave her access to many people’s records. That knowledge is a level of control, and she’s also had the ability to influence many young people over the years.”
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