Last Girl Gone

by J. G. Hetherton

  She kept her mouth shut, and finally he nodded. “We trade, but I get to assign the value of this so-called vital clue.”

  She had nothing but his word, but then again, what else could she hope to get? Her back was against the wall and this was the only play. It was time to take a chance. She walked him through her exploration of the crime scene, climbing the ridge in darkness, finding the recessed ledge.

  At the end he said, “That’s good. You can take me there.”

  “Now?”

  He looked up at the sun. “In a few hours. I have things to do, and in the meantime maybe some of this heat will burn off.”

  It would only get hotter throughout the day, the humidity closing in like a wet blanket, but she didn’t correct him.

  “This can work for both of us,” he said, “but I need us to see eye to eye.”

  “I won’t be a mouthpiece, just printing whatever you tell me to print. I need enough agency to present the story as I see it.”

  “I don’t expect to line edit what you write, but I do call the shots. If I ask you to include a specific detail in a story, I need you to do that. If I tell you something’s off the record, or ask you to hold back key facts of the investigation, I expect you to honor those requests. And if you burn me on this, well, I don’t think your career can take two black eyes.” He paused. “Do you?”

  He shut off the engine and climbed out, headed toward his motel room. Laura followed him out onto the scorching blacktop and caught up with him in the shade under the strip of roof covering the doors.

  “Why work with me at all?” she asked.

  “Until we know who he is, the press might be the only way to reach him, and if we can reach him, we can flush him into the open.” He wiped his brow with the back of one hand. “And because I know you, Laura. I am you. Recognize my accent?”

  She shook her head.

  “Tennessee, born and bred. Hill people stock. I remember being desperate to get out of there. Joining the FBI—that was the dream, and it almost didn’t happen. I made a mistake. A big one. Pulled my service weapon when I shouldn’t have, pulled the trigger when I shouldn’t have. Very lucky no one got hurt. It could have ended my career, but someone higher up took pity on me and smoothed it over.”

  Laura said nothing.

  “And I asked him that same question,” Timinski continued. “‘Why me? Why bet on someone who just exposed themselves as incapable?’ You know what he said? He said, ‘Tim, the dog that lost the fox is twice as eager to please.’ He was sure as hell right about that.”

  “I’m not a dog,” Laura said.

  “You’re missing the complexity of it. It just occurs to me that you might be the type of person who understands the value of a second chance, and who will be careful not to waste it. I could reach out to the News & Observer in Raleigh, or to some other reporter at the Gazette.”

  “But you won’t.”

  “No. I suspect you’ll work twice as hard as anyone else.”

  CHAPTER

  8

  IF SOME MAD scientist had stapled together three normal-sized people, the end result would have been close to Diane Chambers. Curls upon curls of hair blown out daily, costume jewelry dripping down her chins, muumuus sewn to look like shapeless prom dresses. Diane weighed more than three hundred pounds and spoke with a Texas twang despite never having traveled more than a hundred miles from Hillsborough.

  Laura came in though the kitchen door. Her mother spent twelve hours a day sleeping and the other twelve fastened to a Barcalounger in the living room. The kitchen served only as staging area for old pizza boxes and slimy dishes. Today, though, the one oversized kitchen chair was occupied.

  “Oh no!” Diane clapped her hands together, flabby arms trembling in their own personal earthquake. “Have you been fired again?”

  “I make my own hours, Diane.”

  “Don’t call me that!” Her voice combined the worst parts of a wet cough and a leaf blower, a rumbling phlegmy shriek that set Laura’s teeth on edge.

  “That’s your name, isn’t it?”

  “Call me Momma.”

  “I think I stopped calling you Momma in the second grade.”

  “You did, you did,” Diane nodded, her chins bouncing. “Such a thankless child. Always with that sour look on your face. Bring me a glass of water, would you, dear? You owe me that much.”

  Laura sifted through the dusty glasses in the cabinet, located the cleanest, filled it with tap water, and set it on the table. The old farmhouse lacked any kind of air-conditioning. The kitchen didn’t even have a fan. Her mother looked like she was about to melt away into a pool of blubber. Diane slurped the water down in three quick gulps and ran a hand over her bloated lips.

  “Why can’t you be a good girl like this all the time? I swear, the good Lord put you on this earth to test me.”

  “It shouldn’t be a surprise that raising a child is what follows having a child. You chose to have me.”

  “Not alone!” Diane pressed a hand over her undoubtedly oversized heart. “Your father abandoned me.”

  “By dying. I’m sure he did it just for spite.”

  Her mother frowned. “I wouldn’t be shocked.”

  Laura remembered her father’s funeral. Eight years old and devastated to learn firsthand that a person can simply cease to be. Those were long, empty days in the house without him. She could remember rarely speaking for the first few months.

  Her mother, on the other hand, had devoured the attention, consuming hugs and condolence cards as heartily as the casseroles and pies delivered to their door. She wore black for nearly a year, summoned crocodile tears often in public, and complained endlessly about her dead husband at home. It galled her that he’d had the audacity to die. She hated him for it.

  Laura found her mother’s behavior disgusting, which in turn made her feel like a hypocrite. She hated her father too. After all, he had left her alone with Diane.

  “Probably he saw what a little bitch you were turning into and took the easy way out,” Diane said.

  Despite herself, Laura felt dampness at the corners of her eyes. She was twenty-nine years old, but her mother could still make her cry.

  “Oh, now you’re gonna blubber? Don’t blame me, girl. I’m just truth-telling. The man was a coward, too yellow to raise a child. A child is a responsibility, Laura. Not like you’d know yourself.”

  Long experience had taught her to say nothing, to ignore the barbs and just leave.

  “But at least you’ll never have to know the pain I know,” her mother continued. “The pain of having your own child embarrass you.”

  Laura couldn’t believe it. Through middle and high school, her mother had stopped leaving the house entirely. She still had a circle of ladies she called on the phone, fishing for gossip, but none of them visited her and she never ventured out. Laura had made excuses for her all those years, never bringing friends to the house, ashamed to let them see the woman who’d raised her. The words were out of her mouth before she could stop them.

  “Me embarrass you? How?”

  “For God’s sake, Laura, you made such a stink about leaving Hillsborough, all high and mighty. I could have lived with that. Plenty of people in this town need to be taken down a peg or two. But to come back here with your tail between your legs?” Her mother drained the last bit of water, then spit it back into the glass. “It would have been better if you’d died.”

  “Maybe it would have been,” Laura muttered.

  “I see, now you’re going to play the martyr, right on schedule. Don’t think I forgot your tricks, girl.”

  Laura shook her head. “I only tried to do the right thing.”

  “Must not have tried very hard. We’re the town punch line because of you. I can hear it in people’s voices on the phone. They’re all laughing at us behind our back.”

  “Laughing at you, maybe.”

  “Oh, Laura. It’s as though you forgot all the lessons I tried to teach you. You were
supposed to do great things. I didn’t raise no ordinary girl, but that’s what you are now—plain. Homely. Just another dull piece of ass for the boys to play with.”

  “Momma—”

  “No, don’t call me that. I’m not sure I still want a daughter.”

  Laura turned to go.

  “That’s right, leave. Just leave me here all alone. All you’ll do is prove my point, that you’re a good-for-nothing. That you’re a stain this family can’t wash out. I wish you’d just disappear.”

  Laura left. In her room she took deep breaths until she was sure the tears wouldn’t come. Then she put on her boots, filled a bag with clothes and other essentials, and left through the front door. From the front yard she could still hear the raving, cries like knives cutting through the air. As she walked away, the invective turned to indistinct shouting and guttural moans. She couldn’t make out a single word her mother said.

  Which was exactly how she liked it.

  CHAPTER

  9

  “HOLD UP A second,” Timinski said, and stopped climbing. He perched on a rocky outcropping and ran a handkerchief across the top of his head, wicking away the sweat. It didn’t seem to do him much good. Three in the afternoon and the humidity was in full bloom. The sun hung in the sky like a white-hot coal, and the ridgeline didn’t offer much cover.

  Laura looked up and tried to gauge the distance. “It’s not much farther now. Just another hundred yards or so.” Under her breath, she added, “I hope.”

  It was the daylight disorienting her. Everything looked different in the absence of shadows. Last night all she could see existed in the narrow tunnel of her flashlight. Now there were more landmarks than she could count, most of them unfamiliar.

  “Reminds me of taking the FBI physical.”

  “Getting down was the tricky part. It was dark.”

  “You scared to be back up here?”

  She shook her head.

  “Don’t fib. Why are you still trying to be a reporter?”

  He held out his hand and she took it, pulling him to his feet.

  “We’re not as similar as you seem to think we are, Tim.”

  “No? Every man’s an island, like that?”

  “I just mean we don’t know each other well enough for you to say we’re the same.”

  “Talk about a double-edged sword. If that’s true, maybe we’re exactly the same and you don’t know me well enough to realize it. By the way, one of us reads people for a living.”

  “I thought law enforcement was about, you know, collecting evidence. Fingerprints and fibers, witness statements, confessions. All that.”

  “Sure, of course. But the purpose of collecting all that is so it can be presented in court, so some DA can get a conviction.”

  “And that’s not important?”

  “More than important. It’s what makes the whole thing a worthwhile endeavor. It’s the cheese at the end of the maze. But that’s just the beginning and the end.”

  Laura didn’t understand that. She said so.

  “The beginning and the end.” He kept climbing. “You start with a crime scene, you collect evidence. You end with a suspect, collect evidence again. Match the two up, you see? But the middle—boy, that’s the tricky part. Hell of a job finding one person hiding among all the other people in the world.”

  “You mean they don’t usually drop their driver’s license next to the body?”

  He laughed, a hard, short bark. “Not in my experience. The middle of a case is all instinct. Following your gut. Reading people. With enough practice, you start to get a feel for how each type of crime flows.”

  “Flows,” she repeated.

  “Water takes the path of least resistance; people are no different.” He stopped and scanned the ground ahead. “Which way?”

  In front of them stood a stand of scrubby pines she didn’t recognize. Laura put a hand on Timinski’s shoulder and moved past him, climbed up into the pines, and spotted the rocky outcropping level with their position.

  She pointed. “Right there.”

  Timinski followed as she crabbed across the face of the ridge, twice almost slipping and falling due to the loose, rocky surface. The cave, as she’d come to think of it, was quite a bit more disappointing in the daylight. Last night the walls had extended back several yards and she had been unable to rule out the possibility of some tunnel burrowing deeper into the earth. Now it stood revealed, little more than a three-foot depression set under a slight overhang. Still, the leafy brush in front of it made it an ideal hiding place.

  Timinski scrambled up next to her and turned around. “Will you look at that—perfect vantage of the dump site.”

  “Is that what you call it?”

  “Sorry. Inelegant phrasing, I know, but that’s what we call it. She wasn’t killed there; someone placed her out in that field.”

  “I heard,” Laura said. She followed his gaze out into the soybeans. The muddy track still ended in the middle, and from there she could trace her way to the exact spot Olive Hanson’s body had been placed.

  She shivered in the heat.

  “You’ve got another law enforcement contact.”

  The statement caught her off guard, and she almost confirmed it.

  He squatted down and examined the slab of rock under their feet. “So where are they?”

  Laura turned three hundred and sixty degrees, searching the ground. No cigarette butts. Then she saw one caught in a crack.

  “There.”

  He pulled it out with a pair of tweezers and dropped it into a plastic bag. They looked at it together.

  “That’s the same one, I’m sure of it.”

  “How many did you say were up here?”

  “More than five, fewer than ten. I didn’t count. Maybe the wind took the rest.”

  He nodded, then made a cursory search of the ground on either side of the rocks. Nothing to see.

  “Maybe,” he said. “But really the only direction the wind can come from is directly in front of us, which would just blow them up against the wall. I suppose the wind could cut along the ridgeline, but the direction still isn’t right. They should be here.”

  “Meaning what?”

  He said nothing.

  “You mean someone picked them up. But why the one left in the crack?”

  “They missed it. It happens.”

  “But it only took us a few seconds to spot it.”

  “Sure, in the daylight. If they were here at sunset, and gone today, maybe they were collected during the night.”

  Laura’s weight shifted under her, as though the ground were suddenly on a ship’s deck lurching side to side. She leaned back against the rock and closed her eyes.

  “That would mean we were up here together.”

  “Not necessarily. It could have been after you left.”

  Laura thought back to her trudge to the center of the field, to standing in the green and looking back toward the ridge, to the electric feeling in the air.

  “Not after,” she said.

  Timinski pushed himself up, pressed his back into the depression, and looked down again. “He was here,” he said, almost to himself.

  Laura shook off her chill, stepped off the rock. “What makes you so sure it’s a he?”

  “Statistics. Which isn’t the same thing as being sure.”

  “What does that say about men?”

  “Nothing good,” he said. “This is the hardest part. I may be good at reading people, but sitting across from someone, looking them in the eye, that’s a whole different thing than sitting on a ridge, looking at a field.”

  “So you’re saying you haven’t solved it yet?”

  That earned her a wry smile. “No, not yet. That thing I said before about the flow of a crime? The flow is weakest in ones like this. It’s usually not so difficult to connect point A to point B. A wife dies, look to the husband. A husband dies, look to the wife. Find out who loves, who hates, who inherits. Murder isn’t co
mplicated. Quite the opposite: it’s very, very old, and very, very simple. Most of the time.”

  “But for a serial killer—”

  He cut her off. “One body does not a serial killer make.”

  “Two girls taken,” she countered.

  “Even if Teresa Mitchem was dead, it still wouldn’t be enough.”

  “That doesn’t sound like you denying this is a serial killer.”

  Timinski fixed her with that flat blue gaze. “This is one of those times where we need to be explicit. Are we off the record?”

  “Any time you say we’re off, we’re off.”

  He nodded. “Okay, yes, whether he is a serial killer or not will ultimately depend on the number of victims. I think what you’re really asking is, did a stranger do this? Did a man pick these girls out and then take them, for motives that are hard to put succinctly into words? Is that it?”

  “That’s it.”

  Timinski shrugged. “My gut says yes. Could have been a relative, a father or an uncle, being inappropriate with one of the girls. Things get out of hand, he kills Olive Hanson. Then he tries to make it look like something else, get us off the scent.”

  Laura was ashamed to admit she had never considered the killer to be anything but an outsider, a person unknown to his victims. “Is that possible?” she asked.

  “Anything is possible at this point. But we’ve eliminated all the relatives. Some can’t account for their time when the girls were taken, and some can’t account for when Olive Hanson was placed in that field, but make a Venn diagram of the two groups and there’s no overlap.”

  “Maybe it’s more than one person.”

  “Sure, it could be,” he said. “But look where we’ve wandered off to. Now we’ve got two relatives working in tandem, two secret predators who’ve managed to stay hidden all these years. Call it a gut feeling, call it playing the odds, but it doesn’t seem likely, does it?”

  Laura shook her head.

  “And there’s something else. I’m going to ask one more time, we’re off the record?”

  “Of course.”

  “Olive Hanson wasn’t sexually assaulted.”

  It rocked Laura back a step. Again, new information challenged the very specific picture of the perpetrator she had in her mind. He was a stranger, a person who did what he did out of some sick sexual need. But if he hadn’t even touched her …