Last Girl Gone

by J. G. Hetherton

  “Aha,” he said.

  Laura said nothing.

  “I get it,” he said.

  “What’s to get?”

  “This so-called connection. Timinski said it was fact, eh?”

  “Not in so many words, no. He’s a source, and he doesn’t want all the facts to come straight from the horse’s mouth. If he fed me everything it could be traced back to him. Instead, if I do the footwork, go around collecting facts myself, I can cite those other sources and it will put him in the clear.”

  “Oh, I bet it will.”

  “He just pointed me in the right direction.”

  Rodgers grinned again. “Let me guess, he wants to be credited as an unnamed source in law enforcement.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “I think I may have invented that one.”

  She could feel her face turning red. “You can wipe that look off your face.”

  He pressed a hand to his chest. “What look?”

  “The same one as the cat that ate the canary.”

  “He’s using you. Agent Tim whatever-his-name-is, he’s going to have you prop up a theory.”

  Laura didn’t know what that meant, and Rodgers saw it in her face.

  “Girlie, didn’t you learn anything up there in the big city? A place like Boston, I figured you would have been used enough times to get a feel for when someone’s blowing smoke up your ass. In fact,” he said, considering her again, “I’m sure you did. This agent fella must be a real smooth cookie.”

  “Okay, I’ll bite—what’s propping up a theory?”

  “It’s a little trick in law enforcement. Say there’s a direction you want to take an investigation—a suspect you want to sweat, a location you want to stake out—but the evidence doesn’t quite justify it. Doesn’t really matter, since a gut feeling is the only thing a cop needs.” He paused, took a swig of his drink. “The good ones, anyway.”

  “And you were a good one.”

  “I’m sure it didn’t seem like it, me spending time chasing you kids off that baseball field. Not exactly glamorous.”

  “You were just doing your job,” she said.

  “And if that was the totality of my job, making sure kids don’t break arbitrary rules, I wouldn’t blame you for thinking less of me. But we did have a few actual crimes when I was sheriff, most of them solved by me. It wasn’t like working homicide in a major metro area, but I spent my fair share of time out near the limits of human nature. I was pretty proficient out there too. Always had a feeling about the bad ones.”

  “And this specific bad one?”

  “We’ll get to it, okay? But he’s having you prop him up, Miss Chambers, no doubt in my mind. If you’re lead investigator, and you find yourself in the situation I just described, the thing to do is find a nice young reporter and take them under your wing.”

  Take them under your wing—he said it with about as much sarcasm as possible.

  “Feed them a juicy story, anonymously of course, and let them go public with it. The juicier the story, the better it works. The public is outraged, they demand something be done. Soon enough the boys in elected office start shaking in their boots and word comes down from on high—sweat that suspect, Rodgers! And stake out that address!” He grinned again. “And I would always hang my head a little, like I had weekend plans that just got torpedoed, and say, ‘Yes, sir. If you insist, sir.’”

  Laura’s mouth hung open.

  He sipped some more water. “Never failed.”

  “Look, I’m not unfamiliar with the police using the press, and vice versa for that matter, but Timinski seems like a straight shooter.”

  “Oh, I’m sure he does.”

  “And besides, we’re both on the same side. I want a story that gets this guy caught, Timinski wants him caught, so what if he’s using me to put a little pressure on his superiors?”

  “Well, what if he’s wrong?”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “What if he’s wrong, and this so-called connection turns out to be complete and utter horseshit, and you print it on the front page with your name right next to it for everyone to see? He’s insulated, right? You can’t reveal him as a source, and he’s sure as hell not going to reveal himself as a source. You’ll take the fall alone.”

  She tapped her pen against the table. Rodgers put on a convincing show. Could Tim really be using her like that? She remembered her sins against Frank and grimaced. No one was immune to the people they trusted.

  “Maybe,” she said finally.

  “Take my word for it, Miss Chambers. This story is a trial balloon—and you’re riding in the balloon.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  He studied her for a moment, taking the measure of his guest. “Considering what I just told you, that this whole thing might be a wild-goose chase dangerous enough to end your career, do you still want to hear what I have to say?”

  She didn’t hesitate. “Absolutely.”

  He smiled for the third time. “Guess that means you’re worth talking to. Let’s go back to my den.”

  CHAPTER

  11

  THE DEN SQUATTED in the house’s northeast corner and received little afternoon sun. Heavy blinds cut off what light managed to sneak around from the west. Boxes stacked five high ran along every wall.

  “I knew you didn’t leave this behind,” Laura said.

  Rodgers shrugged and pushed himself down into a chair in front of a cluttered credenza. “What gave me away?”

  “You mean, besides the kind of pathology that makes a man keep all this paperwork? Call it a gut feeling. Journalists have them too.”

  He guffawed. “Yeah, usually they have a gut instinct for self-preservation.”

  Her shoulders slumped. “I can’t deny that.”

  “Oh, hey.” He reached out like he wanted to pat her shoulder, then thought better of it and let his arms hang awkwardly at his sides. “I didn’t mean you.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  He nodded. “Okay, so the wall behind you next to the door—that’s all 1988.”

  Her eyes widened. “I thought you might have trouble letting go, that you’d hang on to a lot of files. But that’s all 1988?”

  “I only kept the ones I couldn’t forget about.”

  Her eyes moved up and down the rows, surveying the boxes. “Even if you wanted to forget, looks like there’d be a hell of a lot to unload.”

  He stood and walked to the boxes, laid a hand on one in the top row. “It was a bad one all around,” he said quietly.

  “I don’t mean to be disrespectful, er—”

  “Don’s fine.”

  “—but can you give me a complete summary? I don’t want you to think I’m looking for a shortcut here. I’m not opposed to going through every piece of paper in there twice if the story calls for it. But first I need to see if we can find a connection that justifies such an expense of time and effort.”

  “A summary I can do.”

  “Maybe start with the nickname.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Weird how those work, isn’t it? No one really picks a nickname, not even for a serial killer. It just floats out of the ether, and in just a matter of days we make some kind of collective unconscious decision: this is what we’re going to call the son of a bitch.”

  “It came from the ether?”

  He kept talking without looking at her, almost to himself. “Or maybe it’s just convenience. Got to call him something, can’t just keep calling him the perp or the suspect. No, in a case that goes on long enough, you get kind of familiar with the person you’re hunting. You might not know his face, but all the little details start to fit together like bricks in a wall until finally they’ve built something. Someone. You know him like an old friend. And he needs a name.”

  “Is that really how you feel about him?”

  Her voice snapped him back from whatever daydream he’d descended into. He shook it off and looked at her again.

 
“Over the years I’ve felt just about every emotion possible for a case like that. But the name thing? No, forget all that—I was just talking. After we found Susan Gilroy, the first girl in a field, we were all standing there looking down at her body. She was nine years old, but she seemed smaller. After the things he did to her, she seemed very small indeed. She looked like a flower that had wilted and dried, like the slightest wind might blow her away.”

  He ran a hand down the stubble on his chin.

  “It was horrible. Real bad. Worse thing any of us had seen. And I said something like, ‘Are we going to catch this guy?’ And one of the other guys there, some detective, I can’t remember who, he looked down at her and said, ‘We’ve got to. This kid is a real sick puppy.’ Or something similar. And that was it, that was all it took. A few cops started calling him the Kid, and some days later we all were. Then it bled over into the papers. The rest history.”

  “The Kid,” she said under her breath.

  “Stupid, right?”

  “I don’t know. It’s better than something huge and over top. Better not to make him a bogeyman.”

  “Could be you’re right,” he said, and started pulling down white banker’s boxes. He arranged them in sequential order across the floor.

  He opened one.

  “Let’s start with the last one,” he said. “Let’s start with the Christmas Angel.”

  * * *

  “Maria Mendelsohn,” Laura said, recognizing the moniker from her reading.

  “That’s right. December twenty-fifth, 1988.”

  “There’s almost no details about her in the papers.”

  “No, we left them out that time.”

  She wanted to ask why, but decided to let him tell the story at his own pace.

  “That year was unseasonably cold for central North Carolina, and starting late on Christmas Eve, a rare snow fell. It was a good four or five inches, enough to lay a blanket on the world. Enough that when the Mendelsohns got up Christmas morning, they didn’t immediately notice what was in their front yard.”

  He coughed, sipped his water.

  “There’s an unusual shape under the snow, but it’s hard to make out. It’s next to a wide log, what was left of a downed tree from a few weeks earlier. Klaus Mendelsohn had been meaning to get to it, but it’s at least four feet in diameter. A big job. In fact, he spends the early morning hours dragging brush from the parts he’d already cut near the top, and shoveling his driveway.”

  “Seems unnecessary,” Laura said.

  “Around here? The snow probably would have melted inside of forty-eight hours. But Klaus was looking for something to occupy his hands and his mind. It wasn’t a normal Christmas morning, you see. Their daughter Maria had been missing for three days.”

  “Where was she taken from? Was there any—”

  Rodgers cut her off. “Just let me get through this, okay? Anyway, since he couldn’t sleep, he’d been at it since dawn. At ten thirty, he takes an early lunch break. Goes into the house, eats with his wife. During that lunch, the low winter sun finally climbs up over the eave of the house and shines directly into the front yard. At eleven thirty Mrs. Mendelsohn looks out the front bay window and starts screaming.”

  Rodgers shook his head.

  “Never stopped screaming as far as I know. Old Klaus ended up sending her to an institution. Of course he was never the same either. Hung himself before Christmas next.”

  Laura leaned forward, queasy and mesmerized all at once.

  “The object by the log,” she said. The words came out so quiet, she almost couldn’t hear herself.

  “It was their daughter. What was left of her, anyway. Someone had removed her nose and lips, perimortem, at another location. She was transported, pushed up against the log with her hands bound behind her. Then he cut into her like he was performing seppuku. Her intestines piled in her lap…”

  He trailed off, gulped water, ran his shirtsleeve across his brow to stem the tide of sweat. It ran unchecked down the sides of his face.

  “She was small enough, and the snow was just thick enough, for it to cover up the details. It gave us a few clues, of course. We know it happened before the snow started. All the blood was covered, and there were no footprints other than Klaus’s. No, she was perfectly concealed until the snow started to melt away.”

  Laura tried to make herself focus, started mapping out a timeline in her notebook. “So he kills her, brings her to the house, then—”

  “No, no, no,” Rodgers rasped. “He mutilated her, but she was still alive. She was alive when he placed her down next to the log. She was alive when he opened her up.”

  Laura said nothing.

  “She could see her own house, do you understand that? Her parents didn’t sleep much. Based on statements from Klaus Mendelsohn, he and his wife were in the front room from sunset onwards. In the front room with the big bay window, curtains open, all the lights blazing.”

  “She could see them,” Laura breathed. “He wanted her to see them.”

  Rodgers squeezed his eyes shut. His nostrils trembled with every breath. “Now you’re getting it. All that little girl wanted to do—all any taken child would want—is to make it home. And this … person, he waited until she was close enough to see it, hear it. Almost touch it. Then he killed her. Only then.”

  “Jesus.”

  “And when you think about it, that’s only the beginning. The Kid spent the time and energy to bring her back. He risked someone seeing him, being identified, being caught—everything really—just to create that frozen tableau. To what end?”

  Laura shrugged. “To give someone nightmares. Who knows what’s going through his head?”

  “You say that like he’s some kind of mystery, but as far as I’m concerned, your gut reaction is just right. He wanted her parents to see his little diorama. That’s part of his game. Maybe it’s the end goal.”

  “What about the other two girls?”

  Rodgers snorted. “Practically routine compared to the last one. But there were similarities. The modus operandi—manual strangulation, the bodies discovered in fields around the county. The girls were bound with the same twine. It was twisted out of unusual bright colors. All three of them still had a loop on an ankle or a wrist.” He sighed. “But we could never find a match. I imagine your FBI fella has drawn the connection to Olive Hanson using some or all of that.”

  Laura finished jotting in her notebook before looking back up, waiting for him to continue.

  Rodgers scratched at his stubble, said nothing.

  “Suspects? Other physical evidence? Theories?”

  He shook his head slowly. “Never managed to get that far. You can go through every box if you want, read every piece of paper, but that’s a pretty complete summary. I told you everything that matters; the rest is just a very large collection of dead ends.”

  Laura closed the notebook, stood, and surveyed the boxes one last time.

  “So what’s not in here?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m not asking for anything official, so before you answer, understand I’m not recording your answer.”

  He nodded.

  “But come on, open up a little. I know there can’t be any real evidence, or anything else with proof to back it up, or it would have been important enough to run up the flagpole. I’m asking, what’s not in the files? What are your personal opinions on all this? You’ve got to give me something, Don. Who do you think did it?”

  He laughed, a bark cut off so sharply she thought it might mutate into a sob.

  “Who did it? Who did it—you’re really asking me that?”

  She sat down again, leaned across the table, put her hand on his. “I’m not expecting a revelation, but there must be something.”

  He cracked the knuckles in his right hand, then his left. “My opinion?”

  “Anything,” she said.

  “Okay, we’ve dispensed with what I know, so here’s what I think: it’s
not an outsider; it’s someone who lives right here in Hillsborough.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the most important connection between all three girls, and between this new one, is that he displays them. Most killers, serial or otherwise, do one of two things upon completing a murder. One”—he ticked them off on his fingers—“they leave the body where it falls, recognizing that transporting it opens them up to being seen. Or two, they transport the body intending to hide it. The Kid does neither of those. He moves the body out into the open. At great personal risk, he displays them.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You’re a reporter. When you put together a story, you’re writing for an audience, aren’t you? You write about some fireman saving a puppy, you’re trying to inject them with a little hero worship. You write about molestation, you want them to be appalled.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “He’s writing for an audience too. All of us.” Rodgers gestured to the space around them. “And he wants to see the reactions to his work painted on our faces. I imagine it’s sweet to him. How could he do that without living here? Without walking among us?”

  “I can’t print anything without the evidence to back it up.”

  “Good,” he said. “You print that and you’ll set off a panic. Besides, I’d deny every word. But you can have my files.”

  He walked her out to the car and helped her fill the trunk and back seat with boxes. When they were finished, Laura said, “Let me ask you, do you think it’s the same killer? Do you think the Kid took Teresa Mitchem?”

  Rodgers shrugged. “Neither of us is inside the investigation. But if the FBI sent you to talk to me, there has to be a reason.”

  “What does your gut tell you?”

  He fixed her with a look. “Maybe you didn’t notice, but this whole time we’ve been talking about him? We’ve been using the present tense.”

  An icy finger slid up her spine.

  “You have a good day now, Miss Chambers, and please don’t come back. I’ve been trying to forget this for almost thirty years. Now I’ve passed the torch to you. Consider it my final contribution.”

  “Don’t quit just yet,” she said.

  But he was already up the stairs and back inside.