by Lisa Gardner
Barely a whisper now. “Maybe.”
“Like you said,” Kimberly murmured, “money’s good. You’re still willing to be alone with him, Delilah. How bad can he be?”
The girl didn’t answer for a long time. When she finally did, Kimberly had to lean forward to catch her words. “Last time I was with him, I was on my knees. Doing, you know. And right at the final moment, his hands suddenly wrapped around my neck, squeezed. I couldn’t breathe. I was choking, hitting at him. And I heard him … I heard him whisper, Ginny. Then all of a sudden, he released my neck and I got the hell out of there.
“Thing is, I don’t think he knows he said it. I think he was caught up in the moment. But I’m not sure. Maybe he realized it later. Maybe he knows that I know. I can’t … I don’t feel so good about things anymore. Because what if he did hurt Ginny? Choked her like that. And what if I’m the only one who can connect her to him? You gotta help me. It’s not just about Ginny. It’s me, too. I need police protection.”
Kimberly sighed, rubbed the bridge of her nose. “You want my trust? Let’s start with your real name.”
“Delilah Rose. You can look it up, the police did.”
“Name, date of birth.”
“Why is it always about me? I always gotta prove, prove, prove. I just gave you a pervert on a silver platter. Maybe you should prove yourself to me for a change.”
“Which brings me to my second question: Why’d you call me? How’d you even know my name?”
Delilah wasn’t as quick to answer this time. If anything, Kimberly thought the girl suddenly appeared sly. “You’re the one who caught the Eco-Killer. I saw it on the news. The rookie agent, a girl, no less. I figure if Spideyman killed Ginny, you’re the one who can make it right.”
“I can’t make it right, Delilah. There’s no evidence of a crime, and even if there was, it’s not my party. You need to talk to the Sandy Springs PD.”
“No. It has to be you. You caught the Eco-Killer, you’ll help Ginny.”
“Delilah—”
“I got something.”
Kimberly stilled, eyed the girl more warily. “What is something?”
“That night, when he was choking me, I happened to notice it on the floor, beneath the seat. When he wasn’t looking, I scooped it up.” Delilah looked around the room, as if to ensure they were really alone, then she reached down into her halter top, producing from her left bra cup a heavy gold ring.
“It’s Ginny’s,” she whispered, plopping it on the table with a metallic thud. “She used to wear it on a chain around her neck. She never took it off. I mean never. So, see, this proves Ginny was in Spideyman’s truck.”
Kimberly arched a brow, but moved the ring closer to her, using the tip of her pen and careful not to touch. It looked to her to be a class ring. The center stone was blue. Some kind of inscription appeared on the inside but was hard to read, given the layers of grime.
“Who else saw Ginny wearing this ring?”
Delilah shrugged. “Dunno. Never asked.”
“Did she tell you how she got it?”
Another negative.
“Anyone else know you found it in Mr. Dinchara’s truck?”
“Hell no! Now, see, this is the kind of business that can really get a girl hurt—”
“Yeah, yeah. Got that.” Kimberly frowned, studied the ring. Frowned again. Finally, she sat back. “Can I take this?”
“Sure, yeah, that’s why I brought it. You can open a case now, right?”
“Not quite.”
Delilah’s turn to scowl. “Hey, you asked for evidence, I gave you evidence!”
“Strictly speaking, Delilah, this ring is not evidence. No chain of custody, meaning it would never hold up in court. That it belongs to Ginny has not been corroborated. That it was found inside a subject’s truck is equally murky. At the moment, it’s merely a very dirty class ring.”
“I don’t like your attitude,” Delilah said.
“Trust me, feeling’s mutual.” Kimberly rapped the end of her pen on the table three times fast. “Here’s what we’re gonna do, Delilah. Remember what I said? You gotta pay to play. We’re going to consider this ring a down payment.” She took out a business card, circled the Bureau’s main number on the front. “Bring me more information. Times, places, even other people who can vouch that Ginny Jones used to work in this area, wearing this ring, and has now disappeared. Maybe, if you’re lucky, you can find enough to build a case for the local PD. I’ll help walk you through it, but I gotta be honest. As of this time, this is a case for the locals, not the FBI.”
She started gathering up her supplies again. This time, Delilah didn’t try to stop her, just crossed her arms over her chest with a look of resigned hurt.
It wasn’t until Kimberly stood that Delilah spoke again.
“How far along?”
“Pardon?”
The girl was staring at Kimberly’s stomach. “When’re you due?”
For a moment, Kimberly was nonplussed. Then she caught herself. She was at that point now where other people were bound to notice. She said, “Summer.”
“You feel okay?”
“I feel fine, thank you.”
“Smells bother me,” the girl said matter-of-factly. “I get tired, too. But I keep away from the alcohol and the drugs. Just because I hook for a living doesn’t mean I don’t want better for my baby.”
The girl let her jacket slide open, and for the first time, Kimberly saw it, the tight, rounded abdomen, not so different from her own. Delilah reached for Kimberly’s mini-recorder, picked it up.
“Can I take this?”
“No. Government property. Gotta buy your own.”
Delilah put it back down. “But if I can get more information from Spideyman, maybe get him saying something about Ginny on tape, then you’ll help me?”
Kimberly was still staring at the girl’s belly. She was suddenly sorry she had come down to the Sandy Springs PD. She didn’t want to be handling a young, very vulnerable, pregnant hooker.
Her business card was still lying on the table. Finally, she picked it up and wrote her cell phone number on the back.
“If you get him on tape, call me at that number.” Then, not really as an afterthought: “Delilah, be careful.”
FIVE
My older brother used to tell me, “Do as I say, or the Burgerman will get you!”
“There is no such thing as a Burgerman,” I would shout back.
“Sure there is. He’s big, seven feet tall, dressed all in black. He enters the rooms of all the naughty boys in the middle of the night, snatching them out of bed and taking them off to his factory, where he grinds them into burgers and sells the meat to grocery stores. All the cheap stuff that’s turned brown in the meat market? That’s naughty-boy burgers. You can ask anyone.”
I didn’t believe him until one night I woke up, and the Burgerman was standing at the foot of my bed.
“Shhhh,” he said. “Don’t say a word, and maybe I’ll let your family live.”
I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t scream. I couldn’t move. I just stared at this large hulking form, nearly seven feet tall, all in black. I couldn’t believe my brother had been right. Then I started to shake, and my heart started to pound, and I think I wet the bed.
“Move!” the Burgerman demanded harshly. “You wanna save your family, boy, then get your scrawny ass outta bed.”
But I couldn’t move. I could only shiver uncontrollably.
He tossed back the covers. He grabbed my arm and yanked me to the floor, his fingers digging into my upper arm. He twisted my shoulder and it hurt.
My legs followed him on their own, I swear that’s how it happened, because surely there was no way I wanted to go with a man like him.
In the hallway, he paused as if to get his bearings. I could see the cracked door of my brother’s room, just two feet away. I could hear the sound of my father snoring one room beyond that.
Scream, I thought. This i
s it. Do something.
In the dark, I could feel the Burgerman appraising me. He didn’t seem panicked or even alarmed.
Instead, he smiled, a flash of white in the dark.
“See, boy. See how much they care about you? I’m about to ruin your goddamn life, and your family can’t even be bothered to wake up for the event. Remember this, boy. You mean nothing to them. As of this moment, they no longer exist.
“You belong to me.”
He took away my clothes. Tossed me facedown on the bed. I fought as much as a nine-year-old boy can fight, my face pressed into the mattress, my lungs screaming for air. I thought he would kill me. Maybe I prayed he would once he was done.
But he rolled over. Smoked a cigarette.
I didn’t know what to do, lying facedown, wetness everywhere.
I fell asleep.
He woke me up, beat me, yelled at me until I did what he wanted me to do. Afterward, more cigarettes and then it all started again.
I lost track of time. I lived in a hazy, naked state, my insides too hot, my outside too cold. He wouldn’t allow me to even have a blanket.
Sometimes he brought me food. Burgers, pizza. First time I ate, I threw up. He laughed and told me I’d get used to it. Then he handed me a spoon, pointed to the pile, and said if I wanted to eat again, I’d better get busy.
On and on and on. Life with the Burgerman, grinding the naughty boy into dust.
One day, he opened the door of the hotel room. The sunlight blinded me. I had to shield my eyes. The air smelled like rain and, unconsciously, I drew in a deep breath. The rain was the first thing I tasted that wasn’t like ashes on my tongue.
Burgerman laughed. “See, boy, even after all that, you still want to live. Guess you must have liked it some after all.”
He tossed me clothes. Not my old ones, but new ones he’d purchased somewhere. Barked at me to get dressed. “Goddammit, show some pride, boy, and stop running around so naked. What’re you trying to do, tempt me again?”
I scrambled to get dressed, but wasn’t fast enough.
This time when he heaved off, he grunted, “See, boy, told you you liked it.”
He drove me to another hotel. He wore a suit. I was in a stiff, navy blue sweat suit, two sizes too big. I felt thin and small and ghostlike. I must have looked like a refugee from a foreign war, exhausted, glassy-eyed, hollow.
The receptionist regarded me with concern.
Burgerman leaned close. “I’m with Social Services,” he confided in a low voice. “Just removed the boy from his family. Hard, hard case. The stuff his parents did … He’s had a rough start, but God willing, I’ll take him to a good home now and his real life will begin.”
“Oh, you poor thing,” the girl said.
Then, out of nowhere, I screamed. Screamed and screamed and screamed, told the world of my horror in each heart-stopping wail. I felt as if my lungs were going to burst out of my chest, my head explode with the terrible pressure.
“Told you his parents were monsters,” Burgerman said.
“Oh, you poor thing,” the girl said again.
Eventually he took me to a small apartment. There was a phone, but it only worked with a credit card. The outside door he rigged with a key in, key out lock, with him palming the only key.
At least he finally left me alone, sometimes for hours at a time. I would watch Bugs Bunny until I started to hate the rascally rabbit, so I turned off the TV and watched nothing at all. Just stared at the dingy gray wall. Stared and stared and stared and felt myself grow very tiny.
That was the first time I noticed a spider. I caught it. Put it in a cup, watched its desperate scramble to escape.
I guess the Burgerman was right in the end.
I must have liked it after all.
SIX
“Brown Recluse Spiders are challenging to control, largely because of their secretive habits.”
FROM Brown Recluse Spider,
BY MICHAEL F. POTTER, URBAN ENTOMOLOGIST, UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE
Rita couldn’t sleep. It was one of life’s little ironies; now that she finally had the time to rest, she had lost the ability. Seemed like every night followed the same long gray arc. She would watch the glow of the moon sweep across the far wall. Catch the ripple of the curtains as the cold wind seeped through the edges of the aged windows. Listen to her tiny old house creak and pop as winter treated its wooden joints as poorly as it treated her flesh-and-blood ones.
By the time the sun finally peeked over the mountains, she would wonder for the fiftieth time why she didn’t head to Florida like so many of her friends had done. Or maybe Arizona. Less humidity. More heat. She thought she would like Arizona.
She wasn’t going anywhere and she knew it. She had been born in this house, back in the days when the midwife came to you and labor was no reason to see a doctor. She and her four sisters and three brothers had run through these hills, climbed these trees, trampled the flowers in her mother’s beloved garden.
She was the only one left now. The wizened old woman everyone expected to disappear into a nursing home, much as her mother had done. But Rita was made of sterner stuff. She avoided the diabetes, high cholesterol, and brain cancer that had stolen so many members of her family. She held on, whipcord lean, barely a pound above bird weight, but still capable of splitting a cord of wood every fall in preparation for winter. She hoed her own garden. Shelled her own beans, swept her own porch, and beat her own rugs.
She kept on keeping on, waiting for something not even she understood. Maybe because at her age, waiting was about all she had left.
Once upon a time, her high school sweetheart had whisked her away to the big city of Atlanta. Donny had wanted to see the world. Mostly, he’d seen the airspace above Germany before some Nazi had shot him down, and Rita went from being a young bride to a young widow in less than two years. She’d hardly been alone in her fate. Plenty of other pretty young things crying in their coffee or, more like it, their mid-afternoon brandy. But then the war ended, a stream of handsome men returning and scooping up most of those girls in a whirlwind of thank-God-we’re-alive sex.
Rita had considered her options. Twenty was too young to be sitting home every night, and while she enjoyed her secretarial job, maybe some of Donny’s wanderlust had rubbed off on her. She’d already cut the umbilical cord once. Might as well go out and see what there was to see. Find a strapping young man. Have an adventure.
It didn’t work. In the end, she was not giddy or euphoric or, truth be told, that interested in clumsy, back-of-the-seat sex. Rita just wanted to be Rita. So she settled into the little house she bought with Donny’s death benefit. She grew a garden. She built a front patio. And when the loneliness grew too much, she did the last thing in the world anyone expected her to do: She became a foster mom.
She took in kids for nearly twenty years, from squalling infants to sullen ten-year-olds. She would pick them up at the local Chick-fil-A, their worldly possessions filling a single black Hefty bag, easily tossed in the backseat. She would buy them lemonade, then take them home and give them the lay of the land.
She adhered to basic rules. Follow them, and things ran relatively smooth. Disobey and be punished. Some kids took to the system easily. Others learned the hard way.
Couple of kids scared her, though she liked to believe they never knew. Couple of the kids, she genuinely loved. Though again, she liked to believe they never knew. Life was tough enough without believing a single foster mom could make a difference.
She gave the kids a roof over their heads, three solid meals a day, a place to feel secure, and, hopefully, a foundation for someday, when they finally escaped the system and managed their own lives. She liked to think there were people scattered across Atlanta who still smiled when recalling the time they lived with a woman who ironed even the doilies and made them say prayers every night, and while they resented her at the time, they understood her now. And, maybe, they even loved her a litt
le, though of course, it was only proper that she would never know.
Thinking you could change a life by becoming a foster parent was nothing but romantic claptrap, of course. Of the nearly thirty children Rita had seen in her day, at least five were dead. Drugs, violence, suicide, risky behavior. Did it matter?
Donny died. Her children died. And then one by one, her father, her mother, her brothers, her sisters, until here she was, back in the home of her childhood, one week from her ninetieth birthday, acutely conscious of the slow passage of time and the very real presence of ghosts.
She got out of bed, the sky barely a paler shade of gray, but close enough to call morning. She shuffled her feet into fat blue slippers, grabbed her thick terry cloth robe and shrugged it on over her long flannel pajamas. She wore a sleeping cap, not at all fashionable, but very helpful when your skin was thinner than paper and the old circulation system was moving so slowly she sometimes caught a chill while standing in front of the heated radiator in the parlor.
She made it downstairs, moving at an unhurried pace. In the kitchen, she got the water boiling for a cup of tea. Then it was over to the refrigerator for eggs. She ate two scrambled every morning with one piece of toast. The protein kept her strong, and the breakfast never failed to bring back memories of her youth.
Even now, she heard the floorboard creak behind her; her brother Joseph, in one of his moods again. Joseph had always been a trickster, liking to pull out her chair right before she took a seat.
“Now, now, Joseph,” she chided, without turning around. “I’m getting too old for these games. Last time, you nearly cost me a hip!”
Another creak. She caught a glimpse of a shadow, dashing across the wall. She thought it was Michael, or maybe Jacob. They visited often, no doubt enjoying the familiarity of their childhood kitchen as much as she did.
She saw her parents less often, her mother mostly, hunched over the kitchen sink, humming a mindless tune as she washed vegetables or tended to dinner. Once, she’d encountered her father, standing in the middle of the parlor smoking his pipe. The moment she entered, however, he disappeared, seeming almost embarrassed.