The Forgotten Girls

by Owen Laukkanen

36

  The man wasn’t much to look at, when Pamela Moody first saw him. He was crammed into a booth at the back of the Hungry Horse Saloon, an unfamiliar face among a fair crowd of regulars, the bar pretty well packed, everyone looking for a place to wait out the storm. He was dressed for the weather, bundled up in an old army coat, a heavy wool watch cap. Her eyes had been drawn to the way the bar lights caught the snowmelt on his clothing, in his beard, tiny water droplets gleaming like crystal, unexpectedly bright.

  He’d been watching her. That was the next thing she noticed, how he turned away quickly as soon as she made eye contact, his gaze darting down to the table, furtive. When he looked up at her again, it was like he was forcing himself to meet her eyes, like everything in his being was trying to pull him away.

  “Something to drink?” she asked him.

  “Rainier,” he replied, too loud, abruptly, like he wasn’t used to talking—or maybe he wasn’t used to being taken seriously. There was defiance in his voice, a challenge. He wasn’t comfortable here. She could feel his eyes on her as she went for his beer, tracking her movements across the bar.

  When she turned around, though, the bottle in her hand, he wasn’t looking at her, but down at the table, hunched into himself and drawn into the shadows, and she felt a brief burst of pity for him, a quiet, wilting man in a room full of blue-collar beer swiggers, macho-man types.

  She set the bottle in front of him, and the man put a five-dollar bill on the table and looked up at her again, something desperate in his expression, some kind of yearning, like there was something he wanted to say but just couldn’t. She waited a beat, but he couldn’t find the nerve, and she took the money and left him to his beer, feeling his eyes on her every time she crossed the room.

  He didn’t move much the rest of the night. She brought him two more Rainiers, and he paid and tipped well again, and when she went back to his booth a while later to see about a fourth, he was gone, no trace of him but the puddle of snowmelt where his hat had lain on the booth’s vinyl seat.

  But now he’d showed up again, surprised her in the parking lot outside the saloon, the bar closed and quiet, the lot all but empty, only her boss’s Silverado and her man’s F-150 left in the snow. The storm was still howling, wind gusting, the air white, and she’d slogged through at least a foot of new powder on her way to the truck, could hardly see back to the saloon when she reached it.

  She was standing at the driver’s-side door, fumbling with her keys, when she felt him behind her. Couldn’t have heard him over the wind, couldn’t have seen him through the snow. She was alone one minute, and the next he was there, ten feet from the truck when she turned around.

  “Car won’t start,” he said. Still wouldn’t look her in the eye. “Battery, I guess. You wouldn’t happen to have jumper cables?”

  Pamela glanced back toward the saloon, a reflex, Reg still inside, finishing the count. The way the snow was blowing, he wouldn’t see her truck from the door. Wouldn’t hear her calling over the wind. Shit.

  She did have jumper cables, stashed under the back bench, could help the guy out if she wanted, but everything about this situation was screaming that something was wrong. Telling Pamela to get in the truck, lock the doors, haul ass for home. Leave this creepy guy here and let Reg deal with him.

  The man tried a smile, but it came off as awkward as the rest of his act. “I’ve been out here an hour,” he said. “Pretty well stranded. Think you could help me out?”

  Shit, shit, shit. But just being awkward wasn’t a crime, was it? And what the hell, he’d tipped her decent. What kind of Montanan would she be to abandon a guy in a snowstorm?

  Of all the men in that bar for you to worry about, she thought, this guy is the least likely.

  “Yeah, I have cables,” she said finally. “Back of my truck. Where are you parked?”

  The man waved into the blizzard somewhere. “Across that way. Won’t take more than a minute of your time, I promise.”

  “Well, all right.” She took her keys from her purse, turned to unlock the truck. Felt him move again, saw him, too, this time, a shadow in the corner of her eye. Then something jarred her head and she was falling, and then she was down in the snow and he was standing above her, looking down at her, his lip curled up again, but this wasn’t a smile. This was something mean, hateful, hungry.

  Pamela tried to speak, but she couldn’t, and then her vision started to go dark at the edges, and she fought it, or tried to, but the dark came on too strong. Then she was out, for minutes or hours or days, and she awoke with a fierce headache and a need to throw up. The man was there, watching her, and he wasn’t looking away anymore, didn’t look nearly so shy, and all Pamela Moody wanted in the world was to go back to the darkness again.

  37

  The rider stepped out of the locomotive’s cab as the train slowed for the siding. He climbed down the ladder and watched the forest for the telltale break in the trees. The train drifted to a stop, a red signal in the distance. The rider dropped off the locomotive and into the snow. Hurried across the main track toward the forest on the other side.

  His snowmobile lay hidden where he’d left it, as always. It was covered in snow, a foot at least, fresh. The rider pulled the cover off of the machine and turned the key in the ignition. The engine rumbled to life, reliable as always. The rider liked reliable. He liked trucks that never failed, trains that ran through freak storms. He liked law enforcement that never bothered to look too hard at a dead woman’s body.

  And the law in the mountains was nothing if not reliable. The rider chose drug addicts, prostitutes, the homeless, and runaways. He chose women for whom an early death wasn’t an if question, but a when. He chose women the mountains wouldn’t miss, women who died easy. Women who nobody saw.

  The rider had been careful when he took Pamela Moody. He’d worn a condom, as always. He’d wiped her truck for fingerprints, tried to avoid touching her body with his bare skin as much as he could. He’d tried his best; sometimes his anger took over when he was punishing these women. Sometimes he blacked out and couldn’t help what he did.

  The odds were almost certain that nobody would find Pamela Moody’s body, at least not until spring thaw. The snow would bury her until the weather warmed, and then the animals would have their way with what remained. Maybe a hiker would stumble onto her bones sometime in the summer. Someone would find her truck. What story would they tell themselves?

  She was a bar waitress. Maybe she turned tricks on the side. Maybe it was drugs, alcohol. She got drunk one night and drove off in a storm. It’s a miracle she made it as far as she did before . . .

  Before the inevitable happened.

  The rider sat astride his snowmobile, letting the engine warm. Dug into his pocket for his latest souvenir. He’d been creative this time. He’d been bold.

  PAMELA MOODY, read the label on the inhaler. FOR ORAL INHALATION. TAKE AS DIRECTED.

  The rider had waited until Pamela Moody was disposed of before he’d claimed the inhaler. He’d taken it from the floor of her truck, carried it with him to the train, studied it in the cab of the locomotive as the train rumbled westward. He saw Pamela Moody’s panicked eyes. Heard her frantic gasps for air. The memory pleased him. He would cherish it for a very long time.

  The rider pocketed the inhaler. Reversed the snowmobile from its hiding place. Aimed it up the mountain, through the fresh snow. He was tired. He was eager to get home.

  38

  The blizzard raged through Butcher’s Creek all day and another night, stranding Stevens and Windermere in the railroad hotel with Deputy Finley’s stack of files and the Gold Spike’s dwindling supply of food and drink.

  But on the morning of the second day, just when Windermere was starting to worry that old Hank would run out of chicken fingers—or beer—the storm showed signs of calming. By nine o’clock or thereabouts, the snow had slowed to ju
st a scattering of flakes, and Windermere could look from the hotel window clear across the train tracks to the creek on the other side, a marked improvement from the zero-visibility conditions the day before. By eleven, a snowplow had rolled through town, cleaning up the main road. And by eleven fifteen, Stevens and Windermere were packed up in Finley’s Lincoln County SUV, headed east.

  “Closest cell service is probably in Eureka, about thirty miles from here,” the deputy told them as she drove. “I figure we’ll head up there, check in with our respective people, get this investigation rolling.”

  Damn right, Windermere thought. And step on it. She’d been stewing in that crummy hotel for far too long, reviewing the twenty-five probable cases with Stevens until she was sure they could recite the details of each one back to front. Now Windermere was sick of planning. They’d been groping in the dark for far too long on this thing already. The weather had cleared; it was time to execute.

  The drive to Eureka took nearly an hour. Windermere watched her phone the whole way. Finally found bars on the outskirts of town, and as soon as the bars came, so did the messages.

  Forty missed calls, roughly half of them from Mathers. Another ten from Drew Harris, and one or two from the cable company trying to sell her on the HBO package. One look at Stevens in the backseat and Windermere knew he was seeing the same action.

  “Mathers called,” he said when he caught her watching him. “He called a lot.”

  “Yeah, no kidding.” Windermere punched redial. “Let’s hope he had more to say than just he misses us.”

  —

  Carla.”

  Mathers sounded relieved, and as loath as Windermere was to admit it, she was kind of glad. It was good to hear his voice—nothing against Kirk Stevens and Kerry Finley, but Windermere was starting to get lonely for her big, dumb boyfriend. Not that she’d ever tell him that.

  “Ran into a bit of snow, Mathers,” she said. “You getting separation anxiety already?”

  “A little bit, I won’t lie,” Mathers replied. “But mostly I wanted to catch you up on your case.”

  “Catch me up?” Windermere snorted. “You think you know something I don’t?”

  “I’d bet on it.”

  Finley pulled the SUV off the highway and parked in front of a small sheriff’s detachment. The deputy held up five fingers—five minutes—at Windermere, who nodded Go ahead. She turned her attention back to the phone as Finley climbed from the car.

  “Okay, Mathers,” she said, switching her phone to speaker. “I have Stevens listening in, so don’t get kinky on me. Just give us the facts.”

  “The facts.” Mathers inhaled, like he was about to run down a list. “Okay, first of all, your Jane Doe is an Anishinaabe woman from Wisconsin named Ashlyn Corbine, aka Ashlyn Southernwood. She ran away from home after the death of her grandmother six years ago and had apparently been riding trains ever since. Her mother didn’t put out a search for her because she figured her daughter was happier on the rails.”

  Windermere swapped glances with Stevens. “Huh. How’d you ID her?”

  “Easy. A woman named Ronda Sixkill gave me her name.”

  “Ronda . . . Sixkill. Okay?”

  “Mila Scott uploaded a picture from an IP address associated with Ms. Sixkill’s personal Internet connection, in Seattle. I put the Seattle office on the case, and they got me Ronda Sixkill.”

  “What about Mila Scott?” Stevens asked.

  “I’ll get to that,” Mathers said. “Ronda Sixkill knew Ashlyn, and she knows Mila, too. She believes Ashlyn was murdered by a serial killer who haunts the Northwestern Railroad’s High Line, and apparently Mila feels the same.”

  “Yeah, we’re kind of feeling that way ourselves,” Windermere replied. “Last we heard, Mila was trying to get out to the High Line to do some amateur sleuthing.”

  “But she couldn’t ride a freight train out here in this weather,” Stevens said. “Too cold.”

  “Yeah,” Mathers said. “That’s what everyone I talked to thought, too. But apparently we just missed Mila Scott at Ms. Sixkill’s house, and she was headed east on the next available train.”

  “That can’t be right. She’ll die.”

  “Not so much.” Mathers let it hang, and Windermere knew this was the punch line. “Those big coal trains through the mountains, they use multiple engines, but only one crew. Sometimes they put a remote-controlled engine in the middle of the train.”

  Windermere flashed back to the freight trains they’d seen on the Northwestern main line. She could remember seeing engines in the middle and on the rear of the trains. “Yeah, okay. Aren’t they all locked up?”

  “They are, but they all use the same key. You get a Northwestern key, you can ride any locomotive on the railroad. They’re heated; they have bathrooms and kitchen facilities. Ronda Sixkill had a Northwestern key. She gave it to Mila.”

  Windermere stared at her phone. “So you’re saying this girl is looking for our serial killer, riding toward us right now, in a freaking heated train engine, Derek?”

  “I assume so. I have Northwestern Railroad police checking every remote engine that comes through the Cascade Mountains, but so far they haven’t turned up any sign of her. So it could be I’m totally wrong about this.” He coughed. “But that’s not the only thing about these remote engines, Carla.”

  He waited. Windermere waited. Stevens got it first. “Those trains run in any weather,” he said. “Even storms like yesterday, those trains were running.”

  “Yep,” Mathers said. “Exactly.”

  Through the SUV’s windshield, Windermere watched Kerry Finley come out of the sheriff’s detachment and cross toward the vehicle, her mouth a thin line, her brow creased with worry. But Stevens was still talking.

  “If Mila Scott could get her hands on a key, it’s safe to say she’s not the only one,” he was saying. “We’ve been wondering how our killer could get around in these storms. Prevailing opinion has been it’s impossible.”

  “Yeah, well,” Mathers said. “It sounds like prevailing opinion is wrong.”

  Finley opened the driver’s door of the SUV. Looked in at Stevens and Windermere, then noticed the phone. Opened her mouth like she had something important to say.

  “One second, Derek,” Windermere said. She turned to Finley. “What’s up?”

  “Sheriff’s department just heard from our counterparts in Flathead County,” she said. “They had a young woman go missing last night down in Hungry Horse. Haven’t turned up any sign of her.”

  Windermere felt her body go numb. Last night, while they’d been stuck in that shitty hotel in that nothing town, believing there was no way the killer could be anything but stuck just as bad. Damn it all.

  Stevens was already buckling his seat belt. So was Finley. “He did it again,” Windermere said, though they all knew it already. “He got another one.”

  39

  She was alive.

  Pam Moody woke up in a monochrome wasteland. Flat, lifeless white and dull, dirty gray. Hard, jagged black. And red, too; there was plenty of red. But even the red seemed devoid of color.

  Her head buzzed. She was groggy. She thought she’d been dreaming. Then the pain came back, sudden and unrelenting—hurt like a thousand knives stabbing into her body—and she could feel the man’s hands on her throat again, remembered very clearly what he’d done.

  —

  She kept trying to block out what was happening. Shield her mind, retreat into some kind of fantasy world, ignore the awful reality, the man and his anger and the back of Darryl’s truck.

  She’d done it before. This wasn’t the first time a man had tried to take from her. She’d been younger the last time, still stupid and naive. She’d tried to fight, kicked and clawed, and it was only after she’d exhausted herself and couldn’t fight anymore that she forced her mind to drift
away from her body.

  Pam was older now. She saw no reason to fool herself. She was smaller than the man who’d knocked her out in the parking lot. She wasn’t nearly as strong. She was still dazed from how he’d hit her; there was no point in fighting.

  She wanted to go away. That’s all. She wanted to disappear back into her fantasy world, Christmas morning in Columbia Falls, horseback riding with her dad—her happy place. She could go there, go back, and when she returned, the man would be finished. The hard part would be over. She could pull herself together, go home. She would try to decide what to tell Darryl.

  You were probably asking for it, teasing those men at the bar again. Flirting with them all night; what did you think would happen?

  Maybe she wouldn’t tell Darryl. She would shower and climb into bed and try to forget this had ever happened.

  But the man wouldn’t let her escape. His eyes, they stared down at her in the backseat of Darryl’s truck, glinting in the dim glow from the instrument panel as he whispered to her, cursed her out—vile, awful, profane things.

  He finished quickly. That was her mercy. He’d been unable to function until he’d wrapped his hand around her throat, the smooth leather glove choking the breath from her lungs. Then, panting heavily, muttering, swearing, he’d lifted her skirt and torn off her underwear and done what he’d wanted, crude and rough and violent, single-minded.

  She couldn’t breathe. Even when he finished, when he released his grip on her throat, she was strangling. Wheezing, coughing, gasping for air and not getting any, she twisted and fought beneath him, reaching for her purse and the inhaler inside, cursing herself, her body, the man who kept her pinned beneath him.

  The man followed her eyes. He saw the desperation and seemed to glean its meaning. He reached into the front seat of the truck, pulled her purse into the back. Rummaged inside until he found what she wanted.

  Pamela fought to breathe, her body betraying her, her panic increasing. The man held the inhaler aloft. Then he tossed it to the floor beside her. Laughed as she scrambled for it, as she held it to her mouth greedily. Watched her. Those eyes. He pulled his gloves tight, slow and deliberate. Smoothed the leather, flexed his fingers.