Names of Dead Girls, The

by Eric Rickstad

  “As you wish.” Preacher led them up the stairs.

  Larkin flicked his gaze at Test to indicate that he’d be first to go up behind Preacher.

  In the living area a forsaken couch slouched facing a brick fireplace, the couch’s plaid pattern so faded it was barely perceptible. Dust clung to its skirt. Test saw no TV. The walls were blank, except for a small wooden crucifix above the fireplace mantel. It was not possible to determine if the crucifix was a recent adornment or not.

  On the kitchen entrance hung louvered, saloon-type swinging doors stained a dark brown, the bottom edges scribbled with black magic marker. The dark baseboards were gouged and scratched with the claw marks of a cat.

  “The kitchen.” Preacher pushed through the swinging doors.

  Larkin followed.

  The saloon doors flapped behind Test as she entered.

  The kitchen was just spacious enough to fit a card table and a mishmash of three folding chairs set around it.

  A bible sat on the center of the table, opened to a page somewhere toward the last third. A prop, Test thought.

  Preacher nodded for Larkin and Test to sit. They declined.

  Preacher shrugged and folded himself into a chair at the opposite side of the table, stretched his long legs and crossed them at the ankles. With his long fingers he closed the Bible. “So?” he said.

  A fly buzzed at the sink window, tapped against the glass pane.

  Preacher fixed his black eyes on Test, composed and patient. “You’re here to ask me where I was at a particular time yesterday,” he said.

  Test had expected a coarse man who refused access, defied inquiry, stuck out his chest, and spat vile words; someone like Jed King. This man was not Jed King. This man was far more devious. Yet, as hard as he tried to project a respectful and accommodating manner, he could not entirely conceal a certain cold menace.

  “In fact—” Test began.

  “I’ll save you the time, since your time is almost as valuable to you as mine is to me. I was here. For a spell. Enjoying the fog.”

  “Enjoying?” Test said.

  “It’s beautiful and mysterious. The fog. It never rests, it’s always shifting and taking new shapes, quiet and peaceful one moment, ominous and . . . suffocating . . . the next. It’s miraculous it’s just water droplets. There’s so much to see just out your window. You’d be surprised what’s out your window. Though after a while the fog kept me from seeing most of what’s out there, from seeing much farther than the end of my fingertips.” He flexed his long fingers. The fingers of a strangler. Fingers that had squeezed and crushed the windpipes of young girls after and sometimes during, their rapes. Rath was right: it was not a reach, even without a shred of evidence, to put Preacher at the front of the line as a suspect for Jamie Drake’s murder.

  “You were here for a ‘good spell’?” Test said. “You went out then?”

  “I took a stroll.”

  “To?”

  “Town. I had planned to just go to the main road and back. But when I reached that goal, I just kept going.”

  He smoothed his hand over the cover of the Bible.

  “What time?” Test said.

  “I assume we’re talking about the times roughly around that girl being hanged.”

  Hanged. This detail had not been released to the media. Preacher could not know it. Unless he had done it. Or knew who did. Jesus.

  Test tensed, a hand going to her sidearm, and glanced at Larkin to be ready. She didn’t care if Preacher saw her gestures. Hoped he did. Perhaps Preacher believed the detail of the hanging had made the news as it would have by now if it were not intentionally held back.

  Test had to tread with caution now, could not let Preacher know he’d slipped up. He’d done it. He’d hanged Jamie Drake. Tortured her. Stepped up his desire for sadism.

  “You walked to town? Five miles one way?” Test said.

  Preacher nodded.

  Bullshit, Test thought. You didn’t walk to town. You drove your fucking truck, parked near the Drakes’ home, and waited in the woods for Jamie.

  “You didn’t take your truck?” Test said.

  “That’s not my truck,” Preacher said. “And I like to keep in shape. It isn’t far. Town. An hour and half or so each way. I’ve got all the time in the world now.”

  No, Test thought. You are just like me, just like the rest of us, in that regard. Your time is brief, finite. And you’ve used it to rob other people of their time here, to make it painful for others.

  Test felt herself coiling tight but needed to relax. She did not need more than Preacher’s admission of the girl being hanged to take him in for questioning. It was best to get whatever else he might say videotaped at the department. But she did not want to incite him, not yet, not if it could be helped.

  The fly buzzed past Test’s ear into the ceiling light fixture, where it ricocheted inside with an annoying tick.

  “Why do you think I’m here to ask about where you were?” Test said.

  “Why else would a moderately attractive female detective waste her precious time? You’re not one of my admirers. Not so misguided, so insane as any of those poor birds that send fan mail.” Preacher’s mouth stretched into a slow smile, leaking a malicious confidence. His dark eyes had a brightness in them, a savagery. His teeth shone too white, as if he bleached them in Clorox. “Of course, you pay a visit to the convict recently paroled for past sins, the outside world never able to forget or forgive.”

  Test wondered what had happened to Preacher’s gum. He was no longer chewing it or snapping it. She’d not seen him take it out of his mouth. Had he swallowed it?

  Preacher smacked a palm on the table. Test’s hand flexed on her weapon’s grip. Preacher lifted his hand to show a red splat of blood in the center of his palm. It looked like a stigmata. “What kind of creature feeds on the dead and shit?” he said.

  “To be clear,” Test said, “between eleven a.m. and one p.m. you were walking to town?”

  Preacher blinked, a blink that lasted a half beat longer than his previous blinks. He knew. He knew Test had purposely misstated the time frame. The girl had been murdered between the hours of 2 p.m. and 3 p.m., that much was clear. Preacher could not know Test had given him a misleading time unless he knew the time.

  Preacher tried to give the same smile as before, but missed by a shade; this smile was oily and knowing as the glassy impermeable blackness returned to his eyes. “If that’s the time frame, I was here napping, reading my fan mail. Alone. The time I was speaking of was the afternoon. Say two o’clock or so?”

  Preacher started to reach into his pants pocket.

  Test gripped the butt of her M&P45 more tightly.

  Preacher raised an eyebrow. “Just getting my phone,” he said.

  “Put your hands on the table. Palms down. You can come with us for questioning at the station without resistance, or you can resist and be arrested. And that will be a violation of your parole. You will be jailed.”

  Test glanced at Larkin, who had his M&P45 out, leveled at Preacher.

  “Right,” Preacher said, smiling like a child who delights in misbehavior. He placed his palms flat on the table. “You people.”

  Test went to his side, prepared for him to resist. He did not. He laughed, as if at a sick joke to which only he knew the punch line.

  “Up,” Test said. “You know how this works.”

  “You’ll live to regret this.”

  “I hope that’s not a threat,” Test said.

  “You will wish it were.”

  Outside in the Explorer, the sole of Test’s left boot stuck to the floor mat. She lifted the boot off the floor to look at what was causing it to be so tacky.

  Chewing gum.

  She got out of the vehicle and scraped the gum off her boot onto a rock. She didn’t want anything that had been in Preacher’s mouth touching her.

  37

  “It’s him,” Test said.

  Rath looked up from a to
pographic map he used for deer hunting, a map now spread out on the card table he’d set up in his makeshift office at the station. He’d been determining distances from Preacher’s new place to three other points on the map: Johnson State College, the Wayside Country Store, and the Pisgah Wilderness Area. Each point, by car, could be reached in thirty minutes, give or take, from Forgotten Gorge Road. A perfect triangle, with Preacher at the center.

  “Who?” Rath said, working out the time frame. Preacher could have been watching Rachel and had time to intercept Dana Clark at the Wayside. If Preacher knew Dana’s pattern. And he’d had plenty of time to murder Jamie Drake in the time Rath had slept.

  “Who?” Test said. “Preacher. I’ve got him next door.”

  Rath stared at the thin wall that now separated Preacher from him. In a minute, nothing would separate them, save a few feet of air across a narrow table.

  “Did you arrest him for Clark or Drake? Or both?” He felt almost dizzy with relief.

  “I didn’t arrest him,” Test said.

  “You just said it’s him,” Rath said. “Is it or not?”

  “He slipped up. He mentioned Jamie Drake being hanged. That’s not in the news. And he knows the time frame. We kept both of those facts out. There’s hardly any news reported except a young female body being found. There is no way he could know unless he did it. Or knows who did.”

  “Then arrest him.”

  “It’s not enough. We arrest him, he’ll backtrack, say he guessed, was playing with us, and the D.A. will tell us to cut him loose. We need physical evidence, too. Hard evidence. I requested a warrant for his premises.”

  “Be sure to include his—” Rath was about to say truck, but caught himself. “His vehicle. If he has one, in the warrant.”

  “He claims a truck in the yard isn’t his. I don’t believe him. I’ll run it,” Test said.

  Rath thought about Preacher looking up from his front steps at Rath in the trees. Had Preacher seen him?

  “What is it?” Test said.

  “Nothing.”

  “Video is running in the room. Maybe you can press him, get under his skin, and get more out of him, enough for an arrest. Ready?”

  Rath wasn’t ready. He did not know if he could deny the violence in him. Be careful, he warned himself.

  He let out a breath. “Ready.”

  38

  Pine-Sol, Rath thought as he entered the Spartan interrogation room of one table and two chairs, one chair empty across from the one in which Preacher sat, his hands folded on the table, posture proper, chin up with a slight, yet unmistakable air of superiority; or at least an attempt at it. The guy stinks like he bathed in Pine-Sol.

  Preacher’s eyes followed Rath as Rath shut the door, the bolt finding its recess with a metallic clack.

  “Senior Detective Rath entering the IR,” Rath said for sake of the recording.

  Rath sat. His eyes met Preacher’s black eyes. Rath supposed one might see Preacher’s dark eyes as menacing or mysterious. To Rath they were as dumb and dead as that of a doll.

  Preacher was not cuffed. Nor shackled. Since he was not under arrest, use of restraints was not permitted. One could not just drag in any old rapist and murderer in cuffs on a whim, after all; that would be a humanitarian outrage.

  Rath’s blood swam inside him, hot and tidal. He thought of his sister, Laura.

  Laura who, when Rath had been a boy, had protected him from bullies who claimed his father had left because Rath was a “stupid little fag.” Once, a bully had pinned Rath in the dirt of the playground and had pulled his shirt up and was giving Rath an Indian burn as Rath swatted futilely at him, swatted and cried. Until the torture had stopped instantly, and Rath looked up to see Laura towering over the bully, a rock in her hand as blood streamed out of the bully’s cheek. “Do it again, I’ll crack your retard head open,” Laura had said. Laura who’d had no one there to help when Preacher had attacked her. Laura who’d been expecting Rath for his own birthday dinner, but who’d shown up too late.

  Rath thought of Rachel, too. Of Preacher’s phone call.

  “Frank Rath,” Preacher said. “In the flesh.”

  Rath stared at Preacher. Three feet away. An arm’s length.

  Rath’s presence must have surprised Preacher, yet neither Preacher’s expression nor voice betrayed surprise.

  Preacher’s Adam’s apple jutted just above the primly buttoned collar of his stark white shirt, his skin raw where a razor had tracked it. The shirt was a shade tight and gave the impression of his solid frame beneath. Dry skin flaked at the wings of his nostrils, as if he were shedding.

  “You’re an officer of the law again,” Preacher said. “I regret you have to be here.”

  Steady, Rath told himself. Careful. “You don’t regret anything, except being caught.”

  “It must be hard. To see me. I can barely look in the mirror myself. In fact, I don’t. I don’t have mirrors in my home.”

  “Why do you believe the girl was hanged?” Rath said. Sixteen years after Laura’s murder, Rath thought, and here I sit asking her murderer, days after his parole, about another dead girl.

  Preacher touched the tip of his tongue to an incisor. “Believe she was hanged? I know she was. News travels fast.”

  “It’s not in the news. There’s one way you could be certain. You were there.” Or the person who did it told you. Rath did not want to speak of this possibility. The odds were too slim that Preacher involved anyone else. And he hated to think of what it meant, two men like Preacher unafraid to realize each other’s dark fantasies.

  Preacher leaned forward, in an odd bow, as if he wanted to touch foreheads with Rath. “You and I both know I wasn’t there,” he said and leaned back, head dangling over the back edge of the chair, arms spread wide to his sides, as he’d done out on his porch, just before looking toward Rath in the woods, as if he were in the beam of an alien ship awaiting abduction to another world. Did Preacher know Rath had been watching, had he seen him, after all, had he found the trail camera?

  Rath clawed his fingernails into his palms. Careful. “Dana Clark,” he said.

  Still leaning back, Preacher folded his arms across his chest, hands overlapped in the manner of a corpse about to be wrapped in a shroud.

  “Dana Clark,” Rath said again.

  “You’ve lost me.”

  “The Wayside.”

  “What is this Wayside?”

  “You know what.”

  “Rings a . . . foggy bell.”

  “After you were in Johnson. After you harassed my daughter and called me, you went to the Wayside.”

  “This fog has seeped into your brain. I am not the only man in the world capable of bad things. I’ve done nothing. And I can’t have police showing up at my door with no cause. You can’t just haul me in here for no reason. I have rights. I’m free. Just like you. Just like your—”

  “Don’t you mention my daughter.”

  “I was going to say your homely partner. She should invest in a little makeup. And your daughter? Your?”

  “Don’t you mention her.”

  “Your so-called daughter.”

  “Sit up like a fucking human being.”

  Preacher obliged. “I think you should have that homely detective drive me home now.”

  “You’re not free. You’re paroled. And you have privileged information about a crime that you could not have unless you were there.”

  “So you keep saying. But. I was home. I just. Hear things.”

  “You have no alibi.”

  “Don’t I? And what about you? Where were you while this girl was killed? Do you have an alibi?”

  “I’m not under suspicion.”

  “Yet, I am. Why? Personal revenge? I’ve paid in full.”

  You could be imprisoned for a thousand years and not pay back what you took, Rath thought. He leaned in close and whispered so the video would not pick up what he was saying: “It stops here. I won’t let you hurt anyone else.
”

  “Ah, threats.”

  “It won’t go easy for you.”

  “Yet, here I am, unharmed. How much more would a man have to do for you to harm him? Hmmm? And. Yet. Here I am. Free. How does the saying go: ‘I wouldn’t harm a fly.’ I value my freedom. Hurting the flesh, that’s unlawful. And, so . . . ordinary. Boring. I see you looking at me, the fear in your eyes, searching my face, trying to see, is there a similarity, a trait your adopted daughter and I share? Is it true? I can tell you I am only interested in the truth. I am the truth. What are you going to do if she is who I say she is? If she is mine?” Preacher plucked a hair from his head and set the hair down on the table between them. “One simple test. And you’ll know. You’ll have your answer. Proof. But you don’t want to know. You want to live in a fantasy, need to believe I’m a liar. I bet you lie sleepless wondering if you should tell her. It must feel like a lie to hide it from her. If you tell her what I said, and it turns out I’m lying, you’ll have fallen for a sucker’s con and helped me torment her. If it turns out I’m telling the truth, you’ll have helped me ruin her. Of course, I could tell her myself. It is probably best if it came from me, since you’re too afraid. Are you going to tell her? Or am I?”

  Preacher was right: Rath was afraid. Afraid that if he did not force himself to leave the room, now, he would attack Preacher.

  “I don’t need to cut flesh anymore,” Preacher said. “I know how to crawl inside the weak now. I’m inside you. You think about me more than you think about your sister. You dream of me, when I’m not keeping you awake. Obsess. I see it. There are other ways to turn the screw. I don’t need to torture you when you torture yourself because you are weak, and the truth is too much for you to bear. You won’t do anything to stop me. Only react to me, as cops do.”