Strings of Fate (Mistresses of Fate)

by Dore, Deirdre

  “That’s what the man said. He told me to look into her work for the missing. She’s on the board of directors for the nonprofit that finds missing and exploited children, but she also actively works to find missing children by trolling social media. She’s apparently helped find missing children throughout the U.S.”

  Midaugh eyed him. “You’re not buying it.”

  Ryan ran a hand through his sandy red hair. It wasn’t that he didn’t buy it; he just thought that the woman was strange. At nearly thirty-five, she was unmarried. She lived alone in an apartment above her yoga studio, and apparently spent all her time obsessed with finding the missing. According to the nonprofit website, she and her two friends had started the nonprofit on behalf of their friend Summer Haven, who had gone missing in the fall of 1986 from the woods near Ms. Collins’s home.

  “It’s not that—this girl just isn’t normal. I’d bet my truck this girl is our connection to the killer.”

  “Any communication with this unsub since the media started in?”

  “Nothing overt, but I sent what I knew about Ms. Pascal over to the analysts at the Behavior Analysis Unit. They think they’ve found a connection between posts on a local blog and Ms. Pascal. They’re supposed to be sending me an email this afternoon.”

  “So we’re just waiting?”

  Ryan nodded. “As fucking usual.”

  7

  “ARE YOU FINISHED?” Joe asked the woman.

  The application she was struggling to fill out wasn’t long or difficult, but her hands shook. He thought he should punish her, but he wasn’t sure. This was delicate work, much more difficult than simply taking her strings. He’d thought that this experiment would be life-changing, that he would somehow feel more, but now he wasn’t certain. Her strings were nearly gone. Only one remained, and that one faded and flickered the more he hurt her.

  He turned away from her and went back to his conversation with a man who interested his Creator. Like all the others on the Undernet, the man hadn’t trusted him until he’d proven he belonged, so Joe had sent him the video he’d made of taking the strings from the rainbow-haired girl. He hadn’t sent a clear picture of his face—he was more careful than that—but simply having such a film, a film that so clearly showed the beauty of his work, was enough to earn him the trust of most citizens in the dark underworld of the Internet.

  He didn’t trust them, not really, but they helped him on occasion, for a price. Before he’d found his Creator, the Undernet would help him find people with pretty strings, strings that he collected, hoping that just one more would soothe the biting emptiness that gnawed at him. But all that changed when he found his Creator.

  She’d been fishing in a chatroom under the guise of a vague user profile, looking for predators trying to sell little girls, but that was years ago, before she’d learned what to write, what words to use. Her prey had slid away like a catfish into a mud hole.

  Something about this new user, such an obvious misfit in that particular group, had struck Joe as curious. He’d traced her, found out her real name, and discovered, to his delight, that she could help him get what he wanted—more strings, beautiful strings, strings that would make him feel as he hadn’t felt for a long time.

  Thinking of her prompted him to pull up another screen, one that showed a video feed into her bedroom. “What are you working on now?” he asked her quietly, though she couldn’t hear, wasn’t even there. She was teaching yoga class; he’d seen the students walk across the grassy circle in the center of town to the building where she lived. Old women parked in front of the building and walked inside, but there were three teenagers who walked across the circle from the library. He couldn’t always see their strings—they flickered in and out. He thought that was strange, but they didn’t hold his interest for long, not when his Creator was so close.

  He talked to her sometimes, even though she couldn’t hear him. He scanned through her recent search history and pages. Most of them were connected to her search for the missing, but she’d also taken on more clients.

  One woman wanted to seem like she had a boyfriend for her twenty-year high school reunion, so she had asked his Creator to forge a man who was tall, wealthy, and loved dogs.

  Joe found it interesting that so many people wanted to pretend to be different than who they were, better in some way, even the people who seemed normal. He had tried to talk to people on his own, convince them to share their strings, but they wouldn’t—they thought he was strange, ran away from him. But his Creator helped him. She made people who seemed real. She gave them words, interests, and hobbies. It was so easy to just take those empty vessels for himself.

  He glanced at the woman again. She’d finished her application and was sitting with her head bowed. If this experiment worked, he would try it again with his Creator. He would have her power, if nothing else, the power to create new lives, to cast out honeyed lies like a web, and wait for the flies to come.

  8

  “CRAZY PAIN IN the ass,” Chris muttered into her phone while she boiled water for macaroni. Raquel was stuck in traffic on her way back from Atlanta.

  “Chris, honey, just what is it you expected from the woman? She is who she is; she ain’t gonna change.” Raquel’s drawl tended to come out when she was annoyed.

  “Well, she goes on about being a Christian—did that seem like a Christian thing to bring up?”

  Raquel hummed in her throat. “I’m sure she thought she was telling you something for your own good.”

  “Yeah, I love it when people tell me something for my own good.” Chris poured the macaroni into the boiling water with a little more force than necessary.

  Raquel laughed. “Me, too, honey.”

  She sounded tired, Chris realized, and made an effort to stop bitching about something that was clearly not that important. It was just that this was the time of year when Summer had disappeared, in the fall, when the air smelled of burning leaves.

  “Sorry, I’m bitching. How was your day? Catch any scum?”

  Raquel sighed. “No. We had this guy on the hook, but he figured it out before he got near the house. I’m not sure how.”

  “Man, I’m sorry.” Chris poured the noodles in. “You want to come over here and have some wine and mac-n-cheese? I have a weirder story to tell you.”

  “Cheap wine and mac-n-cheese?”

  Chris looked at the red wine she had in one hand. It wasn’t that cheap. It had cost eight bucks. “It’s not that cheap,” she retorted.

  Raquel laughed. “That’s all right, honey. Maybe tomorrow. I’m headed home for a bubble bath and a pile of reports.”

  “Mmm . . . sounds nice.” Chris sighed. “The bathtub, not the reports.” She didn’t have a bathtub or time to take a bath, since she wouldn’t risk her computers in the water. Already tonight she’d created an online history for a woman who’d just escaped her ex-husband. She’d moved to a new city under an assumed name, but she needed a social media background to make it believable. She’d gotten Chris’s contact info from the man who’d created her fake IDs.

  “We’ll get together tomorrow, and if not, I’ll see you on Sunday.”

  “ ’Kay,” Chris agreed. “Love you.”

  “Love you, too,” Raquel echoed, and hung up.

  Chris continued to make her mac, wondering why she felt restless and a little unsettled. It would be stupid if she’d let crazy comments from a triad of sisters upset her. Still, they were pretty convincing in their weird, creepy way, and she suddenly didn’t want to be alone.

  She thought about calling Chad, her ex, for the company and a quick fuck, but she’d heard he was dating an older woman from the next town. She didn’t want to mess with that, not when she wasn’t interested in starting things up with him again, not after he’d called her an obsessed freak. Obsessed, okay, but freak? She didn’t think so.

  She s
tirred a little more vigorously, annoyed at the memory, and a splash of boiling water was flung out of the pot and hit her arm. “Shit.” She dropped the spoon into the water and clamped her fingers over the small burn. At the same time a loud knock on her front door made her jump. It was a hard, forceful knock, the knock of someone who meant business, like a process server or a Jehovah’s Witness, not that most of them were willing to brave a third-floor walk-up, which made this knock all the stranger.

  Snatching a butcher knife from the block on her kitchen counter, Chris tiptoed through her living room toward the door. She’d seen enough movies to know better than to stand in front of the peephole, so she stood to the side and leaned over to look through it, which was almost tragic, since she stumbled and nearly fell on the knife.

  “Ms. Pascal, open the door. FBI.”

  FBI? Chris mouthed. What the hell would the FBI want with her?

  She called through the door, “Oh, yeah? Hold your ID up to the peephole.” Not that she’d know a real FBI badge from a fake one, but you had to go through the motions, otherwise you deserved it for being the stupid girl who opened the door to a complete stranger.

  He did, and Chris did her best to check the badge for authenticity, going to her tiptoes to see more clearly.

  She waited a minute, then shrugged. She hadn’t done anything that she could think of, not recently, anyway, but maybe this was connected to the information the nonprofit had sent into the FBI office in Atlanta yesterday.

  “Ms. Pascal?” The voice, deep and a little gravelly, sounded impatient.

  “Yeah, sorry.” She shook off her strange thoughts, realizing that she’d kept the FBI standing on her landing, then undid the deadbolt, unlatched the chain, and opened the door.

  There were two men in suits standing on her doormat, which was long and narrow, and featured a dachshund wearing a hat. It had been a gift from Tavey. Behind the men was a short landing that connected the staircase leading down to the next level to her door. She’d put a mirror on the wall to catch the light from the tall, narrow windows on each floor.

  Chris had met plenty of FBI agents, usually when leads that they’d turned in had been crucial pieces of evidence in one case or another. Mostly they’d seemed to regard their little group, dubbed the Mistresses of Fate on a local blog, as a pain in the ass.

  These men seemed likely to agree. They were looking at her suspiciously, their bodies tense, hands near their weapons.

  “Ma’am, you want to put down the knife?”

  Chris looked at the knife in her hands. “Shit. Yeah. Sorry.” She looked around for a place to put it. “Should I just . . .” She waved with the knife toward the kitchen.

  “Just put it on the floor,” the Fed—the younger one—ordered, “and take a step back.”

  “Okay, okay.” Chris bent down and set the knife on the rug at the entrance and stepped away from it.

  He came through the door, a tall, broad-shouldered man with freckles, sandy red hair, big dark glasses like Buddy Holly, fantastic cheekbones, and a strong, well-defined jaw. He was the nerd who got even with the popular crowd by becoming a Fed, the skinny, freckled dork who’d hit a growth spurt and now carried a gun and towered over people. He picked up the knife and looked for a place to set it down in her messy apartment.

  Chris backed deeper into her living room. The floor plan of her apartment was fairly open. The door to the interior staircase opened to her living room, but there was another door, just to the right as you came in, that opened to a wrought-iron balcony and the same switchback staircase that the girls had used to leave the yoga studio. The other side of the apartment housed the kitchen, which didn’t have a wall separating it from the living room, next to it the bathroom, and then her bedroom, which was just down a narrow hall toward the back of the building.

  “Ms. Christina Pascal?” The other Fed, also a big guy, older, kind of looked like he’d played one of the extras in Goodfellas. He had a broad face, olive skin, and thick, fleshy lips. He was interesting-looking, that was for sure. Freckle-Face was less intimidating; she’d bet he played good cop. She looked at them expectantly, waiting for their opening line.

  The Fed rephrased, “Are you Ms. Christina Pascal?”

  “That’s what it says on my driver’s license.”

  “Is that your name or not?” The young one sounded like he’d rather slap a pair of handcuffs on her than make nice. Guess she was wrong about the good-cop thing.

  “Yeah, jeez. That’s my name. Like you didn’t know that already.” Chris shrugged and stretched out a little, pulling her right arm across her chest and stretching out her shoulder blade.

  “What are you doing?” Freckles asked, but the other cop made a face, sniffing.

  “Is something—”

  Chris whirled and jumped toward the kitchen. “Shit, the mac!”

  Freckles moved his hands toward his weapon when she turned, but she ignored him, dashing into the kitchen.

  The plastic spoon she’d been using to stir it had melted into a chemical-accident-smelling mess, but, even worse, the mac was ruined.

  She turned off the burner and dumped the whole thing in the sink, which was conveniently next to the stove. Right next to the stove. Her kitchen was certifiably tiny.

  The Feds had followed Chris onto the tile that separated the kitchen area from the living room and seemed to be examining the exposed brick wall, the ancient appliances, and the large window that opened to a view of the town circle below. She’d shoved a tiny table and two chairs under it and decorated it with a vase she’d made in seventh-grade pottery class that was, in a word, hideous.

  She went to the window, pushing the table as far out of the way as she could, struggling a little because the window was finicky, and tried to lift it open to clear the smoke from the room before it set off the fire alarm. Freckles came and helped her—reluctantly, it seemed, but he helped, his man-strength and greater height making short work of the task.

  He stepped back when he was finished, as if she had some kind of contagious disease, and rubbed his fingers as if they were dusty. It wouldn’t surprise her—a good housekeeper she was not. Ironic, since her mother was known as the finest housekeeper in Fate, a dubious title, if you asked Chris, but one her mother was proud of. Of course, after having a child with her previous employer, anything was a step up.

  It was pretty crowded in her kitchen with the two men inside it, even though there was plenty of space in the living room behind them. She realized that she couldn’t recall ever having two men over at the same time, or at least not any who seemed to take up this much space. The kitchen was plenty big enough for her—she was pretty compact.

  “Ms. Pascal, we need to ask you some questions,” Freckles said finally, snatching up one of her kitchen towels and wiping his fingers. She decided not to tell him that she’d used that towel to wipe up some milk she’d spilled a week ago. He’d figure it out.

  “Okay, shoot.” She folded her arms over her chest and lifted one foot to her thigh in a modified tree pose, then felt the need to clarify. “I mean, ask, don’t shoot, not me, anyway.”

  “Not in here.” The big Fed coughed, his eyes watering.

  “Okay, the living room,” Christina agreed, and waved them backward.

  Tavey called Chris’s decorating garage-sale chic, a term she’d coined to describe the eclectic collection of furniture that Chris had gathered from well-meaning friends and church garage sales. Chris felt her furniture was friendly, even if the couch was a velvet floral monstrosity that her grandmother had owned and not one of the tables matched—matching was overrated.

  She gestured for the men to take the couch along the wall next to the door, while she sat facing them in a gold overstuffed armchair covered in a crocheted afghan. She’d positioned the furniture so that no matter where people sat, if they turned their heads they could see out the windows
, which spanned the length of the wall toward the kitchen and rose almost to the top of her sixteen-foot ceilings. As far as she was concerned, the best part of her apartment was the view of the tree-covered mountain ridges that insulated their town. Gauzy lacy curtains framed them, but she rarely closed the curtains all the way. If she was going to be in her apartment most of the time, she didn’t want to feel closed in.

  The men looked decidedly uncomfortable on the extremely floral couch. Chris didn’t blame them; the scent of old lady clung to the thing no matter what she did. She’d considered borrowing one of Tavey’s hound dogs to see if she could get the smelly beasts to dog the place up. Anything was better than that too-much-perfume-and-baby-powder mess.

  “Ms. Pascal—”

  “Hey, what are your names?” Christina interrupted.

  The older guy introduced himself first. “I’m Special Agent Scott Midaugh, and this is Special Agent Ryan Helmer.”

  “Okay.” She nodded. “So what’s up?”

  “Ms. Pascal, we’re dealing with a serial murder investigation. You may have heard about it on the news.”

  Chris shook her head. “Sorry, I don’t watch the news.”

  “Ever?” Freckles sounded incredulous.

  The older agent, Midaugh, ignored him. “Ms. Pascal, we’re here to find out what you know about an unsub that we’ve been hunting. I understand you don’t watch the news, but you may have heard. The media is calling him . . . the Boyfriend,” he concluded with distaste.

  Chris felt it again, the zing that raised all the hairs on her body. The Boyfriend. Raquel had mentioned the case—she remembered now. Some man was forming relationships with women online and then viciously assaulting and murdering them.

  “The Boyfriend,” she repeated, wondering again why saying the words sent a shiver down her spine tonight.

  Freckles—Agent Helmer—stood up and paced in front of her. “Ms. Pascal, we know you’re not as ignorant as you seem. You have contacts in both the Atlanta PD and the local sheriff’s office. You work with other police departments regularly in your private mission to find missing children. The evidence shows that you have a direct connection to this person, even implies that you could be helping him.”