by James Renner
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FOR KEITH
Truth is so rare that it is delightful to tell it.
—EMILY DICKINSON
PROLOGUE
Butch Atwood almost made it home. It was dark on the Wild Ammonoosuc, but the lights of Atwood’s school bus pushed back the night and reflected off the walls of snow gathered on either side of the two-lane blacktop. It had been a long day, carting kids to the ski slopes in Conway. Almost over.
Around the last curve, he spotted a car stuck in the snowbank on his side of the road, pointing back the way he’d come. It was a tight curve, nearly 90 degrees. The people who lived along this stretch were used to crashes in the night, especially in winter, when the pavement buckles with frost heaves. Butch slowed, stopped.
It was a dark Saturn. The front window was cracked, air bags blown, no flashers. Massachusetts plates. A pretty young woman with dark hair was standing outside. She looked about twenty years old. She was shivering.
“You okay?” he asked. Butch was a big fellow, 350 pounds. Rough-looking, with a stained, blond handlebar mustache.
“I’m just shook up,” she said.
“I’ll call the police for you,” said Butch.
“No,” the young woman replied. “Please don’t. I already called Triple-A. They’re sending a tow truck.”
He knew she was lying. Cell phones don’t work on the mountain, not that far up. He offered her a ride to his house, next door. She declined, so he left her beside the car and drove the last hundred feet to his cabin. He parked the bus beside his garage so he could watch the young woman from his driveway. Then he went inside, asked his wife to report the accident, and returned to his vehicle to fill out the day’s paperwork for First School, the outfit he worked for.
Seven minutes later, the police arrived. By then, the young woman had vanished.
It was 7:45 P.M., February 9, 2004.
It was the last moment of peace for Butch Atwood.
ONE
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
The day my lawsuit against my former newspaper was settled, I drove out to the Lodge, the nudie bar on State Route 14. This was in 2009. For the last six years I had worked as a reporter. Not the sort of reporter you see in movies. I wasn’t a beat reporter for some important daily paper. I wrote for the alt-weeklies, those free papers you find in bars and record stores and comic shops. There were two in Northeast Ohio, The Free Times and Cleveland Scene, before they merged in 2008. When I started out, a feature story paid $2,500. When I was fired six years later, the same story paid $300. Desperate times for a gonzo journalist.
The Lodge is tucked into the woods off SR 14, in Edinburg, a sleepy little hamlet south of Kent. Edinburg is 24.5 square miles of farmland, slanted fields of corn and soy, hog wallows, and mink farms. There’s one traffic light in the school district. I fell in love with my wife out there when we played suspects in a high school production of Rehearsal for Murder. If you wanted to go on a date, there was the Dairy Queen. Otherwise, you had to drive twenty minutes into Ravenna. The Lodge didn’t open until I was in college, and when it did it divided the town into sinners and saviors, and there was a public vote. In the end, the owner got the zoning variance he needed and the girls set up shop in the old honky-tonk across from the trailer yard. My best friend got drunk there one night and drove himself into the side of a house on his way home. I hadn’t been there in a while.
For a tittie bar, the Lodge was kind of a nice place: a big cabin with soft leather couches, the head of a ten-point buck mounted over the fireplace. Against the back wall was a single pole in front of a black velvet curtain. I walked to the bar and ordered a Miller Lite in a bottle.
It’s not like I go to strip clubs often. Maybe ten times in my life, mostly for bachelor parties. I’d paid three women to spank my buddy onstage the day he turned twenty-one. I wasn’t ashamed to be there. I like how strip clubs smell. Like jolly ranchers and scotch.
“Want a dance?”
I turned to find a young blonde standing beside me. She was dressed in red, lacy lingerie. Her taut skin, covered in glitter, shimmered in the sparse light.
“No thank you,” I said.
I have a thing for brunettes. And I don’t like skinny. Not even athletic, really. I don’t usually even buy a lap dance.
This happened a couple more times, that casual proposition. They all had silly names like Desiree, Sammi-with-an-I, or Eden. Really I thought I’d just sit at the bar for a couple drinks and watch the stage.
“I’m Gracie.” This woman wore a thin black dress that stretched past her knees. Dark hair. Her body was soft and it curved in a nice way. Not busty, but healthy. I noticed right away that her eyes were different. She wasn’t hustling, not like the other women. Or, if she was, she was better at it.
I bought her a drink. Vodka and grapefruit, if I remember right. And we talked for a bit. She was from West Virginia, liked to read. At the time, I was working my way through Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. This was before Larsson’s thriller became a publishing phenomenon. Nobody I knew had read it yet. The only reason I even had a copy was my wife bought it for my birthday. Of course, when I browsed the jacket, I was immediately drawn to the similarities between my current predicament and the story—it begins, after all, with a journalist losing his job over a political exposé.
Gracie walked me to the “Champagne Room” and sat me down on a leather couch. It was a private nook with a door that she could close. A bouncer brought me another beer and left us alone. When the next song started, she danced for me. The dress came off. She wore a pair of black panties underneath. She climbed onto my lap and pressed her breasts against my face.
“Do you want to see my tattoo?”
“Sure,” I said.
She stood and, gyrating to the music, turned around. The bottom half of her back was covered by a beautiful, inky-black dragon.
“Do you like it?”
I am no longer surprised by the weird coincidences that occur in my life. After writing about crime for some years, I came to believe that there was a kind of blueprint to the universe, a certain order to the shape of things. “Fearful symmetry,” I’ve called it. Not necessarily intelligent design; more like a natural framework or something. I knew a cop once who’d investigated the case of a murdered girl. Found her body on County Road 1181, in Ashland County. At the time, his cruiser number was 1181. Stuff like that. Stuff like this girl with the dragon tattoo.
Gracie took off her panties, turned around, and straddled my leg. She leaned her head back against my shoulder. We were waiting for another song to start.
“What do you do?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I used to be a reporter. I wrote about crime. Unsolved murders, mostly. I got fired. I’m trying to figure out what to do next.”
Something inside her changed. I got the feeling then that the woman sitting on my lap was no longer Gracie. I go
t the feeling she had somehow become more genuine.
When the music started again, she didn’t move.
“You okay?” I asked.
She nodded against my neck. “My name’s Jennifer,” she said. “I’m not supposed to tell you my real name. But my real name is Jennifer.”1
“Okay.”
“I can dance for you. Or we could talk. Do you want to talk?”
“Do you want to talk?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. What do you want to talk about?”
She didn’t say anything for a beat. She slipped off my lap and dressed. Then she sat beside me, her legs kicked up over my lap, as if we were in a living room and she was waiting for a foot rub. “My sister was murdered,” she said.
How do you respond to that? “Did they catch … him?” I asked, finally. “Her murderer?”
“Yes. Not for a while. But they just did. I spoke to the police down home. I’ll have to go back to testify.”
For the next half hour we sat in the Champagne Room and talked about the particulars of her sister’s case. I gave her some advice on how to speak to the prosecutor and how to testify at trial. Then she hugged me and we just listened to the music.
This was a sign. Had to be, right? I was a journalist. Still. A crime writer. The universe wanted me to be. That’s what Jennifer was about, I thought. Just because I didn’t work for a newspaper, that didn’t mean I had to stop.
TWO
Paramour
One day, while I was scanning Web sites about unsolved crimes at a neighborhood coffee shop called the Nervous Dog, the barista sat next to me and said in a whisper, “I have something important to tell you.”
She was a country-cute eighteen-year-old with dark hair and a round face. The shop was nearly empty. Just me and one other customer.
“You’re that reporter, the one that got fired for that article about Kevin Coughlin, right?”
I cringed. “That would be me, yes.”
She seemed distressed. “I see you come in all the time but I didn’t put it together that, you know, you were the reporter until I read about it in the paper.” Had I offended her in some way I didn’t understand? Was she Coughlin’s cousin or something?
“It was me,” she said. “I was your secret source.”
That’s how it started: an anonymous e-mail sent to my in-box at Cleveland Scene in the fall of 2008. The source claimed that State Senator Kevin Coughlin was having an affair with one of his campaign staffers. The tip included the name of the mistress’s roommate, which was enough for me to do some digging. I had always assumed the e-mail had come from someone in Columbus, a fellow congressman or political rival. I never expected the tip had come from a part-time coffee-slinger.
Coughlin was a Republican blowhard from Cuyahoga Falls, a blue-collar suburb of Akron often referred to as “Caucasian Falls.” He was infamous in greater Akron for a failed coup against the local GOP leadership, led for twenty-five years by a shrewd man named Alex Arshinkoff. Not for nothing, but according to police reports, the married, publicly straight Arshinkoff once picked up a twenty-one-year-old hitchhiker downtown, rubbed his leg, and asked the young man if he “wanted to make some money” before the guy managed to escape by jumping out of the car. In 2008, Coughlin threw his hat into the governor’s race.
After the tip came in I researched Coughlin’s background and quickly got a sense of his character. He and fifty other members of the Ohio House of Representatives had voted to exempt themselves from public records laws. Coughlin sponsored a bill that would have allowed patients to be treated by a physical therapist without a prescription or referral from their primary physician. His wife was a practicing physical therapist. He asked for campaign contributions from Time Warner while sitting on the Senate committee that wrote regulatory policy for cable companies. You get the picture.
The first thing I did was track down the people who rented the apartment across the hall from where Coughlin’s alleged mistress lived. The residents confirmed that the congressman came by when the young woman was home, alone. His SUV, with personalized plates, would be parked out front late into the night. Then I located the roommate, who went into explicit detail about how Coughlin would come over to have loud sex with his staffer in her thin-walled bedroom while the roommate sat in the living room watching TV. When Coughlin caught wind of my reporting, he went ballistic.
One night he left a message on Scene publisher Matt Fabyan’s phone, blaming Arshinkoff for the leak. “He’s been peddling this story ever since he hit on me,” he said. The next day, we got the first letter from Coughlin’s attorney, demanding we kill the story. But word had traveled and other sources were contacting me.
A former Coughlin full-time staffer, a guy named Mike Chadsey, was the one who gave me the info about how the congressman would take his mistress to Ohio State football games and pay for the trips with campaign money. They had a routine: Chadsey and Coughlin’s paramour would meet the congressman in the parking lot of the Sheraton Hotel in Cuyahoga Falls, ride with Coughlin to Columbus, then return to the hotel. Campaign reports show that Coughlin paid for rooms at the Sheraton, billing it as: “Staff Accommodations.”
When the newspaper bigwigs back in Scranton got wind of the letter from Coughlin’s attorney, they spiked my story and told me to work on something else. The paper could not risk a lawsuit, said CEO Matt Haggerty. I told him that if he couldn’t risk a lawsuit, he couldn’t run a newspaper. He told me I was fired. I told him to go fuck himself. Then I e-mailed the article to every contact in my Rolodex. The story was picked up and reprinted online, circulated throughout the statehouse in Columbus. Slate picked up the Jerry Maguire-ish mission statement I sent to the employees of Scene on my way out.
It got messy. I sued Haggerty, Scene, and Coughlin for wrongful termination. The Akron Beacon Journal and The Columbus Dispatch covered the details of the court filings. Eventually, Coughlin, through his lawyer, admitted he never had cause to sue the paper, that his threats to my editor and publisher were baseless. Haggerty and I came to an agreement on the rest.
The young barista happened upon her intel through a local painter, who was the father of the mistress’s roommate. Here’s how small Akron is: That roommate’s father painted my house, which I had purchased from the barista’s uncle. Wrap your head around that. I looked at the young woman sitting across from me at the Nervous Dog and said, “Thank you.”
THREE
Full Disclosure
“I’m thinking of writing about crime again,” I said.
My psychologist smiled, tightly. Roberta was a seasoned counselor working out of a square office below a fitness center in West Akron. I’d been seeing her for three years. I picked her out of the yellow pages in 2006, around the time my first book was published. It was a nonfiction account of my investigation into the abduction and murder of a ten-year-old girl named Amy Mihaljevic. After the book was released, I started having panic attacks in grocery stores. My mind kept insisting that the guy in front of me at checkout was keeping girls tied up in his basement. Turns out I had contracted secondhand post-traumatic stress disorder, the kind embedded war journos sometimes get. That was an idea that took me a long time to accept, by the way, and I still feel guilt when thinking about it. After all, I never served in a war. What the hell do I have to complain about that’s so terrible? And yet, there was no denying the symptoms. A daily Cymbalta took the edge off. Roberta and I met every other week for an hour and she listened to me talk about my fears. I liked her. She was wise from experience. Years ago, she had been the hired counselor for a very famous band, traveling with the musicians on tour, keeping them sane and mostly sober.
“You think that’s a good idea?” she asked. “Writing about crime again?”
“I need something to focus on,” I said. “I need to find a way to make money. And it’s something I know how to do.”
It was a great plan, I thought. I could work on the new book after my wife got home at
three—she taught high school choir a couple towns away. I’d watch our kid in the morning and write at night.
“I have the results from your MMPI test,” she said, moving on.
That would be the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory test, a psychological exam developed by a couple of shrinks in 1939 at the University of Minnesota. It’s the litmus test for psychopathy they use to this day. The CIA gives it to candidates to suss out potential mental health issues in their operatives. The test is a list of 504 simple statements. You fill in bubbles to denote how strongly you “agree” or “disagree” with each statement. Two examples: “I am very seldom troubled by constipation” and “I like to read newspaper articles on crime.” I was taking it now because we were considering an end to our counseling sessions and Roberta wanted to see where my head was.
“How’d I do?” I asked.
“Your results were very similar to those of Ted Bundy, the serial killer.”
That’s one of those statements you just can’t unhear.
“Don’t get too upset,” said Roberta. “You may have the psychopathy of a dangerous man, but so do many cops. In fact, a lot of CEOs would have scored the same as you, or worse. Donald Trump is probably a sociopath. But it’s what makes him successful.”
“How’d I do on the intelligence test?” I asked. She’d given me a second test the last time we’d met—a long series of logic puzzles.
“Perfect score. And that’s the good news. You have the intelligence to temper your psychopathy. You’re smart enough to be aware of your own compulsions, to find healthy outlets for your anger before you explode. You’re smart enough to keep yourself safe.”
My heart was beating fast. It felt like I had just been diagnosed with cancer. One of the bad kinds that never go away. I’d come here seeking a solution and she’d just told me my problem was incurable.