“Is the barn still there?” LaSalle said.
“No, it fell down years ago. The tree’s still there with all the rubble piled around it.”
“Here’s to the tree.” Garrett held up his tea.
While they worked their way through some amazing roasted pork and red potatoes, Tracy and Garrett took turns telling LaSalle embarrassing stories about each other as kids. LaSalle laughed in all the right places, and they didn’t delve into anything beyond Junior High where the stories were still innocent. It made Garrett feel warm.
But it was cold outside and there were other things happening in the world.
“A few years after I left, there was a murder out at the rest stop. You ever hear about that?” Garrett said.
“Of course,” Tracy said. “Some crazy trucker cut up one of those girls from the truck stop. Horrible.”
“What makes you say it was a trucker?” LaSalle said.
“Nadine told me stories. Some of the things these guys do to the girls...”
“Any guys in particular like to get rough?” LaSalle said.
“Oh, I wouldn’t know. She never goes into too much detail. We’re usually at church when we do our gossiping, after all,” Tracy said. She started clearing dishes and both men jumped up to help. “You know who you guys should talk to? Smiley,” she said.
“Popular man,” LaSalle said. “We got that recommendation already. He doesn’t remember our girl, but he’s gonna show the flier around to the other county guys.”
“That’s what I love about Smiley. He’s always helping people out when he can. He looks after Misty Heideman’s little girl like she was his own grandchild,” Tracy said. “I guess it’s kind of natural, since he treated Misty like a daughter when she was young.”
Garrett handed over the last of the dishes and Tracy put them in the washer. She snapped him with a towel and he flicked dishwater at her. He caught LaSalle smiling at their interaction.
Later, Garrett watched LaSalle try to gingerly place the painting of the barn and tree in the Mustang’s cramped trunk. Garrett couldn’t believe Tracy agreed to sell it, but LaSalle convinced her there was a place in his apartment back home desperately in need of the piece.
Tracy pulled her sweater tight against the evening cold and Garrett felt a deep need to put protective arms around her. Instead, he bumped her shoulder with his, like a kid would do. “Thanks for having us over. I have a feeling it’s been a while since he had a home-cooked meal.”
“It’s not every night a girl gets to entertain a PI from New York and a police chief who’s a wanted man,” Tracy said.
“Ex police chief. And I’m marginally wanted at best.”
She zipped his jacket up the rest of the way and patted it like his mother used to. “You’re wanted. And you’re loved. I think you need to hear it from time to time. Are you still taking your meds? You can’t do cold turkey on those.”
“I know, I know. Yeah, I am. But...”
“But?”
“I did just kick the shit out of some guy who had no idea why,” Garrett said.
“How’s the depression?”
“It’s at least staying outside the door now.”
“I thought maybe I’d see you sooner. After the Council meeting,” Tracy said.
He shrugged. “Meh. I would’ve only moped around.”
“That’s okay. I’m thinking of entering a Dali phase and I need some droopy faces around here to model.” She gave him a hug and he had to hold his breath. She’d put on some perfume tonight and it made him want to bury his face in her hair and stand there until the cold drove them inside to the bedroom.
The Mustang’s trunk lid thumped closed and Garrett pulled away from the hug. Not in time to avoid LaSalle’s grin.
***
LaSalle picked Garrett up at his place the next morning. Something about his sporty rental Volvo being safer in the snow. On the drive to Nadine’s, LaSalle made a point of pushing the cool little traction control button and smiling at Garrett.
“Yeah, yeah, anyone can let the computer do the driving. Anything new from the fliers?” Garrett said.
“Nope. But most of the time it’s boots on the ground that gets me there. Talking to people. And dumb luck.”
“Sounds like police work.”
“When are you gonna get back to it?” LaSalle said. He turned a corner and a man in a snowsuit shoveling his driveway stopped to stare at the black man in a Volvo. Garrett smiled and waved. The man went back to shoveling.
“Not sure I want to. I should have an attorney by now and be suing the shit out of the city for firing me over a justified shooting,” Garrett said.
“And why aren’t you?”
Garrett focused on the scenery, tried to put it into words. The fields sliding past his gaze were fallow farms and empty woods now, choked with weeds. As a kid, this place been uncharted lands to be explored, huge dark forests filled with orcs, battlefields of World War Two with machine gun bullets zipping past the barbed wire.
“I thought I was coming back to a different place. Something I remembered as pure and simple. All neighborly country folk who seemed to have Mayberry RFD problems when my old man was Chief.”
“People are people, man, no matter where they live. You get more than two of ‘em together and somebody will start talking about chopping the third one out,” LaSalle said.
“I guess the fantasy was I’d find a time capsule of a place where that wasn’t true. And what the fuck do I find instead?” Garrett said.
LaSalle chuckled. “Normal people.”
“I hate normal people.”
“Then what are you gonna do?”
“Hadn’t really thought about it yet. I’m good at that. Not thinking about things. I can stare at a wall like you wouldn’t believe.”
“I appreciate you giving me valuable time you normally devote to not thinking.”
“This,” Garrett said. “This I’ve been thinking about. I’ve got new questions for Nadine.”
They had to wait until Nadine settled them in with coffee in yellowed, chipped China. She lit her cigarette and a cloud rose past the Savior on the wall. Her voice had a little extra rasp. She’d probably been smoking too much lately.
“Yeah, I knew the poor girl they called Florida. In a manner of speaking, anyway. She never did tell me her name. Thought I was some kind of social worker. If she was afraid of that, then she was probably under eighteen.”
Nadine pointed her cigarette straight up and watched the tendril of smoke rise.
“But you can’t think about that,” she said. “You got to think of them like this smoke. Real enough while it’s in front of you. If you try to take hold of it, why it just disappears.”
One wrinkled hand wafted the column of smoke away.
“So you can never get involved, never care too much, just try to talk to them as best you can. Mostly they roll their eyes and get in the next truck. Sometimes I don’t know why I go out there. And then I think of my Lord and Savior stopping those self-righteous bastards from stoning that prostitute and it gives me strength to go on.”
They all looked up at the Savior. A little dust and some nicotine stains, but still a figure of hope.
“Do you remember if Florida had a regular guy? A road daddy, I think some of the girls call it,” Garrett said.
“None I saw. I can usually spot those. They keep the girls close, or make them go right back to the cab. Can’t have some guy offering money to screw up their deal, you know?”
“You’ve been ministering to the girls as long as I can remember, Nadine. Do you think you’d know a regular trucker who came by out there?” Garrett said.
“Oh sweetie, I’ve seen so many of those guys come through Burton’s over the years. They’ve learned to avoid me, because I used to strike up a conversation and get to know personal things about them. Then when I saw them picking up a girl, I’d yell over, ‘Hey, Bob, is your little girl in school today?’”
LaS
alle and Garrett both chuckled.
“I know this is kind of hard to say, but if I gave you a list, do you think you’d remember any of the missing girls by name?” LaSalle said.
Nadine considered them, crammed together on the love seat. Garrett had seen the look before during countless interrogations. She wanted to tell them something.
“Come on,” she said.
They followed her down a dim hallway with stacks of neatly bundled newspapers lining one side. Garrett saw 1966 on one front page. LaSalle had to angle his body to get past most of it.
She led them into a room dominated by a rollup desk that probably weighed at least a ton. On the desk sat a bright red laptop. Nadine plopped into a leather chair and fired up the computer. In a few seconds, they saw a folder filled with little thumbnails of young women.
“What’s all this?” LaSalle said.
“Sometimes they’ll let me take a picture. I used to use a Polaroid, but I got a digital camera off Amazon a couple years back.”
“I thought you didn’t keep track of them. Smoke disappearing,” Garrett said.
“You wanna be a smartass, or you wanna see some pictures?”
Nadine clicked and a slideshow started. Various pictures of girls out at Burton’s, or at the rest stop. The hair colors changed, the clothes and background changed with the seasons, but all of them had the same tightness around the eyes, fear, borderline despair no one that young should know.
“I have first names on some, full names on others. Hard to know if they told me the truth, so who knows if you’ll match any,” Nadine said.
“Do you remember any girls just up and disappearing, anything unusual about the way someone left?” Garrett said.
“Maybe one a few years back who I thought might be on the verge of going home. I always offer to buy them a one-way Greyhound ticket, and I’ve bought exactly three in over thirty years. This girl never turned up to go through with it. But you can’t be sure. She could just be flat on her back somewhere outside Omaha, still feeding the drug monkey, or those daddy issues, or whatever made her do it.”
“Any more like her recently?” LaSalle said.
“Not anyone I knew well. There is one the other girls were talking about, though.” Nadine stopped the slideshow and scrolled through some photos in the latest folder.
“There she is. Taylor, she said her name was.” Nadine enlarged the photo and Garrett saw a heartbreakingly young girl in a puffy blue Gore Tex coat. Damn thing made her look like a bright blue teddy bear.
“One of the girls told me Taylor skipped out on paying her back for a night in the motel. Seemed unusual. She was well-liked by the other girls. Genuine and scared, not like a con artist out to take people for something, so they’re worried about her.”
“How long ago?” Garrett said.
“Hard to tell. First time somebody noticed she wasn’t around seemed like maybe four or five days back.”
“Ma’am, could I take a screenshot of that photo?” LaSalle said.
“Don’t be silly. I’ll email it to you.”
10
The forlorn picture lay on the desk between Garrett and Trooper Clancy Parker. It wasn’t much to look at. The image of a girl in a puffy blue jacket with the name “Taylor” scrawled across the top in Garrett’s chicken scratch.
“I don’t really know what to do with this, Garrett. I can’t file a Missing Person because Nadine overheard a couple of hookers griping about a friend who skipped town,” Clancy said.
“Just put out a Suspicious Circs bulletin with a description of the truck she was last seen in. Who knows, maybe one of your guys pulled over a trucker yesterday and saw her in the cab. Problem solved,” Garrett said.
“What problem?” Clancy scanned the State Police briefing room. His shift had just gone out, so the place was empty. “I’m gonna tell you something, because you been a friend since grade school. People are talking. Saying you quit LAPD because you had shell-shock, or whatever, and they never should have hired you to be the Chief.”
“And that has what to do with this missing girl?” Garrett said.
“That’s just it. Nobody says she’s missing. Except you. And maybe that New York P.I. character. What’s his name?”
“LaSalle,” Garrett said.
“Yeah, him. For some reason, you’re fixated on helping the guy with his case. I understand wanting to help, but now you’re grasping at shit that isn’t there. These girls come and go all the time. We have no way of knowing whether or not one of them is really, truly missing.”
“No, we don’t, do we?” Garrett said. He stared at the wanted posters on the wall behind Clancy’s head, something stirring in the back of his brain. “No one really wants them. No one looks very hard.”
“You know better than that, Garrett. We can’t do a sweep search for every Missing Person report we get. Hell, it’d be a full time business all by itself,” Clancy said.
“If you were a smart guy, it would be easy to count on that. If you take people on the margins, nobody gripes too much,” Garrett said.
“Take people? Are you listening to yourself? First you tell me a bible-thumping busybody heard about a girl skipping town and you figure it’s a Missing report, and now we’re suddenly talking about kidnapping?” Clancy said.
“If somebody is taking girls out there, we wouldn’t be talking about just kidnapping. But you’re right. Let’s stick to the basics. How about a Suspicious Circs bulletin?”
Clancy leaned across the table and spoke slowly, as if he’d thus far been using vocabulary too complicated for Garrett. “There are no suspicious circumstances involved in a hooker skipping town. I’m not putting my career on the line because we used to get drunk together in high school.”
“I understand,” Garrett said. He wanted to grab Clancy by his jug ears and slam his forehead into the desk. Instead, he shook his hand and left. He felt the looks from the other Troopers when he drove out of the State Police barracks parking lot.
***
Runoff from the melting snow banks beside the highway made the little creek behind the rest stop burble pleasantly. LaSalle took off his jacket and sat on a rock about three feet from the water. So much for him and Garrett splitting up and conquering the world. He hoped Garrett had better luck with his buddy in the State Police.
LaSalle had struck out with the flier, with only one trucker saying Britney looked somewhat familiar. He even tried the picture of the girl Nadine had called “Taylor.” One guy had seen her in the truck stop, but never talked to her. A big nothing.
So what the hell was he doing in the woods, then? He should’ve been on his way back to the motel. Something... something called to him about this place.
The girl the State Troopers called “Florida” had been murdered at this rest stop. LaSalle couldn’t shake the sick feeling there was a bloody tendril in all this connecting Florida to Britney. The locals assumed the killer was a trucker and left it at that since Florida was a transient prostitute. Any more investigating would have to be done by him. And Garrett, of course. LaSalle felt a twinge of guilt about involving the former Chief. The dude had enough problems, and he seemed like a good man. He’d be sorely disappointed when he finally found out what LaSalle was really here to do.
LaSalle donned his jacket again and made his way through an evergreen thicket, until the rest stop was off to his right about fifty yards. He could see a few cars and two eighteen-wheelers, a young couple at a cement picnic table, and a trucker hitching up his pants as he left the bathroom. Between the distance and the light scrub brush in the tree line, they couldn’t see LaSalle watching them.
This would make a really good ambush spot. And he should know.
He made his living by tracking people down. He was very good at it. Of course, most of the time when he found them they went missing all over again. The investigative principle was still the same, though. He had an innate talent for finding people from the tiny clues they left behind in their travels, no
t all of them physical. It frustrated him that he hadn’t been able to get closer to Britney in all this time. It also saddened him, because he knew the biggest reason people always slipped up, always left a way for him to find them.
They were alive.
When you’re alive, you need food, drink, and some form of human company sooner or later. These things make you interact with the checkout girl at the grocery store, your neighbors down the street, the mailman. Someone has always seen you, because you’re alive.
It’s when you’re dead that you drop off the radar.
LaSalle forced those thoughts away and started through the trees again, meaning to loop around back to his car. Instead, he ran across a game trail partially covered with a light dusting of snow. From his background in the city, some might be surprised he even knew what a game trail was. He’d been on more than one trip to track some cat hiding out in the boonies, so he had become a somewhat decent woodsman out of necessity.
He followed the trail until it dipped away from the highway and angled down a slope. At the bottom of the slope lay the snowy open field LaSalle saw the last time he was here. Even though the slope wasn’t terrible, if a man got interrupted mid-murder and ran this way in the dark, he’d have a hell of a time. Unless he knew the area very, very well.
The woods got thicker before they opened into the field. As good a place as any to hide a body. LaSalle had hidden bodies in places like this before. And if he found someone who had in fact hurt Britney Santini, he’d need to hide another one.
He headed back to the rest stop rather than go down the slope, unwilling to risk it in three hundred dollar shoes designed to clip-clop down city sidewalks.
LaSalle observed how the rest stop appeared through the trees when someone came from the woods. The game trail kept him hidden until he was within fifty feet of the brick bathrooms. He stood there, perfectly still, dappled in sunlight and shadow like he wore the camouflage of the gods. The light hit the trail from the side, casting shadows across the ground and his eye picked out a straight shadow not made by the natural world.
He knelt and saw a depression in the earth, a couple of inches across, made by something straight. The mark ran into the snow and disappeared.
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