Smiley

by Ezell, Michael

  “There’s a copy of the report in the bag. I’ve read it, of course. She said her friend left with a trucker she had partied with before, headed for the rest stop. He wanted her to stay the night. When she didn’t come back the next morning, the friend called in,” Shirley said.

  “Did Dad find the trucker?”

  “He put out a BOLO and a trooper got the guy, right at the state line. The driver said they argued over her wanting more money to stay the night and she got out, said she was walking back to the truck stop. The last he saw of her, she was walking down the blacktop into the dark. Like so many have before her,” Shirley said.

  “Did they do a polygraph, all that?”

  “For what?”

  “To corroborate the guy’s story,” Garrett said.

  “You’ve been in this business since you were a youngster. How much effort do you think they put into corroborating a john’s story about a hooker who stiffed her friend for half the motel room? These girls come and go like the wind,” Shirley said.

  “Smoke,” Garrett said.

  “Whichever you like.”

  “He never talked to me about any of this,” Garrett said.

  “You two never talked about much of anything. I think he always regretted that.” She gave him an impulsive kiss on the cheek. “I loved your father very much, Garrett.”

  “Yeah. Lots of folks did,” he said.

  After she drove away, Garrett carried the bag inside and emptied its contents onto the kitchen table. The cigar and tee shirt combined to give him memories of being young, hugging a furry-chested laughing giant clad in a white tee shirt and uniform pants, the sweetness of cigar tobacco mixed with Aqua Velva.

  When Mom died, the laughing giant shuttered up and never came out again.

  More of Dad’s blocky print, this time on the lines of a Xeroxed police report. Ortega, Danielle. Five-four, black over brown. Nineteen. A single photo. Candid, snapped in a hotel room somewhere. Garrett thought he recognized the orange walls from the La Quinta over in Wheeling. Odd, though. She wasn’t posing like she would for a friend. Her hair tousled on a pillow, she gazed at the camera the way a woman looks at a lover in the morning.

  A paperclip attached the report to the front of a large manila envelope, the kind secured by a little white string running around two posts. Garrett unwound it and let the contents slide out. A folded map, a list of female names with dates beside them starting in the year 1984, and one old Polaroid photo.

  The yellowing Polaroid had the halo of a fading memory that would probably be gone in another year or so. Garrett turned it all around, trying to puzzle out what it was. A picture of the ground with an impression of two straight lines diagonally across the frame.

  He flipped the picture over and saw his father’s handwriting again. Travois?

  Garrett shrugged and unfolded the map. His dad had pretty much done the same thing LaSalle did, but without a computer. He had little X’s instead of dots, but there were two dozen marks on the map, with six on the rest stop up on 45. Not as comprehensive as LaSalle’s list, but arriving at the same conclusion.

  Lines in blue ink partitioned off the land mapped below the highway, dividing it up into some dozen or so family farms. All the family names appeared in his father’s scrawl. He saw Heideman circled with Jeremy? written next to it.

  Jeremy Heideman, Misty’s uncle, started stealing tractors at fourteen. He got into heavier things, like heroin, by the time he hit eighteen, and was later accused of having sex with a thirteen-year-old girl at a crack house in Georgia.

  There were lines drawn on the map in blue ink, looked like possible routes from the Heideman farm up to the woods at the rear of the rest stop. Not a bad theory, maybe. But Jeremy had been in prison for five years now on a cocaine trafficking bit. He wouldn’t have had anything to do with LaSalle’s girl, or this latest one, Taylor. If that was really her name.

  Garrett listened to his mother’s old clock tick in the living room. The map of missing girls lay on the same table where he’d gagged on runny egg yolks the first time he tried “over easy” like Dad always had. The old man laughed and laughed, Mom’s eyes crinkled at the corners with her easy smile, and she was ready with a plate of scrambled because she knew.

  He’d always seen his father as a stoic cop who bore everything with a steely-eyed mountain man resolve. To know the job drove the old man to a certain level of obsession could have been something they shared, something to talk about. Could have been.

  Garrett looked at the faded Polaroid again. Travois?

  12

  The bull circled the matador, hooves scraping the earth raw, blood and mucus dripping from the black muzzle. His regal head drooped low, his morrillo, the massive neck mound, already weakened by the spear of the picador. Blood pattered onto the warm dirt from the wounds where the gaily-decorated banderillas hung from his flesh.

  Smiley’s shining eyes drank in the last part, the preparation for the killing thrust, the estocada. The dance of the cape, the edge of danger, the matador allowing death to brush his body as it passes. The Hunter toys with the girls this way, even pulls a red cloth over their pitiful faces when he’s feeling merciful. Which is rare.

  Smiley’s one real indulgence, the massive big-screen TV bolted to the living room wall made the bloody bullfights feel so immediate, so hot and coppery when the blood ran. The Internet wasn’t good for much, in Smiley’s opinion, but he had found these bullfighting DVD’s on a site hawking bloodsport videos. People fighting, animals fighting, and in the case of the bullfights, human against beast. Not unlike the internal battle waged inside Smiley every day.

  A sexual release paled in comparison to the twitching pleasure inside Smiley when the matador slid his shining blade into the hump of muscles on the beast’s neck. The crowd roared and Smiley bared his teeth as the bull collapsed in the ring.

  After they dragged the bull from the ring, Smiley retrieved his own sword from the kitchen. About two feet long, thin and sharp. He’d forged it himself from a billet of stainless steel and sharpened it with loving care.

  His practice dummy knelt the way he liked them to be when he chose to perform the final strike down past the clavicle. The subclavian stab, they called it in the Army.

  He had to use his practice pieces sparingly. He could only sew up punctures so often before the skins started to degrade. This skin was stretched over a cloth under-form packed with buckwheat hulls. It gave him the best tactile sensation when the blade punched through the tanned hide.

  The Hunter stood tall and proud over her, like the matador. He whirled a bolt of red silk, just brushing her face with it. The faces never looked the same once he pulled them off the skull, but her hair moved like the green limbs of a willow in the breeze.

  He rose up on his toes, ignoring the crackling from his ankles and came down on her with a thrust he knew as well as his own heartbeat. The blade pierced the perfect spot and punched into the body until his fist met the cold skin over her collarbone. Or where her collarbone would’ve been.

  Smiley backed away, his breathing ragged and short, not just from exertion. It had actually been quite a while since he dealt the final blow in this particular way.

  Maybe he’d put Bradley Wentz in this position before he opened his no-good heart.

  ***

  LaSalle sipped his coffee and watched the snow whipping past his window. The temperature dropped again last night and a thick white blanket had erased the world outside. He knew the tracks in the dirt behind the rest stop would be gone, but he didn’t need them.

  He took the time to finish his coffee. Not nasty truck stop shit. He brought his own French press and electric boiler with him when he traveled. In LaSalle’s world, man’s ability to make a decent cup of coffee is what separated him from the animals.

  He fired up his laptop and tried to zoom in on the picture of Taylor one more time. No use. Nadine’s camera hadn’t been set on the highest resolution, so every time he tried to blow up th
e area on the girl’s wrist the image became so pixelated he couldn’t see shit.

  Something shiny there. No way to tell if it was a charm bracelet. He doubted even Garrett would consider it good evidence.

  His cell phone bleated and he snatched it up. “LaSalle.”

  A man’s voice with a bit of Maine drawl to it. “Yeah, uh... I pulled into Burton’s here in Artemis and I saw a flier.”

  LaSalle sat up and grabbed a pen.

  “Can I have your name, sir?”

  “Look, I didn’t do anything, I just saw this girl, okay?”

  “Absolutely. I am not a law enforcement officer, sir. I’m a private investigator trying to find a lost girl,” LaSalle said.

  “Okay... It’s Boyd Cummings.”

  “Mr. Cummings, would it be okay if I drove out to Burton’s and met with you?”

  “Just you, no cops, right?”

  “Yes, sir. Believe me, I prefer it that way.”

  LaSalle had trouble keeping his foot out of the Volvo’s carburetor on the way out there. The only thing holding him in check was the new snow dusting all the roads, making it a wheel-gripping drive, even with traction control. His mother would have surely thanked the Good Lord when he pulled into the truck stop’s gravel lot in one piece.

  Boyd Cummings looked pretty much like he sounded on the phone. Craggy New England face under a broad-billed cap, maybe fifty years old. LaSalle could imagine him leaning on a split-rail fence saying “A-yup” to something his neighbor said.

  After a quick handshake, they went inside the truck stop’s diner to escape the bitter chill. Once they settled into a booth in back, Cummings took LaSalle’s flier from his pocket.

  “This was around a year back, but yeah, I definitely remember her. Great girl when she was happy, but when she wasn’t...”

  “Britney was known to have an attitude from time to time,” LaSalle said.

  The trucker snorted. “Attitude? She threatened to jump out of the darn cab because I didn’t want to stop for ice cream. Ice cream!”

  To LaSalle that was no surprise. He even knew her favorite flavor. He pushed it out of his mind for now. “So how did you part company?”

  Cummings looked embarrassed. “I’m not an asshole. If I pick up a girl out here, I treat her right, ya know? We ate and drove up to the rest stop because the lot was too full to sleep here.”

  “Were there other trucks at the rest stop?”

  “There was a car, somebody taking a nap, probably. But that was it.”

  “You remember what the car looked like?” LaSalle said.

  “No, I’m sorry. Just a dark colored car, that’s all I remember. Anyway, we got in an argument up there. She wanted to go back to the truck stop because she forgot to buy...well, more rubbers. I told her I wasn’t turning my damn rig around and going back for that. She started in on me, about how I was just an asshole like any other trucker and she could find those guys dime a dozen out here. I told her, fine, go ahead, get the hell outta my truck then.”

  “Did she?”

  “Yeah. Middle of the night, too,” Cummings said. Then he added, “But it was summer, see? I knew she’d be okay, not like now.”

  “Of course. What happened then?” LaSalle said.

  “I was pissed off, so I figured I’d just get outta here. Drive a few more hours up the line and sleep at the next truck stop I came to. But...I started feeling guilty. I turned around about three exits west of here and came back. By the time I got back, she was gone. I drove down, looking for her along the way, didn’t see her. Didn’t see her at Burton’s, either. Hell, I just figured she’d already picked herself up another john.”

  “Was the car still there?”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t check inside or anything. You know...there was something a little weird,” Cummings said.

  “About the car?”

  “No. When I first went back to the rest stop, and didn’t see her around, I checked the bathrooms. As I was getting back into my truck, I heard a small engine. Like a snowmobile running all out, but real quiet like. Must have been far away, I guess.”

  “You’re sure?” LaSalle said.

  “I’m from Maine, buddy. I know a snow machine when I hear one. But it was like one in the morning, you know? And whoever it was had it flat out, sounded like it. Got quieter, so it must have been going away from the rest stop.”

  LaSalle thought of his impromptu hike through the woods. “Let me ask you something, since you’re the expert. How do people move something large if they’re on a snowmobile?”

  “Easy. Just buy yourself a sled, or make one.”

  “Is it hard to move a sled without it being attached to the machine?”

  “Not if it’s snowy. Hell, not even if it’s warm and the load is light,” Cummings said.

  LaSalle gazed at the snow falling outside, disengaging from the here and now, from conscious thought. Trucks leaving the pumps put temporary tracks through the whiteness, down to the cold gray concrete. Soon enough, white flurries blew into the tracks, at first leaving a ghost of them, then making them disappear completely. In his mind’s eye, LaSalle wove through the trees, white snow crunching under his feet, breathing hard because he’s pulling a load, the sled behind him leaving behind those straight tracks, flurries coming in like conspirators and making his path invisible again.

  Except where the snow was too thin. There he left his marks in the dirt.

  “I got a schedule I’m supposed to be on. I’m really sorry.” The Yankee was yammering about something. Oh yeah, they were just talking, weren’t they?

  “Of course. I understand completely. Thank you so much for your honesty. It really helped,” LaSalle said.

  “I hope so. I feel bad she’s missing. I hope you find her soon.”

  LaSalle offered him a sad smile as they shook hands.

  ***

  This time he wore better shoes. LaSalle followed the slope down from the rest stop, along the game trail, through the heavily wooded area below the highway. Rabbit tracks marred the fresh snow, but nothing else. Odd thing about rabbit tracks, their front feet make the mark behind, with their longer back feet hitting the snow ahead. If you didn’t know what you were looking at, you’d be hard pressed to know if the animal was coming or going.

  At first, LaSalle had to push through brush and tree branches arched over the trail. Then it opened up in an almost unnatural way. Like it was groomed.

  He went slow, examining everything around him. Bushes seemed a bit too rounded on the side facing the trail, not wild enough. Small trees with branches angled up instead of arcing over the trail. Something weird about one of the trees made LaSalle stop and give it a closer look. He ran a finger over one branch and found a manmade bump on the bark. Rusted wire buried in the wood where the branch turned away from the trail. Someone had directed this branch as carefully as a bonsai master forms his miniature creations.

  Now he saw the hand of a man everywhere. All the signs were old. More rusted wire, deadfalls obviously hacked apart with an axe and moved off the trail years ago, and right there, at the bottom of the slope, on the edge of the open snowy field, a lump of bramble and tree branches almost natural in the way they fell together. Almost.

  Like the rabbit tracks, the hunting blind was deceiving. It looked like a wild growth covered with snow. Once LaSalle pushed aside some bramble, he saw a nice space inside. He didn’t know jack-shit about snowmobiles, but they couldn’t be much bigger than a jet ski, and you could definitely park a jet ski in there.

  He stepped in, the low ceiling making him stoop, and examined the workmanship. Dim light and a bit of snow filtered through the carefully woven branches tied into tall bushes, creating a narrow natural parking garage of sorts.

  LaSalle’s white breath hung in the still air like he’d expelled a ghost. Strange tracks marked the ground in the hide. He knew snowmobiles were driven by something like tank treads. Wide tracks with vertical lines across them. These particular ones had what looke
d like three open crescent shapes grouped together in the middle of the tracks. Hard to tell how old, but some looked fairly fresh. He pushed aside the bramble again and went outside.

  The empty white fields seemed to mock him. Now what?

  A hunting blind with snowmobile tracks inside. A bracelet found by the highway. Track marks on a game trail. A jumble of nothings he wanted to force into something concrete.

  It frustrated him to be this close again, speaking to people who’d laid eyes on Britney, but unable to jump the gap like he had so many times before. Make the next connection leading him to the person he really wanted.

  Snowflakes blew into his face and he stood like a little kid, tongue out, face turned to the sky as the white bits drifted down, looping on the wind. It reminded him of a snowy night in Jersey, when he had a man on his knees behind a construction site on New Year’s Eve. He’d had no mercy then, and he wouldn’t now, if he found a killer of women.

  13

  “Whit would lose his mind if he knew I was talking to you.”

  Lyle Hampton sat in his police unit behind the abandoned Buster Brown shoe store on the south side of town. Garrett sat in the Mustang, parked door to door with Lyle.

  “Wouldn’t be a tragedy. Whit doesn’t have much mind to lose,” Garrett said.

  Lyle couldn’t help but grin. He looked at the report again, and then at the map Garrett gave him. “Your dad took the report about a year before I started here, looks like. I never heard him talk about it. Kinda weird he spent this much time on it and nobody knew. No offense.”

  “No, no, of course not. It was weird, trust me. I never knew him to get this involved in anything. You remember any Missing cases before I got here? I don’t remember us taking even one report last year,” Garrett said.

  “Nope. I’ve never taken one. Wouldn’t even know how to put it in the system.” Lyle snapped his fingers. “You know, when I was on training, me and Whit took a courtesy report for the Staties one morning. Roads were icy up over the pass and they had a triple fatal that morning. They couldn’t spare anyone to go to the rest stop and the victim needed to get on the road or he’d miss his delivery time.”