Little Girls Lost

by Jonah Paine

  He let himself in the front door, stepping carefully in case there was a cat underfoot, and passed through the dark living room into the kitchen. He hadn't eaten much, but it was too late for a meal and nothing in the refrigerator caught his eye. Finally he grabbed an apple out of a bowl on the counter. It would be enough to get him to sleep.

  The house was silent when he headed upstairs to the bedroom. Sam listened for the sound of Patty's breathing, and felt reassured when he heard it. He needn't have bothered, though—he could have smelled the stale liquor on her breath from the hallway. He tucked her in and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. Even on the bad days it was good to have her home.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The next morning Sam parked his car in front of a gray suburban house with a sick feeling in his stomach that had nothing to do with the three cups of coffee he'd already drunk in the station.

  Dental records on the body they found in the river had turned up a match: one Jasmine Martin, sixteen years old and a high school junior. Inside that gray house sat Jasmine's mother, who was no doubt struggling to come to terms with the fact that her daughter, once so full of life, was now dead. Sam knew that feeling all too well, and he hated that he was about to inflict an extra bit of pain on her.

  He got out of the car with a sigh, blinking against the bright morning sunshine. If nothing else, he could take consolation in the fact that sometimes the pain is so deep that it can't get any worse.

  There were already two cops in the living room when Sam arrived, and Sam caught sight of Bud in the kitchen. Joining him there, he gave his partner a quizzical look. "Looking for something to eat?" he asked.

  Bud smirked. "Nah. Waiting for you. You're a lot better at this than I am."

  Sam shook his head. "There is no such thing as being good at this." He looked back over his shoulder in the direction of the living room, where he could hear women's hushed voices and scattered sounds of grief. "Let's get it over with."

  The living room of the Martin home was comfortable, a little too much so, with overstuffed easy chairs circling the television set. On the couch in the center of the room sat Jasmine's mother, looking very tired with her dirty blonde hair pulled back into a sloppy ponytail. She was clutching a framed photo against her chest. With a practiced eye Sam sized her up and, despite himself, made a few educated guesses: she was a recovering alcoholic, most likely, and probably a smoker, too, though if so she was a careful one because he couldn't smell nicotine in the room. This thing with her daughter would be hard on her, Sam thought. Losing a child is impossibly hard for everyone, but if you have something to fall back on—your faith, your family, or a sense of purpose—you have a chance to make it through. This woman looked like she didn't have much in her corner on a good day.

  Sam kneeled in front of her. Two other women, about the same age, hovered on either side and eyed him warily. Sam knew they were protecting their friend, but he had some questions that needed asking.

  "Mrs. Martin, I can only guess at the pain you're going through right now, but I need to ask you a few questions." He waited for her eyes to focus on him and for her to nod. "Was your daughter seeing anyone? Was there anyone in her life who made her feel uncomfortable or afraid?"

  Jasmine's mother stared at him silently for a time. Sam knew her mind was returning from the realm of memory to the present day. "I ... no. I don't think so."

  Sam persisted. "Anyone at all. If you can give us anything, any place to start, it would be a huge help in catching the person who's responsible."

  Her eyes filled with tears. Sam knew she was thinking about what had happened to Jasmine, and how her daughter must have felt, how she must have screamed and begged in the last few moments of her life. She took a look at the photo in her hands, then handed it to Sam. It was a photograph of a pretty young girl with brown hair and a confident smile, barely recognizable as the corpse they had pulled from the river the day before.

  One of the women bustling about, who had a tired face and greasy hair, took up a position nearby. "Joanne, don't you think you should tell them about Jimmy?"

  Jasmine's mother shot her an acid look, but then she nodded reluctantly. "I suppose I should tell you," she said, giving Sam an unhappy look. "Jasmine's father ... he left me. We didn't see or hear from him for years, but a few weeks ago he called. Out of the blue. He said he wanted to be part of Jasmine's life again."

  "Was that a problem?"

  She shifted uncomfortably. "He ... he used to get pretty rough, when we fought. And he hit Jasmine too, sometimes. Jasmine didn't want to have anything to do with him." She paused. "Do you think he might have something to do with this?"

  Sam shrugged. "I can't say for sure, but we'll look into it. Thank you. Is there anything else?"

  "She did ... there was a boyfriend. I didn't like him much, I thought Jasmine could have done better. She was so beautiful, she could have had any boy she wanted. But she saw something in him. He's a musician, or at least he claims to be."

  Sam nodded. They had a place to start. He felt intuitively that the deadbeat dad was probably a dead end, but musicians who are just starting out play wherever they can get a gig, in some of the cheapest and roughest parts of town. If Jasmine was following her boyfriend to these places, it could have brought her into contact with the sort of person who would hurt a girl to get what he wanted. "Do you know his name, ma'am?"

  "Billy Monroe," a woman's voice pronounced to Sam's right. He turned to look up into the scowling face of one of the women who had come to help Jasmine's mother during her time of grief. "He used to be friends with my son, until I told my boy he wasn't welcome around our home anymore. If he's still the same little punk I knew, you'll find him causing trouble down by the Lucky Strike on 5th."

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Lucky Strike by day was a depressing little box of a building surrounded by concrete, out in the part of town where downtown began to give way to the dirty factories that dotted the industrial district.

  When the sun went down, though, the nightclub came into its own, illuminated on nearly every surface with a garish display of neon tubing that made shadow puppets of pale punk rockers and cast their monstrous shadows across every surface.

  Sam walked with Bud across the parking lot and toward the front entrance. He knew his partner was taking a measure of the place, trying to decide whether these kids were as tough as they were acting or whether the whole thing was a game of make-believe. As a cop you learn that, in some ways, it really doesn't matter; even if a kid is nothing but a gangster wanna-be he may choose this night to impress his friends by trying to take out a cop. Sam didn't feel the familiar tingle along the back of his neck that signaled danger, though. It was a Thursday night, and the crowd wasn't in full rebel form yet.

  The front door was flanked by five kids in black leather. Sam tried to hide his smirk. They all wanted to be non-conformists, and yet they were dressed so much alike it may as well have been a uniform. Like most would-be rebels he'd met, they were just members of a club.

  He nodded at one of them, a kid with a dramatic mohawk with red and blue stripes. "You know a Billy Monroe?" he asked.

  The kid looked back at him defiantly. "Who's asking?"

  "I am," Sam replied evenly. "Don't worry, he's not in trouble, we just have a few questions for him."

  The kid looked back and forth at his friends, trying to decide what to do. Bud cleared his throat. "There's no trouble here unless you make some. You're obviously a shitty liar, so just tell us where he is and get on with it."

  The kid stared defiantly at Bud for a moment, but then something inside him gave way. "Billy!" he called over his shoulder. "Some people here to see you."

  Sam looked past him at a shadowed area beside a dumpster. Three teenagers in black were huddled there, but when they felt a police detective's eyes on them, two of them beat a hasty retreat. Sam knew that he had probably interrupted a low-level drug sale, but it wasn't worth his time. He had bigger fish to fry. He w
alked over to the remaining figure.

  Billy Monroe was the very image of the punk rebel, with tattoos covering both arms and a black hat pulled down over a head that rested on a the sort of neck you usually only see on a bulldog. To Sam's eyes, he looked like perfect boyfriend material for the sort of teenager who wanted to piss off her mother.

  "You're Billy Monroe?" he asked the kid.

  "Yeah," Billy replied, looking unhappy to find himself in this conversation. Over Sam's shoulders his eyes cast daggers at the friend who had ratted him out.

  "You dated a girl named Jasmine?" Bud asked. He had taken up a position slightly behind Sam and angled so that he could keep an eye out for anyone who might be sneaking up behind them. Sam thought the measure was probably unnecessary, but he still felt glad that his partner quite literally had his back.

  "You heard what happened to her?" Sam asked, watching Billy's face closely for the boy's reaction.

  Billy looked down at the pavement for a few moments, his hands on his hips, before he looked up again. "Yeah, I heard."

  Bud snorted. "You don't seem too broken up about it, sport."

  Billy took half a step forward. "What the fuck do you know, pig?"

  Sam held up his hands in reassurance. "Take it easy. No one's accusing you. But you understand that we need to find out who did that to Jasmine. And we hoped that, since you and she were close, maybe you'd want to help."

  Billy looked off to the side, out into the night. "I would like nothing more," he said, sounding out every word carefully. "Actually, that's not true," he added, looking back at Sam. "There's one thing I'd like better, and that would be to take a gun and stick it in the mouth of the motherfucker who did that and pull the fucking trigger!" When he finished he was breathing hard, and Sam thought he might even be close to tears. He wondered when Billy Monroe had last shed a tear for anyone or anything.

  "You don't know anyone who had it in for her? Did she say anything about someone who was giving her trouble, or maybe someone who creeped her out?"

  "Nah," Billy said, looking away again. "Nothing. Everyone liked Jasmine. I can't say the same for her, she could be a bit of a bitch sometimes. But she had this way of getting people to like her and want to do things for her."

  "Do things for her, or do things to her?" Bud asked.

  Billy's face clouded, and for a moment Sam thought that he would throw a punch. "Fuck you," he snarled.

  Bud took a step forward, but Sam stepped between them before the situation escalated further. "Billy, we're going to need to know where you were three nights ago."

  Billy took a few breaths to calm himself, then looked away. "I was in Portland. My band played a roadhouse down there, five days straight. We got back yesterday."

  Bud snorted. "That's convenient. You were out of town right when someone was cutting up your girlfriend."

  Billy grinned defiantly back at him. "The truth is convenient sometimes."

  "We'll need to check that out. Do you have anyone who can vouch for you?"

  "My whole band."

  "Other than your friends and other people who would be willing to lie for you."

  Billy stared at him for the space of two breaths. "There's the staff at the roadhouse. It's called Jimmy's, and it's on the edge of town on ... shit, what street was that ... Fairview I think it was called. Fair something, anyway. The manager and the waitresses will remember I was there."

  By this point Sam was sure that Billy was pretty much the last person he'd want to date anyone he cared about, but he also was starting to believe that the kid was telling the truth. If so, that was bad news for the investigation, because, with the exception of the deadbeat dad, it put them back on square one.

  They went through the usual routine—telling Billy that he was a material witness in a homicide, that he shouldn't leave town, that if he thought of anything that might help the investigation he should contact them at the station—and then they walked back to the car. Sam was mostly lost in thought when Bud interrupted him.

  "Did you see his arms?"

  "Hmmm?" Sam asked.

  "His arms. More tracks than a train station. The guy's doing heroine, I'll bet."

  "Yeah."

  "Yeah? That's all you've got to say? He's a junkie!"

  Sam knew where his partner was going with this, and he knew from experience not to try to shut him down, but he was too tired to pretend enthusiasm. "It doesn't matter. We have no reason to think that Jasmine was using."

  "Doesn't matter. Drugs means drug-dealers and drug addicts, and wherever you have dealers and addicts you have a need for money. There are two reasons people kill: for sex and for money. I bet it was a robbery gone bad."

  "We'll check it out," Sam said, but his gut told him that it was a dead end. If it was a robbery, then Jasmine's murderer got as much money as she was carrying and no more. That didn't make much sense as a motive, and it didn't explain the multiple stab wounds. Those spoke of anger, and obsession. Those spoke of a different killer than the suspects they'd seen so far.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Sam liked to think of his desk as a refuge, though it sat in the middle of the room and offered no privacy to speak of.

  He would sit in his standard-issue office chair, fill the space before him with papers, and allow his mind to drift off into the facts of the case and the speculation those facts inspired. Sam had never been the gregarious sort, and often the parts of police work he found most draining were the ones out on the street, where he was forced by the requirements of the job to talk with one person of interest after another when he would far preferred to be sitting alone and thinking things through. His desk was where Sam could do what, in his own mind, defined his one true talent.

  Other times, the person of interest came to him. That morning, Jasmine Martin's father had paid a visit. When Sam heard that the man was waiting for him downstairs, for a brief instant he fantasized that the killer was here to turn himself in. In fact, he was here to help. Sam had rarely seen a man so traumatized. Mr. Martin was struggling not only with the death of his daughter, but also with the thought that maybe, if he hadn't skipped out on his family, he would have been there to protect her somehow. Sam took his statement and asked him about his whereabouts, but unless the man was a brilliant actor, he had nothing to do with the death of his daughter.

  Before him lay a stack of manila folders. Each contained a stack of papers that were, at best, hard to read. These papers detailed the sad and brutal end of one woman after another at the hands of sadistic monsters who had been caught, tried, sent to prison, and in some cases set free to haunt the city's streets once again. Sam had been reading files like this for more years than he could count, but he never grew numb to their contents. Every case was an outrage. Every case represented a family destroyed by sorrow. He read through the details, looking for what he needed, and did what he could to float on the surface of the sea of rage without getting sucked down.

  One part of Sam's mind held the details of the damage that had been inflicted on Jasmine's body, and he flicked through pages looking for a match. The report had come in from the M.E.'s office that the wounds were post-mortem, which made them meaningful. They were not the product of some desperate struggle. They were not an accident. They were inflicted when the killer had time to think, prepare, and enact the pattern he carried in his mind. Sam knew that, if he looked closely enough, he could always see the face of the killer in the damage he inflicted.

  The pattern of Jasmine's stab wounds was not absolutely distinct. It did not spell out the name of a neglectful mother, nor did it form a swastika or any other recognizable pattern. There was something about it, though, that caught Sam's eye, something in the way that three wounds clustered around her navel in a way that seemed deliberate. He knew that it was a small thread that he was following, but it was the best he had. Following the thread meant he was still in the office as the clock ticked toward midnight, reviewing the many ways in which women had died at the hands of men w
ho loved and hated them.

  His eyes were tired and his back was sore. Sam leaned back with a sigh and drew a hand through his hair. Bud had long since left for home. His partner was still convinced that the boyfriend, some random junkie, or the Colombian drug cartel were somehow responsible, either because of the weight of the evidence or because it made for a good story.

  It was late, and Sam was feeling particularly tired, when something caught his eyes and set his pulse to running a little faster. The case file was for a sexual sadist by the name of Jesse Wayne Rasmussen, who had been captured and sentenced ten years before. He was a very nasty man, Sam could see. He started out with sexual assault but soon graduated to murder, where he found his signature in the serial murder of three prostitutes who he raped, murdered, and threw into the same river they had recently fished Jasmine from.

  That much was no more than a coincidence. The photos of his last killing, though, showed a cluster of three stab wounds around the victim's navel. Sam held the photo up to the light, his fingers gripping it tightly. He wasn't sure that it would hold up in court, but to his eyes it was clear: Jasmine's body bore the same wounds.

  But could it be the same man? The case file left off with the conviction of Rasmussen. If he was still behind bars, Sam's theory would be no more than that: a theory. He woke his computer from sleep and navigated to the court records database. Punching up Rasmussen's record, Sam read with a mounting sense of excitement. Rasmussen had been tried and convicted on multiple counts of sexual assault and murder, and sentenced to three consecutive life terms. But then his counsel challenged the convictions on the basis that the DNA evidence linking Rasmussen to the crimes had been compromised.

  Sam's eyes landed on the fateful line in the updated report. Rasmussen's conviction had been overturned on appeal, and he had been released six months ago.