Little Girls Lost

by Jonah Paine

  Sam looked around, searching for the words. "Why?" was all he could manage.

  It was a long time before Bud answered. "At first I thought I was in love with her. More likely I was just drunk and stupid. Now I'm just ashamed, and so, so sorry."

  Sam shook his head, then began walking towards his car.

  "Sam?" Bud called after him.

  "I'm sorry too," he said in answer, then continued on in silence.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  An interrogation room is specially designed to make a prisoner feel like he's teetering on the edge of the worst place in the world.

  The flickering fluorescent lighting, the folding metal chair, the bare walls and the two-way mirror that says "We're watching you and you can't watch us," all of it was specifically designed to make whoever sat in that folding chair feel as if he had not a friend in the world.

  Today the occupant of the chair was named Joey Saldana, and Sam watched through the mirror as two officers asked questions of him. The boy had been picked up at school earlier that day. He wasn't under arrest, he was simply here to answer a few questions. Sam could barely imagine how freaked out Joey must have been when the cops came for him, right in front of his friends. Or maybe he was excited; who can tell with kids today?

  Joey didn't look excited. He looked scared, mostly, and was clearly looking forward to the moment when he would be allowed to leave.

  "Could you tell us about your relationship with Pamela Wilson?" asked the paunchy officer sitting across from him.

  "We're friends," Joey answered, visibly squirming. Sam thought that he wasn't a bad-looking kid. He had an athletic build, though he certainly wasn't muscular. He looked like someone's little brother.

  "Do you remember the last time you saw her?"

  Joey's eyes shifted up and to the left as he searched his memory. "Sure, it was in the hallway at school. We talked for a bit."

  "When was that?"

  "Thursday."

  "What did you talk about?"

  "Not much. School stuff."

  "Did you ask her out?"

  "What?" To Sam's eyes, Joey was visibly startled. He had probably been hoping that he was just one of many friends of Pamela who would sit in this chair and answer these questions. Now, for the first time, he was beginning to wonder whether he might be the only one the police were interested in.

  "Did you ask her out on a date?"

  "No, we weren't like that. We were just friends."

  "Are you sure about that? We've talked to other people at the school, Joey. They all say that you liked Pamela. And that you asked Pamela out more than once."

  Joey squirmed uncomfortably, looking everywhere in the room except at his interrogator. "I guess I did."

  "Did you ask her out when you talked to her in the hall on Thursday?"

  "Maybe."

  "Did you or not?"

  "I did."

  "Did she shoot you down, Joey?" The interrogator's voice took on a friendly tone, but Sam could see that Joey was not fooled. He had no friends in this building.

  "She didn't say yes, but I think she maybe...."

  "Maybe what? Maybe you'd be able to convince her?"

  "Yeah," Joey said uncertainly, as if searching for the answer that the interrogator would accept.

  "How would you convince her, Joey? Maybe by following her to work? Maybe by confronting her when she came out of the homeless shelter?"

  "What? No! I'd never do that!"

  "What would you do, Joey? What would you do to a girl who shot you down again and again, in front of your friends? What would you do to a girl who made you look small like that?"

  Joey grew white in the face and visibly restrained himself from leaping out of the chair. He looked down, gathered himself, and then looked the interrogator right in the eye. "I would never hurt Pamela. And she didn't shoot me down! She was way too nice for that. Even if she didn't want to do go out with you, she'd find a nice way of saying it, because she cared about how people felt. No one else gives a shit about anyone, but Pamela does. So you go out there, and you find whoever did this, and you fuck them up! Because Pamela deserved better."

  Sam turned away from the mirror and exited the observation room. At one point he had thought that Joey might be the one behind all of this. He knew Pamela, he wanted to know her better, and as an athlete on the school football team he might have seen Jasmine as a cheerleader on the sideline and Betsy up in the stands. It was a thin thread, but one that for a time seemed promising.

  Now Sam knew better. The kid sitting in that seat had nothing to do with the abductions or the killings. Sam crossed one name off his mental list and focused even tighter on the image of the gray van.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  "Do you think about death, Pamela?"

  Pamela turned her head away from the voice. Crouched in a corner of her cage, she tried to pretend that she couldn't hear him, that she was in some place far away.

  "I ask because I think about death a lot, and I thought you might have some special insight. Seeing as how you'll be dead so soon."

  Pamela hugged herself. Despite her best efforts she was shivering, and the tears were coming again.

  "The people who used to live in Germany many centuries ago believed that, if you were about to die, you would see a crow. The bird was the spirit that would take your soul to the other side. Tell me, Pamela, have you seen any crows today? Of course, it would be hard to make out a black-feathered bird in a place like this. It is pretty dark."

  At first Pamela had been afraid of the dark, sure. For the first few days or weeks—she had no idea how long she'd been locked in this cage—she was afraid of everything that might be out in that dark. Her mind had conjured up every shape fear could take, from rats and cockroaches to tentacled monsters. Pamela had spent a lot of time in the dark, though, and somewhere along the way it stopped seeming dark to her. Now this was simply her world.

  "Do you want to go home, Pamela?"

  This was different. This broke through the pattern of thoughts she played through her head to make it from one hour to the next. Her tormentor had threatened her more times than she could count, he had shouted and raged and spat at her, and he had spoken calmly and at length about all the horrible things he was planning to do to her before the end. But he had never offered her freedom before. The speaker was out of sight, in the shadows or around a corner, but she turned in the direction of the voice.

  "You do want to go home, of course you do. There's no question about that. The question is, what are you willing to do for it? That's something I think about a lot: when you're staring death right in the face, how does it change things? If you're about to lose everything, is there anything that you won't give up in order to avoid it?"

  Pamela hugged her knees and remained silent.

  "Would you be willing to give me your body, in exchange for your life? I'll bet you would. I'll bet you're just the kind of whore to give it up. But that's no good. You'd enjoy it, you filthy slut, and I don't want you to enjoy anything, ever again."

  Pamela turned her head away again. She recognized this game. They had played it before.

  "Since you'd give up your body to me, I wonder if you'd also be willing to give up just a little bit of it. Like maybe your fingers. Would you give up your fingers and walk out of here with bloody stumps at the ends of your arms, if it meant you could walk out of here?"

  He laughed at his joke. Pamela blinked away new tears.

  "Maybe you need to think about it. Here's what I'll do. I'll take one finger tomorrow and let you think about the other nine. That seems fair."

  He laughed again, and Pamela heard his chuckling recede down the hallway, the sounds bouncing off the brick walls.

  In time it was silent again, and Pamela counted one hundred breaths before she moved to the door of the cage. With scraped and bloody fingers she began working again on a loose hinge at the bottom of the cage door. The thought of what he had promised, the chance that
he might keep his promise and cut off her fingers, gave Pamela's work new urgency. She pushed and tugged at the hinge as hard as she could without filling the room with the sound of metal on metal. Her labored breathing was louder than the noise of metal on stone.

  Suddenly, with a tearing sound, the hinge broke loose. Her heart pounding, Pamela listened for a sign that her captor had heard. After counting another hundred breaths of silence, she reached out and put her weight against the door. By bracing her feet and pushing, she was able to create enough space at the bottom to pull herself through.

  And then she was free. Pamela felt a burst of emotion, a mixture of elation and fear. She knew she had little time. She could see more clearly now, and she could tell that she was in some sort of cellar. Discolored brick walls stretched between archways along a low corridor that stretched to her right and her left. Her dark-trained eyes made out a bare wall at the end of the corridor to the left.

  Silently she turned and padded down the corridor to her right. A stairway began to take shape in the gloom. Pamela hid at the base of the wall and craned her ears for any sound. She didn't know where the staircase led. Maybe it led to a locked door. Maybe it led directly into the arms of her captor. Or maybe it led to a way out of here. The only thing she knew is that it was a chance she had to take.

  Three quick steps took her to the bottom of the stairs. Pamela stretched out one foot and carefully put her weight down. Would the stair creak and give her away? Her heart pounding, she put her full weight down on the leg. No squeak. Breathing a sigh of relief, Pamela lifted her other foot.

  "You might have made it."

  The whispered words came just behind her and to her right. Pamela spun wildly and tried to run. But before she could make it up one more stair she was encased in two powerful arms and pulled, struggling, down to the cold stone floor.

  "Put her in the cage," another voice called out from the darkness. "And this time do it right."

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  After he found a parking place under the shade of a tree and the coughing and wheezing of the car's engine died into silence, Sam took a moment to take in his surroundings.

  He cracked the car door to take in the sounds—or rather the lack of sound, since this neighborhood was so silent that it was hard to imagine that it was part of the angry, impatient city that surrounded it. For years Sam had fantasized about living in a place like this. Somehow he'd fall into enough money: maybe he'd buy a winning lottery ticket, or maybe he'd write the story of his life and sell the film rights, and he'd take residence in one of these stately old buildings with ivy-framed windows and trees old enough to have held many generations of children in their branches.

  He first formed that dream when a spacious back yard seemed like a necessity, for Missy to play in and for Sam to preside over the barbecues that he'd always intended to have for friends and family. Now that he and Patty would be alone in one of these great, echoing houses, he was reluctant to let go of the dream. Sam liked the architecture and the smell of growing things, and he appreciated the elegance of the surroundings, but most of all it was the peacefulness that drew him like a moth to a light. Sam craved peace more than anything else on earth. He was only beginning to realize how deep that craving ran.

  With a sigh he pulled himself out of the driver's seat and slammed the car door. Doctor Sundquist's home and office were just across the street. Off in the distance he heard the steady hum of a lawn mower.

  As he approached the house, Sam's steps slowed and finally stopped. Parked in the driveway to the side of the house was a gray van. Since the day he'd seen the security camera footage, Sam had learned how many gray vans there were in the city. At first he had seized on every one of them as a possible lead, but eventually he came to understand that he was searching for a needle in a very large haystack. Worse, he was searching that haystack for a single stalk of hay.

  No doubt it was a coincidence that there happened to be a gray van next to the doctor's house. Sam hated coincidences. He took a slip of paper from his pocket and jotted down the license plate numbers.

  The doctor answered the door and ushered Sam up to his office on the second floor. Once inside, he began clearing his already-immaculate desk and putting away materials he'd been reading.

  "I noticed a gray van parked outside when I came in."

  Warren Sundquist glanced at him. "Yes. If you're wondering whether you were hallucinating, you were not. There is, in fact, a van parked in my driveway."

  Sam smiled without amusement. "Could you tell me who it belongs to?"

  The doctor took a seat in the comfortable chair behind his desk and, with a hand gesture, indicated that Sam should sit on the couch. "It belongs to Tyrone. He's my handyman."

  "Tyrone," Sam said, feeling out the name on his tongue. "Could you tell me more about your handyman? Start with his full name."

  Warren looked at him curiously. "Tyrone Pasco. Is he accused of a crime?"

  "No, not at all. I'd just like to know a bit more about him."

  "Hmmm. Well, I suppose the police have their reasons. Tyrone is a former patient. When he was referred to me, he was almost completely non-functional. He had been severely abused as a child, and while it might have seemed like a good idea at the time, enlisting in the army and going on a tour of duty in Afghanistan only made matters worse. When he returned he suffered from severe post-traumatic shock that manifested in violent outbursts. He has improved under my care, but he still suffers from migraines and flashbacks, and he remains incapable of holding a job. So I give him work around the house. He mows my lawn, trims the hedges, and does various odd-jobs. That, along with his military pension, is enough for him to live a simple existence."

  "That's very kind of you."

  Warren shrugged. "I suppose you might call it kindness, but he performs a service for me, and in return I perform a service for him. It's a simple exchange."

  "You said that your handyman has violent tendencies?"

  Warren quirked his head. "Now I'm beginning to suspect that Tyrone will soon be accused of a crime, if he is not already."

  "I'm simply exploring every avenue. Could you please answer the question?"

  Warren considered him for a moment, then answered solemnly. "To my knowledge, he is not currently a threat to himself or others—and I say that as the person who knows Tyrone best. He was brutalized by his father, and then they put a gun in his hand and sent him off to be brutalized again. It's true, those experiences can cause a person to lash out at the world, taking the pain the experience inwardly and turning it outward where others suffer as they do. But Tyrone, with my guidance, has blossomed into a kind and gentle soul. He is deeply wounded, without a doubt, but what he wants above all else is to save others from being wounded the way he was."

  Sam nodded, considering the doctor's testimony. "So if I were to remind you that someone is abducting, killing, and mutilating young women, you would tell me that this man could not possibly be responsible."

  The doctor looked to the side, collecting himself, before he answered the question. "I would tell you two things. First, that I will do everything in my power to help you find and stop whoever is responsible for these monstrous acts. And second, that it is my clinical judgment that Tyrone is incapable of doing the things you describe."

  "Can you prove that?"

  Sundquist shook his head. "There is not much in my work that can be proven, Detective. All that doctor-client privilege allows me to tell you is that I have very strong reasons for my opinions."

  Sam nodded. He could see that he was not going to get any further with the doctor. There was a part of him, too, that felt guilty at being suspicious of a mental patient simply because of the car he drove. It felt cruel, almost, as if he were singling out the man for additional torment when he had clearly already suffered enough.

  Sam had a simple code as a police detective, though: trust your gut but follow procedure. Right now, both his gut and procedure were telling him to find ou
t more about the doctor's handyman.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  He didn't have long to wait before getting some answers. Sam had been waiting by his car for only about 30 minutes when he saw a man carrying a bucket and rake walk up to the van and open the rear doors.

  "Good afternoon, sir," he called out as he walked up, extending his hand.

  Tyrone looked at him without expression. At first Sam thought that he would refuse the handshake, then he tentatively stuck his hand, still wearing his work gloves. Sam shook his hand, mentally making note of how strong his grip was.

  "Could I ask you a few questions?" he said, keeping his tone light and friendly.

  "I guess," Tyrone said in obvious discomfort, his eyes slipping away from contact with Sam's. He resumed putting his equipment into the van.

  "Is this your van?"

  Tyrone broke eye contact. He pulled his work shirt off and threw it in with the rest. Underneath he was wearing a sweat-stained tee shirt. "It's mine," he said at last.

  "Could you tell me where you were last Tuesday night?" Sam asked. He looked carefully at the man's face when he asked the question. He wanted to see what emotions played out there.

  He saw nothing. The man may as well have been carved out of granite, for all his eyes and face shared with the world. "I don't know," he mumbled in reply to the question.

  "You don't know? Think back on it. It's an important question. It was this last Tuesday."

  Tyrone looked at him and shrugged, in every respect looking like a little boy accused of stealing cookies or pulling his sister's hair. "My memory's not so good sometimes. The doctor says that happens with the pills I'm taking."

  The direct questions were going nowhere, and so Sam decided to try a different tack. "Dr. Sundquist. Have you been seeing him for a long time?"