Sometimes Bunny made her face as blank as possible, as if she were recharging her batteries. Back in high school, she’d been a bright, athletic kid with a cute overbite who got along with everyone. Now she lived on the streets and could possibly be the Crow Killer’s next victim. It was grossly unfair. Natalie wished she’d done more to help her friend when she had the chance.
“Daisy’s funeral is tomorrow,” Luke told her. “Between that and the search and rescue for Bunny, we’ve got our hands full, so I’m assigning the task of extrapolating who could’ve received the B-minus from Daisy to Jacob. His caseload isn’t as heavy as yours.”
Natalie nodded and took out her phone. “I’ll send him what I’ve got so far.” She wanted a drink. A glass of wine. Craved it all of a sudden.
“We’re coordinating tomorrow’s search with the DWW. Jimmy Marconi has volunteered his time.” Luke rested his elbows on the table and said, “Didn’t you used to date him?”
“God, no.” She laughed. “Jimmy? Shudder.”
“Really? I thought you two were an item once?”
“An item? Stop. Seriously. You’re thinking of Samuel Winston, and this was way back in college. It was a disaster. I was bored after five minutes, but the evening stretched on and on, like the Boston Marathon.”
“Heartbreak Hill?” he said.
“Exactly.”
He smirked. “I know the feeling.”
“You dated Rainie Sandhill for a while, didn’t you?”
Luke cringed. “She’s a nice person. Always checking her text messages and talking about her kundalini. And you and Hunter Rose hooked up once, if I remember correctly.”
“His Peter Pan act quickly lost its charm.” She smirked.
“With that creepy salesman’s smile of his,” Luke added. “Too many bong hits back at the ranch. Have we dissed everyone yet?”
She laughed. “Not hardly.”
“I love it when you do that,” he said.
“Do what?”
“Laugh. You have this little line on your upper lip … like a smile above your smile.” He waved his finger in the air. “Never mind. Scratch that.”
“You’re a hit-and-run flatterer.”
“Am I? Shit.” He smiled and picked up his burger.
Her face flushed as she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
“Anyway,” he said, brushing it away, “let’s not get sidetracked. God forbid.”
“Speak for yourself. You’ve been getting sidetracked an awful lot lately.”
“I know. It’s not healthy.” He stared at her, nakedly awake.
Her heart misfired. The warmth and pleasure of his company was overwhelming. She sensed his physical body across the table from hers. It was a distraction from the important issues, but Natalie had to acknowledge that something was happening.
She hesitated before saying, “My last relationship was such a train wreck that falling in love again feels like the kind of wild abandon I can’t afford right now.”
He gave her a half shrug. “I know what you mean.”
“I’m over it. But it took a while.”
“After my wife took our daughter away, it was like she’d ripped my heart out,” he said softly. “The hardest part of my divorce was picking up the pieces. I hated that. Here I was, this tough-guy cop, struggling to control his emotions. But this job … this occupation where we’re constantly reminded about the brutality and depravity of mankind … it’s not easy being a law officer. It’s a devouring job. You immerse yourself in the town’s business. You know everybody’s secrets, their shameful truths, and you somehow manage to keep it to yourself—you’re like a priest that way.”
The dynamic, loud, Friday night atmosphere of the bar faded around them as they huddled inside their exclusive bubble of intimacy and vulnerability.
“Remember Alma’s Bar on Bearkill Road?” Luke went on. “The one with the mechanical Hawaiian lady dancing in the window? It got torn down last year. Anyway, your father used to sit in the corner by the jukebox, drinking vodka martinis and listening to Frank Sinatra. He didn’t bother anyone. Two or three drinks, and then he’d head down to the lake to skim stones. I followed him one evening. I was a rookie cop at the time, and he was retired by then, but I loved the son of a gun. Anyway, after you went away to college, he missed you so much. He worried about you. We used to play golf together. Well, not exactly golf. Remember the Zambranos’ dairy? They had a couple of black walnut trees growing on the property, and every September, the walnuts would drop off and litter the ground. Those husks are heavy and round as golf balls. Tony Zambrano hated it, because he couldn’t mow his lawn without picking up hundreds of them first. So Joey and I would take our clubs over there, and Tony would join us, and the three of us would have a competition to see who could whack the most walnuts into the woods.
“One of those times, one of those beautiful, golden late summer days … Joey asked me a question. He said, ‘What’s the most important factor to skipping stones? What stops the stones from sinking into the lake?’ And I said, ‘That’s easy. Angle, speed, and spin rate. If the stone hits the water too steeply, it’ll sink. But if the angle’s too shallow, it won’t bounce.’ He said, ‘That’s right.’ He told me the perfect angle is twenty degrees. A flat stone is best, of course. The whole thing is about a transfer of energy. When you skip a stone, you’re transferring energy from your arm into the stone. Just like when you swing a golf club, you’re transferring energy from your body into the club.” Luke shrugged. “So Joey said, ‘Okay. But what’s the most important factor?’ Well, I didn’t know. ‘Stability,’ he said. Stability is critical. Primates can’t skim stones or swing golf clubs, because they have no stability. They can’t balance on two legs. But human beings can. We can. Stability is crucial to skipping stones, playing golf, and being a cop—that was his point. Police work means lots of grueling hours and follow-up interviews. All those homicides, suicides, car accidents, rapes, drug overdoses—all the evil you can see and smell and practically touch … what you need is a stable home life to keep you grounded. That’s the secret to being a good cop, he said. Stability. That’s what it’s all about.”
She stared at the ceiling, blinking the tears out of her eyes.
“Stability, he told me,” Luke said softly. “Find it wherever you can, Natalie.”
42
She drove home and put the teakettle on. Moonlight fell in icy squares on all the polished surfaces. The violet flowers on the dining-room table looked real until you touched them; they were made of fabric and coated with dust. Her mother’s collection of yard-sale lamps gave the place its nostalgic glow.
Natalie took her cup of peppermint tea into the living room, sat at her desk, opened her laptop, then stared at the blank screen. Her fingers were shaking. She closed her eyes and watched vivid bursts of color painting the surfaces of her eyelids. It looked like an iridescent butterfly. She bit her lower lip and tried not to cry. Her face grew feverish. Her thoughts would not stop spinning.
The stick. The dead raccoon.
She logged on to the National Crime Information Center’s database. The NCIC kept track of sex offenders, fugitives, repeat offenders, gang members, and terrorism. All across the country, the distinguishing body marks of criminals, such as tattoos, moles, birthmarks, and scars, were photographed as part of the booking process. However, as Natalie had discovered, the procedure wasn’t universally enforced. Record-keeping errors were common, and older files could get lost, misplaced, or destroyed by fires. Also, the state databases weren’t organized in the most efficient manner, either. There were categories for criminals and categories for victims, but it was impossible to make a positive ID if the keywords hadn’t been entered properly.
You never knew how many incarcerated individuals had birthmarks until you searched through the national and state databases. Thousands upon thousands. It wasn’t easy coming up with a list that fit the specific variables. Besides, nothing would help if the perp hadn
’t been registered in the first place. If Natalie’s attacker had led a quiet life under the radar, she’d never find him in any of the databases.
Now she drew a troubled breath. She’d been searching for the bogeyman ever since she was a rookie cop. She’d tracked down a few promising candidates, but nothing had ever come of it. Not that she wanted to reopen old wounds. She kept trying to put it behind her, but this recent spate of violence brought it all screaming back. The attack in the woods had changed her on a primal level. It made her want to save the world. It made her strong. It made her believe in monsters.
Now she opened the menu, chose her selections, then keyed in the variables and cross-references, including race, sex, and age of the criminal. At the time of the attack, the boy was approximately five foot ten, a hundred and sixty pounds, eighteen or nineteen, perhaps older. Today, he would profile as a male Caucasian, thirty-five to forty-five. She left a lot of blanks: no name, no DOB, no hair or eye color. Just the distinctive birthmark—a port-wine-colored butterfly on the inner left arm.
Her last promising lead had occurred two years ago. Stewart Rawlins was a barrel-chested ex-con in a motorcycle jacket and straight-leg jeans. Late thirties. Cagey eyes. A natural-born bullshit artist. According to the NICC, he had a port-wine-colored birthmark on his arm. The description was vague enough to capture her imagination—a four-leaf clover. Four-leaf clovers were similar to butterflies in some people’s eyes. Plus, he fit the general profile, so Natalie tracked him down on her off-hours. He lived in a village north of Albany, just a freckle on the map. She staked him out as if she were working undercover. She followed him into a bar one night and deliberately got him drunk.
Rawlins had distracting spaces between his teeth and comb-over hair you could see his glistening scalp through. At some point, the motorcycle jacket came off, revealing a Grateful Dead T-shirt and two fleshy arms leaning against the bar, but the geography of the birthmark wasn’t the same. Rawlins was not the man she was looking for, and Natalie promptly left the bar. He followed her out the door, hollering, “Hey! Come back! Was it something I said?” She drove home feeling defeated that night, vowing never to put herself into such a bizarre situation again.
Now she couldn’t resist. She hit Enter, and a list came onscreen. She selected Most Recent, but nothing new came up. She checked her watch and realized she was no longer officially on-call. Detective Augie Vickers would be taking over. She could relax. Maybe take a couple of sleeping pills tonight.
She felt ashamed of her feelings, which overwhelmed her occasionally. She hated the bogeyman, and yet he’d become such an alluring target. She couldn’t stop thinking about him during her weakest moments; she wanted to catch him, fiercely; she wanted to catch the butterfly and kill it. She wanted to squash it flat, obliterating her bad dreams once and for all. The thought of it infuriated and excited her all at once.
She powered down her computer and went upstairs. She stood in the shower stall and scrubbed herself raw with a nailbrush—trying to rid herself of the last few molecules of the crime scene. Of Daisy. She closed her eyes, and a cluster of falling stars burst across her field of vision.
She toweled off, got dressed for bed, and swallowed two sleeping pills with a glass of tepid water. The house lights cast crawly shadows. She gazed out her bedroom window at the clamoring darkness across the street, where trees tossed lazily in the wind. Traffic was sparse on her dead-end road. Nothing supernatural lurked in those woods—even though, whenever the moon slipped behind the clouds, the landscape became bathed in mystery.
A heavy silence filled the house. Her thoughts grew stagnant. She went to bed and closed her eyes. Tomorrow was Daisy’s funeral.
43
Natalie barely got six hours of sleep before it was time to go to work again. She took a shower, got dressed, gulped down her coffee, and drove across town to the police station. Luke had put Detective Peter Murphy in charge of the search-and-rescue mission. The more she got to know Murphy, the more she liked him. In his midforties, he had slick dark hair, a dour sense of humor, and heavy, Muppetlike eyebrows. He was insatiably curious and knew a lot of trivia.
“Sometimes they show up, Natalie,” Murph said by way of a greeting. “You never know. Last year a hiker went missing in the park, and we searched for three days before discovering he was at home in Alabama with his family.” He shrugged. “You have to think positive.”
“How many volunteers showed up?” she asked.
“Thirty-five so far, including a retired veteran of the National Park Service and the vice president of a volunteer SAR organization from Vermont. The phones are ringing off the hook. We’ll probably have a hundred more by this afternoon.”
“Good,” she said. “Where’s the starting point for the operation?”
“The Hadleys’ farm, the point last seen. We’ll be increasing our range concentrically,” he explained. “We’ve also got searchers stationed at the ten containment points—all of the places Bunny was known to frequent, like the A and P. They’ll remain in those positions while the search is ongoing, in case she shows up. We’re also going door-to-door, asking about potential sightings and handing out missing person posters. We’ve got a separate hotline for any new leads.”
“What can I do?” Natalie asked.
“We’re looking for volunteers to replace our guys in six to eight hours … we’re doing rotating shifts.”
“Okay, I can put in a few hours later today.”
“Bunny’s gonna be just fine,” Murphy said.
“Those are comforting words, Murph.”
“You have to learn to relax, Natalie. I’m reading this book called Zen Anus. It teaches you how to relax your asshole. It says that if you can relax your asshole, then everything else will fall into place.”
She laughed. “Don’t let this define you.”
“I’ll try not to. See you later.”
She headed for the elevators and rode one down to the first floor. The station was crowded with volunteers and off-duty officers. On her way out the back entrance, Jimmy Marconi came strolling over.
“Natalie, how are you doing?” he asked.
“Thanks for volunteering, Jimmy.”
“No problem. Samuel and the guys are here, too. We’ve got our people going deep into the woods, checking out clearings and creek beds that are off the main hiking trails. We’ve got dogs, but no helicopter—too sunny out.”
Natalie nodded. Helicopters were not only expensive, they were less effective on sunny days like today, which cast too many shadows on the ground, obscuring the target.
“I hear Bunny’s disappearance is connected to the Missing Nine?” Jimmy said, rubbing a red spot on his chin. “Is that true?”
“We’re trying to tease out the details, but we recently found an unmistakable pattern to some of the old cases.”
“What kind of pattern?” Jimmy asked.
“We need to dive further into it, but there were clues we’d managed to overlook.”
“Clues connecting the nine cases? Like what?”
“Come on, Jimmy. I’m not willing to make any judgment calls yet.”
He nodded, always courteous and respectful, but his face was tense with curiosity. “Sure, Natalie. I understand. But it might be helpful to the team if we knew this was the work of a serial offender, since they tend to be highly organized and forensically aware.”
“All I can say is … it’s a possibility.”
“Okay.” He nodded, crossing his arms. “Good to know.”
“Thanks again, Jimmy. I’ll be joining the search later on.”
“We’re doing group text messages to keep in touch with the volunteers,” he said, taking out his phone. “Do we have your number?”
“I think so.” She gave it to him again anyway, and they parted ways.
Natalie got in her car and drove over to St. Paul’s Church, where half the town had shown up for Daisy’s funeral. Every available officer who was not on the SAR mission was tas
ked with crowd control. It was their job to ensure that the church parking lot wasn’t blocked by the army of satellite vans, and that the mourners weren’t ambushed by obstinate news crews. They were also supposed to note down any suspicious-looking vehicles slowly driving past the church, or any oddly behaving funeral attendees.
An audience of 250 people was packed inside the church, with a spillover crowd of 200-plus mourners outside. Natalie’s assignment was to develop a behavior profile of those in attendance—specifically Ethan Hathaway, Brandon Buckner, India Cochran, and her closest friends, along with Kermit Hughes, Owen Kottler, and Benjamin Lowell.
The mayor greeted Natalie at the church door as if he were campaigning for his next election. He wore his navy-blue Chamber of Commerce jacket and shook hands vigorously. Ms. Agatha Williamson played a moving “Amazing Grace” on the pipe organ. Brandon was surrounded by friends and family in the front row. His lawyer was in attendance, taking up valuable real estate. Natalie couldn’t get anywhere near them.
Pink roses, lilies, and white orchids covered the chrome-handled oak coffin like a parade float. Daisy’s parents moved with halting steps down the aisle toward their pew. Jasmine Forester wore a black dress with a white lace collar. She steadied herself by clinging to her husband’s trembling arm.
Grace and Ellie were seated in one of the middle rows. Grace wore a subdued dove-gray outfit and kept a tissue pressed to her lips. Ellie had tamed her wild black hair, combing it behind her ears and securing it with a pink headband. Lindsey Wozniak sat next to Grace. She wore a Christian Dior dress and gold jewelry, unafraid to flaunt her success. Bunny hadn’t shown up—a faint hope on Natalie’s part.
Ethan Hathaway sat in the back row, looking shell-shocked and isolated. A few rows in front of him, India Cochran sat next to her dad, who kept checking his phone messages. Berkley and Sadie were nearby with their families. None of Riley’s friends had shown up to honor their dead teacher.
Natalie stood in back and observed them all, taking mental notes.
Trace of Evil Page 27