Vanishing Girls

by Lisa Regan

  Josie squeezed her eyes shut, “Not Holcomb. Please, God, tell me you didn’t let Holcomb tell them.”

  She opened her eyes and Noah met her gaze. “No,” he said. “I told them myself.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You ready to get to work?”

  Josie took a deep breath, bracing herself for what was to come. Reliving her ordeal for Lisette’s sake, breaking the news of Ray’s death to her, watching the videos, and finding Isabelle Coleman. “Yes,” she said.

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  “You said they found bodies up there on the mountain,” Lisette said. She stared at Josie from the recliner chair in her room, her eyes as wide as Josie had ever seen them. One of her hands fidgeted with a balled-up tissue.

  “Yes,” Josie said. “Noah said they found graves, but none fresh enough to be Isabelle Coleman. Gram, did you hear me? Gosnell killed Ray.”

  Lisette nodded and pressed the tissue to the corner of each eye. Maybe she was having trouble processing it. Maybe it was too much, too big to take in all in one go. Life without Ray was unfathomable. Josie had still needed him, she realized. Maybe not on a daily basis, but he had carried her past, her demons with him. Only Ray knew everything; he had been there through most of it, and without him she had to carry it alone. The only way Josie was able to function was by focusing on what needed to be done next. Talk to Lisette, then meet with Holcomb. For now her list was never-ending, and she was grateful.

  “I’ll go with you to the funeral,” Lisette said. She reached a hand across to where Josie sat on the edge of her bed and Josie took it. “I’m so sorry, Josie.”

  Josie swallowed the lump in her throat. “Thank you.”

  It was kind, but Lisette seemed far more upset about what Nick Gosnell had been doing on his property over the years than she was about Ray’s murder. She let go of Josie’s hand and sank back into her chair. Second by second, her eyes took on a thousand-yard stare. Josie had the feeling her mind was somewhere else entirely.

  “Gram,” Josie said softly. “I have to go soon. They’re only giving me an hour. I have to go… go look at videos. Identify all of Gosnell’s customers. Will you be okay until I can come back?”

  “Sherri must have been horribly abused,” Lisette said as if she hadn’t heard Josie.

  Josie sighed. Perhaps the Gosnells were safer emotional territory than Ray right now. She glanced at the clock by Lisette’s bedside. She had fifteen minutes left. “Yes,” Josie responded. “On the way over Noah told me he had talked with the medical examiner about Sherri. She said Sherri’s autopsy showed many old fractures. Ribs, arms, legs, even a skull fracture. Typical of a victim of domestic violence.”

  “It’s so sad,” Lisette said. “She never said a word.”

  “It would have been pretty difficult for her to socialize,” Josie said. “Given what her life at home was like.”

  “She never said a word,” Lisette said again. “Just went about her work. She wasn’t unkind, just… she was just… there.”

  Josie tried to imagine what Sherri’s home life had been like. In many ways, she reminded Josie of June Spencer in her catatonic state. She simply went through the motions of living. But she supposed that for Sherri, living with a monster like Nick Gosnell, life had been all about survival. Just getting through each day alive or without being beaten must have felt like a victory. Josie wondered if she had ever gotten any true joy out of life. She was torn between feeling sympathetic for Sherri and feeling enraged that the woman had been such an active participant in his evil enterprise. She wondered just how much culpability Sherri had. There was no denying that Nick had abused her, but the lengths she had gone to help Nick were simply incomprehensible.

  Lisette’s voice took on a sudden fierce intensity. “That son of a bitch, Alton Gosnell. Look what he created. You know they never did find his wife. He said she ran off, but I guess now we know what really happened to her.”

  “They’ll find her on the mountain, I’m sure,” Josie said quietly, not wanting to upset her grandmother further by sharing what Nick had told her about his mother.

  She heard what sounded like a sob and quickly added, “I’m coming to question him, Gram. The moment we’re done with these videos. Nick implicated him and I am not letting him get away with anything.”

  Josie heard sniffling. Then Lisette said, “Good. I’m glad. He shouldn’t get away with a damn thing.” She lowered her voice. “He’s very sick though. Some kind of infection, they said.”

  “That doesn’t concern me,” Josie said coolly.

  There was silence. Then, “That’s my girl.”

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Josie couldn’t stand Special Agent Holcomb. She had been relieved to see him at the Gosnell property and she was happy for the FBI presence, but Holcomb’s personality left much to be desired. It was about as colorful as his short, drab hair. Maybe he had seen too much in his long career, especially working for the FBI’s Civil Rights Division which investigated police corruption and human trafficking, but he didn’t seem angry or impassioned enough for her.

  “Maybe that’s what we need. Someone who will be clinical. Detached,” Noah had tried persuading her after a day in Holcomb’s company, the three of them trawling through videos from Gosnell’s bunker, trying to identify all the men in the videos. They would ID the men first so they could arrest them quickly. Later, the FBI team would work on identifying all the women and then matching them to the remains that were already being recovered. There were nearly two decades’ worth of videos, and they only got through about five years’ worth that first day. Holcomb fast-forwarded through all of them. He was only interested in catching stills of the men’s faces at that point. Later, for the sake of prosecution, someone would have to go through each and every video thoroughly. He stopped the video every few seconds, demanding to know if Josie or Noah could put a name to the face, and grew impatient when they hesitated.

  Even on fast-forward, the videos were horrific. Both Josie and Noah had to take several breaks, escaping outside into the fresh air, letting the rain wash the horror away if only for a few seconds. Holcomb had only gotten up twice. Once to eat and once to retrieve a cup of coffee—for himself, none for them. Then he had wordlessly recorded each name they gave him on a legal pad with the same expression Josie imagined he employed when making his grocery list. It irked her.

  By the end of the third day they had a solid working list, and Holcomb left them to put together warrants and teams to execute them. “This has to be done quickly,” he told them. “We’ll want to pick them all up in a short span of time. We don’t want them tipping each other off. I want every last one of these scumbags.”

  It was the first thing Holcomb had said that Josie could get on board with.

  The moment he left, Josie turned to Noah. “How many people are searching for Isabelle Coleman right now?”

  “I have a dozen people out right now.”

  “Then let’s go talk to Alton Gosnell.”

  Noah frowned and looked at his watch. He was one of the few men that Josie knew who still wore a watch instead of relying on his phone for the time. “Right now? Don’t you want to rest? It’s been a long three days.”

  “No. I don’t want to rest. Let’s go.”

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Alton Gosnell was so ill that the nursing staff did not want to let Josie anywhere near him. She was not to be deterred. “I don’t care if he’s in the middle of a goddamn heart transplant. I want to talk to him,” she told the director of nursing at Rockview.

  “Miss Quinn—”

  Noah, who stood behind Josie, said, “It’s Chief Quinn. As in the chief of police.”

  The director forced a weary smile. “Chief Quinn, Mr. Gosnell has an extremely high fever. His heart rate is up, and his blood pressure is down. As you are probably aware, he has a stoma and speaks using an artificial larynx. In his condition, any type of… interview would be extremely stressful. I simply cannot
allow it.”

  Josie put a hand on her hip. “I’ll be sure to pass along your recommendation to the families of the women he raped and killed. It’s not an interview. It’s an interrogation. If he’s about to die, then it’s especially urgent that I speak with him. There is still a girl missing in this town, and I’m damn well going to find her.”

  “You can’t just walk in here and start making demands. You may be the chief of police, but you can’t just do whatever you want.”

  Josie’s voice was low and tense, a wire pulled taut to its breaking point. “I’ve had just about all I can take of people getting in my way. This man left a mass grave on his property. Do you understand that? They’re unearthing the bodies of young women—ten so far—and they’re still going. Ground-penetrating radar shows there could be as many as sixty more buried up there. Mr. Gosnell may speak using an artificial larynx, but he can still speak. Those women don’t have that luxury anymore. I’m their voice now, and I have a lot of fucking questions. Now, you can get out of my way, or I can have you arrested and charged with obstruction of justice.”

  “You can’t—”

  “I can and I will. Don’t test me. Maybe it won’t hold up in court, but that’s not really my problem, now is it? That would be your attorney’s problem.”

  Josie motioned toward the hallway behind the woman and stared her down, daring her to stand her ground. After a long, tense moment, the director stepped aside, wordlessly. At Josie’s back, she called, “He’s in room—”

  “I know where he is,” Josie snapped without looking back at the woman.

  Alton Gosnell was propped up in his bed, wearing a faded blue pajama top. The few strands of white hair left on his head floated upright. His skin flamed red. When he breathed, his stoma whistled. The sound of fluid in his lungs sounded like a coffee pot percolating. The room smelled of stale urine and sweat. His dark eyes followed Josie and Noah as they entered the room. Noah stood on one side of the bed, Josie on the other. Noah went through the motions of introducing them and reading him his rights. When Noah asked if he understood the rights as he had read them, Alton’s right hand lifted and pressed the artificial larynx to his throat. “You arresting me?” the robotic voice asked.

  “We’re just here to talk, Mr. Gosnell,” Noah said. He waved a copy of the Miranda warning in the air. “I just have to read this before I talk to people about crimes.”

  Alton nodded sagely. They had agreed beforehand that Noah would do most of the talking, since a misogynist like Alton would be more likely to talk to a man than a woman. That, and Josie wasn’t quite sure if she could trust herself to be professional.

  “Mr. Gosnell, I’m sorry about the death of your son,” Noah began. Neither of them was sorry, but they had agreed that it was a place to start.

  Alton shrugged. “He was weak. Stupid.”

  Noah and Josie exchanged a look. Noah dove in. “Stupid? It seems he was running quite a successful business up there on your property. From what we can tell, he was doing it for decades.”

  The gnarled hand pressed the larynx into his throat. “Got caught though, didn’t he?” Alton eyed Josie. She refused to feel uncomfortable beneath his leering gaze, almost identical to his son’s. He was old and infirm. He couldn’t even walk. He could leer all he wanted, but he couldn’t hurt her. “They never caught me.”

  “Your son implicated you in his crimes,” Josie said.

  The man laughed silently. Then he pressed his device against his throat again. “You can’t arrest me now. I’m too old, too sick.”

  Josie didn’t care if the guy disintegrated when they slapped the cuffs on him, he was going down. She opened her mouth to say so, but Noah jumped in. “What was the difference? Between you and Nick. Why didn’t you ever get caught?”

  Gosnell’s eyes traveled back toward Noah. “I didn’t bring nobody else up there. It was just me. I didn’t sell ’em, and I sure as shit didn’t keep ’em around. When I was done with ’em, I put ’em down.”

  “Put them down?” Noah prompted.

  Alton said nothing. Noah tried a different tack. “What did you do with them after you put them down?”

  “Plenty of land up there,” Alton said. “Especially after I bought the property behind us.”

  “Where did you take them from? Why didn’t people notice?”

  Alton shook his head. “Never took one from the same place twice. Drove as far as I could, picked one I didn’t think would be missed, waited till no one was around and I took her. Back then we didn’t have cell phones and goddamn cameras everywhere. It was easier back then, and I sure as shit never took as many as my boy.”

  “How many do you think are out there?” Noah asked.

  “Don’t know. Never counted ’em.”

  “Do you remember the first time you, uh, put one of them down?” Noah asked.

  Alton stared straight ahead. If his breathing wasn’t so labored, Josie might have thought he was dead. Noah said, “Mr. Gosnell?”

  Perhaps he was remembering. His eyes glazed over, and a look that could only be described as euphoric came over his crimson face. Josie felt sick. He was, she realized, a genuine serial killer. He had operated for decades unchecked, unfettered, with enough private land to hide his crimes for all that time. Not only was he completely without remorse, but he had enjoyed his crimes. Josie knew from the resurrected town lore about the Gosnell family that Alton’s wife had supposedly run off when her son was only nine, which meant that Nick had been raised almost solely by his father, who had shaped him in his image. Two generations of serial killers. Like father, like son.

  Lisette’s voice, fierce and tremulous, sounded from the door. “You tell them the truth, Alton.”

  Startled, Noah and Josie looked at her. She stood leaning on her walker, her tiny frame seeming to fill up the entire doorway. Her eyes were aflame, and they were trained on Alton Gosnell with a savage intensity. Josie had never seen that look on her grandmother’s face before. Her sweet, loving grandmother.

  “Gram?” Josie said.

  Lisette thrust her walker into the room, wielding it like a weapon. She banged into Gosnell’s bed, jarring it. Gosnell’s euphoric reverie gave way to annoyance. He flicked her a dirty look. Pressing his artificial larynx into his throat again, he said, “Shut up, Lisette.”

  She shook a finger at him. Her entire body shook with rage. “You think I don’t know what you did? I figured it out. I know it was you. I know what you did to my… my…. Ramona. Now you tell the truth, you sick bastard.”

  At the name Ramona, Josie felt all the color drain from her face. “Gram?” she said again, her voice weakening as she looked over at a woman she barely recognized. This woman was not her grandmother. This was a different woman. A woman with hate in her eyes and vengeance quivering through her body. The only thing that seemed to stop her wrapping her fingers around Gosnell’s throat was her walker.

  Gosnell laughed noiselessly again. Then he looked at Lisette and pressed his device into his throat. “She was perfect. You did a good job making her, Lisette. I hated putting her down. I would have kept her forever.”

  Tears streamed down Lisette’s cheeks but she refused to acknowledge them, letting them fall to her shirt. She said nothing.

  “You think I didn’t know?” he said to her.

  Still, she remained silent.

  “It was that army boy, wasn’t it? The one who boarded with your family for the summer? I saw you in the woods with him once. Gave it to you good, he did.”

  Lisette gasped. Noah remained completely silent and still, letting the whole thing play out. Josie’s voice was little more than a whisper. “Gram, what is he talking about?”

  Lisette kept her eyes on Gosnell. “I was a girl,” she said. “Only thirteen. My parents rented out a room in our house to make extra money. One summer we had a soldier on his way from one place to another. He stayed a few months. He wasn’t that much older than me. I thought I loved him. After he left I realized I wa
s pregnant.”

  “What? Dad was your only child.”

  “He was, as far as anyone knows. My mother told everyone that she was pregnant. As soon as I started to show, they kept me home. Told everyone I was sick. I gave birth at home to a beautiful baby girl. My mother passed her off as her own. My sister. Little Ramona.”

  Gosnell mouthed her words. Little Ramona.

  Josie’s voice trembled. “How long did she… did she live?”

  “She was eight years old. I was hanging wash at the side of the house and she was playing there in the yard. Running around, chasing butterflies. Then she was gone. Just like that.” She glared at Gosnell. “He took her.”

  “Wild animals ate her,” Gosnell said.

  “The only animal that got her was you,” Lisette shot back.

  More silent laughter shook his body.

  Lisette said, “I searched the woods for her. My father searched with me. For days. We had the law up there looking too. Then, after about a week, we found her clothes there in the woods. Torn up. Police said she must have been attacked by a bear, or coyotes. They probably dragged her off. They tried to find her body for a few weeks but couldn’t. We buried an empty coffin.” Her voice choked in her throat. In a whisper she added, “An empty little coffin.” She took a moment then to wipe her tear-streaked face with the back of one of her sleeves. “My mother was happy to brush the whole thing under the carpet. I never believed a wild animal got her, but what else could have happened to her? Back then we didn’t have Megan’s list and all those things. People didn’t talk about sex crimes or child molesters. I just knew in my heart something bad happened to her, and it wasn’t an animal that did it. I was in those woods my whole life and never even saw a coyote. When you told me about Nick and about the women, I knew. I knew the kind of man Alton is—you don’t hear the things he says to the ladies here. It wasn’t a stretch that the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.”