by Lisa Unger
Lydia walked over to where Jeffrey stood. He pushed aside some weeds, revealing a partial footprint. The rest of the area was more exposed to the wind, but the weeds had preserved the top half of a large boot. Lydia glanced over at the hunters.
“It could belong to one of them, or to another hunter. We should check their boots before they leave.”
“Gentlemen, could you help us out over here?”
One by one, each man removed his right boot and compared the tread to the track in the ground. There were no matches.
The crime-scene photographer came over and took some shots as Jeffrey directed.
“Chief, can you get someone over here to take a mold?” Jeffrey inquired.
“I don’t know how well a mold will take. The ground is pretty soft,” Morrow replied.
“We should at least try,” Lydia snapped, annoyed by what she considered to be his laziness.
“Fine,” Morrow replied curtly, angry at her tone but feeling powerless. He walked off to the squad car to use the radio.
“He’s right, Lydia. There’s no need to be so hard on him.”
“Back off, Jeffrey.” Lydia was still angry from their argument earlier in the afternoon. She always held a grudge for a little while, at least, and didn’t like being criticized at the best of times.
“Fine.” Jeffrey walked off toward the squad car as well.
You’re the most popular girl at the crime scene, she thought.
Lydia walked back over to the body and scrutinized it for anything she might have missed before. Around Maria’s neck hung a small gold cross. Lydia bent down, covering her mouth and nose against the stench, and leaned in to get a better look at it. It was plain, thin and light, a cheap piece of gold if it was gold at all. Had she seen something like this in the case at the church? She couldn’t remember. She checked Maria’s earlobes. They were pierced but she wasn’t wearing earrings. Lydia was reminded of the earrings Jed McIntyre had stolen from his victims. She noticed that Maria’s right hand had a deep, wide gash, probably a defensive wound, and that she appeared to have blood beneath her fingernails.
Lydia approached Jeffrey and Morrow, who were conversing with the hunters. She eyed the strange men one by one, envisioning each of them as the killer, trying to imagine them stalking and murdering their victims, then removing their organs. But they all seemed too dimwitted, too simple. She was sure they would offer nothing by way of leads or evidence. She waited for a pause in the conversation.
“Morrow,” she interrupted, purposely neglecting to use his title, “will you make sure that you get that gold cross off her neck? And we need to talk to someone who administers the park to find out if there is a camera at the entrance, or a register of vehicles that have entered the park since Maria Lopez went missing.”
“Yeah, no problem,” he answered, silently kicking himself for not thinking of that first.
She turned to Jeffrey. “Unless you think I should stay, I’m going to speak with Greg Matthews and then go to Smokey’s, see if anyone’s talking, maybe run into Mike Urquia.”
“You want me to come with you?”
“No, I think I should go alone. Sometimes people are willing to say more to one person than they are to two.”
“I’ll go with Morrow and follow the body to the Medical Examiner’s office and see what the autopsy turns up. On the way out, we’ll stop at the guard on duty, find out what the procedures are for logging in visitors.”
Lydia looked at Jeffrey, and smiled slightly, lowering her eyes in a silent apology. She raised her hand and quickly smoothed the collar of his leather jacket, a gesture he knew meant peace. “I’m sorry, too,” he said and her smile widened.
“The results from the Maria Lopez apartment could arrive as early as tonight,” Morrow interjected. “I have a contact at the state lab who promised me a rush.”
“Great,” Jeffrey answered Morrow. Turning to Lydia, “Just be careful. I’ll get a ride back to the house from Morrow or someone.”
He watched her walk back to the car, her hands in her pockets. She paused before she was out of sight and looked back at him, saw he was watching her, and smiled again. She looked at him with equal parts apology, laughter, and wistfulness. He took a breath at the intensity of his feeling for her, at the magical quality of her beauty in the early-evening light.
Lydia knew about isolation, the lure of it, the seduction of having only yourself to answer to. She knew about the craving for a silencing of all voices but one’s own, about the urge to escape the gaze of others. In fact, she had constructed a life where isolation had become as comfortable as down, solitude as welcome as sleep. She was alone, had taught herself not to need anyone, and somewhere along the line loneliness just became familiar. And she had grown afraid of everything else. She had started to fear intimacy the way some people fear being alone. She had driven people away all her life with her coldness. She had no friends; her relationship with her grandparents, who still lived in Sleepy Hollow where they had moved from Brooklyn after Marion was killed, was loving but distant. The only significant person in her life was Jeffrey, and she kept him always at arm’s length.
But she also knew that beneath that desire to alienate the world was another, more ardent wish to be understood and recognized, a desire bound and gagged by the hopelessness that such a thing was possible anymore.
That was the look she saw in Shawna’s eyes, and the image she carried in her mind as she drove up the winding road toward the garage where Greg Matthews worked. Lydia pulled up slowly, the gravel and sand on the unpaved road crackling beneath her tires. The garage looked more like a shack than a place of business but the large, painted sign above the roof reading JOE AND GREG’S AUTO REPAIR told her she was in the right place. As she got out of the car, a young man emerged from beneath a red pickup. His curly hair stuck out from beneath a plain red baseball cap, its team logo, whatever it had been, long since fallen away. He stood up, wiping his hands on his overalls and squinting into the dusk, then shielding his eyes as he strained to see her.
“Are you Greg?” she called as she walked toward him.
“I sure am,” he said amiably. “What can I do for you?”
“I would like to talk to you about Shawna’s disappearance.”
The friendly smile dropped from his pink lips and his face seemed to age. Big, light-blue eyes swam with emotion in a galaxy of freckles. His hands were square and strong, with black grease wedged beneath his fingernails. He smelled of soap and gasoline, and beneath his baggy coveralls, he was large and muscular like a bodybuilder.
“I’ve already spoken with the police and nobody has listened to a word I said,” he said quietly. “Short of accusing me of hurting her, they basically have done nothing to try to find out what happened to her. I’ll tell you what I told them, my girl did not run away. Unless you’re going to tell me something I don’t already know or are going to try to do something to find out what happened to her, I have nothing to say to you, ma’am.”
He turned to walk away from her but Lydia gently grabbed his arm.
“Greg, wait. I don’t think Shawna ran away, either. I’m an investigator. My name is Lydia Strong and I do want to find out what happened to her.”
He looked her up and down suspiciously. She was conscious that she didn’t look the least bit official in her faded blue jeans, lizard-skin boots, and cream suede jacket. She began to reach for her ID, but he spoke before she could present it.
“All right, then, come on inside.”
She followed him behind the garage and the adjacent office to a small apartment. Run-down but clean and orderly, it smelled of burnt coffee and cigarettes. Lydia sat down at a faux wood Formica card table on a wobbly, green vinyl-covered chair, while Greg made coffee.
Her eyes scanned the room, soaking up details. The appliances, an olive-green stove and matching refrigerator, were old but seemed to be well maintained. The countertop, made of butcher block, was well scrubbed but riddled with scratch
es and deep, black burn marks. Some of the Formica tiles on the floor, featuring a gold and brown floral pattern, were buckling. The orange sun coming in from a dirty window over the stainless steel sink lit the dust particles that fell like snow through the air. The room was overly warm and Greg turned on an air-conditioning unit over the door that protested, then reluctantly groaned to life.
She could see two orderly bedrooms from where she sat at the table. One, presumably Greg’s, had a wall covered with posters of motorcycles and a shelf filled with books about hot rods, mechanics manuals, and luxury car magazines. On the bedside table was the picture of Shawna that she recognized from the copy in her file.
These were the rooms of hard-working people of small and honest means. If she had to guess, Lydia would say that Joe Matthews, Greg’s father, was a former military man who conducted his business and his home the way he had been taught in the barracks. Greg’s mother had either left them or died young because there was no feminine warmth in any of the rooms, and Greg seemed fairly self-reliant in the kitchen, not like a mama’s boy used to being coddled.
She tossed it out. “You live here alone, Greg?”
“No, with my dad. My mom passed on when I was ten from cancer.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Me, too. But my dad took real good care of me. A little strict, though,” he chuckled without much mirth. “But what do you expect from a former Marine?”
“Mind if I record our conversation?” Lydia asked, pulling a small tape recorder out of her bag and laying it on the table. She never went anywhere without it but almost always forgot to use it, relying more often on pen and paper.
“No. How do you like your coffee?”
She looked over at him and noticed that he was peering into an empty refrigerator. So much for light and sweet.
“Black,” she answered. “ ‘No,’ you don’t want me to record this? Or ‘no,’ you don’t mind?”
“I don’t mind, Ms. Strong. I’ve got nothing to hide.”
He sat down across from her, placing a chipped white cup in front of her, filled with coffee so black it looked like tar. The chair creaked beneath his weight and screeched against the floor as he pulled it toward the table.
“Your name sounds familiar,” said Greg.
“Well, I’m a writer.”
“I’m not much of a reader. Is that why you’re here? You’re going to write about Shawna?”
“Not exactly. I also consult with a private-investigation firm.”
“Did somebody hire you to look for Shawna?”
“Not exactly. Let’s just say I’ve taken a personal interest in this case and I have the time and the resources to see what I can do to further the investigation. Shawna is not the only person missing.”
“You mean that other woman who went missing yesterday?”
“Yes, and others, too.” She didn’t want to be the one to tell him that Maria wasn’t missing anymore. He’d read about it in the papers soon enough.
“Why are you interested?”
She considered her answer before speaking. “I lost someone once, too, Greg. A long time ago. And even though I know what happened to her, I still don’t know why. So I guess I’m always looking for answers, in a way.”
He nodded as if he understood that. Lydia wasn’t even sure why she said it that way, having never vocalized the thought to anyone. She’d never revealed anything about herself to a stranger before, especially someone she was interviewing. But the fact that she’d shared something personal with Greg seemed to have put him at ease and he began to speak.
“Most people just assumed Shawna ran away, Ms. Strong. And while she might have run away from her foster parents, she never would have run away from me. We were just waiting for her to turn eighteen so that we could get married and live here. I was going to keep working for my father and someday we wanted to buy a house.”
Greg’s eyes glistened and Lydia felt him searching her face for faith and compassion. He had paused, waiting for her to question his words, offer judgment, but she nodded her head and remained silent.
When he didn’t continue, she encouraged him. “Tell me about the night she disappeared.”
“She called me on the phone about eight on Sunday, August fourteenth. She was real upset and said she was on her way over. I told her to stay put, that I would come and get her. But she said no, she had to leave the house that second. It was a short walk, about a mile, and she needed the time to cool off. She had had another fight with her foster parents. They are good people but they were strict with Shawna and she was headstrong, so they were always going at it.
“I told her to get moving because it was getting dark. I waited about a half an hour and then I set off to find her down the only road she would take. I went all the way to her house and knocked on the door. Harden, her foster father, told me she had left. I didn’t believe him, so I pushed my way into the house and ran up to her room. She was gone but it didn’t look like she had packed anything.
“I was angry. She had promised me she would try to get along with them because we only had four months to go and I didn’t want her to be sent away. I got back in my truck and drove home fast, hoping I would find her there. But the house was empty. I swear to God, as soon as I walked into this kitchen and didn’t see her where you are right now, smoking a cigarette, I just had a feeling in my gut that something wasn’t right. I don’t know how many times I drove up and down that road looking for her.
“She’s gone,” he said, voice trembling, betraying a boyishness that his physical bearing did not. “Something terrible happened to her that night. I can just feel it, you know?”
Lydia was thinking of Maria Lopez’s gutted body rotting in the woods.
He paused and looked away from Lydia. His voice was softer, almost a whisper when he began speaking again, and she noticed his hands were shaking slightly.
“I would have made her stay put if I could have. But no one could tell Shawna what to do, not even me. She had a real problem with authority. I wish she had listened to me only this once.”
She didn’t have to be a mind reader to see how much Greg had loved Shawna, and that he would rather be dead than ever hurt her. There was no way to fake grief like that. Lydia hated to probe further, knowing that the more he had to recount for her, the more painful this conversation would get, but she needed to know who Shawna was, where she had spent time, what her routines were.
“Greg, tell me what you can about Shawna, what she was like. I need to get a sense of who she was.”
“Other people only saw the worst of her, her bad temper, her lack of interest in school, her rebelliousness. But to me, she was an angel. God, she was sweet. Loving, thoughtful.”
The earnestness in his voice moved Lydia more than she liked. She steeled herself against the wave of sadness and sympathy that welled within her.
“No one I know had a harder life than Shawna. Her parents both died in a plane crash when she was five and she was turned over to the state because she had no living relatives. A lot of people who take in foster kids do it for the money. They don’t really care about the children; some even resent them. Shawna had a real run of bad luck when it came to that. Most of the time she wouldn’t even talk about it. But she had scars all over her body—cigarette burns, a long gash on her back. If you raised your hand too fast, too close to her, she’d flinch. If I held her too tightly, too close to me, she’d panic, fight to get away like a coyote in a trap.
“Meg and Harden Reilley, her foster parents up the road, never hurt her, she said. But she was more than they could handle, stubborn and wild. They tried to love her, I think. But she wouldn’t let anyone close to her but me. She distrusted everyone—for the most part.”
“ ‘For the most part’?”
“She loved to go to church. She said it was the only place that gave her peace, the only place where she didn’t feel like a black sheep. She was close to Father Luis and his nephew Juno at the Church of th
e Holy Name. She helped out with things like the bake sale, bingo night, the Christmas party. She said they accepted her without judgment, like I did. Trusted her with responsibilities that no one else would dream of. They made her feel special, trustworthy. It was very important to her—the church. But she kept it a secret. She would sneak off there, like she was going to do something wrong. I asked her why she didn’t want anyone to know. She said she was afraid someone would take it away from her. She wanted to guard with her life the things she loved, always afraid of losing them. It broke my heart.”
“So she spent most of her time at the church, at school, or with you. Was there any other place she hung out regularly?”
He shook his head. “She didn’t really have any friends. She wasn’t one to go to the mall. She didn’t care much for movies. We stayed around here mostly.”
A silent tear traveled down the landscape of his face. He put his head down in his hands and sat, his breathing shallow and quick. She wanted to reach out and touch his hair, or take this boy in her arms and tell him that the pain goes away—that it fades like the memory of Shawna’s face will fade. But she was locked up tight inside, unable to give him what she was still unable to give herself. And besides, maybe it wasn’t even true. Maybe his pain would never go away; maybe every woman’s voice would echo Shawna’s for him for the rest of his life; maybe he would keep thinking he saw her in crowds; maybe the color green would forever remind him of Shawna’s eyes.
Lydia sat across the table from him, watching his big shoulders tremble. She was not at all surprised to learn of Shawna’s connection to the church. Since a few hours ago, when they’d put everything together, she expected each of them to have left a silken, spider’s-web thread leading her back to Juno. She just needed to find the point at which it all converged and the killer would be there, waiting for her.