Nobody's Damsel

by E. M. Tippetts

  They both eyed up the flowerbed and frowned. “Yep,” said one, “there’s a mound there.” He and his associate got down on their hands and knees and began to dig. The plants they piled up to one side as they dug down and down, like dogs after a bone.

  “There’s a mass, round and smooth.”

  Acid pooled in my stomach. I did not want to see them pull up a skull.

  “It’s a rock,” he said. “Hang on, there are a lot of rocks-”

  “Naw, I’ve seen this before,” said the other. “It’s to help with the water flow or somethin’. You make a hummock and layer it with some gravel.”

  The first one picked up a plant and sniffed it. “This is an herb garden.”

  They went through the plants and then made a haphazard effort to put them back, which was more than they were legally obligated to do, but I suspect that, like us, they were beginning to get a picture in their minds that made them squirm.

  This man liked kids, as was evidenced by his career choice. He had a beloved granddaughter or niece whom he’d photographed playing in the bathtub. Maybe he’d been rude to the cops who’d come by to talk to him, but that was really the only negative thing we knew about him. We’d just hauled an innocent man in for questioning and torn up his backyard as part of a wild goose chase.

  I glanced at Miguel who cuffed me lightly on the shoulder in a gesture to lift my spirits. “DNA evidence’ll be in tomorrow,” he reminded me as we moved back around the house to the street out front.

  “You DNA guys think you can solve anything.”

  He shrugged. “So what’s it like for you? Bein’ on the other side of a crime like this?”

  “What’s it like for you?”

  “I been doing this for ten years. Every now and then we crack a case wide open and save a life and it’s worth it, but a lot of the time, it’s just a confirmation that a lot of bad things happen to a lot of people. I hate crimes against kids. I’d take the abuse for all of them if I could, just lay it on me. I’ve been there. I survived it.”

  “When I was the victim,” I said, “I never thought about what it would be like for the adults working the case, and that’s how it should be, I guess.”

  “Sure.”

  “But it never occurred to me how many people watched and worried and got angry and wanted to fight for me.”

  “What, they never told you?”

  “I was unconscious for a while, and then the hospital was my whole universe while I recovered. I don’t even really remember the court case that much. My mom had a kind of meltdown and I almost had to look after her. Nobody at school ever talked about it. It all got swept under the rug, in a way.”

  “Yeah, I hear that. I got moved into a foster home and then into juvie.”

  “You’ve got a rap sheet?”

  “Oh yeah.” He smiled. “Nothing since I was sixteen, though. A high school guidance counselor was able to straighten me out.”

  “You grow up here?”

  “Nah, Houston.”

  I nodded.

  He kicked a pebble in the road. “What’s hard about being the good guys is the bad guys can work without principles.”

  “Yeah, but we’re smarter, right?” I didn’t say it with a ton of conviction, which fit the overall mood.

  “Hafta say, you’re not what I expected.”

  “What did you guys think when you heard Jason Vanderholt’s wife was coming to work at the lab?”

  “I’m sure you can guess.”

  “That I’d walk in with an attitude, no skills, and a sense of entitlement?”

  “That you’d be the one demanding all the funding and attention.”

  “This from a DNA guy?”

  “Well, yeah. It’s my job to hog the funds and the glory. You get how this works.”

  “Yep.”

  He looked sidelong at me. “You’re all right, Vanderholt.”

  “I’m just a girl from the South Valley. Underneath it all, I’m still trailer park.”

  “So what’s it like? Being married to Mr. Hollywood?”

  I looked at his left hand with its slim gold band. “It’s like being married, you know? There’s hard stuff and easy stuff and you work at it every day.”

  “Oh, you mean he didn’t sweep you off your feet and make your life perfect?”

  “I do less housework, I guess. I mean, I never did a ton, but I managed that before by having a really small house.”

  Miguel burst out laughing. “Yeah, I should tell my wife that’s my strategy. Honey, I’m cutting down on the housework.”

  “She stay home?”

  “For now, yeah. Our kids are little.”

  “That is so great that you have kids.”

  “I had to. It’s how I put the past behind me. Proving that I’m not so damaged I can’t do this right. Guess that sounds weird.”

  “No. What’s normal when you’ve had adults try to mess you up in a big way when you were a kid?”

  “True enough.”

  “Are a lot of people in the lab crime survivors?”

  “I guess. I mean, Wilson’s kind of famous because he got kidnapped and taken to the Dominican Republic. That was on the news. People at the lab remembered that when he came to work, and I forget what everyone else said. Some people were saying, ‘Yeah, I got beaten within an inch of my life,’ or whatever, and then Greg just looked around and said, ‘Sooo, yeah, someone stole my iPod once. Or I thought they did, but actually I just lost it.’ He was just a fan of crime shows as a kid. That’s why he studied forensics.”

  I laughed.

  “But sure, there are quite a few crime survivors. In this field there are always some, you know? Those of us who aren’t in jail or worse gotta end up somewhere.”

  The front door of the house opened and Detective Baca marched down the walkway towards us and said, “All right. Got one more firearm, and then we got one more scene to hit.”

  “What’s that?” asked Miguel.

  “A registered sex offender who also happens to live next door to Esperanza’s daycare.”

  “Seriously?”

  “It’s not a legal, registered daycare. It’s a lady who watches a bunch of kids.”

  It occurred to me that I would have been left at such a place if my mother hadn’t demanded that my father shell out for a good facility. I always thought of her as so selfish, but that didn’t necessarily stand up to scrutiny.

  “More CSI than I’ve done in the last year, I tell ya,” said Miguel.

  The sound of a car made me look up. My friend in the white sedan pulled up behind the CSI van.

  “How does he even keep finding me?” I said. “We gotta check if he put a GPS tracker on the van or something.”

  “Nah, he’s been tailing us this whole time. Just keeps his distance and goes around the block and stuff,” said Miguel.

  “My glamorous life,” I said as we got out the supplies to package up the gun Detective Baca wanted to confiscate from the property. I shot a glare at the sedan and the driver gave me a grin and wave in reply.

  The sex offender did not go after Detective Baca when he knocked with the search warrant in hand. Instead the man looked at the paper, then up at us with an embarrassed and resigned expression, then stepped back to let us in. He was a scrawny man with greasy, dirty blond hair and rotting teeth, the epitome of stranger danger that they warned us about in elementary school. He shuffled off into his living room and sat down on a battered, orange couch that had rips with the stuffing peeking out. A mangy looking dog peered up at us with a guilty expression from its dog bed in the corner. The place smelled like rotting food and unwashed puppy.

  While this house wasn’t neat, it wasn’t a complete dump either. The man seemed more poor than anything else. Empty beer cans stacked in a pyramid in the kitchen showed what he considered his greatest recent accomplishment to be.

  I glanced at the man again and he sat with his elbows on his knees, his gaze fixed on the floor.

  “Can
I ask you some questions?” asked Detective Baca.

  “I got nothing to hide.”

  “The people on the street know your history?”

  “I’m in the register. They can look it up. I don’t got to go telling all of them.”

  “But do they know?”

  He shrugged.

  “The woman next door, does she know?”

  “I don’t bother her or those kids.”

  “Gotta be a temptation.”

  The man didn’t reply.

  “Do you know this girl?” The detective held up a picture.

  “Sure. She’s the one missing.”

  “What do you know about her?”

  “Just that she’s missing.”

  “You ever seen her before?”

  The man stared at him, warily, before dropping his gaze and saying, “She comes here to that lady next door most days in the summer.”

  “You seen her?”

  “Not since she went missing, no.”

  “Have you ever spoken to her?”

  “Nope.”

  “You ever see what kind of car picked her up and dropped her off?”

  “Some days it was a gold Nissan Maxima, and some days it was a white Ford pickup truck.”

  “So you keep an eye on things over there?”

  “I notice stuff.”

  “Do you know either of the girl’s parents?”

  “Not the mother, no. The boyfriend, yeah.”

  “Boyfriend?”

  My ears pricked up at that.

  “The guy in the pickup truck. I assume that’s the boyfriend. The little girl’s dad. They have the same last name, at least.”

  My spirits crashed down again. I was way too emotionally involved in this little exchange.

  “You know him?” asked the detective.

  “Yeah. He’s Luis. We went to the same high school.”

  “Do you know him well?”

  “He says hi to me sometimes. That’s all.”

  “You got any idea where this girl might be?”

  The man shook his head and his greasy hair flopped into his eyes.

  Detective Baca got down on his haunches and looked the man in the eye.

  The man shifted his gaze to the wall. “You can look around the house. Search what you want. I got nothing to hide.”

  “I am going to do that. That’s why I’ve got this here search warrant.”

  “I didn’t do nothing to that girl.”

  “What about Wendy Mitchell. You do nothing to her too?”

  The man reeled back, glared at the detective, and said nothing.

  “You know, they never did find her body,” Detective Baca pressed. “You’ve got a talent for hiding them.”

  “I told the court everything. Not my fault the cops couldn’t find her.”

  “No, why would anyone blame you? All you did was stuff her body into a trash compactor, according to you? Who’d blame you for a thing like that?”

  “It was the truth.”

  “I’m not disputing that. You sure you know nothing about this little girl here?”

  The man met Detective Baca’s gaze for a long moment. “She had a purple monkey doll she’d carry with her sometimes.”

  “What was its name?”

  “I dunno. I just saw she had it sometimes.”

  “Was purple her favorite color?”

  “I dunno. She wore a lot of pink.”

  “So was pink her favorite color?”

  “I don’t know. I never said nothing to her. Her best friend was a little blond girl named Ramona. She doesn’t go to that place anymore, not since Esperanza went missing.”

  “Why do you think that is?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You got any other facts about her we should know?”

  “No.”

  “You ever see anyone other than her parents pick her up? Ever?”

  “No.”

  “Ramona’s mom?”

  “No, never. It was always those two cars.”

  Even if this man wasn’t guilty, he was providing useful information. I could believe that someone with an unnatural interest in children would spy on them. I wondered if he had a day job, or just sat in his living room watching the daycare.

  What was frustrating was how tiny these snippets of information were. This was our third mention of the white pickup truck. The neighbor across the street from Esperanza’s house had seen it, the father owned one, and now this man confirmed it had been here. So what? my subconscious screamed. None of these facts were coming together into a picture of what happened to this little girl.

  Detective Baca looked up at us. “Check the bedroom.”

  Miguel and I exchanged a look and went out to get the forensic light source and other items from the van. “I just feel like that guy’s whole bed is going to light up,” said Miguel. The light source would cause bodily fluids to fluoresce.

  “Yeah… I would almost prefer blood and gore right now.”

  The sun was behind clouds now, and it looked like we might get an afternoon rainstorm. Moisture gave the air a certain tang that anyone from the desert could smell. A very distant thunderclap rumbled off to the west of us.

  I took one last breath of clean air before ducking back into the house with my colleague.

  Detective Baca and the man kept talking while we worked. I plucked strands of hair from the sheets. My vision went dark at the edges; my mind’s way of funneling what I perceived. I didn’t want to remember this room. It’d give me nightmares of seeing Esperanza tortured in it. I didn’t want to think of the horrible, sick things people did to children. I’d never considered the crime I’d survived to be the worst thing a human could endure. Other people seemed to feel this way, but to me it was just another part of my life. Now I knew it wasn’t the worst thing a human could endure. Not by a long shot.

  An image flashed in my mind of my mother, sitting at my hospital bedside looking lost and confused. I’d wanted to slap her so many times during those early days when I regained consciousness. She was the adult. She was supposed to grasp my hand, tell me it was all right, and say that she loved me. She was supposed to tell the doctors and nurses what to do and make sure I got everything I needed.

  Now it occurred to me that she was twenty-eight at the time. Younger than Jason was now. I imagined what I’d be thinking if I sat next to Steve’s daughter, Maddy, in a hospital bed after a violent crime. Would I be on my feet, taking control, or would I be staring wide eyed with horror, unable to comprehend how anyone could do something so awful to a child?

  Miguel put a hand on my arm and guided me out of the room. “Go to the car, Vanderholt. I got this.”

  “You shouldn’t have to-”

  “I got this, all right?”

  Normally, I wouldn’t let someone shoulder the burden like that. I was always determined to do my fair share, but today I let him send me out to the van, where I got out my cellphone and called my mother.

  Clayborn stood outside of a house cordoned off with crime scene tape. Three police cruisers with their lights still flashing were parked in the driveway and on the street. It was late afternoon, turning to evening, and Mitchell stood behind her, one hand in his pocket. “Clayborn, give it a rest.”

  “Time is of the essence-”

  “Which is why you move fast on the best lead. Not all the leads.”

  “What? I’m turning up too many crimes for you?”

  “Taking the advice of a junkie and doing what should be a months long drug bust in one afternoon is reckless. We could probably catch much bigger fish than these little dealers and labs if we took some time, got informants, built a case, but you’re just tearing through in this scorched Earth campaign. It’s not how things are done.”

  “You tell that to Hope.”

  “Don’t play the cute kid card with me. Yeah, it’s awful that things like this happen. Yeah, we all want her to be found safe and sound, but at what cost?”

 
; “How much is your daughter’s life and safety worth to you?”

  “Are you listening to me? I care. I care a lot. I’m just saying that there are more people we could have helped if we dealt with these drug sites in a different way. They aren’t even jobs for a homicide detective-”

  “I turned them over-”

  “After you investigated the scenes yourself.”

  “I also turned up two pedophiles and a child porn collector-”

  “The last of which might be supplying a larger ring, but you blitzed through that scene so fast, who knows what we’ve lost? Hope Tanner isn’t the only victim out there, Clayborn. You get that?”

  She glanced back at him over her shoulder, then marched off.

  “Clayborn? Clayborn! Where are you going?” He followed her.

  “You’ve done your job. You’re the boss, you look at the big picture. My job is to save a little girl. You done with your lecture?”

  “You think that making yourself suffer from overwork is going to help her?”

  “No, I think my work might help her, so I’m getting as much done as possible.”

  “And suffering. Causing yourself no end of distress.”

  “Just call me a damsel, then.” She fluttered her eyelashes, sarcastically. “I’m sorry, is there a fun way to do this I’m not aware of? Sure, it’s hard. But this isn’t about me. It isn’t about me at all. It’s about her.”

  “Sure it is.”

  “I had my lucky break already. If you knew what that felt like, you’d go full throttle to try and catch one for someone else too.”

  “Clayborn, just ease up, all right?”

  She didn’t reply, just stepped out of frame.

  “Hello?” Mom’s picture popped up on Skype. She worked in a hotel behind the front desk. I gathered it was a little motor lodge, and that she spent a lot of time just reading and surfing the internet.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “How are you, sweetie?”

  “I’m all right. Read any good gossip about me lately?”

  “They sure do like to see you frown.”

  “I know. I need to stop doing it in public. They always get a picture.”

  “Well, ask Jason for advice. An actor oughtta have some tips.”

  “Good idea.”

  She looked confused for a split second, then smiled. Were my compliments to her really that rare?