by Jen Blood
“Definitely,” I promised. “And you have my phone number. If there are any problems, you can just call.”
She nodded. I kissed Einstein’s head and told him when I’d be back. Then, I manned up and left the dog.
If I’d had any idea how long it would be and how much would happen before I saw him again, no one on the planet could have pried me away.
◊◊◊◊◊
After that, Juarez pointed the car south along Route 1 and I tried to catch a little more sleep before the day got rolling. When we pulled into a tiny dirt parking lot beside a tiny dirt airstrip about an hour later, he woke me with his hand on my knee and his mouth at my ear.
“Rise and shine, princess.” Princess. I opened one eye and glared at him, but he just laughed. “You really don’t like mornings.”
“No sane person likes mornings.”
He nipped my earlobe. “I bet I could make you like them,” he whispered. With the smoky accent and the deep dark eyes and the way his hand traveled up my thigh, I almost believed him. If anyone could make me embrace a new day, it would be Juarez.
If I hadn’t had drool on my chin and there hadn’t been a gear shift between us and a plane waiting to take us to a world-renowned morgue to talk about young women being tortured and killed, things may have gotten sexy at that point. Instead, I kissed him very briefly on the mouth and we prepared to take to the friendly skies.
A little twin engine something-or-other was waiting for us in a dome-shaped hangar in the middle of nowhere. Curly’s Charters was written on a faded wooden sign just outside the building. Our pilot was a small, wiry man whose moniker was refreshingly free of irony. Besides an impressive head of dark curls, Curly was notable because he was missing two fingers on his left hand. He joked about losing them in a plane crash. Juarez didn’t look like he appreciated the humor.
Once we took off, I read Erin Lincoln’s journals while Juarez looked out the window beside me.
“It doesn’t make you sick to read in this thing?” he asked after we’d been in the air for about half an hour.
I shook my head. “Kat says motion sickness is all about mind over matter. She says nausea’s a sure sign of someone lacking character.” I hesitated. “Or someone lacking moral fortitude… I can’t remember, exactly. It’s one of those.”
“Well, I must have no character at all then,” he said. Now that he mentioned it, he did look a little green.
“You get airsick?”
“It’s just the height,” he explained. “And the speed. I’m not actually that fond of the motion, either. I should be used to it by now. Perhaps I should talk to your mother.”
“She’d cure you in no time,” I agreed. “She’ll fuck you up in sixteen other ways in the process, but you probably won’t get nauseas as much.”
He tapped the journal in my lap. “So, have you learned anything? What did Erin Lincoln have to say about the world?”
Quite a bit, as it turned out. She was a bright kid, but none of her entries were all that revealing. She talked about what they had for dinner, what kind of grades she was getting, where she passed her afternoons. She didn’t say anything about someone stalking her. Jeff was a pain in the ass who definitely pushed the limits sometimes, but so far she hadn’t said anything about him being a crazed sadist in the making, just waiting to torture and murder the town’s fairest daughters.
I turned the pages until I found one of the more interesting entries so far, and read aloud.
January 9, 1970
J. says this house is haunted. He says he saw Mama at the top of the stairs last night, and he sees a little girl here sometimes who looks like me. Wednesday night, he said he thought it was me when we were going downstairs to meet Creepy Will and Hank Gendreau. But the ghost girl didn’t say anything to him, and then she just disappeared.
He said she was crying.
I don’t mind the idea of Mama being here, as long as she’s okay. It would be better if she was in heaven, I know, but maybe she just doesn’t want to leave us alone with Daddy. I could understand that. The little girl makes me nervous, though.
I don’t like this house.
I finished and looked at Juarez. “Creepy, right?”
“Very,” he agreed. “Her brother could just be teasing her, though.”
“My father believed in ghosts,” I said. “I remember that about him, at least. Everything Isaac Payson talked about in church services, he bought hook, line, and sinker. Maybe it was because he thought he really did see something in that house.”
Diggs would have shot that down in a second. Juarez just nodded. “Anything’s possible, I suppose. What about the final entry? Don’t tell me you’re not the kind of woman who’ll skip to the end to see how everything turns out.”
“Only when it’s merited.”
That last entry was actually one of the first things I’d read the night before. It turned out to be disappointingly innocuous. I flipped to the entry again and read to Juarez.
September 19, 1970
Daddy went to Quebec for the weekend, leaving Jeff and me. Jeff says he does business up there, like he used to in Lynn. I told him he doesn’t know that for sure. Sarah and Luke came over, and I helped them with their homework. Luke gets so frustrated. Jeff came in and made fun of him, but I told him to get lost. He started in all over again about how Luke’s got a crush on me, and why did I want to spend time with those townie losers, anyway. He’s one to talk, with CW and H. trailing after him all the time. Talk about townie losers. Thank Gawd Mr. E’s in town a little while longer. I never would have made it through the summer without him.
“Who’s Mystery?” Juarez asked.
“Mister E,” I corrected him. “I don’t know. I think he stayed that summer with them—Erin mentions him a few times. She never calls him anything but that, though.”
“According to the Sauciers, that previous spring was when Jeff shut Luke in the basement, wasn’t it? And that was when the whole incident with Sarah Saucier took place.”
The ‘incident.’ I nodded, reluctant to talk about it. Or think about it.
“Their mom died in the winter of 1968,” I said. “Erin writes in here that they moved to Black Falls in ’66. Considering that and the shitty way their father treated Jeff, it’s not surprising that he went off the rails. He was fighting in school. Drinking and staying out all night with Will and Hank…”
“The next logical question,” Juarez said, “is whether all those incidents were really just him acting out against a home life turned upside down, or if this behavior started earlier. She doesn’t mention anything about that?”
“You mean something like, ‘Got an A on my math test today; Jeff skinned Mister Whiskers and left him in the neighbor’s kiddie pool?’ ”
He smiled. “Something like that, yes.”
“Not a word. In fact, so far the only thing that sounds remotely like my father in all this is when Erin talks about how he was with animals. There are a couple of entries where she talks about him feeding the birds… And he refuses to go bear baiting with Will and Hank that summer. That doesn’t sound like the kind of guy who’d get his rocks off torturing teenage girls, does it?”
Juarez considered that. “No, it doesn’t. I’m not ready to make up my mind one way or the other just yet, but that’s definitely a point in your father’s favor.”
“Well, that’s something, at least. Right now, I’ll take any points I can get.”
We touched down in Montreal at ten-thirty, and stepped off our little twin-engine straight into a hip, bustling European furnace. The temperature had to top ninety, and the humidity was enough to make even Juarez break a sweat. According to the GPS in our little rental car, it was supposedly a straight shot to drive from the airport to le Laboratoire de Medecine Legale, but in reality it was a harrowing thirty-minute drive, navigating through construction and detours and an unholy mess of one-way streets. When we finally did arrive, Juarez pulled into a lot reserved for staff, and
we went inside a surprisingly modern facility to find a veritable ghost town.
“They take weekends off here,” Juarez said to me as I joined him on the elevator. “Unlike we Americans.” He pressed the button for the basement. Once the doors were closed, he turned to face me.
“So, you’re clear on the rules, right?”
“Everything’s off the record,” I parroted back. During the car ride over, this had been our primary topic. “No touching anything. Only speak when spoken to. Chew with my mouth closed.”
“The last two are just personal preferences,” he said. “The first two are critical, if you ever want to be invited back.”
“I know,” I agreed. “I’ve got it, don’t worry.” I moved in a little closer. Juarez was in another of his standard-issue FBI suits. Despite the heat and the lack of sleep, he still managed to wear it well. “You’re cute when you’re official, you know.” I bumped my hip against his.
“And you’re cute when you’re impossible,” he returned evenly. He returned the hip bump just as we reached the basement, then raised it with a light slap to my backside as he stepped out of the elevator. “Which is almost always.”
I followed Juarez down a deserted, dimly lit corridor to a locked door marked Laboratoire Pathologie. He was just about to hit the buzzer when a small, gray-haired woman in a lab coat appeared down the hall.
She strode the rest of the way to us and met Juarez with a hug before greeting me with a perfunctory nod.
“Dr. Sophie Laurent, this is Erin Solomon. That friend I was telling you about.”
She looked me up and down with keen gray eyes, then responded in completely unintelligible French—or at least it was unintelligible to me. Apparently it wasn’t to Juarez, who surprised me by laughing and then launching into a lengthy dialogue of his own, also in French. I held up my hand.
“Hey, no fair.”
Juarez winked at the woman. “Sorry, Sophie. English, oui?”
“English it is, then,” she agreed. There was only the slightest trace of an accent.
She let us into the lab, a relatively small, overly bright room that smelled like bleach and chemicals. I waited for that stench of death writers are always talking about, but none came; no doubt an advantage to working with bones versus flesh. Four steel gurneys were lined up against one wall, each holding a different set of remains. The bones were clean, the skeletons completely disassembled. Dr. Laurent turned on a series of light boxes above each table, all holding x-rays.
“Where are the other victims?” Juarez asked, indicating the four bodies present and accounted for.
“I’m having a student run some tests. I’ll let you know what we find. We’ve identified all six girls now,” Dr. Laurent said. “You have the first five files?”
Juarez nodded, pulling them from his briefcase.
“The sixth victim was a transient from Boston: Kelsey Whitehart. Based on her history, it’s possible she’d been hitchhiking in Maine or New Hampshire when the killer picked her up.”
“Can you run me through the details of the attacks?” Juarez asked. “You said you had some new information.”
“Oui,” she agreed. “You’re free to do whatever exams and tests you want once we release the remains, of course, but these preliminary findings should give you a place to begin.”
She opened her own file and began listing details that I assumed Juarez had already known, since he didn’t ask her to slow down. Juarez had already made me promise I wouldn’t take notes or record the session, but I was sorely tempted to renig on that promise when I realized just how much information Laurent was providing.
“All six victims stabbed multiple times; based on the bone markers we found, it appears the attacks were centered around the abdomen, upper torso, and face.”
I winced. Juarez caught me and raised an eyebrow. “You okay?”
“Yeah, of course,” I said quickly. “Go on.”
“All six had nicks in the second, third, and fourth ribs consistent with a straight razor, which was used to carve what we believe was the letter J into each woman’s chest.” She paused when Juarez jotted something down, then looked at Laurent to indicate he was ready for her to continue. “There are a couple of other details I think you’ll find interesting.”
She went to the light boxes and pointed at two x-rays—one of a leg, one of a foot.
“You see this?” She pointed to the x-ray of the leg. “The victim, Jennifer Bishop, fractured her tibia, but there was already some mending taking place. If you look here, you’ll see a metatarsal stress fracture in the left foot, suggesting that she had been running barefoot for an extended period of time before she was killed.”
I thought of Brian Bishop. He was already broken, but he’d never survive if he found out this was how his daughter spent the last days of her life.
“Can you tell if there was any sexual assault?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Not this long after the fact, no. The cloth the victims were wrapped in was too degraded to learn anything, and of course there was no genetic material to test from the victims themselves.”
“What about the other victims?” Juarez asked.
“Those particular details are the same for all six women: damage consistent with running for an extended period of time, no sign of rape from the admittedly limited testing we’re able to do at this stage of decomposition. The differences are what I found particularly intriguing.”
Juarez and I both remained silent, waiting for her to elaborate.
She walked to the table farthest from us and stopped at the remains. “This is Jennifer Bishop,” she said. I thought of the girl in the photos: the pudgy four-year-old with glasses and pigtails who grew to become the lean, smiling blonde teen on horseback. Dr. Laurent went to the next table. “And this is Stacy Long.” The nineteen-year-old high school dropout.
“According to the missing persons reports,” Juarez said, “they disappeared in 1982, within two months of each other. Jennifer Bishop at the end of May, Rebecca toward the end of July.”
“Oui,” Laurent said. She flipped a few pages in her file and handed it to Juarez. I leaned in closer to see what she’d given him. “As I mentioned, there is no genetic material on which to do a chemical or nutritional analysis, but we can look at bone density and some other orthopedic abnormalities to find out about these young women in their early lives. Stacy Long, for example, was already showing some signs of osteoporosis consistent with poor nutrition as a child. Ms. Bishop, alternatively, had strong bones, the best dental care, and a fairly expensive procedure to mend a broken clavicle when she was between eight and ten years old.”
So far, these were all things I’d known from reading the files. I kept quiet, waiting for her to get to the point. It didn’t take long.
“In the last months of her life, however, it appears based on a bone density scan my assistant just completed, that Ms. Bishop suffered from severe malnutrition. She also had stress fractures in both wrists and ankles that indicate she was bound for an extended period of time.”
“He kept her,” I said softly.
Dr. Laurent nodded. “Very good. Yes… He kept her. I believe she was imprisoned in a small space for some time—a matter of weeks, at least, and possibly months— before the next phase of her torture began.”
“Do you think he let her go when he kidnapped Stacy Long?” Juarez asked.
“ ‘Let go’ may be a bit generous,” Laurent said. “That was when the hunt began. What was of particular interest to us was the fact that there are no indications that Stacy Long suffered through the same type of imprisonment that Jennifer did.”
“So, he kidnaps Jenny Bishop,” I said. My voice faltered. “Makes her his prisoner for two months, and then kidnaps Stacy Long. Brings them back to the same stretch of woods and… What? Hunts them both?”
“That would be conjecture on my part,” Dr. Laurent said. “But the theory is supported by the evidence we’ve collected thus far. The
same pattern was repeated on the other four victims.”
“One victim kidnapped first, held captive, then a second kidnapped. Both released and hunted together,” Juarez summed up. I was starting to feel sick. I took a deep breath and backed away from the remains, working hard to keep my cool. I didn’t miss the look that passed between Juarez and Laurent.
At the moment, I couldn’t seem to do much about it, though.
Juarez guided me toward the door, his hand at the small of my back.
“I should probably speak with Dr. Laurent alone for a few minutes. Would you mind waiting for me outside?”
Diggs would have hidden his head in shame; I was so much better than this kind of reaction. I couldn’t help it, though—my breath was coming harder and the room was getting smaller and I knew if I didn’t get air soon, things would get ugly. I nodded.
“Yeah. Okay. I’ll meet you out there.”
Juarez may have meant for me to just wait in the hall, but I chose to believe he’d be all right if I left the whole damned building behind. The air was still stifling when I burst through the side entrance, but at least there was no chemical smell. No tiny mortician telling me in graphic detail about the horrific ways six young girls were tortured before they finally met an equally horrific end.
It was just past eleven o’clock. I paced the sidewalk until sweat dripped from my forehead and clung to the small of my back. The only solace I took from any of this was my renewed certainty about one thing:
My father could never have done this.
Juarez met me outside twenty minutes later. I’d managed to avoid a full-on anxiety attack, but just barely. We walked back to the car in relative silence. It wasn’t until we were back on the road headed for lunch that he spoke.
“You’re very quiet. No jokes? No theories?”
I shook my head. I hadn’t even asked what else Dr. Laurent had told him after I left. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. I couldn’t stop imagining Jenny Bishop—the girl who loved horses and didn’t like college because it was too far from home—caged like an animal. Tortured and hunted and tortured again. And what about Stacy Long? What role had she played? Ally? Foe?