Little Girl Gone

by Gerry Schmitt

  “One o’clock,” Thacker said. “I can’t wait to hear his explanation about this—or maybe I can.” The phone on his desk suddenly shrilled. “Hang on.” He picked it up. “Yes, Angel?” He listened intently. “What? Now?” He straightened up in his chair and frowned. “Okay. Well, put her in Conference Room C. That’s right, the one that looks like a big orange Creamsicle puked its guts out.” Thacker hung up and shifted in his chair. “Change of plans.”

  “What’s up?” Max asked. “Is the FBI stepping on somebody’s toes?”

  “No. It appears that Mrs. Darden just showed up here. I mean right now this minute. And she’s asking to talk to the person in charge of her daughter’s investigation.” He cocked a finger at Max. “That would be you, my man.”

  “Okay.” Max made a motion to stand up.

  “Not so fast,” Thacker said. “Susan Darden also wants to see your sidekick here.” This time he pointed at Afton.

  “Me?” Afton squeaked. “Why?”

  “Damned if I know,” Thacker said. “But I’m betting that, between the two of you, you’ll wring it out of her.”

  * * *

  SUSAN Darden wasn’t so much sitting in an uncomfortable orange plastic chair as she was crouched in it. Every muscle was tensed, her normally flawless complexion was red and blotchy, and her fingers drummed relentlessly against the Formica table. Even though she was a hot mess, Afton noted that she wore a spectacular winter white pantsuit with gold braid trim.

  Max held the door open for Afton as they shuffled into the room. “Hello,” Max said, nodding at Susan Darden. He was according her the distant respect a mongoose might give a cobra.

  “Hi,” Afton said. She wasn’t sure what to expect either. Would the woman go postal and start hurling invectives at her? Would she remain calm but seething? It looked like they were about to find out.

  Afton and Max slid into chairs across the table from Susan.

  “I appreciate your meeting with me like this,” Susan said. Her lips barely moved and her voice was low and contained.

  Max tipped a hand as if to say, Go on.

  Susan cocked her head. “Obviously you heard what happened?”

  “Just briefly,” Afton said. Her face was fixed in a neutral position, but deep down she was dying to hear the full story.

  “Why don’t you tell us what happened,” Max said. He was staying cucumber cool, too.

  “That asshole was cheating on me,” Susan spit out. Then, wraithlike, her face twisted with pain, she lurched forward in her chair and barked, “Richard was planning to see her. Our precious daughter’s been kidnapped, I’m a complete basket case, and all he can think about is that little tart.”

  “We’re sorry about that,” Max said. “We really are. But how exactly do you think your husband’s, um, extracurricular activity affects this particular situation?”

  Susan paused to gather together her thoughts, and then said, “What if it’s a plot?”

  “A plot against you?” Afton asked.

  “I don’t know,” Susan said. “What if Jilly took the baby? Or the two of them conspired and are holding the baby somewhere?”

  “And they would do that . . . why?” Max asked. He wasn’t buying the conspirator theory, but he was giving her the benefit of the doubt.

  “To drive me crazy,” Susan said. She twisted the ring on her right hand, an enormous moonstone set in gold. “It is driving me crazy. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, I can’t focus. All I can think about is Elizabeth Ann.”

  “You know we’re doing our best,” Max said. “We’ve been working in concert with the FBI, following up on a number of leads.”

  “I get that,” Susan said. “I saw the two of you on TV last night. You were down in those woods checking to see if that poor frozen baby was Elizabeth Ann.” She hesitated and then her voice grew softer. “That’s when I knew that both of you cared deeply. I finally comprehended that finding my baby is important to you, too.”

  “We understand your pain,” Afton said. “We’re parents, too.”

  Susan pulled a hanky from her purse and dabbed at her eyes. “I thought for sure that little baby was Elizabeth Ann.”

  “But it wasn’t,” Max said. “Which really is a blessing of sorts.”

  “Know this,” Afton said, leaning forward. “If it had been her, we would’ve called you immediately.”

  “Really?”

  “Absolutely,” Afton said. “We wouldn’t have let you spend one extra second worrying if it was her or not.”

  “It’s always better to have an answer,” Susan said.

  “Yes, it is,” Afton said.

  Everyone was quiet for a moment, and then Susan gazed at Afton and said, “You’re a mom, too?”

  “Yes, I have two girls,” Afton said. “And Max has two boys.”

  “So then you know,” Susan said.

  “I do and I don’t,” Afton said. “I know the love a mother feels for her children, but I’ve never experienced the terrible pain you’re going through right now.”

  “It’s awful,” Susan whispered.

  “Tell us more about the plot,” Max said.

  Susan waved a hand. “I don’t know that it’s a legitimate plot. On the other hand, I wouldn’t put it past Jilly. She’s a strange girl. Very focused and driven. When she sees something she wants, she doesn’t hesitate to go after it.”

  “And you think Jilly went after Richard?” Afton asked.

  “Well . . . yes, I do,” Susan said.

  “You’re thinking she stood a better chance with the baby out of the way?” Max asked. Susan winced at his words and Max said, “I’m sorry, but we need to be absolutely clear about this.”

  Susan picked at an invisible piece of lint on her lapel. “Yes, I think Jilly would stand a better chance without the baby. It’s . . . The baby served an important part in keeping our marriage together.”

  “Okay,” Max said. “That’s all we need to know.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Susan asked.

  “It means,” Max said, “that we’re going to severely sweat the two of them.”

  “That’s the best news I’ve heard yet,” Susan said. “But Richard is . . . well, let’s just say he’s honed his skills at being evasive.”

  “Of course he has,” Max said. “He’s a corporate big shot. Still, we’re fairly skilled in our interview techniques. And there’s always the threat of incarceration.”

  “That sounds good to me,” Susan said. She showed a faint smile. The first one they’d seen from her.

  “While we have you here,” Afton said, “would you mind if we went over a few things?”

  “I guess,” Susan said.

  Afton consulted her notes. “Are you familiar with the Wee Ones Daycare Center on France Avenue?”

  Susan shook her head. “No. Why?”

  “The woman who owns it had some trouble recently,” Afton said.

  “Concerning a child?” Susan asked.

  “Actually, it was a tax issue,” Afton said.

  “Oh,” Susan said. She looked thoughtful. “You know, I never considered taking Elizabeth Ann to day care.” She curled her lip. “But I was pretty darned hot to hire a nanny. Although I hesitate to call Jilly Hudson that now. Considering . . .”

  “I doubt she’ll be putting nanny duties on her résumé for a long time,” Max said.

  Afton leaned forward and said, “If you can manage it, I’d like to hear a little bit more about the doll show lady. The one who called herself Molly.”

  “There’s not much to tell,” Susan said. “I was at the Skylark Mall buying a pink snowsuit for Elizabeth Ann and I kind of stumbled upon this doll show.”

  “And you met a woman named Molly who created reborn dolls,” Afton said.

  “Yes,” Susan said. “At first
it seemed a little weird, but when you see one of them, when you actually hold one in your arms, there’s something . . . kind of compelling about it. Something magical.”

  “So you’d say this Molly was fairly polished at sales,” Max said. “At drawing in customers.”

  “She drew me in,” Susan said bitterly.

  “What else can you remember about her?” Afton asked. “I know you sat down with a police artist and did an Identi-Kit sketch, but the one I saw was fairly generic. It could have applied to a lot of females in the forty-to-fifty-year age range.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” Susan said. “My memory . . .” She touched a hand to her head. “It’s terrible.”

  “Don’t apologize,” Max said. “At least it’s a starting point. But what we’d really love is some little detail or snippet of information that might be lurking in your memory. Something you picked up, but haven’t shared with us yet.”

  “I have no idea what that might be,” Susan said. “I mean, I’ve been over this about a dozen times with the FBI. I even looked at that nanny cam footage, but it was too dark and grainy to really see anything.”

  “We know that,” Afton said. “And we appreciate it. But if you could just scrape up a little bit more information on this Molly person. Even if you just shared your impressions, it would help us.”

  “Well,” Susan said. “She was a thin woman and not all that attractive.”

  “How’d she wear her hair?” Afton asked.

  “Kind of mousy and straggly. Brown, with little touches of gray.”

  “So your general impression was . . .” Afton prompted.

  “That she’d lived kind of a hardscrabble life,” Susan said slowly. “She had this careworn look about her. And her hands . . . they were rough and raw, as if she’d done a lot of hard work. Like maybe she’d worked in a factory or on a farm.”

  “What about her speaking voice?” Max asked.

  “Fairly smooth,” Susan said. “But now that you mention it, she was doing the nicey-nice thing. You know, like salesclerks do? Pretending they’re your friend?”

  “Did you get the impression that this woman was educated?” Afton asked.

  “Just the opposite,” Susan said. “In fact . . .” She stopped, tilted her head, and said, “She had that Midwestern dialect going. Kind of like those people in the movie Fargo. Like, when she finished a sentence, her voice kind of went up at the end. As if she was asking a question, even though she wasn’t. Hmm, it’s funny how I just remembered that.”

  “You did good,” Max said.

  “You did great,” Afton said.

  Susan gazed at them, her eyes suddenly turning red and moist. “Are you going to find my baby?”

  Afton never hesitated. “Absolutely we’re going to find her.”

  18

  SPITS of ice and snow pinged the windshield of Max’s car. Car exhaust boiled up around them, making it look as though they were navigating a field of hot springs in Iceland. Instead, they were blasting through the heart of downtown Minneapolis on barely plowed streets, headed for the Medical Examiner’s Office.

  “You shouldn’t make promises like that,” Max said. He reached over and turned on the radio. Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” blared out. He curled his lip unhappily and clicked it off as they slewed wildly around a corner.

  “We have to give Susan some hope,” Afton said. She held a cup of coffee in her hand and was alternately trying to warm her hands, sip from it, and avoid a catastrophic spill.

  “Why?” Max asked. He switched lanes and ended up directly in front of an enormous sixty-foot-long articulated bus. When the driver blasted his horn, Max simply ignored him.

  “Because we have hope. We still believe that baby can be found.”

  “Maybe,” Max said. They were on their way to meet with the ME about yesterday’s Cannon Falls baby. Neither of them was looking forward to it. In fact, Afton was dreading it.

  “Do you think this is really necessary?” she asked. “Wasn’t this Cannon Falls baby case already kicked over to the FBI?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Max said. He had a big plastic Super America travel mug that he was sipping from. Afton figured the coffee had to be stone cold. “But you never know what we might find.”

  “You think the two cases are connected?”

  “Not really.”

  “But you have a hunch.”

  “Not exactly,” Max said.

  “A twinkle?”

  “Whatever.” Max aimed the nose of his car at the opening of an unmarked parking ramp. “Here we are.” They bumped into the darkness and sped past a row of dark blue state cars, then circled up two floors and found a spot.

  “I was wondering,” Afton said, “if I could sit in on your session with Richard Darden this afternoon?”

  Max kicked open the driver’s side door and frigid air swept in. “Not possible,” he said. When he saw the look of disappointment on Afton’s face, he added, “But I could probably arrange for you to watch the interview from behind a one-way mirror.”

  * * *

  CROWDED into an anteroom just outside the morgue, Afton and Max grunted as they struggled with disposable gowns, gloves, and masks, trying to pull them over their street clothes. The morgue attendant, a tiny Hispanic man who seemed to speak in a perpetual hoarse whisper, supervised their transformation.

  “Booties,” the attendant rasped. He pointed at Afton’s uncovered loafers and handed her two blue puffs of crinkly paper.

  It was, of course, a wise precaution until the medical examiner got a firm handle on the cause of death. Or in case the maniac who’d murdered this poor child had transmitted any sort of communicable disease.

  As the two of them shuffled awkwardly into the morgue, Afton gave an involuntary shudder. Cold, clinical surroundings never failed to depress her. And this place had it all—stark metal tables and cabinets, the inevitable sound of running water, unholy plumbing that kinked down into floor grates.

  “Good morning, I’m Marie Sansevere.” The medical examiner gave a perfunctory smile as she introduced herself.

  Afton noted that Dr. Sansevere had a body that was beyond thin, almost bordering on anorexic. Her green scrubs hung loosely on her spare form and her pale, translucent skin looked as though she’d never seen the sun’s rays, an indulgence Afton still allowed herself. Dr. Sansevere’s short, cropped, Scandinavian white-blond hair was the type seldom seen outside Minnesota or Wisconsin. Afton decided the good doctor was as pale and ethereal as the bodies she worked on.

  Once they’d gathered around the autopsy table, Dr. Sansevere said, “You know we only have time for a cursory look this morning?”

  “Understood,” Max said.

  The baby lay on a waist-high aluminum autopsy table that sloped gently from top to bottom and featured drainage holes much like a kitchen colander.

  “This is awful,” Afton whispered to Max. He nodded back.

  Dr. Sansevere began with a visual inspection of the body, dictating her observations into an overhead microphone. “Rigor mortis is well developed and livor mortis is dorsally distributed,” she said in a monotone.

  Afton and Max followed Dr. Sansevere around the table like a pair of ducklings as she took various swabs and blood samples. Then she put on a pair of magnifying glasses and examined the infant carefully.

  “See anything?” Max asked. “Hairs or fibers?”

  “A couple,” Dr. Sansevere said. She touched a tweezers to the baby’s right hip and extricated a strand of something. Then she turned off all the lights in the autopsy suite and switched on a black light. She focused the light about six inches from the body and moved it slowly across, then up and down. Where a few areas glowed a ghostly phosphorescent white, she stopped and took smears from those areas.

  “What causes that weird glow?” Afton asked.

 
“Not sure,” Dr. Sansevere said. “Until we run tests.”

  “Do you know what the cause of death was?” Afton asked.

  “Not until I open her up,” Dr. Sansevere said.

  Max grimaced. No way did he have the stomach to stick around for that.

  “She looks underweight,” Afton said.

  “She is,” Dr. Sansevere said. “This child was malnourished.” She shook her head, took a step back, and pulled off her mask. “A few months ago, I autopsied two children. The mother and the boyfriend, both crack users, had kept them locked in a closet for almost a year. The older one, the five-year-old girl, should have weighed at least sixteen kilos, but she was just under twelve. Died of starvation and pneumonia.” She busied herself with her instruments. “Absolutely inhuman,” she muttered.

  Twelve kilos, thought Afton. That translated to about thirty-five pounds. It was heartbreaking to think that two children had been kept in a dark closet, starved to death, and never given medical attention. But over the last couple of years, she’d come to know and understand firsthand the harsh realities of the world. Terrible beasts roamed the earth, killing and wrecking havoc at will, leaving carnage in their wake. In a little cottage in North Minneapolis, she’d come face-to-face with a woman who’d fed rat poison to her sick and aging parents. Sitting handcuffed in her cheery harvest gold kitchen with matching café curtains, the woman had matter-of-factly explained to police that her parents had simply become too much of a burden for her.

  * * *

  YOU ready to go back to the scene of the crime?” Max asked. They were ripping off their paper suits and hastily stuffing them into a bin that was labeled, HAZARDOUS WASTE.

  “What?” Afton said.

  “I mean go over to Hennepin County Medical Center to talk to that babysitter, Ashley. HCMC is, like, two blocks away. We can walk there through the skyway.”

  “I guess,” Afton said. The truth of the matter was she was dreading it. All night long she’d had troubled dreams where she’d struggled with a faceless attacker, fighting him off as his hands crept around her throat to choke her. And when she finally pushed him away and reached out to rip off his mask, there hadn’t been any head at all. Just a bloody neck stump.