Runaway Girls

by Skylar Finn

  She ran across the road and opened the door. The interior light didn’t come on, which was weird, and for a moment, his shadowy face scared her, like he was a stranger she’d never met. Then she saw his smile in the dark, the way his sharp, white teeth glowed, and she felt happy again. She got in and never looked back.

  When we got to CARD headquarters the next morning, the place was in an uproar. All the agents present were buzzing around like angry bees. It was like someone had just kicked over the beehive. I grabbed Agent Manning as he flew by me.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Another girl has disappeared,” he said grimly.

  “Who is it?” Harper asked.

  “Crystal Deakins,” he said.

  10

  The Worst Kind

  “We just spoke to her yesterday,” I said. “What happened?”

  “Call came in to local police this morning. Mother was hysterical, saying she’d been stolen out of her bed. All her stuff was still there, so there was no way she ran away, not according to Mom. April Deakins is also pretty strung out on something—meth or some other kind of speed, so she may be suffering from stimulant psychosis. But under the circumstances, we’re assuming the worst.”

  I put my hand to my head. I’d been two feet from her less than twenty-four hours ago. It was hard not to feel responsible. We’d focused on getting Brittany back and investigating the people closest to the girl, along with the possibility that a random drifter was responsible. This changed everything.

  Harper turned to me. “What do these two girls have in common that they would both go missing within a week of each other?”

  “It seems unlikely that Brittany’s real father was involved,” I said grimly. “Unless he also kidnapped his daughter’s best friend to keep her company.”

  Manning shook his head. “We found the dad late last night. He really has been at work in Louisiana. Didn’t even know his daughter was missing. The foreman on the job accounted for his whereabouts for the last week.”

  I remembered the truck with a Louisiana license plate speeding away from the bar. It could have been anyone. It could have been just a coincidence.

  “Look, you raised the possibility with Agent Brown that Daniel Hayes and his business partner might be using their company as a front for drug-related activity,” said Manning. “There’s a common thread there. It might be a thin one, but right now, it’s all we have. Crystal’s mother and her boyfriend are obviously up to their necks in something.”

  Harper nodded. “You want us to check them out?”

  “Yes. One of the registered sex offenders has gone off the grid. Didn’t show up for a check-in with his probation officer, isn’t answering his phone or the door. Brown’s on it with the local PD. Check out Deakins and her boyfriend while we’re coordinating that.”

  “We’ll head there now,” I said.

  Crystal and her mother lived in a falling-down shack on the Ohio side of the river. It was one of the ramshackle old places that looked like it was barely standing. If it hadn’t been for the old Ford on cinderblocks out front, I would have thought the building was condemned.

  A string of Christmas lights had been left up on the porch, with half of them burnt out. Part of the front porch had caved in. A dog that looked more like a coyote leered at us from the yard. I eyed him warily as we approached, but the dog left us alone as if he couldn’t be bothered. As if there was nothing worth guarding here.

  The door was hanging slightly off the hinges, and the inner door was ajar. I frowned at Harper, my hand drifting instinctively to my waist and resting lightly on my sidearm. Then I heard it.

  “I told you to shut up!” There was a scream, followed by a loud crash. “This is all your fault!”

  I knocked loudly on the door frame. The din inside immediately fell silent. “Who’s there?” It was the same voice as before, a woman’s, wary now.

  “FBI,” I called. “Do you have a moment to speak with us?”

  The sound of thudding footsteps crossed the floor inside. The door flung open. The woman who opened it looked like a carbon copy of Crystal, aged by maybe fifteen years, tops. Her long, streaky hair was peroxide blond with ombre tips and black roots. She looked like a feral cat with her patchwork hair and bright, calculating green eyes, her teeth small and sharp. She wore a leopard-print camisole and tight black jeans.

  “It’s about damn time,” she said. “I bet you people were over at the Hayes place the second their perfect little daughter went missing, but you’ll take your time with us river rats, won’t you? All we had out here was that fat moron of a cop.” She held the door open wide for us. It emitted a drawn-out, anguished creak.

  “Hold on!”

  I could hear a man’s voice screaming inside. Footsteps rapidly thudded across the floor. There was the sound of a toilet flushing. I sighed. We had other things to worry about besides whatever he’d just flushed.

  April Deakins flung the door open, unconcerned with whatever her boyfriend was up to in the background. The living room reeked of cigarettes, just barely masking the smell of something else beneath. Something sharp and chemical that I didn’t recognize as any drug I was familiar with. Bath salts, maybe.

  She stalked over to a sagging, sad chair that might have been either brown or leather—possibly even both—at one time another in its history. She collapsed into it. She lit a Merit 100 with a lime-green, plastic lighter and stared at us.

  “Well? Are you going to sit down, or are you waiting for me to offer you some Kool-Aid?”

  Harper drifted passed me and made a polite show of sitting on the edge of the tatty, plaid upholstered couch. I remained standing. There could be anything inside of that couch.

  “When did you notice Crystal was missing?” I asked April.

  “When I went in to wake her lazy little butt up for school. She always oversleeps. Not only was she gone, but her purse and all her things were still there next to her bed.” She tapped the long ash of her longer cigarette into an ashtray shaped like Texas.

  “And you found her phone?”

  “I found her smartphone; that’s how I knew. She’s glued to that thing. But I think she’s got herself a burner, too. In case she feels like getting up to something.” She snorted. “I’d like to find it and take it, but I do the same thing myself.” She held my gaze, challenging me; I remained silent. “I think the same pervert who took that other girl took her. That’s why I called the cops.”

  “Is there someone else here?” I glanced toward the dark hallway. The living room was dark, too, lit solely by the light that barely seeped through the cracked, nicotine-stained Venetian blinds. I heard a deep rasping cough from the bathroom that carried through the paper-thin walls.

  “Yeah, Randall. My boyfriend.”

  “May we speak to him?”

  “He’ll be out here in a second. Randall! Get out here!”

  “Hold your horses!” An angry mumble came from the bathroom.

  She turned back to us. “He has no idea what’s going on. I can tell you that right now. You’d like to think if you keep a man around the house, he’ll offer you some kind of protection, but that’s not the case where Randall is concerned. I’d have been better off picking up a twenty gauge than him.” She shook her head.

  “Can you tell us if Crystal was talking to anyone online recently that you knew about? Someone other than her classmates?”

  She frowned. “Well, she doesn’t have a computer. She could have done it on her phone. That cop took it with him. I didn’t know her password. It’s hard to say what she’s been getting up to. My girl is smart, though. She wouldn’t let no stranger get the better of her. I think he snatched her right outta her bed while we was asleep.”

  The bathroom door slammed open. A bone-thin, shirtless man with a straggly beard and a Confederate flag bandana wrapped around his long, greasy black hair stumbled out into the hallway. His dark jeans sagged around his hips. He collapsed in the chair next to Harpe
r, opposite April. He looked at him bleary-eyed, his expression glazed.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Hello,” said Harper cordially. “Did you hear anything last night, sir?” His manners were borderline Southern; I had a hard time believing he was from Grosse Pointe.

  “Last night?” Randall scratched his head. “No, sir, I did not.”

  “Nothing at all? Maybe a window opening, or the front door?”

  “That door was locked!” barked April.

  “Maybe someone jimmying the lock?”

  “Well, we got ourselves a guard dog for that,” said Randall, scratching his head. The bandana shifted back, revealing his receding hairline. I couldn’t discern his age in the darkened, smoky room. His face was heavily lined, but he could have been a hard-living thirty or a natural forty-five. “So, I doubt that very much, sir.”

  “He was passed out drunk on the couch,” put in April. “He didn’t hear shit.”

  “What about you?” I asked.

  “I’m a heavy sleeper,” she admitted. “I got to take something for my nerves, you see. I was out like a light.”

  I imagined the Ambien commercial with the luminous green butterfly drifting through the window and landing on her bed. I had no doubt in my mind she needed something to get to sleep. That was something I was willing to take at face value.

  “Who do you think took Crystal?” I asked. “Do you think it was the same person who took Brittany?”

  April’s expression darkened. “I think it was her bastard of a stepdaddy,” she said.

  “Daniel Hayes?” Harper leaned even farther forward on the couch. Any farther than that and he would have tumbled right off onto the nubby, stained carpeted floor. “What makes you say that?”

  “She was always going over there. Thinking it was like her dream family or something. Ungrateful for what she had. Brittany’s mom hated her, of course—I’ve never gotten along with other women, myself—but that stepdad took a real shine to her.”

  “In what way?”

  “He’d give her things. She’d come home with a new notebook or whatever, something she’d asked for that I couldn’t afford, and she liked to rub my face in it. She seemed to think he was ‘just being nice,’ because he knew we were poor and felt bad his wife was mean to Crystal—plus he wanted to suck up to Brittany’s friends besides, try to stay on her good side—but no man ever does something just to be nice. That’s what I always say.”

  “That’s perfectly untrue.” Randall’s sleepy voice from the couch beside Harper. His eyes were shut, and he had listed halfway sideways on the arm of the couch like a sinking ship in a plaid sea of despair. April ignored him.

  “He was probably doing stuff to his stepdaughter and thought he was gonna do something to mine. I’ll tell you what, my girl will claw his eyes out if he tries anything in whatever basement he’s got ’em locked up in. She’ll get away and tell us all about it. And you’ll know it’s the truth when he turns up with one eye missing.”

  “Okay, Ms. Deakins,” I said. “I think that’s all we have for you right now.” I raised my eyebrows at Harper; he nodded. I took my card from my wallet and handed it to her. “We’re working closely with a dozen other agents to get your daughter back. If you think of anything or you need anything from us, please don’t hesitate to call.”

  I was sorry the woman was having a hard time being taken seriously by local authorities, who had probably arrested her half a dozen times, and by her community at large. I believed every person deserved justice, regardless of how poorly their peers thought of them or treated them. I knew Crystal was a fighter, but she was still a young woman pitted against a violent and unknown entity who was inevitably older, stronger, and far more evil.

  She took the card and looked at it, biting her lip. “Thank you,” she said in a strangled voice. When she looked up, her green cat eyes were bright with tears.

  “Well, that was…” Harper was unable to find a diplomatic way to finish his sentence when we left.

  “Profoundly depressing?”

  “Well…yes.”

  “You’ve had more experience in this arena than I have,” I said. “What do you think about Daniel as a child predator?”

  He was silent. Only after we’d gotten in the car and started down the road that led back to the bridge did he speak. “It’s hard to say,” he said at least. “I’ve seen all kinds. Those who obviously have something deeply wrong with them, people it’s disturbing to even look at, let alone speak to. But those aren’t the worst kind.”

  “What is the worst kind?”

  “The worst kind are the ones who seem perfectly normal and ordinary. They’ve mastered the art of wearing a mask. They seem like amicable, law-abiding citizens. They’re trusted or even admired and revered in their communities. They’re in a position of power or authority. They’re the local reverend or principal. They’re the last person you would ever suspect—and the last person you would ever want to have access to your kids. And they get away with it for years.”

  “Do you think that Daniel Hayes might be the second kind?”

  “That’s the thing,” he said. “Until you uncover hard evidence or catch them in the act, with the second kind? It’s almost impossible to tell.”

  “Maybe that’s what he and Katy Lipman are hiding,” I said.

  “That’s what doesn’t ring true for me about the whole thing, if it’s him and Lipman. Unless she found out something and is covering for him to save her financial interests. In my experience, predators are solitary individuals. They work alone.”

  “And kidnappers?”

  “It takes all kinds,” he said.

  11

  Fire Starter

  Since we were in Ohio, I told Harper to drive to Marv’s on Muskingham Street. “You’re filled with secret eating spots,” he said.

  “I am when it comes to this area,” I said. “And I guess other places, depending on where you’re working.”

  “You should start your own Zagat’s for feds,” he said. “You would have a somewhat limited market, but your hard work and research would be gratefully appreciated, I’m sure.”

  The food at Marv’s was one of my favorite things about coming here. I left Harper on his own, having faith he would select something far better from the menu than a glass of lemon water. I ordered the Town Pump and a sweet tea.

  “The Town Pump?” He looked intrigued. “What on earth is that?”

  “It’s a sandwich,” I said. “It’s named for the water pump outside.”

  “Oh, is that what that was?” he said.

  “Have you never seen a water pump before?”

  “We don’t have those in Grosse Pointe,” he said.

  Harper got a Marv Burger, which I felt was respectable on his part. “You seem to have strong ties to the area,” he said.

  I shrugged. “My mom didn’t like coming back here and being reminded of growing up in a small place and being trapped. But I loved it here. I didn’t grow up here, so I never felt trapped. To me, it was always just a good place to go. I got to see my grandparents, and it’s familiar to me. It’s devastating, what’s happened here.”

  “You mentioned you worked a case in the area,” he said.

  “I was part of a massive raid in Belmont County on pill mills, handing out prescription opioids like they were candy.”

  “I heard about that,” he said. “The DEA was involved, too, right?”

  “Everyone was involved,” I said. “Pretty much every acronym government agency you can think of, and some you’ve never even heard of. It was pretty epic. Naturally, the doctors handing out these drugs, who were responsible for who even knows how many deaths—not to mention countless others now saddled with a lifetime of addiction—actually had the audacity to plead ‘not guilty.’ Not that I was surprised. How often does someone own up to the crimes they’ve committed or the wrongs they’ve done against others? It’s always somebody else. There’s always an excuse. The guilty are
never the ones to blame.”

  “Like claiming that they couldn’t possibly have foreseen how prescribing someone OxyContin for a sprained ankle would lead to long-term abuse?”

  “Exactly. They’re somehow the innocent ones in all of this. This region got hit hard by the opiate crisis, and Ohio and West Virginia have had some of the highest rates of overdoses the country has seen. There was a huge fallout here after the bottom dropped out of coal and steel. We’re talking tens of thousands of people out-of-work. It’s a domino effect: people lose their jobs, their health insurance, their preventative care. They get depressed. They’re looking for the silver lining, a reason to get out of bed. They can’t find one. What’s the one respite they can find from all this misery, the only solace they can seek?”

  “Drugs?”

  “Exactly,” I said. “That’s why I think this is drug-related.”

  “You were part of the bust that broke up the pill mills,” he said. “I mean, I would never assume that solved the problem, obviously. We both know that’s not how it works. But do you think it’s still as pervasive as ever?”

  “It wasn’t a ‘case-closed’ kind of thing. It was clear that new issues would arise in their place.”

  “What kind of issues?”

  “If you look at the rise of fracking and the arrival of all the transient gas and oil workers, who routinely work eighteen to twenty-hour shifts, it was inevitable that meth would follow. You look at Lipman and Hayes, capitalizing off that transient population—or trying to—with their phantom construction site with no workers, you have to wonder what they’re really up to. Hayes’s daughter goes missing. My first question is: who did he owe money to, and why? Allegedly, they haven’t received a ransom of any kind, but it might not be that kind of ransom, and it might not have been ‘requested’ of Cynthia Hayes. There might be another reason we haven’t heard about it, and that might be the fact that Daniel Hayes is concealing it from us because he was instructed to.”