by Jack Heath
I swallow the urge to defend the two guys. McLean came across as a prick, for sure. But he doesn’t eat people. I want to imagine Thistle could see me as having a high desirability score. That’s hard when she’s looking down on better men.
“For McLean to see the driver with that level of detail, the car would have had to stop in exactly the right spot,” I say.
“You think it was shady that he couldn’t remember anything about the car?”
“Maybe. Except a good liar would have come up with a common make or model. And if he’s lying about the woman, then he is a good liar.”
Thistle nods slowly. “Okay, let’s say he’s a suspect. Motive?”
“Well, housemates get mad at each other all the time.” I’m searching on my phone, looking for more information about the factory we’re headed to. “Maybe it was a fight over the dishes that escalated.”
“What about Biggs and the other fourteen victims?”
“Unrelated. Different killer. Or maybe McLean killed the others for money, and then Ruthven found out about it, so he killed Ruthven, too.”
Thistle doesn’t look convinced. Nor am I.
“It’s a tiny apartment,” she says. “No backyard. How would he get rid of the bodies?”
I dissolve skeletons in the bathtub, but I don’t want to appear too knowledgeable about that.
“Maybe he dumps them out in the woods,” I say, thinking of Biggs’s half-frozen corpse.
“Well, I’ll get someone to check his financials for anomalies, and see if he rents any other spaces. Plus I can get a warrant for his ISP, check out the porn angle. But I’ve gotta tell you, I don’t think he’s our guy.”
I grunt. She’s right. But I don’t like the other possibility that springs to mind.
Charlie Warner is a good-looking blonde woman in her forties. Known for making people disappear. Known to use the woods where I found Biggs.
But if it’s her behind these disappearances, then I’m in trouble. I don’t want to catch Warner. If she’s arrested, that means no more food for me. Which means I can’t be around Thistle. I’ll get too hungry. I’ll hurt her.
Also, it means Warner already has a new body-disposal guy. She can kill me at any time.
We’re in Deer Park now—a landscape of petrochemical plants, chain-link fences and towers of shipping containers. No parks or deer to be seen. “Turn off here,” I say, pointing.
Thistle does. “So what’s the connection to this factory?” she asks. “Was it in Biggs’s search history?”
“Not exactly,” I say.
“Then why are we here?” She squints at the approaching building.
“It’s a sex doll factory,” I tell her.
Thistle considers this for a moment.
“I don’t think that answers my question,” she says at last.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
You can drive it, but it’s not a car. You can bank it, but it’s not money. The rich have blue, the cruel have cold, many Americans have red. What is it?
The reception is a narrow room not unlike that of the FBI field office, except for all the framed pictures of nearly beautiful women. Nearly beautiful because if you look close enough, you can tell the women aren’t real. It’s something about the eyes. Slightly too big, and none are looking exactly at the camera, or at anything. Other parts of the women are slightly too big, as well.
A glossy sign above the desk has the company name in cursive font: She’s Alive! It’s a case of hopeful naming, since the women clearly are not alive. Like calling your son Rich or your daughter Chastity. Maybe deceptive naming rather than hopeful, like how North Korea is officially the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Or the United States of America, which aren’t especially united.
The receptionist is a young Latino man with a fade buzzed into his hair, slouching in his chair as he plays a game on his phone. I can hear the crunching and blipping as he smashes digital crates for coins. He looks up as we enter. “Help you?”
Thistle flashes her badge. “We’re with the FBI. Can we speak to the managing director?”
“Alexandra Howard,” I add—one of the things that popped up in my search.
The kid looks alarmed. He picks up the phone, and says, “Uh, hi. The, um, police are here.”
A minute later, a gaunt middle-aged woman with freckles emerges through some sliding doors. “Lexi Howard,” she says, taking off a pair of work gloves to shake Thistle’s hand, then mine.
“I’m Agent Reese Thistle, FBI. This is Timothy Blake.”
“What can I do for you?”
“We won’t take up too much of your time,” I say. “Is there somewhere private we can talk?”
“I’m in compliance with all the relevant laws,” Howard says, loud enough for the worried-looking receptionist to hear.
“Frankly, I’m not even sure what those laws would be,” Thistle says. “You’re not being investigated for anything. We were hoping you could help us with a case.”
She nods warily. “Okay. My office is this way.”
She leads us back through the sliding doors and out onto the production floor. Thistle and I are both taken aback by the sight. Hundreds of bodies hang from the ceiling, hooks lodged through their bloodless necks. Most have no faces, just bare white skulls, which look like hockey masks. Severed heads are mounted on one wall, some bald, some with wigs. It reminds me of the cabin in the woods, with the wolf head and all the other trophies.
From here I can see baking trays where nipples and fingernails are laid out like candy. Workers are mixing chemicals in buckets and pouring them into molds. A dumpster in the back corner is filled with individual body parts. The smell of silicone is overpowering.
And they say American manufacturing is dead.
“It looks like a serial killer’s home,” Thistle breathes.
I think about my own house, which looks pretty normal.
“Everyone says that.” Howard shoots us a wry smile. “Sorry, I should have prepared you. Sometimes I forget how jarring it can be to outsiders.”
“What’s the process?” I ask. “How is one of these things made?”
“It’s pretty straightforward, but every step has to be done carefully. Our customers are discerning. We assemble the titanium skeleton, put it in one of those molds over there and fill it with silicone. Then we do makeup and put on the extraneous bits—nails, nipples, heads.”
“Heads are extraneous?” Thistle says.
Howard smiles wryly. “I know, right? Some men just buy the ass on its own.”
She leads us into an office, which has a window overlooking the production floor. There’s a desk, a computer, a filing cabinet—and a plastic tub filled with body parts. I’m already getting used to it.
Howard sits behind her desk. Thistle and I take the two stools opposite.
“To be honest,” Thistle says, “I’m a little surprised to see a woman running this place.”
“A man used to run it. But he made the breasts too big, the waists too narrow. The results didn’t look like real women anymore. My dolls are much more convincing, so they sell better. Men only think they know what they want. No offense,” Howard adds, glancing at me.
I just nod. None taken.
“You don’t think it seems kind of...” Thistle looks like she’s hunting for a less offensive word than misogynistic.
“First,” Howard says wearily, “there are plenty of male dolls down there, too. Second, this isn’t objectifying women. It’s womanifying objects. This is the least harmful part of the adult entertainment industry. You know how much physical damage is done to a porn actress over the course of her career? You know how many have been drugged or threatened just before the cameras start rolling? You know how many cam girls are prisoners in those little rooms?”
“There are laws...�
�
“In the USA, sure. Laws that are impossible to enforce in the age of the internet. Look.” She picks up a breast from her tub and starts absentmindedly squeezing it like a stress ball. “Plenty of my customers are lonely men with social anxiety who form a genuine romantic bond with the doll. Sometimes they don’t even fuck. They watch TV together. She reads him the news. She—”
“She what?” Thistle interrupts.
“Oh yeah. The new ones have a computer in their heads, so they can talk. Like a Google Home or an Amazon Alexa, but nicer to look at.”
“I’m sure some of your customers have wholesome, chaste relationships with the dummies,” Thistle says, one eyebrow raised. “But aren’t most just looking for a woman who won’t say no?”
Howard nods. “Yep. Most customers buy them for rough sex. Some actually beat the shit out of the dolls. I’ve even heard they turn up at the dump with stab wounds. But, ultimately, wouldn’t you rather that happened to a doll than a real woman? Not that it’s easy to tell the difference.” She tosses the breast to me. “Tell me that doesn’t feel like a genuine boob.”
“He wouldn’t know,” Thistle mutters.
Howard is looking out the window. “In Japan,” she says, “some men form romantic attachments to apps instead of women. They take their phones out on dates to restaurants and parks. You know what women call those men? Soshoku. It means herbivore.” She looks back at us. “Because normal men are predators.”
The opposite of herbivore isn’t predator; it’s carnivore. But I don’t point this out.
“Do you take requests?” I ask, keen to get to the point.
“Our whole business is requests,” Howard says. “Customers choose the face, the wig, the color of the nails, the type of nipples. Sometimes customers get bored, and they buy new faces for old dolls. You can peel off the face and swap it out.”
Thistle shudders. She’s seen dead bodies. She’s shot people. But she’s never peeled off someone’s face.
“We don’t make anything criminal-adjacent, though,” Howard says.
“Criminal-adjacent?” I repeat.
“Customers sometimes ask me to make children. Animals, too. I used to pass those requests on to the police. But it turns out it’s not illegal to request a sex toy shaped like a child or a dog. Doesn’t mean I’m gonna make one, though.”
She seems to have forgotten her argument from before. I think about asking her, Wouldn’t you rather that happened to a doll instead of a real dog? A real child? But we’re not here for an ethical debate.
“I was thinking something different,” I say. “Giants.”
“Giants?”
“Yeah. Women more than, say, seven feet tall.” On the forums where Biggs had been browsing, Sleeping Beauty had asked if anyone wanted to have sex with a giant in real life. A huge sex doll was the only way I could think of that the offer might be genuine.
Howard nods thoughtfully. “You know what? I do remember something like that.”
Thistle looks at me, impressed.
She starts to scroll through emails, talking as she goes. “Someone did ask me to make a giant. I assumed it was some kind of art project. I couldn’t help them, though. The molds and skeletons are a standard size. I can’t make big women.”
I sigh. Another dead end.
“Who was it?” Thistle asks.
Howard hesitates. I can tell by the movement of her eyes that she’s found the email. “Confidentiality is crucial to my business,” she says. “I can’t just give out customer details.”
“We’re FBI,” Thistle says. “And this person wasn’t a customer, if you didn’t make the doll.”
“You got a warrant?”
Thistle and I look at each other.
“I didn’t think so,” Howard says. “Get one, and I’ll be glad to help.”
“If we come back with a warrant,” Thistle says, “we’ll end up with access to your whole database. Surely it’s better to tell us about just one customer rather than all of them?”
“Sorry. But our privacy policy is clear on this. I could be sued if I give you a name without a court order.”
“Can you at least tell us if the customer was Kenneth Biggs?” I ask.
Howard glances at the screen. “I can tell you it wasn’t Kenneth Biggs.”
I sigh, frustrated.
“How about Shannon Luxford?” Thistle asks.
“Also wrong. Now, I can’t keep playing twenty questions with you. I have work to do. Come back with a warrant.”
* * *
“Well, that was a bust,” Thistle says as we walk back to the car. “But it did give me a million-dollar business idea.”
“Really?” I ask.
“Yup.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“You’ll have to sign an NDA first,” she says, deadpan.
“I’ll do it back at the field office. Spill.”
She spreads her hand wide. “Sex doll brothel.”
I laugh.
“Seriously. Did you see the catalog on Howard’s desk? Those dolls cost upward of two grand each. I can’t imagine many perverts have that kind of cash to splash around, and if they’re married, they wouldn’t want the thing in their house. But there must be plenty of guys willing to pay a hundred bucks for an hour with one. Or six minutes, or however long these guys last.”
We climb into the car and she starts the engine.
“You think they’d be willing to have sex with a doll someone else has just used?” I ask.
“Well, they fuck human hookers, don’t they? And we’d obviously wash them between customers. Plus, a doll can work twenty-four hours per day, seven days a week.”
“I thought you were against the whole concept.”
“What can I say? Howard was very convincing.”
“You think a guy would spend two hundred and sixty dollars to rent a doll?”
“That sounds too much for... Wait. You reckon that’s why Biggs took the cash out?”
“No,” I say. “Just thinking out loud.”
Thistle stops at a red light. Pedestrians shuffle across in front of us. An old man with a walking frame, a lady with a briefcase, a teen on a scooter. Something on the radio catches my attention. I turn it up.
“—at least sixteen victims from around the Houston metropolitan area. The killer, nicknamed the Crawdad Man, seems to target white males between the ages of twenty and forty. The FBI has not named a suspect at this time.”
“There goes our head start,” I say. How long have I got before Warner realizes I’m still on the case?
The director’s voice comes through the speakers. “We’re devoting all available resources to the investigation, and we’d encourage any members of the public with information to come forward.”
“Why ‘the Crawdad Man’?” I ask.
“Maybe all the good names were taken. You know the Grim Sleeper killings were originally called the Strawberry Murders?”
“The dump is in Louisiana. Maybe that’s why?”
“Or because it’s a dump,” Thistle says. “Don’t crawdads eat decomposing matter?”
The radio host is reciting a phone number. “And we’d like to hear from you. This just in on the text line: ‘What a surprise that the police are focusing all available resources on a killer of white men.’ Hmm, interesting. Thanks for your feedback, Vanessa.”
The light goes green. Thistle waits for the last few jaywalkers to hurry off the road, and then we’re moving again.
“Do a U-turn,” I say. “Quickly.”
Thistle flips her blinker on. “Why?”
“I just saw the guy who ran from us at the dump. The one who stole the tractor.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
If five dogs can eat five bones in five minutes, how long does it take four dogs
to eat four bones?
Thistle heaves the Crown Vic into the U-turn, scanning the faces of pedestrians on the sidewalk. Other cars slow right down to avoid colliding with us. Someone honks. “You’re shitting me,” she says. “Where?”
“He’s driving a white Mazda,” I say. “He went that way.”
“You sure it was him? The traffic’s doing fifty.”
“Ninety percent sure,” I say. It was a split-second glimpse, but it was enough. I’m good with faces.
Thistle reaches for the siren.
“Don’t,” I say. “Let’s see where he goes.”
“I can’t see the car yet.”
“Me neither, but it’s there. Eight cars ahead. Overtake this guy.”
Thistle swerves into the other lane and zooms past a black Toyota. The driver sticks his hand out the window and flips the bird at her. Without even looking, Thistle presses her badge to the window. The guy blanches and slows right down. His car gets smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror.
“Is that it?” Thistle asks, pointing to the white Mazda.
“Yeah.”
“Can you see the plates?”
I can’t, but I did when he passed us the first time. I recite the numbers, and Thistle punches them into her dashboard computer. A registration pops up on the screen.
“The car is registered to Hector Gomez,” she says. “Not listed as stolen. Was that one of the fake names in Edwards’s files?”
“No,” I say. “Doesn’t mean it’s real, though. Let’s see where he goes.”
“We should call it in.”
“Not yet. He’d hear our backup coming.”
We follow the old Mazda west on the I-10, out of Houston. We pass through Katy—trees on our left, places selling tractors and RVs to our right—and then we start to see signs to San Antonio, a hundred and sixty miles away. A short drive by Texas standards. Another sign says Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.
“You reckon he’s headed for the border?” I ask.