It was so small. The body. Ruby.
It hurt too much to give them names sometimes. They became people that way. If they had a name, they had loved ones. They had thoughts and feelings and wishes and silly daydreams and a family who sang “Happy Birthday” in loud, embarrassing voices, and maybe a sibling who stole crayons and other prized possessions. They became real, instead of just another mystery to solve.
But the girl deserved one. A name.
Alice couldn’t look at the shoes any longer. She wanted to cover them up, make sure they were completely hidden from prying eyes, from people who didn’t realize those may have been the girl’s favorites. Maybe Ruby would have even refused to leave the house unless she was wearing them.
Something brushed her shoulder, and Alice realized that Nakamura had come to stand next to her, his leg pressing against the length of her arm. She leaned into the contact, thankful for the steadying presence.
Her eyes shifted up along the girl’s body, which was draped in fabric. The wind caught the edge of the sheet, lifting it, and something scraped against the back of Alice’s throat. She didn’t want to see the girl’s face. She knew what it looked like: the cheeks that were just losing the baby roundness, the upturned nose and bright blue eyes, the strawberry curls that always seemed to want to rebel from braids and ponytail holders. Alice had seen enough pictures, enough video footage, in the past few days that she even knew about the thin white scar on Ruby’s jaw, from that time she’d jumped from the top of the slide at the playground.
She breathed deeply, and the salt in the air coated her lungs as she stood up.
“No tire tracks,” she finally said, and Nakamura hummed in agreement, a low sound at the back of his throat.
“She’s light.”
It didn’t account for the deadweight, though. She couldn’t have been carried far.
Alice shifted to look back toward the dunes, back toward the pink-and-turquoise house that disappeared with the curving of the earth. It was an eyesore. A lot of things in St. Pete were, though.
“Is that the only road entrance?” she asked the group at large. It’s where she and Nakamura had come through, a little path that ran alongside the house out onto a quiet cul-de-sac that was now bursting with cop cars.
“About a quarter mile down is a public parking lot,” a voice chimed in. She didn’t care whom it came from. The answer was all that mattered.
“A quarter mile carrying, what, forty pounds?” Alice lowered her voice so only Nakamura could hear.
“Or they came in through the house access here,” he said.
“Which would require less strength, at least.”
“Could you carry her?”
Alice looked back at the bundle. Remembered the weight of Lila when she begged to be hauled around like a toddler instead of the six-year-old she’d been. “Please, Mama? My legs are so tired, I can’t even take another step.”
“Yes.”
They both shifted their gazes to Charlotte. The woman was about ten years younger than Alice but had a similar build: tall and thin with long limbs and shoulders that were a touch too broad. However, Charlotte, unlike Alice, carried her willowy frame with an easy grace that, combined with a delicate bone structure in her face, turned her into a dreamy Romantic painting.
Everything about Alice was sharper. Where Charlotte was lazy, pastel strokes, Alice was heavy, dark slashes, with high, defined cheekbones and toned muscles and harsh collarbones that overshadowed a flat chest. She was a short, dark chin-length bob, where Charlotte was a wild cascade of curls. She was narrow hips and long legs, where Charlotte had somehow conjured up a hint of curves.
“Could she? Carry her?” Nakamura voiced the direction both their thoughts had traveled in. There was doubt in the question, like he didn’t think those slim arms could bear the weight of a dead child.
“You’d be surprised at what people can do,” Alice said. “With enough motivation.”
Nakamura knew that. Every cop knew that. They looked back at the body, and Nakamura knelt down to where Alice had just been. He lifted the sheet with the tip of his pen, and she tried not to look away.
If Alice didn’t know better, she’d think the girl was napping; she’d think maybe those eyes were seconds from blinking open, bleary and crusted with sleep. There were no bruises on her throat, no cuts on her face, no scratches along her skin to suggest otherwise. A fading shadow on her arm was the only sign of a struggle. And even that was old.
“Chief says there’s a wound at the base of her skull,” Nakamura said.
“Must have happened somewhere else.” There was no blood on the sheets, which would have been saturated from a head injury.
Her clothes were intact, her limbs arranged neatly by her sides. Care had been taken with her body.
Perhaps they’d find skin cells beneath her nails or lacerations hidden by her T-shirt, anything that would tell a story that was different from the one written out in front of them so clearly.
Because right now, it looked like the girl had known her killer. Had known the person well.
“Two minutes until Sterling’s here.” The chief’s warning cut into the fragile web of their shared thoughts. It was funny, that. How quickly she’d slipped into trusting her new partner. She stepped away from Nakamura, severing the connection.
There would be photos, evidence, memories—distorted or not—from the jogger and the house’s owner, a million minuscule details to examine for the tiniest hint of a clue. They’d have uniforms talk to the men who’d found Ruby and scour the rest of the neighborhood for more witnesses.
That would come later.
This wasn’t the time for that. This was the time for impressions, quick and irrational and possibly faulty but authentic nonetheless.
Now. Now there was the rolling ocean lapping ever closer to those sneakers, there was the sand that embraced the tiny body, there was the electricity in the salt-heavy air that crackled around them, there was the sun that must have been only an idea when the girl had been left here.
Now there was just that one question, the one they’d all been asking since news of the missing girl had been splashed across every TV in the county.
What kind of monster could do such a thing?
CHAPTER TWO
CHARLOTTE
July 22, 2018
One week before the kidnapping
The tangy smell of sex almost overpowered the stale smoke that seemed to be a permanent feature of the dingy motel room. The combined scent would cling to Charlotte’s hair, her clothes, her pores. No matter how many times she showered, it would be there.
Cigarettes and sex. It might as well be her signature perfume.
A manic laugh caught in her esophagus, and she swallowed hard before it could escape. Enrique was sleeping. Or pretending to. Sometimes she didn’t care enough to figure out which it was. Sometimes she could hardly care enough to remember his name.
Charlotte pulled her knees up and shifted so she was sitting on the edge of the bed. Enrique didn’t move at the sound, so she pushed to her feet and padded across the carpet that was matted with unknown substances and scarred by burns that had singed the discolored fabric.
She closed the thin bathroom door behind her and leaned back against the cheap wood. The air was cleaner in the tiny space, and she let it fill her lungs. Her heart, which had begun to race in that way it did before the darkness started closing in, steadied. And Charlotte concentrated on that—that even staccato—as the world became less blurry around the edges.
Why must her constant companion be panic? Why was it like this, always? Or, she knew why it was like this always, but why couldn’t she wrap her arms around it and understand it? Better yet, why couldn’t she bury it, hide it, shove it away?
She squeezed her eyes tight until the stars burst against her lids, then turned on the shower. It was dilapidated, like everything else in this godforsaken hellhole of a motel room. The walls of it were crusted orange wit
h years of shampoo residue, the yellow tiles along the wall cracked into patterns that might have been pretty under other circumstances.
There was a part of her that wished she could blame Enrique, wished he was a prick who wanted to hide her away in places that charged by the hour if given the right incentive. But it wasn’t on him. She’d been the one who’d picked the Flamingo for their seedy little rendezvous. She always picked the places.
So instead of thinking about the lipstick-smeared towel she would have to use, Charlotte stepped under the lukewarm spray and wished she could feel clean. For once in her life.
There was a waxy tablet of soap wrapped in impossibly thick plastic sitting on the rim of the tub. The packaging refused to relent to her damp, fumbling fingers, so she simply ripped it with her teeth. Then she dragged the bar along the ridges of her hips, scrubbed at the sweat-tinged skin under her collarbones.
The water turned cool, but she didn’t step out until the first telltale shivers ran along her spine. If she gave in to them, she would end up curled on the floor, a whimpering mess, unable to stop shaking. So she climbed out and wrapped herself in the disgusting towel, the rough fibers of it an uncomfortable rasp over her skin.
Leaning against the brown-tinted porcelain of the sink, she forced herself to meet her bloodshot eyes in the fogged-up mirror. There were thick mascara tears smudged beneath her lashes, but the rest of the makeup she had so artfully applied was just a memory. Stripped of the painted facade, her pale face was all that was left—too needy and too desperate and too wan and too thin and too hollow and too much. Charlotte slapped her hand against the glass, wanting the image there to dissolve into nothingness as her palm hit it. Her face stayed, though, stubborn and defiant. So she turned and left the bathroom, left the bruised eyes and sad lips behind, no longer caring how much noise she made.
“Mmm, what time is it?” Enrique muttered from beneath the pillow he’d shoved over his head.
Charlotte glanced at the red numbers on the bedside clock. “Four in the morning,” she answered without sympathy.
“Babe . . .”
“Don’t call me that,” she snapped as she started to dress.
“Charlie,” he said instead, and that was far worse. She didn’t bother to correct him this time. “Come back to bed. Another hour won’t hurt.”
She wrestled herself into her wrinkled blouse, smoothing a hand down over the fabric. It was hopeless. “No.”
Enrique knew better than to argue further. Instead, he rolled onto his back so he was leaning on his elbows to watch her check under the bed for her shoes. “So, Wednesday?”
This was a game they played sometimes. One where she pretended this was the last time. Where she pretended she could say no.
But she was tired. The day had been unbearably long. And it was four in the morning. “Thursday,” she countered.
“’Kay,” he said, and pursed his lips as if blowing her a kiss before collapsing back into the blankets.
She slipped her purse onto her shoulder and pushed into the crisp early-morning air, letting the door close behind her without looking back.
It was that in-between time when it wasn’t quite night but wasn’t day yet, either. Charlotte liked it best, liked the uncertainty of it. The feeling that maybe the sun wouldn’t rise, that maybe the night wouldn’t ever end. If only she could live here in this hour, maybe she wouldn’t feel like she was being held together by shoddy glue and a defiant streak that just wouldn’t let them win.
A few cars passed on the mostly empty four-lane highway that cut through South St. Petersburg, and she ducked so her hair covered her face each time the beams caught her peripheral vision. She didn’t think she’d be recognized. Not here. Not now. But it didn’t hurt to be careful.
She started walking. The motel was snugged in between greasy fast-food joints that were just waking up for the morning crowd. Fat and oil hung heavy in their parking lots and crawled into her nostrils, coating the delicate hairs there.
Just three more blocks. Then she could take a cab. Three more blocks of desperation in the form of cheap gas stations and cheaper motels and storefronts that had long ago given up the ghost of caring.
The first catcall was almost a comfort. There were so many different types of monsters in this world, and sometimes being surrounded by the tame ones made her feel safe. The “Smile prettys” and “Hey, beautifuls” became almost harmless compared to the other shadows that crept up, quiet and fatal, a whisper of steel slipped beneath ribs in the dark of the night.
“Shake that beautiful ass for us, girl,” one man shouted from a cocoon of blankets and cardboard on the street.
She ignored him and checked the intersection. It was far enough from the hotel; she hailed a taxi.
By the time she had the cab drop her off ten minutes away from where he’d picked her up, the sky was hinting at the coming sun. Charlotte was cutting it close. The judge was up not a second later than 5:30 every morning. There had been only two occasions in his life when he’d overslept. The first had been the day after Ronald Reagan had won the presidency. The second had been when Charlotte’s older sister, Mellie, had run off with her high school sweetheart, leaving a note that she was four months pregnant and headed to Vegas to get hitched. The boyfriend had dumped her before they’d even made it to the altar.
So Charlotte decided not to risk walking to another location before getting her second cab. It was a slip in her normally regimented procedure that she would have to live with and hope she wouldn’t pay for later. She was lucky; one pulled to the curb only minutes after she’d made the decision.
The house wasn’t far. Charlotte touched fingers to the pulse that was wild beneath the nearly translucent skin of her wrist, and she counted. She counted to ten, and then she counted to twenty and then thirty as the run-down one-story homes with overgrown lawns and broken-down cars in driveways faded into a middle-class shabbiness that at least was coated with a thin layer of paint.
In another life, she could see herself living in one of those houses. Ruby and her. She liked St. Petersburg, for all its quirks, not that she’d ever known anything else. But the people, the real ones, the ones who lived in these houses, not the ones who looked for creative ways to stab each other in the back, were nice. Carefree and simple in a way that came from living on the beach. They hung wind chimes made of spoons and beads on their porches and wore cheap plastic flip-flops when they went to restaurants.
Maybe in that life she’d work as a middle manager at some large office building and save up for the taxi rides they’d have to take to the ocean. Ruby would beg for toys and ice cream once there, and Charlotte would have to make her choose which she wanted more. Maybe they’d be happy. In that life.
She had the cab stop four blocks away from the house, then checked her phone: 5:05. Close but doable.
It wasn’t until she was on the steps leading up to the porch that she realized she wasn’t alone.
“Sinning on a Sunday.” The quiet, mocking voice slapped at Charlotte just as her foot hit the wood. “Out early praying, were you, dear Auntie?”
Trudy. Charlotte should have known, though she could barely keep track of the girl’s whereabouts these days. Charlotte sometimes wondered what had happened to her sweet little niece, the one who would hunt seashells and build secret forts and lie in meadows of flowers with Charlotte and tell knock-knock jokes that made no sense. Gone was that round-faced eight-year-old, and in her place was a bratty, moody eighteen-year-old little shit who did things like wait on the porch to catch her aunt coming home.
“Or were you on your knees for another reason?” Trudy continued while Charlotte just stared at her.
Charlotte finally snapped out of it, not sure if the rush of heat to her cheeks was rage or humiliation. “Watch your mouth.”
“You’re right, I shouldn’t be so disrespectful to my elders,” Trudy said, touching her toes to the porch, enough to push the swing into a lazy arc. The chains protested, a g
rating squeak that rubbed already-frayed nerve endings raw. Trudy smirked. “Perhaps you should tell the judge all about it.”
Charlotte took a step closer, her fingers itching to slap that mouth.
“Or maybe you could explain where you were two hours ago when Ruby woke up crying for her mama.”
It was the death blow, and Trudy knew it had landed.
All Charlotte’s anger collapsed on itself, melting down into self-loathing and fear and hate. “Is she . . .”
“I got her back to sleep.” Trudy’s voice softened for the first time. If nothing else, she loved Ruby.
Charlotte nodded once. It would have to be thanks enough.
“Oh, and Charlie dear,” Trudy called out just as Charlotte’s hand closed around the door. “Do be sure to change out of that dress. There’s a stain on it that I don’t think can pass as holy water.”
Charlotte bit her lip until she tasted copper.
She was going to ignore the taunt, ignore Trudy. She was tired and emotionally strung out from a day that had pressed on all her bruises, and she had zero energy left to spar with her niece.
“Why are you like this?” Charlotte whispered, not even caring if the girl heard her. Because she knew. She knew why Trudy lashed out at her, why she used those razor-sharp claws to tear into the deepest of Charlotte’s wounds. It was funny how two people in the same circumstance could cope in such different ways.
Charlotte’s hatred had turned inward, sometimes to the point that it was paralyzing. Always to the point that it was destructive.
Trudy’s had washed outward in waves, crashing over everyone, without mercy.
It had been a long time since Charlotte had even tried to get through to her. She didn’t know why she was waiting now for an answer that wouldn’t come. Charlotte turned the handle of the door.
That’s when Trudy spoke.
“Wait,” the girl said, a soft, plaintive plea, her voice stripped of the venom it had been drenched in only moments earlier. She sounded so young all of a sudden. “I need your help.”
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