by SLMN
Govindethi sada snanam Govindethi sada japam, Govindethi sada dhyanam, sada Govinda keerthanam
“Carla? I’m sure we don’t need to use threats.”
The voice was American; husky and yet kind. Bimala looked to the veranda. There were three men standing there now. She’d been so intent on the ritual and the memory of the Ghost Lake, that she hadn’t noticed the men come from within the chalet.
Two of the men were in black suits, with white shirts beneath and sporting black ties. Both were wearing wraparound sunglasses and had curly transparent wires coming from their ears. The wires disappeared into their jackets. They were looking everywhere except at Bimala. They surveyed the compound, heads swinging like RADAR dishes. Constantly scanning.
The third man was in a shadow, but she could make out that he was tall and broad. An expensive blue suit fitted him perfectly. A green tie hung down the front of his pink shirt. He was made of color. He reached out a hand towards Bimala.
Bimala’s feet didn’t move.
Govindethi sada snanam Govindethi sada japam, Govindethi sada dhyanam, sada Govinda keerthanam
Carla nudged Bimala forward, “Go on, Bimmy. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“Quite so, Carla,” said the man. “Come Bimmy, let’s go now.”
Bimala took the offered hand. It was warm, soft, and transmitted nothing of the threat she was feeling.
“If there’s anything else I can get you…?”
The man gently guided Bimala onto the veranda and took her towards the door. “No thank you, Carla. You have already exceeded all my expectations with Bimmy here. So I’ll wish you a good night.”
As the chalet swallowed them up, Bimala dove into the Ghost Lake. Its cool waters rushed over her mind’s skin, filling her hollows with its fresh purity, washing the fear from her body to leave it empty of thought and terror. The last thing she heard before the door closed was Carla replying, “And a good night to you, Mr. President.”
10
“Okay, Bryan, what have you got?”
Passion was back at the hotel. She’d showered, taken four hours to sleep, but no more, and although didn’t feel fully refreshed, the sense that she’d rubbed off some of her exhaustion that morning was a welcome one.
“My God. Teenage girls. We should create a virus and have them all eradicated.”
“You don’t have children do you, Bryan?”
“Not if I can help it, no.”
“I haven’t had time to go through all of the logs and messages. What have you got?” Passion could feel the antsy-ness from lack of sleep rolling back into her speech—coupled with the fact that sometimes Bryan was an infuriating asshole. It was an unfortunate combination.
“Jake doesn’t exist. Well, not in the way Alaina thought he existed. He reached out to her Instagram account and the rest, as they say, was grooming. He was very good.”
“Doesn’t exist?”
“Nope. There’s no one called Jake Whymark in Dallas of that age who matches. No father who matches. The pictures on his profile, seem to have been lifted from this account: a Mark Sendon.”
The screen of the Samsung tablet flicked from the Jake Whymark account to that of Mark Sendon. The pictures were the same, but not in the same order, and the lead post was a pronouncement from Mark’s parents that although he was dead, he would be forever in their hearts, and they were leaving the page up as a tribute to their forever loved son, Mark. The rest of the profile had been lifted wholesale to create Jake.
“Mark was killed last year in Atlanta. Good kid by all accounts, bright future. Stumbled onto the wrong side of a gas station hold up and got himself shot. Whoever has been grooming Lainey—or Pippa Graves as she was known on her secret profile—was very good. I mean, really good. Professional. Definitely not nineteen, and definitely not Mark Sendon.”
Pippa Graves’ profile replaced Jake’s.
Lainey in all her Goth Glory as “Pippa.”
“How much Goth is the surname Graves? I’m almost impressed.”
Passion shook her head, but didn’t answer Bryan. She flicked through the Pippa profile. It couldn’t have been more different from the Aliana profile—the transformation from blond-haired 18-year-old cheerleader to Goth ingénue, partying and excessing her way through a series of selfies and shots from her Goth friends. The clubs looked dark and sweaty. Lainey’s eyes looked strung out and her clothes left little to the imagination.
There was rebelling against your parents, and there was a full-on civil war. The fact Lainey had pulled on the shield of Pippa’s maturity disguised the bald fact that Lainey was still naïve and vulnerable. Jake—or whoever he was—would have seen that in a heartbeat and seized on it. To groom in this way, you have to have an ability to spot the weak and those open to having that weakness exploited. Was this same method this guy had used on the other girls the Agency had failed to find? Those girls who had slipped through Passion’s grasp?
Was Passion now closer to this man?
“Is it possible the girls we’ve not found before were groomed by the same man and in the same way?”
“It’s possible. Without knowledge of their fake profiles and logs it would be difficult to say for sure. We were lucky here that Gary Malcolm cloned Lainey’s phone. Without that we wouldn’t have known any of this.”
Passion was skimming the chat logs between “Pippa” and “Jake”: two people who weren’t who they said they were, talking as if they had been lovers for eternity.
Passion scrolled and scrolled the streams of text.
“Jake doesn’t know who she really is.”
Passion’s speakerphone made a snort. “I was wondering how long it would take you to notice.”
“I’ve had four hours sleep in nearly three days, Bryan. Give me a break.”
“But yes, correct. He doesn’t know—well certainly none of the logs would indicate it. Her Instagram account as “Pippa” was public, he could have found it by random and played her along until he was ready to take her.”
“I don’t think we’re dealing with a serial killer here. I think there’s something more to this.”
“Well it’s clearly not random. Other than the one body, a suicide in the Philippines we have no other bodies. What’s happening to the girls, I have no idea. But unless he’s very very good at disposing of corpses, I think we can only assume the girls are still alive.”
“That doesn’t bear thinking about.”
“Indeed. I’ve never been able to watch Silence of the Lambs a second time. Or think about body lotion.”
“Bryan!”
“Yes, well. We’re working on out finding anything we can about Fake-Jake. “Pippa” never called Jake when they spoke on the phone. He always called her at a pre-arranged time and his number was withheld. He said it was because his father was heavily into family security. How ironic.”
“Okay, let me know when you find anything.”
“We have a record of Pippa receiving a call from a withheld number the night before she disappeared, and that was the last dump of info that was sent from the cloned phone to Gary. So that’s where the trail ends. When she walked out of the compound, we don’t even know if she was met at the gates or went on down the road a ways before meeting up with Fake-Jake. Sven did his job all too well with the CCTV. He didn’t even review it before he wiped it.”
“So the trail is cold?”
“Not quite.”
“Oh.”
“Pippa’s phone was turned on after many hours and dumped a fresh set info to the clone app. No messages were sent, no chat logs, no new pictures. If someone had the technical knowhow to check to see if a phone had been cloned then…”
“They would know, possibly, that the cops or someone like us may have all the information we need to find them.”
“Yes.”
“And that might make them careless?”
The speakerphone made the noise again.
Passion didn’t realize how carel
ess Fake-Jake would be until she heard about Glen Malcolm’s suicide on the car radio as she drove away from the hotel.
His body had been found hanging from a beam in the underground car park of a yet-to-be-opened shopping mall. He’d written a suicide note confession to the abduction, rape, and murder of Alaina Ralston. He said he’d dumped her body in the river, and that he was sorry, and that he was taking his own life because he didn’t deserve to live.
The media expected a statement from the Ralston’s in the next hour, as the feeding frenzy was growing.
Passion made two calls. One to Bryan, and then one to Stephen Crane.
“And in an amazing twist, reports are reaching us that Gary Malcolm, school friend of missing Alaina Ralston—the 18-year-old daughter of prospective Texas Senator Huey Ralston—has confessed to the abduction and murder of the girl in a suicide note. The note, which the Police have yet to confirm, is an accurate account of the death of Alaina Ralston. They say his body was discovered by security at the site of the new Mall of America site in Fleetway Village this morning. Police report that there will be an autopsy carried out to ascertain the cause of death, but are not releasing any further details at this time. A spokesman from Mr. Ralston’s office say that the prospective Senator will be making a statement in the next few hours.”
Jake-Not-Jake laughed as Dragons turned off the radio.
Lainey had been taken out of the trunk of the car again, especially to hear the news report. The Buick was parked in a huge, empty metal-framed building that was open at one end before the bright Texan sky. There was a vast expanse of concrete outside the building, and Lainey could hear jets taking off and landing somewhere out of sight.
She was in an aircraft hangar.
When they’d opened the truck, Lainey was stiff with cramps, as her hands and feet were almost blue from the cut off circulation caused by being bound. The first thing she told them was that she needed a pee. Jake-Not-Jake rolled his eyes, and Dragons cut the tape around her legs. It still clung to her fishnet stocks and flapped against her ankles as she walked.
Jake-Not-Jake led Lainey to the end of the hangar, where there was a small office, a tool shed, and a small rest area for the ground crew to do one’s business when on shift. Jake-Not-Jake took her into the stall, but did not untie her hands. Lainey looked at him.
“Do you want me to pee through my underwear?”
“Where you’re going, doll, that’s exactly what some of the sick fucks will want you to do. But, hey I want to deliver you in prime condition, so let’s cut the chances of diaper rash, huh?”
The garlic stink of his breath was in her face as he leaned in. As she had expected, instead of Jake-Not-Jake releasing her arms, he hugged her close, pushing his chest against hers. She felt the stubble of his cheek against her temple, saw the light dancing off his earring. He was hot and humid with sweat, and as he pulled her in tighter, she could feel a hard lump in his pants against her thigh.
“Gotta admit you got me hot, Pippa. All those texts all those promises of what you were going to do with me in the Sheraton. Are you really a virgin, I wonder? Really? Shall I check?”
With rising panic, Lainey felt his rough hand moving down her belly toward her groin.
“Please…please…don’t” she pleaded. “I don’t know what’s happening with all this, but I won’t cause you any trouble I promise. I’m scared. I can’t…I don’t…please…”
Jake-Not-Jake’s hand stopped, then in one quick movement flipped under her skirt, slid a thumb through the top of her underwear and yanked it down to her knees, burning her thigh in the process.
“It’s okay, kid. Only playing with you. Rosa’s gonna want your virginity intact. That’s an ultra-sellable commodity right there.”
The words chilled Lainey, almost as much as watching Gary slowly strangling as he dangled from the rope.
Commodity?
The idea sucked her insides so hard she honestly felt that she would never pee again. Jake-Not-Jake removed his hot hand from her cold thigh and pushed her back onto the toilet. His toe caught onto the flapping duct tape on her ankle, and it ripped away from the fishnet-covered skin painfully.
“Oww!”
“A low pain threshold, huh?” Jake-not-Jake laughed, as he flicked the tape off the sole of his boot. “Some guys pay extra for that too.”
Lainey looked up at Jake-Not-Jake with terrified eyes. He blew her a kiss. “You’ve got thirty seconds. After that, you’re gonna be pissing yourself in the trunk, and we’ll just hose you down before we put you on the plane.”
“Plane?” Lainey said, trying to keep the tremor in her voice under control.
Jake-Not-Jake looked at the watch on his wrist. “Yeah, it’s about an hour before wheels down. Just enough time to see what waves we’ve caused in the surface of the pond. Now, pee!”
Back at the Buick, Dragons re-taped Lainey’s ankles, just as tightly as before, but let her lean against the car instead of folding her back up into the trunk.
Mustache fed her some mineral water from a bottle he’d been drinking from without wiping the top first. Lainey didn’t care. Her mouth was dry and her thirst was raging in the heat of the hangar. She had peed long and hard in the restroom and now she was feeling even more dehydrated.
The news report shocked her down to her guts.
The world and her parents would think she was dead. Did that mean the police would stop looking for her? And did it matter if they did? They were here waiting on a plane to land in the next hour that she assumed was going to take her far away from her family, friends, and her city.
It was going to take her to a place where her virginity and pain threshold were a sellable commodity. She had no idea what that might entail as a reality, but she knew it wasn’t going to be pleasant.
Jake-Not-Jake clapped his hands, bringing Lainey out of the terrible things she was imagining about her immediate and long-term future.
The white nosecone of a small private jet—a Gulfstream, like the one her father owned—was rolling into the view at the open end of the hangar.
Jake-Not-Jake was applauding. “That’s my girl. Right. On. Time.”
11
The Ralston residence was full of screams.
Huey sat at the wide expanse of his desk, his hand on the green leather top, surrounded on all sides by the red leather spines of books he’d never read.
Detective Myer spoke his piece, and Huey listened with a rising tide of chilly shock climbing from his belly—washing up over his head, cooling his thoughts, locking them in ice. Myer was Crane’s connection to the Houston PD. Crane told Huey that he’d had many dealings with the young detective through his perfectly calculated connections with the Houston Police Benevolent Fund, which Myer’s father—a grizzly ex-detective, who’d passed his tenacity onto his son—was still the patron. Robert Myer Jr. conveyed the lie of incorruptible freshness of a man who wanted people to think he was doing God’s work. And as he told Huey and Brenda the news of the suicide of Gary Malcolm and what the boy had written in the note, he’d offered to kneel and pray with the family in their hour of greatest need.
The only time Huey knelt was to worship at the temple of the Pussy. So he had politely declined, saying that he and his wife needed some time to process the information that their beloved daughter might be dead; heinously murdered by stalker scum.
Brenda collapsed into a hysterical fit on the carpet in front of Huey and Myer. She beat at the carpet, screamed for her baby and kicked her legs like a toddler having a tantrum. Huey and Myer stood by, both unsure how to handle the situation. In the end, Huey called on Marcella the housekeeper to help Brenda up to her room and to call the Doctor immediately.
Marcella hadn’t been able to get Brenda to stand, and so Huey had to intervene and help as Myer stood back, his face a mask of cool evangelical compassion.
As Huey helped the plump, middle-aged Marcella—who he knew Brenda had engaged precisely for those attributes—to put him o
ff fucking her, he realized that this was the first time he’d laid hands on his wife, other than to punch her in the gut in the last two years.
Brenda didn’t stop screaming as she was brought to her feet and hung her arms around the plump and unattractive housekeeper. She continued screaming as she was led from the office. Huey and Myer heard her screaming all the way up the stairs to the master bedroom. Even with the door shut, and the office door closed, there was still a background scream underpinning everything.
It was like being irreversibly trapped inside an Edvard Munch painting.
Myer told Huey that everything would be done, God willing, to find Lainey alive or to bring her back to her home. “It’ll be Houston PD’s number one responsibility sir. No question.”
After that, Myer had left, giving Huey the first opportunity since he’d been told the news of Malcolm’s note to address the elephant in the room. Although he was shocked, saddened, and angry that the life of his daughter could have been taken so egregiously, there was also the Political Math to consider.
Huey checked himself at that, surprised that political ramifications and the political advantages of a dead daughter, could be in his thoughts.
A succession of future images tumbled through his mind. A press conference. Stoic and statesman-like. Perhaps a tear. I’m sorry but I’m sure you understand why my wife isn’t here right now. An interview for the Post, no…60 Minutes. A sofa sit down with Fox. The funeral, high summer and high drama. A flag-draped coffin, a sea of mourners all in black; women in veils. Brenda stumbling on his arm. Huey holding her up. Did the Marines offer gun salutes for the children of politicians? He made a note to ask Crane how they would get that done. And then the election in the fall. Of course I’m not pulling out. I owe it to the people of Texas to stand for them. To stand with them against the tide of crimes sweeping up from the South. I have been touched by the same tragedy as you, my friend. I feel your pain. I know your hearts. You wouldn’t want my personal grief to rob you of my support in Washington, would you? Thank you. Thank you. I accept the nomination. Thank you! Thank you! I will work for all Texans! Even those who did not vote for me. I will be a Senator for all! Huey’s ears were full of cheering. His eyes full of people. Balloons falling from the ceiling of the office. The fireworks in the fireplace! The music! The book deal…the Presidency…