Come With Me

by Ronald Malfi

  “I’m just saying it was weird,” said Bobbi. “I wanted to know the score, so I took her out to lunch again. She played it off like it was some terrible coincidence—that this runaway story she’d been interested in had now turned into a murder investigation. A believable enough story, sure. Yet my Spidey sense started tingling at that point, you know? Journalistic intuition.”

  “What’d you guys talk about over lunch?”

  “The murder. Your wife had a list of people she wanted to interview—Gabby’s friends and family, the police. She asked me about the boys who found the body.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  This was when she told me the story of the two boys who discovered Gabrielle’s body beneath the Nice Bridge, not leaving out any of the gory details.

  “Your wife took notes and asked some questions. I remember thinking, man, this chick knows an awful lot about murders for someone supposedly doing an exposé on teen runaways. I mean, she had that list of potential interviewees already prepared. It’s one of the reasons I checked out her background after she’d left.”

  “How was she killed? The newspaper articles don’t say.”

  “Yeah, well, the police, they had to wait for a coroner’s report. They don’t like to speculate to the media and an autopsy takes time. How squeamish are you?” She began to dig through her backpack.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ve got a contact in the coroner’s office,” she said. “One of the reasons the local cops hate me.”

  What she laid down on the table between us were several eight-by-ten glossies, full color. I was staring down at them before I could stop myself—before my brain could even register what I was looking at in that top photo. I turned it around so it was right-side up, and felt my breath catch in my throat.

  “Jesus Christ,” I uttered.

  “You said you weren’t squeamish.”

  “I didn’t actually say that,” I corrected.

  I was unable to pull my eyes from the photograph of Gabrielle Colson-Howe’s mangled body. And that’s exactly how it looked—mangled. As if a great pair of hands had grasped her and twisted her, knocking all her limbs out of joint, and leaving behind discolored bruises along her exposed flesh.

  They were crime-scene photos. There she was, half-sunk into brown marsh water beneath the stanchions of the bridge, a pale, crooked arm, a shoeless foot stripped of its digits, the gleam of a gold ankle bracelet. I turned to the next photo and saw a dime-sized hole in the corpse’s abdomen. I asked what it was and Bobbi reminded me about how one of the boys had admitted to poking the body with a stick. Another photo, and there was the girl’s face, turned unnaturally on her neck so that the right side of her face lay submerged in brown water. Her left eye blazed out—or, rather, an eye socket filled with a bulb of whitish jelly—and I could see the mud that had hardened in the creases around her nose and mouth and at the corner of that single horrific eye socket.

  “She was strangled and dumped in the river,” Bobbi said, shuffling through the photos herself now. She came to one that showed the girl’s shirt twisted around her neck. “See the shirt hiked up like that? Most likely it happened in the river, the current tugging it up out of place like that, because she wasn’t strangled with it. The son of a bitch who did this, he used his hands. There were indentations made by the killer’s fingers along her neck. I’ve got some clearer photos from the coroner’s office that show the bruising on the neck, if you want to see ’em.”

  “No, thanks.”

  Our waiter arrived with our food. He was a middle-aged guy with a few days’ stubble on his chin and a look of bleary disinterest in his eyes. He glanced at the photos spread across the table then met my gaze as if I were the responsible party for what had befallen the girl in the photographs. His disinterest turned to disgust as he set our food down on the table—a crab cake for Bobbi, a club sandwich for me, and two steaming mugs of coffee. At the sight of the food, my stomach executed a somersault.

  “Sorry,” I said to the waiter, and turned the stack of photos upside down.

  Bobbi did not seem to notice; she slid her plate in front of her and unspooled her utensils from their napkin sleeve, eager to dig in.

  “What about any suspects,” I said after the waiter had gone. “It’s been three years. No leads?”

  “Like I said, the police are pretty tight-lipped when it comes to open cases. I know they questioned some Aqualand folks at the time, brought ’em in. Grist for the mill. Someone from there seemed the most likely suspect, according to police.”

  “What’s Aqualand?”

  “A little community of double-wides near the foot of the bridge. There’s a lot of drug problems out there, a lot of domestic violence. Same with the Port Tobacco RV rec area. There’s some Section Eight housing nearby, too. What I’m saying is there are countless potential leads every which way you turn your head in just a ten-mile radius. My guess? I think she was attacked and killed right there in Port Tobacco and then dumped in the river somewhere up that way. Keep it simple, right?”

  “Then how’d she wind up under the bridge?”

  “There’s a fairly large spring in Port Tobacco, connected to the Potomac by a series of creeks. Her body could have been dumped in the spring and traveled along one of the channels out to the river, where it ultimately washed up beneath the bridge. There are also some pretty large drainage tunnels that go underground. The footing on the Maryland side of the Nice Bridge has a habit of collecting whatever floats by, whether through the drainage system or the river itself. The bridge gets jumpers from time to time, too, and the bodies wash up along the shore. They’re generally a mess, like they’ve been hit by a truck or something, the bodies. I’ve seen my share of floaters. You know, some years ago, the carcass of a fully grown hammerhead shark washed up there. Can you imagine? DNR came and collected it with a winch hooked to the back of a pickup truck. I’ve got pictures.”

  “What about you?” I asked. “Did you ever have a suspect in mind?”

  “A suspect? You mean like a specific individual? No. But cases like these, it’s usually someone the victim knows. A crime of passion. A crazy boyfriend. Something like that.”

  “Did she have a boyfriend?”

  “Lord. Only about a half-dozen,” Bobbi said, rooting around in her bag again. “Not to sound shitty, but Gabby wasn’t exactly a Girl Scout, if you know what I’m saying.”

  She produced another photo from her bag and handed it to me. I was relieved to see that this one was what appeared to be a school photo of Gabrielle Colson-Howe, not another crime-scene photo. It was the same photograph used in the missing poster you had in your notes and alongside some of the newspaper articles, only those had been black-and-white reproductions and of poor quality that did not truly highlight the intricate details of the girl’s face. This photo, however, was crisp and full color. The girl had delicate, pixie-like features, a cascade of blonde hair, a coyness behind her bright green eyes. Much like you, there was a depth to this girl, a secret chamber that I recognized hidden far within her.

  “She’s pretty, isn’t she?” said Bobbi.

  “She is.”

  “Anyway, Gabrielle and her friends bought pot from some guy at the RV park on occasion,” Bobbi went on. “I’ve done stories on the drug culture out here, particularly among high-school kids. I mean, I’m not condemning them—hell, I’ve got a guy, too, right?—but it doesn’t make for a clean case, far as the police and their leads go. The night Gabby went missing, her friends were partying on the beach. Not down where her body was found, but farther up the creek. The spring in Port Tobacco closes after dark, but kids go there to do whatever kids do. They’d stolen a bunch of beer and cigarettes from a convenience store. There were one or two guys there that night who’d been, you know, involved with her. According to her mother, Gabby had been sexually active since she was twelve.”

  “Twelve? Jesus Christ. That seems impossible.”

  Bobbi laughed, patted the top
of my hand. “You’re cute.”

  With palpable reluctance, our waiter returned to refill our coffees. I thanked him, but he didn’t respond. His eyes suggested he was still disgusted by me, and he was quick to depart without uttering a word. I took a long pull of my coffee, and said, “So I guess these boyfriends were all interviewed by police?”

  “Of course. But, see, I don’t think it was some kid from town she was hooking up with. I think it was most likely someone else she was involved with that no one knew about. Not even her friends. A secret lover or somebody like that.”

  “She wouldn’t have told her friends about some guy she was seeing?”

  “Not if it was weird,” she said around a mouthful of crab cake.

  “What’s weird?”

  “Like, if it was some older dude. Some guy she might not want her friends to know about for whatever reason. Or maybe the guy was married. I mean, who really knows? It’s just a hunch. But something like this… like I said, it’s a crime of passion, man. You gotta really wanna fucking kill somebody to choke ’em out like that. I mean, do you have any concept of what it takes to strangle someone to death? You really gotta work at it. It’s much more intimate than shooting someone or even stabbing them. And it takes time. No one ever thinks of it like that, but it’s true. It’s probably the most intimate thing in the world. Even more than rape.”

  “Was she…?” I let my voice trail off.

  “Raped? No, she wasn’t. The current of the river stripped half her clothes off but the coroner found no evidence of sexual assault. My source at the coroner’s office said the only clear indication of physical trauma was around her neck. Remember what I said about the distinct bruising around her neck where you could make out the individual impressions of fingers? That was it. Did I mention I got the photos from the morgue, too, if you wanna see ’em.”

  “That’s all right,” I said.

  Bobbi flipped over the crime-scene photos so that they were face-up again and spread them across the table with one hand. “Here. See? See this?”

  It was a close-up of a section of the girl’s neck, where the shirt had been pulled aside. There were speckles of mud on her pale flesh and a solitary band of seaweed tangled in her hair. Purple bruises in the distinct shapes of fingers were clearly visible against the colorless skin of the girl’s neck.

  “To hold someone down like that and strangle the life out of them,” Bobbi said. “Man, that takes something.”

  “Don’t they usually scrape underneath the fingernails for bits of skin? DNA or whatever? You see it in the movies.”

  “Of course,” Bobbi said. “There was nothing. Nada.”

  Shaking my head, I leaned back in my seat. The coffee was good but it wasn’t sitting well. “You keep referring to her as ‘Gabby.’ Did you know her personally?”

  “No, I didn’t. Not back in 2016, anyway. But since then, she’s never really left my mind. I guess I got to know her post-mortem.” She frowned, a glob of tartar sauce tucked into one corner of her mouth. “Boy, that sounds morbid.”

  “I noticed you’d written some more recent articles about her,” I said.

  “Just trying to keep her top-of-mind. Look, the cops may never bring anyone to justice in this case, but that doesn’t mean this poor kid should be forgotten.”

  “That’s exactly what my wife would have said. And it’s why I came here to talk to you.” I opened the accordion, took out the individual files, and fanned them out like playing cards across the table, placing them atop the photos of the girl. “Like I said, Gabby’s wasn’t the only murder my wife had been investigating.”

  Bobbi peered down at the files. A forkful of crab cake halted midway to her mouth.

  “There’s six in total, including Gabby’s. To date, and as far as I know, only one of them has been solved—the murder of a seventeen-year-old girl from West Virginia named Holly Renfrow. I was already out there and spoke to the chief of police. Renfrow was killed when some local degenerate tied her hands behind her back and threw her in a river to drown. The guy overdosed on heroin back in January. The murder took place last fall.”

  “I knew I liked your wife,” Bobbi said.

  “At first, I thought Allison might have made a connection between all these murders, and that the guy who’d killed Holly Renfrow had killed all the others. But that’s not the case. That guy had been in prison for over a decade, so he couldn’t have killed any of these other girls. So then I started wondering if Allison’s motivation might be the same as what you’re doing with Gabby—to keep the memories of these girls alive, or maybe even to give them a voice and tell their story. To keep them from being forgotten. Only that can’t be it, either.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because she’d kept this stuff hidden for years. What voice has she given to Margot Idelson, killed back in 2006? Or Shelby Davenport, murdered in 2008? Those murders happened over a decade ago. If she’d wanted to keep these girls in the public consciousness, just as you’ve done for Gabby, she wouldn’t have kept their stories locked up in a trunk in our bedroom closet.”

  “And you came here to see me because you thought I’d have an answer for you? For why your wife had been investigating these murders?”

  “I came here because I don’t know what the hell I’m looking at here. And this stuff was important enough to my wife that she’d devoted herself to it, so I want to make sure whatever she was looking for doesn’t get overlooked.”

  Bobbi slowly moved her head up and down. Her gaze, clinging to me, was intense.

  I produced the sheet of legal paper from between two of the files. I pointed at the six columns you had meticulously drawn on the page, then pointed to one of the Gas Head phrases that surrounded the drawing.

  “Does this phrase mean anything to you? ‘Gas Head will make you dead.’”

  “Never heard it before in my life.”

  “What about this weird diagram thing? These six rectangles?”

  Bobbi shook her head.

  I opened the Colson-Howe file, flipped to the printout of the newspaper article where the same drawing had been sketched beside Bobbi’s byline. Said, “See? It’s here, too. Right by your name.”

  “I see that,” she said, “but it still doesn’t mean anything to me. I’m sorry.” She paused. “Except…”

  “What?”

  “Six rectangles,” she said. “Six murders? Maybe there’s a correlation there.”

  “Like what?”

  “I really can’t say, Aaron. It’s just a guess. I don’t know.”

  “Could you look at this stuff for me? Go through it, see if it means anything more to you than it does to me? Maybe make sense of something I’ve overlooked?”

  She reached down and flipped through a few pages of the Colson-Howe file. “I don’t know what I could possibly make of all this stuff.”

  “Please,” I said. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I translate books for a living, I’m not a reporter. My wife was the reporter. Just like you.”

  She met my eyes. Since your death, Allison, I have grown to hate the look of pity on someone’s face when they realize what has happened to you and, by proxy, what has happened to me. The look Bobbi Negri gave me in that moment was no different, yet this time I did not shy away from it, did not become embarrassed or angered or ruined by it. This time—and to speak frankly, Allison—I willed myself to look as pitiful as possible.

  Bobbi set her fork down. She studied her wristwatch.

  “I live less than a mile from here,” she said, collecting her crime-scene photos and tucking them inside her backpack. “You grab the check and meet me outside. You can follow me back to my house.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  She gathered her backpack, popped a final bit of crab cake in her mouth, then slipped out of the restaurant. A moment later, the waiter arrived as I was wedging your files back into the accordion folder. He set the bill down on the table, and I could feel his gaze on me, intense as a laser bea
m.

  “Sorry about those photos,” I said, digging out my wallet.

  “Show some respect next time,” he said. “I knew that girl.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and left him a considerable tip.

  4

  Bobbi Negri lived in a bungalow-style stone house buried among a sprawl of shaggy firs. The river was not visible from her property but the briny scent of it hung in the air like a garland. A collection of wooden birdhouses populated her lawn, and there was a Jackson Pollock smattering of bird shit on the flagstone walkway that led toward the ivy-trellised front door.

  The interior of the house was dark and musty, a conglomeration of food smells clinging to the walls. Although I could see no cats, litter boxes were stationed in all four corners of the cramped foyer, strategic as the placement of roadside bombs.

  A dowdy, middle-aged woman appeared at the opposite end of the hallway. She had a hefty hardcover book tucked under one arm. “You’re home early today, Bobbi.”

  “The unpredictable life of a small-town reporter.” Bobbi repositioned her backpack and pulled off her windbreaker, which she draped over the handle of an umbrella poking from a ceramic umbrella stand. “How was she today?”

  “In and out. She’s refusing to turn on the lights again.”

  Bobbi sighed. “Thanks, Dory. You can head on home.”

  The woman repositioned the hefty tome under her other arm, grabbed a purse that looked equally heavy, and zippered up her fleece pullover. She eyed me somewhat suspiciously as she moved past me in the hall.

  “See you tomorrow, Bobbi,” she said, then squeezed out the door and clomped down the stairs.

  “Dory’s my ma’s caretaker,” Bobbi said as I followed her down the hall.

  “Is your mom okay?”

  “Alzheimer’s. It comes and goes.”

  “That’s too bad. I’m sorry to hear it.”

  “It’s getting to the point where I’m going to have to put her in a home.”