by Jenna Kernan
“The initials you carved on the women. That was for ‘homewreckers.’ Right?”
Her mother’s lopsided grin showed appreciation. She met Nadine’s gaze and inclined her chin. Then said, “I ain’t sayin’.”
Nadine changed tack. “You ever hear from anyone in the family?” she asked.
“What d’you mean, ‘the family’?”
“Uncle Tinsel?”
Arleen laughed, a cackling dry thing. “I forgot you called him that. He had that tooth fixed, you know?”
“You’ve seen him?”
She broke eye contact. “Naw. He wrote for a while. Honestly, I ain’t heard from him in, oh, some time.”
Her smile and the emphasis indicated otherwise.
“Does he visit?”
“‘Visit’? Nope.”
“Call?”
She smiled and shook her head. “If he does call, I can ask him to look you up,” said Arleen. “Just give me your number.”
Nadine wasn’t doing that.
“He can call me here.” Nadine pushed a piece of paper across the table. Arleen didn’t take it.
“Not a Florida area code, Dee-Dee. This is up north somewhere.” She glanced at the agents standing still against the wall and smiled at Torrin. “Like Washington, maybe?” She pushed it back. “I ain’t giving him this.”
Nadine took the paper and tucked it away.
Arleen was playing them all.
They stared at each other in silence, opponents once more.
Special Agent Torrin had asked her to use only the questions prepared by the FBI. She fell back to them now.
“I want to ask you about the other man you mentioned to me. The one who owed you money?”
Her mother fumed, her face turning scarlet in an instant. The veins on her neck and forehead bulged and pulsed. Arleen leveled her gaze on Nadine, aiming it like a loaded shotgun.
“You know, Dee-Dee, I always figured you for a smart girl. You got those letters after your name, and all. So, what I’m wondering is, if you’re so damn smart, why are you acting as a tool for these gorillas?”
“I’m not a tool. I’m trying to solve a multiple-homicide investigation so I can help you. See you more. Get you more money.”
“Ha! This ain’t your job, is it? Your job is to figure out if I’m crazy or not. Wading in with the gators to find dead bodies? That’s theirs.” She twisted her wrist, aiming a thumb at Torrin and making her shackles clank.
“I’m trying to do what’s right.”
“Because you feel guilty. And you ain’t even done nothing.” Arleen sneered, her expression full of scorn. “Guilt is the real enemy. It’ll trip you up. You can’t go back and change the past or who you are, Dee-Dee.”
Nadine dropped her eyes as the truth of that struck like buckshot.
“It’s your job to survive out there. Get what you need because you can’t trust men.” She lifted a finger at Torrin, rattling her shackles. “They only want to boss us, blame us for shit that ain’t our doing, get in our pants and move on. To survive, you gotta be tougher than they are. Smarter too.”
Nadine met her mother’s cold stare.
“And you are, Dee-Dee. Trust me on that. You are.”
And that was one of the many things that scared Nadine. Her mother was tougher and colder. She knew it. But inside herself, was she her mother’s daughter?
Arleen narrowed her eyes on the two agents.
“You think I don’t see what you’re doing? Using my daughter like a puppet. What is it they say about ungrateful children and serpent’s teeth? That surely is my Dee-Dee. My brother ain’t forgotten me. My son writes me regular. And my daughter shows up with the FBI. It’s a dirty shame.”
“Well, Arlo has a lot more time on his hands than me.”
Her mother scowled. “Dee-Dee, whether you admit it or not, you are like us. Only difference is, I’m in here and you’re out there. If you just stop listening to men, you could be great. You could be free.”
“Free, like you? Seems to me that you are the opposite of ‘free.’”
Arleen tapped her index finger to her temple, leaning in. “I’m free in my mind. I don’t let no man tell me what to do. Not no more! Not my father, not my cheating druggie ex-husband. Bastard left the minute he found out I was pregnant with you!”
Was that why he left them, because Arleen had gotten pregnant again? Her mind spun with speculation and she couldn’t focus on what Arleen was shouting.
Finally Nadine mentally shook herself, focusing on her mother.
“… Men! They’re only good for two things. Screwing and killing. Took me years to figure that out. I don’t need no man. Not no more.” Arleen stood. “I’m done here.”
The guards moved forward as Arleen aimed a finger at her daughter.
“I’m disappointed, Dee-Dee. I surely am disappointed. I ain’t given up hope. But I’m getting damned close.”
Nadine didn’t like being scolded. She lowered her chin and went off script.
“Where’s Dad?” Nadine asked.
Her mother’s face turned scarlet again. For a moment, Nadine thought Arleen had stopped breathing. Her eyes blazed as she slammed both her shackled hands down on the table.
Both agents straightened, taking aggressive stances. The guard behind Arleen moved forward. Her mother’s stare flicked from one to the next and then back to Nadine.
“Shut up about him.”
A more cautious person would’ve dropped the topic. But she had found the pin with which to poke her mother and was not near done.
“He’s my father. I have a right to know where he is.”
“You were a baby. You have no rights. As for him, he don’t want nothing to do with you.”
That much was obvious from the decades of absence.
“Why did he leave?”
“That bitch stole him is why. Homewrecker. But I…” Arleen clamped her mouth shut. “I ain’t talking about him. He was a terrible father.”
That makes them a perfect parenting pair, Nadine thought.
Arleen turned to Torrin. “You find him, you let me know. You have any idea how much money he owes me?”
She turned back to her daughter. Her face was still red, and her mouth twisted in an ugly sneer.
Nadine followed a hunch. She’d heard her mother rage about this other woman for years after their father’s abandonment. “The women you killed looked an awful lot like Infinity Yanez. So, I’d say that it did matter.”
“How do you know? You never seen her.”
Nadine lifted a hand and indicated the FBI agents standing like gray pillars.
Arleen’s gaze flicked from the agents, back to Nadine.
“What’re you saying? That I killed them others because I couldn’t kill her? Well, let me tell you something, missy. She ain’t the reason.”
“Where are they, then?”
“They run off together.”
“Did they?”
“Sure.” Arleen flashed a quick smile. Duping Delight, again. It expressed satisfaction from pulling one over on someone. On her.
Her mother knew exactly where Nadine’s father was; Nadine was certain.
Was this the reason her dad hadn’t been in contact or made any effort to see her in over twenty-five years?
The FBI hadn’t been able to locate Dennis Howler. His sister had not heard from him in decades. Suddenly the narrative fixed in Nadine’s mind tilted. Had her father abandoned her, or was that what Arleen had wanted everyone to believe?
Her mother had said she’d killed a man with a shovel. Used his truck and his hose and his pool because he owed her money. Was that child support?
Her assumptions crashed into the facts. Either her father had fled ahead of apprehension, changed his identity, and worked somewhere off the books, or…
Is he dead?
Was her father dead?
Thirty
Darkest before dawn
“Why was the public kept in the dark
about the initial murders?”
Nadine caught some of the live broadcast of the press conference on her laptop at eleven on Wednesday morning and was so grateful not to be on hand. But there stood their governor, Neal Eaton, looking polished and confident as always. The man could hold his smile even through a press conference on serial killers. His silver hair and black eyebrows gave him a distinguished flair, and his dark tan made her suspect that this publicly elected official didn’t spend a lot of time behind his desk. Eaton had flown in from Tallahassee to stand beside the chief of police, mayor and Special Agent Fukuda, who must have drawn the short straw. From what Demko said, their state’s leader wouldn’t be behind them for long if they didn’t make an arrest soon.
The follow-up was brutal. “Do you feel responsible for Officer Pender and his ex-wife, Hope Kerr, who were unaware that there was a predator in their community?”
The mayor was eloquent in her answer, referencing the need to avoid public panic. The chief of police was less than forthcoming, citing no wish to jeopardize an ongoing investigation.
At this point, Special Agent Fukuda asked the public to be on the lookout for Anthony Dun, possibly driving a white rental van.
Nadine groaned. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of white vans in the city. She already felt sorry for the police call center operators and every service provider who showed up at a residence or condo in a white van.
She wondered what the reporters would say when they realized that the police department was pulling neighborhood patrols to cover protection and security for the governor’s visit?
When the conference ended, she resumed her digital search for her uncle, using what she had learned from Torrin, but struck out again. If the FBI couldn’t find Guy Owen, what chance did she have?
They had shared that the prison logs showed Arleen received few phone calls, but more mail than most inmates. Mail was opened and checked for contraband. They did not keep a log of callers but would begin doing so at the Bureau’s request, along with scanning all envelopes and correspondence.
Her mother’s implications troubled her. During another restless night, she decided she needed to speak to Arlo again.
She made another call to the chaplain and Arlo called back two hours later.
Her brother sounded breathless. “You all right?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Chaplain said you’d been in an accident.”
“No. I’m fine. The emergency was more metaphorical.”
“You’re going to give me a heart attack with this shit.” He blew out a breath.
She gave him a second but knew the phone cards used money and this was burning up his minutes.
“Listen, I upped the amount in your account.”
“Thanks, Dee-Dee.”
The silence stretched as her heart thumped in her chest. She sucked in a breath and launched into her concerns.
“Remember that guy she told me about, the one she said owed her money and that Uncle Tinsel helped her move the—”
Arlo interrupted her. “Dee-Dee, be careful. They monitor these calls.”
She paused. Had she been about to say body?
“Okay.”
“Uncle Tinsel? Yeah?”
Nadine continued with more care. “He helped her move something… heavy.”
“All right.”
“Could that have been… been…?” Nadine couldn’t manage a word past the lump.
“Dad?” said Arlo.
“I don’t know.” Her voice rasped. “Maybe. The FBI can’t find him. And Mom started to say something and clammed up.”
“You think she…?” His words trailed off.
“I don’t know. Do you?”
“All the ones after looked like her, like Yanez. Didn’t they?” he asked.
She didn’t need to ask who he meant. Her victims. And yes. They did.
“We need to find Uncle Guy,” said Arlo.
“Are you in touch with him?”
“No. You?”
“No. FBI can’t find him, either.”
She ended the call more troubled than when she began it.
Nadine made another call, this one to Demko, explaining her suspicion. She asked him to run a search on Infinity.
“I’ll let you know what pops up,” he promised.
Late in the day, Torrin stopped by to obtain the key to her PO box in order to retrieve the letters her mother mentioned during their visit. Nadine had explained about the PO box and was happy to turn over the job of reading the correspondence to the FBI. Better them than her.
“Do you have any of your mother’s personal effects?” asked Torrin.
“My uncle took them after my mother’s conviction.”
Nadine asked him if Demko had mentioned the Peace River as a possible body dump. He said they were aware.
“I have some additional information on your dad.”
“You found him?”
“No. We obtained his military records. They showed a dishonorable discharge for selling drugs on base. He spent time in a rehabilitation facility before returning to Ocala.”
“He was a drug dealer?”
“Lots of addicts sell to finance their habits.”
Was her father dead or one of a thousand drug-addicted homeless men shuffling through their cities? Both thoughts punched at Nadine’s insides.
“Did you find Yanez?”
Torrin shook his head. “She’s listed as a missing person since June 1993.”
Arleen had killed them both. Nadine was certain, but she had not a shred of proof.
“What about my uncle?”
“Nothing.”
“Did she kill him, too?”
Torrin had explained that their goal was the apprehension of their prime suspect, Anthony Dun. Her uncle’s disappearance was not the focus of their investigation. They didn’t know, or seem to care, if either Infinity Yanez or Guy Owen was deceased or had disappeared by design.
On Thursday, she got a message from Demko, telling her they’d been staking out several positions she’d mentioned on the Peace River since Monday night. Where was Carla Giffin right now? The waitress was a married mother of two children, neither her son nor daughter was yet old enough to attend school. And Nick Thrasher might not be the ideal husband, but his job as a manager and cook at the restaurant provided for his wife and baby girl, born with autism. Was that infant now also a child without a father? She hoped they could catch this murderer before the killer dumped the bodies and vanished.
She moved back to her cottage apartment after work on Thursday, partially out of bravado, but mostly because the suite at the airport hotel taxed her budget.
At her place, she installed a curtain on the porthole window and armed her new security system.
Despite the upgrades, she was getting antsy, troubled by the accelerated timeline and in a panic over the pair who had been held at Myakka. Part of her hoped they lived, and another part prayed they were dead. Years ago, her mother had tortured her supervisor Michelle Dents at the marina and Dent’s lover, Parker Irwin, keeping them for most of the weekend. After that, it was Nadine’s classmate, with her dealer and pimp, Stephen White. Arleen had cut Stephen repeatedly with a carpet knife, before staking him out alive, beside the manure pile, for the ants and flies. When Nadine was a girl, and her mother worked at the stables, she had told Nadine that the flies that bit the horses also laid their eggs on the skin. The larva ate into living flesh, creating open wounds. You didn’t have to be dead for maggots to eat at you.
Nadine’s stomach heaved at this thought, knowing exactly what White had suffered.
As she crawled into her own bed, her mind fixed on the possibility that the killer had already captured the final pair.
When she finally fell into a restless sleep, images of Sandra Shank woke her in a cold sweat.
* * *
On Friday morning, she got a call from Demko.
“We found two bodies. Male and female. Tentative
ID is Giffin and Thrasher.”
“On the Peace River?”
“No. On Phillippi Creek.”
“What? That’s west of Myakka.” Her profile was wrong.
He did not issue incriminations or tell her that her map had the FBI and local police setting up a dragnet on the wrong waterway. All he said was “Yes.”
“I’m so sorry!”
“Not your fault. The bodies have been there several days. They were tangled in debris near the Phillippi Creek Bridge. Found the white van, too, behind one of the outbuildings. The park thought it was one of theirs.”
“The van. That’s good. Right?”
“Yes, but it looks like Dun sprayed the interior with sodium percarbonate and hydrogen peroxide. Both are hell on organic matter, so we aren’t going to get any blood or DNA. I’m assuming he wiped it, but we’ll check for prints.”
Sandra Shank was next.
“And they didn’t find Dun?”
“Correct.”
The killer might already have Sandra. She drew a shaky breath. It wasn’t Sandra. But it would be a teen, a girl, like her classmate.
“I’ll be here processing all day. You want to come down?”
“Yeah. I need to add these victims to my map.” The sight of the bodies still upset her, but now for different reasons. Now they infuriated her because each one represented a failure to give the authorities what they needed to catch this killer.
“See you soon then.” He disconnected and Nadine tucked her phone away.
What was she missing with her geographic profile? She had entered all the information. The locations were physically similar to where her mother had dropped her victims.
“There’s something wrong with it,” she told herself, but she could not figure out what.
Nadine headed out, meeting Demko in a beautiful park that she had not even known existed. The divers had ferried the bodies to shore and the ME had already removed them. She jotted down the coordinates for her map, wondering if the tide had carried them into the creek or out?
The FBI had also asked Crean to work as a consultant and she was still on site.
