Girls Like Us

by Cristina Alger

  “He did. It checked out. He was out all night, partying with friends.”

  “And the client?”

  “Never did figure out who it was.”

  “Did the motel have security cameras? Client records?”

  “Cameras were broken. Had been for months. Most of the clients paid in cash. It’s that kind of establishment.”

  “Were there any leads at all?”

  Lee sighs. “There was a landscaper. Alfonso Morales. He lives in Brentwood, down the street from the Sandoval house. Ria’s friend Luz said he used to stare at Ria when she passed by. Followed her a couple of times, too. Luz said that she once heard footsteps around the house late one night when Ria was staying over. She thought she saw a man staring in at them through the back window.”

  “And she thought it was Morales?”

  “That was her guess, but she never called the police or anything.”

  “Does Morales still live in Brentwood?”

  “Last I checked.”

  “And what about Luz?”

  “Not sure. I assume so. She works at a bar down by the marina now. Hank O’Gorman’s place. Remember him? I see her there sometimes. I hope what happened to Ria scared her straight, you know?”

  “Scared her straight?”

  “Got her to stop selling herself.”

  I take a beat. “You do understand that most girls don’t choose that life, right?”

  “Everyone makes choices.”

  I take a deep breath and decline to respond.

  “Oh.” Lee snaps his fingers. “There was a thing about a red truck. Morales drives a maroon pickup. The motel clerk said he thought he saw a red truck in the lot the night Ria was there, but he couldn’t say for sure. And he couldn’t positively ID Morales.”

  “Did you talk to Morales?”

  “We picked him up a couple of times. I always thought there was something off about him myself. He looks all around when you talk to him, but never right in the eye. Got nervous when we started asking questions about Ria. At first, he tried to claim he’d never seen her before.”

  “Maybe he’s scared of cops.”

  “Maybe. I got a bad feeling, though. He does some work for the South Fork Preservation Society. You heard of them?”

  “The plover people?”

  Lee snorts. “Yeah. They care a lot about the plover. They do projects all over the island. Run by a bunch of bored hedge-fund wives, mostly. Too much time on their hands and definitely too much money. They buy up land for preservation and do sand dune restoration and that kind of thing. Last summer, Morales was working at one of their sites in the Pine Barrens, not too far from where the body was buried. He was planting trees out there. And guess what the tree roots were wrapped in?”

  I raise my eyebrows. “Burlap.”

  “You got it. He had yards of it in his truck. Same make, everything. That said, it’s pretty common. You can find it in most of the nurseries on the North Fork.”

  “You find anything else? Hair, blood?”

  “Nah. We searched the car, his house. Nothing.”

  “What about DNA?”

  “Vic’s body was too badly degraded to find anyone else’s DNA. Morales had scratches on his hands and a big, nasty gash on his leg. Looked like it was healing up, so maybe a few weeks old. Matched up with our timeline.”

  “Did he have an explanation?”

  “Claimed he got injured on the job.”

  “Plausible.”

  “I guess. In the end, we had to let him walk. Your dad didn’t think we had enough to hold him.”

  “What did you think?”

  Lee sighs. “I thought he might be good for it. At least, I thought we should have turned him over to ICE, let them get rid of him. Better safe than sorry, right? But what did I know? I was two weeks into homicide. And your dad wasn’t really into friendly suggestions.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  Lee pulls over on the sandy shoulder of the road and cuts the engine. “He was tough on you, huh?”

  “You could say that. He had a well-developed sense of right and wrong.”

  “Couldn’t have been easy, growing up with him. I mean, he was a good man and all. But he scared the crap out of me.”

  “Scared the crap out of most people.” I push open the car door.

  There is a news van up ahead, parked behind an SCPD cruiser.

  “Fuck.” Lee shakes his head. “These guys are like vultures. They smell blood and come running.”

  “What do you expect? You can see the crime scene from the Ponquogue Bridge. And hey, maybe it’s a rich white girl this time.”

  Lee hands me an SCPD baseball cap from the back seat of his car. “Put this on. Last thing you need right now is a spot on the five o’clock news.”

  4.

  We hop out of the car. Sand slips into my sneakers, under my toes. I halt when I see a woman step out of a Jeep on the side of the road. Lee is talking, but I’ve stopped listening. I watch the woman as she closes her car door, her cherry-red lips parting into a smile as she greets a passing police officer.

  Twenty-one years ago, Ann-Marie Marshall was a cub reporter at Newsday. I was seven years old. While my father and I were out camping in Sears Bellows County Park, my mother was murdered in our house in Hampton Bays. By the time we got back home, our block was swarming with cops and reporters, Ann-Marie Marshall among them. While I don’t remember the details of the night she died, I have a visceral impression of the following morning. I knew something was wrong as we approached our house because of all the flashing lights. To this day, I seize up at the sight of police lights cutting through fog. Dad made me stay in the car while he got out to see what the fuss was about. I remember that the windshield wipers were on; I can hear them when I dream about that day. I can smell the faint scent of the cigarettes Dad smoked in the car when he was angry and the pine-scented air freshener he used to cover it up. I pressed my face against the window as techs wheeled my mother’s body down the driveway. A sheet was draped over her, but I knew it was her. Dorsey was there. Dad ran to him; collapsed into his arms. It was one of the few times I ever saw either man cry.

  Dorsey took us both down to the station. For an hour or so, he separated me from my father. He brought me a soda and asked me questions about the night before. Where had we camped? What did we eat for dinner? What time did we go to bed? Did I sleep through the night? Had Dad and I been together the whole time?

  I answered most of the questions silently, just nodding yes or shaking my head no. I knew my answers were important, and my hands shook so hard that I sat on them to make them stop. Eventually, Dorsey patted me on the shoulder and told me I could go home. She did good, he whispered to my father in the hallway. Dad looked relieved. He put his hand on my shoulder and gave me an affectionate squeeze. Dorsey winked at me and smiled.

  Not long after, a seventeen-year-old boy from down the block confessed. It wasn’t Sean Gilroy’s first brush with the law, but it would be his last. The previous year, a neighbor claimed he’d been watching her shower from a tree outside her window. There were all kinds of rumors about him. People said he killed cats and rabbits, skinned them and kept their pelts in his basement. I never found out if that was true or just a suburban myth about a quiet, strange boy who’d never really fit in. According to his initial confession—one that he would recount and then retell in a narrative that shape-shifted over the course of his sentencing and incarceration—Gilroy saw my mother washing dishes through the window. Her long black hair was down; she wore a low-cut top and a skirt that skimmed her narrow hips. She was tan from the summer, and Gilroy said she was smiling to herself like she had a secret. He was overcome by his sexual desire for her. He knocked on the door and she let him in willingly, even offering him a cold drink from our fridge. He attacked her in the kitchen and they struggle
d. She pulled a knife out of the butcher’s block on the counter to defend herself. Gilroy overpowered her, seized the knife, and stabbed her in the chest with it, not once, but eight times, straight through the heart. Then he took a shower in my parents’ bathroom, changed into clean clothes that belonged to my father, and returned to his house as though nothing had happened. When the police came to question him, he was sitting on the couch watching baseball. He was still wearing my father’s T-shirt and jeans. His sneakers were splattered with her blood.

  Gilroy was sentenced to life in prison without parole. On the morning Gilroy was sentenced, a small cluster of reporters waited for my father and me outside our house. My father instructed me to ignore them. I did, on what felt like an eternal walk from our doorway to the SCPD cruiser that was waiting for us at the curb. I kept my eyes down and counted the cracks in the sidewalk cement. I had almost made it into the car when Ann-Marie Marshall called out, “Nell!” I looked up, and for a second, we locked eyes. Then my father stepped between us and hissed to her that if she approached us again, he’d have her arrested for harassment. At night, I dreamed not about my mother but about Marshall, those red lips of hers calling my name. Not long after, we moved to Pop’s place on Dune Road. Our house was sold and razed to the ground. No one wanted to live in the house where a detective’s wife had been murdered, especially not us.

  Ann-Marie won’t recognize me now. I was just a child then. But I recognize her. Even after Sean Gilroy was sent up to Shawangunk Correctional Facility and everyone lost interest, she kept writing about him, about the case. She argued that Gilroy was slow and unable to understand the questions the police had asked of him. She wrote about how he was kept for hours without an attorney present, without food and water, and how he eventually produced a statement that was riddled with contradictions and inaccuracies. She said he left the interrogation room with a freshly broken finger. She argued that he confessed because he wanted to go home. Even though he admitted to her, in an interview years after his sentencing, that he had, in fact, murdered my mother, Sean Gilroy became a touchstone for Marshall. She kept coming back to him in subsequent articles, as a reminder, a warning, a sign that Suffolk County was rotting. If they would treat a poor, slow young white boy like this, she seemed to say, think about what they would do to the rest of us.

  I’m surprised by how much she looks like her byline picture. Silver hair, cropped short, with bangs. Sharp, serious face with brows that seemed knit together in constant contemplation. She looks up, and for a moment, I think she sees me. Her chin lifts, her eyes narrow in recognition. But then she waves at a car coming down the road. My shoulders drop from around my ears.

  “You okay?” Lee asks. He puts his hand gently on my back. I flinch at his touch, and he takes the hint. He steps away from me, giving me space.

  “Yeah. Sorry. Thought I saw someone I knew.”

  We take the long way around the barricades that have been set up at the entrance to the park. A camera flashes as we pass. I turn my face down, angling my body behind Lee’s. Past the barricade, an SCPD officer holds a clipboard. Quietly, Lee gives him both of our names. It occurs to me that I probably should’ve checked with Lightman before taking on an unofficial consulting position with the SCPD. He would have said no, which is, of course, the right answer. I don’t particularly want to advertise my whereabouts to Dmitry Novak and his cohort, nor do I feel like opening myself up to subpoenas from DAs and defense attorneys, if and when a suspect is taken into custody.

  It’s too late to worry about that. The crime scene recorder has written down my name in his official-looking notepad. And Ann-Marie Marshall’s presence has sent me spiraling back into a dark part of my past. I won’t leave Suffolk County without talking to her, I decide. My uncertainty about what happened that night—and about the weight Dorsey gave to my testimony—has always eaten away at me. It’s a fire that has slowly but steadily consumed me for years. Now that I’m home, I feel its burn more than ever. This may well be my last trip to Suffolk County. Once I close my father’s estate, there will be no reason for me to return. I need to know more about Sean Gilroy, about what happened in those dark hours while I slept soundly in my tent in Sears Bellows County Park. Ann-Marie Marshall has talked to Gilroy more than anyone else. She’s looked into his eyes; she’s heard him tell his side of the story. If I talk to her, maybe I can finally put it behind me.

  Lee and I walk across the sand and up into the dunes. It’s nothing short of miraculous that this land has remained undeveloped all these years. It’s beautiful. I hate thinking that about a crime scene, but it’s true. There’s water all around us. To the south, the ocean advances and retreats on the sand, the sound of the waves steady as a heartbeat. To the north, the bay sits dark and still, glimmering in the morning light.

  Unlike most beaches in the Hamptons, this place is untouched. The dune grass grows high and unruly. In places, it comes up past my knees, nearly brushing my hips. Overhead, seagulls circle, dropping crabs onto the rocks to crack open the shells. One swoops off with a whole fish in its claws, victorious. I take a deep breath, filling my lungs with fresh salt air. If I’m going to be buried anywhere, I’d want it to be somewhere like here. Somewhere beautiful and wild.

  The dunes hum with activity. Along the perimeter of the beach, Southampton Town Police are setting up more orange barricades, sure to attract attention. The coroner’s van is in the parking lot at the base of the dunes. A physician’s assistant chats with a tech beside it. A spark of light by the gravesite tells me the photographer is here. Officers are everywhere, sweeping the dune grass for evidence. They walk with the synchronized cadence of a chain gang. In the distance, a cadaver dog barks. For a moment, everyone freezes.

  “Just a dead bird,” someone calls out, and the dunes spring back to life.

  A red flag sticks in the sand at the side of the road. Lee gestures for me to follow him in that direction. The dune is steep, maybe fifteen or twenty feet high. Once we reach its crest, I have to pause to catch my breath. The terrain along the top of the dune is thick with sumac and bramble, a challenge to navigate. This is the kind of place my father would warn me against exploring as a kid. Ticks thrive in grass like this. There’s a wooden fence surrounding the area, presumably to keep people out. A stretch of ten feet or so has been knocked over. I walk over to it, crouch down. “SFPS” is stamped in small letters along the edge.

  “Lee,” I call out, beckoning him. He doubles back and kneels down beside me. I point to the lettering. “South Fork Preservation Society. Looks like this is another one of their restoration sites.”

  Lee shakes his head. “I’m telling you. Morales.”

  We stand and keep moving until we come to a break in the bramble. A grave has been scratched out of the sand, like a giant plover’s nest. About six feet long and five feet wide. Stakes and crime scene tape form a rough-edged pentagon around it. At my feet are clumps of dune grass, torn up at the root.

  I squat down, staring close at a pile of rocks. They are small and flat, about as thick and wide as the palm of my hand. Seven of them. Stacked one atop the other, like a deck of cards.

  “A cairn,” I murmur, turning my head to examine it closer.

  “A trail marker?”

  “Something like that. Cairns have been used for centuries, for lots of things. Trails, caches of food. They can be ceremonial, like for a burial site.”

  “Here.” Lee hands me a pair of latex gloves. He puts on a pair himself, stretching them over his long, bony fingers.

  “Look at this. This is deliberate. The stones are stacked so precisely. And I’m not sure these rocks are even from this area. They should be tested. Was there anything like this near the Sandoval site?”

  “Not that I recall. But it’s possible we missed it.”

  “It could have been disturbed before you got there, too. Maybe the hikers who found the body remember seeing it.”

&nb
sp; “You think it might still be there?”

  I shrug. “It’s worth going back to check it out.” I stand up, brush some sand off my jeans. “I have a friend from the Bureau. Sarah Patel. She works out of Miami. She’s the head of a human trafficking task force. If we’re looking at two young sex workers murdered a year apart, killed in this very particular way, I think you guys should consider bringing in her team. Either that or someone from the BAU.”

  “You’re from the BAU.”

  “You know what I mean. This is not a case for local PD, Lee. You need to be cross-checking this stuff against national databases.”

  Lee kicks the sand with his toe. “I’ll raise it again with Dorsey.”

  “Or you could just let me call Sarah Patel and let her decide.”

  “No.” He shakes his head emphatically. “Absolutely not. Dorsey will flip out. He does not want outside involvement here. And it’s his call, not Sarah Patel’s.”

  I disagree, but there’s no point in saying so. We’re quiet for a minute. I clear my throat, breaking the tension. “Who did you say found this body?”

  “Grace Bishop. She lives down the street. Married to Eliot Bishop.”

  “The Treasury Secretary?”

  “Yep . . . she’s on the board of the Preservation Society, actually. She might know about the restoration project here. She walks her dog on the beach every morning. Dog took off, came up here, dug up the body. Tore off a piece of the ankle bone. Grace had to wrestle it out of the dog’s mouth. When I got here, she was hysterical.”

  “A human foot before seven a.m.? I’d be hysterical, too.”

  Lee blanches, and I wonder if he’s going to lose his breakfast. He probably hasn’t seen all that many murder victims in his time at the SCPD. Fewer than I have, anyway. Car accidents, sure. Maybe the occasional suicide. But there is something particularly unsettling about murder scenes. There is a darkness that clings to the air long after the killer has departed. I know it well.

  This one feels particularly gruesome. The body in the grave is shrouded in burlap. It reminds me of the trip Dad and I would take every December to a nursery on the North Fork. We would pick out a Christmas tree—usually a small one, so that I could reach the top of it without too much help—and the nursery owner would wrap it in burlap just like this. Then Dad would hoist it over his shoulder and tie it to the top of our car. We’d drive home in silence, both of us knowing that Dad rarely had the energy to decorate the tree. During the holidays, Dad’s drinking was worse than usual. Something like a tangle of Christmas lights was enough to set him off. He’d get frustrated, yell at me, throw something. Then he’d disappear, returning only when he was too drunk to notice that while he was gone I’d managed to unwind the lights, fix the broken bulbs, and wrap them around the tree by myself.