Sure would be nice to have your resources, he had said. Even for one single day.
One officer in one of the little towns on the eastern edge of the Bay Area had told me he had nothing to offer since most of the killings that occurred in his jurisdiction were domestics, something that made me sigh quietly to myself. I still made him look up the brown-haired young woman.
Could be a boyfriend or something, I had said.
These women never got to the big city, he had replied, and I wondered how he knew. But he’d given me information anyway, and part of me wished that he hadn’t.
I grabbed an apple from my stash and took a bite, then went back to the phone. My stomach was churning a bit from all the coffee. I took my legal pad and set it on the counter, then dialed the Walnut Creek police department.
After a tired-sounding man answered, I went through my usual stories, asking first for information on any unsolveds of any unidentified young women they might have, and when he told me they had none, asking about cases involving a one-ton.
“A truck?” The officer—who had identified himself as Albert Jessup—sounded wider awake now. “What kind?”
“A Ford F-350,” I said.
“Well, now I can help you,” he said.
My heart started to pound. I grabbed my pen and opened the legal pad to a fresh sheet of paper.
He said, “We had a weird call in June about an F-350. I remember it because I took it. Caller said some girl was screaming at the top of her lungs from the bed of an F-350. The truck had pulled into the Enco gas station and was filling up, and the girl in the back started screaming blue murder. Attendant went inside, called us, and I got dispatched.”
My hand was frozen over the legal pad, pen between my thumb and forefinger. I needed to know how this turned out before I wrote anything down.
“I got there, truck was gone. The attendant couldn’t figure out how to keep the bastard at the station. He had paid cash, so there was no way to track him, not that I’d expect some doer to write a check. But you never know. Perps can be squirrelly.”
“They can,” I agreed, mostly to keep him talking.
“The attendant did what he could. He gave me the license plate, and off I went, but we never did find the doer or the girl.”
Jessup sounded a little shaken even though this had happened more than a month before.
“Why didn’t the attendant help her?” I asked before I could stop myself.
“He tried,” Jessup said. “Girl was under a pile of blankets. He managed to pull one back, saw a rope, attaching something—her, the blanket, something—to one of the hooks inside the truck. Then the driver grabbed the attendant by his collar and tossed him away from the truck. Bruised him pretty bad. The doer unhooked the nozzle from his gas tank and spilled some gasoline on the attendant’s leg—attendant thinks deliberately.”
My breath caught. My hand was still over the legal pad.
“Threw a five on the attendant, and jumped in the cab, and drove off. Attendant stood up, got the plate, had it when I got there. The whole place smelled of spilled gas. They had to put up signs everywhere, telling smokers to stay away until it got cleaned up. Called in two extra guys just to get through that night.”
“What time was that?” I asked, not exactly sure why that was relevant, yet needing to know.
“About eleven,” Jessup said. “I’d just come on. Spent a week searching for the bastard. Figured he’d be somewhere. Never did see hide nor hair of him or the girl.”
“What do you think happened?”
“He got away, what do you think?” He sounded snide.
“No, no,” I said. “I didn’t ask the question correctly. The girl was tied up, right?”
“I assume so. Dunno for sure. She might’ve been injured or tangled in that blanket. All I know is that she was screaming for help, and the doer drove off like he’d done something wrong. Attendant said he was freakishly strong. Attendant is about two hundred pounds, and that driver lifted him like he weighed no more than a feather.”
I let out a small whistle before I remembered I was on the phone. I didn’t apologize, though.
“You still have that license plate?” I asked.
“Do I ever,” he said. “Hang on.”
He set the phone down, and I heard him say something to a person nearby. “…maybe finally catch the son of a bitch…”
And then the phone rustled as he picked it back up. He gave me the license plate number.
“You couldn’t match it?” I asked.
“Asked the DMV for a match, but they said the plate doesn’t exist. Most frustrating dead end of my career so far. I kept thinking about that attendant, you know? All that driver would’ve had to do was light a match…”
He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t have to.
I was scrawling everything down now, trying not to breathe too loudly. I was glad he couldn’t see me.
My excitement would’ve been palpable.
“And you know what else?” he asked. “I find myself wondering sometimes about that nut in Vallejo, you know, from July? And I wonder if it was the same guy. Because that was weird too.”
I frowned. I had no idea what he was talking about.
“Nut in Vallejo?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Jessup said. “Fourth of July? Made the news everywhere, I thought, but maybe not San Fran. The nut who drove up to a couple necking in their car in Blue Rock Springs Park? Shot them like a million times. Killed her. The guy lived.”
“He was in a truck?” I asked.
“The guy?” Jessup asked.
“The shooter?” I asked.
“Naw. A Corsair, maybe. I just kept thinking our truck guy might’ve dumped his truck for something more practical.”
“Wouldn’t he have changed his MO too?” I asked. “I mean, shooting’s a long way from tying someone up in the back of a truck.”
“Not as long as you’d think,” Jessup said. “You’d be surprised. If you’d asked about older cases, I might’ve had something for you.”
The hair on the back of my neck stood up. “What do you mean?”
“Lots of woods around here,” he said. “Lots of ditches and mountain roads. It doesn’t hurt that one of ’em’s named Mount Diablo.”
I got the sense he’d told this part of the story a few times.
“We find more bodies than I like to think about,” he said. “But they’re usually skeletal by the time someone finds them.”
“Any of them wrapped in blankets?” I asked.
“Hard to tell,” he said. “Cloth decomposes just like skin. And we get a lot of rain, lots of animals. We got a lot of unsolveds, but they’re old. Not the girl you’re looking for.”
“You get calls from other jurisdictions about this?” I asked.
“Not as many as I’d like,” he said. “That’s why I watch the news, try to remember odd cases. Figure I can call one of the big boys with a possible when we find something. So far it hasn’t panned out. But you put my name down, okay? I got information, and I’d love to leave Walnut Creek one day.”
I smiled. Poor man must have been desperate to say that to someone he thought was a San Francisco cop on crummy night duty.
“I got your name,” I said as warmly as I could. “I’ll contact you if I need anything else.”
And I hung up. Then I wrote down the rest of what he had told me, and underlined that license plate number.
I glanced at the clock on the stove. 1:30. Too late to go to the gym, obviously, and too late to call Eagle or Pammy even if I had their phone numbers, which I did not.
I wiped my hands on my robe, then walked around the apartment, trying to work off some of the nervous energy. I’d had a breakthrough.
A truck with a woman in the back. A license plate. A strong man who could toss a 200-pound gas station attendant like he weighed nothing.
The college kids were onto something.
I still hadn’t found Darla. But I’d found something
that might’ve been just as good.
31
Pammy
They left via the alleyway, in an ancient Oldsmobile with great tires. Strawberry sat at the wheel as if she were born to drive. Norma huddled in the back seat, the white tape across her nose reflecting in the light over the door.
The baby slept in her carrier, unaware that she was changing locations—maybe for good.
Pammy and Stella had helped pack. They filled the car with food and blankets, keeping the disposable diapers within easy reach, and adding a stack of ripped and discarded towels in case the diapers ran out.
Strawberry took three grocery bags out of the pile that Pammy kept under the sink to use as garbage bags. She had a hunch one of the first things that Strawberry would buy on a pit stop were expensive plastic bags so that the diapers wouldn’t stink up the car too badly—if they needed to change one on the road somewhere.
When the group finished, they had awakened Norma, got her ready, and taken the trio to the car. Before they drove off, Pammy had walked around the car, making sure that it was solid. The car looked all right to her, and Strawberry had said that her father made sure the car was tuned every single time she came home.
But Pammy didn’t know the last time Strawberry had gone home. A two-plus-day drive to Canada would put a lot of stress on a car. Pammy wanted everything to go as well as possible. She wished she could pay for a tune-up before they left, but there was no time.
She also wished she could call Opal to join them in this tight little alley, because Opal, with her automobile repair class experience, could have looked under the hood to make sure everything was okay. But it was after midnight, and Pammy couldn’t in good conscience call. Even if she wanted to wake Opal up, she didn’t trust Opal to keep Norma’s presence quiet.
So, Pammy would have to trust on another level. She would have to trust this father that she did not know, and hope the car was up for the drive.
Stella had done her part as well. She had five hundred dollars in cash. Apparently, she kept a stash in the house for emergencies. Those emergencies, Pammy was beginning to learn, were rarely Stella’s.
Stella had pressed three hundred and fifty dollars of that five hundred in Strawberry’s hands while the three of them were alone in the kitchen, as Norma still caught the last of her hour of rest.
Normally, I’d give you all of it and tell you to give half of what you have left to Norma when you reached your destination, Stella said, but she might take off with the baby before you get there, and I don’t want that child to have to spend a cold night out in the woods somewhere.
Strawberry had looked startled at that but, to her credit, she hadn’t denied that Norma’s return was a possibility. Maybe Strawberry had heard Pammy after all.
The other thing that Stella didn’t mention was that Strawberry was untested. Norma wasn’t the only one who could run off. If Norma and the baby became too demanding, Strawberry just might leave. And if she did, Norma had enough money to make it until new help arrived.
If Pammy had to bet on it, though, she would have wagered that Norma was much more likely to bolt than Strawberry.
Before they left, Strawberry had offered to let Pammy look at the map so she would know where they were going to go. Strawberry made it clear that this was a huge offer, based on trust.
Pammy declined.
Not because she was afraid to know the route that Strawberry’s draft-dodger underground railroad used, but because Pammy didn’t want to obsessively think about where the trio would be as each hour passed.
For all Pammy knew, they weren’t going to Canada at all. They were going to go south to Mexico or they would take a flight out of Los Angeles to somewhere else.
Lord knew that Stella had given them enough money to do any of those things.
It had taken nearly an hour to get Norma into the car, in the backseat, with the baby in her little carrier. Strawberry insisted on using some kind of origami magic with the seat belt to thread it through the carrier, to protect the baby, she said. She wanted to face the baby toward the seatback, but Norma had balked. They had the baby facing Norma, sideways in the seat, so that Norma could fuss over her.
At 2:00 a.m., the loaded Oldsmobile had finally backed out of the alley and headed off into what remained of the night.
As they drove off, Stella slipped an arm around Pammy. Pammy leaned her head on Stella’s shoulder, feeling a great exhaustion wash over her.
She had a fifteen-minute drive home and then a wind-down. She had promised Eagle and Val that she would check with the admissions office in the morning, which meant that she had to be up at seven at the latest. For a moment, Pammy toyed with getting her four hours of sleep here and then she realized she hadn’t brought any extra clothes.
She did have extra underwear and socks for just that sort of thing, but if she were being honest with herself, she needed to get out of here. She needed a few hours to herself, just to shake a little.
Stella squeezed Pammy’s waist.
“Thank you,” Stella said quietly.
When someone thanked her in these instances, Pammy used to say, There’s no need or That’s fine, but she didn’t anymore. There was a need for a thank-you. She needed to hear it.
And what had happened here tonight was not fine. It might never be fine, and if she had protected herself well enough, she would never know if the entire venture went bad.
“You’re welcome,” Pammy said, and slipped out of Stella’s hug. Pammy went through the back door into the kitchen. Lights were still on. The remains of a sandwich sat on a plate on the counter. Someone else had left their crusts behind. Glasses sat in the sink.
“I’ll do the dishes,” Stella said from behind her.
“Let’s leave them for the morning,” Pammy said. “We need sleep.”
She ran a hand through her hair. She still had some cleanup to do out front and in the locker room. She didn’t want the women who arrived for the first class to get any hint that someone was here late into the night, and she certainly didn’t want them to know that someone had bedded down in the locker room.
Stella followed her through the kitchen door, and Pammy, exhausted, nearly told her to stay put. Then she remembered that Stella’s purse was in the locker room.
They walked down the hallway into the gym proper. It looked both empty and weirdly bright with the overhead lights on. Pammy shut off the lights over the punching bags and t-shirts, leaving only the lights over the counter and locker room on.
“May I ask a question?” Stella was standing next to the counter, facing the locker room door. She was probably going to ask why Pammy wanted to clean up alone.
“These lists,” Stella said, one hand tapping the papers on the countertop. “What are they?”
Pammy let out a small sigh. Stella had trusted her, repeatedly, with the lives of other women, to help with problems in her community. Stella, despite Pammy’s initial impression of her, had done more for women connected to the gym than almost anyone, except Eagle and Pammy herself.
“Help me clean up,” Pammy said tiredly, “and I’ll explain as we work.”
They went into the locker room first, folding blankets, putting away the nest of towels. The level of laundry that Pammy would have to do this week had gone up exponentially.
And as the two of them worked, Pammy told Stella about Eagle’s encounter with the man in the truck, the possible kidnapping, and the warnings students had heard about the same man.
By the time they finished with the locker room and shut off the lights in there, Pammy had gotten to the visit that Darla Newsome’s father had made to the gym and about her disappearance.
“About forty percent of students never complete their degree,” Stella said as they headed into the kitchen. “That’s one of the statistics that bugs Roy the most, and a reason he became a regent, not that they’re working on it as much as he would like.”
“I’m aware of dropout rates.” Pammy suspected the
number was higher for women, since so many of them had been encouraged to come to college just to marry—or get their M-R-S. degree, as Irene Roth derisively put it.
“This could be one of those,” Stella said.
“I’d agree,” Pammy said, “if it weren’t for that idiot in the truck, and the fact that Strawberry and some of the other students had identified the kids who disappeared as participating in what they called ‘The Movement.’”
She went on to explain as they straightened the kitchen how many of the students had already dropped out, but were—in Strawberry’s words—committed to the cause.
Stella had paused in the middle of gathering the garbage, and looked at the back door.
“My goodness,” she said quietly, “I just realized that if Strawberry decides to stay with Norma and help her and the baby get settled wherever they’re going, then she’ll be a dropout.”
“Most likely.” Pammy rinsed off her hands and put out a new towel beside the sink. She ran her fingers over the open weave.
Stella rolled the top of a big grocery bag, stained with something wet despite the fact that she had put other bags inside of it.
“Puts a whole new perspective on it, doesn’t it?” she asked. “How easy it is for these kids to just…vanish. Maybe those Movement kids, as you call them, are doing something Important with a capital I, and haven’t bothered to tell anyone.”
Pammy nodded. She hadn’t thought of that. The kids involved in all the different causes around campus would be more likely to leave on some kind of mission than other kids.
“Maybe, that list isn’t important at all,” Stella said. “Maybe those kids are just do-gooders.”
Pammy let out a small sigh. Maybe they were. Maybe she was overreacting because of her history, and because of Darla’s father’s panic.
Pammy could guarantee that Strawberry’s father knew nothing about what his daughter was doing at the moment. And she wouldn’t be calling him with that information.
Strawberry hadn’t had time to tell friends that she was leaving. She might not have even told her roommates—if, indeed, she had roommates. Pammy knew nothing about Strawberry’s living arrangements and, Pammy just realized, she didn’t know Strawberry’s real name either.
Protectors Page 31
