Protectors

by Kris Nelscott

  “He got it from the attendant,” Val said. “I think the attendant was thinking about other things at the time.”

  Pammy shuddered. Gasoline poured all over her legs at a gas station. Yes, she’d be thinking of other things.

  “How do we get that detective our number?” Pammy asked. She felt over her head here.

  “I don’t know,” Val said. “If I call back, why would I have him run the plate when I can do it myself—in theory, you know?”

  Eagle was nodding. “But we have confirmation. This is our guy. The same truck, the same everything.”

  Pammy frowned. “It’s not really confirmation. I mean, you didn’t see this man wrap a woman in a blanket—”

  “No,” Eagle said fiercely. “I saw him kidnap her.”

  The words reverberated in the small room. Then Val gathered herself and made eye contact with both Pammy and Eagle.

  “There’s one more thing,” Val said. “There are reports of bodies, male bodies—skeletons, really—found near Mount Diablo, wrapped in blankets and tied up.”

  Eagle’s gaze met Pammy’s. Pammy had gone cold. She had never really heard of anything like this. There were spree killers, like that man in Chicago—what was his name? The one who killed all the nurses—and that shooter in the University of Texas Bell Tower a few years back. But someone who kidnapped people, young people, and then tossed them away—

  “Have you ever heard of anything like this?” Pammy couldn’t help herself. She had to ask.

  She wasn’t looking at Eagle, though. She was looking at Val.

  Val half shrugged.

  “I come from Chicago,” she said, and Pammy tensed. She would probably find out the name of that nurse killer now. “And there are a lot of bodies that get discovered all over the South and West Sides. But those are usually gang related. The bodies get dumped as a warning. Truman—”

  Her voice broke, and her eyes filled with tears. She held up her hand, then shook her head.

  Eagle was watching her, as if uncertain what to do.

  Val cleared her throat.

  “Truman,” she said, her voice a bit wobbly. “He said the gangs were an insolvable problem, and it was closer to a war than it was to anything else. So, I guess, no, I’ve never heard of anything like this.”

  “Yeah,” Eagle said quietly. “A war.”

  Pammy wondered what was behind those three words. Eagle did not elaborate, but Pammy stared at her for a long moment.

  “My experiences don’t count,” Eagle said.

  “If you have something—”

  “Honestly, Pammy,” Eagle said. “My experiences don’t count.”

  She spoke very forcefully, and Pammy had no choice but to stop pushing.

  “What kind of man are we dealing with?” Pammy asked.

  “As I see it,” Val said, “he’s doing one of two things. He’s killing these people and dumping their bodies, or he’s dumping the bodies of people who died accidentally. I’m thinking it’s not accidental, though, given the treatment of that gasoline attendant.”

  Pammy shuddered. “How do we get this to the police?”

  “We have only supposition at the moment,” Val said.

  “Well, not entirely,” Eagle said. “You’ve forgotten Kelly MacGivers.”

  “You think she was abducted by this truck monster?” Pammy asked.

  “Yes, I think she was abducted,” Eagle said, with the same kind of force she had used before. “And here’s why. I think it’s really strange that her parents took her to an outside hospital, told the attending not to send information for a follow-up to the family doctor, and she has the same kinds of injuries.”

  Pammy let out a small sigh. Poor girl. Pammy wondered how she had gotten away.

  “These people are clearly scared.” Eagle looked at Pammy. “Maybe we figure out how to talk to her?”

  Pammy held up her index finger. She grabbed her own list and shuffled through it, looking at the four names marked in red, hoping as she did so that she had a reason for remembering Kelly MacGivers.

  “There it is,” she said, feeling an elation that she immediately tamped down as inappropriate.

  “What?” Val asked, leaning forward.

  “Kelly MacGivers,” Pammy said. “She’s back on campus.”

  “What?” Eagle asked.

  “She re-enrolled.” Pammy shook the paper at Val and Eagle. “I have her address right here.”

  38

  Eagle

  Eagle hadn’t expected Pammy to have Kelly MacGivers’ campus address. She had thought that Kelly MacGivers was up in her bedroom in her parents’ house, hiding and shivering and pretending that she was Just Fine. Eagle hadn’t expected the girl to be back at the university.

  Pammy’s office was hot and close. Val looked a little shell-shocked. Pammy was more animated than she had been throughout the entire conversation. She held a piece of legal paper in her hands.

  Eagle leaned forward, reaching for the paper. “Are you sure you have Kelly MacGivers’ current address? Because she had enrolled before. That’s how the students knew her.”

  Pammy gave Eagle a withering look. “I spoke to the admissions office this morning, and this is what they gave me.”

  She handed Eagle the sheet. The same names that Eagle had been dealing with for the past twenty-four hours were on that list, only in Pammy’s neat printing. Most had notations in another hand nearby, but four were circled in red. One of those names was Kelly MacGivers.

  “The address is at the bottom of the page,” Pammy said.

  Eagle’s gaze snapped downward. There it was—Kelly MacGivers.

  “This can’t be right,” Eagle said. “She lives in Stern Hall?”

  “What’s wrong with Stern Hall?” Val asked.

  “It’s a dorm,” Eagle said.

  Val shrugged. “Don’t college students live in dorms?”

  “She’s not a first-year student,” Eagle said. “And from what I can tell, her parents have money.”

  “Generally students with money end up in their own apartments,” Pammy said. “Sometimes the parents even buy housing for them.”

  “Oh,” Val said, her voice lilting upward in obvious understanding. “I encountered that yesterday, with Darla’s roommate.”

  “Darla didn’t have the money to buy housing,” Pammy said, frowning. “Her father said she was a scholarship student.”

  Eagle was frowning too. She had forgotten about Darla Newsome.

  “I know she didn’t have the money,” Val said. “But her roommate, Lucy, owned the entire building or rather, her father did. And Lucy still has to pay rent, along with three other girls. Darla’s one of those girls. I let Lucy believe I was going to sublet from Darla.”

  “Still,” Eagle said, “that sounds expensive.”

  Val nodded. “Darla was working several jobs to pay for school and housing until sometime last year. Then she came into money.”

  All three women looked at each other. Eagle wasn’t understanding any of this. How did a student come into money that her parents didn’t know about?

  “Was she selling drugs?” Pammy asked.

  “No,” Val said. “Lucy has a no-drugs policy. Her father’s really strict. They can’t even smoke marijuana in the apartment.”

  Val said “marijuana” primly, and Eagle stiffened just a little. She suddenly realized that Val would disapprove of her lifestyle, if she knew about it.

  “Let’s get back to the point,” Eagle said, not wanting to discuss drugs at all. “We need to talk to Kelly MacGivers, but how?”

  “We’re not sure that she knew this guy,” Val said. “Something else entirely could have happened to her.”

  “Really?” Eagle asked. “Like what?”

  “A hazing gone wrong,” Val said. “Sororities and fraternities have strange rituals. It wouldn’t be the first time someone got injured in one of those.”

  Eagle was shaking her head. “If that happened, Mommy and Daddy would
be suing someone. These people have money. They would be talking to the university and they probably would not have sent their daughter back here.”

  “Hmm,” Val said. “Then maybe what happened to her didn’t happen at the university. Maybe we’re looking in the wrong place.”

  Eagle hated all of this guessing. They needed facts, not supposition. “I think we need to talk with her before we rule her out. She’s on the list, and she’s a good lead.”

  “She’s exactly what we thought,” Pammy said. “We thought the students would misidentify a few students as missing when the students were actually still enrolled.”

  “She’s not at all what we thought.” A throbbing had started in Eagle’s left temple, a clear sign that her blood pressure was going up. Why couldn’t these two understand? “Kelly MacGivers was injured, she deliberately went to a hospital outside of her neighborhood—both of her neighborhoods—”

  “Maybe whatever happened to her happened close by,” Pammy said.

  “If she was raped,” Val said, her voice quiet and yet somehow more powerful than everyone else’s, “her parents wouldn’t want anyone to know that. She wouldn’t want anyone to know that either. Maybe that’s why she avoided the family doctor.”

  Eagle looked at her. There was a hint of dusky red in Val’s cheeks. She wasn’t making eye contact.

  Pammy’s gaze had sharpened. Her frown deepened. She looked at Eagle and tilted her head slightly as if to say, Hmmm.

  “It’s possible,” Pammy said softly. “That would explain all of the secrecy, and the fact that the parents were being overprotective.”

  “Yeah, but it doesn’t explain the medical report,” Eagle said. “The file that the woman at the hospital read to me said nothing about assault, sexual or otherwise.”

  “Would that woman have told you?” Val’s voice was still quiet.

  She would have told Ethel, Eagle almost said, then caught the remark before it escaped. Val and Pammy didn’t know about Ethel or the Berkeley Department of Public Health. They didn’t know about all the lies she had told.

  Eagle sighed. She had to be honest here, in this room.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “The woman I was speaking to might have kept it quiet.”

  “Or, it might not be in the records at all,” Val said. “You mentioned the parents had money. If they had enough influence, they might have convinced the ER doctor to look, but not to mention it.”

  Eagle’s cheeks warmed. She thought of the ERs she had worked in as she trained. They had left a lot out of the reports, particularly compromising information, particularly information that had to do with some important person’s reputation.

  “That just confirms it,” Eagle said. “We need to talk to her.”

  Val sat up, ran a hand over her face. Her mood had changed from earlier. She seemed smaller somehow.

  “I suppose I can talk to her,” Val said. “Play the student again. But I don’t know how I’m going to get from ‘Hi, I want to move into this dorm’ to ‘Hey, when you were in the hospital last March, had you just been attacked? Or were you tied up at some frat party gone wrong?’”

  Eagle’s face grew even warmer. Put like that, none of them could talk to Kelly MacGivers. The lead was not as good as Eagle thought.

  “I can go,” Pammy said.

  Both Val and Eagle looked at her.

  Pammy shrugged. “I can play the Good Samaritan. I can bring her a flyer for the self-defense class, say a friend asked me to talk to her because she was in the hospital last March, and just see what happens.”

  Eagle knew what this kind of probing did with hospital patients. They often responded angrily, as if their privacy was being invaded. She couldn’t imagine what would happen with a student like Kelly.

  “It could get ugly,” Eagle said, not really wanting to elaborate.

  “I can handle myself,” Pammy said with a small smile. It sounded like bravado.

  Eagle shook her head. “I found her. I should talk with her. I can speak to her as a nurse—”

  “Eagle,” Pammy said in that condescending tone she had somehow mastered. “We both know I’m the best choice for this.”

  “She’s white?” Val asked.

  Eagle started. For a moment, she had forgotten that Val was even in the room.

  “Yeah, I…” Eagle shrugged. “I didn’t ask. I have no idea.”

  Pammy said, “With a name like Kelly MacGivers—”

  “She could be anyone,” Val said, a little sharply. “But the neighborhood where her parents live, you said that was a wealthy neighborhood?”

  “Yes,” Eagle said.

  “A wealthy white neighborhood?” Val asked.

  Eagle wasn’t sure how to answer that. “The neighborhoods are changing here. You know, covenants—”

  “That’s a yes, right?” Val asked.

  Eagle hated thinking about race, almost as much as she hated ignoring it.

  “It’s a yes,” she said quietly.

  “Then odds are that Kelly’s white,” Val said. “And if I went in, asking impertinent questions, she won’t talk to me.”

  “She might,” Pammy said.

  Val shook her head slightly. “Let’s not sugarcoat.”

  Pammy’s cheeks turned red. Val had clearly embarrassed her.

  But Val seemed to be ignoring that. She shifted in her chair, and looked at Eagle. Val seemed to be growing stronger again.

  “And Eagle, you would be coming at it from the medical side, right?” Val asked.

  “Yes,” Eagle said. “I think I could approach her as a nurse, and…”

  She let her voice trail off as Val shook her head, more strongly this time.

  “She was injured in March. Her parents—or maybe it was her—anyway, someone kept it quiet. That’s over four months ago. If she has lingering injuries, either her personal doctor or someone is taking care of them. Or she’s ignoring them. A person can do a lot of healing in four months, and being reminded of an old injury isn’t what someone usually wants.”

  That sounded like the voice of experience. Eagle had the sense that more had happened to Val than she had confided at Caffe Med.

  “I think,” Val was saying, “Pammy’s right. She’s our best choice. If you approach her in some kind of nonthreatening way.”

  She said that last to Pammy.

  Pammy leaned back slightly. She clearly wasn’t used to having someone else be in charge. She didn’t know anything about medicine, so she let Eagle handle that, but it was always Pammy’s idea to bring Eagle in on some case. Eagle wouldn’t take the lead until Pammy assigned it.

  Val wasn’t waiting for permission from Pammy to take the lead. Val was acting with initiative, the kind that someone who was used to being in charge took naturally.

  Pammy’s lips thinned. She looked slightly distressed, even though she had been the one who had initially suggested that she talk to Kelly alone.

  “I won’t threaten her,” Pammy said tightly.

  “That’s not what I meant,” Val said. “If you showed up out of the blue to talk to me about some trauma in my past, I might slam the door on you. But maybe, if you can approach her in a way that would get her to help someone else…”

  Eagle shifted slightly in the folding chair. It creaked, and she felt a surge of irritation.

  That was what they were doing with Val. They were bringing her in, getting her to help someone else, even as she was helping herself. Was she so self-aware that she knew this was going on? Or was this just a side comment without any awareness at all?

  Pammy did not look at Eagle. Maybe Pammy hadn’t made the connection, or maybe she was still struggling with losing control of the conversation.

  “I can handle this,” Pammy said again, her tone just as irritated as it had been before.

  “I know,” Val said. “I just find myself worried about this girl. If she was raped or traumatized somehow, then she’s probably pretty fragile. That’s why I think it’s really gre
at you’re going to see her. Maybe you can get her to sign up for a class. Even if she can’t help us, she might benefit from it. Because just the handful of details that we have point toward something awful in her recent past.”

  Compassion. Eagle hadn’t expected that. Sometimes Eagle felt like she had lost the ability to show compassion. She faked it good, but her heart wasn’t in it.

  Val’s clearly was.

  Pammy’s expression had softened. Somewhere she realized that Val hadn’t been insulting her or trying to take over the conversation. Val was worried about the other woman, a woman none of them had met yet.

  Pammy probably liked that. Pammy worried about other people too much. It was one of the things that irritated the hell out of Eagle. It was one of the reasons for situations like the one last night.

  “I’ll talk to her,” Pammy said softly.

  “Today,” Eagle said firmly. “Maybe if we can figure out what’s going on, we can still find the woman I saw.”

  Or, at least, find her alive.

  Although Eagle doubted it. If this guy was kidnapping women—people?— and carting them off somewhere, maybe Mount Diablo, maybe somewhere else, he clearly wasn’t keeping them forever. He was hurting them for his own sick reasons and then dumping them.

  “I don’t have a lot of classes today,” Pammy said. “I’ll head over to Stern and see if I can catch her. I’ll make sure Jill’s prepared to take my late afternoon class if need be.”

  “Thank you,” Eagle said. She looked at Val. “What were the names of those cops with that jurisdictional case?”

  “I just have last names.” Val checked her list. “Fleenan and Ruffner.”

  “Not the men who came to see me, then,” Eagle said. “I think I’ll talk to those two, remind them of the jurisdictional case. Maybe they didn’t even know.”

  “You might want to ask them about the girl in the park,” Pammy said.

  Eagle raised her head. Val looked over at Pammy as well.

  “What girl in the park?” Eagle asked.

  Pammy nodded. “Someone found a body in Tilden Park yesterday. Not your girl, Eagle. She’d been dead longer than Sunday.”