Girls on Film

by Gregg Olsen

  “She was very pretty,” I say when Mr. Moriarty hands me an amber bottle of beer.

  He swallows some beer, slumps into a chair across from me. I’m grateful for that. My CM indicated he’d slide next to me on the couch. I’m not always right.

  For the next hour he drinks three beers. I dump the second half of mine in the plant on the stand next to me. It foams over and I’m pretty sure he’s going to notice. But he doesn’t. He’s too busy telling me what a bitch his wife was and flexing his triceps in that way that is supposed to turn a girl on.

  “Another beer?” he offers.

  “I have to drive.” I don’t tell him that I barely know how to drive and that drinking any more than half a bottle of beer is too great of a risk. I can’t get a DUI. If I did my mother would die of complete embarrassment.

  Before my father actually kills her. If I don’t find her in time.

  Mr Moriarty tells me about the trial. How Megan’s boyfriend, Kim Mock, was convicted.

  “I wasn’t sorry when he got shanked to death by some crazy in prison. I mean, not at first,” says Mr. Moriarty. He belches and I do my best not to recoil.

  I didn’t know Kim had been killed, but I don’t let on.

  “Retribution,” I offer instead. “For Megan?.

  He nods. I see a strange look in his eyes. I can’t quite place it.

  “You’re holding something back, Mr. Moriarty”

  “Call me Dan, honey”

  I resist the childish compulsion to call him Dan-Honey.

  “Dan, what is it?.

  He draws in a deep breath then exhales the warm air of a brewery in my direction. I try not to wince.

  “I don’t know. My wife. Ex-wife. She never really believed that Kim killed Megan. I guess I had some doubts too”

  “What doubts?” I ask.

  “Kim was a typical teenager. Sure, he was all over Megan like a dirty shirt half the time, but she could hold her own. She was a cheerleader, but she didn’t put out. She told her mom she was saving herself for her husband. That’s cool. That’s every father’s hope. I think Kim understood that. My ex didn’t think he was the type to abduct and rape Megan. Anyone who really knew him said he wouldn’t do that”

  I take in his words. His demeanor has changed with the speed of a flash flood. He looks broken-hearted, pathetic. His wall has come down. I don’t trust him, but in that moment I find something to like about him. He loved his daughter. He thought she was safe. He is awash with regret.

  “Megan was missing for ten days, right?.

  He shakes his head. “Two weeks”

  “Where was Kim?.

  “That’s just it. He was here most of the time. He was helping to look for her. It didn’t seem to any of us that he could fake that kind of hurt and worry. Kim was just as distraught as we were. Devastated.” He stops and peels off the label on the beer bottle, then stares over in the direction of the mantel.

  “Mr. Moriarty—I mean, Dan,” I say, trying to reel him back in the moment. “You don’t think Kim did it? Despite the evidence?.

  He snaps back. His dark eyes look directly into mine. “I wanted to believe it. I really did. The detective working the case recovered Megan’s underwear from Kim’s car. Dirt in the trunk matched soil on her heels”

  “Where did they say he kept her?.

  This is important. I don’t know for sure, of course, but I hope that wherever the killer kept Megan—the same place he kept my mother—is still a favorite.

  Dan Moriarty shifts in his chair. “They never knew,” he says. “Somewhere around here. I never figured Kim could do that to my little girl. Raping her. Defiling her like he did”

  Part of me wants the gory details of what the killer did to Megan because I know that whatever it was—up to a point— was the same thing he did to my mom. My mother. They were all picked up around the same time. I look down at my notes. I see the date on which Megan disappeared. I calculate backwards nine months.

  I am sixteen. Sweet sixteen. I’m the same age as the girls.

  The thought of that brings me back to the tattoo. I ask Mr Moriarty if Megan had a tattoo.

  “That’s another thing,” he says, surprised by my question. “Not many people know about that. We hadn’t seen it before. They said she got it a week or so before she went missing”

  My heart rate quickens. I already know what it was and where it was. I ask anyway.

  “A heart. On her shoulder,” he says.

  “With a sixteen in it?.

  He shoots me a peculiar look. “Yeah, how did you know?.

  I turn to a clean page in the reporter’s notebook—also stolen from cat-loving community newspaper editor Tracy Lee—and sketch out my recollection of the one Mom had on her shoulder. It was faint and I was so young, but I do my best to draw it anyway.

  “Did it look like this?” I ask, spinning the notebook in his direction.

  He nods slowly, very slowly, as though he’s fighting a recollection that at once hurts and haunts. Then he dissolves into tears.

  “Yeah. I only saw it one time. In a police photo”

  BACK AT THE BEST WESTERN, I take an apple from the front desk and go to the business center. I hover over a kid playing Candy Crush and sigh loudly. He ignores me and goes on with his game until I do it a second and third time. Finally, and very reluctantly, he leaves the little room containing a single computer, a printer, and a trash can. I hold it inside, but I’m enraged. After seeing what my bio dad has done to the Blumes and even Dan Moriarty I want to kill him for that alone. What kind of human garbage goes around torturing young girls? What kind of evil ectoplasm coagulated to create this monster? I have a gun. I have an ice pick. I have scissors. I will need even more than those to come after him and put him in a place where he writhes in agony and I show him what it is to experience the pain he’s brought to others. That’s what’s driving me. The mask that I’ve been wearing as I play Tracy Lee is starting to crack and I’m fully aware of it.

  I search Kim Mock’s name on the internet. It’s a common name, but the one I’m looking for is the one that was incarcerated for Megan Moriarty’s murder. I skim through the trial transcripts and news articles. Nothing more jumps out at me. I see a picture of Kim. He looks bewildered, sitting next to his defense attorney. In the background I see a man I recognize as Dan Moriarty—younger, but out of shape. Next to him is a woman with her hands pressed against her chest as if she’s holding her breaking heart inside. Megan’s mom. She has those same haunted eyes that I saw in Mrs. Blume. No mother ever gets over such a loss. If I was going to actually write that article as Tracy Lee that’s how I would start it.

  Next, I scroll down. A headline jumps at me.

  mock succumbs to injurie.

  I devour the article giving a recap of Kim Mock’s crime. All of it. How he’d been sentenced to life, and how, on his eighteenth birthday, he was moved from a juvenile justice center in Seattle to the men’s correctional facility in Monroe, a sleepy prison town east of Everett, Washington. As I read, it is as though I’m in a race to capture every detail I can in one giant gulp. He was considered a model prisoner there, teaching other inmates how to read and write. He even led a Bible study group.

  On Tuesday Mock was in the prison chapel when an assailant stabbed him with a knife made from a flattened and sharpened spoon. Mock was taken to the infirmary where he died after surgery. His attacker has not been identified. The prison was on lockdown for twenty-four hours, but is operating normally again today.

  At the bottom of the article mention is made that there was a pending investigation into Mock’s death.

  I move further down the computer screen. The article is so brief that if I blinked at the moment it passed in front of me I would have missed it.

  REVIEW INTO MOCK DEATH COMPLET.

  I can’t see any of the words in an order that I can read because a person’s name assaults my eyes. It pulses at me. It sends a shiver down my spine. At the same time I feel a kin
d of elation and hope. Just for a moment.

  The name of the guard who found Kim Mock stabbed and alone was Michael Rader.

  An icy chill pours down my body.

  From what little I can find about Alex Rader, and there isn’t much—no phone, no address—I know from an old directory still online that Alex has a younger brother. His name is Michael.

  Chapter Twelve

  Cash: $53.

  Food: Four apples from the front desk. One granola bar.

  Shelter: Best Western Motel, Kent, Washington.

  Weapons: Gun, scissors, ice pick.

  Plan: Find Alex Rader and shove the ice pick into his eyes.

  AS I DRIFT INTO UNEASY slumber, Selma comes to me in a dream. The girl from the rest stop is running as fast as she can. Her feet are bare and bloody, her dark curls streaming back in the wind. I call out to her to hurry, but no sound comes from my lips. She moves toward me, and as she approaches, I recognize the look in her eyes. She’s terrified of something and she needs my help. She screams. The sound is so loud that I close my eyes to try to seal it from my eardrums. When I snap them open a second later, still in my dream, all I see is a white and red nightgown laying in the parking lot next to the well-worn trail to the restroom. I cry out for Selma as I hurry to the nightgown. I pick it up and hold it to my face. The smell is unpleasant, and I know instantly what it is. I’m taking in the acrid odor of blood.

  When I pull away, I notice that my hands are bloody.

  The dream—no, the nightmare—propels me out of my restless slumber. I feel sick, scared, angry. I don’t grasp the importance of the dream or why I had it. Caleb told me one time that dreams were messages from your subconscious. I’m more practical than that, but I let him believe that I agreed. I hated lying to him, but I saw the lie as a way to get just a little bit closer to him. So if he was right and I was wrong—and I don’t like admitting it—what was that dream, that horrific dream, telling me? Was Selma me? Was Selma my mother? We’re both blond, not dark haired. Our hair is straight, not the mass of curls of the girl running away from the van.

  Then it begins to hit me. I roll out of the bed and go the bathroom where I sit on the toilet and cry. I am crying so loudly that I turn on the shower so that the people in the motel room next door can’t hear. For good measure, I flush the toilet three times. In the mirror, I see my mother again. Not a ghost or a spirit or whatever, but the essence of her in my face. I don’t say the words, but they move from my mind to wherever my mom is right now.

  Hold on.

  I’m coming.

  I will make him pay with his life.

  We will be free.

  As I think these words, I know each one is a long shot. As resourceful as I want to be, I’m only fifteen—sixteen at the most. I’m a girl. I’ve never shot a gun or hurt anyone in my life. All the odds are against me except one thing that my bio dad could never count on.

  I am determined to be as ruthless as he is.

  THE NEXT MORNING I STEAL the maid’s tip money from her supply cart parked in the middle of the hallway two rooms away. Honestly, she was almost offering it up as help for the cause. It was just sitting there out in the open and I took it. Crime of opportunity. I feel bad about it, of course, but I need enough cash for another night’s lodging. That’s in the immediate. I hurry past the tiny soaps and toilet paper-laden cart as silently and as quickly as I can to the front desk where I pay the clerk and say that my sister Leanne wants me to hang out with her one more day. I act put out by the inconvenience.

  “I thought her name was Megan,” she says.

  Uh-oh.

  “Megan-Leanne. I know,” I say, “completely whack. My mother had two sisters and couldn’t make up her mind so Meglee, as we sometimes call her, got stuck with a hyphenated name. I never know what to call her”

  She shakes her head. “Parents can be so dumb”

  I nod with a bemused look. “Yeah, and if you ask me,” I say, “they don’t get smarter with age”

  That cracks her up and as I wait for her to print out the receipt I pick the lone banana from the remainder of the tragic little fruit bowl set aside for Diamond Members—of which I’m not, having never stayed there before. I don’t really like bananas because they make my tongue feel itchy, but I’m getting tired of apples. A second later, I’m out the door and driving toward Leanne Delmont’s childhood home in a neighborhood yet further south of Seattle in Tacoma. I’m pretty good at being a reporter, I think, and I wish that I’d taken more than three business cards from Tracy Lee’s little holder. And it turns out that I’m not a halfway bad driver either. At least, no one is honking at me to go faster any more.

  When I arrive my jaw drops. The Delmont residence grabs the edge of a cliff that overlooks the city of Tacoma and the surprisingly pristine looking waters of Commencement Bay. It is by far the biggest and nicest house that I’ve ever seen outside of a magazine. The front door is huge and all glass. I wonder how anyone could keep such a thing clean. Hayden with his dirty little fingers would make a mess of it in about two minutes.

  Hayden. His third day alone. I worry about him. So small. So trusting. And I’ve abandoned him. I want to call him. I need to. But I can’t. At least I don’t think it is a good idea. I don’t know if he and Aunt Ginger are really safe. I could be wrong about my father. He might be watching them too, as he tries to find me.

  A woman with spun gold hair and big diamond earrings answers the door. I recognize her immediately. Leanne’s mother, Monique Delmont, was in all the papers. After her daughter’s disappearance and murder, she found purpose in creating and funding a victims’ advocacy group that eventually led to more stringent laws against habitual offenders.

  Like the monster that police and prosecutors said killed her only child.

  This advocacy group had made life much easier for me. Last night I simply called their number from the motel and arranged to meet with Mrs. Delmont. She told me she’d be happy to help with my article.

  “We must never forget our victims and all they’ve gone through,” she said before hanging up.

  The gleaming hardwood floor echoes under the heels of her designer shoes as she leads me to a cozy seating area in the corner of a great room that is full of understated elegance. The room is larger than the last two houses our family lived in. She offers coffee and some amazing almond cookies and I am grateful for something other than fruit and granola bars. I know I should stop and have a proper meal, but I can’t. I am running out of time.

  She looks at me closely. The look on her face is strange. Sweet. Concerned. I haven’t seen that kind of look in my direction in a long time. If I have, I didn’t acknowledge it. I keep the shell pretty secure.

  “Are you all right, dear?” she asks.

  I wonder what it is that she thinks is wrong with me.

  “Excuse me?” I say in the kindest, most nonthreateningly, attitude-free manner in which anyone could ever utter that pair of words.

  Her eyes are deep blue and full of genuine concern. She looks down at my hands. “You’ve chewed your nails to the quick,” she says.

  I look down. My fingernails are nearly gone. I hadn’t realized that I’d been gnawing them to the point of oblivion. I wonder what other ways my anger, anxiety, fear, and need for revenge is manifesting itself. I feel I am changing in ways that I both welcome and revile. Chewed nails are on the reviled side of the T-chart that makes up my life’s pros and cons.

  “It’s just this story,” I say, noticing that one of my fingertips is wet. Have I been chewing my nails in front of her? How could I be so unaware of myself? What is wrong with me.

  “It has been a long time, but it still hurts me deeply too. I try to keep busy. I try to help, but in the background I still see my Leanne and her father on the sailboat, smiling, having the time of their lives. She went missing from the marina and I play that day over and over”

  “Of course you already know this because of your work, but you’re not alone. All homicid
e survivors feel that way.” As the words tumble from my lips, I notice her face tighten. I was trying to be thoughtful, but it came off as condescending. I reel back in my words with the only thing that I can think of. I lie to her.

  “My sister Courtney was murdered,” I say. “I grieve for her every day”

  Monique Delmont’s face relaxes. She rests her hands on my knee. “Well then, we’re in a sisterhood of unending grief,” she says.

  I don’t want to be in any such sisterhood. I want to be in a sisterhood of vengeance and retribution. All of her meetings, her fundraisers, her local talk show appearances, haven’t added up to anything. Not really. As long as the killers breathe in the same air as we do, victims’ families are never free.

  We talk about the article I’m supposedly writing and then burrow into the specifics of her case. Apart from the reference to the sailboat, Mrs. Delmont doesn’t mention her husband once in our time together. I don’t know if they’re divorced or if he’s dead. I don’t ask. I don’t think I can take one more bit of the hurt that visits the parents of dead children.

  Her gaze is directed out at the waters of Commencement Bay and the tankers and the parade of tugboats that plow through its deep blue waters. She talks about the hell that became her world when Leanne disappeared and was found twenty-two days later in a gravel pit and quarry near Issaquah, Washington. It was hard to pin down exactly what had killed her because there were so many attacks on her body. She’d been beaten. Burned. Stabbed. The medical examiner who testified at trial said that what had been done to the sixteen-year-old was “the most heinous and barbaric attack” she’d ever seen inflicted upon another human being.