[Kate Lange 01.0] Damaged

by Pamela Callow

  “I sold Lisa some pills and then she got killed.” She shrugged. “Just like the others.”

  “We’ll get to the others in a minute. What time did you sell Lisa the pills?”

  “Around ten o’clock.” Shonda shrugged again. “Shit, I don’t know for sure.”

  “Let’s assume it was ten o’clock. What happened then?”

  “Lisa took the pills. She went off with some friends. They were goin’ to someone’s place.”

  “And?” Kate Lange prompted gently.

  She hadn’t freaked out about her selling Lisa the pills, Shonda realized. She slumped back against the chair and began to play with the hole in her T-shirt. “She got high. I saw her later. She was by herself.”

  “What was she doing?”

  “She was walking home.” She had watched Lisa skip down the street. Lisa’d stopped and given her twenty bucks for one last hit, then headed south.

  “Was that the last time you saw her?”

  Jesus, how many fucking questions did this woman have? She wasn’t used to talking this long. “Yeah.”

  “Tell me about the others.”

  The lawyer’s eyes rested on her face. Kate Lange’s eyes were like clear, bright pools. Like a kid’s. The other girls always looked at her with eyes that were hard and dull like old marbles. “There were two other girls who went missing.”

  “Since when?”

  She thought about it. Since when? She never thought about time in months anymore. It was all about the day she was in. When she’d have to get out of bed, when she’d eat, when she’d deal, when she’d get high. That was it.

  “Was it just recently?” Kate Lange asked. “Like in the past few months?”

  She shook her head slowly. “No. Vangie disappeared when I was fifteen.”

  “How old are you now?”

  “Seventeen.” Was that surprise on the woman’s face? She hunched her shoulders.

  “So this girl named Vangie went missing several years ago?”

  “Yeah. She got in a car with some guy and no one saw her again.”

  She still remembered that night. Vangie’d been holed up in her room. If she’d known how strung out Vangie had been, she’d never have gone to the apartment. But it’d been a freezing September night, the mist soaking her through and it hadn’t even started to rain. She didn’t want to spend another night huddled under the overpass. The damp, the cold, the darkness. It never changed. Never got better.

  She’d thought Vangie would help her. But Vangie’d had too many rocks and Darrell was pissed that she was huddled over her dirty sheets, her wig all hangin’ over her face.

  The look in his eyes when he saw her made her stomach turn over. She’d stood in the dim living room, not sure whether she should just leave but the warmth had glued her to the spot. Then Darrell uttered the words she’d sensed had been growing like maggots in his small brain for a while. “If Vangie don’t work, you’re gonna.”

  Shonda didn’t waste any time. She strode into Vangie’s bedroom. Vangie was kneeling on the floor, her head on the mattress. A glass tube with a tiny piece of rock in it lay between her fingers.

  “C’mon, Vange. Get your ass off the bed,” Shonda said. She’d slid her hands under Vangie’s pits and pulled her up. A smell wafted off Vangie: stale, bitter, used.

  Shonda’d seen Vangie wasted before, but not like this. Vangie swayed on her feet against Shonda. Then her whole body spasmed. But she said nothing. Nothing. Just stared past Shonda’s shoulder. Usually when Vangie was high she’d be all excited and loud, shouting and singing and partying. It was the only time she’d smile, because she’d forget to hide her broken teeth.

  Darrell’s cell phone had rung and he strode out of the room. Over his shoulder he yelled, “Get the bitch outside.” He threw a ten dollar bill at Shonda.

  “Sure thing,” Shonda’d said. Vangie leaned against her. Pity and revulsion flooded through her. Vangie smelled like something else. But she was so thin. And small. Shonda hadn’t realized how tiny Vangie was. Like a little broken bird on her shoulder.

  Shit. She couldn’t be feeling all sorry for her. She was a crackhead. She smoked rocks instead of eating.

  Shonda’d pulled Vangie more roughly than she intended across the room. Vangie muttered, “I’m a bird.”

  “You crazy bitch,” Shonda’d said, and picked up the ten dollar bill Darrell had left for her. She stuffed it into her pocket, guiding Vangie past the old sofa with the stains bigger than the faded flowers. They reached the door. Vangie looked around her, as if trying to figure out something.

  They went outside. It was so quiet, Shonda’d heard her stomach gurgle. She could almost taste that burger. And she hadn’t tasted much in the past two days. Drizzle fell. Damp coated the north end street in a greasy sheen. The smell of the container pier, of oil and rancid seaweed, filled Shonda’s nose. Her stomach roiled.

  She’d led Vangie to her corner. No one else was there. All the other girls had already gone with johns. Shit. It better not be a quiet night. Vangie needed to make some money for Darrell. Shonda didn’t want him asking for no money back.

  A car cruised slowly down the hill, toward them. Relief made Shonda’s head buzz. Looked like Vangie had a customer. And that meant she’d make some dough for dickhead.

  That meant Shonda had done her job and could buy her burger, her fries, her milk shake.

  She’d propped Vangie against the telephone pole. Mist shivered on the coarse strands of Vangie’s wig, silvery and damp. It shrouded her head in a spider’s web.

  Goose bumps had prickled Shonda’s skin. Vangie’s lips looked sunken and shriveled in the unforgiving streetlight. Like a death’s head. Shonda’d groped in her pocket for her lip gloss. The car had stopped at the lights thirty feet away. She had just enough time to smooth the gloss over Vangie’s cracked lips. She tilted Vangie’s chin in her hand. Her heart unexpectedly contracted with concern. Vangie’s skin was friggin’ cold.

  “You okay, Vange?” she’d asked.

  Vangie swallowed.

  The lights changed. The drizzle turned to rain as the car drew nearer, like the headlights were performing a magic trick. Damp crawled over Shonda’s bare arms, up under her skirt. The car slowed down in front of them.

  It stopped.

  She’d waited for Vangie to make her move. To sashay over in her heels and show her scrawny leg, maybe flash her red thong.

  She did nothing. The man in the car waited.

  “C’mon, Vange,” she’d said.

  Vangie’d muttered to herself.

  The passenger’s window slid down. “You workin’?” the man had asked from the dark recesses of his seat.

  Shonda couldn’t see his face but she sensed his impatience. “Yeah,” she said quickly. She’d grabbed Vangie’s hand before the man could say anything more. He opened the door, and Shonda propelled Vangie forward on her heels, pushing her into the car. She shut the door before Vangie could say anything. The car drove off.

  The queasy feeling had churned Shonda’s stomach again. The whole deal seemed off, different from the other times, wrong somehow. Maybe it was because Vangie’d been doing too much crack. It was changing her. Maybe she shouldn’t have put Vangie in the car.

  “Did you report this to the police?” Kate Lange asked.

  Shonda focused back on the lawyer’s face. She bet Kate Lange had probably never had a run-in with a cop in her life. To a lawyer, cops were friends, looking after the rich folks. But to Shonda, they were a threat. Runaways don’t go to no cops. “No.”

  Kate Lange showed no surprise at this answer. She shifted slightly on her chair. “What did she look like?”

  Shonda tried to picture Vangie in her mind. “She was real small. Old.”

  “Anything that made her special?”

  “Nah—” she started to say, but then a picture shot through her head. Vangie putting those fucking red shoes on. The fluttering tattoo covering her skinny ankle. “She had a tattoo. It wa
s a bird…”

  Kate Lange leaned forward. “What kind of bird?”

  “Shit, I don’t know.” She stretched the hole in her shirt bigger. She used to know the name of it. “It’s a small bird. With little wings that fly really fast.”

  “A sparrow?”

  Shonda flashed her a look of disgust. “Nah. It sticks its nose into flowers.”

  “A hummingbird!”

  “Yeah.” Their eyes met in a look of mutual satisfaction. Shonda looked back down at the hole in her shirt. “It was orange and red. Real pretty.”

  Kate Lange wrote this down on a notepad. “Anything else?”

  Jesus, would she stop with the questions. “No.”

  “And there was another girl?”

  Shonda felt the pressure growing inside her. She needed another hit. But a vague memory crept across her brain. Karen…Karen what’s-her-name. She was supposed to meet her a few months ago after turning tricks to buy more dope but she never showed up. Shonda had been too high to worry about it.

  “Karen,” Shonda said. “Karen went missing. We figured she’d gone out west…” She shrugged. “Turns out the cops said she’d died of ex…ex…of being out in the cold too long.”

  “Marian MacAdam said you told the police this and they did nothing about it.”

  “I told the cops about Karen. And Vangie. They told me it was so long ago it’d be hard to track her down. They wanted me to make a missing persons report.”

  “Did you do that?”

  “Yeah.” Shonda remembered the small black words. A woman cop had helped her fill in the blanks. She shrugged again. “But the cops did nothin’. And now Krissie’s missing.”

  “Krissie?”

  “Yeah. She’s another girl I know. No one’s seen her since Saturday night. But sometimes she goes home to Cape Breton to see her mother.”

  “Do the police know that?”

  “I’m gonna call them if I don’t see her…” She bit her lip. Krissie also went on smack binges. She wasn’t going to tell the lawyer about those. But she didn’t want to call the police and get Krissie dragged into the hospital. Krissie would be so pissed with her.

  Kate Lange stood. “Thanks for talking to me, Shonda. I’ll check on those missing girls for you. What are their last names?”

  “Vangie’s last name was…” She searched her memory. It felt like she was stirring sludge with a stick. “White. I mean, Wright.” She pursed her lips. “Don’t remember Karen’s.”

  Kate Lange took out another card and jotted a number on it. “This is my direct line. Call me on it if you remember Karen’s last name.” She handed it to her. “Thanks very much, Shonda.”

  “What’re you goin’ to do about all this?”

  “Once I track down the reports, I’ll see if there’s something the police might have missed. Then I’ll call you.” The lawyer glanced around the room. “Do you have a phone?”

  She stood and patted her pocket. “I got a cell. Here’s my number.” She recited it while the lawyer wrote it down. Then the lawyer headed for the door. Shonda unchained it, scanning the street before letting the lawyer by.

  “See ya.”

  Kate Lange stopped on the sidewalk. “Call me if you have any more concerns, Shonda. I would like to help.”

  You can’t help me. The thought flashed through her head. She steadied herself against the door. Fuck, she needed a hit. “Yeah.”

  “Goodbye.”

  She closed the door and leaned against it. Darrell would be back soon. She got to fill those baggies.

  Chapter 22

  Kate drove back to her office, idly listening to her car radio. Her mind was on her conversation with Shonda. The girl was a drug addict, but her concern about her missing friends was genuine. She sorted through the facts: the first girl to go missing was Vangie Wright, about a year and a half ago. Then another prostitute by the name of Karen disappeared. But she apparently died of exposure in February…so that girl was accounted for. And the last girl—Krissie Burns—just went missing thirty-six hours ago. All these girls were transients and drug addicts, girls who easily moved around and fell through the cracks when they used. It didn’t mean they were victims of foul play.

  “Breaking news,” a chirpy female announcer on the radio said excitedly. “A serial killer is on the loose on the streets of Halifax!” She paused for dramatic effect.

  Kate shook her head. The radio stations were getting really desperate for listeners if they had to resort to pronouncements like that.

  “Yesterday we reported that police found the body of a young woman. They are viewing the death as suspicious,” the announcer added in an I’m-a-serious-news-anchor voice.

  Kate’s scalp prickled. She turned up the volume. “We have just learned this hour that sources close to the scene have indicated the young woman was killed in a similar fashion to fifteen-year-old homicide victim Lisa MacAdam.”

  Suddenly the announcement of a serial killer preying on Haligonians didn’t seem so preposterous. Could the victim be the prostitute whom Shonda said had disappeared on Saturday night?

  She waited for more details, her pulse racing. “And now a look at sports,” the news announcer intoned.

  “Damn,” Kate muttered. Until she knew who the murder victim was, she wouldn’t be able to get the missing Krissie Burns out of her head. She hurried back to her office. Ignoring all her messages, she checked the local news sites on the Internet. But there was no further information.

  Now what should she do?

  Call Ethan.

  But after their last meeting it was the last thing she wanted to do.

  She could call the police.

  She bit her lip. She could just imagine that phone conversation. Yes, I’m the lawyer who gave bad advice to the first murder victim’s grandmother and then reported her missing. I’m also the ex-fiancée of one of your detectives. You know, the one who humiliated him in front of your division on New Year’s Eve? Now I have information that may show you guys aren’t on the ball…or at least Vicky isn’t.

  They’d love that. Just as much as Randall would. His pointed warning flashed through her mind. Do a good job on the TransTissue file. She was still waiting to hear back from John Lyons about her memo. But what with the events of the past week, she’d barely thought about TransTissue’s defense, hadn’t even dug into the piles of research mounded on her desk. And if she really wanted to impress John Lyons, she should be determining the evidence needed to support their position. Panic welled inside her. She wanted this case. She wanted to do a good job. Not just to assure herself a spot on the LMB letterhead, but to prove to herself—especially after the Marian MacAdam debacle—that she actually was a good lawyer.

  But she couldn’t ignore what Shonda had told her.

  If the second murder victim was Krissie Burns, then maybe Shonda’s other missing girls were related to this case, too. The police needed to be given the heads-up.

  She reached for the phone. Her stomach clenched.

  * * *

  Ethan’s cell rang as he was pulling out of the halfway house parking lot. Frustration seethed in him. Tracking down the ex-cons Judge Carson had put away was looking more and more like a dead end with the discovery of a second victim. Krissie Burns’ connection to Judge Carson was nil. Unless the murderer had been bitten by bloodlust and had begun to pick off other prostitutes for the fun of it, Ethan was wasting his time.

  “Drake,” he said into the phone.

  “It’s me. Kate.” Her voice was low, strained.

  His body reacted before his brain did: his heart accelerated, a vein pounded in his temple. Despite himself, despite his rationalizing that Kate was the wrong woman for all the right reasons, his heart squeezed painfully. He bit down on his bottom teeth. He couldn’t afford to feel this way about her. Especially after the way she pushed him away. She was in Randall Barrett’s camp now. And she couldn’t risk going against the bastard. He had to remember that. His grip on the steering wheel ti
ghtened.

  “Hi.” He forced his voice to sound businesslike. “Did you find the notes?” Although Judge Carson had moved down the list of suspects, he still wanted the notes. Just to tie off loose ends.

  Just to make sure that Kate kept her promise to him.

  “No.”

  His disappointment angered him. He should have known better.

  She hesitated. “But I’ve got some information. It might be pertinent to the MacAdam case.”

  “Just a sec,” he said, his tone curt. “I’m gonna pull over.” He slid into a parking spot at a convenience store. “So. What kind of information do you have that wasn’t in the notes?” He allowed a derisory edge to sharpen his voice.

  He could feel her tension over the phone. It fueled his own in a perversely satisfying way.

  “I had a phone call from Lisa MacAdam’s grandmother. She met a girl named Shonda at Lisa’s funeral who told her some other girls went missing. Other prostitutes. One of them was named Krissie Burns.”

  “Krissie Burns?” His contrariness evaporated. That was victim number two. If this girl Shonda had actually seen the killer pick up her friend… “You sure?”

  “Yes.” She paused. “Was Krissie Burns the girl whose body was just found?”

  He hesitated. It was confidential information, and Kate was officially—and unofficially—off limits.

  His conscience won out. She’d called him in good faith. “Yes. We’re still tracking down her family.”

  “How did you ID her?”

  “Vicky remembered her from her criminal record.”

  “Oh.” That one word spoke volumes. Vicky had also remembered Kate’s father from his criminal record.

  “She gave us our break, Kate,” Ethan said softly.

  “Yes. I understand.” Her voice was cool.

  “Did this girl Shonda report her suspicions to the police?” he asked.

  “She hadn’t reported Krissie Burns’ disappearance because she said sometimes she went to see her mother in Cape Breton. Apparently there were two other girls—”

  “When?” He tensed.