Missing White Girl

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  Buck found Manuela Lavender, wearing a nightgown, faceup on the floor. Her legs were splayed awkwardly and the nightgown had ridden up almost to her left hip. He wanted to pull it down, to allow her some modesty, but he knew the integrity of the scene had to be preserved until it could be photographed.

  Her face was bruised, lips split, a couple of teeth knocked out. She’d been hit hard with something. That hadn’t killed her though. The hole over her breast had probably done that. The cotton nightgown was singed at the hole’s edges, and blood had infiltrated the cotton fibers like a battalion of tiny saboteurs. Two flies twitched lazily around the wound. Gently, Buck prodded with the toe of his boot, turning her just enough to see the fist-sized exit hole between her shoulder blades.

  He moved on to Hugh, also on the floor, closer to their unmade double bed. Rolled over on his side, arms flopped out, legs bent, Hugh wore pajama bottoms with no shirt covering his muscular chest. He’d also been shot, in the back of the head. Most of the top half of his face was gone. Bits of brain and skull and flesh littered the quilt and clung wetly to the wall above the bed, shellacked there by a spray of red. Hugh’s had been an old man’s face, prematurely aged by sun and wind and work. His dark skin had taken on a grayish cast over the years. As with many ranchers, there had been a permanent ridge above his eyes where his hat rested every waking hour unless he was eating or in church. All gone now. Buck bit back a curse.

  He couldn’t stomach much more of this, but he forced himself to keep going.

  The next room was the one he’d been most afraid of entering. The two younger kids, boys, shared it. He knew their names, Kevin and Neal, made himself say them out loud. They were eight and six. The room looked like a boys’ room, with action figures and children’s books and Scooby-Doo sheets on the bunk beds. The boys had been handsome kids, Buck had always thought, inheriting golden brown skin, their father’s tightly curled hair, and their mother’s almond-shaped eyes.

  Those eyes were closed now, mercifully. Both had been stabbed in the chest and stomach, not shot—stabbed twice in Kevin’s case, the older boy; three times in Neal’s. Blood had soaked into the sheets beneath Kevin’s body, and no doubt the mattress as well. Neal was on the floor near the lower bunk. His fingers were abraded, and Buck wondered if he had fought to protect his brother.

  One door remained. Buck remembered the last time he had seen Lulu Lavender, down in Douglas on the Fourth of July. She had been at the park for the fireworks display with a young man from Bisbee. They had been holding hands, kissing, laughing together. She was a beautiful girl, with coloring and eyes like her little brothers’, but with a glow all her own. She was eighteen, slender, active in the community, always pushing a petition or putting up posters about some cause or other.

  He swallowed hard, closed his eyes; tapped the flashlight anxiously against the outside of his thigh. He didn’t want to go in there. He wanted to mount Casper, his white Arabian stallion, and ride high into the Mules where the air was clean and fresh and no dead teenagers waited for him.

  Lulu wasn’t a hard case like some teens, or a Goth or a punk or any of those other things kids got into these days. A good student at Cochise College, she worked part-time, babysitting and the like, but put most of her efforts into classes and her causes. She respected her parents. On the walls of her room she had posters of bands she liked, photos of animals she’d raised during her 4-H days, more photos of herself with friends and family from vacations, picnics, school trips. Her bedspread was a quilt she and her mother had made together.

  He was surprised to find the room empty. Her bed was unmade, blankets and sheets snarled up like a twister had struck, but he couldn’t see any blood. Lulu hadn’t been murdered in the night, like the rest of her family. At least, not in her own room.

  He hurried through the rest of the house. The dining room and kitchen he had ignored earlier. A walk-in pantry. A mudroom.

  No Lulu.

  The Lavenders had a barn, a corral, a little well house and almost eighty acres of land. If Lulu’s body was out there somewhere, he’d find it. But if it wasn’t, only three other possibilities came to mind. She could have spent the night with that boyfriend, up in Bisbee. She could be missing, like Elayne Lippincott. Or she could have done all this. Buck didn’t think that was likely. It took a certain type of individual, cold and empty, to kill her own family, and he couldn’t see Lulu as that type.

  Anyway, her purse, wallet and cell phone had been in her room. If she had gone someplace voluntarily, she would have taken those.

  Rage rose in his throat like bile. Someone had come into his territory to kill these people. He took it personally. Unprofessional, maybe, but he had become a cop in the days when trusting gut instincts was more highly valued than science. He had developed a cop’s gut, and he continued to rely on it, maybe more than he should.

  Buck exited through the mudroom door. Scoot Brown had emerged from his car and paced outside. “The girl’s missing,” Buck said. “Lulu’s not in there.”

  “I haven’t seen anything out here,” Scoot offered.

  “Call it in, then check the barn. You don’t find her in there, I want you to walk every square foot of this property.”

  “Right,” Scoot said.

  Buck saw footprints in the dirt around the house, but he’d have to check the feet of the family members, rule them out before he knew if they meant anything, and he’d have to make casts of the tracks before the rains came. Same with the tire tracks in the dirt drive and the unpaved road that led off Davis Road. Follow Davis about six miles till the pavement started, and it ran straight into Douglas, another ten miles south. In the other direction it hit McNeal at Highway 191, which ran through Elfrida and on up the Sulphur Springs Valley.

  At the other edge of Douglas was the Mexican border. If Lulu had been taken there, she would be outside the reach of American law enforcement. He just had to pray that wasn’t the case.

  He glanced down Larrimore Trail, away from the backdrop of the Pedregosa Mountains and the Swisshelms toward Davis Road. Another house nestled in a little hollow there, surrounded by scrub. He jabbed his thumb toward it. “That’s where the new folks live, right? The old Martin place?”

  The young deputy nodded, chewing on his lower lip. He hadn’t started for the barn yet. “That’s it.”

  “Know their name?”

  “Mailbox says ‘Bowles.’”

  “How long since they moved in?”

  “Late winter, early spring, seems like,” the kid said.

  “So maybe six, eight months,” Buck said, mostly to himself. “He teaches at the college?”

  “What I hear,” the kid said. His eyes were big, liquid. Probably his first murder scene, Buck thought. Different than car accidents or UDAs freezing or dying of thirst in the desert. Harder to take, even for him.

  Going to have to have a look at the professor, Buck thought. He had no particular reason to do so but proximity, and that gut of his. The Lavenders weren’t wealthy; no one would mistake their house for someplace where a lot of cash or high-end electronics would be found. Anyway, the brutality, the savagery on display here indicated something more personal, some emotional component, which meant the murders had likely been committed by someone who knew them. A neighbor, maybe.

  Scoot stood beside the house, as if the order to leave it had given his feet roots. Buck would check the barn himself, then. He needed to make a more thorough pass through the house with his kit, collecting whatever evidence he could find, but first he wanted to make sure Lulu was no longer on the property. Reminding Scoot to call Sheriff Gatlin’s office in Bisbee and then to cast those shoe and tire tracks, Buck headed toward the barn, silently promising the Lavenders that he would find Lulu, and discover who had violated them in such a horrific way.

  3

  “…Jessica Drake reporting from Sierra Vista, Arizona. Jessica?”

  “Thanks, Martin. I’m here at the Lippincott house, where we’ve just learned of a
potential breakthrough in the abduction of Elayne Lippincott. Authorities today say that they’ve received a tip from what is described as a reliable source, which they believe might lead them to the present whereabouts of Ms. Lippincott. As you know, Elayne Lippincott was abducted twelve nights ago from the house you can see behind me, here in southeastern Arizona. At the time, police found some evidence in the house but not enough to point them in any specific direction. With this new tip, however, police may well be able to locate and rescue Elayne Lippincott and return her to the family that misses her so deeply. Martin, back to you.”

  4

  Six miles from the Lavender house, Barry Drexler sat in the cramped office of Rojelio Chavez, his employer, with his fists clenched so tightly that his fingernails dug into the flesh of his palms.

  “You know sales have been down,” Chavez was saying. He sat in his rocking desk chair, tilting back toward shelves full of catalogs, phone books and cartons of inventory. The rest of the tiny office was similarly cluttered, so much so that Barry had often wondered how Chavez managed to find anything he really needed. “I’ve been putting my own money back into the business, trying to stay solvent. But I just can’t afford to keep doing that.”

  It wasn’t much of a job, working at Redi-Market. But since Barry had wrecked up his back five years before, he hadn’t been able to keep ranching. Years of drought had made ranching a questionable business anyway, especially at his small scale. He had tried auto mechanics, but things had changed in that field so much since his younger days, he hadn’t been able to make a go of it. His one mechanic’s job had been lost to a Mexican kid a third his age, and he’d been lucky that Chavez had been willing to take him on, at fifty-nine, even part-time.

  Two years later, he sat behind the register in the little market four nights a week, selling liquor, smokes, packaged foods and sundries to the people in McNeal. He had met folks there who had lived in the area as long as he had but with whom he’d never had contact before. The job had opened up a new social world to him, as well as providing a paycheck and getting him out of his empty house.

  “So when’s it happen?” he asked.

  “Last day will be Friday,” Chavez said. “I’ll put up a sign today, let everyone know what’s happening. If anyone asks for details, just have them see me.”

  “Right,” Barry said.

  “Barry, I’m really sorry about this. If there was anything else I could do, I would. I know the community counts on this store, and I know you like that regular check.” Rojelio Chavez appeared genuinely pained. His smooth forehead furrowed like a freshly plowed field, and the lower tips of his drooping black mustache were wet from him chewing on it while he talked.

  Barry relaxed his fists and rubbed the gnarled surface of his left thumbnail. “You got that right.”

  “I can’t do much by way of a severance package. I’ll cut you a check for a couple of weeks.”

  “Anything you can do, I’d appreciate.” Barry couldn’t quite believe he was being so deferential. Chavez was forty, with plenty of money. His wife worked at the hospital down in Douglas. His family wouldn’t go hungry no matter what. Barry didn’t have any family, hadn’t since his wife Clarice died eight years back. They’d had one son, killed in the first Gulf war, so Barry was effectively alone in the world. He had a brother named Stuart, eight years younger, who had moved to Ohio after his own army stint and gone to work for a big insurance company. That company had folded a few years back, and it turned out the pensions promised to its employees didn’t really exist. Stuart had a wife and a kid still in college, so his financial straits were even worse than Barry’s, but that didn’t mean Barry could get by on his minimal savings. “Why do you think it is, business bein’ off?”

  “Could have to do with the Wal-Mart,” Chavez said. Barry had expected that response, since his boss had been complaining about the giant chain ever since they’d expanded their superstore in Douglas, just blocks from the Mexican border. “People are willing to drive all that way to save a few pennies, and then while they’re down there they buy ten things they don’t even need.”

  “That’s right.” Barry had been there a couple of times himself, but the size of the place had put him off. Aisle after aisle stacked high with junk, most of it plastic, some of it he couldn’t even guess as to what it was used for. He’d never been able to find what he wanted in there, and looking for it disoriented him.

  “You might think about applying there,” Chavez said.

  “At my age?”

  “They hire older folks sometimes,” Chavez replied. “As store greeters and such. I’ll give you a good recommendation if you want to try it.”

  Barry quit worrying the nail. The stiff visitor chair across from Chavez’s desk was getting uncomfortable. “I’ll give it some thought, Rojelio. Thanks for the offer.”

  Chavez stood up, which Barry knew meant their cheery little get-together had come to a close. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

  For Barry to do that, he’d have to remember to copy down Rojelio Chavez’s phone number from the store’s emergency contact list. His employer had never given it to him, never invited him over or socialized with him in any way outside the shop.

  He thought, for just a moment, about cleaning out the cash register before locking up tonight. He wouldn’t get much out of it though; couple hundred bucks maybe, certainly not enough to risk jail over. Living on a fixed income would be hard, but at least his mortgage payments were low, and he had five rooms to wander around in. Spending the rest of his years in an eight-by-eight wouldn’t do, not at all.

  “Guess I’ll get to work, then,” Barry said.

  His employer didn’t answer.

  5

  She can’t get comfortable. With her wrists bound behind her back, no position offers relief, and anytime she finds one better than another, the violent motion of the vehicle throws her out of it. Her shoulders burn with agony, her mouth aches to be free of the putrid rag filling it. The boxer shorts she was wearing when he came are soaked and soiled.

  She wonders if the ride will ever end. Death would mean sweet release from the pain, the terror, but she can’t will herself into its embrace and she doesn’t have the ability or resources to take her own life. Instead, she prays for salvation, for rescue, but if her prayers are answered, it’s not in the concrete, non-metaphorical way she needs at the moment.

  Someone else, she tells herself, would have paid attention from the beginning, kept track of the twists and turns, the time elapsed, so that she might someday direct authorities back to wherever it was she was being taken. Not her, though. She was unconscious at the beginning, and when she woke up all she could think about was her family and her own physical discomfort. She heard gunshots, back at home, after the guy came into her room and slapped a wet rag over her face. Almost instantly she felt woozy, disoriented, and he tied a rope around her and carried her out of the house, into the truck. She tried to fight, to stay awake, especially when she heard the shots, but then she was out.

  Her father owns a rifle, in case, he says, anything bothers the livestock. She only remembers it being loaded once during her lifetime, when she was eight or nine, which means that the shots she heard were almost certainly fired by her attacker. She can’t assume he had left anyone alive at home, although she hopes with all of her might that she’s wrong.

  Once she awakened, she had no idea how long they’d been driving and couldn’t see outside to look for landmarks. She thinks about trying a couple of times, dismissing it each time as too late, then the bolts of pain shoot through her body and the humiliation of her circumstances sends shame rushing through her and she forgets all about it for another minute or hour.

  By the time the vehicle stops, she has fallen asleep. She dreams of a bird, trying to fly, but its wings have been matted with thick oil and all it can manage is useless fluttering. When the rear door opens and light streams in, light she can’t see but can only sense through the blindf
old, for just a fraction of a second, she thinks she is home in her own bed.

  But then she remembers.

  6

  With only morning classes on that Wednesday, Oliver Bowles left the campus of Cochise College shortly after noon. Rain had started a few minutes before he got out of the building, and by the time he reached his Subaru Outback it pelted him full force. As he drove east on Highway 80 and then north on 191, it sheeted down the front of the windshield, reducing visibility to almost nil. He fought to keep the car on an even keel, hydroplaning from time to time.

  When he’d moved from San Diego to Arizona in late January, he had laughed at the signs that said DO NOT ENTER WHEN FLOODED. Monsoon season started in early July. Now that he’d lived through two months of it, he no longer laughed, and he understood the prevalence of high-clearance trucks and SUVs in the area. A four-foot dip didn’t seem like much in dry weather, but when it filled with rushing water it could be treacherous.

  He had learned to love the area, especially the border town of Douglas. Dinner in the El Conquistador dining room of Douglas’s Gadsden Hotel had become an every-other-Friday-night ritual for him and Jeannie, always accompanied by a wonder-filled stroll around its gorgeous lobby, admiring the marble and gilt and huge Tiffany window and Tom, the taxi-dermied mountain lion who watched over it all from the landing of the sweeping staircase. He liked the small town atmosphere, the fact that people at shops and the post office and library all seemed to know one another and welcomed them like old friends after the first few visits. He’d never lived near such a little country town, never dreamed he would take to it, but he had.