The Girls He Adored

by Jonathan Nasaw

  Donna Hughes. Born Sanford, Florida, 12/20/56. Last seen, Plano, Texas, 6/17/98. Casey did most of his hunting in the spring or summer months, leading the investigators to speculate that he lived in a climate where the winters were not conducive to travel. Pender wondered if Pastor knew that. It might help narrow the search.

  “I should be there,” he said aloud, his voice sounding strange and distant with the earplugs in. “I should be there—they'll never catch him without me.”

  But he wasn't there, he had to remind himself. Instead he was here. In Dallas. Which was right next door to Plano. And suddenly, though he was by now so wrecked on the painkillers that he could scarcely think, Ed Pender understood to a stone certainty exactly what his next move had to be.

  51

  ANGER. DENIAL. DESPAIR. BARGAINING. Acceptance. These were the stages the human mind passed through when faced with the prospect of its own demise. Irene Cogan had been going back and forth between anger, denial—or at least dissociation—and despair for thirty-six hours. Now, alone in what under other circumstances she would have considered a charming little third-floor guest bedroom with an antique brass bed, big maple bureau, night table, escritoire, and adjoining bathroom, she had reached the bargaining stage.

  She began by apologizing to the Virgin Mary for the things she'd said about Her Son and His Father after Frank died, and for not having been to mass since then, but pointed out that she had tried to live a good life, hadn't sinned much, at least in deed, and had helped quite a few souls in need, professionally (although she had to admit she had been well paid for it). She promised Mary that if She did intercede on Irene's behalf, she would go to mass every Sunday and volunteer her services at one of the free clinics in Seaside, Watsonville, or Salinas.

  That was how Irene bargained in her head after the woman had locked the bedroom door behind her. It brought her little if any peace. Then she went through the contents of the bureau and the closet and slipped into deeper despair. For in the top drawer of the bureau she found underwear in a variety of styles and sizes, bras ranging from 32C to 40DD, barely-there bikini panties and capacious bloomers, bobby socks, knee socks, pantyhose, all showing signs of wear. Similar range of sizes for the neatly folded T-shirts, jerseys, and blouses in the second drawer—smaller sizes to the left, larger ones to the right—and for the sweaters, slacks, and jeans in the bottom drawer.

  Inside the deep, narrow closet were skirts, dresses, coats, sizes 6 through 16. On the closet floor were shoes, sneakers, sandals of varying sizes, all previously worn. Irene slammed the closet door and backed away, then sat down heavily on the bed. How many women had contributed to this collection? she wondered. Dear God, how many women?

  She dropped to her knees and began to pray in earnest, not with her head this time but with her heart. Dear Jesus I'm so frightened. Help me Mother Mary, I can't do this alone. Holy Spirit, give me strength. Give me wings. Help me our Father in heaven hallowed be thy name I'll believe in You with all my heart I'll never forsake You again. And even if You can't save me, even if it's part of Your plan that I die here, please, please, please be with me. Don't leave me alone here. Jesus. Please.

  She didn't realize she was crying until the first teardrops hit the hardwood floor. But by then the worst of the despair had passed. Irene tried to tell herself that Jesus had answered her, but she couldn't help thinking about something one of her professors once said on the subject. The comforts of religion don't actually require the existence of a deity, he'd informed the class—only a belief in one.

  “Thanks anyway,” she said aloud, climbing to her feet and wiping away her tears. Then, with bravado, only half-joking: “I'll take it from here.”

  Normally—previously—Irene hadn't been much of a believer in what the New Agers call affirmations. Saying, “I am a radiant being,” into the mirror every morning, that sort of thing. As a psychiatrist, she knew too much about the subconscious for that, knew that every time you say, “I am a radiant being,” your subconscious replies, “Are not.” A hundred affirmations a day, a hundred are nots —a person would be lucky to break even.

  But desperate times require desperate measures. She made up an affirmation on the spot: “I will stay alive. Everything else is secondary. I will stay alive.”

  And it helped. She was nowhere near the acceptance stage, but at least she felt able to function. She opened the closet door again. Hanging from a hook on the inside of the door was a floor-length cotton nightgown the color of marigolds. As she reached for it, something nagged at the back of her mind—something about the clothes. So after undressing and slipping the nightgown on over her head, Irene did a little detective work, forcing herself to go through the bureau drawers again, taking a closer look at the dresses in the wardrobe. Different sizes, yes; different styles, too. Small women and large, younger women and older, chic women and women with no taste whatsoever.

  But there was one thing the clothes all had in common: the color scheme. Warm Spring on the seasonal charts. Delicate tones. The neutrals were camel browns, creams, and grays. Some true greens and golden yellows, but no true blues, only aquas, turquoises, and teals.

  Not quite a redhead's palette, though: the clothes on the red end of the spectrum were not the brighter shades that would have flattered a classic redhead. Instead, salmons, corals, pumpkins, peaches, and roses, the softer pastels she herself had favored before frosting her own strawberry blond hair.

  Irene backed away from the closet, her mind spinning. The women who had left these clothes behind—were they all strawberry blonds? Was that why that hideous creature in the glorious strawberry blond wig had plucked her hair out—to examine the roots?

  The implications were unthinkable. Suddenly Irene felt unbearably claustrophobic. She staggered over to the small four-paned sash window, opened it, stuck her head out. As she gulped in the sweet mountain air, she caught a glimpse of Maxwell trudging across the meadow toward the house, his head down, his blond hair white in the starlight.

  I will stay alive, Irene told herself, quickly pulling her head back inside and lowering the window again. Whatever's going on here, I will stay alive.

  Will not, replied the little voice in her head.

  52

  FOR A MOTEL THAT RENTED rooms by the day or hour, the beds in the Sleep-Tite were fairly comfortable. The alarm on Pender's watch woke him from a sound sleep at seven. At seven-thirty he phoned Thom Davies, the British-born database specialist.

  “Morning, T. D. Hope I didn't wake you.”

  “Pender? For God's sake, man, it's eight-thirty on a Sunday morning.”

  “It's only seven-thirty here, and I'm up.”

  “Central time? I thought you were keeping regular in Prunedale.”

  “I'm in Dallas. How's my account in the old favor bank?”

  “I believe you still owe me several lunches and your firstborn child.”

  “Care to make a deposit on my second-born?” He told Davies what he was looking for.

  “I'll get on it first thing tomorrow morning,” said Davies.

  “Not quite what I had in mind.”

  “Ed, it's Sunday morning.”

  “He's averaging two murders a day since he escaped, Thom. You do the math.”

  “How about a shit and a shower? Do I have time for a shit and a shower?”

  “You could probably skip the shower,” replied Pender. “I doubt there's going to be anybody else in the office.”

  Plano was a northeastern suburb of Dallas, though the town had enough of a history that it preferred not to think of itself as suburban. “It's plain to see/Plano is the place to be,” read the Chamber of Commerce sign.

  The Hughes house was a white colonnaded near-mansion in the pricey Lakeside addition. Pender, a Yankee to the bone, half expected Hattie McDaniels or Butterfly McQueen to open the front door. Instead the maid who answered the doorbell was Hispanic; Pender wondered if that represented progress.

  The maid informed Pender that Señor Hughes
wasn't home, but he could hear voices out back. He turned and started down the walk, then cut around the side of the house. Sure enough, Horton Hughes was sitting poolside, wearing a white polo shirt and twill slacks, Italian loafers, no socks, reclining on an upholstered chaise longue, reading the Sunday paper. Behind him a tanned twentysomething brunette in a well-filled white bikini was swimming laps in the azure pool. Whitewashed wrought-iron chairs were grouped around a whitewashed wrought iron table shaded by a yellow canvas umbrella.

  Hughes looked up. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Special Agent Pender, FBI.” As he flashed his credentials, Pender realized he must look like day-old shit in his wrinkled plaid sport coat, with his bald head clumsily bandaged under a bloodstained tweed hat.

  “Is it Donna?” asked Hughes. “Have they found Donna?”

  It seemed to Pender that there was a strange note of ambivalence to the tone, as if Hughes weren't entirely sure which answer he was hoping for, yes, no, dead, alive. He decided to Columbo the man.

  “Well sir, Mr. Hughes, we think we've identified the individual she left with. May I ask you a few questions?”

  “I suppose,” Hughes answered reluctantly. “But we've been through all this.”

  “Aren't you going to introduce me to the young lady?” Pender nodded toward the girl in the pool.

  “That's Honey.”

  She rolled onto her back and waved, then went back to her laps. Pender asked Hughes if Honey were his daughter, and received a terse, thin-lipped “No.”

  Now Pender understood why Hughes had seemed so ambivalent about Donna—he'd turned her in for a newer model.

  In response to Hughes's shouted orders, the maid brought out another china cup and saucer for Pender and poured his coffee for him. Pender sat with his back to the pool and asked Hughes to tell him about Donna's disappearance.

  “Is there really anything to be gained by going through all this again?” asked Hughes. “I've told the police, I was out of town that week. I got home, Donna was gone, along with her suitcase, her good jewelry, and her Lexus. I haven't heard from her since.”

  “Do you know which clothes she packed?”

  “I'm afraid I didn't pay all that much attention to Donna's clothes, other than that she bought too many and they cost too much.”

  Two aggressive non-answers so far. Pender decided to abandon the affective approach and push back a little. Though he could empathize with the haughty rich, put himself in their shoes for the sake of an interview, as a poor boy from Cortland Pender had no objection to trying the opposite approach.

  “But the jewelry, that you had no problem identifying as missing?” he asked in a deliberately provocative manner.

  “Of course not. I bought most of it for her myself. And I can't say I approve of your tone, Agent Prender.”

  Oh-ho. “That's Pender. Had Mrs. Hughes given any indication that she was troubled or unhappy?”

  “No more than usual.” Hughes leaned forward as if to impart a confidence. “I've never pretended we had an ideal marriage, Agent Pender —is that right?—but frankly, that's none of your goddamned business.”

  “How about Honey there? Did she know Mrs. Hughes?”

  Hughes shoved his chair back from the table, the metal feet screeching on the patio tiles, and rose haughtily to his feet. “This interview is over, Agent Pender. If you have any further questions, contact my—”

  Pender ignored the dramatics, took a sip from the china cup; it really was very good coffee. “Hey there, Honey,” he called over his shoulder—his back was still to the pool.

  “Hey, G-man,” called the girl.

  “Did you know Mrs. Hughes?”

  “I surely did—she was my momma's best friend.”

  Pender turned around, an arm draped over the back of his chair. “Does your momma know you're sleeping with her best friend's husband?”

  “Why not?” replied Honey. “She did.”

  “Just a goddamn minute,” said Hughes.

  Pender turned back to him. He could hear Honey climbing out of the pool behind him, breathing hard, dripping water onto the tiles. “I like interviewing her a whole lot better than you, Mr. Hughes. Think her parents would be equally forthcoming?”

  The girl padded across the tiles, toweling off her long black hair. The combination of the raised arms and the vigorous toweling imparted an interesting motion to her bosom. “You want to talk to Momma, you better get there before her third mimosa. As for Daddy, he's so long gone the only way she even remembers his name is she reads it off the alimony checks.”

  “How about you then, Honey? Did you see Mrs. Hughes before her disappearance?”

  Pender looked down at his coffee cup as she wrapped the towel around her head in a turban and adjusted her bikini top unselfconsciously, then sat down next to him and poured herself a cup of coffee from the silver carafe. Hughes sat down as well, somewhat anticlimactically.

  “Sure, about two weeks before. And I was not screwing Horty here until the bed was good and cold, I'll have you know.”

  She was a spoiled little rich bitch, but Pender found himself liking her—at least she was honest. An odd crime statistic he'd run across somewhere surfaced in his mind: wealthy Plano, Texas, had the highest per capita rate of teenage heroin-related deaths in the country in 1996 or '97, he couldn't remember which. “Were there any signs she was having an affair?”

  “I can't picture it. I mean, I can't even picture her doin' it with Horty. The woman did not exactly ex-hude sexuality. 'Course, last time I saw her she didn't know about Horty and Momma—walkin' in on them the way she did mighta put a little itch in her britches, payback being a way of life 'round here.”

  “Is that true, Mr. Hughes? Mrs. Hughes found you in bed with her best friend?”

  No answer. Pender didn't press it. Oh, Donna, he thought, to the tune of the old Richie Valens song. No wonder you ran away from home. Part of him wanted to believe that she'd run away with someone other than Casey, but it didn't seem likely. If she'd been poor, then sure, maybe she'd have hit the road and not made contact for a year. But she was far from poor, and in Pender's experience, nobody walked away from money.

  They did sometimes walk away with it, though. “I understand all of Mrs. Hughes's bank accounts were untouched, Mr. Hughes. And of course there's been no credit card activity. Would she have had any other source of cash readily available to her?”

  “I've already answered that question,” said Hughes.

  Oh-ho. Foolish answer. Guilty answer. It probably wouldn't mean much for the investigation, but several of the other strawberry blonds had disappeared with amounts of cash proportionate to their means. “What was it, a wall safe?”

  “I don't know what—”

  “If you tell me here and now, I promise it goes no further. If not, the IRS is always happy to cooperate with the FBI—and vice versa.”

  “Yes, it was a wall safe.”

  “Excellent. How much did she leave with?”

  “Twenty grand in hundreds and twenties, best I could tell.”

  “Good enough,” said Pender, who over the years had developed a sixth sense about just how far you could push an interview. “Thank you for your cooperation. And now I'll leave you two to your Sunday. Here's my card—use the sky pager number if you think of anything. And Honey, if I could get your last name and your mother's address?”

  “It's Comb. I was just heading home myself—you can follow me if you want.”

  “Honey Comb,” repeated Pender, amused.

  “Don't even,” said the girl. “I've already heard every joke there is.”

  53

  JUST STAY ALIVE. . . .

  Irene slipped out of bed and crossed the room to the window. It had been a brutal night. Hard to say which was worse, the fitful bouts of nightmare-ridden sleep or the wide-awake three A.M. dreads. Probably the latter—at least you could wake up from the nightmares.

  Eventually, though, she had managed to arrive at an
uneasy truce with her terror by continually reminding herself that so far, most of what she'd told Barbara had come true. Maxwell wanted her help, which meant he needed to keep her alive. And where there's life, there's hope, wasn't that what everybody said? A cliché, perhaps, but one that she would have to teach herself to appreciate on a gut level.

  In the meantime: just stay alive. Irene parted the white muslin curtains, raised the window, took a deep breath. Mountain air, morning dew, sweet meadow grass, Christmas tree tang of the Doug firs. The two-horned mountain to the west was blue-green and shrouded in mist; the meadow grass riffled in the wind, pale green with an undertone of shimmering gold.

  And now, in the daylight, Irene was able to make out a peculiar structure half-hidden in the high grass of the meadow about a hundred yards from the house, not far from where Maxwell had been walking the night before. She stuck her head out of the window for a better look, and saw what appeared to be a sunken greenhouse the size of an Olympic swimming pool, covered by an opaque Plexiglas bubble rising only a few feet above ground level.

  Then it dawned on Irene that the window she was leaning out of was only a little narrower than her shoulders, and that directly below her was the roof of the screened-in porch. She eyeballed the two-story drop and realized that there was nothing to prevent her from climbing out the window and lowering herself to the porch with a bedsheet rope.

  Not yet, though, she told herself. Not until you've figured out a way to get past the dogs or over the electrified fence.

  Suddenly there was a knock at the door. With a guilty start, Irene pulled her head back inside and closed the window as quietly as she could. “Just a minute.” She found an apricot-colored velour bathrobe in the closet and slipped it on over her nightgown, then opened the door.