I groan and remember my promise to Rowan from this morning: no secrets. “There’s a theory milling about that Marci’s death could be connected to these recent ones.” I wait but Rowan doesn’t respond. “It’s far-fetched, but I can’t rule it out.”
Rowan’s sigh is deep and loud. “Don’t, Luce.”
“Don’t what?”
“You know what. Get so entangled in this case you can’t get yourself out.”
It’s the frustration that curls Rowan’s words through the speaker of the phone. It’s the anger at Marci, a girl she’s never met, that gets my back up. “I’m doing my job, Ro.”
“Fine. Do the job.” Her voice has gotten louder. “That’s not what I’m talking about and you know it. It’s the mind-fucking I can’t take. The torture you put yourself through and me in the process. I meant what I said, Luce. I’ll leave.”
I’d sworn off Marci’s case months ago after a particularly intense mind-fucking, as Rowan put it. Years had passed since her death and I decided to reexamine her crime scene while working on a murder case in the Columbus area—I thought I could handle it. A nineteen-year-old woman in a Columbus suburb was killed by repeated rock strikes to her head while jogging along a wooded trail. I couldn’t help but to make comparisons between this athlete’s death and Marci’s. In some strange way, their cases melded together for me until all the details and clues churned into one. Just like Marci’s case, the case in Columbus wore on for months and eventually all the suspects’ alibis cleared. I wouldn’t let the case go cold, though. The memories of Marci’s murder sent me into high gear; I would not give up on the nineteen-year-old’s case. I let no tip go and my hours at work began to skyrocket.
In the end, it was the constant comparison to Marci’s case that drove me crazy. I’d convinced myself that if I could only solve this murder, if I could only put her killer away for good, then it would solve Marci’s case as well. When we finally caught the young woman’s killer, no one but Rowan could figure out why I wasn’t celebrating. I’d gone into a depression so deep I couldn’t work, eat, or sleep for days, but only stare out glassy-eyed at the TV from the couch, only a shell of me.
For three months, Rowan waited. She watched as I added more stones to my Berlin Wall, folding into myself like a work of origami. Only I didn’t emerge a folded eagle or crane or bear. I simply never emerged. I started sleeping on the sofa and found multiple reasons to work late. It wasn’t until she packed up and threatened to leave me that I was able to reach up from that tar-like abyss I’d fallen into and grab hold of her extended hand.
I’m suddenly so tired. “I have no choice, Rowan. Besides, you aren’t here. You don’t have to hear about it.”
“I’m never with you, am I? Even when I’m sitting beside you.” Rowan gives out a hard sound, almost a cough. “I never signed on to compete for you with a ghost.”
“Rowan!”
The phone cuts off on Rowan’s end. I punch the pillow beside me over and over again until a scream lodges somewhere deep inside me. No matter how hard I try, sometimes nothing comes out right. I don’t call back. Instead, I lie down between the scratchy sheets with no warm spine to rest against. The bed is rock hard and I try not to think about how much I miss Rowan’s curled body inside my arms. The television roars with late-night reruns that my eyes don’t take in. The images flash across the dank room turning everything an eerie television blue, the same color as Princess Leia in her flickering hologram. Only this time it’s not Princess Leia I see and hear but Marci Tucker: Help me, Lucinda Ann Hansen…
*
The girl heaved for the relief of a deep breath but received none. She bit and scratched and kicked at the dark shadow’s chokehold until she fell under the veil of unconsciousness. The man with the slim hips gripped the girl under her shoulders and pulled her back into the thick woods, away from the entrance to the quarry, far from safety. Her bare feet scraped over the rocky ground and underbrush, leaving only a thin trail of crimson behind.
The dark shadow might have been slight, but he was strong. He tossed her lifeless body over his shoulder as if the girl weighed nothing more than a sack of potatoes. Her thin arms draped down behind him with long fingertips reaching for something, anything.
Inside the cave she had escaped from, he propped her against the stone wall next to the camera. Her chest rose and fell with scattered, uneven breaths. A phlegmy moan escaped her purple lips from somewhere halfway between consciousness and unconsciousness. He stood over her a moment, his gaze taking in the girl before him. The crotch of his pants rose with his arousal. Slowly, he knelt and unzipped her jean shorts, then ripped her thin shirt collar down to expose the girl’s chest. He fiddled with the exact placement of the shirt’s collar, exposing one breast fully, then covering the second. He fumbled with attempts to keep the flaps of her shorts open. A guttural groan came from the dark shadow as he worked, his crotch now a full tent of desire.
A call from somewhere in the wood. “Marci!”
The dark shadow sucked in his breath as the female’s voice grew closer. “It’s your fault for running, bitch,” he seethed at the girl. With one swift and frightful movement, he backhanded her across the right cheek and the distinct crack of her bone filled the cave.
Fast now, he gathered his camera and tore apart the tripod. Then he turned back to the girl. The large rock came down on the crown of her head again and again and again. The voice’s rustle wasn’t far from the cave. The girl was dead. He grabbed his bag and scanned the cave for safety. There was only one place to go—the same place the girl had tried to go for safety. The back section of the cave.
The dark shadow crept on hands and knees into the hidden back corner just as the voice broke through the entrance of the cave.
“Marci!”
*
I wake gasping for breath, fighting the hotel bed for solid ground. The dream. It’s just the dream again. My T-shirt’s wet with night sweats and I make my way to the bathroom. The cold water spreads over my face and neck while my breath begins to settle into a rhythm and my heartbeat slows back to normal. I watch myself in the bathroom mirror drink a tall glass of water. My face is eggshell white, and dark circles have appeared under my eyes. I’m beginning to look as haggard as Davis. Gripping the sides of the bathroom counter, I wait for my hands to stop trembling. “You are safe,” I whisper to the reflection in the mirror.
Safe. Hadn’t that been what Marci said about Stonehenge? Our safe place? We’d never really been safe, though, always teetering on the edge of something very dangerous where we both failed to see the warnings.
May 1989. State Route 55. Green with scattered sunlight exploded everywhere through thick boughs that canopied the highway. Like driving down a part in long hair, Marci’d said. I rode shotgun in her convertible, the top down with the wind blowing her near-white blond hair into a halo around her face. I flipped through the radio stations until I found anything Def Leppard, and she threw her head back with a scream that taunted the sky: Just try and rain on us! We had the pattern set by then, both of us converging in Willow’s Ridge quarry an hour before the One True Path meetings every week. L&M time. Cigarettes and peppermint candies. Her laugh and my off-key singing. Her confident touch and my hesitation.
“Ready? she said, pitching the car up the hilly road until it crested, and as always I lost my stomach, the drop so quick like a beast of a roller coaster. I looked over at her smiling face, all white teeth and glistening navy eyes and thought, This is how I will remember Marci—happy and so free.
It had recently rained and she took the curve too close. We spun around while the tires squealed against the pavement, the wheel turned round and round in her hands but caught on nothing, and we both screamed, thinking about the wooded ravine not more than a quarter of a mile away from the berm. Instead of the ravine, though, the car spun wildly into a shallow ditch alongside the road. Together we pushed and fought the car from the ditch, a vicious battle with wet mud that made us late for
the meeting.
Pastor Jameson met us at the door when we finally arrived, eyeing our muddy clothes and battle-worn gym shoes. He was a short, sturdy man with a powerful voice. But it was the glare he gave us both through glasses that only magnified his eyes into steel blue marbles, the look of sheer horror that made me want to slink away from the group in shame.
“Girls”—the pastor glowered at us underneath heavy brows—“you’ve disrespected the group with your tardiness.” He demanded that we pray for forgiveness. Forgiveness for what exactly, the entire group understood, without our infractions spoken aloud. Marci and I both understood what was coming. The pastor never just demanded prayer for forgiveness; a punishment always followed.
“Leviticus 20:13,” he bellowed at us all. “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.” The pastor’s face burned red and he leaned toward us. “Do you think you are any different because you’re female?”
Marci and I shook our heads in rapid unison.
“Hell awaits if you do not change. In case you forget how important it is that I save your lives, you each must handwrite the entire chapter of Leviticus five times.” He snorted in disgust through his flared nostrils.
The real damage done that day wasn’t to our clothes or the group or the car. The real damage was that the secret of Marci and me slipped away from us and out like tendrils of smoke under a closed door.
Later, on the phone, Marci and I laughed about the car wreck, the near brush with disaster, and the sheer miracle that the old convertible’s engine turned over. We complained horribly about the pastor and Leviticus. We carried on about the injustice of the One True Path organization, the place our parents made us go in order to change us.
What I didn’t tell Marci during that phone call was that the spinning and the loss of control of the car that day had given me an enormous thrill. In my sixteen years of life that car ride had only been matched with the recklessness I felt when Marci kissed me, or the breakneck careen I felt when she reached for me, pulling my body so close to hers. I could hardly admit, even to myself, that I felt a few jolts of exhilaration that the pastor did know about Marci and me and that he couldn’t do anything about it, even with all his preaching and prayers and punishments. He simply couldn’t stop us. All those love stories I’d heard throughout my life, all the prince-saves-princess stories, the Romeos and Juliets of my English classes—I understood now the force of love. The sheer determination of it. I couldn’t deny that whatever this was, it was real. In some skewed version of our world, I recognized that this gave us power over the pastor. In that intoxicated state, I didn’t think about what the pastor had taught us about power until after Marci died: power eventually punishes unless it’s deemed righteous by the Lord.
Chapter Eight
Thursday, January 10
The Rise and Shine café straddles Main Street with its tiny parking lot overflowing with vehicles. The siding, peeling off in long egg-yolk-colored strips, gives the squat building a tired look. Shoddy at best. Inside the breakfast place is loud and bustles with every table filled and a gaggle of people waiting to be seated. I find Ainsley and Davis in a booth at the back of the restaurant, well lubricated with multiple cups of coffee.
“There’s the sleepyhead,” Ainsley says when I slide into the booth beside Davis. I wave the waitress down for a coffee—very black and very strong.
I apologize and unwrap myself from my puffy coat but leave on my Russian hat. The Rise and Shine is only a few blocks from the hotel, but even by car, Willow’s Ridge is blindingly cold. My thick gray pants feel frozen from the frigid air, sandpaper against my winter-dry skin. I press my fingertips to my cheeks to stop their burning. Even though I’ve lotioned up my face, it’s beginning to chap.
“This place might not look like much,” Davis says to me, “but the food is out of this world.” He’s wearing an electric-blue silk shirt with no tie and his clothing hangs from his thin frame.
Men and women in scrubs and medical office uniforms surround us. Their white, thick-soled shoes squeak against the exhausted brown tile. Men in suits line the bar and read the morning paper, while mounted televisions in the corners are set to Fox News.
“Our boy is as cool as can be this morning,” Davis informs me. “The hearse has been under officer surveillance since we left last night. No action from Sambino until he left the funeral home at seven a.m. for his apartment. He’s been there ever since.”
“I’d love to rattle those fangs right out of his head.” Ainsley stuffs a tremendous bite of runny eggs into his mouth.
“What about permission to search the hearse?” I ask.
“Waiting for normal business hours to make the request.”
We all know the hearse will be clean without so much as a fingerprint left behind. Sambino may not be the smartest suspect I’ve worked with, but he has to know what could come down the road for him. I am surprised, though, that we haven’t already heard from an attorney this morning, someone Sambino plucked from a quick Google search. The fact that he remains without legal counsel impresses me to some degree. Either he is a man who has done nothing wrong or he is a man with a death wish.
Sambino, I’m certain, knows something. His anxiety and the messages from his body give him away—the half-chewed lips, the roll of his temples as he grinds his teeth, the way he picks at his black nail polish, the bounce of his knee during questioning. Sambino’s body also tells me that he’s been threatened to keep quiet. We need to figure out who has issued this threat and why.
While we eat runny eggs and bacon that drips with delicious grease, Davis details the assignments for the day. His eyes are bloodshot from lack of sleep and the pressure mounting on him. He’s never faced a serial murder before, and the nation’s eyes are on Willow’s Ridge at the moment. It’s Davis’s face that everyone recognizes on the evening news. Fair or not, he’ll be the one who either rises to hero status with the capture of the killer or falls to the point of losing his job if more victims are taken. Davis must understand the implications of either outcome on his career.
Davis explains that in the past two days we’ve gotten close to eighty tips on the case. The website and tip line have been singing with all the increased media presence.
Ainsley, in usual fashion, talks over Davis to me. “We got something at a grave.”
“What?” I almost choke on a bite of food. Graveside activity can be worth a hundred phone-call tips. Since serial killers are driven by fantasy, we hoped he’d eventually visit the victims to relive his conquests. Techies had set up infrared-sensored recording equipment at all the graves, including Marci’s.
Ainsley nods and dumps a blast of black pepper onto his remaining eggs. “Forty-two minutes long. A visitor after midnight.”
“Which grave?” I ask.
“The Jones girl. I’m willing to bet money it wasn’t grieving relatives at that hour, but it could be a rabbit eating the girl’s funeral flowers. IT is getting the recording set up for us now.”
I look to Davis, whose shrug says, We’ll see. After he wipes his mouth and hands, he gives Ainsley and me a computer-generated log from the tip line. Phone numbers and who they are registered to are reported along with timestamp and date of call. Even hang-ups are registered.
“My officers have tips to check out within their patrol zones today. That leaves the three of us with the top ten most credible calls.”
Nine times out of ten, tips on these lines don’t take us anywhere. The revenge calls take the longest to weed through and waste so much of our time. It never ceases to amaze me how many people will call in tips on the neighbor who hoards and doesn’t mow his grass, or the college kid who parties in his pool all hours of the night, or the ex who exhibited road rage long ago. We’re after that 1 percent, the rare tip that will give us a tiny piece that will lead us to the next.
Davis adds more sugar
to his coffee as I explain that there’s a chance all of the victims were linked in a way we hadn’t considered, that all may have been lesbians. “I think we need to consider the Tucker case as related.”
Ainsley’s I-told-you-so grin explodes across the table from me. “I like this girl!”
Davis ignores Ainsley. “Hate crimes?”
I hold back the piece about the One True Path ministries. I need more evidence. “We need to check in on some of the local groups like PFLAG and any support groups at the local high school.”
Ainsley grumbles, “We don’t have things like that in Willow’s Ridge.”
“All towns have things like that.” My sarcastic response comes out stronger than I mean it to.
“She’s right, Ainsley. Even if there’s the slightest chance this could be related to sexual orientation, we need to warn these groups.” Davis turns to me. “Why don’t you start at the high school and talk to a few faculty members? Meet with some of the kids. Take Ainsley with you.”
I groan on the inside.
“Almost forgot.” Davis bites the strip of bacon between his teeth like a cigarette and pulls out an ID card from his pocket. “Here’s a temporary ID that will get you into the station anytime.” He hands the card over with a parking pass for the police lot. “Sanders called. He’s held up in Columbus with another case. He’ll be here within forty-eight hours.”
“Keys?” Ainsley says. “I guess you’re a keeper.”
I’m in no mood to joke or to try to figure Ainsley out this early in the morning. I might have slept an hour since I last saw these guys. My head feels foggy. Arguments with Rowan always knock me off-kilter; she’s my balance and my safety that I never quite recognize until she’s no longer there. A swing of my elbow and the water glass tumbles down to the tile and shatters at my foot. Quiet settles for a few seconds around us. My body is tired, stiff, clunky, and I drop to my knees to collect the detritus in the palm of my hand.
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