The Drowned Girls (Angie Pallorino Book 1)

by Loreth Anne White

  “He’s too soft and simple to be a lawyer. Too … I don’t know—he should’ve been a social worker or artist or something. Don’t know where that kid came from. Not yours or mine by temperament.”

  “A law degree will help him, Ray, as will his anthropology degree.”

  Jayden heard the television come back on. The anchor was still talking about the Cemetery Girl and an unidentified body found floating in the Gorge.

  He began to shake as fear noosed around him.

  “Anything new on those cases?” his dad said, obviously watching the news.

  “MVPD is holding a press conference this morning,” said his mom. “They’ve identified both victims and are keeping my office looped in. This thing is going to spiral out of control unless the MVPD gets a handle on it and tamps down the budding hysteria.” A pause, the sound of crockery going into the dishwasher. “I have a meeting tonight.” His mother’s voice. “Will you be home for dinner?”

  “Got a late business thing for the new development on the waterfront. Probably be back around ten.” Another pause. The sound of his father clicking his briefcase shut. “Have a good day—see you later.”

  Jayden quickly ducked around the corner. He heard his father’s footfall on stone tiles, the thud of the front door. He hurried along the passageway to his suite in the west wing of his parents’ house, which was far too big for just the three of them.

  Once inside his suite, Jayden stood at his window, watching his father’s bronze Jaguar wind down the driveway as he made his call.

  It was answered in three rings.

  “So, you heard—you saw the news?” came the voice.

  It was enough to undo Jayden. His shakes turned into great big palsied shudders, and sweat began to dampen his body. In an effort to steady himself, he dragged his hand up over his brow and pressed his palm down hard on the top of his head, as if he could somehow bottle it all back down, as if he could make this all go away as long as he could just keep it inside his skull. “What … what happened to Gracie? How?” he managed to say.

  “How the fuck do I know what happened?”

  Jayden swallowed, and his voice cracked. “And the body in the Gorge—who’s that?”

  There was a beat of silence. “Jeezus, Jay, how in the hell would I know? C’mon, what’s going on with you?”

  “I … I’m just wondering if this is … connected. I mean with—”

  “Listen to me. This has got nothing to do with us. Neither of these deaths do.”

  “What’re we going to do?”

  “Nothing, Jayden, nothing. I told you this has nothing to do with us.”

  “But on the back of—”

  “Are you hearing me? It’s not linked. Understand?”

  “What if the cops come looking?”

  “Why would they?”

  “I was going to be with Gracie. I … I … I was going to help her. When she had enough. We had plans to—”

  “Jayden, listen to me, very carefully. Is there any record of you helping her? Anything at all? Financial records? Did you buy her anything on your credit card?”

  “No. I … I don’t think so.”

  “Then the police will not come looking at you. And if they do, if you fuck up and you talk, we all go down. You hear me? You’ll take your mother down with you. Your father. All the others. A scandal of epic proportion. You’ll do prison time. That’s how serious this is. So you just shut the fuck up and lay low. Go away if you need to—take a holiday out of country.”

  “I got exams coming up—I want this degree.”

  “Then focus on what you do want. And listen, I don’t know what you were thinking getting messed up with that girl in the first place—you can do so much better—but I am sorry for you. You have my condolences. Now let it—her—go.”

  Several reporters glanced Merry’s way as she entered the newsroom. They’d clearly all been talking about her, about her brazen tweet, her blog.

  “You okay, Merry?” It was Dwaine, a colleague whose desk abutted Merry’s.

  “Fine,” she said as she hung her jacket over the back of her chair and seated herself at her computer.

  But she was not okay.

  For the first time in five years she had a bad need for a hit of crank, and it scared the bejeezus out of her. She’d cracked at the idea that he might be back—and it proved that she was still just a junkie tweaker. It was spiraling her out of control. She needed sleep. Had lost her appetite. Had consumed too much caffeine and was overcome by jitters.

  Another reporter’s voice came from the other side of her cubicle partition. “Want a bet they fire your ass before the hour is out, Winston? Career suicide by Twitter.” He chuckled dryly. “You wouldn’t be the first. Who was that politician, put a photo of his prick on Twitter? And the MVPD chief, tweeting sweet nothings to the wife of another officer under his command, thinking it was private? Just watch Killion use that when he eventually fires Chief Gunnar’s ass. It’s the same psychology—like getting behind the wheel of a car … you’re removed from face-to-face responsibility and you think reality can’t bite you in the butt.”

  “Fuck off, Steve.”

  “Merry!” The editor in chief, red-faced, stalked into the newsroom and jerked his head toward his office door. “My office.”

  “Whooo,” the reporter said from behind the wall. “What I tell you?”

  Quickly, she began copying her files onto a memory stick. Once they’d been moved over, she started deleting everything she’d ever written on her workstation computer.

  Dwaine watched her. “They’ll find them,” he said. “It leaves digital footprints.”

  “Nothing worth finding,” she snapped, pocketing the memory stick along with the saved digital files of the recordings she’d made of her deep throat’s calls. She wasn’t going to leave her hard-won work and contacts if they fired her.

  She got up, squared her shoulders, and walked to the gallows, half expecting to see out the corner of her eye the security guys arriving with a cardboard box to pack up her things while she was inside the editor’s office.

  “Shut the door,” her boss said as she entered. She closed the door and seated herself slowly in front of his desk.

  “I had a visit from two MVPD officers at my home early this morning. They want to know who your source is.”

  Merry cleared her throat. “My sources are good. I verified the information given to me by those sources,” she lied. “And don’t ask me to reveal them, because they’ll stop talking.”

  “The MVPD is looking for a possible internal leak.”

  “Then that’s their problem, not mine, not ours.”

  His gaze tunneled into her. “What you did—putting information out like that on Twitter, on your blog—”

  “The info wasn’t wrong—it all checked out. The MVPD has a media conference coming up this morning, and nothing I put out there is being denied.”

  “You’re treading a very fine line here, Merry. If they do come back with a court order—”

  “Then let them. With all due respect, sir, freedom of the press is a good fight. And look at the publicity my blog and Twitter account has brought the Sun. Every reporter, every news station out there was onto it and running with their own versions. It’s been picked up by the wires, even. It’s me who’ll get sued for my personal blog and tweets if I’m wrong, not the Sun. You get all the glory plus my follow-up stories. And if the MVPD does come after me for my sources, we become the news. Even better.” Her mouth was dry, her pulse racing, but by the look in her boss’s eyes, she was winning.

  He heaved out a big sigh. “Okay. You’re on thin ice. Proceed cautiously. Because if the editorial board does decide to cut you loose, you’re gone, Winston. No benefits, no letter of reference, zip. And I will not back you. I took a risk hiring you in the first place, and the Sun took a chance in unofficially allowing you to run your crime blog on the side to begin with—we’re feeling our way in this new and ever-changing dig
ital landscape.”

  “You know why the editorial board has not shut me down? Because I’m moving print newspapers. I’m bringing new readers. Wasn’t that the mandate when Raddison Industries bought the outfit—build readership? Go lowbrow and trashy?”

  “Be careful,” he said quietly. “I like what you bring to the paper, Merry—there’s a feisty rat-pack quality to your approach. I like your energy. But if there’s someone or some persons inside the MVPD feeding you information on the side, they’re using you as much as you are using them. They have some kind of agenda.” He watched her in silence for a beat. “You could get yourself into hot water, and we will not be able to help you out.”

  Gracie Drummond’s body was draped in a white sheet, her head exposed. Her features were almost serene. She reminded Angie of a patchwork doll, with the stitched crucifix wound on her brow and the thick line of black sutures from where Barb O’Hagan had sliced and peeled back her face to remove her brain from her skull.

  Angie stood beside Maddocks once again as O’Hagan ran them through her preliminary report.

  “COD was drowning in freshwater,” O’Hagan said as she folded back the sheet to reveal the top of the Y-incision on Drummond’s young chest. “Note these contusions here, along the sides of her neck and on her shoulders, and this line here, across the bottom of her ribs.” The pathologist pointed to a fat line of dark blue-and-red bruising.

  “She could have been forced over something, like the rim of a bathtub,” said Angie, “or a trough of some kind, while her head and shoulders were held under water and she struggled to free herself.”

  O’Hagan nodded. “Drummond also presented with vaginal and anal tearing indicative of rough sexual penetration. And I found small traces of powder residue in her vaginal vault—same as with Hocking.”

  “So he used a condom,” Maddocks said. “In both cases.”

  “Drummond’s circumcision occurred antemortem, as we know. But Hocking was circumcised postmortem,” O’Hagan said.

  Angie and Maddocks exchanged a glance. “So he switched MO?” Angie said.

  “Or he’s refining it,” Maddocks replied. “Or he thought Drummond was already drowned and dead when he did it.”

  “Appears that it was definitely executed by the same hand in both cases—same size blade, same direction of cuts, same parts excised.” She shook her head, staring at Drummond’s dead, calm face. “What people do to each other in the name of sexual gratification. The mind is the largest sex organ—whatever can be imagined can be enacted, and often is. And there’s nothing like an orgasm for positive reinforcement of an idea.”

  Angie felt hot and overly conscious of Maddocks beside her. “And the crucifix markings on her brow?” she said.

  O’Hagan led them over to a light box on the wall containing X-rays. “This is Hocking’s skull. You can see faint scoring on bone here.” The doc pointed to very thin lines in the shape of a crucifix on the brow bone. “And this is Drummond’s skull. Same scoring depth, same shape.”

  “Again, looks like the same hand,” Maddocks said. “He exerted the same pressure with the blade in both cases.”

  “Drummond was in otherwise healthy condition,” O’Hagan said. “Whatever other trace might have been left on her body was likely lost in the hospital.”

  “Her clothing is still with the lab,” Angie said. “Maybe we’ll get something off it that could tie these two victims together in terms of location—perhaps some clue as to where they were abducted and then assaulted.”

  “Her teeth?” Maddocks said.

  “Very good shape. No evidence of cosmetic work there. The odontologist will be taking a look at Hocking’s dental work later this morning. There’s evidence of very poor oral hygiene and serious decay in Hocking’s past, which has been remediated by some rather high-end dental wizardry.”

  “We now know that Hocking was a crystal meth user for several years,” Maddocks said. “Her tooth decay, or meth mouth, would thus be consistent with her drug use.” He paused. “It’s like she was cleaned up.”

  “And had the finances to do so,” O’Hagan offered.

  “Or, more likely, someone paid to have her cleaned up,” Angie said.

  CHAPTER 23

  “Yo, yous got some spare cash?” A rake-thin woman, scabby face, rotted and missing teeth, accosted Detectives Kjel Holgersen and Harvey Leo as they strode down the sidewalk past a thrift store with its fake Christmas tree and tangled tinsel in the window. Kjel ran his gaze quickly over the sorry creature. She wore fingerless gloves, jeans, a filthy denim jacket. Her wet hair clung in ratty, dun-colored strings against her hollowed cheeks, and her mad eyes darted up and down the street.

  She grabbed at Leo’s jacket. “C’mon, gramps, you got cash. Spare some for the season of joy, a time of giving.” She shot a paranoid glance over her shoulder, her tongue darting in and out of her mouth.

  “Get your hands the hell off me, you meth-ho,” Leo snapped as he shook her off and sped up, leaving Kjel in his wake.

  “Asshole!” she shrieked after Leo. “Fucking prick. Yo, man, you … I’m talking to you, grampa! Come back here. Look at me. Look in my face. I seen you around. I know yous. You want some pussy, man? Merry fuckin’ Christmas!”

  “She stinks,” Leo muttered as Kjel caught up to him. Rain, icy, pattered down harder on their shoulders, splashing into puddles forming between mounds of melting brown slush. “Fucking tweaker. Sky-high on crystal meth, oozing chemical scabs.”

  Kjel cast him a sideways glance. But he bit his tongue. For now. He’d barely been getting a handle on Pallorino, and now he had this asshole to deal with. Harvey Leo came with a different kind of chip on his shoulder than Pallorino, but he was a bona-fide member of the old boys’ club back at the station. Kjel figured he’d do well to stay on the right side of that bunch.

  “You know the difference between a crackhead and a tweaker?” Leo said as they rounded the block on their way to Harbor House. “Crackhead will steal your shit and bounce—tweaker will steal your shit and then help you look for it.” He chuckled throatily at his own joke, finishing with a rattle of a smoker’s cough. “Can bang like rabbits for hours, those tweakers.”

  Kjel said nothing.

  “What kind of name is Kell Holgersen, anyway? Like Scandinavian, Nordic, what?”

  “It’s Kjel.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “No, yous said ‘Kell.’ It’s pronounced like Hh-yell. Like you was saying the ‘H’ in the word ‘huge.’ But most English folk can’t say it like that, so they use Sh-yell.”

  “Yeah. Like I said, what kind of name is that, anyway?”

  “My pops’s family came from Norway.”

  “That why you talk funny?”

  He gave a slow smile, his gaze darting into shadowed doorways, trying to see into the faces of the homeless who crouched there. Victoria was full of them. And yeah, he still thought he might one day see the eyes of his father looking back at him from some dark doorway or cardboard box. It’s why Kjel had become a cop. Why he’d worked narcotics up north, and undercover. He liked to work the streets, walk the walk. Talk the talk. If he hadn’t become a cop, he’d probably have ended up like his pops, anyway. His badge was the fine line between one side and the other. Or … maybe it wasn’t.

  “I come from a place up near Bella Coola, near the Alaska border. It was settled by Norwegian fishermen forever ago. Got pretty isolated and hardscrabble once the fishing industry dried up, though.”

  “So … you what? Came down to sunny Victoria to further your career as a cop?”

  “Sunny, my ass.” He wiped rain from his brow.

  “Warmer at least. It’s why half the homeless end up here. They call it the San Diego of Canada. I heard you worked UC?”

  “You got a lot of questions, Leo.”

  “It’s why I’m a great detective.” He grinned.

  “Yet you never made sergeant? Your age and all.”

  A dark shadow crossed the
old cop’s face.

  “Hey,” Kjel said with a shrug. “I got questions, too.” They arrived at the entrance to Harbor House. Kjel banged with the base of his fist on the door. Third time knocking, the door opened to reveal a dark-skinned man dressed in baggy brown corduroy pants and sporting a goatee. He kept his hand on the door, holding it half-closed as he regarded them with gentle-looking liquid-black eyes.

  “Pastor Markus Gilani?” Kjel said.

  “Who’s asking?”

  The detectives showed their badges. “Kjel Holgersen and Harvey Leo, Metro PD. Can we ask you a few questions?”

  “About what?”

  “Do you know this young woman?” Kjel nodded to Leo, who held out a damp flyer with Hocking’s mug shot.

  Gilani stared at Hocking’s picture. Kjel watched the man’s eyes narrow. A small vein swelled at his temple.

  Hand still on the door, Gilani said, “Look, the kids who come here, they don’t want to be found. They just sleep here, get a hot meal. Trust is a big issue for them. They don’t trust the system, but they do trust they will be safe here, because we don’t give out information.”

  “So you do know her?” Kjel said.

  The pastor’s jaw tightened.

  Kjel scratched his wet head. “See, here’s the thing, Pastor Gilani—yous a real pastor, by the way?”

  Silence.

  Kjel nodded. “See, thing is, your kids might not want to be found, but Faith Hocking here has already been found. Dead. And we kinda want know how she gots to be that way.”

  The man paled visibly under his brown skin, and his eyes flickered. “What … what happened to her?”

  “So, yeah. You do know her,” Kjel said.

  “She hasn’t been here in a long time. Three years maybe.” The man flicked a nervous glance at Leo, who was still holding out the wilting flyer.

  “Can we come inside, Pastor?” Kjel said. “Kinda wet out here. Water’s dripping down the back of my neck, see.”

  Reluctantly, the pastor opened the door wider to admit them. He shut and locked it behind them. “Come through this way. We don’t open up for the kids until six sharp in the evenings, when we offer a volunteer soup kitchen. While we generally have enough food, thanks to volunteers and donors, we never have enough beds for all of them, so we run a nightly lottery while they’re eating, and the ones who don’t win—we have to put them back out into the cold.”