The Drowned Girls (Angie Pallorino Book 1)

by Loreth Anne White

“You a smoker?”

  “Occasionally.”

  She casually flipped open the matchbook cover to the number she’d seen scrawled on the inside flap. “Who gives out matchbooks these days anyways?” she said, studying the number again.

  Anger darkened his face, and he snatched it from her hands. “You want to look at anything more in this office, you better come back with a warrant.”

  She looked up into his black eyes. His mouth was tight, neck taut. Raddison, it seemed, was not a young man who appreciated being crossed by a woman. Or maybe by anyone.

  “Maybe we will, Zach,” she said softly. “Maybe we will.”

  As they exited the building, Angie ducked under an awning out of the rain. She pulled her notebook out of her bag slung across her chest and quickly checked the number Drummond’s mother had given her at Saint Jude’s moments before her daughter had died. “Shit,” she said softly.

  “What?” said Maddocks.

  She looked up, excitement fizzing into her blood. “It’s hers,” she said. “The phone number in that matchbook was for Gracie Drummond’s cell. And it was written inside a matchbook with a logo that says B.C.” Her eyes lanced his. “Like on her calendar—B.C.—the dates she had with Amanda R. and Lara P.”

  CHAPTER 39

  Killion was standing in his office doorway when Zach turned around. There was a strange look in his boss’s eyes.

  “What was that about?” Killion said.

  Zach inhaled deeply, his mind racing, questions crackling and sizzling along synapses and short-circuiting, then zipping right back to be asked again. “Those detectives had questions about a friend of mine, Jayden Norton-Wells. It seems they’re looking for his Lexus, which was stolen about two weeks ago.”

  “So why come to you, why this office?”

  “Like I said, Jay’s my friend. They wanted to know if I was with him at a restaurant the night his vehicle was taken—seems Jay was a bit too drunk to recall who all was there.”

  Silence. A strange kind of energy rolled off the mayor. A disquiet crawled into Zach’s chest.

  “And this thing about the initials, B.C.?”

  So Killion had heard the conversation. Zach fingered the matchbook now in his pocket. “I have no idea.”

  “If there’s anything I should know—”

  “There isn’t.”

  The mayor held his gaze for a moment, then cleared his throat. “Have those council agenda updates gone out to the media?”

  “A while ago.”

  The door closed suddenly. Zach stared at the shut door, and the dark disquiet in his chest deepened.

  Jack Killion picked up his phone, glanced at his closed door, and quickly dialed a number. Their special number. As the phone rang, he swiveled his chair to watch the silvery rain beat against his window.

  “What is it?” came the husky voice he loved so much.

  He moistened his lips. “The police were just here.”

  “Your office?”

  “Two MVPD detectives—one male, one female—asking Zach questions about a stolen Lexus and your son.”

  “Jayden?”

  “Yes.”

  “What … why?”

  “Did he have a Lexus stolen?”

  “I … yes, I heard him talking to his father about it. I don’t involve myself in issues between those two. It never ends well. At least the cops are doing their jobs looking for the darn thing.”

  “So why come and see Zach, and why in my office? At this time—on the eve of my inauguration?”

  “You think it’s posturing on the part of the MVPD, some vendetta?”

  “I’ve not made friends among law enforcement with my campaign promises to sweep the MVPD clean. And I chair my first in-camera police board meeting tomorrow. They’re all anticipating a change of guard.”

  A long pause. “I’ll speak with Jay when I get home tonight. It’s probably nothing more than it seems.”

  “Joyce, the optics of it—Metro investigating a criminal issue in connection with the ADAG’s son is a big enough media event as it is. And detectives coming to the mayor’s office links me to your family and a criminal investigation. Christ, given the way the MVPD can’t control the leaks from within their own organization, we could see this on the front page of the Sun tomorrow or on that woman’s blog. Next thing we’ll have telephoto lenses pointing into our penthouse windows, with media watching us from a press boat in the harbor.”

  “Maybe it’s time,” she said quietly. “To cut Gunnar loose and put your man Antoni Moreno into place, where he can watch and handle things. Where he can roust out this inside informant. Your hand might just have been forced, Jack. You can set it all in motion at the police board meeting tomorrow, right? You have at least three board members on your side, no? Maybe four.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do it, Jack. Start the process. It’s time.”

  “What about this serial killer thing—the idea of holding off on Gunnar until they’re close to catching him?”

  “You’ll have to spin it another way. This is you stepping up to the plate to take charge as soon as you take office. This is you putting better, fresh police management in place, stat, to take over this grave investigation, to get rid of the traitors on the force, and to make the city safer for all those young women out there who are terrified to go out alone at night now.”

  Angie sat with Maddocks at the opposite end of Buziak’s desk. Buziak had shut his door and drawn the blinds across his window that looked out into the homicide bullpen. He clicked the back of his pen in and out as he listened to Maddocks and Angie update him on the Norton-Wells interview and their subsequent interaction with Zach Raddison.

  Before their meeting, another check had been run to ensure there was indeed no record of the Lexus being reported stolen. There wasn’t. A BOLO had since been put out on the plate.

  Once they’d covered everything, Buziak leaned back in his chair, pen still in hand.

  “So, we have a connection between Gracie Drummond, Jayden Norton-Wells, and Zach Raddison at the mayor’s office. Both the men are Caucasian, black hair. Raddison has a matchbook in his office with Drummond’s phone number and the letters B.C. on it—the matchbook may or may not be his. The B.C. logo may or may not refer to something on Drummond’s calendar. But right after you’d questioned Jayden Norton-Wells about the Lexus seen on the bridge and outside the cemetery on the night Drummond was assaulted, Norton-Wells rushed straight to Raddison, where he argues with him. Norton-Wells, the ADAG’s son, is a practicing Catholic who wears a Saint Christopher medallion around his neck. He also has the initials J.R., which match the inscription on the back of Drummond’s medallion. Plus he never reported his father’s Lexus stolen, nor canceled the plate and associated insurance, and we have found no proof that he was ever dining at the Auberge the night his vehicle allegedly went missing. Or that the Lexus was ever parked in the pay lot up the street from the Auberge.” He clicked his pen again.

  “And then there’s his father, developer Ray Norton-Wells, supporter of the Killion campaign, who has Killion’s backing for his planned waterfront development, and who alleges he was too busy to cancel insurance on the missing vehicle. He, like his son, has black hair. Plus there’s the ADAG—mother and wife … what a clusterfuck.” He leaned abruptly forward, started rapidly ticking his pen against the desk now.

  Angie had to restrain herself from stopping him. The sound was making things zip around in her brain like little live electrical wires. As Buziak was about to open his mouth again, a knock sounded at his office door. He stiffened, and his eyes met theirs.

  “This connection between the Norton-Wells family, the mayor’s office, and a vehicle possibly used in the commission of a homicide stays in this room until further notice, just between the three of us for now. Got it?”

  They both nodded. He glanced up. “Come!”

  The door opened. It was Leo. The hoary detective did a small double take when he saw Maddocks and Angi
e in Buziak’s office, and he scowled.

  “What is it, Leo?” said their boss.

  “Botanist’s report has come in. That specific combination of the Garry oak and agronomic grass form part of a rare ecosystem—one where the native oak has adapted to shallow soil and developed wind resistance. And there is only one place with this ecosystem that also has goats—feral goats. Thetisby Island.”

  Angie and Maddocks exchanged a fast glance. Excitement rippled through her.

  “Meteorologist also confirms that powerful currents, the recent onshore winds, and high tidal flow could push something like a body from the area of Thetisby into the harbor. This would be consistent with the sheep maggot evidence, too, if the body was kept on the island for a time before entering the water.”

  Angie sat bolt upright. “There’s an abandoned homestead on Thetisby Island,” she said. “From the 1862 smallpox epidemic. A group of people left the mainland and established a small community there in an effort to avoid the plague. It was a going farm concern with goats, other animals. When the pox got them anyway, it went to ruin, and there’s been a colony of feral goats breeding there ever since.” She paused. The excitement in the room was palpable.

  “We just might have our Hocking murder scene,” Buziak said, coming sharply to his feet. “Let’s get the ball rolling!”

  CHAPTER 40

  WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 13

  Angie stood in Tyvek boot covers beside Maddocks, Holgersen, and Buziak in the freezing and cavernous root cellar of the crumbling homestead ruins on Thetisby Island. In silence they watched as Barb O’Hagan worked the scene with the forensic ident techs, the photographer documenting every millimeter of their progress. Kitted in white boiler suits, caps, booties, and wearing nitrile gloves, the techs moved as if in slow freeze-frame images as the camera flashed white light. It lent the subterranean scene an otherworldly air. There was no noise apart from the click of the camera and the thin ghostly wail of the wind that sought entry through the broken rafters in the ruins upstairs.

  They had not been able to set out first thing this morning as hoped. A new storm front, dense fog, and high surf had held them back until this afternoon. The trip to the island, which should have taken them twenty minutes in the MVPD harbor unit craft, had taken far longer as they’d battled onshore westerly winds and high seas. Leo was on the island, too, but he’d been felled by seasickness and remained outside, smoking and trying to stop himself from throwing up again, swearing like a sailor at not being able to come down into the cellar to observe, in case he puked his DNA all over the place.

  When they’d arrived it had been close to pitch-dark in this underfloor hole dug into the black earth. And it was cold—“cold as a witch’s tit,” Holgersen had so succinctly informed them. Cold as a meat locker, Angie thought. Combined with the well-below-freezing arctic outflow temperatures that had locked them in a frigid grip over the last two weeks, it was no leap of logic to see how Faith Hocking’s body could have been preserved for some time down here. Given this new context, O’Hagan figured PMI was ten days to two weeks. Hocking’s body, she’d said, would have kept as well down here as any human flesh stored in the morgue cooler. Even now, with this stormy, wet, and warmer trend, the place still felt like a frigid earthen maw, exhaling breath from the ground below.

  They’d brought in portable, battery-powered LED lighting systems, which had illuminated with stark, unnatural light, providing clues to the horrors that might have been perpetrated down here. As she watched, Angie tried to piece together what might have happened to Faith Hocking in this cellar.

  They’d found fresh scrapes in the slimy detritus covering the wooden dock where they’d put in with the MVPD boats. It was their first sign that there’d been recent activity on the island—a boat had been moored against the wood. And it was unlikely that it had been tied up there for a pleasure trip, given the weather over the past weeks. Tracks had then been found leading up from the dock—footprints in previously frozen mud, along with strange drag marks that had chunked up moss and lichen that grew over the rocks.

  Outside the homestead entrance, more tracks in mud had been evident. And inside the ruins of the home, they’d found a herd of feral goats seeking shelter. It was easy to see how goat hairs, plus old Garry oak leaves, seeds, and other detritus, could have ended up trapped in Hocking’s tarp cocoon.

  But it was down in the root cellar where they hit the real pay dirt.

  Polypropylene ropes hung from a support beam overhead and swayed softly in the breeze that managed to punch down through the open trapdoor—the same kind of rope that had been used to truss Hocking up. Luminol had revealed evidence of human blood on the rough rope strands. And trapped in the strands, the techs had found human hair trace—black, brunette, and dark blond strands. Angie figured the longer brunette hair strand could be Hocking’s. It was the other hair trace that was now of keen interest. Some looked to be pubic, or male body hair. It had all been bagged and logged, and she was itching to know if it matched any of the hair trace that had been found on Drummond’s clothing, because that would link the donor to both homicide victims.

  A tech crouched near the wall where he was working to scrape up bits of candle wax. Several candle stubs, burned to the ground, had already been bagged and logged into evidence and carried upstairs to a tented staging area that had been set up outside the house.

  A sheet of the same kind of polyethylene tarp that had cocooned Hocking was bundled into a far corner of the cellar, near remnants of decayed sacking, old wooden produce crates, and little windswept piles of dried Garry oak leaves, acorns, bits of old grass and bark, and strands of witch’s beard that had been ripped from the pines growing on the windward side of the island. Luminol had also revealed as blood the dark stains on the cedar planks that lay across the earthen floor.

  O’Hagan crouched near the stains, examining the scene against a set of morgue photographs that she’d brought to the island with her. She pointed with her nitrile-gloved finger to the rough, bloodstained cedar. “The size and spacing of the planks matches lividity patterns on Hocking’s back.” She pursed her lips, resembling some strange Pillsbury Doughboy squatting in her oversize boiler suit and cap.

  “What is it?” Buziak said.

  The pathologist glanced up at the dangling ropes strung over the support beam. “The rope circumference is consistent with the size of some of the ligature marks around her neck, but …” She worried her bottom lip with her teeth. “It’s the gastrointestinal contents. She consumed a gourmet meal to the extreme.”

  “And there is no evidence that she ate that here,” Maddocks said.

  “Gives new meaning to a last supper,” Holgersen added. “I’s always thought it was a waste, you know, that last fancy supper request stuff for death row inmates, the food sitting undigested in their stomachs when they kick the bucket.”

  Ignoring Holgersen, Maddocks said quietly, “She could have been killed somewhere else and brought here by boat shortly after her murder, before lividity set in, which could have happened when her body was left lying on those planks. Or she could have been brought here right after her meal and then strangled here, with those ropes.” He tilted his chin toward the hanging ropes.

  “Yeah, like, she could have eaten anywheres along the coast and gotten out here within the hour by boat,” said Holgersen. “Or she was strangled on the vessel that brought her here. Doesn’t exactly narrow things down.”

  The wind outside howled suddenly, and a visible shudder chased through the tech scraping up the wax near the earthen wall. He glanced up, wide-eyed, as if one of the ghosts from the eighteen hundreds pox epidemic had suddenly crossed his grave. The ropes swayed, and upstairs a floorboard creaked. Somewhere an old shutter banged.

  And suddenly the little girl was there—she was standing next to the tech with the candle in a soft, shimmering wash of pink. Angie froze. She heard the voice inside her head again, like a singsong playground tune …

  Come um
dum, playam dum grove …

  Then the woman’s scream in Polish … Uciekaj!

  The girl spun around and ran with flowing hair and dress right through the cellar wall of black earth. Angie stared at the place the child had vanished, sweat breaking out over her body, her heart beating a steady thwump, thwump, thwump. In the distance, as if down some distorted tunnel, she was aware of Holgersen talking.

  “Yeah, so he brings her down here, where she either dies, or she’s already dead when he brings her. Maybe he revisits her a couple of times, and once he’s finished with his fantasy thing, and the cutting, and once he figures she’s going a bit rank, he rolls her up in the tarp, drags her down to his boat tied to the dock, puts out to sea. He then tosses her overboard on the lee side of Thetisby Island. He thinks she’ll go down, except … the currents and weather start her traveling toward the inner harbor. Then maybe she floats up some, and her ropes get hooked up in some boat prop.” He paused. “Skipper probably thought he hit a log or something. God knows those logs are floating half-submerged everywhere out there—real boating hazard in these parts. And then this freak hookup drags her into the harbor, until the rope is severed, and she flows with the powerful tidal surge into the Gorge, just in time for the homeless dude to see her come up under the bridge.”

  His voice droned on and on, then drowned as if being swallowed in a tunnel. The cellar started to go black, all light narrowing to one little pinprick …

  Pallorino … are you okay … Pallorino …

  “Angie!”

  Her eyes snapped wide. She came back into focus.

  “You okay?” It was Maddocks; he had his arm around her, holding her up. Panic kicked in. She tried to swallow, but her mouth was dust-dry.

  “Ah, yeah. I’m fine.” She dislodged herself from his support, grabbing instead on to the ladder that led down from the trapdoor above, steadying herself as she swayed on her feet again.

  “Your pupils are really dilated,” he said. “You look waxen.”

  Buziak and Holgersen were staring at her, too. O’Hagan was also watching her intently from her crouched position. Concern creased the old doc’s face, which frightened Angie. She needed air. She needed to get out of here, fast. Every molecule in her body was screaming, Flee! Run! Uciekaj, uciekaj! She blinked as a red flash cut across her vision, and she caught a glint of silver that somehow felt like ice searing across her mouth. Her hand shot to her scar, and she brought it away, examining her fingertips, half expecting to see blood.