Traces of the Girl
Page 10
She had been one of the only certified hypnotists in the area, a technique that Dr. Tompkins sometimes used in his therapy. And if the way Emily believed her and Albert was any indication, she was good at her job.
She liked this Emily person in a way because she felt that Emily, whose life also had been pretty hard, would be sympathetic toward Joyce and Albert’s plight if she knew their whole story.
Joyce felt she’d been destined to meet Emily. When Emily had asked her for the time at the doctor’s office, Joyce had told her and Emily had thanked her profusely. She had been so nice. Very few people would ever be that nice to a stranger. Emily was special. So what if she had seemed a little high at the time? Emily seemed like a genuinely decent person, and Joyce had never met one of those.
Joyce had read and reread Emily’s files with the doctor’s notes in them at the medical office. Joyce didn’t want to seem obsessed so she’d used the article from the newspaper as an excuse to know Emily. She’d doubted Emily could have remembered her from the doctor’s office but she had. If Emily seemed like the kind of person people remembered meeting or even just seeing, Joyce wasn’t.
The doctor had marked Emily as a ‘perfect candidate’ for hypnosis, although Joyce never got the chance to work on her, but Joyce knew it would work once she did, and it had worked. Joyce never got a chance to work with Emily at the medical office because Dr. Tompkins had let her go. “I’m going to have to let you go,” was exactly how he put it. It was too bad really because she’d liked Dr. Tompkins up until that point. Up until then things had been getting better for both Joyce and her brother, and because of Joyce’s new job they were even able to rent a nice house for a while. But because of her getting fired they had to leave the house and were living out of their car before the robbery. Seeing Albert killing the doctor with his bare hands had been liberating to Joyce. And it had shown her how much Albert loved her. More than once Albert had told Joyce how she was more like a ‘mama’ to him than a sister.
Of course, Dr. Tompkins had other patients but Emily fascinated her. She’d become a hypnotist in the first place because she liked having control over other people when she grew up having almost no control over her own life.
She’d only worked at Dr. Tompkins’s for a short time. She did that a lot, hold jobs for short amounts of time, many jobs. And then she’d just move on to the next one. But the doctor’s office job was supposed to have been different for her, she had worked there for the longest time, it had been a milestone for her.
Until that no-good doctor went and fired her, for what exactly? She had taken a few patient files home with her, including Emily’s. Something like that. She’d only worked there a couple days a week. But the doctor had put an end to her accomplishment of long employment.
She was glad Albert had killed him and glad she had seen it. Albert knew that if the doctor recognized her then he could identify them and tell the police they’d kidnapped Emily Will, so just tying him with ropes and putting duct tape or something like that over his mouth, wouldn’t have done.
This murdering stuff was really Albert’s thing. She’d gone along with the killings. Killing that persistent woman at the auction had made Albert proud of her, she could tell. He had gotten the guns for them to bring along during the robbery. Just in case, as he’d said. Just in case. To scare someone, Albert had said, that’s all they would use them for, so they’d be taken seriously. But the guns had come in handy, hadn’t they? Joyce wondered a little if Albert lied to her and had planned on killing someone so he had insisted on having the guns. Albert had been annoyed with her when she dropped her gun right after the robbery and hadn’t had time to retrieve it, and she had felt like an idiot. Fingerprints. Albert had a criminal record but she didn’t. But Albert had touched her gun too.
That orphanage must have messed Albert up badly. And where had he learned that bomb-making stuff? He mentioned he’d been to Iraq at eighteen after he left the boys’ home, but she gathered he’d been dishonorably discharged. So much time had passed that she didn’t know her little brother anymore. But that would change when they got to Cuba. Cuba meant freedom, even if it meant she would spend the rest of her life looking over her shoulder.
During the time she worked at the doctor’s and after she left, she’d sometimes pretend that she and Emily were long-lost sisters, like Albert had been her long-lost brother. Or even that she was Emily’s mother, although Emily wasn’t that much younger than her. She couldn’t have kids, anyway. She always thought that was why her husband had left her. Joyce had come to think of Albert like a son, and he already thought of her as his mother.
Emily was an orphan like Joyce and Albert. But she wouldn’t tell Emily any more than she needed to know about herself and Albert. She had promised Albert she wouldn’t let Emily see her vulnerable.
Joyce smiled to herself as she watched Emily awaken from a dream where she had been murmuring, “Peter. Peter.”
Peter. A man’s name. The name of the man Emily hadn’t married?
“You were talking to yourself,” Joyce remarked to Emily. “You were saying, ‘Peter’. Is that your former fellow’s name?”
Emily didn’t answer Joyce’s question about the name. She shook her head. “No, I wasn’t saying anything.”
Joyce viewed her as an adult would view a spoiled child and smiled. The constant disrespect Emily had shown her enraged Joyce. And Joyce had told her again and again how she hated it but Emily never listened. It never seemed to sink in through her thick skull. Joyce had liked Emily and she’d wanted Emily to like her. Now she didn’t care whether Emily liked her. But she wanted Emily to never forget her.
“Lights out. May you have sweet dreams again, Peach.”
Joyce swung a punch at Emily’s face and Emily’s head flew backwards and Joyce heard her take in a burst of air through her nose. Emily’s head tilted to the left then the right, and she sort of half hung there with her eyes closed like she was sleeping. She’d blacked out and was unconscious.
“What the hell did you do that for?” Albert remarked.
“I’m sick of her. I’m sick of her and her sarcasm.”
“I thought you liked her.”
“I do like her.”
“You have a funny way of showing it.”
Joyce shrugged. “Maybe you don’t know me after all.”
“Maybe I don’t. We haven’t really known each other well since we were kids. A lot of years passed between the time we were kids and us reuniting.”
“But we live together,” Joyce said.
“Oh, please. We were living out of your car before this. And before that, we were hardly ever home at the same time.”
Their bickering wasn’t a good sign and she knew it. A plan could easily become unraveled if the two participants started disagreeing. Many big-time criminals had fallen for that very reason. If they were disagreeing over something as small as this, then how could they fly to Cuba and start over as fugitives?
Joyce wondered if Emily knew that she and Albert planned to kill her after she’d flown them to Cuba. Maybe once they were in Cuba she could hypnotize Albert like she’d hypnotized Emily into believing what they wanted her to and doing what they wanted. Albert was a fool if he thought Joyce wouldn’t use that against him because they were related. Joyce would do anything to find her version of ‘happiness’, though she didn’t know quite what that was, even if it meant putting herself first over Albert.
Joyce loved Albert but wasn’t as attached to him as she suspected she would be if they had spent more of their childhoods together. Joyce realized then that when she thought of herself and Albert: she thought of herself first and then Albert, in that order.
“Come on, tell me why you punched her, why you really punched her.” Albert just didn’t know when to quit it.
He took his eyes away from the road for a moment and glanced at her and she didn’t like the sparkle in them. “Do you think I’m jealous of her, is that what you’re thinking?” she asked.
“She had a pervert bothering her at work, the poor thing. And I read in her files that she had a miscarriage a long time ago,” Joyce said.
“So even after all of that, she didn’t turn out as mean as us.”
“So that makes her – what are you saying? – stronger than us?”
Albert nodded. “Yeah, maybe that’s what I’m saying.”
“Yeah, well, she won’t be strong enough to survive this, to survive us.”
“Ain’t that the truth?” Albert smiled at her. “So, why did you punch her?”
Joyce shot him a look. “I told you, I don’t like her sarcasm. Why didn’t you stop me if it bothered you so much?”
“I’d personally never harm a woman but you’re your own person.”
“You’ve come close to hitting her yourself,” Joyce pointed out.
“Yeah, but I never actually did it.”
“What high morals you have,” Joyce said sarcastically. Then she shook her head. “Men!”
She patted the still unconscious Emily, who leaned back in the seat toward the headrest. “Can you believe the crap us girls have to put up with?”
Emily didn’t move and Joyce touched her shoulder again. “I guess you can’t hear me.”
Chapter Nine
Harry’s real name was Harriet but all the cops she ever worked with called her Harry. The fact that this was done in jest of ‘Dirty Harry’ wasn’t lost on her. The nickname had caught on at Harry’s new station without Harry even mentioning that had been her nickname at her old job. Because of her name and her occupation and the character from that movie, it was inevitable she was called that. It didn’t bother her.
Harry didn’t just consider herself tough she knew she was tough. She was a regional kickboxing champion after all. She’d started kickboxing when she first became a cop and got good at it fast. That had been a couple of years ago, when she was in her twenties, but she still could kick some serious ass and she regularly did as a cop.
Harry was new in town and a young officer had been assigned to help her with the auction robbery and murders case. Harry felt that the officer, Carlow what’s-his-face? No. Rick Carlow. That was it. Not Carlow Rick. Harry felt this Carlow guy might have been a bit sexist in that he’d looked surprised when the police station’s captain, who was their boss, introduced her, who couldn’t have been much older than him, to him as the new detective he’d be working under.
Harry had moved to the area after her career in the city derailed after her partner got shot while they were doing a heroin bust, and he died, and then she kind of lost it afterwards
. And her department made her take some time off. Not ‘crazy’ lost it, but she lost it enough to accept the chief of police’s suggestion that she not return to her job. And that she instead take her younger brother Mickey’s offer of staying with him and his wife, Maria, in their small town and getting a job with the police department there, to escape the city, at least for a while.
Harry didn’t end up staying with Mickey and his wife when she got there. She visited them, but she’d gotten her own apartment. Harry wasn’t great at making attachments, not even with a close relative like her brother, and she thought she’d return to the big leagues of the city someday, which she used as an excuse not to form close bonds in the small town. She went around with the attitude of, “This is only temporary.”
Harry had been a member of an elite K-9 unit back in the city. Her partner who was killed was a German Shepherd member of the team named River. He was a dog, but they were partners in every sense of the word, whose lives depended on one another. In the city Harry had gone when the opportunity arose from being a beat cop to a homicide detective to a member of a K-9 unit that focused on narcotics because it had always been a dream of hers to work with those smart, loyal dogs. But that dream ended with River’s death, in tragedy. So, a little more cynical, she went back to being a detective, but in a small town.
She’d left the city where she and her brother had been raised and where their parents still lived, to move to the small town where Mickey had gone to be with Maria.
No one in her new station knew every detail of what had happened to Harry back in the city and she planned to keep it that way. And it had all been working out pretty well for her. Until some son of a gun decided to rob the auction place where Maria worked, killing her and a man she worked with, Dan Wesley, in the process. And Mickey and Maria had two young kids who were left motherless after the incident. It was rotten luck, Harry thought, for her to just move there and have that happen.
The crime was personal to Harry and she vowed not to sleep until she solved the case. Needless to say, she hadn’t gotten much sleep over the past few days. The case was still only days old, and Harry knew that once the time stretched into weeks and then months the case risked becoming cold and unsolvable.
She’d promised Mickey in his living room the long, late night she’d delivered the news of Maria’s death to him, that she would find Maria’s killer or killers, no matter what or how long it took. Mickey hadn’t asked Harry to stay and help with the kids because he knew Harry wasn’t capable of being mother-like. Heck, Mickey could be more mother-like than her. But she visited them often.
Harry was a lifelong tomboy, tall and strong with very short brown hair and a confident strut, and who could be mistaken for a guy from far away when she wore a baseball cap. Her mother liked to tell her she had nice, fine features and could be pretty if she wanted to, but she didn’t care about stuff like that. She cared about her job.
Today, she sat in the captain’s office in the chair opposite his desk, with the door shut. The captain had called her in to speak with her about her personal connection to the case and whether she should be removed from the case. Since Harry had only been working with her partner for about a week and less than three days before the crime occurred, she didn’t expect her partner, who didn’t know her well and there was that possible sexist thing, to back her up, so she went in ready for a fight.
“You’ve only been with us for around a week,” Captain Nolan said.
“Yeah, and in that time, my brother’s wife was murdered. I see no reason why I need to be taken off the case. I came here before the crime happened. It’s not like I came here just for it.”
“No one is doubting it’s a bad coincidence. But that FBI agent – what’s his name again?”
The FBI had sent an agent to the station yesterday to assist with the investigation since the robbery fell under federal jurisdiction. She’d worked with the FBI a couple of times back in the city and it always went the same way: they tried to take over.
The agent, Paul Maple, a good-looking hotshot, already irked Harry. Pretty much everyone irked Harry except for Harry. In fact, at her old job, there’d been more than one complaint filed against her that she’d been ‘disagreeable’. Harry had argued that the complaints were bullcrap and escaped being reprimanded.
“Paul, sir, Paul Maple,” Harry said.
She remembered the name because the FBI agent had mentioned he was from Vermont originally, although he now lived in Virginia, and Carlow had made a joke about his last name. Carlow had started to refer to the agent as ‘Maple Man’ behind his back. What a jackass. Even Harry, who couldn’t stand Maple, wouldn’t do something like that.
“Right – Maple. Maple has expressed some concern you might be too attached to this case emotionally to be able to handle it.”
“He said I was too emotional?” Because I’m a woman? What bullcrap. Agent Maple had just got there and already was starting trouble.
She sat up taller. “She was my sister-in-law. Of course, I’m attached to it.” Harry cleared her throat, something she often did when irritated. “With all due
respect, sir, there are no other detectives in this town at the moment since the only other one retired. I’m the only one you have. If you take me off the case, then that means Maple’s in charge. I’m sure he’d love that, he’d get to take all the glory. That’s probably why he’s doing this. He wants this case to himself.”
Nolan motioned for her to settle down.
But she couldn’t. Not yet. “He’s only been here for a day. What the heck does he know?” Harry said in exasperation.
“I don’t agree with him. No one at this station wants you off the case. I sure don’t. Look, it’s like this: The FBI is in charge, we’re just here to assist them. So, if Maple says you need to go, then you’ll need to go.”
“And has he said that?”
“Not explicitly but he implied it.”
Harry made a face when the captain glanced away for a moment.
“We need the FBI because they can go across state lines in case the perpetrators flee the state,” he said. “They also have more resources than us to put into the case.”
“Thank God, it’s a big state,” Harry remarked.
“But you’re still in for now,” Nolan said.
“Until Maple Leaf says so?” She cracked the joke.
Nolan started to frown then smiled. “Don’t let him hear you calling him that. I know Carlow already has a nickname for him.”
“Carlow’s nickname for him is ‘Maple Man’. I like mine better.”
“Me, too, Harriet, me, too. Why did they call you ‘Dirty Harry’ back in the city?”
“You know about that? I thought the nickname hadn’t really caught on here. I mean, I thought only Carlow called me that behind my back.”
“No. It has caught on like wildfire. Everyone’s calling you that now, even our station secretary. It won’t be long before they start calling you it to your face.”
Harry shrugged. “Doesn’t bother me.”
“It’s an obvious nickname, because of the movie, and you’re a cop. I actually first heard about it from a school buddy of mine who’s now a detective in the city.”