Shut Your Eyes Tight

by John Verdon

  Blatt shrugged.

  Rodriguez nodded in agreement. “Okay, Bill, let’s move on with the phone-call report.”

  Anderson shuffled once more through his papers, which were spreading out over a larger area of the table. “The addresses, phone numbers, and other contact information we used were the most recent on file. The number of graduates within the five-year target period is a hundred and fifty-two. Average is about thirty per year. Of the hundred and fifty-two, we think we have currently valid contact information for a hundred and twenty-six. Initial calls have been placed to all hundred and twenty-six. Of those calls, forty resulted in immediate contact, with either the graduate herself or a family member. Of the remaining eighty-six for whom we left messages, twelve had gotten back to us as of nine forty-five this morning.”

  “That makes fifty-two live contacts,” said Kline quickly. “What’s the bottom line?”

  “Hard to say.” Anderson sounded like everything in his life was hard.

  “Jesus, Lieutenant …”

  “What I mean is, the results are mixed.” He fished another sheet of paper out of his pile. “Out of the fifty-two, we spoke directly to the graduate herself in eleven instances. No problem there, right? I mean, if we spoke to them, they’re not missing.”

  “How about the other forty-one?”

  “In twenty-nine instances, the individual we spoke to—parent, spouse, sibling, roommate, significant other—claimed to know the location of the graduate and to be in contact with her.”

  Kline was keeping a running tally on a pad. “And the other twelve?”

  “One told us her daughter had died in an automobile accident. One was extremely vague, probably high on something, didn’t seem to know much of anything. One other claimed to know the exact whereabouts of the subject but refused to provide any further information.”

  Kline scribbled something on his pad. “And the other nine?”

  “The other nine—all parents or stepparents—said they had no idea where their daughter was.”

  There was a speculative silence in the room, broken by Gurney. “How many of those disappearances began with an argument about a car?”

  Anderson consulted his notes, frowning at them as though they were the cause of his weariness. “Six.”

  “Wow,” said Kline with a soft little whistle. “And that’s in addition to the ones Ashton and the Liston girl already told Gurney about?”

  “Right.”

  “Jesus. So the total is close to a dozen. And there are still a hell of a lot of families we haven’t spoken to yet. Wow. Anyone want to comment on this?”

  “I think we owe a thank-you to Dave Gurney!” said Hardwick, who had slipped into the room unnoticed. He glanced at Rodriguez. “If he hadn’t nudged us in this direction …”

  “Nice you could find time to join us,” said the captain.

  “Let’s not get carried away with crazy theories,” said Anderson glumly. “There’s still no evidence of abduction and no evidence of any other related crime. We could be overreacting. All this might be nothing more than a few rebellious kids cooking up a little scheme together.”

  “Dave?” said Kline, ignoring Anderson. “You want to say anything at this juncture?”

  “One question for Bill. What’s the pattern of distribution of the missing girls over the five graduating classes you looked at?”

  Anderson gave his head a little shake as if he hadn’t heard right. “Excuse me?”

  “The girls who disappeared—which graduating classes were they in?”

  Anderson sighed, went back to flipping through his pile of papers. “Whatever you need,” he muttered, generalizing to no one in particular, “it’s always on the bottom.” He poked through at least a dozen pieces of paper before he fastened on one of them. “Okay … looks like … 2009 … 2008 … 2007 … 2006. And that’s it. None from 2005. Earliest disappearances, if you want to call them that, were from the May 2006 graduating class.”

  “So, all within the past four years,” concluded Kline. “Or, actually, the past three and a half years.”

  “So what?” said Blatt, shrugging. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “For one thing,” suggested Gurney, “it means that the disappearances began occurring shortly after Hector Flores arrived on the scene.”

  Chapter 53

  Game changer

  Kline turned toward Gurney. “That ties in with what Ashton’s assistant told you. Didn’t she say that the two graduates she couldn’t get in touch with had gotten interested in Flores when he was working on the grounds at Mapleshade?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is the damnedest thing,” Kline went on excitedly. “Let’s assume for a minute that Flores is the key to everything—that once we figure out what brought him here, we’ll understand everything else. We’ll understand Jillian Perry’s murder, Kiki Muller’s murder, how and why he hid the machete where he did, why the camera didn’t pick him up, the disappearance of God only knows how many Mapleshade graduates …”

  “That last thing could be a harem thing,” said Blatt.

  “A what?” said Kline.

  “Like Charlie Manson.”

  “You’re saying he might have been looking for followers? For impressionable young women?”

  “For female sex maniacs. That’s what Mapleshade’s all about, right?”

  Gurney looked at Rodriguez to see how he might react to Blatt’s comment in light of the situation with his daughter, but if he felt anything, he was hiding it under a thoughtful scowl.

  Kline’s mental computer seemed to be back in high gear, as he presumably weighed the media benefits of trying and convicting his very own Manson. He tried to build on Blatt’s idea. “So you’re imagining that Flores had a little commune tucked away somewhere, and he talked these women into leaving home, covering their tracks, and going there?”

  He turned to the captain, seemed deterred by the scowl, and addressed Hardwick instead. “You have any thoughts on that?”

  Hardwick responded with the ironic leer. “I was thinking Jim Jones myself. Charismatic leader with a congregation of nubile acolytes.”

  “The hell is Jim Jones?” asked Blatt.

  Kline answered. “Jonestown. The massacre-suicide thing. Cyanide in the Kool-Aid. Wiped out nine hundred people.”

  “Oh, yeah, the Kool-Aid.” Blatt grinned. “Right, Jonestown. Totally fucked up.”

  Hardwick raised a cautionary finger. “Beware of men who invite you to places in the jungle they’ve named after themselves.”

  The captain’s scowl was reaching thunderstorm intensity.

  “Dave?” said Kline. “You have any ideas about Flores’s grand plan?”

  “The problem with the commune thing is that Flores lived on Ashton’s property. If he was gathering these women and stashing them somewhere, it would have to be nearby. I don’t think that’s what it was about.”

  “What, then?”

  “I think it’s about what he told us it’s about. ‘For all the reasons I have written.’ ”

  “And those reasons add up to what?”

  “Revenge.”

  “For?”

  “If we take the Edward Vallory prologue seriously, for some major sexual offense.”

  It was clear that Kline loved conflict. So it didn’t surprise Gurney that the next opinion he solicited was from Anderson.

  “Bill?”

  The man shook his head. “Revenge usually takes the form of a physical attack, broken bones, murder. In all these so-called disappearances there isn’t even a hint of that.” He leaned back in his chair. “Not a single hint of it. I think we need to take a more evidence-based approach.” He smiled, seemingly pleased with this neat summation.

  Kline’s gaze settled on Sergeant Wigg, whose own gaze was, as always, on her computer screen. “Robin, anything you want to add?”

  She answered immediately, without looking up. “Too many things don’t make sense. There’s bad data
somewhere in the equation.”

  “What kind of bad data?”

  Before she could respond, the conference room’s door opened and a lean woman who could have inspired a Grant Wood painting stepped into the room. Her gray eyes settled on the captain.

  “Sorry to interrupt, sir.” Her voice sounded like it was sharpened by the same cold winds as her face. “There’s been a significant development.”

  “Come in,” commanded Rodriguez. “And close the door.”

  She closed it, then stood as rigidly as an army private awaiting permission to speak.

  Rodriguez seemed pleased by her formality. “All right, Gerson, what is it?”

  “We’ve been informed that one of the young women on our call-and-locate list was the victim of a homicide three months ago.”

  “Three months ago?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You have the specifics?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Go ahead.”

  Her expression was as stiff as the starched collar of her shirt. “Name, Melanie Strum. Age eighteen. Graduated May first of this year from Mapleshade Academy. Last seen by her mother and stepfather in Scarsdale, New York, on May sixth. Her body was recovered from the basement of a mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, on June twelfth.”

  Rodriguez grimaced. “Cause of death?”

  Gerson’s lips tightened.

  “Cause of death?” he repeated.

  “Her head was cut off. Sir.”

  Rodriguez stared at Gerson. “How did this information come to us?”

  “Through our outgoing calling process. Melanie Strum’s name was on the list subset assigned to me. I made the call.”

  “Who did you speak to?”

  She hesitated. “May I get my notes, sir?”

  “Quickly, if you don’t mind.”

  During the minute she was gone, the only person who spoke was Kline. “This could be it,” he said with an excited smile. “This could be the breakthrough.”

  Anderson made a face like a man with a sore on the inside of his lip. Hardwick looked intensely interested. Wigg was inscrutable. Gurney was less disturbed than he would have been comfortable admitting. He told himself that his lack of shock or sadness was due to the fact that he had from the beginning assumed that the missing girls were dead. (On occasion, when he was alone and exhausted, some inner defense system would be breached and he would see himself as a man so emotionally disconnected from the lives of others, so lopsidedly devoted to his puzzle-solving agenda, that he hardly qualified as a member of the human family at all. However, that troubling vision would pass with a good night’s sleep, after which he would rationalize his lack of feeling as the normal by-product of a law-enforcement career.)

  Gerson stepped back into the room, carrying a flip-top notepad. Her brown hair was pulled back severely into a tight ponytail, giving her features a skull-like immobility.

  “Captain, I have the information on the Strum call.”

  “Go ahead.”

  She consulted her pad. “The phone was answered by Roger Strum, Melanie’s stepfather. When I explained the purpose of the call, he expressed confusion, then anger at the fact that we didn’t already know that Melanie was dead. His wife, Dana Strum, joined the conversation on the extension. They were upset. They provided the following facts: Acting on a tip, the Palm Beach police had entered the home of Jordan Ballston and discovered Melanie’s body in a basement freezer. The police—”

  Kline interrupted. “Jordan Ballston, the hedge-fund guy?”

  “There was no specific mention of a hedge fund, but in my follow-up call to the Palm Beach PD, they did say Ballston lived in a multi-million-dollar mansion.”

  “The fucking freezer?” muttered Blatt, as though food-contamination concerns were making him queasy.

  “Okay,” said Rodriguez, “keep going.”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Strum mostly went on about how outraged they were that Ballston was out on bail. Who was he paying off? Did he have the judge in his pocket? Remarks like that. Mr. Strum indicated that if Ballston managed to buy himself out of this, he would personally ‘put a bullet in the bastard’s head.’ He repeated that several times. I was able to ascertain that they did have an argument with Melanie on May sixth, the day she left home, about a car she wanted them to buy for her—a Porsche Boxster that costs forty-seven thousand dollars. They say that she flew into a rage when they refused, said she hated them, didn’t want to live with them anymore, didn’t want to speak to them anymore. She said she was going to live with a friend. The following morning she was gone. The next time they saw her was when they ID’d the body in the Palm Beach morgue.”

  “You said the local cops were acting on a tip when they found the body,” said Gurney. “Do we know anything more about that?”

  She glanced at Rodriguez, apparently to confirm Gurney’s right to ask questions.

  “Go ahead,” said the captain, with obvious mixed feelings.

  She hesitated. “I told the chief investigating officer in Palm Beach that we had an interest in the case and we’d like as much information as possible. He said he’d be willing to talk to the person in charge of whatever investigation we had going on up here. He said he’d be available for the next half hour.”

  After a few minutes of waffling on the pros and cons, the DA and the captain agreed that the call, with whatever information exchange would occur, would be a net plus all around. The conference room’s landline phone was moved to the center of the table around which they were all seated. Gerson dialed the direct number she’d been given by the detective in Palm Beach. She explained to him briefly who was in the room, then pushed the speakerphone button.

  Rodriguez deferred to Kline, who provided the names and titles of the people at the table and described the case as a possible missing-persons investigation in its earliest stages.

  The faint southern accent of the man on the other end made him sound like he might be a native Floridian, a rare breed in that state and almost unheard-of in Palm Beach. “Being alone in my office here, I feel kind of outnumbered. I’m Detective Lieutenant Darryl Becker. I understand from the officer I spoke to earlier that you folks would like to know more about the Strum murder.”

  “We sure would appreciate knowing as much as you can tell us, Darryl,” said Kline, who seemed to be absorbing and reflecting Becker’s drawl. “One question we have right off the bat here—what kind of tip was it that led you fellas to the body?”

  “Not a particularly voluntary one.”

  “How so?”

  “The gentleman who offered the information was not what you’d call a public-spirited citizen helping out the forces of good. He acquired his information in a somewhat compromising manner.”

  “The hell’s he talking about?” murmured Blatt, not quite under his breath.

  “How so?” repeated Kline.

  “Man’s a burglar. A professional burglar. That’s what he does for a living.”

  “He was caught in Ballston’s house?”

  “No, sir, he wasn’t. He was apprehended emerging from another house a week after breaking into the Ballston place. Burglar’s name happens to be Edgar Rodriguez—no relative of your captain there, I’m sure.”

  A snorting one-syllable laugh burst out of Blatt.

  The captain’s jaw muscles bulged. The remark seemed to anger him far out of proportion to its mindlessness.

  “Let me guess,” said Kline. “Edgar was looking at serious prison time, and he offered to trade some information about Ballston’s basement, something he’d seen there, for a more lenient approach to his situation?”

  “That would be it in a nutshell, Mr. Kline. By the way, how do you spell that?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your name. How do you spell your name?”

  “K-L-I-N-E.”

  “Ah, with a K.” Becker sounded disappointed. “Thought it might be like Patsy.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Patsy Cline. N
ot important. Sorry for the diversion. Go ahead with your questions.”

  It took Kline a moment to get back on track. “So … what he told you was sufficient for a warrant?”

  “It was indeed.”

  “And when you exercised that warrant, you found what?”

  “Melanie Strum. In two pieces. Wrapped in aluminum foil. In the bottom of a freezer chest. Underneath a hundred pounds of chicken breasts. And a fair amount of frozen broccoli.”

  Hardwick produced a snorting laugh of his own, louder than Blatt’s.

  Kline looked baffled. “Why was your burglar unwrapping aluminum foil packages at the bottom of a freezer?”

  “He said it’s the first place he always looks. He said people think it’s the last place a burglar would look, so that’s where they put their valuable stuff. He said you want to find the diamonds, look in the freezer. He thought it was pretty funny, all those people thinking they had a bright idea, thinking they were going to fool him, thinking they were smarter than he was. Had a good laugh about it.”

  “So he went to the freezer and started unwrapping the body, and—”

  “Actually,” Becker interrupted, “he started unwrapping the head.”