The Prettiest One: A Thriller

by James Hankins

  “I am,” Bix chimed in. “And if Goody Two-shoes here won’t go on the run with you, I sure as hell will.”

  “I’m not saying I wouldn’t go on the run with her—”

  Caitlin opened her eyes. “Guys?”

  “Well, are you saying you would?” Bix challenged Josh. “Because that’s not what I’m hearing. But that’s exactly what I’m willing—”

  “Whoa,” Josh said. “I never said I would or I wouldn’t—”

  “Guys,” Caitlin said again, much louder this time, silencing them both. “I’m not going on the run. As I’ve said, I have no desire to live like that, always looking over my shoulder. And I couldn’t drag either one of you into a life like that with me.”

  “Either one of us?” Josh asked. “Like there’s a choice? I’m your husband.”

  Caitlin sighed. “I know that, Josh. I didn’t mean . . . Look, forget about going on the run. That’s just not happening.”

  “Please tell me you’re not going to turn yourself in to the cops?” Bix said.

  “I’m not,” she said. “At least not yet.”

  “So what do you want to do?” Josh asked.

  Caitlin took a breath, then another. “Despite the evidence—that is, the gun I had and the blood all over my clothes, and the fact that I woke up near that warehouse, and I saw the murder victim’s face in my dream . . . heck, I even shot him in my dream, sort of—well, despite all of that very compelling evidence, you guys seem certain that I couldn’t kill anyone, at least not in cold blood.” The men were nodding along now. “So I’m selfishly willing to give you both the benefit of the doubt for the moment. But we all have to admit that the evidence seems to indicate that I shot that guy for some reason, right?” The men nodded again, but with less enthusiasm this time. “Okay,” Caitlin continued, “so for now we’ll proceed under the assumption that I was justified in shooting that guy—”

  “If you truly did,” Josh interjected.

  “If I did,” Caitlin agreed, nodding. “So what we need to do is try to figure out why I might have shot him. If we can figure that out, we can decide the right time to go to the cops.”

  “Never,” Bix said. “I don’t care why you did it.”

  “Well, I do,” Caitlin said. “If it was cold-blooded murder, I’m turning myself in and you guys won’t be able to stop me.”

  “And if it wasn’t?” Josh asked.

  “If it wasn’t, if I was somehow justified in killing him, then we’ll take what we know to the cops. They won’t ignore evidence that proves I had no choice but to shoot that man. They can’t.”

  “So either way, you’re going to the cops?” Bix said.

  Caitlin nodded. “I am. But I’d much rather do it with an armful of evidence showing that I acted in self-defense or something like that. But if we can’t find anything like that, or if we find out that I’m nothing but a murderer, plain and simple, well . . . I’m still walking into that station.”

  “I think that’s a really bad idea, Katie,” Bix said.

  Caitlin turned to look at Josh again. He had a sad smile on his face. She knew why. He may not have known her quite as well as he thought he did, that she had this other person hiding inside her all these years, but he still knew her pretty well. He knew this was what she ultimately would decide to do. And he knew he couldn’t stop her.

  “How long will you give it?” he asked. “How long until you turn yourself in?”

  “Hey, don’t get me wrong,” she said. “I’m not in any rush. Let’s work our asses off to get to the bottom of whatever I did, whatever I was doing that led up to whatever I did. I’d much rather find those answers than give myself up empty-handed.”

  “And let’s not forget,” Bix said, “the decision whether to turn yourself in might not end up being yours, anyway, Katie. After all, the cops are looking for you. And now that your face is in the papers, how long will it be before someone recognizes you and drops a dime on you?”

  That was a good question.

  “So what do we do next?” Bix asked. “We can take another look at the list you kept hidden in the box in your closet. Try to figure out how the things you wrote factor in here. We think we know who the Bogeyman is, though not why the monster from your dreams would be on the list. But maybe if we ask around a little, we can figure out who this One-Eyed Jack is. And when we find him, maybe he’ll tell us who the other guy on the list is. What was the name? Bob?”

  “Bob, yeah,” Josh said.

  “But the address won’t help us, right?” Caitlin said. “That was a dead end. So who’s to say the whole list isn’t a wild goose chase?”

  Bix said, “Well, I say we go with it. It’s all we have.”

  “I agree we should go with it,” Josh said. “But it’s not all we have. We also have your friend, hon. Janie Whatever-Her-Name-Is. You should call her. See if she can tell us anything. If you two were close, maybe you confided in her, told her something about whatever was going on.”

  Caitlin nodded. “Right. And we also have—”

  “Martha’s list of employees,” Josh finished for her.

  “I knew you saw it, too. That’s why you took a picture of it instead of letting me write down Janie’s number. I didn’t see it at first,” she admitted, “but after you took the picture, I read the rest of the names to see if any of them rang a bell, and that’s when I saw it.”

  Josh slid his tablet from under Caitlin’s seat in front of him, where he’d stashed it when they’d gone into the pub, then set it on his lap and started typing.

  “What did you see?” Bix asked.

  “My name,” Caitlin said.

  “What about it?”

  “Just give me a minute, guys,” Josh said, his fingers tapping away at the tablet’s screen. “This shouldn’t take long. Maybe it’s nothing,” he added, almost to himself, “but maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s . . . something.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  AS DETECTIVE CHARLOTTE HUNNSAKER SAT at her desk scanning a report, she thought for the twentieth time in the last hour how much she hated reviewing tips called in to the department’s tip line. The computer sketches of Vic Warehouse and the mystery redhead had been shown on that morning’s early local TV news, and they had made it into the morning editions of both the Globe and the Smithfield Beacon. Television viewers and newspaper readers were asked to call the tip line if they had any information about the person in either sketch. Then the fun began, as it always did. As usual, some people called just to talk about the ongoing case, as if the act of dialing the phone number earned them a backstage pass into a police investigation. Other callers, possibly well intentioned but totally off their rockers, called to report valuable information such as the fact that the people in the sketches had been invading their dreams, or they looked like people with whom they attended kindergarten three decades ago. A few folks called to try to convince the police that the people in the sketches looked like their ex-spouses or ex–significant others in the pathetically transparent hope that the police would hassle a former paramour with whom they’d had a falling out. Of course, there were always the high school pranksters who called because their idiot friends thought they were funny. It went the way it always did—calls came in, information got recorded, and reports were generated.

  Hunnsaker requested that the reports on this case be sent to her every two hours. Then she would begin the work of separating the cranks from the nutjobs from the callers with marginally promising leads. Armed with a variety of different colored highlighters, she was halfway through the first list of the day. Pink for the pranksters and the crazies, blue for the tips that might be worth checking out, and yellow for the most promising leads. So far, after forty-one calls, she had highlighted twenty-four in pink, nine in blue, and eight in yellow. Two desks away from hers, Javy Padilla was slogging through the same report, using the same color-coding scheme.

  Hunnsaker looked over at him and called, “You finished yet?”

  Padill
a looked up, and for a moment Hunnsaker thought he was having a heart attack. His eyes were squinted shut and his lips were pulled back from his teeth in an agonized grimace. Before Hunnsaker could leap to her feet, Padilla’s face began to relax. “Oh my God,” he said, “I hate this shit.”

  Only then did Hunnsaker notice on Padilla’s desk the big, clear, plastic travel cup three-quarters full of a thick spinach-green liquid. On the inside of one side of the cup, the sludgy concoction was slowly receding from the rim, from where Padilla had clearly just sipped.

  “I thought you only drank that stuff at home,” Hunnsaker said, “where Elaine can monitor you.”

  Padilla shook his head. “I can’t lie to her.”

  “I thought you lied to her all the time.”

  “Yeah, I do. What I meant was, I can’t lie to her and get away with it. She asks, I lie, and then she says she can tell I’m lying and that I’d better start drinking this crap again. She says it’s for my own good.”

  “She must love you for some reason I can’t begin to fathom,” Hunnsaker said.

  “She has a funny way of showing it,” Padilla said as he took two deep breaths, then began chugging more of what looked increasingly to Hunnsaker like hazardous waste. Padilla’s features contorted and Hunnsaker grimaced in sympathy. Padilla finished swallowing—not without obvious effort—and looked forlornly at the half-full cup on his desk.

  “She’ll know if you don’t finish it?” Hunnsaker asked.

  “God only knows how, but she will.”

  Padilla seemed to have recovered from his last sip, so she asked, “You done going through the tips so far?”

  Padilla looked down at the report on his desk. “Four more to go.”

  “How’s it looking to you?”

  “Eight yellows and ten blues. The rest is the usual garbage.”

  “That’s close to what I have. Probably mostly the same ones. I’ve got a few calls to make, then we should head out and follow up on the more promising leads, see if we get lucky.”

  She was getting frustrated with the case. They just didn’t have much to go on so far. Without an identity for the victim, they were unable to run down the kinds of leads that were often so valuable in homicides—family, friends, coworkers, and acquaintances, as well as lifestyle, habits, hangouts, and the like. Forensic investigation had turned up virtually nothing of value. No DNA or trace evidence on the body that didn’t belong to the victim. And the immediate area of the warehouse surrounding the body had been traversed so many times over the years—by employees while the building was in operation and by vagrants, hookers, druggies, kids, and thrill-seekers after it had been abandoned—that the odds of finding anything useful were longer than those of winning the Powerball lottery.

  All of which, for the moment, left Hunnsaker with the results of the tip hotline. She scanned the blue- and yellow-highlighted text on her copy of the report. It looked like they’d be visiting three apartment buildings, a pharmacy, a local gym, a hospital, and—after they opened—five eating establishments and six bars or nightclubs. If they won the lottery today, someone at one of these places would turn out not to be a crackpot and would actually have useful information about their victim or the redhead. As frustrated as Hunnsaker was becoming, as much as she disliked having to rely for the moment on tips—most of them anonymous—she couldn’t help but feel uncharacteristically optimistic that one of these leads would pan out. And if none did, more tips would trickle in throughout the day. Someone out there knew what Hunnsaker needed to know. All she had to do was find that person. And she would. Because Vic Warehouse’s refusal to be identified was starting to make her angry. And she was even more pissed off at the redhead, who also refused to be identified but who didn’t have the excuse of being dead. Without realizing that she had moved her eyes from the report, Hunnsaker found herself looking at the sketch on her desk of the mystery redhead.

  “I’ll give it five hours,” she said quietly to the computer drawing, “ten at the most, before you and I are face-to-face. And if you saw who shot my buddy Vic, you’re gonna tell me who it was. And if it was you, you’re gonna tell me that, too. I promise you.”

  “Who the hell are you talking to?” Padilla called to her.

  “The redhead.”

  After a moment, Padilla said, “You’re crazy.”

  “Look at that sewage you’re drinking,” Hunnsaker said, “and you call me crazy?”

  “Fair enough. I’m almost ready to go.”

  “I need ten minutes. Then we hit the streets, find out who the hell Vic is, and locate our pretty friend here.”

  “Sounds like a solid plan.”

  “I spent all morning working it out.”

  Despite the lightness of their banter, she intended to implement that plan and see it succeed. She was going to keep her promise to their mystery redhead.

  “Okay, I think I have something here,” Josh said.

  He looked down at the news article open on the Internet browser of his tablet. He had already read it through three times, then searched with marginal success for more like it. He found only two related articles. The first, more than two decades old and only a column long, was from the online archives of the Smithfield Beacon, a midsize newspaper that was much smaller than the Globe or the Boston Herald.

  “You going to fill in the rest of us,” Bix asked, “or are you just gonna keep reading it to yourself over and over?”

  Bix was behind the wheel, and they had been driving aimlessly through town while Josh had done a little Internet research from his usual place in the backseat. They hadn’t decided where to go next, but they hadn’t wanted to remain parked in front of Commando’s in case Martha was less than true to her word and called the cops the second the three of them walked out of the place.

  “Sorry,” Josh said. “Just wanted to be sure.” He looked at Bix. “It started with Caitlin’s name in Martha’s notebook at the pub. Her list of employees.”

  Caitlin stepped in. “At first, I was just looking for Jane Stillwood’s name and number, but when I skimmed the other names, I saw my own, which had been crossed out. But it wasn’t really my own. It was close, but not quite right.”

  “Meaning?” Bix said.

  “Meaning it was spelled wrong. My first name was spelled right, or at least it was spelled the way I spelled it when I was going by Katherine, but my last name wasn’t listed as Southard. It was Southern.”

  “So?” Bix said. “Martha probably wrote it down wrong. I’m guessing there are all sorts of errors in her books, both intentional and unintentional.”

  Caitlin shook her head. “No, the handwriting was mine. All the names and numbers were in different handwriting. I guess Martha had people write their own contact information in the book.”

  Bix looked confused again. “Why would you spell your own name wrong?”

  “Because it’s not her real name, remember?” Josh asked.

  “We’re hoping it means something,” Caitlin said.

  “And I think it does,” Josh said. “Are you ready, hon?”

  She frowned. “Why wouldn’t I be ready?”

  “It . . . it’s not very pleasant.”

  After a moment, she nodded.

  He took a breath and began. “Okay, so I had already searched the Internet for Katherine Southard, the name Caitlin was using around here, the one on her car registration and fake driver’s license. I had started by focusing my search on this town, then broadened it to include all of Massachusetts, and finally the Northeast. I got nothing that seemed to work. Next I tried changing the spelling of ‘Katherine,’ using every possible spelling I could think of. I even shortened it to Kathy with a K, Cathy with a C, and Katie. Still nothing. But after seeing the name in Martha’s address book, I tried the same geographical searches with the name Katherine Southern. Again, I started locally and then widened my search.”

  “And?” Caitlin said.

  “And still nothing.”

  “Impress
ive,” Bix said. “You’re definitely onto something, Sherlock.”

  Josh ignored that and continued. “But then I tried the same alternate spellings of Katherine but with the last name Southern. And that’s how I found it.”

  “Found what?” Caitlin asked.

  “Using the name Kathryn Southern,” he said, spelling the first name for them, “and combining it with ‘Massachusetts,’ I found an online article from the Boston Beacon from twenty-two years ago. About a suspected pedophile who lived two towns over. It’s also about two little girls—one missing and one . . . ‘damaged from the experience’ is how they say it in the article.”

  Josh watched Caitlin carefully to see how she was handling this. “Let me guess,” she said. “Kathryn Southern is one of those little girls.”

  Josh nodded. “The missing one.”

  “So was that you, then?” Bix asked. “The missing girl? Kathryn Southern?”

  “No,” Caitlin said. “That was never my name back then. The police and the media wouldn’t have called me that.”

  “So why did you take that name now?”

  Caitlin shook her head. “I have no idea, but there’s just no reason for me to have been identified by that name, especially not by the authorities who presumably would check their facts before releasing the name of a missing girl.” She turned to Josh. “What’s the name of the . . . what did you call her? The ‘damaged’ little girl?”

  “The article doesn’t say. I guess because she survived her ordeal, they kept her name out of the papers to protect her identity.”

  “Am I mentioned in the article?”

  “Not by name, no.”

  Caitlin was quiet a moment. “So, theoretically, that abused girl could be me?”

  “Well . . .” Josh began, “theoretically, I suppose.”

  Caitlin nodded. “Did they ever find the girl who was missing?”

  Josh had read two more articles that appeared over the two years following the suspect’s arrest, the only related articles he could find. One was about the suspect’s conviction, and one was about his sentencing. Josh shook his head. “She hadn’t been found by the time the pedophile was convicted a year and a half later. I Googled her and didn’t find anything saying she’d ever turned up, either alive or . . . not. It doesn’t mean she never did, of course, just that I didn’t find it on the Internet.”