Body of Lies

by Deirdre Savoy

  “The TA they put me on nights. I told them I had a daughter to raise. Her mother died four years ago. It’s just us. But they don’t listen. They don’t care. I didn’t know anything about this girl in the hospital. Nothing, until I came home and turned on the news. I think my daughter is in school, but I see this girl has dark hair like my Nancy and I worry. I call her school and they say she’s not there. I go to her room and she’s not there. I’m afraid this man got her, this Amazon Killer. I went to the hospital, but the men there won’t let anyone near her room. So I come here. I need to know if this is my little girl.”

  Zack scrutinized Parks’s face. The man was on the verge of melting down. Whatever information he wanted, he’d better get now, because whether this girl was his daughter or not, Zach doubted he’d be in any shape to talk later.

  “I understand that, Mr. Parks. I have a few questions for you first. Is that all right?”

  Parks nodded. “I understand.”

  “How old is your daughter?”

  “She’ll be sixteen in August.”

  “She was home alone last night?”

  He nodded. “I didn’t like it, but I had to work.”

  “Did she have a boyfriend?”

  Parks shook his head. “Some boy from around the neighborhood came sniffing around, but she didn’t want him.”

  Famous last words. He passed the paper and pen he’d been making notes on to Parks. “Can you write down his name and address?”

  Parks seemed surprised. “You think he had something to do with this? I heard on the news that it was that killer.”

  Since he wasn’t ready to part with any information regarding their suspicions, he said, “If he was coming around your daughter, he might know something.”

  That seemed to mollify Parks, who wrote a name and a Morissania address on the pad. Zach knew the area somewhat. A couple of blocks of private houses sandwiched in between bombed-out buildings and run-down tenements—Eden in the middle of chaos.

  He had Parks write down his address and other contact information while he had the pad in front of him. Parks laid down the pen. “Can we go now?”

  “In a minute.” Zach stood. “I’ll be right back, and then I’ll take you to the hospital.”

  Parks nodded, keeping his head downcast.

  Zach went to the adjoining room where he found the captain, McKay, and Smitty in a huddle. Zach held the pad up showing the information Parks had written. Just in case they hadn’t been paying attention, he said, “We need to pick this guy up.”

  Smitty copied the information onto his own pad. “I’ve got this one.”

  The captain nodded as Smitty rose to leave. “Both of you report back whatever you get ASAP.”

  “Poor bastard,” Smitty said, referring to Parks, once he and Zach were alone in the hall together.

  Zach grunted his agreement with Smitty’s assessment. At least he didn’t gloat with any I-told-you-so’s about the boyfriend angle.

  Zach went back to Mr. Parks, who was in much the same position he’d been in when Zach left. “Mr. Parks?”

  Parks looked up, seeming closer to tears than before. “What do I do if it’s her?”

  Since Zach had no answer for him, he didn’t bother to formulate one. Instead, he helped the man to his feet and escorted him out of the station house into the bright spring morning.

  Zach had seen many loved ones’ reactions to learning that one of their own had fallen at the hands of some predator. Some responded with sorrow and tears, others with angry accusations and threats. Still others resorted to hysteria or appeared totally bloodless and cold, in shock. Some just affected a kind of calm resolve that was probably what was truly needed.

  Zach hadn’t figured Parks would fit into the last group. Standing just outside the girl’s room, Parks dried his eyes and tucked his cap into the pocket of his windbreaker. “Did she have a ring on when she came in? A Claddaugh ring. Her mother was Irish.”

  There wasn’t a ring, but there was an untanned portion of her right ring finger that suggested there had been one. “Is that your daughter, Mr. Parks?”

  Parks nodded. “Can I be with her?”

  “That’s up to the doctors.” At this point there was no official reason why he shouldn’t be. While they’d been en route, Park’s story had been checked out. His whereabouts could be verified for the entirety of the previous night. The captain had called Zach with that news as they’d pulled up to the hospital.

  Parks nodded, then turned doleful eyes to him. “You catch that bastard who did this to my Nancy and the other girls.”

  It wasn’t so much a question but an exhortation; a demand that he make sure justice was done.

  Zach focused on the girl, for the first time really looking at her. Her father said she was fifteen, but she appeared much younger, fragile, pale in the garish fluorescence of the room’s lighting. He supposed he saw now what Alex had seen when she looked at her. Waste. A young life nearly snuffed out for no earthly reason other than the perversion of another.

  Damn. Zach swallowed down the bile that rose in his throat. All this time he’d thought he was doing the work he was supposed to do. But there was the job he did that was assigned by his superiors and the obligation he had to the victims, plural in this case. He’d been doing the first but falling down on the second. Even his reaction to McKay had been skewed. He’d been angry with the man for being a sloppy cop, but not so much for his shirking his obligation to the victims.

  He’d acknowledged a sense of cynicism and ennui creeping up in him for some time now. But how long had it been since he’d really looked at any victim as anything more than another case to close? He honestly didn’t know.

  But Parks wasn’t really looking for an answer, so Zach didn’t bother to try to give him one. He left him in the capable hands of the hospital staff, went back to his car, and drove back.

  Fourteen

  “What’s his problem?”

  Zach nodded toward the kid on the other side of the two-way glass in the interrogation room. There was something hard in Freddy Morales’s face, despite its youthfulness. Something else was off, too. Despite being dressed only in a T-shirt and jeans and the air-conditioning blasting full bore, Morales was sweating and his skin was pasty-looking and pale. And neither the captain nor McKay had said boo so far. Maybe he simply knew he was got, but Zach didn’t think so.

  The man beside him, one of the precinct detectives named Kraft, shrugged. “Probably on something, though we didn’t find anything at the house. Nothing illegal anyway. When we got to his place he was sitting on the sofa in his underwear drinking beer and watching the tube like he was waiting for us.”

  That might explain why Morales hadn’t asked for a lawyer or protested his statement being taped. The kid had been read his rights already, which meant they had no intention of letting him go unless Mother Teresa appeared from the heavens to say he didn’t do it. Smitty had already reported back that they’d found traces of blood on a baseball trophy hidden in the kid’s closet and a sweater from St. Catherine’s Academy was found in the trash. It was the same school outside of which Thorpe had been accused of exposing himself. Zach, however, wasn’t in the mood to appreciate the irony.

  The captain set a can of Coke in front of Morales. “Can we get you anything else, Freddy?” Obviously he was trying to play it nice. Or get the kid’s prints on the can so they could take them without officially putting him in the system. With McKay’s perennially sour expression, who could tell what he was playing?

  Morales ignored the soda. Instead he started scratching a spot on his upper arm through the armhole of his shirt. “I don’t want any damn soda. Let’s get to it.” He glanced up at McKay. Surprisingly there were tears in the kid’s eyes. “We all know what I did to Nancy.”

  “Nancy Parks?” the captain asked.

  “No, fucking Nancy Reagan.” The kid wiped his arm across his face. “I killed Nancy.” His voice had risen in volume and pitch, but he to
ned it down to a low monotone. “Or I thought I had.”

  The captain sat in the chair opposite Morales. “Tell me what happened.”

  Morales sniffled and brushed his hair back from his face. “I convinced her to come over to my place, you know. I told her a friend of mine’s dog had puppies and I wanted to show them to her. She was crazy about dogs and her old man wouldn’t let her have one.”

  “So she came over to see the puppies?”

  Freddy shook his head as if disgusted by the captain’s stupidity. “There wasn’t no damn dog, man. I just told her that so she’d come over. She was a tease, man, always walking around in that little Catholic girl skirt. She told me she liked me, but she wouldn’t give me any, you know? I got tired of that shit. You know what I’m saying?”

  “What happened after she got to your home?”

  “I told her to come to my bedroom ’cause that’s where the dog was. When she saw there were no puppies she started tripping. But I wasn’t having that. I hit her a couple of times and threw her on the bed and did it anyway.”

  “You raped her?”

  “Nah, man.” Morales opened and closed his mouth a few times as if he was searching for the right words with which to express himself. He ended up hanging his head, as if defeated. “Yeah, I guess I did.”

  Then he started to cry with sobs that wracked his shoulders but produced little sound. Trails of mucus ran from his nostrils unchecked. “I was high, man. I neva woulda hurt her if I was all right. She just made me so mad. She got up screaming how she was going to tell her pops on me. How she was going to call the cops. I hit her just to get her to stop, to listen to me. But she fell and there was so much blood and she wasn’t breathing.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Zach heard Kraft beside him mutter. Zach had a few choice words himself, but he kept them to himself. He felt nothing but contempt for Morales, despite his pathetic display of emotion. Especially since Morales didn’t consider he’d hurt the girl until he’d delivered the blow that had rendered her unconscious. The rape had been his right. Then, rather than seek medical attention for her he’d brutalized her further so that he could deflect the blame from himself. Morales hadn’t said that, but that’s what had to come next.

  Zach had heard enough, but something about Morales’s demeanor bothered him. As he’d spoken, he’d seemed to wind down like a child’s toy, slurring his words by the time he finished talking. He sat now, slumped back in his chair, his head down, his arms hanging limply at his sides.

  McKay, who’d stood by quietly while Morales spoke, stepped up to the kid and tugged his head back by his hair. “Sit up, you sick piece of shit. What else did you do to her?”

  The captain stood to wave back McKay, blocking the view. Something was going on, but Zach couldn’t tell what. A second later, there was a crashing sound and both men jumped back. Morales was on the floor, his body seizing with convulsions.

  “Holy shit,” Kraft said, racing fro the room.

  Zach stayed where he was. He’d leave the lifesaving techniques to those better versed in them. In another moment Morales quieted anyway. Kraft felt for a pulse on the kid’s throat. He obviously didn’t find one, since he shook his head.

  Damn. Zach felt the breath whoosh out of him. As much as he hated what this kid had done, he didn’t want to see him dead on the station house floor. More waste. There was a ringing in Zach’s ears that he slowly recognized as the sound of his phone.

  Without looking at the display he opened the phone and barked, “Stone,” into the phone.

  It was Smitty reminding him that they had the autopsy in less than an hour. Zach didn’t need the reminder.

  The offices of Juvenile Justice were housed in a small office building on Pelham Parkway, a ten-minute drive from the office Alex and Roberta shared. The door was unmarked save for a sign that instructed callers to ring the bell.

  “You’re sure you want to do this?” Roberta asked.

  “Absolutely.” But Alex wondered about Roberta’s hesitancy. Was she having second thoughts about involving her friend? If that was true it didn’t make sense, since according to Roberta, this was what he did. Or maybe he preferred to work directly with the police, not civilians.

  “Just checking,” Roberta said, then pressed the button.

  “Coming,” called a male voice from the other side. The door pulled open, revealing a dark-haired man with gray eyes that widened in surprise when he saw Roberta. “Hey, sis.” With a broad grin he enveloped Roberta. “You didn’t tell me you were coming by.”

  “You didn’t listen to your messages again.” Roberta stepped back from his embrace. “Alex, this is my big brother, Eric. Eric, this is Alex Waters. We sort of work together.”

  “Good to meet you, Alex,” Eric said, shaking her hand. “Roberta’s told me a lot about you.”

  “Good to meet you, too,” Alex echoed, but her eyes were on Roberta. Until that moment Alex hadn’t known she had a brother. Their friendship had been based mostly on professional matters. Roberta had never said much about her upbringing, and since Alex didn’t want to talk about hers either she hadn’t pressed. But her mind went back to that morning when Roberta had told her that this organization had been founded after the owner’s sister had been abducted.

  Roberta must have been reading her thoughts, since she whispered, “Our younger sister.”

  Still, that event must have affected her profoundly and could explain, at least in part, some of the cynicism in Roberta’s nature.

  “Come on in.” Eric beckoned them forward with a wave of his hand. “The guys are just starting to come in now. No point in being here when the kids are in school.” He led them through a large room full of computers and telephone equipment to a small office in the corner. “We can talk in here.”

  None of the furnishings Alex had seen in the outer office were brand-new, and those in the inner office seemed a bit more worn. The desk that dominated the room was old, scarred, and cluttered with papers. The black Dell laptop that sat at one corner of the desk threatened to topple over until Eric righted it as he moved around the desk.

  Once everyone was seated, Eric said, “I take it this isn’t a social call.”

  “Not exactly,” Roberta said. “Have you heard of the Amazon Killer?”

  “Who hasn’t? Didn’t he dump another girl last night?”

  “Something like that.” Alex didn’t want to cloud the issue with suppositions that hadn’t yet been proved.

  “What about him?”

  “Although it’s been reported in the papers otherwise, not all of his victims were prostitutes. He might have approached some of these girls online and persuaded them to meet him.”

  Eric muttered something under his breath that Alex didn’t catch but doubted was for public consumption anyway. “How many girls?”

  “Four or five. The police are still checking into it.”

  Eric looked from her to Roberta, then back. “How are you two involved with this?”

  She assumed he already knew her occupation, so she didn’t bother to repeat it. “The man doing this may be a former patient of mine.”

  “And you don’t like how the police are handling it?”

  “I felt the need to do something.”

  He gave a short, self-deprecating laugh. “I know how you feel. That’s how this place was born.” He leaned back in his chair gesturing in a way that seemed to encompass the whole office. “When our kid sister, Georgie, went missing, I couldn’t stand by and do nothing. This was right after our dad died. The police tried to convince us she’d run away, but she’d left things behind she would have taken if she hadn’t intended to come back.”

  Eric sighed. “Turns out she’d gone off for the weekend with some guy she met at the store where she worked after school. She’d thought it was love, but he’d had other plans. He’d had her for a week before I found them. He probably would have killed her when he got tired of her. I’m just grateful to have found her before that happened.�
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  Alex said nothing for a moment, considering both brother and sister. There was a sheen to both their eyes that bespoke unshed tears. Neither of them had gotten past this, but then violence was often just as difficult for loved ones as it was for the victim. And then the victim was expected to be coddled and looked after, to be given counseling and support, while those around the victim were supposed to be strong and nurturing despite having their own needs going unmet. They also often felt guilty for not protecting the victim from harm in the first place or selfish for needing support themselves. No wonder so many marriages or relationships ended once tragedy struck. Alex wondered how old Georgie was when this happened, but didn’t ask.

  “Is that what you do here?” Alex asked. “Look for runaways?”

  Eric inhaled and shifted in his seat. “That’s how we started, but we didn’t really have the manpower for that. Everyone here volunteers and we still need to eat. We figured it made more sense to go after the predators, since a single one could create hundreds of victims, especially nowadays with the Internet. We enter chat rooms pretending to be young boys or girls and see who bites. A girl can get as many as twenty IMs, instant messages, the moment she enters a chat room. For boys it’s slower. Many of these folks are just being friendly, but a lot are trolling for young people to molest.”

  Remembering what Zach said about the girls having similar online accounts, she asked, “Have you heard of Yourplacedotcom?”

  “Yeah. It’s one of the newer sites kids frequent. They’re popping up all the time. Kids fill out detailed profiles including pictures, mostly so the site’s advertisers can target them, but the profiles can be viewed by anyone. Kids don’t realize how much information they’re giving up to belong. That’s how these scumbags fixate in on who they want. If a kid is vulnerable in some way they pick up on it and exploit it, like Georgie with her daddy issues.”

  “So not all of these guys pretend to be kids?”