Blanc sat silently in her black suit, its cuffs spattered with dried slush and road salt.
Rath sat across from Land. “Can you look at me?”
Land gnashed away at her thumbnail.
“Luke Montgomery,” Rath said.
“What about him?”
“What role did he play in Mandy Wilks’s murder?”
“Nothin’.”
“You killed Mandy because of him.”
“So?”
“So that’s not nothing. You and Montgomery, maybe you’re closer than you’re telling?”
“Fuck you.”
“Your friend. Jamie Drake. She’s dead. Did you know that?” Rath said.
Abby Land looked up, empty-eyed. A dribble of bloodied saliva trickled down her chin.
She spat a tag of skin from her thumb on the floor. “Are you stupid? Do you think we don’t get TV in here? I watch a TV the size of a movie screen, it’s ten times better than the piece of shit I had at home. I just saw the big breaking news update, the identity of the mystery dead girl.”
Blanc crossed one leg over a knee.
“She was murdered,” Rath said. “Hanged. That wasn’t on your TV.”
Blanc cut her eyes at Rath, disapproving his tone.
A quiver worked across Land’s lips.
“She was tortured. Deliberately and slowly.” Rath would never impart such traumatic information to a teen in a normal state of mind; but in the case of Land, trauma might be just what was needed to reach her.
Land stopped savaging her thumbnail.
“What does this have to do with my client?” Blanc said.
“Jamie Drake died a mean, cruel, slow death,” Rath said.
Land swallowed her flesh. She blew on her tattered thumb, wincing, waving it at her side as if it were on fire. “Yeah. What’s it got to do with me?”
“That is what I want to know,” Rath said.
“If you’re implying my client—” Blanc began.
“I’m not,” Rath said.
“And. Umm. Hello. I’m in here?” Land said. “How can it have anything to do with me? I didn’t kill her, obviously. Even you can figure that out, probably.” The old shining meanness leapt in her eyes. How did a person, a kid, end up like this? Rath was not looking at evil, not in the way he stared at evil when he met eyes with Preacher. No. What he was looking at he’d seen dozens of times from kids when he was a cop in the nineties; kids he’d give warnings to for partying in a park after dusk or drinking under age, only to be met with a recalcitrant, venomous disrespect for him and everything and everyone else in the world. It was not evil. It was pain. The pain of years of neglect and abuse, of invisibility and disrespect, fossilized into a contempt for and blindness to the very kindness the kids had most needed early on but to which now they were inured. The aftermath of lovelessness.
“Did you come here just to tell me the happy news that my friend was tortured?” Land said. “Is that how you spend your time?”
“I find it odd. That both you and a friend of yours are involved in violent deaths. You bludgeon a girl so hard with a tire iron that you struggled to dislodge it from her brain so you could hit her again. And now, your friend is killed in a ghoulish way.”
A look of confusion fluttered in Land’s eyes; she didn’t understand what ghoulish meant.
“Yeah. Well,” Land said. “Life sucks.”
“Death’s worse,” Rath said.
“Can’t be worse than this hole.”
“I doubt there’s TV.”
Land’s eyes gleamed, then dimmed. “That might suck worse. Not that I’ll be able stay here forever for the TV anyway. I’m a minor. When I turn eighteen, I’ll be released. Free.”
Rath wondered who had poisoned Abby’s naive head with lies. Abby Land was going to be tried as an adult and thus not see the free world until at least 2036, even if she were Mother Teresa inside of whatever maximum-security prison she got as a present for her eighteenth birthday.
“Did you tell her that?” Rath said to Blanc.
“Certainly not. I’ve tried to explain—”
“She don’t know shit,” Land said.
“How did you and Jamie become friends? You two don’t exactly strike me as compatible, if you know what I mean.” Rath decided to rile her.
“What do you mean?”
“You coming from the household you do: unemployed, coke-dealing stepdad; absentee mom, living in that hovel; playing dated cartridge video games; driving jalopies, if they start. Meanwhile Jamie’s bedroom is the size of your whole apartment, decorated just so; she wears brand-new, brand-name clothes, the latest fashions; she has the best laptop and the latest iPhone, lives in that big house on five secluded acres, drives a nicer car than you’ll ever own in your life and whines that it’s a piece of shit. Not exactly alike. You two.”
“What would you know about it?”
“Plenty.” Rath did know plenty about growing up in poverty. After his mother had sent his father packing, she’d worked three jobs just to string together enough for rent, thrift shop clothes, and the weekly groceries. He’d been so embarrassed about the state of their cramped, messy home he’d never asked what few fleeting friends he had over after school.
“We had things in common,” Land said. “Acting.”
“She get all the plum roles, did she? That piss you off?”
“Easy,” Blanc said. “You don’t have to answer any of these questions, Abby. I advise you not to, in fact.”
“I got good roles,” Land shot. “I got plenty of good fucking roles, if you think—”
“I don’t like this line of questioning, it’s upsetting my client,” Blanc said.
“I’m trying to help your client help herself,” Rath said. “If she knows something about her friend’s murder, if Montgomery was involved in either murder, and she can help us with it, we may be able to do quid pro quo.”
“Quid what?” Land said.
“Was your friend in trouble? Do you know anything that would suggest your friend’s death wasn’t random? Was your friend doing anything she shouldn’t be doing?” Rath used the word friend intentionally.
“Did she do stuff she shouldn’t?” Land scoffed. “You fuckin’ serious? We all do stuff we shouldn’t. Every day.”
“What did your friend do?”
“I wasn’t her mother. I just know we all do. I’m sure you got stuff you shouldn’t a done. Got all kinds a secrets you don’t tell no one. Don’t mean you got it coming or deserve to get killed for—” She stopped, as if she were struck for the first time by the fact that maybe Mandy Wilks hadn’t deserved to be beaten to death with a tire iron for looking the wrong way at a boy Abby had liked. If that was why she’d done it.
“This is enough. Enough,” Blanc said.
“It don’t matter,” Land said. “I did it. I said I did it. Killed Mandy. I confessed. It don’t matter if I say it again.”
“We’re done,” Blanc said.
Land dug at a loose piece of cuticle, peeled back a long strip of flesh, blood rising again.
She stared at Rath. A smile seeped across her face, grim and cold.
Rath thought perhaps his earlier musing was wrong, that perhaps this girl was evil. Not on the order of Preacher—whose evil was malignant and malicious. Hers was a banal and sad evil, but just as deadly.
Abby Land fixed her eyes on Rath. “Just because you don’t have something coming,” she said, “don’t mean it ain’t coming anyway.”
43
Luke Montgomery was scrubbing down a rear fender of a fire engine with a sudsy brush when Test walked up to the open overhead bay doors of the station. A System of a Down song echoed off the concrete floor of two empty bays, the trucks parked along the curb. The song was a favorite of Test’s husband’s, not a note of which appealed to a strand of Test’s DNA. It amused her that her husband gravitated to music in complete contradiction to his quiet temperament.
Two other young men were lathering
the front of the engine with soapy sponges.
Montgomery seemed to sense Test and turned to give her a look as if he’d been lost in a daydream. The look sharpened as he wiped his hands on the front of the yellow, rubber raincoat and overalls that reminded Test of the boat captain on a fish sticks box. His big black rubber boots looked like something an astronaut might wear.
He was tall, sturdy, good looking in that bland, homogenized way of young men who were only a few years beyond bad skin and braces; Test could see why teenage girls might fawn over him, though she had always leaned toward the quirky, awkward, offbeat types her friends deemed homely.
Montgomery looked confused; why was a strange woman here?
The two other young men, also in yellow rain gear, kept at their task, oblivious of Test, their movements in aggressive time to the music.
Montgomery stepped out onto the sidewalk. “Help you?” he said. His eyes shifted to his fellow firemen. Test sensed he hoped his peers wouldn’t notice the woman whose attention was all his for the moment. Test hoped they wouldn’t notice her, either. She didn’t need to deal with false bravado or rivalry for her attention.
Test showed her ID and told him who she was. “I’d like to talk to you about Mandy Wilks and Abby Land.”
“Who?”
“Mandy Wilks, she was murdered a couple weeks back. Abby Land murdered her.”
“Yeah,” he said, “Right. Crazy.”
He glanced at his peers again, and this time Test wondered if it were out of wanting to protect his territory, or some other motive. He seemed nervous.
“You knew them,” Test said.
“No. Not really.”
“I’d like to talk to you anyway.”
“Let’s get out of this noise.”
Montgomery walked down the sidewalk and opened a door to an office of sorts, a concrete floor and white walls, a metal desk and chairs. On a lone shelf above a filing cabinet sat a police scanner, rows of red lights blinking, a half-dozen walkie-talkies perched in chargers.
On the table sat an iPad and a deck of playing cards, on the back of which were images of naked women. Montgomery snatched up the cards and tossed them in a drawer.
“I didn’t know them,” Montgomery said. “I knew who Mandy Wilks was, of course, but—”
“Of course?”
“She was behind me a couple grades. But she was the kind of girl you noticed. Kind of creepy saying that now.”
“You were seen at a party with her, there are pictures of you standing near her and her looking at you while you had your arm around Land, laughing.”
“Pig roast. Everybody was there. Like four hundred people, probably. Lots of pics taken. Six kegs got tapped in no time. Port-a-Lets. The works. I was pretty wrecked, honestly.”
“Were you talking to Mandy?”
“I didn’t know her. I told you.”
“If you never talk to pretty girls you don’t know, how are you ever going to get to know any pretty girls?”
“What? I just didn’t talk to her.”
“What about Abby Land?”
“I’m twenty. She’s like what, twelve?”
“Answer the question. Did you know her?”
“No. I was having a good time. Joking with people. I don’t remember having my arm slung around her. I don’t understand. Why’re you after me? I didn’t know them, and I didn’t do anything. I told the cops all this shit a couple weeks ago.”
“No one is after you.”
“Then why are you asking me questions weeks after that skank was busted?”
Test hesitated, then said, “Because Mandy Wilks was killed because of you.”
“Are you crazy?”
It was an awful way for Test to put it, but it was the truth, at least Abby Land’s truth, if you believed what she claimed, that she’d killed Mandy Wilks out of rage spawned of jealousy over Montgomery giving Mandy the eye at the pig roast. Test didn’t believe it. Not anymore. No. There was more to it than Land being pissed off over a flirtatious glance. Had to be. Didn’t there?
“Land said she killed Mandy because of the way she looked at you.”
“So? This Abby Land chick is bat shit. But don’t say Mandy was killed because of me.” He took a step toward her. “If some crazy chick killed a guy for the way he looked at you, would you think you were to blame?” His voice was raised. Test had her parka zipped up, her M&P45 tucked in her chest holster underneath it. She’d not worn a hip holster today.
“Take a breath and—”
“Take a breath. I’m at work. I volunteer to save lives, risk my life probably more than you do, for free, when other guys my age are whining because someone said boo on Facebook, and you accuse me because a retarded redneck chick killed another girl for looking at me wrong?” The veins in his neck stood out. The music had stopped, and now the other two young men, big meaty guys, stared at Test through the window that looked out to the bay. Their stares were not the ones she had imagined earlier, where she was the object over which the young men would compete for attention, the boys turning to nemeses against each other. No. The looks were those that steeled their camaraderie, fraternity. The young men were on the same side here.
The beefier of the two young men opened the door and they stepped inside the small office.
“She bothering you?” the bigger guy said, his cheeks puffy from too much booze.
What was this? He was asking another young, built guy if a woman half their weight and six inches shorter was “bothering” him.
“She’s giving me shit about some crazy chick I don’t even have a clue about. I’ll tell you what,” he said, glaring at Test, “say another word accusing me—”
Test stepped closer. A headache pounded at her forehead, seemed to want to splinter her skull. She’d been clenching her jaw. Could not unclench it.
“Speak to me like that again, and I will arrest you,” Test said. “And you two.” She pivoted to the other two boys, in part to meet their eyes straight on, and in part to demonstrate that she was unafraid to put her back to Montgomery. “Step out. I’m an on-duty police detective conducting an interview and you two are interfering. Step out or get arrested.”
The young men eyed each other.
“We’ve got no gripe with law enforcement.” Puffy Cheeks shrugged as if to say you’re on you own, man and the two young men left and went back to washing the truck.
Test turned to Montgomery. “Don’t speak to me again like that.”
Montgomery seemed to release the tension in his body, though his face remained flushed. When he spoke, the anger in his voice was tempered, but the message was the same. “I have work to do. You want to speak to me again, contact my dad’s attorney, Fredrick Bauer.”
He left and set to washing the engine.
Test’s blood fizzed, not with anger, but with the adrenaline rush that her suspicions might be correct. Somehow, Jamie Drake, Abby Land, and Mandy Wilks were connected, and Luke Montgomery was connected as well. Mandy Wilks had been in the Dress Shoppe and been seen by her mother and two clerks leaving the shop for a moment to stand out on the sidewalk, looking around and acting odd, as if she’d seen someone pass by. Looking toward the firehouse. That night, Abby Land kills Mandy. She admits she killed her in a rage of jealousy spurred by Mandy looking the wrong way at Montgomery. Montgomery who claimed he didn’t know either girl. Now, Abby was in jail, and her closest friend is found hanged. Test looked out the door window at the bay. Montgomery looked up and gave her a fake smile. She smiled back, not at him, but at the thought that he was going to need his attorney sooner than later, and not for the reasons he believed.
44
Rath sat in the hospital cafeteria sipping coffee from a cardboard cup and staring at a bowl of coagulated oatmeal. He’d gone so long without eating he’d lost his appetite.
At a nearby table, doctors and nurses in scrubs bantered with a tone that bordered on flirtation. At another table, men, women, and children fidgeted in silent gl
umness perhaps awaiting news of a sick loved one quarantined in the hospital’s deeper reaches. Plastic trays clacked on the buffet line’s metal rollers as visitors selected yogurts and salads from glass displays. This cafeteria was light-years from the institutional species in which Rath’s mother had succumbed. It was as upscale as any restaurant Rath patronized, not a high bar perhaps. Organic Greek yogurt had replaced Jell-O cups, and steel-cut oatmeal had replaced Froot Loops, although if Froot Loops was an option, Rath’s cereal bowl would have been empty.
Tammy Clark had chosen to meet here. She was working a double shift and didn’t have time otherwise. Rath needed to tell her, somehow, of his belief in the connection between Preacher and the hanged girl, and Tammy’s mother’s disappearance. Then he needed to get to Johnson to see Rachel. He needed more time.
As if to taunt him, a text from Test came through on his phone. Meet me at the Wilderness Restaurant when you come back through on your way to Johnson.
He needed a lot more time.
He slipped his fingers in his jacket pocket and took out the envelope with Preacher’s hair in it. One simple test.
He glanced up to see Tammy Clark beeline toward him as she slipped a notepad from the handbag slung over a shoulder, the bag’s rainbow pattern matching that of her scrubs.
She sat and set her cell phone on the table.
“Have you found her?” she said, without greeting.
“Afraid not.”
She let out a breath and retrieved a plastic bottle of water from her bag, chugged half the water so fast the bottle crackled and burped. “Nothing?” she said with calm reserve. Rath did not know the type of patients for whom she cared, but he knew her occupation required calm amid chaos and grave developments.
“Not yet,” Rath said.
In some ways, one looked to a detective and to a nurse with a similar mix of apprehension and hope, in search of answers that might give one a way back to the life lived before they’d been set upon by the unexpected. Often it was too late to go back to that life, because that life no longer existed.
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