Names of Dead Girls, The

by Eric Rickstad

  “I have an idea,” Rath said.

  “In your line of work I guess you would,” Sheldon said. “We were not close. Sometimes during library duty together, shelving books, he’d try to bend my ear, convince me he was ‘saved,’ whole. However you put it. He’d— He’d almost convince me he was.”

  “But?” Rath said.

  “But he didn’t.”

  “Why not?” Test said.

  “I’m not religious. Spiritual, maybe. Not how I was before. But. I know right from wrong. I knew going into that store to rob it was wrong. Preacher did not seem to know. I’d tell him ‘You’re empty, man, missing something if you can do what you did and just, just not want to kill yourself,’ you know? And he’d say or do something to try to convince me he was changed. Born anew.”

  “Why didn’t he convince you?” Test said.

  “I looked into the shit he did. I kind of knew. We all kind of know about each other, but a lot of what we hear is crap. Made to sound even more wicked than the real deal. But I checked it out on our computer, just a few old articles, hard to find, but after he did what he did . . . You know he killed two young parents, right? While their baby was sleeping? That kid. How fucked up is she now? No God can give you peace after that. The man is missing a soul to not just put a gun in his mouth and get it over with. Y’ask me.”

  He took a toothpick he’d kept hidden behind his ear and picked at his teeth. “I don’t know what else to tell you.”

  “Did you ever see him speaking to other inmates . . . who’d done things like he’d done?” Test said.

  “There’s a few of his type that like to swap stories, like a sick club, they get each other off on it. Literally, they get each other off.”

  Test grimaced.

  Rath felt too warm. Grimy. He couldn’t peg Sheldon, figure out yet what was bullshit—because there was always bullshit—and what was genuine, and what the motives would be behind the bullshit.

  “I don’t think he was in with anyone,” Sheldon said. “He seemed like a club of one member.”

  “No one you think he’d meet on the outside?” Rath said.

  “He dug his own company. Loves himself. Worships himself. I think the only reason he talked to anyone was so he could talk about himself.” He shrugged.

  Rath nodded at Test to indicate they were done, for now.

  Test handed Sheldon her card. “Get in touch if anyone comes to mind that Preacher might contact on the outside.”

  Rath opened the door. The wind and rain tore at his jacket, churned the fog. When will it end? he wondered.

  48

  Monday, November 7, 2011

  Sleepless again, Rath stood in his bathroom and stared at the medicine cabinet, the mirror as fogged from his morning shower as the fields and woods were fogged outside, tiny tremors of anxiety buzzing in his hands and fingers. He licked his dry lips. Opened the medicine cabinet door.

  Stared at its contents. Shaving cream. Razors. Lotions. Medicines.

  Rachel’s old hairbrush.

  Her long dark hair of her old self tangled in it.

  He took hold of a strand of her hair and pulled it free of all the others. Opened the envelope in his hand and placed his daughter’s hair in it, next to the other hair.

  He shut the cabinet door and left his quiet house to head out on the road again to see his daughter and take her the clothes and jacket he’d bought for her.

  49

  The ring of his new work cell phone startled Rath as he drove 114 West on his way to Johnson mulling what little he knew of Dana Clark and Jamie Drake. He looked at the phone on the seat beside him, a strange number on the screen.

  He pulled over into the Lac Wallace fishing access and answered. “Hello?”

  “Senior Detective Franklin Rath?” a voice said in an unmistakable Quebecois accent. It was not anyone who knew Rath: no one called him Franklin.

  Rath confirmed that he was Senior Detective Frank Rath, though the title sounded as foreign as the name Franklin.

  “This is Inspector Gerard Champine of the Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu Police. I wonder can I speak to you, non?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I prefer not.”

  “I don’t—”

  “In person. I prefer. I am in the Jay Peak Resort, for skiing with family, les petite enfants. Moi? I sit and read. But the fog. Rain. Aye. There is no skiing. I could drive to meet at a place you like as the kids enjoy the water park.”

  “What is this?” Rath said, wondering if this man was even who he said he was.

  “You have a murder, non?”

  Rath nodded, though the inspector could not see the gesture. When the inspector said nothing, Rath realized his faux pas. Jamie Drake’s hanging had not been reported as murder. Not yet. “I can’t speak to any murder,” Rath said.

  “I appreciate. Even still, you have a murder.”

  “What is it I can help you with?” Rath said.

  “Non, non. It is me who helps you. Or, as I prefer, we helps each other. I am ’omicide. I have dead girls. I am watching your local TV news just now. Your girl. In the woods. I am watching while les enfants swim. Your girl. She is hanged, non?”

  How the hell did he know Jamie Drake was murdered, let alone hanged? Who was this “inspector.”

  Rath looked out the Scout window toward Lac Wallace. But the lake was not out there. Only fog.

  “My three girls are not solved,” the supposed inspector said.

  Three girls? “Tell me more,” Rath said.

  “I prefer not on phone, but I see on the news you have the girl in the woods. Hanged? Non?”

  Had Test leaked information? “Is that what the news report said?” Rath said.

  “It is what is not said.”

  “Who the hell is this? Tell me about your girls, if you are who you say—”

  “As I say. I prefer not on phone. We rendezvous? I can tell you my own cases. And what other links I think we share.”

  “Tell me what you know, or I’m hanging up,” Rath said.

  “I prefer not on phone.”

  Prefer not. Who was this guy, Bartleby?

  “How did you know I’m working this case? Or get my number?” Rath said. “I’ve barely started and—”

  “I request from the woman who answers police’s line to please speak with the detective of the case. Will you rendezvous?”

  “Give me a reason.”

  “If your girl was hanged, we will meet. If not. We can say au revoir.”

  Damn it, Rath thought. He could tell the inspector to meet him in Johnson, but if the inspector did indeed have three dead girls, hanged dead girls, Rath did not want to chance running into Rachel with him and having her ask questions. “There’s a roadside place in Starkville, about halfway between us. Called Borderland.”

  “We meet in forty-five minutes then, non?”

  “Twice that, with this fog.”

  “Bon, detective.”

  Rath ended the call.

  Detective.

  Rath had not been called detective in sixteen years.

  He was not sure how he felt about it.

  Desperate, he decided. Barrons had miscalculated. One factor that kept police officers from crossing lines was fear of ruining careers. Rath did not have a career to lose. Did not have to worry about scandal if he acted out of bounds. It wasn’t that he did not respect the profession. Or the law. He’d do whatever he needed to do within the bounds of the law. But life was about priorities. Preventing another girl from ending up dead in the woods, that was his priority.

  When this was over, and Rachel safe, he would not look back. He would go deer hunting as deep into the woods as he could hike. Away from it all. He’d track and take a big buck, pack away venison to last until spring, and hole up in his home by a fire and read novels and carve decoys and grow a beastly beard. He’d hike up the remote trackless wilderness on the backside of Mount Monadnock and try to find an ancient geologic anomaly rumored to exist up th
ere.

  He stared out the windshield. At it. The window was painted white with fog, as if the fog were trying to block out the world in order to get Rath’s undivided attention, get him to focus, to tell him something.

  Or warn him.

  50

  Rath had driven nearly an hour without a single pair of headlights passing him in the fog going the other way. Route 114, which scribbled its way west just a few hundred yards south of the Canada border, then southwest toward Burke, was no Autobahn even on a clear summer day, yet Rath had traveled it dozens of times at 3 a.m.—when he was younger heading back from drinking in Quebec and Montreal, where he and friends took advantage of the lax drinking age of eighteen; and when older, heading to deer hunt the backside of Great Averill Lake—and even then passed a dozen tractor-trailers along the way.

  Not today. Not a soul.

  Rath had the sensation the Scout was drifting through clouds—complete with turbulence from bucking on frost heaves—and that time had slipped a gear.

  Ahead, the red of a neon sign stained the fog.

  It had taken him an hour to drive the last twenty-five miles.

  He pulled the Scout into a mire that was once a dirt lot, relieved to find Borderland was open. The possibility that it might be closed had occurred to him as he drove. Yet places like this never closed. They prided themselves on staying open, no matter what—in spite of what—the rest of the world did.

  As he stepped out into the fog, his face was wetted with mist. Despite the raw temperature, the fog felt warm, as if it were the damp breath of a dragon.

  Several ATVs sat parked near the porch rail, a modern-day substitution for the Old West’s hitching post.

  Inside Borderland, the clack of billiard balls accompanied boisterous banter from a few men who taunted another man who circled the pool table with his cue, his face fixed with the cold concentration of a sniper assessing the best vantage from which to fire his kill shot.

  The men were loggers, their steel-toed boots encased in muck, duck cloth overalls and leather chain-saw chaps darkened with rainwater, the bills of their trucker caps with chain-saw and automotive logos blackened with grease. They looked at Rath with his wool jacket, his face unshaven, and frayed Carhartt jeans jammed in rubber boots, as if Rath were wearing a Brooks Brothers suit, then resumed mocking their friend.

  The fog made it dangerous to work in the woods, gave the loggers an excuse to break early for lunch and enjoy a beer that would lead to a half-dozen beers and most of the men staying here until closing at 1 a.m. Rath knew. As a teen he’d worked for a logging company marking trees. Worked for a roofer and house painter, too.

  Rath took a stool at a bar crafted of a single span of roughhewn old-growth spruce, hundreds of spent brass bullet casings embedded in the wood beneath clear resin.

  A bent, elderly man shuffled over behind the bar.

  Rath did not want a beer this early, but knew to order anything except a beer or booze would be suspect.

  “Labatt Blue,” he said. The man dug around in a cooler at his hip, popped the cap off a longneck with a piece of deer antler, and slid the bottle along a few feet of bar to Rath. He limped back through the kitchen door.

  Rath sipped his beer.

  The bar door opened.

  Out of the fog, a tall man with wire-rimmed glasses appeared, wiped his black overshoes on a mat visible only to him. He was as likely to be the first patron to wipe his feet upon entrance to the establishment as he was to be the last.

  He was older, nudging seventy.

  Water dripped from his fedora, the orange feather in the hat band wet and wilting. He did not wear the hat with the forward tip of Sinatra flair or the hipster cock, but squarely, for the purpose for which it was intended: to keep rain off a man’s head.

  He shed the hat and snapped it against his black wool coat, water spraying as he revealed a head of white hair tidily cropped. A cop’s cut. Except this man could not be the inspector. This man was too old for that world.

  The man unbuttoned his coat, unslung from around his neck an orange scarf that accented the fedora’s feather. Under his coat a checked dress shirt, dry-cleaner pressed.

  The men at the pool table halted their bullshitting to observe the stranger as if he were an exotic bird, but quickly gauged him as no threat.

  The man walked to Rath, his long legs scissoring.

  “Detective?” he said.

  “Inspector?” Rath rose as the inspector shook his hand with fingers long but not bony, cool and soft. The inspector settled in the stool beside Rath. He did not take in his surroundings, and while his impeccable dress was as out of place as a tux in a deer camp, he betrayed no awareness or discomfort at the incongruity. He was at ease. He’d been in legions of places like this, and much, much worse, Rath was certain. He’d seen the world’s ugliness. While he was lean and dapper, and his age presaged the shadowy beginnings of inevitable fragility, there was no trace of softness about him. He did not need to fit in to his surroundings to be respected or left alone.

  Next to this inspector’s poise and polish, Rath felt like a roadside chain-saw carving.

  “Your girl,” the inspector said, pulling down his coat cuff where it rode up over a slim silver watch, “she was hanged or non?”

  How does he know? Rath thought. If the inspector knew, could Preacher have figured it by watching the news?

  “Tell me about your girls first,” Rath said.

  The inspector smiled.

  “I had two earlier girls before this new one. Both November. Both strangled.” He paused, reflecting. His eyes narrowed and he smoothed the feather of his fedora resting on his knee. “Rochelle Beauchamp.” He paused between the two names, as if to give each their due reverence. “And Vanessa Lancaume. One discovered in Henryville, the other in Iberville, in the woods, each along the banks of the Richelieu. Clothed. Each strangled with something from their own attire. A long cord from the hood of Rochelle Beauchamp’s sweatshirt. A bootlace for Vanessa Lancaume.” The inspector closed his eyes. “Méprisable.”

  Rath had not yet read a complete report for Jamie Drake but wondered about her boot being put back on her foot when she was hanged. Was a bootlace missing?

  “How old were they?” Rath said.

  “Teens. Girls.”

  “Quebecois?”

  “Oui. You doubt they are like your girl. We have, umm, bogue dans le cerveau—bug in brain—about it, yes. The border. Like it is a wall and no one can do a bad thing on both sides of the wall. But what is there stopping someone from driving back and forth to do the same things?”

  The inspector was right. The border created a psychological distance that was illusion. There was not a damned thing to stop anyone from crossing the border, anyone with a clean record that was. So maybe that was a start, their man was clean. He’d killed numerous girls, but had not been caught. Was clean, officially. That might rule out Preacher. Unless—

  “It is a border only on a map,” the inspector said.

  “Your girls and my girl have similarities. But—”

  The inspector looked at Rath. His eyes were pale and tired. Haunted.

  “Like I say, it is my suspicion your girl is hanged. Because of what the TV did not say. We are to report the same way about my most recent girl. We told CTV Montreal what to say, exactly. We have CTV say, ‘The body of young girl is found in the woods along the Richelieu River.’ We tell them not to say murdered, not to say hanged, not to mention anything. See. It was supposed to be reported today. So. When I am in my resort room and hear on your TV, on your WCAX channel, a report about your own girl, I think I was hearing a report of my girl on CTV. It is so same. Exactement.”

  Rath had hung his hat on less. “And your new girl?”

  The inspector sighed. “Hanged. See. It did not kill her right away. It was not the snap of the neck. Non. It was slow. Grotesque. Torture. And the rope. Is not just a rope. Non? Is a loop for killing animals. For the trappers. Yours, too?”


  “Fuck,” Rath said.

  “Same then. Tell me of your girl.”

  “I need to see ID. You know who I am because you called me, but—”

  The inspector smiled, retrieved a thin black wallet from inside his coat, and slipped an ID card from it.

  inspector service de police

  de la ville de montréal

  inspecteur en chef

  henri la salle

  retraité

  The ID appeared legitimate, though Rath had never seen a Montreal inspector’s ID to know with certainty.

  “Retraité?” Rath said. “Retired.”

  “Fifteen years.”

  “How can you be working recent murders if you’ve been retired for fifteen years?”

  Was this guy a nutter? as Rachel would say. Maybe his ID was genuine, but he couldn’t be working a new case if he’d been out of the game for fifteen years, unless he was a consultant of sorts, as Rath had been with the Mandy Wilks case. But Rath was twenty-five years younger, at least.

  “Excuse me,” Rath said.

  The inspector, or whoever he was, nodded. “Bien sûr.”

  Rath walked into the restroom, its greasy yellow tiled floor littered with leaves of toilet paper, stinking of and tacky with piss.

  Rath took out his phone, brought up a browser, and googled Henryville, Quebec + Hanging + girl + murder.

  Nothing about a murder came up.

  He googled the same for Iberville.

  Nothing.

  He’d been played. Who was this guy?

  Rath stormed out of the bathroom.

  The inspector, the stranger, sat where he’d been left.

  “Who are you?’ Rath said. “What is this all about?”