Names of Dead Girls, The

by Eric Rickstad

  “Do you know Abby Land or Jamie Drake?” Test said, coming straight at him.

  “Who?” Pratt said. Test wondered if he was trying to buy time by asking her to repeat herself, a technique politicians and manipulators used to gather their thoughts, gauge the enemy, and prepare a mollifying answer instead of a truthful one.

  Victoria Pratt looked at her husband, then back to Test. The mention of female names had touched a nerve.

  “Abby Land and Jamie Drake,” Rath said.

  “Never heard of them.”

  “Perhaps not their names.” Test took out photos of each of the girls. “How about their faces?”

  Pratt glanced at the photos. “No.”

  The wife looked at the photos more closely, with at least feigned respect for Rath and Test.

  “Look at them closely,” Test said.

  Pratt gave a petulant sigh and gaped. “No.”

  “Why are you asking my husband about these girls?” Victoria Pratt seemed to sense this was important in a way to which Boyd was oblivious, or pretending to be oblivious. But the wife’s concerns were likely pedestrian, suspicion of an unfaithful husband, compared to why Rath and Test had paid this visit.

  “Mandy Wilks? Did you know her?” Rath said.

  Pratt licked his lips. “Her? Again?”

  “Who?” Victoria said, more than suspicion in her voice now. Worry. Perhaps anger. Maybe even fear of not so much wondering how well she knew her husband, but that she knew him all too well. His philandering. The look she gave her husband could have melted iron.

  “I didn’t know her,” Pratt said. “I told the officer that weeks ago. From what I gather you’ve resolved all that mess up your way.”

  “Who are these girls?” Victoria said, as if trying to defuse the rising tension.

  Pratt glanced at his watch. “Seven minutes. I suggest you lay out your reason for being here.”

  “You’ll speak to us for however long it takes.” Test was not playing this game. She was not abiding by his schedule or exposing her reasons for being here. Pratt knew the girls. Somehow. He knew them. All of them.

  “What was your reason for being at the Double Black Diamond Resort on October twelfth?” Rath said.

  “I’ve been over this.” He took off his cap and put it back on, more snugly. “I met about a possible adoption.”

  “It’s true.” Victoria Pratt slipped a pair of sunglasses out from her jacket pocket and put them on. They were the colossal, retro style à la Audrey Hepburn that swallowed half the face and seemed absurd on most women, in a way that reminded Test of an insect. On Victoria Pratt they were, of course, impeccable, their light pink frame coordinated exquisitely with her French manicure.

  “You wanted a boy, a son, American, white, from good stock, is that correct?” Rath stared Pratt in the eye.

  “How did you acquire personal information?” Pratt said.

  “Nothing is personal in a murder investigation,” Rath said. “About the adoption.”

  “Your own daughter is adopted, if I read recent stories correctly,” Boyd Pratt said.

  “Murder investigation?” Victoria said. “How does that have anything to do with us? Our pursuit of adoption? You can’t just ask my husband willy-nilly questions and expect—” Her anger had taken a turn, directed now at Test and Rath. Her husband may have been a heel or a cheat, but murder? One had to draw the line.

  “If you think I left my home at four this morning to ask willy-nilly questions, you are mistaken. My questions have very specific reasons, none of which you need to know,” Test said.

  “Five minutes,” Pratt said.

  “Abby and Jamie. Both were at the Double Black Diamond when you were there October twelfth,” Rath said.

  “Small world,” Pratt said.

  “Too small for our liking,” Test said, “and for your own good. Abby Land is in jail for murdering Mandy Wilks.”

  “What are you implying?” Victoria said. Test could not see the woman’s eyes behind her sunglasses, but she could feel them on her; she was giving Test her undivided attention. Unlike Pratt who looked off toward the store, affecting superiority through boredom.

  “I know all this,” Pratt said. “It’s old news.”

  “And Jamie Drake was found hanged,” Test said.

  Victoria Pratt went so stiff she looked as if she might shatter. “Suicide. What could that possibly have to do—”

  “Murdered,” Rath said.

  That got Pratt’s attention, though he tried to conceal it. At the word murder, he’d just managed to stop himself from jerking his head to face Test. Had he done it? Killed Jamie after torturing her to get information from her? But what information? What could she know? And Pratt’s flinch seemed one of surprise. Or was he just as practiced an actor as he was an ass?

  Pratt glanced at his wife. He then fixed his eyes on Test. “It’s got nothing to do with me.”

  “You see our concern, though,” Test said, nodding at the wife whose eyes remained hidden behind her sunglasses. Test wanted to swipe the glasses off the woman’s face, so she could read her eyes, see if there were fear of her husband in them, fear of ideas formulating in her mind about her dear, rich hubby. “Both these girls were at the resort at the same time as your husband.”

  “He and five hundred other guests. It has nothing to do with him, as he just stated.” She removed her sunglasses, her eyes set on Test’s. Ice cold. She’d protect her husband. Protect her way of life. “The time my husband has granted you is up. This is rather ridiculous, you ambushing us like this.”

  “I’ll need to know your whereabouts this past Saturday,” Rath said to Pratt.

  “Will you now?” Pratt said. Test could see him straining not to smile. “You’ll have to know my whereabouts? You’re something. The both of you, driving all this way for nothing in a car that looks like it might disintegrate any second. Doesn’t the Canaan Police Department provide vehicles?”

  The wife raised an eyebrow at her husband. They were on the same team now. “Tell her,” she said to him.

  “I was here, in town,” Pratt said.

  “Anyone who can verify this?” Test said. “Besides your wife?”

  “He was breaking ground for the new town library he’s building. Half the town was here,” Victoria Pratt said.

  Test’s confidence flagged.

  “You can confirm this?” Test said to Pratt.

  “Google it,” the wife said. “It made the front page of the Free Press and was aired on the local news. Maybe if you’d checked into that first, you’d not have wasted our time. Now, please. We’d like to have our day back.”

  60

  Back home after a long day, Rath was too keyed up to sleep.

  He took out his .30-06 Springfield 760 rifle and laid it on the kitchen table to disassemble it as he drank a beer or three. Breaking down the weapon was an annual ritual he usually performed in October to prepare for rifle season. He’d not found the time this year, but now, tonight, he needed to take on a task natural to him, to the season. Do something for himself, something that concentrated his focus on the minutiae at hand, and nothing else.

  There were seventy separate parts to his Springfield pump action 760 carbine. Rath knew each one by feel, blindfolded, from the action bar lock and the bolt assembly, to the hammer spring trigger pin and rear-sight aperture.

  He aligned his tools and rags and snake bore cleaner, solvent and oil.

  He had it all set up, ready to go when his phone buzzed. He ignored it.

  The first time.

  Not the second time.

  Not at this late hour. He feared it could not be good, so could not be ignored altogether.

  It was a Quebec number by the looks, though unfamiliar.

  Rath answered. “Hello?”

  “I have something for you, Inspector.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Pardon, Inspector Hubert. Champine has arranged for you to meet the owner of Chez Darlene.”


  For a moment Rath thought he was being played by Grout. Except Grout had no idea of Hubert’s or Champine’s names, nor could he fake a Quebec number.

  “What is it?” Rath said, “Why?”

  “We have checked deeper. We have learned despite Lucille Forte being from a what you say, good family, she worked at this place. This Chez Darlene.”

  “Are you shitting me?” Rath said.

  “Excusez-moi?”

  “Nothing. Sorry.”

  “La mise en place est sur cent trente trois Nord. Champine visited the owner. Alex Poitras. Champine got nothing, but thinks perhaps if it is linked to an American crime, too, one that will make bad news for American customers, well, perhaps a visit from an American inspector. If you want to see this owner a midi, noon, Champine will—”

  “I know the place,” Rath said.

  “Mais oui. Bon. Bonne nuit.”

  As soon as Hubert hung up, Rath realized he was in a jam. He and Test needed to get down to Concord, New Hampshire, and get the jump on that Timothy Glade.

  They needed to do it together. Glade was a violent, unhinged sort; Rath did not want Test approaching him alone.

  If he had time after Chez Darlene, maybe they could make the run. He texted Test and explained. He knew she’d be miffed about his not making it to Concord, and she’d want to hit Quebec with him. She’d be even more ripped when she read that he wanted her to take shifts out on the road by Preacher’s place. Tail Preacher if he so much as slithered on his belly from the place.

  He didn’t look at her text when she shot back an instantaneous response.

  61

  Thursday, November 10, 2011

  At 11:30 a.m., Rath pulled off 133 Nord, just past the twenty-foot silhouette of the naked woman and into Chez Darlene’s parking lot. The sign was sooted grimy and gray with road grit and exhaust fumes from generations of passing vehicles. A smaller modest sign, black with soiled white lettering read: danseuses nues ouvert 24 heures tous les jours. Nude Dancers 24 hours every day.

  A lot of girls, Rath thought. Around the clock like that.

  The one-story, cinder-block building, windowless and painted black, had a flat roof that must have been a bear to shovel after a heavy snowfall.

  He drove the Scout around back. It was 11:34 a.m. on a weekday morning, mid-November, and the spacious back lot was nearly full with pickup trucks and sedans. The lot was not visible from the road: local family and businessmen did not need their vehicles seen by passersby.

  The lot abutted a foggy cornfield. To the north, a dairy barn and three towering grain silos. Just south, on the roof of a shuttered, roadside donut shop circa 1950s, perched a gargantuan orange donut that Rath believed used to spin in a slow, drunken manner, though perhaps it had only been he who had spun slowly and drunkenly.

  He trod to the metal door at the back of the club.

  His phone buzzed. Grout. He left a voice mail. Rath gave it a quick listen. You’re blowing me off again. Rain date, tomorrow, same time and place on the river. We need to talk.

  Rath hauled open the solid door and was clobbered by the Lenny Kravitz cover of “American Woman” detonating from down a hall as dark as a rat tunnel, at the mouth of which strobed gaudy red and green lights. Rath wondered if the color of the lights was Chez Darlene’s nod to the coming Christmas season.

  Out of the dark stepped a bald bouncer with a goatee and a serpent tattoo curled around the edge of his left eye. His white button-down shirt lay open at the neck to display a gold chain as thick as a jump rope. “Three,” he said with a French accent. He knew an Anglo-American when he saw one.

  Rath dug out a five from his Carhartts and handed it to the bouncer who stamped the back of Rath’s hand with a female silhouette much like the sign out front. He did not offer Rath change.

  Rath walked down the dark throat of the corridor toward the flashing lights and din. The perfumed air almost, but not quite, cloaked the greasy, bodily odors lurking in the place, which would have been as dark as a shut tomb if not for the red and green strobe lights fracturing the darkness every millisecond.

  Rath had the sensation of being trapped in the complete dark, and that the schizophrenic lights, and the images revealed to him in this close space, were in his mind alone, part of a macabre and base hallucination. The deafening music assailed his eardrums.

  The walls of the dark, low-ceilinged room, made up of solid mirror, reflected the images of themselves back to themselves infinitely, so at first Rath thought the place was more expansive than he’d remembered, that there were dozens of girls performing on as many cramped stages. But no. There were just four girls, working their bodies in rote gyrations meant to be erotic, or at least raunchy and titillating, but left Rath cold. He did not know which inspired greater pity, the young girl nearest him, closer to sixteen than to twenty years old, or the dancer pushing a very hard fifty. The young girl, in blond pigtails and a Santa’s elf getup, was white as milk; the older woman, black as coal.

  The few spaces not dedicated to mirrors were given to flat-screen TVs playing varied hard-core pornography scenes. Orgies, threesomes, women on women. With the TVs sound muted, the faces on the screens looked distorted with anguish instead of the ecstasy for which Rath supposed they were striving. The TVs had not been here years ago.

  Anger at the owner Alex Poitras, and disgust at himself for ever having set foot in here years ago, edged out Rath’s pity for the dancers.

  At tables circling the stages, half occupied by women, patrons stared with blank eyes at the dancers and TVs, lips slightly parted.

  To the left was the bar. Lit in a red, liquid, lava lamp glow.

  A tall woman in an electric blue wig and brutally kohled eyes stood behind the bar and served a drink to a man whose eyes were riveted to the climactic scene playing out on the TV behind the bar. The Money Shot, Rath and his buddies had called it, no second thought. No thought at all.

  The place was claustrophobic, stifling, the air dead.

  Rath tried to plant his eyes somewhere so they would not be beset by the images of flesh, but had trouble doing so. He supposed this was the point.

  Beyond the bar, behind the drawn black curtains, were the VIP stages, and the private booths.

  The bartender walked up to him as “American Woman” faded and “Shook Me” started up. The music was not new. The music was old and unchanged.

  “Yes?” the bartender said. She saw through Rath. She was not sure if he was a cop or not, but she knew he wasn’t here for what the place offered.

  “I’m here to see the owner. Alex Poitras.”

  The woman laughed. “I sincerely doubt that, honey.”

  “I was told to meet him in his office. It’s about a girl who worked here.”

  “It’s always about a girl who works here.”

  “Not up there,” Rath said, referring to the dance stage. He nodded to the kitchen door behind the bar.

  “Her? She didn’t show for her shift for two straight days. No call, no text, just left me hanging. Shocker. Teenagers these—”

  “She’s dead. Her body was found twenty kilometers from here. So maybe you could cut her some slack.”

  The woman washed a glass in the sink at her hip.

  “Alex is expecting me,” Rath said. “It was set up.”

  “Alex’s office is not on-site.”

  “I’m a cop.”

  “Again. Shocker.”

  “From the States.”

  “The shocks just keep coming.”

  “A Chief Inspector Hubert set up the meeting. They must have thought I knew the office was separate from this place, or Inspector Champine and I would sort it out.”

  “Tightly run ship.”

  “Can you reach Alex, let him know.”

  “Yeah. Sure. I’ll do that.” She pulled a cell phone from her apron pocket and texted. Waited, clicking a long, fake fingernail on her teeth.

  She looked up from her phone.

  “Alex says you’
re late. If you can get to the city inside thirty minutes, you can have a half hour.”

  “Where?”

  “Hotel Gault. Quatre cent quarante St. Helene. Old Montreal. The penthouse apartment. Third floor; look for the red door.”

  Outside, even the degraded light of the gray day forced Rath to squint and blink. His skin was oily and hot, as if he’d had a plastic bag over his head while inside.

  How had he ever come here? Not just as a stupid teenager, but as a man, a cop?

  In the Scout, Rath tried to breathe as he watched three young men and a woman stagger out of an SUV laughing as they cavorted to the door of the club.

  The thought came hurtling to his mind before he could drive it away: You’d still be coming to places like this and never have changed if you hadn’t had to raise Rachel. She saved you.

  She had.

  Because Preacher murdered her mother.

  Rath shook his head to try to rid the thought that plagued him most: that good had come of Preacher’s murders. Yet, it was true. Rath was a better person because Preacher had murdered his sister.

  62

  In Montreal, Rath exited 10 Ouest onto the ramp, the La Ronde Monstre, the tallest wooden roller coaster on earth cresting in the distance on the banks of the St. Lawrence.

  Rath had never been to Old Montreal, and instead of heading straight into downtown as he’d done on every other visit, he veered right, North onto Rue Notre-Dame. Luxury sedans and SUVs swam and powered past, making the rattling Scout seem as anachronistic as rabbit ears.

  The four-story Hotel Gault, with its gray stone and terraced top floor, stretched from the lobby entrance at the corner down the twin blocks of Rue Sainte-Hélène and Rue Récollets. The grandeur of its architecture felt like a different world from the Chez Darlene, but it was the same world, where one business bankrolled the other.

  Rath drove past a valet out front, parked on the street, but had no Canadian coins to feed the meter.

  As the doorman held the door, Rath realized the smallest bill he had was a $10. It didn’t matter. His mother had survived on tips for two decades; he knew its toll.