Names of Dead Girls, The

by Eric Rickstad

  65

  Rachel gasped as she bumped into a man.

  She fumbled for her backpack zipper to get at her handgun.

  She was too slow.

  “Apologies,” the man said.

  He looked vaguely familiar. Handsome. Sort of. For an older guy. His eyes had none of that bright spark that quickly glazed with lust when men his age realized they were unexpectedly in the presence of a young woman and had her undivided attention, if only for a nanosecond.

  Maybe he was gay. He didn’t give off a gay vibe, though.

  Why did he look familiar?

  “Were you hiking up the hill earlier?” he said.

  Rachel did not answer. She needed to get moving. She could not be late for her handgun class.

  “I offered you a ride,” he said.

  “Oh. Right.”

  “You still look in a hurry. I’m heading downhill.” He nodded at the vehicle nearby. “If you care for a lift.”

  She did not care for a lift. Not from him. Not from any stranger.

  “I understand,” he said and walked toward his old car.

  Rachel was running even later now from standing around and talking.

  She’d accepted plenty of rides to and from campus when she’d missed the shuttle. Rides from strangers. Most from girls, a few from guys her age, students; though guys her age, in some ways, were worse than older men, their motivations so obvious, their attempts at double entendre coarse and juvenile. Give yah a ride. A lift? Pathetic.

  The stranger was opening his car door now, not looking back. Rachel’s fear of Preacher had made her so paranoid she trusted no one; before Preacher, she’d have taken this guy up on his offer. He seemed perfectly normal. And there was something about him. A confidence. Not swagger, just a sort of take it or leave it aura, not flip like young guys whose apathy was just another tired ploy: the more they pretended they didn’t care for her attention, the more desperately they wanted it. This guy. He just was. It seemed he’d asked if she needed a ride simply because he saw she needed a ride. He reminded her of how Felix might be when he was this guy’s age, no ulterior motive. Except, Rachel had to admit, a bit guiltily, this older guy had probably been more handsome than Felix in his day.

  “Hey,” Rachel shouted as the guy shut his car door.

  Rachel jogged up to the car. The man, startled, cranked his window down a piece. This man was not Preacher. She could not let Preacher inform her every decision, cripple her everyday freedom. Could she? She might as well stay locked inside or flee to Florida.

  The ride down the hill would take two minutes, tops, and she had a gun in her backpack. Her fear was misplaced. If she could not accept a normal ride, how could face Preacher?

  She unzipped her backpack a bit, slipped her hand inside it to get her fingers around the butt of the revolver.

  “Change your mind?” the stranger said.

  Rachel considered getting in the car with a frisson of inexplicable high excitement and apprehension, as if she were about to step out onto a high wire.

  “It was nice of you to offer,” Rachel said. “But I’ll walk.”

  The man nodded amiably.

  “Hope you don’t mind,” Rachel said.

  “Why should I mind?” the man said, seeming confused by her apology. “Be safe.” He rolled up the window and drove away without a hint of hesitation or regret.

  66

  The door to Clay Sheldon’s unit was open a crack.

  Rath unsnapped the holster of his M&P45 and approached from one side of the door as Test approached from the opposite angle, waved him to move in on the door. She slipped her hand on her own weapon, at her hip.

  Rath rapped a knuckle on the door. “Sheldon,” he said through the crack. “Detectives Sonja Test and Frank Rath.”

  Test nodded for Rath to push the door open.

  She did not like the door being open. No one left a motel door open, unless they were moving into or out of it. And if Sheldon were packing up to split in the night, they’d hear him inside; unless he’d heard them and had taken cover because he knew why they’d returned.

  Rath pushed the door open and stepped inside, weapon drawn, sweeping the unit that was lit by one pale bedside table lamp.

  Test entered behind him, sweeping her own weapon across the room.

  There was nowhere to hide, except the bathroom.

  Its door was shut. Light leaked from under it.

  Test covered the closed bathroom door with her sidearm.

  A ticking sound came from the kitchenette, like that of a clock hand pinging away each irretrievable second.

  The place appeared the same as when Test had last questioned Sheldon. Almost. The bed was unmade. Normal enough. Enter Test’s bedroom any given day and you’d find her bed unmade too.

  The nightstand drawer hung open a few inches.

  Test smelled burnt coffee. An empty coffeepot sat on a hot plate, its bottom charred black as it ticked, as if about to explode.

  Test nodded for Rath to open the bathroom door.

  He pushed the door open.

  The reek of bleach burned in Test’s nostrils and eyes.

  Water dripped behind the plastic shower curtain, dribbled from the sink’s faucet.

  Test nodded to Rath. He pulled back the curtain.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  No.

  Not nothing.

  Test knelt. Along the bead of caulking where the turquoise tile met the ceramic edge of the dated tub, a dark spatter. Not even a spatter. Five or six specks.

  “Blood,” Rath said from behind her. “The sink, too.” A wafer of melted white soap sat beside the faucet. Except the soap wasn’t quite white. A film of pale pink coated it, the foam in which it sat a shade brighter.

  On the floor beneath the sink, a few drops more.

  “I’ll call New Hampshire staties,” Test said.

  67

  “Who are you two again?” New Hampshire state trooper Lawrence Pines said as he stood outside the North Star Motor Court and rubbed a thumb absently over a nasty mark on the back of his hand. The ragged flesh a livid pink against his dark skin. It’s not a scar, Test thought, it’s too fresh. A wound.

  “Detectives Test and Rath,” Test said. “Canaan Police.”

  The trooper stared at them. Test and Rath showed their IDs.

  “What are you doing here, is probably the better question,” Pines said.

  Test explained the previous interview. Sheldon’s connection to Preacher and thus perhaps to the hanged girls and possibly to Dana Clark’s disappearance. “We left feeling squared with him. But came back based on an interview that revealed Sheldon had lied to us.”

  “Will wonders never cease,” Pine said. “You should have been in touch with us the first time.”

  “It was an informal inquiry, being right across the river,” Test said.

  “Save it. Law enforcement needs to work together.”

  “We are. Now,” Test said. “If we’d looped you in the first time, you’d probably have bitched we were wasting your resources.”

  “We’ll never know.”

  “Let me show you what we have,” Test said.

  Upon being shown the blood, Pines said, “So?”

  “We need forensics here,” Test said.

  “It’s a bathroom. Looks like someone got cut shaving.”

  “You shave in the shower much?” Rath said.

  “Could have nicked himself and kept bleeding. You know how a nicked chin bleeds like a sliced artery.” He considered Rath’s unshaven face. “Maybe not. More likely a woman friend cut herself in the shower, shaving her legs, kept bleeding at the sink.” He scratched at the ruin of flesh that was the back of his hand.

  “The door was open,” Test said. “The coffee burned to a black crust. His clothes are still here but he’s gone.”

  “Let’s speak with the manager,” Pines said.

  The manager, a middle-aged woman wrapped in a sari the color of a plum,
told them Sheldon had paid for the two weeks, in advance. “He not trouble. Quiet like the mouse.”

  “Have you seen him today?” Test asked.

  “Not for couple days. But that does not mean he is not round. I don’t see everything. I am busy. I guess he is inside because he asked the maid not come.”

  Rath looked at Test.

  “This is not unusual,” the manager said. “Many who lives in efficiency do not have maid each day. It is extra cost.”

  “Do you have CCTV?”

  “I do not know this.”

  “Video cameras. Security?” Test said, looking around at the ceiling corners of the lobby.

  “Too much of the money. Is broken. My husband, he has a gun instead.”

  “Where is your husband?” Test said.

  “Maine. We have other motel. That one it has the cameras,” she said. “They not break.”

  “Can we see Sheldon’s registration card?” Test said.

  The manager gave a wary look, but dug around in a tin box of index cards. “Here.” She handed the card to Test.

  Test looked at it. “Did you see him driving the car listed on here? A black Civic?”

  The woman nodded. “Is something happening?”

  “We will need to take a closer look in the unit. If that’s OK.”

  “If it is a must. I hope nothing happens to him.”

  Test thanked the woman and turned to leave.

  “His poor wife,” the manager said.

  Test turned back. “He’s not married,” she said.

  “Girlfriend she is maybe then.”

  “Who?” Test said.

  “The woman who is crying.”

  “When was this?” Test said.

  Rath and the state trooper exchanged looks with Test.

  “She was here,” the manager said, “the night we got all the first fogs and rains. She was, it’s not my ways to gossip. But she was very drunks. I saw him helping her from car, holding her upright, I heard her making sobs.”

  “What did she look like?” Test said.

  “I do not knows. It is dark and all the fogs.”

  “But it was a woman?” Rath said.

  “I see this, yes. I am going from a room to office, a family need a crib. I brings it to them. I am coming back when I sees him pulling her from backseat of car. She could not stand on her owns, and was, she was getting sick. I said something but he had car parked right in front and was inside quick like cat.”

  “And you didn’t ask what was going on?” Test said.

  “I see many much worst things here, a motel, many, many things worst than a drunks wife.”

  “Why do you think it was his wife?” Rath asked.

  “I sees him next day. He is getting ice from machine.”

  The trooper scratched at the back of his wounded hand, but his focus was on the manager.

  The manager bowed her head slightly, looked up from under her eyelids as if she’d talked too much and feared repercussions.

  “I ask if his wife is OK, and he say fine. Fine.”

  “Did you see her again, the wife?” Test said.

  The manager shook her head. “I heard car late at that night. Woke me in office, the engine and headlights.”

  “Did you see her get in?”

  “I see only the car drive away.”

  “What time?”

  “Late. Next morning. Three in morning or more.”

  “And when did it come back?”

  “I don’t knows. I sees the car is back sometime, but not sure when it got back. I am busy.”

  “Have you seen her, the wife, since?” Test said.

  “Not ever since.”

  68

  “I’m going to be late,” Test said to Claude, speaking to him on her cell phone as she stood outside Clay Sheldon’s taped-off efficiency, members of the NH State Police crime scene forensics team scrambling in and out of the unit.

  Test sensed Claude wanting to ask how late, but he didn’t. There was no point. They both knew that even if Test estimated when she’d be home, she’d likely be as accurate as a ten-day forecast in January.

  “Sorry,” she said. “When this case is over, you’ll get some time for yourself.”

  “It’s not time for myself I want. We have to talk, too, about the visiting artist position.”

  “We will.” She’d forgotten all about it.

  “I need to give them an answer.”

  “I know.”

  “By tomorrow noon.”

  Test paused. She wanted Claude to take the post, but they needed time to figure out what they would do with the kids those two weeks. She’d be able to handle them if her caseload allowed, and she could take a few PTO days. She’d not taken a day since July; doubted she’d take any more until April. But if she got a crazy couple weeks when Claude was gone, what would she do with the kids then? The sitter was for evenings, date nights, not a nanny who could watch them at all hours. Neither she nor Claude had family nearby as many of her friends did, grandparents itching to watch their grandkids for free. “Just tell them yes,” Test said. “We’ll make it work.”

  “You sure? What if they want me to take the fulltime position next fall?”

  Rath stood in the doorway of the efficiency, paper booties on his socked feet, paper hat on his head, blue surgical gloves stretched over his hands. He looked like a mad baker. He had no wife. Besides Rachel, in college, he had no obligations other than to himself, and Test could see in his eyes, his appetite for police work surging with each step in this case.

  “You sure?” Claude said again.

  She wasn’t sure. But he wanted it and it was only two weeks. They could negotiate the fulltime position later, if it were offered. “Take it. I gotta go.”

  “I don’t want to just—”

  “Take it.”

  Test ended the call and walked over to Rath. “Any prints?”

  “It’s a fleabag motel, they don’t exactly scrub each surface clean between visitors,” Rath said. “Going to take forever to sort them out. We need to get prints from Dana’s home, for a comp. Her iPad maybe, or a brush with a hard handle. A remote control. Something only she used.”

  “You think she was the woman the manager thought was his wife?” Test said.

  Rath nodded.

  “Where the hell is her car?” Test said.

  “Out there.” Rath looked out toward the parking lot. Route 145 was a hundred feet away, yet invisible in the fog.

  Trooper Pines stepped out from inside the unit. He did not look well. He looked as if he’d just been diagnosed with a terminal illness.

  In his hand, pinched between his gloved fingers by its corner was a photograph.

  A Polaroid.

  69

  The Polaroid was of Dana Clark. A younger Dana Clark. Not that anyone other than Rath and Dana Clark’s daughter would ever be able to identify the bloodied body so cruelly cut and brutalized as being Dana Clark, or even being female. Rath doubted Dana Clark’s husband or closest friends would be able to ID her. Rath and Tammy Clark had an advantage, a disadvantage. They’d both seen this photo before, or one like it. And witnessed the woman herself, left for dead in her flower garden.

  “Fuck,” Rath said.

  “There’s more of them inside,” Pines said. “Dozens.”

  Rath looked out toward the highway hidden in the fog, listening to the sound of cars and trucks swoosh past in the rain.

  “Dozens,” Rath heard Test say. “How long would that take?”

  “At least a minute for each photo to develop, I’d think,” Pines said. “He’d have to place the photos somewhere, not just let them fall facedown on the grass, get ruined. He’d have to change film, too.”

  “He brought boxes and boxes of film with him. He knew he was going to take all those pictures?” Test said. “He attacked Dana Clark back then. He gets out of prison and . . . finishes what he started. He moved right across the river, has a vehicle. Unlike Preacher.”
r />   “It makes no sense,” Rath said, turning to them from looking at the fog. “He has no prior. He robbed a store and killed a kid. I bought that he was suicidal about it, that he’s never forgiven himself for that.”

  “Bought a bill of goods, sounds like,” Pines said.

  A woman in forensics garb and eyeglasses with thick blue frames stepped outside from the unit. She held up a sealed evidence bag. “A hair from the bathroom floor. Near the droplets of blood. Long. Gray. Likely belonging to a female.”

  “Dana Clark’s,” Test said.

  “We’ll see,” the woman said and marched off across the parking lot into the fog.

  “We wondered if Preacher and Sheldon were tight, that’s why we visited Sheldon the first time,” Test said. “Sheldon convinced us otherwise. But maybe he and Preacher were tight. Are tight. Maybe Sheldon opened up to Preacher about his own dark past that no one else knew about, and no one would understand, appreciate, except someone like Preacher. Sheldon is the perfect age for the CRVK. He lived within twenty-five miles of most of the murders.”

  “If we buy that he and Preacher were tight,” Rath said. “If we believe Glade over Sheldon.”

  “Pick your convict,” Pines said.

  “We’re here,” Test stressed, “because you visited Glade, on your own and believed him. And now you question it? It led us to a gray hair, blood, an abandoned motel room, and these photos. To Sheldon. It doesn’t mean Preacher’s not involved just because it doesn’t lead straight to Preacher; and it doesn’t mean it’s not good police work on our part. Your part. If Sheldon shared his plans with Preacher, it explains how Preacher knew about Jamie Drake’s hanging. But we follow evidence. If Preacher’s not our man for this he’s not our man. We’ll get him on something else eventually”

  “Where’s that leave our Quebec girls?” Rath said.

  “I don’t know,” Test said. “Where’d you find the photos?” she asked Pines.

  “Plastic baggie hidden in the back of the minifridge. Not inside in the back, but between the minifridge’s plastic shell and its interior body.”

  “God damn it,” Rath said. “We had him and we let him get away.”