by Meg Gardiner
“Bad boy with a soulful stare.”
“Our guest back there is the new version.” Villareal tossed her head in the direction of the cells. “Complete charmer. Though he’s not fooling me. But at least he doesn’t throw his piss at the bars, or call me the c-word. He’s happy to eat the fast food we bring in.”
“Not your usual prisoner.”
“He’s the opposite of a problem.”
Caitlin nodded, wondering how deeply Detrick had greased his way into his jailers’ good graces.
Villareal sighed. “Making friendly small talk with the guards isn’t an issue. They are.” She nodded pointedly out the front window.
“The news media?” Caitlin said.
“Them, and the others. The admirers.”
Caitlin grimaced. “SKGs. Serial killer groupies. It’s a real thing.”
“Before we put a lid on it, a couple of national reporters visited the jail and interviewed him. That really brought the fans panting.”
Outside, women stood on the sidewalk in front of the courthouse, snapping photos, selfies, photobombing the television reporters.
“They’re waiting to see if he’s taken next door for any court appearances. Nothing’s scheduled today, but that doesn’t stop them. I do.”
“They come in here?”
“Wanting to visit him. And more.”
Caitlin wasn’t surprised that carrion crows of all varieties had descended on Crying Call. She’d seen the Facebook groups that had sprung up, protesting Detrick’s innocence.
“I bet. Hybristophilia—it’s a sexual attraction to criminals. Arousal by outrage,” Caitlin said. “I presume they try to wrangle conjugal visits.”
“At least Detrick doesn’t scream at us when we drag them away.”
Yeah, Caitlin thought: Detrick was perfection incarnate. Mr. Wonder Bread, congenial and compliant.
The police chief came out to the desk. He extended his hand to Caitlin. “Heard the latest?”
“Fill me in. But I’m guessing—Detrick loves this circus.”
“That ain’t the half of it. Come on back to my office.”
• • •
He could hear them.
From his bunk in the cell, between the cold steel bars, their voices echoed. Muffled, indistinct, but their pitch and tone came through.
Caitlin Hendrix was back. All the way from Virginia, two thousand miles to this pissant town. Just for him.
They couldn’t keep away, the women—they just couldn’t.
The bitches.
His girlfriend, Emma, was gone. She’d left him after a single visit to the jail. Came in looking like she was sitting on a cheese grater, face contorted, wouldn’t hold on to his gaze no matter how many times he called her by name. She’d embraced him, but dutifully, pushing dark glasses up her nose and talking about how awful it was that the police and FBI had searched the motel room, how intrusive and disturbing for Ashley.
They didn’t find anything, though, he said. Right?
She looked at him then. Looked at him and said, “I’m going home.”
Never mind. Nobody in the media had gotten Emma’s name. Nobody was going to chase her down and try to worm information out of her. Not that she’d have anything bad to say about him. Her own fears were what had driven her off.
Didn’t matter. Emma was gone, but panty throwers had lined up to replace her.
Strangely, that made jail tolerable.
At first, he’d felt out of control. Wild. Caged. He’d never been arrested before. He had wanted to lash out. Only his incredible intellect and discipline allowed him to keep from cutting these rubes down verbally—and that bitch who’d just walked in, Hendrix, physically.
But after he talked to the FBI and saw the looks on their faces when he lawyered up—and he guessed he was now the type of guy who used the term lawyered up—he found strange depths in the experience of being in custody.
He was the lion in the zoo. And like the lion, he could roar.
So, when the panty throwers couldn’t get in to see him—after the first one . . . the jailers wised up after she lifted her top to show him her tits—he sent a message out, through his public defender, requesting visits from people attached to legal organizations and charities and public service news media and social justice groups. And they came.
So many of them came that the jail had to create a liaison for him, in addition to his lawyer. A paralegal from an Arizona legal aid charity. He had a link to the outside world. A mouthpiece if he wanted it—a conduit if he needed to forward requests or speak to people on the outside.
Meanwhile, he used the women who contacted him: to raise money, to give interviews, and to gather information. Some of his fans had access to confidential databases. They provided him with names, addresses, and background on people he was interested in. He didn’t have a computer, but he had a legal pad his jailers let him write on. And he had his perfect memory.
He was the center of attention—he gave himself that. It was not what he wanted, but it was his, and he needed to use it to his best advantage, to make this a win.
Her voice, Hendrix’s voice, was too bright, and impossible to decipher. She was talking to the desk clerk, and now to the police chief.
Hendrix being here meant that his court date was only a day away. Detrick steepled his hands on his chest and stared at the ceiling. He knew that outwardly he appeared serene. It baffled the town cops who brought him his meals and chatted with him as they hauled drunks to and from the neighboring cells.
One day to the preliminary hearing. He sat up and opened the lawbooks at the foot of the bed. He had work to do.
• • •
The chief closed his office door. “Yesterday Detrick rejected his court-appointed attorney and demanded to represent himself in court.”
“The judge permitted it?” Caitlin said.
“He did. Recommended strongly against it, and Detrick’s public defender had it read into the record that this was over his objections. Detrick insisted. He’s going into the hearing tomorrow in pro se.”
“Adding jailhouse lawyer to his résumé.” She considered it. “Surprising, but not. His driving motive, his base need, is control. He can’t relinquish it.”
“That I can see,” the chief said. “It could be a total fuster-cluck. What happens if he’s convicted and argues for a new trial based on incompetence of counsel?”
“Cross that bridge when you come to it.”
Silver sat heavily in his desk chair. “One thing you should be aware of. Because Detrick’s now his own counsel, he gets to review all the evidence against him in discovery.”
“He already had that right, as the defendant.”
“But defendants never bother looking at the evidence. Trust me on that. This guy is something different.” He looked up from under heavy eyebrows, his expression portentous. “He went through it all with a fine-tooth comb, including the affidavit you wrote out supporting his felony arrest.”
“Yeah?”
“Which mentions a confidential informant.”
Caitlin frowned. “That’s not unusual.”
“Any thoughts on whether he might know who that is?”
She shook her head carefully. “I don’t know. But the confidential informant is, for now, confidential.”
“Good.”
The chief’s phone rang. When he answered, his shoulders lowered, as though he’d been abruptly laden.
“Coming.” He hung up. “We’re getting calls from all over. People see the newscasts, hear about those women you found laid out in the woods down in Texas. They see the Polaroid photos.” He sighed. “Families of young women who’ve gone missing. They’re phoning us from across the country, hoping we can tell them if Detrick killed their daughters. The numbers . . . it’s disturbing.”
“Not a call. A warning. Another family just walked through the front door. You want to be the one to tell them we can’t help?”
40
At a free desk in a corner of the cramped police station, Caitlin listened to the story. The stricken parents sat across from her, bunched in their coats, ruddy and strained. Turk and Mary Jane White had flown from San Antonio to Phoenix, then driven to Crying Call, hoping for some answers. Mary Jane held a wet tissue balled in her hand. She pulled a photo from her purse.
“That’s her. The most recent picture I have. That’s Sonnet.”
Caitlin took the snapshot. Sonnet White looked disturbingly familiar. She had the willowy blond looks of so many of Detrick’s victims. But Caitlin didn’t recognize her.
“When was this taken?” Caitlin said.
“Last year.” Mary Jane dabbed at her eyes.
“Ten months ago,” Turk clarified. “She won’t have changed much.”
Caitlin did them the respect of looking a long time at the snapshot, but she was sure she had never seen Sonnet’s face. The young woman was not among Detrick’s eerie photo gallery.
Caitlin held the photo up. Gently, clearly, to ensure that Mr. and Mrs. White would hear and process the information, she said, “Your daughter is not in any of the photos we’ve recovered from the crime scenes.”
Mary Jane sagged and pressed the tissue to her eyes, collapsing with relief, but Turk’s eyes stayed steely.
“You still don’t know for sure if he’s got her, though,” he said.
Caitlin hung on to the photo, examining Sonnet’s features. She was beautiful, in a hard way, and her gaze was distant. Her tattoos were extravagant. She looked to be in her early twenties.
“I have no evidence that the offender has ever crossed paths with her,” Caitlin said. “Do you have reason to believe she knows Kyle Detrick? Did she spend time in Gideon County, Austin, or San Marcos?”
“We . . .” He trailed off, hesitant.
Mary Jane looked up, her eyes brimming. “We don’t know where she’s been. We originally reported Sonnet as a runaway.”
Turk said, “Mary Jane.”
She cut a harsh look at him. “No point in hiding it now. We came all this way. We should explain.” She straightened. “I admit she has problems. Sonnet. Trouble . . . with . . . drugs, and unsuitable men, and the law . . .”
Turk averted his gaze.
“But after seeing those photos the FBI found. All those girls who look so much like her. We got to fearing that maybe she didn’t run away after all . . .”
Mary Jane broke down and leaned into Turk’s arms. Stiffly at first, then with rough agony, he clasped her to him. The look he gave Caitlin was tormented.
His voice was a rasp. “Keep the photo. I wrote her cell phone number on the back. She won’t answer a call from us, but maybe if you try. Please, keep it. In . . .” His voice broke. “In case.”
They left, Turk with an arm over Mary Jane’s shoulders. Caitlin rubbed her eyes. She couldn’t relieve their anguish. Or that of the other families who had phoned the Crying Call PD, begging for help.
So many missing.
Through the front window, she watched Turk hold the door of their car while Mary Jane got in, crestfallen.
Sticking the photo in her back pocket, Caitlin walked to the front desk. “I want to see the prisoner.”
Villareal scrunched her mouth to one side. “You can’t interrogate him. He lawyered up.”
“I was there. But now he’s his own lawyer. Who can give permission to speak.”
With a shrug, the desk officer picked up the phone, talked briefly, and pointed over her shoulder. “They’ll admit you.”
At the back of the station, Caitlin waited for the door to the jail unit to buzz open. A young officer waited on the other side.
His thumbs were notched beneath his belt buckle. “Miss.”
“How’s the prisoner behaving?”
“He’s a cream puff.”
There was no sally port. The officer pulled out a key ring, opened a locker, and let her place her Glock and her drop-point knife inside. He locked it, then led her around the corner. The jail had six cells, three on each side of a central hallway.
Detrick was watching.
He sat on the thin cot in the cell, legs outstretched, leaning back against the cinder-block wall. He’d heard her voice approaching and had assumed a pose.
The young officer said, “See you in a few.”
He left her alone. Only one other cell was occupied, next to Detrick’s, by a gray-faced man passed out and reeking of whiskey. Caitlin stopped, leaned back against the bars of the empty cell opposite Detrick’s, and took a studied look at him.
Two weeks in jail had cost him his winter tan. His face was paler and thinner. It brought out the lines of his jaw. His hair had grown out just enough to fall over his forehead in a Superman curl. The stubble on his cheeks kept him from looking too young. The orange shirt and loose pants hung on him like he was a model.
An empty KFC box sat on the floor, smelling of grease and salt. Detrick had a lawbook open on the cot beside him. He ran a finger down the page, as if he were stroking a woman’s back.
“Here for your session?” he said.
“I missed your feeding, but I thought I could still get a look at you in your new habitat.” She spoke offhandedly, but her heart had begun to pound.
“I knew you couldn’t stay away,” he said.
“Since you’re now representing yourself, I presume you’ve seen the list of witnesses the prosecutor is going to call at your hearing tomorrow. I’m eager to testify.”
He closed the lawbook. The gray of his eyes seemed peculiarly piercing. Maybe it was the lights.
“Don’t pretend you came to rub it in,” he said. “That’s not why you’re here, ogling me.”
“I’m here, Counselor, to emphasize what a disaster you’re facing. The evidence against you is overwhelming.”
“You want me to hear you out. You want me to tell you how to stop yourself from going down that dark path. The one that ends with you blowing your brains out. You want me to save you.”
She smiled. She tried to laugh. Her heart was hammering.
He leaned forward. He had a coiled, sleek energy. “You should see yourself right now.”
He uncurled from the bed like a sidewinder rising to strike. Sauntered to the bars of the cell and hung his hands on a crossbar. Shadows from the overhead bulbs striped his face.
“But it’s not a gun, is it?” he said. “Because a gun’s your lover. You feel naked without it on your hip right now, I bet. You’d never want it in your brain.” He looked thoughtful. “Would you?”
She stared at him. “Tell me where Teri Drinkall is.”
His gaze slid over her. A shiver cascaded down her shoulders.
“That’s the woman from Dallas?” he said.
Cocksucker. “If she’s still alive, telling me will open a whole world of possibility to you. If she’s not . . . telling me will still make a difference to your sentencing.”
“Sentencing? The only sentences involved here are going to be the ones in the blockbuster memoir I write about my false imprisonment and exoneration.”
“Tell me today, and I can do something for you. Get to court, and you’ll bear the full weight of Arizona law. Which, you should know, is even harsher than Texas law.”
“You want me to talk about the dead women, right? How they all had their wrists slashed.”
Something about the way he said slashed caused the breath to catch halfway to her lungs.
She saw again the cuts in Phoebe Canova’s wrists. Angled, deep, four inches long. Not a cut. A gash. Slit. Slash. And the knife that made them, razor sharp.
It was Detrick’
s freakish sexual metaphor. Slitting their wrists was a substitute for sexual penetration. It was how he got off. The cuts on Phoebe’s wrists had looked wide, like the edges of a crevasse. Like a petal opening. They’d been probed, with the knife at the very least.
Good God. How did he get so twisted? Why?
Don’t ask why. You’ll go crazy. She stared at him, trying not to let her racing heart give her away.
“You’re never going to control it,” he said. “You can’t.”
“Control is for you, isn’t it?”
Her hands were clasped behind her back. She dug her nails into her palms, to force herself to focus. And to boil off her raging anxiety.
His expression, despite it all, looked every bit as seductive and concerned as it had the day she’d met him in his Austin real estate office. He was wearing the mask. The face of sanity, of allure, of reason and hope. It was amazing.
She thought of the parents jamming the police department’s switchboard. Of Turk and Mary Jane White, crushed by the not knowing, raked by the fear that this man had taken their daughter, Sonnet. She thought of the faces in the Polaroids. Of terror. They were the reflection of his true being. They were his real self, projected and captured in the moments before he killed them.
She pulled the snapshot of Sonnet White from her back pocket. “Where’s this girl?”
He eyed it, almost lackadaisically. “Who’s that?”
Holding the photo up, she took a step toward him. He sighed, bored. But he took a minute to judge the photo. Something skittered behind his gaze, then was gone. A reaction, fleeting. Familiarity, or want. Or just pattern recognition. Caitlin took another step toward him. She would have shoved the photo down his throat if she could.
“Nice,” he said. “I like. What’s her name? Got her number?”
“Tell me what you did to her.”
Detrick’s gaze shifted from the photo. It painted Caitlin up and down. “Have you ever considered going blond?”
The sick shiver wormed down her spine. “I’ll see you in court.”
He smiled. “It’ll be good to talk without these bars between us.”
He grabbed the bars with both hands and leaned back, stretching. His gray eyes seemed to devour her.
