Painted Skins

by Matt Hilton

  Both Tess and Po looked searchingly at the woman.

  ‘I’ve nothing to answer to Daryl Bruin,’ Margaret stated.

  ‘But … Margaret?’ Trojak’s eyebrows sought his hairline.

  ‘You’ve had your answer, Trojak,’ Po growled.

  Trojak’s mouth curled up at one corner, and he turned his face aside. He glanced back at Mrs Norris. ‘Daryl won’t be happy.’

  ‘I don’t care if he messes his shorts with frustration,’ Margaret told him.

  Po grunted in mirth, while Tess’s eyelids also pinched in humour at the lurid image Margaret painted. Even Trojak’s lips quirked briefly. ‘OK,’ he acquiesced, ‘at least I can tell him I tried.’

  Tess moved past Po, shrugging out of his tentative grasp.

  She stood a few feet from Trojak.

  ‘Look, Trojak. I understand you’re only doing Daryl’s bidding. He’s your boss, and you have a job to do. We all get that. But you’re setting yourself between a rock and a hard place. I’ll ask again: back off. Stay out of this, and it’ll be best for everyone.’

  ‘I came here to speak to Margaret. She doesn’t want to speak. I’ll happily leave now.’ Trojak stared at Po. ‘But there’s nobody going to tell me what to do. I’m my own man.’

  ‘Tell that to your wife,’ Po said.

  Trojak’s nostrils pinched, but he didn’t reply.

  ‘And tell that to Bruin,’ Po added.

  Trojak dusted himself off some more.

  ‘I’m going to leave now because it’s my choice to do so,’ he said, and looked directly in Tess’s eyes.

  ‘Fair enough,’ she said.

  ‘Right.’ He moved to leave.

  ‘Trojak?’ Po called.

  Pausing, without looking back, Trojak waited.

  ‘Twice already you’ve narrowly survived a beating,’ Po announced at his back. ‘Third time you might not be as lucky.’

  SEVENTEEN

  A deluge fell overnight, banishing the heat of the past few weeks to a memory. With the rain came gusting wind from the northwest holding a distinct chill from its Arctic source, and a promise of a harsher cold snap to come. It had gone from summer to fall in a few short hours. Trees that had held on to their foliage were almost stripped bare, and drifts of leaves cluttered the drain covers and kerbs. Floodwater threatened some houses and establishments. In her upper-floor home, Tess wasn’t in danger of being washed away, but she’d noticed Mrs Ridgeway had firmly closed her shop’s door, and had been out with a broom, sweeping the sidewalk clear of debris. Tess had considered going down to help, but the shopkeeper had things under control in no time.

  Mid-morning and it was still dim outside, and Tess had her lights burning in her living room. In the corner her iMac was running, but she’d stepped away to replenish her coffee mug and now a screen saver swirled in myriad colours. She’d also set up her tablet, and her cellphone was plugged in to charge. All were integral tools to her job, working away to trace Jasmine. There had been a couple of interesting hits overnight, but nothing that had panned out when she checked the reports to source. A woman found dead by the side of a road in neighbouring New Hampshire had given Tess cause for alarm until she read that she was African-American, so couldn’t be Jasmine. She was a victim of a hit-and-run accident, a street worker in the wrong place at the wrong time. Immediately Tess burned with guilt for the relief she’d felt: the woman who’d died deserved as much pity and resolution as anyone else. A second hit was on an abandoned car, the same model as Jasmine’s – but that struck out when the licence plate came back to another owner.

  She sipped her coffee, thinking back to the previous evening.

  Po wasn’t around.

  He’d returned to her house last night, and stayed until dawn. It hadn’t been their most memorable night together, with Tess retiring to bed alone, and Po on the settee in her living room. They hadn’t argued. There’d been no need. A silent scolding proved more effective on her man. She’d been getting somewhere with Margaret Norris until the overspill of testosterone between Po and Trojak had erupted into a fistfight. Once Trojak left with his tail between his legs, Tess had tried to engage the woman again, but Margaret had had enough for the evening and shut her out. Tess glared at Po, and Po had shrugged. ‘Trojak needed putting in his place,’ he’d said.

  ‘I’m only glad I made it outside in time,’ Tess told him. ‘What was next? You were going to gut each other.’

  ‘I wouldn’t go that far.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you though?’

  Their drive back to her place had been in uncomfortable silence.

  Once they were inside, and Po had checked out of the blinds a couple of times he’d slipped on to the settee, left arm stretched across the back. Ordinarily Tess would have filled the gap he’d offered, and the sheltering arm would have become an embrace, leading to intimacy that would take them both to bed. But she hadn’t sat. She’d checked her programs. Made some supper. Told Po she was too tired to fight.

  ‘I ain’t fighting,’ he reassured her, earning a scowl. She adored him, but the man could infuriate her without trying too hard.

  ‘That was a cheap shot,’ she said.

  Po frowned.

  ‘With Trojak,’ she went on.

  ‘What was a cheap shot? He asked for it. I gave him fair warning, asked him to leave. He was the one tried pushing his way inside the house.’

  ‘That snippy dig about his wife,’ Tess said.

  ‘Oh. I get ya.’ Po pushed his fingers through his hair. ‘But it was true.’

  Tess wondered who the advice was genuinely aimed at. She wanted to ask about his parents, but it wasn’t the right time, not when there was a buzz of irritation in the atmosphere.

  ‘A woman who hits her man is equally loathsome to me as when the shoe’s on the other foot,’ she said.

  ‘Wasn’t advocating he hit her,’ Po replied, and appeared suitably abashed.

  ‘I know.’ Tess leaned in and pecked a kiss on his lips. He looked up expectantly, his turquoise gaze sweeping her features. She rolled her head away from him, followed it to the bedroom. ‘I’m worn out. Need to sleep.’

  She expected Po to follow, but he didn’t, and she lay alone in bed wondering if she was prodding a hornets’ nest of emotion on bringing up the subject of domestic violence again. In the early hours, she slipped from the room, the house quaking under the thunderous impact of rain, and checked on Po. He was where she’d left him, ankles crossed, hands folded on his stomach, sound asleep. She didn’t disturb him, but returned to the warmth of her bed. She needed to sleep, but couldn’t. Her mind was turning over as she attempted to reorder what she’d learned, and more so fit together what she hadn’t yet, about Jasmine’s disappearance. The deluge on the roof sounded like a drumroll announcing an oncoming epiphany, but her enlightened moment failed to transpire, and instead the incessant rumble finally lulled her to sleep.

  When she rose, Po had left, but not without leaving a handwritten note.

  Back soon, it said, with a surprise.

  Po wasn’t a flowers and candy kind of guy. What was he up to? Hopefully he didn’t return with John Trojak’s liver on a platter.

  After showering and brushing her teeth and hair she prepped coffee and bagels, and she broke her fast while sharing her time between her computers and the window. Mrs Ridgeway, dressed for the weather in a bright yellow slicker and hat, waved, but quickly returned to her broom duties. She used the shaft to scrape out an accumulation of fallen leaves from the nearest drains, before hurrying back inside and closing the door tight. Business would be slow in the shop. Mrs Ridgeway would probably spend most of the day with her nose buried in another paperback novel, and Tess was prepared to read a similar word count.

  Since the two false leads, her programs had picked up nothing of interest. She thought again about the victim of the hit-and-run, experiencing a fresh twinge of guilt at writing the woman off, and it made her think of all thousands of women who were killed or m
urdered or simply vanished off the face of the earth each year. That sent her thoughts down a different track, and she bent to her iMac to launch a new search.

  As Po once pointed out, people went missing for all kinds of reasons and not all of them bad. But it surprised her to find how many people actually disappeared, and once the flurry of search activity ceased were relegated to a memory, sometimes even forgotten about altogether. People who were transient by nature drifted at the best of times, and when they upped and disappeared the search was unlikely even to begin. Tess searched for missing females between mid-teens and late thirties but it was far too large a return to recognize any form of pattern. She reduced it to white women from Maine over the last two years: the list was still extensive, but manageable. She worked her way through, cross-referencing where possible, and eliminated a number of women who turned up elsewhere. She even discovered the current locations of two women listed as still missing and thought she should report her findings to the police – except further digging showed that they would prefer their anonymity to remain a secret: one was escaping an abusive spouse, the other, a married woman, was enjoying a lesbian relationship with a new partner, and reporting their whereabouts could cause more harm than it would solve. An unscrupulous investigator might have contacted them and insist they buy her silence, but that wasn’t how Tess Grey worked. She deleted them from her records.

  Jasmine Reed’s name remained prominently displayed, alongside four other girls and young women missing from Maine. Tess checked on their circumstances. Two were drug addicts who’d been found dead in other parts of the country, one to an overdose, the second at the hands of her overzealous pimp, while the third was married with a young family in Iowa. None of the three cases had been closed by the law-enforcement agencies that had logged the original missing person’s reports so she made a note to contact them and hand over her evidence. But for now her mind was concentrated on Jasmine and the last girl on her list, Elsa Jayne Moore, who had only recently been reported missing when her family was concerned that she hadn’t contacted them since leaving to begin a new life in California. When she brought up side-by-side comparisons, Tess recognized a type. Both women were young, athletically toned, beautiful, tattooed – and both had been marked in another indelible fashion. Jasmine’s scars weren’t obvious, they were hidden beneath her clothes, but Elsa had been the victim of a fire, and the dappled scar tissue on her left hand and reaching up from her chest to below her chin was obvious.

  It was a long shot, but Tess reset her search criteria, extending her reach into neighbouring states, and adding ‘scar’ to her list of tags. She sat back, sipping her now tepid coffee, slightly nervous at what her latest search might turn up, hoping that it would return a nil result.

  Five more names made her heart sink.

  She put aside her mug and her fingers flew over the keyboard. She eliminated three who had scars from minor surgical procedures. But it left two: Carrie Mae Borger and Lucy Jo Colman.

  Tess brought up pictures.

  Athletic. Beautiful. Tattooed. Scarred.

  She sucked in her bottom lip, considering what to do.

  Before jumping to any conclusions she again cross-referenced, and also delved into the circumstances of the missing girls’ disappearances.

  Carrie had been gone three months, last seen at a gas station on the I-91 in Massachusetts. Lucy hadn’t been seen or heard from for almost four months. Her last known sighting was also at a gas station on the I-91 corridor in Massachusetts, but further south, alongside the Connecticut River. Neither woman had run away from their responsibilities. Both cases were still open with their respective police forces, though their cases had never been connected.

  Four women of a similar demographic, with similar looks and body type, going missing over a period of months was probably coincidental, but when they all also carried obvious scars, and two at least had last been seen on the I-91, the pattern set Tess’s antennae twitching. She checked on Elsa Moore. There was no positive last sighting but her final credit card transaction had been to pay for a meal at a steakhouse in Auburn, Mass. Tess brought up a Google map of the region, found Auburn and noted that the mall where Elsa last ate sat alongside the I-90. The I-90 and I-91 intersected further to the west, but was there a connection between the areas where the three women had last been? Had Jasmine Reed travelled either road since making off from Portland? Interstate 91 ran north-to-south along the Vermont and Massachusetts border, and she doubted that it would have been Jasmine’s route of choice when escaping Maine. She plotted the I-90 back from Auburn to Boston, to where Jasmine could have driven either the I-95 or Route 1 all the way from Portland.

  She could be totally misguided, but she couldn’t ignore her instincts. She reached for her cell and called Emma Clancy.

  ‘Emma. It’s Tess. Just wanted to throw something by you and have you confirm I’m not nuts. You see there’s this pattern I’ve detected and …’

  ‘Hi there, Tess,’ Emma cut in. ‘Nice to hear from you, but do you want to slow down there a little?’

  ‘This case I’m working …’ Tess went on.

  ‘The missing Reed girl? Yes, I know it. Have you had a breakthrough?’

  ‘Not one that I was expecting,’ said Tess, as she pressed the heel of her palm against her forehead. ‘Hell, I hope I’m wrong about this, Emma.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Like I said, there’s a worrying pattern to all this. There are other missing girls, Emma.’

  ‘From here in Maine?’

  ‘Not all of them are from Maine. They’re spread across neighbouring states too. That’s why I don’t think they’ve been connected before.’ She briefly explained the process she’d followed, how she’d recognized the similarities between Jasmine and the other women’s disappearances. ‘Because there’s been no indication of foul play, the details most likely haven’t been shared across the jurisdictional borders. Jasmine’s case has been practically dismissed by Portland PD, it’s possible that the other girls’ cases have been put to bed as well.’

  Emma inhaled deeply, and Tess gave her a moment to absorb what she’d suggested. ‘You’re implying that we have a serial offender on our hands?’ Emma was careful not to mention the words serial killer; no bodies had been discovered to date and she hoped that none would.

  ‘The four women I’ve identified could only be the tip of the iceberg,’ Tess said. ‘I’ve only searched a few states up until now. There could be others to add to the list.’

  Emma muttered under her breath.

  ‘I can’t ignore what my gut is telling me,’ Tess stated.

  ‘And I don’t expect you to. But I think before you release this particular genie from its bottle you need to do some more checking.’

  ‘I was tempted to send what I know already to the FBI. But first I wanted to hear your take on it. You’re right, Emma. I need to make sure before I alert the big guns.’

  ‘They wouldn’t thank you for an unsubstantiated workload. But if you were to hand them a fully informed investigation, they wouldn’t ignore it.’

  ‘I’m going to stick with this then, Emma.’

  ‘In other words, you’re requesting a little free time to do what needs doing. No problem. Things are quiet here, so take whatever time you need.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Tess thought about mentioning the recent incidents with the mystery man. ‘Did you see Alex last night?’

  ‘No. I was at a civic function; not exactly your brother’s cup of tea. We spoke briefly this morning, but Alex is back on duty. Why do you ask?’

  ‘No reason,’ said Tess.

  Emma laughed without humour. She didn’t get to where she was by allowing the wool to be pulled over her eyes.

  ‘It’s just that he might have mentioned a couple of strange things that happened yesterday.’

  ‘You mean the guy who was following you?’

  ‘Then he did say?’

  ‘He mentioned something about dealing w
ith an assault victim. Some guy was beaten after following a car thief or something like it. Alex mentioned the incident originated from outside Po’s garage?’

  ‘Yeah, that was about it. We don’t know who was involved yet, but I’m beginning to think it’s connected to Jasmine going missing.’

  ‘You think this person and your serial offender are one and the same?’

  ‘It’s a possibility,’ said Tess, ‘but unlikely. No, I have some more digging to do on this guy too.’

  ‘OK. So keep me informed. If there’s anything I can do to help, you know you only have to say.’

  ‘I do. Thanks, Emma.’

  ‘No problem.’ Emma was about to hang up, but paused. ‘Tess. If what you’ve discovered with those missing girls pans out, do come to me with it first. I’d like to be the one to get the ball rolling with the FBI.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Tess, because the kudos earned from bringing down a serial offender would do the world of good for Emma’s company, and a lot of attention that Tess could do without. ‘It’s the least I can do.’

  EIGHTEEN

  Po hadn’t returned by midday, and Tess was beginning to grow concerned. She hoped her silly thought about bringing back Trojak’s liver wasn’t about to come true – or worse, that Trojak was the one who’d taken a trophy of their latest encounter. She was fretting for nothing; his note had been effusive, for him, and she suspected he was excited about whatever the surprise was. She sent him a text, informing him where she was going, but didn’t expect a reply. Po surprised her:

  BACK SOON. STAY INDOORS.

  He was feeling nervous about leaving her unprotected when the mystery man was still on the loose, but Tess wasn’t concerned. She was more interested in finding out exactly who it was. She returned his text by way of a sad-faced emoticon and the words: CAN’T SIT HERE ON MY THUMBS, LOVERBOY XX

  She pulled on clothing more appropriate to the inclement weather, plus a woollen hat that she jammed over her hair and ears, and headed out into the teeming rain. Without her chariot driver, she had to trust in her own driving skill to negotiate the slick streets as she headed back to North Deering. Her Prius was no muscle car, but it was probably easier to handle in the driving rain and wind. She made it to Margaret Norris’s house without any major drama, and parked outside the front gate. Perhaps she should have called ahead, but she doubted that Margaret had anywhere she needed to be in such a downpour.