The Highway Girls

by Matt Lockhart

  “I reject this kind of talk,” Anastasia says. “I won't hear of it, Belinda.”

  “You never treated me or my daughter with no respect,” Belinda says.

  “Absurd.”

  “It ain't.”

  “Look,” Nate says, “I'm not trying to start a fight here. I just don't want your money. I've been clear as to why.”

  “I'm offering you the opportunity to grow your operation, Mr. Striker. To bring on staff, to widen the parameters of your search.”

  “I don't need the money to find out what's happened.”

  “I believe Bianca when she tells me that she believes Belinda,” Anastasia says. “We may disagree on details, but she is someone who's put a lot of faith in you. Seems to think you have something other investigators don't have.”

  “This is blind faith then?”

  “I don't know what you'd like to hear, Mr. Striker. You want me to pay lip service to what she believes? Fine. Perhaps you have some level of intuition and know-how others don't. I'm assuming this is correct, Belinda? This is what you believe about this man? We know you used to be a detective with the police in Canada.”

  You know about my daughter too, Nate thinks. But, that's what you do, right? This is what you do when you own the world, or you endeavor to.

  You push, you coerce, you plant seeds to elicit emotion in order to get what you want. Until you're satisfied with the result and sometimes you even manage to convince the one you're coercing it's the result they want too.

  This is what the wealthy believe, it is their altar of worship… influence, manipulation… a seeming unending ability to get whatever it is they want using any means necessary. Means that never expire, means that never seem to diminish but only grow. Bank accounts line bank accounts and these accounts grow until they become castles unto themselves and grant you access to every other castle in existence. High perches for the captains, stone balconies from which to watch the plebes scurry from one keep to the next in an attempt to cobble together just enough from the scraps you throw them that they might carve out a hole in the floor whose stone they physically toiled to lay, a place of shelter, where they can raise another generation of grist for your platinum mill.

  How many died to build the family fortune? How many are buried beneath your empire? If we pried the upper crust free and held it high, how many bones of the poor would tumble into a pile next to the spoils of your privilege?

  You want to buy justice, but justice is an amorphous thing. Sure, you can buy an acquittal here, a mistrial there. And it can buy you retribution too. But, those are results. Results are not justice.

  What happened to your girls? An inept FBI field agent isn't something you can account for, or maybe you can, but if shoddy investigators show up on the wrong side of the ledger, no amount of money can wash their incompetence away. You might be able to buy the services of a great private investigator, but there is no price tag on a result where Raina, Carly, and Zoe walk out of those woods alive.

  Would justice be seeing them alive again? Holding them in your arms one more time? Breathing in the smell that was unique to them? Hearing their soft voices? Is justice turning back the clock to before they stepped off the plane in Calgary and headed to the RV rental place? Is justice stopping a sadistic killer before they strike? Is it finning a shark before they can inflict themselves on the helpless creatures of the shallows? Or is justice merely finding out what's happened? And if you find out, is exacting your revenge a form of justice as well?

  “I couldn't take that money without conditions,” Nate says.

  “Rest assured, Mr. Striker,” Edelman says, “we would have a few conditions of our own.”

  Nate smirks, gives a knowing nod.

  “What kind of conditions do you mean?” Bianca asks.

  “For starters, we'd have to get real about what we're looking at here.”

  “What does that look like?”

  “Ms. Lewis over here seems convinced, and I don't mean to put this indelicately, but-”

  “You believe what Belinda believes?” Bianca asks, her tone conveying she wasn't really wanting the answer.

  “Yes, I do.”

  Anastasia's gaze turns even colder, as though a temperature beneath Absolute Zero was even possible. “And that's that?”

  “How do you mean?” Nate asks.

  “You've made up your mind? About what it is you're investigating, that is?”

  Nate nods. “I believe I know what I'm looking at, yes.”

  “So, not that our girls are missing?” Bianca says, trying to steady herself with a tremulous breath.

  “Obviously, they are missing,” Nate says. “Officially. But, the focus of my investigation is not only to find them, but also to find out what might've happened to them.”

  “The police are doing that too,” Bianca says. “However slowly.”

  Anastasia pushes her appetizer dish away and speaks in a low, grave tone. “You do not expect to find our daughters alive.”

  “Sorry to say it, but that's right.”

  Her lips purse, and she pushes her chair back without standing, though Edelman anticipates she's about to. Still, he remains seated momentarily in unison with her. She speaks without looking at Nate. “Then I'm not certain we have anything further to discuss.”

  Bianca holds her arm out toward Anastasia. “Anastasia, please.”

  “I understand,” Nate says.

  Other voices jump in, and what sounds like an ensuing argument fades to the back of his consciousness as he deliberately tunes them out and looks off to his right towards the embankment sloping away from the great stone patio.

  Out past the foliage, he turns his attention to the loud torrent and white water in the river, churning and flowing away through the gardens. From there the swift waters carry across pasture land and under weeping branches of oak and elm that buffet both sides.

  He listens to the power of the current swishing by in the dark, and contemplates Raina, Carly, and Zoe. The bubbles incessantly push up from the riverbed, finding freedom at the surface. The rushing water says something to him. Speaks to him in a way that disturbs him in that moment. An unsettling notion.

  Nate doesn't make the connection thinking back on that moment. It's hours after the dinner and still he is transfixed by the power of the river. He packs his things in his hotel room for the return trip home. He's ready to meet the cab driver out in front of the lobby and his cell phone vibrates with a notification.

  Constable Samuel Gray. A bolt from the blue. Someone he didn't expect to hear from again, or at least, not for a while. And his unease back at that patio, staring out at that black river returns to him in a flood, returns to him in a text message where Gray informs:

  “May have found one.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  She checks her watch, it's 5 in the afternoon. Mom would call it evening. What time does the sun go down out here? Not for a while yet. Pretty late. Raina's never been this far west. She's never been past Ohio.

  She feels vulnerable. Hot girls on the side of the road. Perverts and creeps come out of the woodwork.

  Fuck, it's two guys this time. Too late cheese dicks, we already called the rental place for help.

  Attention, as always. Everywhere they go.

  Carly knows what she's doing lounging in that lawn chair. Bikini top, jean shorts. Wavy hair. Long, tan legs.

  She's a billboard.

  Zoe too.

  We all are.

  Banff is so screamingly close and yet…

  It's truck after truck streaming by on the road. At least it was, before. So many vacationers.

  Where'd they all go? Now there's no one. No one but these two.

  They've pulled off the other side. Faces Raina doesn't like the look of. Zoe maybe too, though she won't say. But, everyone's a potential friend to Carly.

  Who drives a van like that anymore? Is it a Canadian thing? A thing in this State, all the older cars. Wait, not a State. A Province.
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  Raina can't relax. Can't articulate her misgivings, but this place, this wild country causes her stomach to churn. The sun hangs at another angle all its own. She doesn't like how the light of late afternoon strikes the mountains around them. Something about the deeper blue of the sky before the evening sets in, and the longer shadows thrown from the pipe cleaner trees. You realize the desolation, you feel lost just observing it.

  Beyond the roadside peaks, in hollows and grottos, there's cabins and hideaways and people who don't want to be found doing things they don't want revealed. There's tents and trailers and campfires just like there's dwellers and grabbers and thieves. But, what they steal isn't always candy bars, and their weapons aren't blades or guns alone – there's geography. Weaponized distance. Fuck, fight, or kill – you wanna do it where no one else knows, and there are places you can go. Raina can't help but feel they're in one of those places, or close to it.

  These two dudes don't look right. Carly greets them with a hearty hello anyway. Flashes the can of beer in her hand without thought of consequence. They come up to them under the auspices of helping them with their troubled vehicle. Raina wants to be left alone.

  She checks her watch again. Time's slowed to milliseconds peeling away like hours. The roadside guy said an hour, probably. Shit. May as well be a millennium.

  These guys are who you meet first, right? Before you wind up with your insides pulled out by a starving grizzly or an opportunistic mountain lion that stalks you through the backcountry. These guys are the vultures who swoop in before the kill. Imagine that. Pre-emptive scavenging. Or maybe they do you first and leave your remains for the other scavengers. Belinda always told her daughter she had a dark mind. Always jumping to the worst case scenario. Like mother like daughter.

  Some time later, Raina swallows the lump in her throat and nearly chokes on her tears. Forced at gun point, a small handgun, into the van – her and Carly and Zoe. They're in the back with one of the men.

  Worst case scenarios happen.

  We're in it now, we're in it now, we're in it now. Raina repeats it. You repeat something long enough, you defeat the thing you try to distract yourself from.

  “Shut the fuck up,” the guy says.

  What did she know? What did she learn? Second locations, right? That's what they'd talk about on those shows mom always watches. You get in that van, it's all over. No, you let them take you to a second location, you're done. Nothing good comes of it, only evil.

  The struggle is enough they pull off somewhere else. Somewhere impromptu. Raina was the toughest.

  They tie her up.

  Pull the van off even deeper in the trees. There's no sound of any other traffic.

  Sun is still out. It hasn't been that long, though it's been long enough the tow truck is probably at the RV soon.

  Raina, bound, can barely move at all. They tied her tight.

  They speak outside the van.

  Zoe cries.

  Carly makes no sound.

  Back doors swing open, Zoe is first out. She screams and then comes a heavy whack. Heavy like the kind makes you sick to hear it, you know when the sound hits your ears someone is being devastated.

  Carly out next.

  Raina wants to kick, she's stuck.

  Screams, sometimes muffled, sometimes not, pierces the evening air, causes Raina's bowels to drop.

  Screams unlike anything she'd ever heard.

  Visceral.

  Not roller coaster screams.

  Not even someone's frightened kind of screams.

  This was different.

  Survival screams.

  Screaming like it was the last time your lungs might ever fill with air.

  First Zoe. A long squeal, then a drone. Long and low and foreboding. A cat on fire. She cries for her mother.

  Then it's Carly.

  She screams so loud Raina thinks her ears might explode. More whacks, a final thud. Raina struggles against her ties so hard she believes she's dislocated her shoulder. They tied her too strong.

  Zoe and Carly, covered in blood, their clothes twisted and dirty are tossed back in.

  Alive.

  Then the two men tie them too.

  The girls shake like wounded animals.

  The men in front blare hip hop drums through the speakers, laughing. Liquor bottles rattle against the girls as they roll back and forth while the van navigates up and down over rough roads, steep climbs and steeper drops.

  Off to another location.

  Raina wriggles and works her wrists.

  Raina fights, but it doesn't matter.

  The forest never lets up.

  The mountains carry on forever.

  Distance is just as much the enemy now.

  The men in front know. They're sharks taking prey. The girls drifted near predators and the predators weren't letting them go, instead they're dragging them into deeper ocean.

  Their waters.

  A place where they'd never be found. To be owned and ripped and sliced apart.

  Consumed in the place where sharks express their essential nature.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  One in the afternoon.

  Nate drops Cream, gets out of his Taurus.

  Has to park well back of the press line. Helicopters swoop overhead. An army of police vehicles hum in the distance.

  Before he can get to the yellow tape he's intercepted by Constable Gray.

  “What's up, Sam?”

  “Nate,” he says, deadened tone. What amounts to the two men making up.

  Gray's fatigued. Eyes burned out. Crows feet in full effect.

  The clouds open for a spell. Rain dampens the scene. Nate welcomes the cool water on his neck and arms. Refreshing.

  “Thought I'd see you sooner than this,” says Gray.

  “Had to travel. Seeing my client.”

  “You tell her what we found?”

  “You haven't told me.”

  “By now it's gotta be all over the news.”

  “Might be. Haven't checked.”

  “It's a foot, Nate.”

  “A foot?”

  “Lower leg, actually. From just below the knee down. Left leg. Washed up on the Cline River. A hiker found it. And before you ask, we've sent it out for testing, identification, all of that. We don't know if it's one of them yet, or which one.”

  “But, you have a good idea.”

  “You pin me down to a guess, I'd say it's what we're looking at.”

  “Cleanly cut?” Nate says. “More of a hack?”

  “Again, tests will tell us.”

  “Well, you saw the thing, didn't you?”

  Gray nods. “Looks rough to me, but you know, could've been an animal was at it. Could tell though, it'd been out there a while.”

  “This comes back as one of them, you know what it means.”

  “Yep.”

  “So, what's on the go now?”

  “Search crews are out. Everything you see in front of you. All hands.”

  “Finally.”

  “Yeah, well, we weren't lucky enough to have Nate Striker in charge.”

  The rain lets up. Nate eyes the choppers.

  “I'm guessing this is as close as you're letting me get.”

  “You guessed right. Hell, I'm barely privy to a lot of it.”

  “You haven't found anything else?”

  “We were lucky to get the foot. Flood waters must've carried it into the river.”

  “I know you know this, but that means-”

  “I know what it means.”

  Forget the list of registered sex offenders in Rocky or Lacombe County, is what it means, Nate thinks. Cline River is far enough out, far enough even from Nordegg you could eliminate all the usual suspects from the towns east of these forests edging all the way up to Banff National Park.

  Nate kicks at a bit of gravel. “How you gonna broach it? No one's gonna wanna hear you're digging up properties on the reserve.”

  “Some will.”<
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  Nate knows what he's getting at. White folks in Rocky Mountain House. White folks across Alberta. White folks across the country for that matter. Of course, it's the natives, Albertans will think – sorry, the proper nomenclature is indigenous in this day and age. But, of course, everyone will jump on that bandwagon, it's the indigenous that are responsible in this case. They're a broken people. Fucked up. Prone to violence. Raised fucked up. Terrible parenting, terrible home lives. Substance abuse, disorganization, dysfunction.

  “Let's not get ahead of ourselves,” says Gray. “Coulda been it washed up from a campsite. Could be unconnected to our case. Could be it washed down from some back country trail. Victim of a mauling maybe.”

  “You been looking into anyone from Buffalo Pass?”

  Gray nods.

  They had to be. Politically correct or not, even the racists had a point, Nate thinks. Reserves like Buffalo Pass were high crime areas. Places where a lot of police resources were spent, though the stations themselves were often located in predominantly white prairie towns, necessitating long drives by responding officers out into remote indigenous communities hostile to folks in uniform, especially the RCMP.

  The hostility exists on both sides.

  “Any names from around here I might know?” Nate asks.

  Gray shakes his head. “Doubtful.”

  “Try me.”

  “Striker, you know I can't get into it.”

  “Drips and fucking drabs.”

  “It's all I've got for you.”

  Five hours later, back in Rocky, Nate has to hear it from his television – the lower leg identified as that of Carly Ann Lewis.

  Holy shit.

  He let Belinda know. Brace yourself. We know what's coming.

  “When you find her, I wanna know what happened,” came her text. “I want the guy who did it found.”

  Nate promises her he will find out.

  Six p.m., he towels off from the shower, throws on a denim button up and he's out the door for a meet he's anticipated for a little while. Russ Camuner, that friend of Bryce Tobin's. Drives the white Pontiac with the kid's toy in the window.

  They grab A&W Drive-Thru and sit in Nate's car on the edge of town. Russ didn't drive the white Pontiac when he came to meet him. Drove a pick-up instead.