River of Glass

by Jaden Terrell

  I pointed to a scar in the cleft where the girl’s neck met the collarbone. “What’s that?”

  Harry pulled out a penlight and shone it on the mark, a raised white scar, pink around the edges and shaped like something you might see on a Chinese menu.

  “Looks like a brand,” Frank said.

  “You think he’s a collector? Marking his property?”

  “Maybe. Or could be traffickers.”

  “I read about that big ring you guys busted up. Bunch of Somalis?”

  “It’s not just the Somalis.” He rubbed his palms over his face. “Turns out those three interstates that make us all so happy during rush hour also make us a trafficking hub.”

  “That’ll look good in the tourist brochures.”

  I looked at the woman again, the wasted body and misshapen face. The thin, bloodstained fingers that had plucked glass from her wounded feet and then fingered my father’s photograph. A rush of anger slipped beneath the curtain of detachment I’d pulled up over my mind. Someone had brutalized this girl, systematically and over time. Whoever he was, I wanted to snap his neck.

  Frank said, “Could have been her pimp. There’s one over on the east side brands his girls. But he uses a double helix. Like DNA.”

  I found my voice, pushed the anger down. “Interesting choice.”

  “His name’s D’Angelo Norton Albert. Initials DNA. Guess he thought it was clever.”

  “Clever pimps. What’s the world coming to?”

  “Sign of the apocalypse for sure.” Frank cracked a grin. “You’re sure you don’t know this girl? Never met her, never dated her best friend’s sister’s cousin?”

  “I don’t know her.”

  “’Cause we really need to catch this guy.”

  “I can’t help you, Frank. I don’t know who she is.”

  “She’s connected to you,” he said, an edge to his voice. “Your dad’s picture, your address and phone number. This isn’t random.”

  “I get that.”

  “Maybe somebody’s sending you a message.”

  “Somebody who’d have a decades-old picture of my dad? Why wait this long to pull it out of the hat?”

  We looked at the body in glum silence. When I thought I’d paid due respect, I said, “Can I go now? I can still make Paul’s meeting.”

  He glanced at Harry, who signaled his acquiescence with a twitch of the shoulders.

  “Fine,” Frank said. “As soon as you give me your statement.”

  It wasn’t much of a statement. No, I’d never seen the girl before. No, I had no idea who she might be.

  I finished my statement and peeled off the paper jumpsuit, cap, and booties. Frank flipped his report book closed. He looked tired, and I suddenly remembered something he’d said back at the house.

  “Hey,” I said. “It’s Thursday.”

  “So?”

  “So, you haven’t missed a shift since bread was invented. Why’d they have to call you to come in?”

  His grin came a beat too late. “I’m not sure you’re in a position to throw stones.”

  “Not throwing stones. Just—”

  “Mac,” he said. “Go to Paulie’s meeting. Everything’s fine.”

  “If you need—”

  He held up his phone. Waggled it. “I’ve got you on speed dial.”

  Since pushing Frank was about as effective as trying to levitate a tank with the power of your mind, I let it go. He’d tell me when he was ready. He led me back around to the front and lifted the crime scene tape. As I ducked under, Ashleigh called my name and started in my direction. I trotted across the street to the Silverado and pretended not to hear.

  3

  I slipped into the meeting room of the Mount Juliet community center just as the last boy was receiving his progress bead from the Cubmaster, a scrawny guy named Leon Musgrave, who wore Coke-bottle glasses and had an Adam’s apple the size of a nectarine. In the front row, beside D.W., Paulie slumped in a metal folding chair, his cap pulled down too far in front, his new bead clenched in one stubby hand.

  When we’d first learned our son had Down syndrome, we’d wondered if he’d ever ride a bike, play baseball, even dress himself. Now I felt a swell of pride at the sight of him in his blue uniform, his yellow scarf knotted at the base of his throat.

  Musgrave gave an affectionate pat to the last Scout’s cap. With a broad grin, the boy clomped down the stage steps, and as if on cue, a horde of chattering youngsters surged out of their seats and swarmed toward the refreshment table, where a guy in a well-floured apron was setting out cookies. D.W. said something to Paul, who shook his head and slumped lower in his chair. His lips looked a little blue, and for a moment, my throat closed. Kids with Down syndrome are prone to heart defects, and Paul had had a murmur since he was a baby. Then I saw the cup of purple Kool-Aid on the seat beside him and let out a relieved breath.

  I commandeered another cup of Kool-Aid, wrapped a couple of chocolate chip cookies in a napkin, and took them over to him. He looked up and scooted closer to D.W. He might as well have carved my heart out with a screwdriver.

  “Hey, Sport,” I said, and held the cup and cookies out to him. He ignored them.

  “Cub Scout is honest,” he said, reproach in his gravelly voice. “You said pick me up.”

  “I’m sorry, Sport. Something came up. Police stuff.”

  D.W. stood and stretched. “I’m gonna go get a cup of that Kool-Aid myself,” he said, and wandered off.

  Paul said, “I hate police stuff.”

  “I hate it too sometimes.” I slid into the seat D.W. had vacated. Held up the Kool-Aid. “You sure you don’t want this?”

  After a moment, he reached for it. Took a long sip. I handed him a cookie, and while he nibbled at it, I ate the other one. By the time he’d finished the cookie and the juice, there was a purple ring around his upper lip, and he was sitting up a little straighter.

  “Look,” he said, and opened the hand with the bead.

  My chest loosened. “It’s terrific. I’m proud of you, Sport.”

  He climbed onto my lap and chattered about the upcoming Blue and Gold banquet, where he would become a full-fledged Wolf. Then I set him on the floor and held out my empty hand. He took it, palm damp and a little sticky, and I led him over to D.W., who was watching with a bland, enigmatic look on his face that made me want to punch him.

  “Glad you could make it,” he said. I listened for a judgmental undercurrent, but he seemed sincere. “Maria said you got tangled up with another homicide. Good Lord. You just attract this stuff, don’t you?”

  There was no good answer to that. It was my dumpster, even though I shared it with four other offices. It was my father in the photo and my phone number on the back. If I wasn’t attracting it, something was.

  D.W. shrugged into his jacket, and I helped Paul into his. I walked them to the parking lot and watched as D.W. pulled away, Paul waving furiously from the back window.

  THE DEAD girl had nothing to do with me, and everything to do with me. The photo was a seeping wound. I worried at it on the drive home, past the blazing lights of a shopping complex with the optimistic name of Providence. The space between street lights grew longer. Then the road narrowed, lit only by head-lights. I passed a state park the size of a postcard and home to an endangered wildflower, and three minutes later, no closer to an answer, pulled into our gravel driveway and parked the Silverado next to Jay’s new Lexus. No sign of the red BMW 3 Series that belonged to his lover, a sculptor and graphic artist named Eric Gunnerson.

  Eric had paid his way through art school drawing avatars for role players, and while our friendship had gotten off to a tenuous start, his ability to draw a portrait from a verbal description had made him useful to me on more than one occasion.

  Another raindrop fell, then two more. My foot hit the porch steps just as the rain began in earnest, and I pushed inside, where the air was thick and sweet with the smell of carmelizing peppers. The skitter of nails sounded
on the hardwood, and Luca, the Papillon pup we’d inherited from Jay’s former lover, skidded around the corner. I scooped him up and cradled him like a football, and he licked my fingers while I sifted through the mail on the foyer table.

  Cable bill, a request for a donation to the firemen’s fund, and a check from my brother in Alaska. No message. No return address. I put down the dog and stuffed the check into my wallet.

  Jay came out of the kitchen wearing khakis and a pale blue shirt, buttoned to the collar. His new regimen of meds seemed to be working, and he looked good, if a little pale.

  “What did Frank want?” he said.

  “He asked me to identify a body. A courtesy, he said.”

  “And could you? Identify it?”

  “No.”

  “What made him think you could?”

  I filled him in. The picture, the address and phone number on the back. He tipped his head to one side, blew out a long breath.

  I said, “Whatever it is, it isn’t going to follow me here.”

  “I wasn’t thinking that.”

  “Maybe you should be.” I looked away. “Maybe I should leave. At least until this is over, whatever this is.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Absently, he toyed with the top button of his collar. “If someone comes here looking for you, do you think he’ll shake my hand and thank me when I say you’re gone?”

  “Not when you put it that way. So maybe you should leave for a while instead.”

  “Does Frank think the killer is on his way here?”

  “Not that he mentioned.”

  “Then let’s wait and see what’s what before we do anything dramatic.” He disappeared into the kitchen and called, “Stuffed peppers for dinner.”

  I hadn’t thought I was hungry, but the peppers were good, and by the time Jay started to clear the table, my plate was empty. He washed, I dried. Then he picked up the dog and said, “Let’s see if your dead girl’s on the news.”

  “She’s not my dead girl.”

  I brought him a beer, kept one for myself, and settled onto the couch while he flipped on the TV. He clicked past Channel Three, a quick flash of Ashleigh’s bleached smile, and landed on Channel Five, where an anchor we didn’t know and had no reason to dislike reeled off the news with a solemn, trust-me expression.

  The top spot went to the murdered girl. The anchor reported the story with appropriate gravitas, but said nothing I hadn’t already heard from Frank. The weathergirl came on, pointed to a swirl of green on the map, and assured us that, while scattered showers seemed probable for the foreseeable future, major flooding was unlikely.

  Jay tipped the neck of his bottle toward the television. “Probable. Unlikely. Could she be more definitive?”

  An interview with a farmer whose prizewinning cow had birthed a healthy two-headed calf was followed by coverage of an explosion at a meth house. Not unusual in itself—meth labs were always exploding—but this time someone had left a typewritten note in the mailbox: For Justice. This is only the beginning.

  If he hadn’t left the note, he could have cleaned out a dozen labs before anybody bothered to run the odds. But the kind of guy who leaves a note isn’t looking to clean things up. He’s looking to get noticed.

  The news went off, and Jay switched the channel to an old BBC comedy. I went upstairs and roamed from room to room, opening drawers and banging them closed, putting stray paperbacks back on the shelf, plucking out a couple of half-hearted songs on my guitar. Thinking about the dead girl. Trying not to think about the photograph.

  I put away the guitar and took a velvet-lined box from my closet. Fingered my father’s medals and his Metro police badge, then pulled out my mother’s photo albums and stared at Dad’s pictures as if I might see the shadows of Vietnamese orphans in his eyes.

  He looked impossibly young. At thirty-six, I was older than he’d ever be.

  Downstairs, the television went off. Jay’s footsteps padded toward his bedroom. His door snicked shut.

  I pushed the album away and opened my laptop. Tapped in a search for killers who branded their victims. Three million hits, most for commercial marketing/branding sites and a metal band called Serial Killers. After twenty pages of dreck, I typed human trafficking into the search engine.

  Sixty-three million hits. Good God.

  I added Nashville to the search terms. Ten pages of local news stories and a special report from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. Better.

  I scrolled through the articles. Most centered on the Somali case and on a young Hispanic woman who’d been kept chained in an apartment for six months. Several dozen mentioned rescue organizations, and of those, more than half referenced a group called Hands of Mercy. Founder, artist/art therapist Claire Bellamy. Executive Director, investor/philanthropist Andrew Talbot. Both were cited as consultants and said to work closely with the law enforcement triumvirate—FBI, TBI, and local police.

  The Hands of Mercy website looked slick and professional, with tabs leading to articles on trafficking, testimonials from rescued women, and opportunities for sponsorship. A photo on the home page showed Bellamy and Talbot on the courthouse steps, Bellamy blonde and earnest-looking in a pencil skirt and peasant blouse, Talbot suave and polished in a tailored suit. The caption said: POLICE WORK WITH RESCUE EXPERTS TO NAIL HUMAN TRAFFICKERS.

  The pimp Frank had mentioned, D’Angelo Albert, aka Helix, also had a website. It looked slick and professional too, with a photo of a handsome black man in a tailored suit at the top and a disclaimer at the bottom that said the information provided was for entertainment and educational purposes only. His book, How to be a Mack Pimp, was available for immediate download, and for the paltry sum of $14.99, I too could learn how to target and manipulate vulnerable young women.

  Instead, I ran his name through SearchSystems and a few other databases, then cross-checked with Metro Nashville’s public arrest records. He had a few arrests, no convictions. No surprise there. Pimps are notoriously hard to convict. The surprise was his degree in business. A real degree, from an accredited four-year university.

  Somehow that made it worse. A college diploma, and his idea of being an entrepreneur was branding women and selling their services to strangers.

  Disgusted, I shut down the laptop. Nothing more I could do until Frank and Harry identified the murdered girl. I dashed out through the rain to feed the horses, came back thirty minutes later soaked and shivering. As I peeled off my wet shirt and jeans, I glanced at the bedside table, where my phone blinked up at me—Missed message. I flipped it open, found a text message and a voice mail. The text was from a woman I’d been dating on and off since Christmas. She was on sabbatical, starting a school for rural kids in South America. Just as well, maybe. She had baggage, I had baggage. A little time apart might do us both good.

  The text said: Bought supplies. Heading up to the village tomorrow. No signal for a few weeks. How was your day? I miss you.

  My thumb hovered over the keypad as I imagined my day encapsulated in a text box. Missed Paul’s Scout meeting, dead girl in dumpster.

  Right.

  Learned dad had secret life in Vietnam, dead girl in dumpster.

  No good.

  Finally, I tapped in: Miss you too.

  The voice mail message was from Ashleigh: “Hey, Cowboy. Buy you a drink if you’ll give me the scoop on what happened today.”

  I sent her a text message too: No comment.

  4

  Morning came, wet and hazy. I cashed my brother’s check and drove the money over to his wife’s house. When no one answered my knock, I slipped the envelope through the mail slot and went around back to offer a mint to the rescued Arabian I’d given my nieces. They’d been good for him; his coat was glossy, and he didn’t flinch when I rubbed my hand over his blind eye.

  I did another background check from the cab of my truck, took a few pictures of a cheating husband and a few more of a cheating wife, then referred a man with a missing son to another a
gency. I had neither the time nor the heart for another lost boy.

  The storms lingered through the weekend. Between squalls, I took a chain saw to the fallen tree and cleared the debris from the trails, trying to ignore the dead girl prodding at the edges of my mind. On Monday morning, with Frank’s shrewd gaze still fresh in my mind, I pulled up to the curb in front of my office a little before nine. The crime scene tape had been removed, and the rain-washed street looked much as it had before the murder. No cops. No reporters. Not even a rust-colored stain on the concrete walk to say a woman had died here.

  At the top of the porch steps, I fumbled with my keys. The locks were new, like the new buzzer system the tenants had pitched in for. Now clients who wanted in had to push the buzzer with my name on it and identify themselves via intercom so I could buzz them in. Or not. It might have made a lesser man giddy with power.

  Finally, my key turned and the door swung open. Inside, an Asian woman sat on the steps, a small leather purse slung across her shoulder, a misshapen duffel made of olive green canvas at her feet. She looked up as I came in.

  One of the Strip-o-Gram girls, I thought at first. Then I saw the scars. Angry, puckered scars that flowed down her right cheek and disappeared into the neckline of her blouse. It looked like one side of her face had been melted.

  The scars ran out the right sleeve of her shirt and past the elbow, where they converged in a patch of shiny, puckered flesh at the end of a stump.

  She was too old for a Strip-o-Gram girl too. Late thirties, early forties, maybe older. The scars made it hard to tell. The fingers of her left hand toyed with the necklace at her throat—a jade monkey on a silver chain. The buzzer system, it seemed, wasn’t foolproof.

  When she saw me, she came to her feet, smoothed her slacks with her good hand, her only hand, and peered closely at me. “You know Jay Pee Mac Kean?” she said. “You look like. A little.”

  Her accent was thick. Vietnamese, I guessed, considering the circumstances.