Her phone had been silent since she’d gotten here. No calls from Hamill, nothing about the Lange girl. The idea of the FBI handling everything was unnerving. Even if they promised they were keeping the detectives in the loop, Dana knew that wasn’t the case. She and Hamill had chased down a lead that turned ugly, nearly blinding her, and yielding only a small-time pot dealer. They had brought in a student who had two — now possibly three — of the victims’ names in the back of a paperback book but there was no hard evidence to link him to the murders, and he had an alibi for each, along with Wayland Kimball, so long as the initial time of deaths didn’t shift too much. Though a three hour class was not a huge window for an alibi. But now here she was with one of the most interesting potential suspects yet.
Dana sized up the room. Lori had an antique-looking desk, a bureau, and two sets of bookshelves, both filled. A well-read girl. On the other side of the room was an easel and a box of paints, plus a small drafting table with a jar of pens and pencils hanging off the side. The walls were bare.
Lori pulled something out from beneath her bed. It was a large portfolio. She unzipped it.
“I don’t keep anything hanging around,” she said. “I like to keep things blank. Clean slate.”
She flipped to the first drawing, which was protected in a large plastic sleeve. Dana leaned over to look. She suddenly forgot everything clamoring in her mind.
The drawing was gorgeous, a nude female figure, done in charcoal, with great realism. Not that she knew much of anything about art. What she knew was that the head was not a human head, but an animal’s, a fox.
“I took studio art last semester,” Lori said. “And we would have these models come in and pose nude and all of that. But I thought, I don’t know why — faces are boring. So I added these heads.”
She flipped through the large pages, handling each with care, even as they sat protected in the sleeves. They varied in color, shading, and scale, with one or two more rudimentary sketch pages with several figures on each.
“These are great,” Dana said in a choked voice. She cleared her throat and willed herself to remain patient. “When did you say you did them?”
“Last semester. In the spring.”
In the spring, she thought, her mind now racing ahead. Months before the deaths of Sonia Taylor or Holly Arbruster. Drawings that were strikingly similar to the one in Scott’s room. There was no mistaking the human-animal hybrid. It couldn’t be coincidental. But Dana was hard-pressed to come up with an explanation.
“Lori?”
“Yeah?” She was bending over the portfolio, flipping with one hand, holding her hair out of her face with another. “Is it bad to like your own work?”
“Have you ever met a young boy named Scott Dunham?”
Lori kept looking at the drawings, flipping pages. She was almost to the end. There were a few landscapes and also a male figure with a lion’s head. She wanted to study them all very closely, but later.
“Lori?” Her hand was close to her weapon.
“Um, Scott who?”
“Scott Dunham. Do you know him?” The boy who found your friend’s body in the water, gray and bloated.
The student was staring at the pictures, as if in a trance. Dana felt like things were coming full circle.
“Hey,” Dana said, leaning down into her line of sight. Lori looked at Dana. “Sorry,” she said and abruptly flipped the portfolio closed. “It is bad to like your own work.” She seemed to clear her head before answering, her eyebrows knitting together. “Um, yeah. I think maybe I’ve heard that name.”
Dana’s fingers twitched against the holster. She moved her hand back behind her. “Where? How?”
“Um, someone I know, I think, babysits for a kid named Scott? Not sure about the last name.” The student’s smile faltered as she read Dana’s seriousness, her mounting alarm. “Is he . . . okay?”
“Does he live in Hazleton? It’s about a half hour from here.”
“I think so . . .” She crossed her arms. Dana leaned back, took a step away. Lori looked increasingly worried. “What is it? You’re kind of freaking me out.”
Dana’s mind was still bounding ahead, seeking connections. She tried to focus. “No, it’s okay,” she said. “Scott is fine.”
“Why are you asking me about him?” Her artwork was forgotten, the plastic sleeves of the portfolio slipping from her fingers.
Dana forced herself to slow down. This could be something major or just a coincidence. She had to proceed carefully.
“Who is the friend you have that might babysit for him?”
“Well, she’s not a real friend friend, you know . . .”
“Who?”
“We took the studio art class together,” Lori said, nodding at the portfolio. “Angie Gilroy.”
Gilroy, thought Dana, Angie Gilroy. So far in the investigation, the name had come up only once: she was the girl who had initially called Plattsburgh PD to report that Holly Arbruster was missing. At this point, Dana wasn’t sure who had taken Angie Gilroy’s statement. Had it been Hamill? Things were frenetic there at the beginning, the case moving in different directions at once. She needed to go back to the statements, look them all over again.
She took out her phone, leaving her gun alone for now.
But the girl was still talking.
“You think, um . . . ?”
Dana felt the hairs standing up on the back of her neck. She gripped her phone, poised to dial. “What?”
“One of my drawings was stolen,” Lori said. “Taken out of my backpack.” She reached in and rummaged through the pack, and Dana’s reflexes tightened again. She was about to put the phone away and unsnap her holster, when Lori pulled out some lip balm and applied it.
“Who do you think took your drawing?”
Lori mashed her lips together. For some reason the gesture seemed to betray her age — she was just a kid. We think of college students as grown up, but they are still so young, Dana thought.
Lori frowned. An uneasy look claimed her, like she didn’t want to throw anyone under the bus. “I don’t know.”
“Think Angie Gilroy would have taken it?”
Lori shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“Who else?”
“I really don’t know . . .”
“Do you show your work to people? Did you show the missing drawing to someone who might have later taken it?”
“Yeah, I mean, I’ve shown them to a lot of people. And there are exhibitions . . . I guess, I don’t know, maybe a quarter of the campus has seen my stuff? Something like that?”
Dana realized she was standing in the middle of the room, unmoving, holding her phone. She glanced at her watch and saw that it was going on one a.m.
“When was your last exhibition?”
“This summer. In August, just before classes started.”
“And it wasn’t taken then.”
Lori frowned. “No. They’re behind locked glass.” Then Lori’s eyes glinted. “I took them all with me to see Sonia at work after the last day of the show. Bunch of us were hanging out . . .”
“At O’Sullivan’s?”
Lori nodded, but fell silent. Her eyes were welling up with tears. Dana hadn’t expected the sudden emotion. She wasn’t sure what to make of it — was it for show? Was the girl unstable? And then she recognized it, plain as looking in a mirror. Guilt.
“I talked Sonia into the study,” Lori said in a pinched voice. “I didn’t want to do it alone.”
Dana was beginning to understand. “The study is where you and Sonia met the other students,” Dana concluded. “Maggie Lange, Holly Arbruster, and Perry Brady.”
“Yes.”
“And you guys became close?”
“Yes.”
“How close? What did you do?”
She sniffed and then hunted around for a tissue and blew her nose. “We hung out. Thursday nights, mostly. You know, Ladies’ night. Drinks on the house. Woohoo. She did
n’t work at the bar much longer. Classes started up. She was really looking forward to the semester. God, she was so happy . . .”
Lori started sobbing again.
Dana gave the girl a second, and took a moment herself to collect her thoughts. Her heart was racing.
“But you did a little more than hang out.”
Lori had wet, reddened eyes.
“Did Perry Brady get it in his head to sleep with all four of you? Or did it . . . was it sort of agreed upon?”
The student sighed, took a shuddering breath. “I guess. Yeah. Viking stud.”
“What does that mean?”
“Just . . . stupid shit. You know, Viking shit. Pagan stuff. Free love, whatever.” A single tear fell from her eye and landed between her sneakers.
“It’s okay. But, he wrote your names down in that book. Unraveling the Ancient Wisdom. That was your book, wasn’t it?”
She looked up, wet eyes wide, nose bright red. “You found the names?”
“Yes. Where did you get that book?”
“Doctor Lata.”
Dana stepped closer. She slipped her phone back in her pocket. “Lori, do you think Doctor Lata had anything to do with putting the idea in Perry’s head to try and sleep with all four girls in the study?”
Her face crumbled. “No.”
“Someone has to know that Perry had that list. Okay? So who else? Someone else that maybe knew that he had this little plan to sleep with you and the others? Anyone else that might’ve known? Lori? Did that book get shown around, too; did you show it to someone else? Like Angie Gilroy?”
Lori shook her head vigorously. “I always had it. Until I gave it to Perry. He seemed genuinely interested. He’s not a bad guy, you know.” Lori zeroed in on Dana then, and that feeling returned. As if the girl was now intuiting deeply intimate pieces of Dana’s personal life.
“I’m not saying he’s a bad guy. I want to know what he might have done with the book. If he’d written down the names, yours included, because he planned to sleep with you, okay? I’m not judging him for that. Nor any of you, if you welcomed it. What I want to know is if it gave anyone else an idea. A bad idea. About the names, about you girls. Someone who didn’t approve. Maybe someone who saw the drawing – maybe took it from you, and, I don’t know . . . it set them off. Because it was blasphemous, pagan, I don’t know. Then found the names in the book . . . Where does Perry go? What does he do?”
Lori’s face was twisted from crying. A beautiful face, wrenched with guilt and fear. “He goes to Charlie’s.”
That name again. “Who is Charlie? Lori? What is it? What do people do there?”
Lori sniffed, and seemed to harden. “What don’t they do?”
Dana took a beat, then asked, “Have you been to Charlie’s?”
She shook her head, an emphatic negative. “No.”
Dana’s phone buzzed in her pocket.
* * *
“We got her.”
She listened to her partner on the other end of the line as she watched Lori’s face. “You found Lange.”
“Yeah, pard.”
“She’s okay?”
He took a breath. “County Sheriff’s found her, along with three civilian searchers.”
Dana was anxious. It didn’t sound good. It sounded like there was a third victim and they hadn’t been able to stop it.
“Where?”
“They found her by boat, Dana.”
She felt cold again. Cold in the pit of her stomach. Cold spreading down through her hips and groin. As if wading into icy water.
“By boat,” she repeated.
“Gates . . .” Hamill’s voice sounded like it had gotten farther away.
“What?” Her own tone was prickly sharp. She kept her eyes on Lori.
“Gates, partner, you know . . . it’s right where . . .”
“For fuck’s sake, Rob, spit it out.” Dana was shaking now. But she had known this was coming, hadn’t she?
“She was found in Topper Pond, Maggie Lange was found in Topper Pond. Right where . . . I mean, it’s crazy, it’s almost in the exact spot where . . .”
Where my brother was found. Dana finished the thought for him, silently. Where David’s body was found floating.
She took a step back, then another, until her calves bumped the edge of Lori’s bed, and she sat down heavily.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE / Topper Pond
Mid-autumn. The leaves had peaked, green only in the oaks. The forest around Topper Pond, five miles from Hazleton, had been a riot of color, the maples turned red and orange and pushing off their leaves, the birch a virulent purple. The water in the pond had been low and chilly.
Dana had ridden her bike to the edge of Top Beach to meet her brother, who had gone ahead of her. He’d been skipping his extracurricular activities; he’d even dropped out of band. Their parents didn’t know. They were preoccupied. Heather, Dana’s older sister, was getting married in a week. She and her fiancé, a construction company owner from Lake Placid, had tried to predict the foliage climax and overshot it by one weekend, to everyone’s secret pleasure. And her next eldest sister, Shannon, was having problems again, both with boys and with drinking, and she had their parents worried to death that Shannon was going to ruin Heather’s perfect wedding. And, Dana thought, they just might’ve been right, if it weren’t for what happened instead.
Shannon, much as Dana loved her, was not all that bright. She was an incredible, talented vocalist and had already exceeded everyone’s expectations in the school choir and musicals and was singing in a rock band at seventeen. But she was oblivious to the rest of the world, and lazy. David had joked that their older sister thought “manual labor” was the President of Mexico. Shannon had never held a job for more than a few weeks, sponged off their parents, and used the money to score drugs half of the time.
Between perfect Heather and messed-up Shannon, Dana and David were often overlooked completely. So the fact that David’s grades had been slipping and that he’d taken to meeting with Dana after school to drink beer, went unnoticed by their parents.
Topper Pond was a small hamlet, and its namesake body of water was shallow, only fifteen feet deep out in the middle, with a mushy bottom that dissuaded people from wading in. The water was too cold for an enjoyable swim in early October. So when Dana pulled up on her bike, she was surprised to see David’s things scattered along the beach; his school bag, his headphones and Walkman.
Top Beach was called a beach though it was really no more than a swath of sand twenty feet long. Just off the road, away from the few houses, and there was no lifeguard. Most days after school, that time of year, there was no one around at all. The few houses around the pond and one shambling general store constituted the population of the hamlet. There was never anyone out on the sidewalks; there were no sidewalks. There was a causeway, a place where a land bridge had been created for the road to go through.
She had set her bike down in the sand next to her brother’s things. She walked to the edge of the lapping water and dipped her fingers in. She put a hand up to shield her eyes from the sun as she scanned the horizon. The wind whipped the lead-colored surface of the water. The air bit into her ears as she looked out.
She’d spent fifteen minutes looking for her brother, eventually leaving the beach and walking along the causeway. A few cars had passed and she’d wondered if she should flag one of them down. She’d gotten worried right away, and as the minutes passed by, she’d become afraid. Yet she’d never hailed a car.
It’s just something people do, she thought now, sitting on the edge of Lori’s bed. She was no longer watching Lori, but engrossed in her memories.
Just something people do. It was true. Even when you had that feeling that something was wrong, you tried to talk yourself out of it. To flag down help would’ve been to admit the worst. Instead, she’d climbed along the scree of rocks that formed the causeway, and kept her eyes on the water. And then she had seen him. A red shirt, t
hirty feet out.
There was hardly any current to the water, just a subtle draw towards an outlet which fed a stream.
She had rushed into the pond, moving clumsily over the rocks, feeling the bite of the cold water through her jeans, then dived forward, and swam for the red shirt.
“Dana? You there?” Hamill was still on the phone. His voice brought her back into the present.
“Yeah.”
She could hear the wind buffeting Hamill’s phone. She wondered where her partner was. If he was on the rocks. If Maggie Lange was wearing red.
“You alright?”
“I’m on my way.” But she didn’t move from the bed. She already knew what Hamill was going to say.
“Nah, let me handle this, pard. You stay with Lori Stender. Captain wants her in full police protection; you can’t let her leave your sight. Maybe call her parents; make sure she does. We got this wrapped here.”
“Hamill,” Dana said with a rush of bitterness. “I’m not a babysitter.” She glanced at Lori. She would’ve said no offense, but the student didn’t seem to care.
“Partner,” Hamill said, “You know this is the right thing.”
“I know what? This is the worst possible outcome, that’s what I know. That girl, she . . . that poor girl, Hamill. My God.” She struggled to keep her composure.
“I know.”
“Listen, if this is someone out there copycatting my brother’s murder, then I’m the first person to be involved, I’m the one should be there for every second of everything . . .”
“You know it works exactly the opposite of that, D.”
She wanted to hit something, anything. Her anger was all over the place these days, she was on some emotional roller coaster. If she lost it now, the captain would regret putting her back on the case ahead of schedule, and take her off it for good.
“They’re going to come get Lori now,” Dana said.
“Yeah, okay, right; they’ll up the ante on the PC. Gonna go to the Feds I bet. But you stay with her until they come. Got it?”
DARK KILLS a gripping detective thriller full of suspense Page 15
