by Skylar Finn
“Are you inferring this solely from our conversations those two? They were like a couple of clams.”
“No. This has all been coming together in my mind based on everything we’ve seen so far. It was seeing Crystal’s family that tied it all together for me. We have a nice, well-off, middle-class family like the Hayes, whose daughter disappears. Then we have a family living in abject poverty like the Deakins, whose daughter disappears. What’s the only common factor between the two of them?”
“Drugs,” said Harper.
“Exactly,” I said.
Harper suggested we pay a return visit to Lipman & Hayes Construction. I agreed and suggested in return that we make it a clandestine one. “I’m curious to see what their daily routine looks like when they don’t know they’re being watched,” I said.
We drove past the office. Both Jeeps were out front. “It appears they spend less time on site than they’ve led us to believe,” observed Harper.
He pulled in at the gas station, and we waited. There were few enough cars on the highway that it wasn’t hard to spot Katy Lipman’s old Sahara rumbling past a little over twenty minutes later.
Harper pulled out of the gas station and made a U-Turn. He followed Lipman down the road, maintaining a following distance of at least two cars between us. I wasn’t worried she’d notice us; I’d found over the years that few persons of interest made the automatic assumption they’d have a tail—it tended to be more the province of innocent people with overactive imaginations and people so cranked out they thought the cops and the government were spying on them no matter what they were doing.
Katy Lipman—despite acting frightened half to death every time we spoke to her—seemed like she could be out on a Sunday drive. It was warming up as February gave way to March, and she had her hardtop on, but her windows rolled down. I could tell because she had one arm dangling out of the driver’s side, lit cigarette in hand.
We didn’t have far to go. A little way up the road, she put her left-hand turn signal on and eased up the hill to a greenhouse. Harper crept in at a slow crawl and waited for Lipman to park. She parked close to the building, and he found a spot at the back behind an unhitched tractor-trailer.
I took his binoculars from the glove compartment and watched Lipman. Her location was literally transparent, and it was easy as pie to track her movements inside the greenhouse. Normally my suspects didn’t make things quite this easy on me. I watched her walk around, examining various flora and fauna, while I thought of the saying about people in glass houses. How did it go? Something about how they shouldn’t throw stones.
I handed the binoculars to Harper. He eyed her for a moment, adjusting them slightly as she moved further back in the building. “She’s loading up a wagon with fertilizer. Maybe they’re doing some landscaping?”
“I doubt that,” I said dryly.
“All right, she’s coming out now. She had to get someone to help her. She’s got a wheelbarrow of fertilizer, too. Someone’s doing quite a bit of landscaping.”
“Sounds like someone’s cooking quite a bit of meth,” I said.
He glanced at me, lowering the binoculars slightly. “That’s dark,” he said, going back to watching Lipman and her helper. “I’m guessing your theory is that they’re definitely not taking it to the site.”
“That site looked like no one has worked on it for months,” I said. “On top of their behavior when we questioned them, I think we can safely assume that they’re up to something: something they’d prefer to hide.”
“Do you think Mrs. Hayes knows about it?”
“If she did, I highly doubt she would tell us,” I said. “Besides, she seems more like the type with a full medicine cabinet and a will for denial.”
“We might be able to garner something just from her reaction alone if we ask the right questions,” he pointed out. “Or more to the point, a repression of her reactions.”
“This is true,” I said. “You’re right. I think it’s time we paid a return visit to Mrs. Hayes.”
When we arrived at the Hayes house, I leaned forward and gazed through the windshield, blinking in disbelief. Rather than the perfectly ordered, well-appointed House Beautiful spread that had greeted us the last time we were there, it had taken on the appearance of a riot. Smoke billowed up over the lawn covered with what looked to be flaming heaps of men’s clothing and accessories—wingtips, ties, New Balance running shoes, flannel shirts, and one familiar-looking blue down vest.
I glanced around just to make sure that Mr. Hayes wasn’t inside of any of his clothes while they burned and was relieved to find he was nowhere to be seen. Until the door burst open and a harried-looking Daniel Hayes stumbled down the steps. He carried a duffle bag and glanced fearfully back over his shoulder as if the very hounds of hell were on his heels.
Mrs. Hayes followed him in hot pursuit, yelling at the top of her lungs. She threw a suitcase after him. It clipped him on the back of the legs, and he went down on the last step, face-planting the lawn while Harper and I watched in shock from the safety of the car.
“Should we—” Harper started to say.
Daniel Hayes was already in the Jeep and backing out of the driveway so fast he hit the trashcan, eliciting a fresh volley of verbal abuse from Mrs. Hayes on the front porch. Her hair was in rollers and a kerchief. She looked completely disheveled and borderline insane. The only thing missing was a rolling pin clenched in her waving right hand.
Daniel peeled out and took off down the street, burning no small amount of rubber in the process. Harper got out of the car and started stomping out the fire on the lawn. After a second shocking moment where my brain tried to process what we had just witnessed, I got out of the car and joined him.
We were soon assisted by a breathless Mrs. Hayes, having rushed down the front steps with what I thought was a blanket but turned out to be a large overcoat. One I could only assume had also belonged to Mr. Hayes. She threw it over the nearest heap of clothes, putting out the flames.
“Detectives, I mean, Agents, I’m so sorry you had to see this,” she babbled, as if she were merely entertaining us in a messy living room. “This has simply been a very bad time for our family all around. My husband and I are just having a few problems, I’m afraid. As you can clearly see.” She laughed crazily, a slightly unhinged glint in her eyes. She reminded me of a zoo animal that gets loose and has to be tranquilized. I imagined handing Harper a dart gun while I chased her through the neighborhood and tried to subdue her.
“Problems over Brittany?” I queried, stomping out the last of the flames, a smoldering tie that had escaped the overcoat.
“Oh no, nothing like that,” she said vaguely. It was clear she had no plan to elaborate. I assume she felt it should stay between the two, though this obviously wasn’t the time for discretion. “No,” Mrs. Hayes continued, her expression darkening. “Brittany has got nothing to do with it at all.”
“Ma’am, your daughter is missing,” said Harper in a stern but gentle tone. “I’m afraid everything that happens right now may be relevant, whether you think so or not. Concealing information from us—any information—could be considered obstruction of justice.”
Mrs. Hayes, for all her avid TV watching, recognized the term “obstruction” when she heard it. She clearly didn’t want to fall under such an umbrella.
“Our problem,” she said reluctantly, stopping. She gritted her teeth, grinding them back and forth before starting again. I wondered, not for the first time, what exactly was in her medicine cabinet. “Our problem…is Daniel’s infidelity,” she finally spat the words out as if they tasted bad, like cherry cough medicine mixed with vinegar.
I was startled. That was the last thing I had been expecting.
“He was being unfaithful?” asked Harper.
“It’s been going on for a while now, I’m sure.” Mrs. Hayes sat down on the front steps and crossed her legs primly. She folded her hands neatly on her lap as if we were merely discussing
something as mundane as the weather as if her earlier outburst had never occurred. “He always sneaks back downstairs to call her after he thinks I’ve fallen asleep. With Brittany right there at the end of the hall. I can only imagine the effect this has had on her.”
“Who do you believe he’s having an affair with?”
“Katy Lipman,” she practically exploded, getting red in the face all over again. “Obviously. That devil of a woman. I never trusted her, I mean never trusted her, practically begged Daniel not to go into business with her, but did he listen to me? Of course not. He never listens. He never listens,” she hissed, and then surprised me further by promptly bursting into tears.
Harper, the considerate individual that he was, went into his pocket and found a pack of tissues, handing them to Mrs. Hayes. I remained still, watching her. I had no doubt in my mind that her breakdown was real, but she seemed to vacillate between extremes: uppers and downers, most likely. I waited until she had pulled it together somewhat before I continued questioning her.
“Do you think the affair has anything to do with her disappearance?”
“I don’t believe for one second that her father is telling the truth,” she said. “They talked to one foreman, and that’s it? They just believed him? He could easily be down there with Brittany right now. Think of how easy it would be to get her to leave if she was unhappy at home. If she felt like she came from a—from a—broken home!”
With this, Mrs. Hayes dissolved into tears again. She was no river rat, in her mind. In her mind, a broken home was the worst thing you could have.
12
Prisoner
Brittany Hayes gazed up at the narrow shaft of sunlight filtering through the dirty basement window. At least, she thought it was a basement. It had a cement floor and cinderblock walls, just like a prison. Her prison.
She knew she wasn’t the best kid, but she didn’t think that she deserved this. Or maybe she did. She knew she’d been making her mother’s life miserable for months now, maybe even longer. Maybe it was years. Maybe her mother regretted having her at all. At this point, Brittany wouldn’t blame her. Maybe bad things only happened to people who deserved them.
She thought she’d been in for the time of her life. The boy who waited for her in the car that night wasn’t a boy at all, but a man. Not Pete. He looked like he was in his twenties. At first, she’d jumped right into the car without even looking, and when she did, she gasped. She recoiled, pressing herself against the door with her hand on the handle. Everything that Crystal said about getting catfished ran through her mind, and she couldn’t get over how stupid she had been.
She expected the man to speed away immediately, but he didn’t. He just looked at her and smiled. Then he laughed as if amused by the expression on her face. Brittany wanted to be scared, and she was—the most scared she’d ever been. But underneath, it was a much stronger feeling of excitement. Excitement like when she snuck behind the gym to smoke with Crystal while Dana played the lookout. Excitement like when she cut class and went into the woods to drink with the upperclassmen boys on the football team.
If he had been ugly and creepy, she would have dive rolled out of the car immediately like she had across the lawn when she snuck out, even if the car was moving. She would have clawed at the locks, smashed the window, screamed her lungs out. She would have run away.
But part of what intrigued Brittany was the fact that the man wasn’t ugly at all: he was the most handsome man she’d ever seen. Easily as good-looking as any of the movie stars on her walls, if not more so. She found she wasn’t so much disappointed and afraid that he wasn’t actually Peter Moss as she was curious and excited.
“You can go, if you want,” he said, lighting a cigarette and rolling down his window. Casual as could be. “If you’re disappointed. I know you were expecting your little high school boyfriend. Now weren’t you.”
It wasn’t a question. He reminded her of the Big Bad Wolf. Brittany knew reading the story as a kid that it made him a villain, but she had loved animals so much that she had always been mad when the hunter came along and cut him open, filling his stomach with rocks. Even though it meant that Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother got away. They shouldn’t have gotten themselves caught by the wolf in the first place, she used to think reproachfully.
Now she thought that maybe they hadn’t gotten caught by simply being careless. Maybe there was a part of them that had wanted to be caught.
“Who are you?” she demanded.
“Thomas Aquinas,” he said. It sounded weird, old and made-up. Or familiar. Like a name she’d heard before. “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
“Why did you pretend to be Peter?”
“Well, Brittany, I just wanted to get to know you better. But it would hardly be appropriate for someone my age to talk to someone your age unless I was also your age. Would it? It’s very easy to intercept a conversation that you have with someone online. You wouldn’t have wanted to get me in trouble, now would you?”
He was exactly like the wolf in the story. Brittany knew she should get out of the car and start running, but something about Thomas Aquinas had her hypnotized, frozen in place like a cobra in a basket listening to a flute.
“How old are you?” she asked.
“How old do you want me to be?” he asked her right back.
She screwed up her face in confusion and discomfort. “It doesn’t work that way,” she said. “You’re not allowed to talk to kids for a reason.”
“Are you a kid?” He glanced over at her, his eyes flicking briefly over her in the most cursory of ways that still made her shiver inexplicably. This wasn’t like in the woods at school, dumb jock Ted teasing her, stealing her shoe, making her chase after him while she feigned outrage. This was something else.
“Yes,” she said defiantly. “Legally, I am.”
He laughed at this. “Legally, you are. Oh, that’s rich. You know,” he said, gazing into her eyes. “If this was Kentucky, we could get married.”
Brittany felt a flash of irritation at this. Like she would want to marry some stranger, parked at the end of her driveway in the middle of the night. Did he think she was a total moron? She had gotten into a stranger’s car without looking, she supposed, but it wasn’t like she sat around playing with dolls and staging their weddings. She wasn’t nine.
“We’re not in Kentucky,” she snapped.
“Almost,” he said. “We’re pretty close to the state line, aren’t we?”
“You can’t take me over state lines,” she said triumphantly.
He sighed. “Well, I guess you have me there,” he said. “You really seem to know the law.”
“What do you want, anyway?” asked Brittany.
It was a stupid question, she thought, even as she asked it. It was obvious what he wanted, wasn’t it? He was obviously a predator. He had preyed on her online, pretending to be someone she knew, lured her out of bed in the dead of night and into his car where no one knew where she was, and now—Brittany shuddered. And now it was the end for her.
But they still weren’t moving. Brittany glanced down at the door locks. They were all unlocked. If he was going to kidnap her, wouldn’t he have done it by now?
“What are you doing?” he asked, watching her.
“Are you kidnapping me?” she asked.
He started laughing at her again. “If you think that, don’t you think you’d better get out of the car?” he asked.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “What do you want? You can’t be my boyfriend. You’re too old.”
“Am I?” He studied her.
She looked at him again. She was intimidated but also slightly thrilled. His eyes were a brilliant shade of blue. He had a dark beard and perfectly symmetrical features, which she read somewhere was the secret of being beautiful.
“Probably.” She looked down at her lap.
“Probably? Or definitely?”
She looked up again, unc
ertain. “I don’t want to do anything with you,” she said.
Secretly, she thought that she might. There was something about the idea that excited her, in a way fooling around with Ted—his clumsy, fumbling hands and slobbering mouth—never had. But what if it got out of control? What if it was awful and she didn’t like it? Would he stop? Probably not. He was bigger and older than she was, and he would do whatever he wanted. He wouldn’t care. No one even knew where she was.
“That’s okay,” he said. “You don’t have to.” He reached across her lap, and she flinched. He raised his eyebrows at her as he opened the glove box. He pulled out a pint bottle of Jim Beam and unscrewed the top, and she felt bad for flinching. “Would you like some?”
She hesitated slightly before taking the bottle from him. This was something she knew how to do. After a few swigs off the bottle, she started to feel warm. Warm, and also confident. She gazed at Thomas dreamily, unembarrassed to stare. And that was how I lost my virginity, she imagined telling Crystal.
Crystal was always bragging about her many conquests before she’d moved to town when she lived in the city. She reveled in making Brittany feel like a hopeless, naïve toddler who could never hope to compete with her. Inexperienced and backward. Well, she bet Crystal had never even met anybody like this, let alone done anything with him. She didn’t even know how much of what Crystal said she believed.
He lit a cigarette for her off his own. She rolled down the window of his old car and blew the smoke out in a long, languid stream. She felt older and more sophisticated. Her head fell back against the seat. She felt good.
“Do you want to see a trick?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said.
“Look at the streetlight,” he said.
She looked through the windshield at the streetlight, its amber light casting a warm circle on the pavement below. “What am I looking at?”
