by Leslie Wolfe
“Why don’t you go back to work and finish sorting through Holt’s old cases? That’s where I’d place my bets,” Glover said, grabbing a file and starting to thumb through it quickly. “This cop must’ve pissed someone off really badly in his fourteen years on the force.”
“How about Holt?”
“What about him?” Glover pushed back, pretending he wasn’t getting it.
“Let’s locate him.”
“No,” Glover replied coldly. “Our job is to find Meredith, and Holt didn’t take her. Go back to work, Rosales.”
“What if he—”
“For the last time, Rosales, drop it. Holt is a decorated Navy officer who served eight years with a Special Warfare Group. I’d say—”
“Yeah, yeah, he was a SEAL,” she interrupted. “So? Don’t the same rules apply to him?”
“He deserves some confidence. I’m willing to trust him.”
“Never trust a word Jack Holt is saying when he’s after something.” Jennifer’s voice startled them both.
She stood in her bedroom doorway, disheveled, pale, and red-eyed. She leaned against the doorframe, holding on to it with both hands as if it were the only thing keeping her from falling.
“Do you know something we don’t?” Glover asked.
“I know the man I used to be married to. He lies like a pro,” she replied. “Apparently, they taught him that in the SEALs.”
Glover struggled to contain a smile. Hell hath no fury, although he couldn’t understand why the woman, who had remarried twice after her divorce from Holt, still seemed so badly scorned.
“I don’t believe they teach deceptive tactics in Special Warfare,” he replied, “but I believe you,” he added quickly, seeing her eyebrows angle dangerously.
“What should we expect from him?” Rosales asked in her charismatic, velvet voice that went a long way with heartbroken parents.
“Bodies piling up until he finds Meredith,” she replied with an indifferent shrug.
She went back into the bedroom and closed the door behind her, while Glover stared after her, wondering what, if anything, was wrong with Holt’s anticipated plan of attack.
He would’ve done the same if it was his child; have his own plan. The man deserved a break, and some real, off-the-books support from other law enforcement officers, like him and, unfortunately, Special Agent Rosales.
That might take some doing.
17
Heidi
Twenty-eight hours missing
I arrived at the Conway residence and cut the engine, then took a brief moment to summon the strength I needed to ring the doorbell and shatter the hopes of two heartbroken parents. I’d still not heard a word from Holt and wondered if he suspected there was a correlation between his daughter’s kidnapping and Alyssa Conway.
Images of the crime scene invaded my mind, and unanswered questions immediately followed. But this wasn’t the right time to dive into the mind of a psychopathic murderer, to try to understand his motives, his urges, his dark fantasies.
I pushed those questions aside for later and walked quickly to the house. As soon as I pressed the button, I heard rushed footfalls, and a brief moment later, Mrs. Conway opened the door.
Blood drained from her face when she saw me; without a word she stepped to the side, inviting me in. I only got as far as the granite-tiled hallway, when she broke down in tears.
“She’s gone, isn’t she?” Mrs. Conway asked, trying to contain her sobs with her hand pressed firmly against her gaping mouth. “My little girl is gone,” she wailed, heaving, out of breath.
I wondered how she knew, then realized it wasn’t that difficult to figure out. I didn’t look chipper, like a bearer of good news would’ve seemed. I also wasn’t the cop they’d been working with on their daughter’s missing persons case. The badge hanging from my belt didn’t leave any doubt in her mind as to who I was.
“I’m very sorry for your loss,” I said, looking around for a tissue to give her. I didn’t see any. I walked over to the kitchen, looking around. The house had fallen into disarray. Since their daughter had disappeared, the Conways had probably stopped caring about keeping their home in order.
I saw a roll of paper towels on the counter, littered with dirty dishes, and I grabbed it, then walked back into the living room. Mr. Conway had appeared, probably from upstairs, and was holding his wife in a tight hug, his tears getting lost in her hair. I waited, unwilling to interrupt, yet painfully aware of every passing minute.
“I’m Detective Baxter, Las Vegas Homicide,” I said quietly, knowing what effect the last word would have on them.
They pulled slightly away from each other and looked at me through a veil of tears.
“I have questions about your daughter’s abduction,” I added gently. “I’m hoping you could—”
“Oh, now it’s an abduction?” Mr. Conway reacted, his anger turned to bitterness under the shock of learning his daughter was gone. “We told you she didn’t just leave,” he continued. “But you wouldn’t believe us. You said she’d run away, or maybe she was mad at us, like teenagers get sometimes, and left with some friends. You just wouldn’t listen, you and your damn rules.”
Feeling a bit uneasy, I lowered my gaze and stared at the floor. I’d never been a fan of the part of police procedure that doesn’t take missing persons reports seriously in the first twenty-four hours. In Alyssa’s case, acting immediately could’ve made the difference between life and death, a terrible, senseless, and horrifying death.
Alyssa had last been seen getting into an unmarked police car, with two uniformed cops. Unlike Meredith, she’d been observed from a distance, after having left the gym and crossed the street, and there were discrepancies among the witness statements. Nothing unexpected; witness accounts are often unreliable, especially when the witnesses in question were teenagers playing ball. Most of them agreed that Alyssa had climbed into the car willingly, without apparent pressure from either of the two men. Because no ransom call had been received, her disappearance had been considered a missing persons case and treated accordingly, not as a kidnapping. It was kept on the back burner for the first twenty-four hours, and by then, no new information could be found, no forensics or new witness accounts.
The absence of a ransom call further substantiated the decision to classify her as a missing person. Based on Anne’s autopsy findings, Alyssa had been held in captivity and sexually assaulted repeatedly for the past three weeks, then taken into the desert for the last forty-eight hours of her ordeal. The presence of the GPS tracker microchip in her arm seemed to indicate she’d been taken by a human trafficking organization and forced into sexual slavery. The last two days of her torment pointed in the direction of an extremely sadistic serial killer.
It didn’t fit. None of it did. Alyssa’s story felt as if someone had pasted together two scenes from two different movies, one featuring a sex trafficking organization servicing Vegas clientele with underage girls, and the other a murderous psychopath like none she’d seen before.
But Meredith’s ransom call had happened already, and Holt seemed to know what that was about, although he wouldn’t share.
Bloody hell, Holt…
Then how were the two cases related? Were the two girls frequenting the same circles?
I raised my eyes and looked straight at Mr. Conway, hoping my compassion could bring even the tiniest amount of comfort.
“I understand your frustration—” I started to say, but he didn’t let me finish.
“This isn’t frustration,” he said, gesturing at himself and his wife. “There’s no word in the dictionary to describe what I—what we feel. You killed our daughter, you and the other cops.” He pressed his lips together, as if containing his urge to scream, then took a few steps toward the door.
“Mr. Conway, please,” I said, realizing he was about to kick me out. “I need some information about your daughter.”
“We told everything we knew to the police, the d
etective who worked on Alyssa’s case. If she worked on it at all. What else could you possibly want to know?”
I decided to take a different approach. “Who was your daughter’s best friend?”
He sighed and pointed out the window. “The girl next door, Heidi. They’ve been inseparable since they were this tall,” he said, lowering his palm to about knee level.
“I read in the case file that Alyssa had a boyfriend, Noel Franks,” I said. “What can you tell me about him?”
“He’s a kid, a seventeen-year-old kid, two years her senior,” Mr. Conway replied. “We thought he might’ve been involved in this somehow, but after he came over here crying his eyes out every day for a week, we started thinking otherwise.”
Yeah, the seventeen-year-old boyfriend didn’t fit at all with the sex trafficking angle.
“We asked him many times,” Mrs. Conway intervened. Her voice broke with every word, and her breathing was shallow and shattered. “He hadn’t seen her leave with those cops, and he said Alyssa never told him anything that would suggest she knew who they might’ve been. No… she vanished one day, just like that.”
“She was taken; she didn’t vanish,” Mr. Conway snapped. “Like we always said she was.”
There was nothing more I could do but let the two parents grieve in peace.
I excused myself and walked out of there as quickly as I could, leaving their split-level house, heading for the neighbor’s ranch-style, three-car garage property. By the look of those houses, the homeowners must’ve been successful in their professions, or they caught a good deal, because I knew I couldn’t afford a house like theirs, not even if I earned twice my pay.
I rang the bell next door, and a flushed teenage girl opened immediately, wearing a smile that vanished when she realized I wasn’t who she was expecting. She wore her light brown hair straight and mid-back long, with blonde highlights on the bottom. Her bra straps were visible on her shoulders underneath a white sports top, and ridiculously short, frayed Daisy Dukes left little to the imagination. Who the hell was that fifteen-year-old expecting to ring her bell?
I showed my badge and entered, after being reluctantly invited in. “Are your parents home, Heidi?”
She shook her head quickly, while her pupils dilated. “Uh-uh, no.”
Bollocks… I was about to question a minor without a guardian present. Just as I recalled Holt and his interview with Casey, Meredith’s best friend, I realized what the two girls had in common, Casey and Heidi. They both looked trashy, despite their young age. I wondered if that was another correlation, or it simply was the way teenage girls dressed these days.
“I have some questions about Alyssa,” I started to say, but then remembered she didn’t know she’d been found dead. As soon as I broke the news to her, she rushed to the bathroom and slammed the door behind her. I could hear her sobs through the door, loud at first, then more and more subsided.
I gave her a few minutes; eventually, she came out wiping her eyes and nose with a Kleenex.
“I’m really sorry for your loss,” I said gently.
She walked over to one of the large, white leather armchairs and threw herself on it sideways, flinging her slender legs over the armrest.
“You have no idea,” she blurted, then sniffled and wiped her nose again. “My parents are going to be so freaked out, they’re going to ground me for, like, ever. Why the fuck did she have to die, huh? That isn’t fair!”
I was aware my jaw had dropped and quickly controlled my appearance.
“Tell me she wasn’t raped or something,” she said in a frustrated tone. “That’s all my mom needs to hear to dress me up like a nun for the rest of my life.”
“I’m sorry to say, but yes, she was raped,” I replied coldly, knowing the local news channel was going to run the story with all the sordid details for as long as it could.
“Damn perfect,” she snapped, flexing her legs at the knee above the armrest and hitting the furniture with her heels in a rhythm of spoiled irritation. “Okay, so what do you want?” she turned to me and asked.
“Just some information, and then I’ll let you grieve,” I replied, not even attempting to disguise my sarcasm.
She didn’t seem to notice it. She made an impatient gesture with her hand, inviting me to talk.
“Have any men approached you or Alyssa with, um, unusual insistence?”
She put a finger to her lips and stared at the ceiling for a moment. “Men approach us, you know,” she said with a lascivious smile. “Men who aren’t dead.”
“Anyone standing out from the hordes of men fawning over you two?”
She shot me a side glance as if to warn me I’d taken it too far, and she wasn’t an idiot. But then a sly smile bloomed on her perfectly glossed lips.
“Promise not to tell my parents?”
I made a quick cross with my fingers above my heart in a gesture I hadn’t done since high school, while keeping a perfectly serious composure. “I swear.”
“Alyssa sometimes liked playing games with men, you know. Make them pay?” she added, seeing I was staring at her dumbfounded.
I frowned. At fifteen, Alyssa was a call girl. Bloody fantastic. “Did your friend have a pimp?”
Heidi laughed heartily, in a resounding voice. “No, nothing like that. She wasn’t a hooker.”
“Then what was she doing?”
“I’ll explain,” she said excitedly, lowering her voice as if she was about to share a juicy secret. She shifted in the armchair, turning and sitting straight the way people normally did, back against the backrest, feet on the floor, arms folded neatly in her lap. Then she leaned forward, and I took two steps closer and crouched to her eye level. “Some guy offered us both a hundred each to let him, um, you know,” she said, blushing a little.
“No, I don’t know,” I stated calmly, cringing in anticipation.
“To put his finger in there,” she whispered. “I said ‘no way’; he was gross. Sweating, bald and fat, eww. But Alyssa said yes. She needed the money. I understood that, so I kept watch while he… Um, anyway, then he was gone. Quickest hundred ever, not even five minutes.” She whistled, as to express her admiration for her late friend’s money-making abilities.
“Didn’t you try to stop her?” I asked, feeling so nauseous I longed for a drink of water, even the stale bottle in my car.
“Nah… She needed the money pretty badly.”
“What for?” I asked. The Conways seemed well-off, their house furnished with all the trimmings of a prosperous, middle-class family.
“Stuff,” she replied, looping a strand of hair around her finger. “Like earrings, lingerie, you know, stuff.”
I swallowed with difficulty; I was suffocated by the need to yell at the girl until I unloaded all that I had to say about her reckless behavior.
“Then what happened?” I asked calmly instead, knowing that my advice would not be well received and would represent a waste of time I couldn’t afford.
“Nothing,” Heidi replied, looking at her watch and frowning. “We need to wrap this up,” she added. “I’m busy.” She grabbed her phone and checked for messages, then sighed.
“I thought you were going to tell me something about Alyssa and how she liked to make men pay,” I said, wondering where our conversation had derailed so badly.
“That’s what I did,” she replied, giving me a condescending stare. “You needed an example, and I gave you one. That hundred bucks was how she got started.”
“Started with what?” I asked, unwilling to believe the obvious without double-checking.
She groaned and jumped to her feet, then started pacing the room, every few steps looking outside the window. “With men and money. She started to like it, the money, that she didn’t have to ask her parents for it no more.”
“Did she work the Strip? The hotels?” I asked, finally accepting the possibility that Alyssa had been a little more than a trashy teenager.
“No, she wasn’t a whore,
I told you that already,” Heidi said, in an escalating tone. “Jeez… You really don’t get it, do you?”
“No, I don’t,” I replied simply. “Was she sleeping with men?”
“Her parents would’ve killed her, so no. These days it’s all about oral, so you don’t get pregnant or caught,” she said, chuckling quietly. “Then, she’d make them pay.”
I stood there speechless, suddenly feeling old at thirty-six. When had the entire world gone to bloody hell?
Then I remembered what I’d wanted to ask and showed Heidi a photo of Meredith. “Do you know this girl? She goes to Western, just like you do, and she’s your age. Or maybe Alyssa knew her?”
“I’ve seen her, yeah. I remember her… She’s a poser. She’s got this lame Goth thing going on, like it’s halfway done. She’s going for Goth but doesn’t have the guts to go all the way. We don’t hang out with her.”
That meant Meredith might’ve not been as tawdry as the other girls.
“Was she, um, making men pay, by any chance?”
She laughed and dismissed my question with a wave of her hand. “Those guys like blondes. She’s a brunette. If she wanted to go that way without a serious makeover, she’d starve.”
A car pulled in at the curb, and a moment later, a door slammed shut. Heidi’s grin widened, then turned into a scowl when she remembered I took space in her living room. Her date was there, and my time was up.
“One more question and I’ll leave. Where do you girls find these men who are willing to have oral sex with teenagers and pay for it?”
18
Snitch
Twenty-nine hours missing
Holt checked his watch and cursed. He felt anguish creeping up on him, numbing his mind, paralyzing him, yet rendering him frantic. He’d been running all night, trying to find a trace, a lead, a witness, or anyone who knew anything and could point him in the right direction. His clothes were soaked with acrid sweat, but he didn’t feel the chill of the windy, January day. He didn’t feel the pain of his bruised shoulder, or the throbbing in his eye, swollen shut by Darrell’s fist. All he felt was deepening despair for every moment his little girl spent in captivity, at the mercy of her kidnapper.
