Someone had gutted Maria Lopez like the dog Lucky. It was a disturbing sight for the hunters who found her, in an open body-bag, sloppily half-covered with the dirt and sand from the ground around her, deep in the woods at Cimarron Canyon State Park. I guess you thought the animals would get to her, you cold bastard, thought Morrow as he stared down at her decomposing body.
“Cover her up,’’ he said to the uniformed officer standing beside him. He felt badly for her. No one had come to the station to report her missing, no one could be found to notify about her death. And there was no one to question about her life except her boss at the restaurant and Mike Urquia, who was the last person to see her alive. He was the prime suspect, only because there were no other suspects. But there was no evidence so far to indicate that he had done anything but sleep with her, and looking into his eyes, Morrow knew it wasn’t him. This was something much bigger than a good fuck gone wrong. Something so much uglier.
He took the number Jeffrey Mark had given to him and called from his cell phone. The phone rang a couple of times at Lydia’s before she picked it up.
“You and Jeff might want to meet me at the station. We think we found Maria Lopez’s body.’’
“I want to see where he dumped the body. You didn’t move it yet, did you?’’
“No, but…’’ Morrow didn’t really want her at the crime scene. He didn’t want her to have a front-row seat to this investigation, even though he’d agreed to have them on board.
“Good,’’ she said, like she was talking to a student. “Tell me how to find you.’’
He told her to take Highway 64 north for thirty miles and that he would have a squad car waiting for her at the park entrance so she and Jeffrey could find the way to the remote spot in the woods.
“Fine, we’ll be there.’’ She hung up the phone without another word. A little civility was perhaps too much to ask from someone like Lydia Strong.
An hour later the pair arrived at the crime scene. Lydia brushed by Chief Morrow without a word and walked straight to the covered body. She asked the uniformed officer for a pair of surgical gloves, which he handed her, and she removed the light plastic tarp from the victim’s body.
“Was this tarp sterile?’’ Morrow heard her ask the officer. “Because if it wasn’t, you just contaminated the crime scene.’’
“Yes ma’am.’’
“‘Yes ma’am,’ what?’’
“Yes, it was sterile.’’
That was exactly why Morrow hadn’t wanted her here, looking over his shoulder, second-guessing every fucking move he made. Waiting for him to screw up again so she could ruin him for good.
“Hey, Chief,’’ Jeff said as he approached Morrow. “Who found the body?’’
“Some hunters from New York were looking for big game and they came across the body instead.’’ He motioned to a group of men, who for all their weathered toughness, rifles, and orange hunter’s attire, looked pale and shaken.
Lydia regarded the grotesque body of Maria Lopez. Throat slashed, a gaping wound from her sternum to her belly, eyes wide and glassy, skin tinged black-and-blue, the naked body lay discarded by the killer without regard. Lydia could tell instantly by the careless disposal that the killer did not care for Maria, had not known her in life. She was less than trash to the person who had killed her. Lydia wondered if the killer was becoming disorganized, descending into a careless rage to murder Maria so brutally and then dispose of her like a hated piece of furniture. Or maybe he was becoming cocky, having killed, presumably, three times without even raising suspicion.
She did not feel moved by the body. Life had abandoned it. It was nothing more than an object, arousing only wonder in her, as if she had spied a single shoe lying dirty and flattened in the middle of a city sidewalk. She stood up and circled the body. This was a dump site and not a true crime scene. He had not killed her here. There was not enough blood. He had carried her here in the body bag and opened the zipper, hoping, probably, that the scavengers would find her before the park visitors did.
It had not rained since Maria was taken from her apartment, but the ground was soft and damp so maybe they would get lucky – footprints, tire tracks. He could have driven only part of the way to the dump site. He would have had to then park the car on the dirt road below and carry her up the incline that Lydia and Jeffrey had just ascended, moving through the trees. Had he known this area well? Or had he just driven in during regular park hours and dumped her, hoping he wouldn’t be seen? It was very risky behavior, if that’s what he had done. Maybe, more likely, he had come and stayed at one of the campsites and done his deed under the cover of night. She wondered if there was a visitor registry or a list of license-plate numbers of park visitors.
“Lydia, check this out,’’ Jeffrey called.
Lydia walked over to where Jeffrey stood. He pushed aside some weeds, revealing a partial footprint. The rest of the area was more exposed to the wind, but the weeds had preserved the top half of a large boot. Lydia glanced over at the hunters.
“It could belong to one of them, or to another hunter. We should check their boots before they leave.’’
“Gentlemen, could you help us out over here?’’
One by one, each man removed his right boot and compared the tread to the track in the ground. There were no matches.
The crime-scene photographer came over and took some shots as Jeffrey directed.
“Chief, can you get someone over here to take a mold?’’ Jeffrey inquired.
“I don’t know how well a mold will take. The ground is pretty soft,’’ Morrow replied.
“We should at least try,’’ Lydia snapped, annoyed by what she considered to be his laziness.
“Fine,’’ Morrow replied curtly, angry at her tone but feeling powerless. He walked off to the squad car to use the radio.
“He’s right, Lydia. There’s no need to be so hard on him.’’
“Back off, Jeffrey.’’ Lydia was still angry from their argument earlier in the afternoon. She always held a grudge for a little while, at least, and didn’t like being criticized at the best of times.
“Fine.’’ Jeffrey walked off toward the squad car as well.
You’re the most popular girl at the crime scene, she thought.
Lydia walked back over to the body and scrutinized it for anything she might have missed before. Around Maria’s neck hung a small gold cross. Lydia bent down, covering her mouth and nose against the stench, and leaned in to get a better look at it. It was plain, thin and light, a cheap piece of gold if it was gold at all. Had she seen something like this in the case at the church? She couldn’t remember. She checked Maria’s earlobes. They were pierced but she wasn’t wearing earrings. Lydia was reminded of the earrings Jed McIntyre had stolen from his victims. She noticed that Maria’s right hand had a deep, wide gash, probably a defensive wound, and that she appeared to have blood beneath her fingernails.
Lydia approached Jeffrey and Morrow, who were conversing with the hunters. She eyed the strange men one by one, envisioning each of them as the killer, trying to imagine them stalking and murdering their victims, then removing their organs. But they all seemed too dimwitted, too simple. She was sure they would offer nothing by way of leads or evidence. She waited for a pause in the conversation.
“Morrow,’’ she interrupted, purposely neglecting to use his title, “Will you make sure that you get that gold cross off her neck? And we need to talk to someone who administers the park to find out if there is a camera at the entrance, or a register of vehicles that have entered the park since Maria Lopez went missing.’’
“Yeah, no problem,’’ he answered, silently kicking himself for not thinking of that first.
She turned to Jeffrey. “Unless you think I should stay, I’m going to speak with Greg Matthews and then go to Smokey’s, see if anyone’s talking, maybe run into Mike Urquia.’’
“You want me to come with you?’’
“No, I think I should go alone. Sometimes people are willing to say more to one person than they are to two.’’
“I’ll go with Morrow and follow the body to the Medical Examiner’s office and see what the autopsy turns up. On the way out, we’ll stop at the guard on duty, find out what the procedures are for logging in visitors.’’
Lydia looked at Jeffrey, and smiled slightly, lowering her eyes in a silent apology. She raised her hand and quickly smoothed the collar of his leather jacket, a gesture he knew meant peace. “I’m sorry, too,’’ he said and her smile widened.
“The results from the Maria Lopez apartment could arrive as early as tonight,’’ Morrow interjected. “I have a contact at the state lab who promised me a rush.’’
“Great,’’ Jeffrey answered Morrow. Turning to Lydia, “Just be careful. I’ll get a ride back to the house from Morrow or someone.’’
He watched her walk back to the car, her hands in her pockets. She paused before she was out of sight and looked back at him, saw he was watching her, and smiled again. She looked at him with equal parts apology, laughter, and wistfulness. He took a breath at the intensity of his feeling for her, at the magical quality of her beauty in the early-evening light.
Lydia knew about isolation, the lure of it, the seduction of having only yourself to answer to. She knew about the craving for a silencing of all voices but one’s own, about the urge to escape the gaze of others.
In fact, she had constructed a life where isolation had become as comfortable as down, solitude as welcome as sleep. She was alone, had taught herself not to need anyone, and somewhere along the line loneliness just became familiar. And she had grown afraid of everything else. She had started to fear intimacy the way some people fear being alone. She had driven people away all her life with her coldness. She had no friends; her relationship with her grandparents, who still lived in Sleepy Hollow where they had moved from Brooklyn after Marion was killed, was loving but distant. The only significant person in her life was Jeffrey, and she kept him always at arm’s length.
But she also knew that beneath that desire to alienate the world was another, more ardent wish to be understood and recognized, a desire bound and gagged by the hopelessness that such a thing was possible anymore.
That was the look she saw in Shawna’s eyes, and the image she carried in her mind as she drove up the winding road toward the garage where Greg Matthews worked. Lydia pulled up slowly, the gravel and sand on the unpaved road crackling beneath her tires. The garage looked more like a shack than a place of business but the large, painted sign above the roof reading joe and greg’s auto repair told her she was in the right place. As she got out of the car, a young man emerged from beneath a red pickup. His curly hair stuck out from beneath a plain red baseball cap, its team logo, whatever it had been, long since fallen away. He stood up, wiping his hands on his overalls and squinting into the dusk, then shielding his eyes as he strained to see her.
“Are you Greg?’’ she called as she walked toward him.
“I sure am,’’ he said amiably. “What can I do for you?’’
“I would like to talk to you about Shawna’s disappearance.’’
The friendly smile dropped from his pink lips and his face seemed to age. Big, light-blue eyes swam with emotion in a galaxy of freckles. His hands were square and strong, with black grease wedged beneath his fingernails. He smelled of soap and gasoline, and beneath his baggy coveralls, he was large and muscular like a bodybuilder.
“I’ve already spoken with the police and nobody has listened to a word I said,’’ he said quietly. “Short of accusing me of hurting her, they basically have done nothing to try to find out what happened to her. I’ll tell you what I told them, my girl did not run away. Unless you’re going to tell me something I don’t already know or are going to try to do something to find out what happened to her, I have nothing to say to you, ma’am.’’
He turned to walk away from her but Lydia gently grabbed his arm.
“Greg, wait. I don’t think Shawna ran away, either. I’m an investigator. My name is Lydia Strong and I do want to find out what happened to her.’’
He looked her up and down suspiciously. She was conscious that she didn’t look the least bit official in her faded blue jeans, lizard-skin boots, and cream suede jacket. She began to reach for her ID, but he spoke before she could present it.
“All right, then, come on inside.’’
She followed him behind the garage and the adjacent office to a small apartment. Run-down but clean and orderly, it smelled of burnt coffee and cigarettes. Lydia sat down at a faux wood Formica card table on a wobbly, green vinyl-covered chair, while Greg made coffee.
Her eyes scanned the room, soaking up details. The appliances, an olive-green stove and matching refrigerator, were old but seemed to be well maintained. The countertop, made of butcher block, was well scrubbed but riddled with scratches and deep, black burn marks. Some of the Formica tiles on the floor, featuring a gold and brown floral pattern, were buckling.
The orange sun coming in from a dirty window over the stainless steel sink lit the dust particles that fell like snow through the air. The room was overly warm and Greg turned on an air-conditioning unit over the door that protested, then reluctantly groaned to life.
She could see two orderly bedrooms from where she sat at the table. One, presumably Greg’s, had a wall covered with posters of motorcycles and a shelf filled with books about hot rods, mechanics manuals, and luxury car magazines. On the bedside table was the picture of Shawna that she recognized from the copy in her file.
These were the rooms of hard-working people of small and honest means. If she had to guess, Lydia would say that Joe Matthews, Greg’s father, was a former military man that conducted his business and his home the way he had been taught in the barracks. Greg’s mother had either left them or died young because there was no feminine warmth in any of the rooms, and Greg seemed fairly self-reliant in the kitchen, not like a mama’s boy used to being coddled.
She tossed it out. “You live here alone, Greg?’’
“No, with my dad. My mom passed on when I was ten from cancer.’’
“I’m sorry.’’
“Me, too. But my dad took real good care of me. A little strict, though,’’ he chuckled without much mirth.
“But what do you expect from a former Marine?’’
“Mind if I record our conversation?’’ Lydia asked, pulling a small tape recorder out of her bag and laying it on the table. She never went anywhere without it but almost always forgot to use it, relying more often on pen and paper.
“No. How do you like your coffee?’’
She looked over at him and noticed that he was peering into an empty refrigerator. So much for light and sweet.
“Black,’’ she answered. “‘No,’ you don’t want me to record this? Or ‘no,’ you don’t mind?’’
“I don’t mind, Ms. Strong. I’ve got nothing to hide.’’
He sat down across from her, placing a chipped white cup in front of her, filled with coffee so black it looked like tar. The chair creaked beneath his weight and screeched against the floor as he pulled it toward the table.
“Your name sounds familiar,’’ said Greg.
“Well, I’m a writer.’’
“I’m not much of a reader. Is that why you’re here? You’re going to write about Shawna?’’
“Not exactly. I also consult with a private-investigation firm.’’
“Did somebody hire you to look for Shawna?’’
“Not exactly. Let’s just say I’ve taken a personal interest in this case and I have the time and the resources to see what I can do to further the investigation. Shawna is not the only person missing.’’
“You mean that other woman who went missing yesterday?’’
“Yes, and others, too.’’ She didn’t want to be the one to tell him that Maria wasn’t missing anymore. He’d read about it in the papers soon enough.
“Why are you interested?’’
She considered her answer before speaking. “I lost someone once, too, Greg. A long time ago. And even though I know what happened to her, I still don’t know why. So I guess I’m always looking for answers, in a way.’’
He nodded as if he understood that. Lydia wasn’t even sure why she said it that way, having never vocalized the thought to anyone. She’d never revealed anything about herself to a stranger before, especially someone she was interviewing. But the fact that she’d shared something personal with Greg seemed to have put him at ease and he began to speak.
“Most people just assumed Shawna ran away, Ms. Strong. And while she might have run away from her foster parents, she never would have run away from me. We were just waiting for her to turn eighteen so that we could get married and live here. I was going to keep working for my father and someday we wanted to buy a house.’’
Greg’s eyes glistened and Lydia felt him searching her face for faith and compassion. He had paused waiting for her to question his words, offer judgment, but she nodded her head and remained silent.
When he didn’t continue, she encouraged him. “Tell me about the night she disappeared.’’
“She called me on the phone about eight on Sunday, August fourteenth. She was real upset and said she was on her way over. I told her to stay put, that I would come and get her. But she said no, she had to leave the house that second. It was a short walk, about a mile, and she needed the time to cool off. She had had another fight with her foster parents. They are good people but they were strict with Shawna and she was headstrong, so they were always going at it.
“I told her to get moving because it was getting dark. I waited about a half an hour and then I set off to find her down the only road she would take. I went all the way to her house and knocked on the door. Harden, her foster father, told me she had left. I didn’t believe him, so I pushed my way into the house and ran up to her room. She was gone but it didn’t look like she had packed anything.
“I was angry. She had promised me she would try to get along with them because we only had four months to go and I didn’t want her to be sent away. I got back in my truck and drove home fast, hoping I would find her there. But the house was empty. I swear to God, as soon as I walked into this kitchen and didn’t see her where you are right now, smoking a cigarette, I just had a feeling in my gut that something wasn’t right. I don’t know how many times I drove up and down that road looking for her.
“She’s gone,’’ he said, voice trembling, betraying a boyishness that his physical bearing did not. “Something terrible happened to her that night. I can just feel it, you know?’’
Lydia was thinking of Maria Lopez’s gutted body rotting in the woods.
He paused and looked away from Lydia. His voice was softer, almost a whisper when he began speaking again, and she noticed his hands were shaking slightly.
“I would have made her stay put if I could have. But no one could tell Shawna what to do, not even me. She had a real problem with authority. I wish she had listened to me only this once.’’
She didn’t have to be a mind reader to see how much Greg had loved Shawna, and that he would rather be dead than ever hurt her. There was no way to fake grief like that. Lydia hated to probe further, knowing that the more he had to recount for her, the more painful this conversation would get, but she needed to know who Shawna was, where she had spent time, what her routines were.
“Greg, tell me what you can about Shawna, what she was like. I need to get a sense of who she was.’’
“Other people only saw the worst of her, her bad temper, her lack of interest in school, her rebelliousness. But to me, she was an angel. God, she was sweet. Loving, thoughtful.’’
The earnestness in his voice moved Lydia more than she liked. She steeled herself against the wave of sadness and sympathy that welled within her.
“No one I know had a harder life than Shawna. Her parents both died in a plane crash when she was five and she was turned over to the state because she had no living relatives. A lot of people who take in foster kids do it for the money. They don’t really care about the children; some even resent them. Shawna had a real run of bad luck when it came to that. Most of the time she wouldn’t even talk about it. But she had scars all over her body – cigarette burns, a long gash on her back. If you raised your hand too fast, too close to her, she’d flinch. If I held her too tightly, too close to me, she’d panic, fight to get away like a coyote in a trap.
“Meg and Harden Reilley, her foster parents up the road, never hurt her, she said. But she was more than they could handle, stubborn and wild. They tried to love her, I think. But she wouldn’t let anyone close to her but me. She distrusted everyone – for the most part.’’
“‘For the most part’?’’
“She loved to go to church. She said it was the only place that gave her peace, the only place where she didn’t feel like a black sheep. She was close to Father Luis and his nephew Juno at the Church of the Holy Name. She helped out with things like the bake sale, bingo night, the Christmas party. She said they accepted her without judgment, like I did. Trusted her with responsibilities that no one else would dream of. They made her feel special, trustworthy. It was very important to her – the church. But she kept it a secret. She would sneak off there, like she was going to do something wrong. I asked her why she didn’t want anyone to know. She said she was afraid someone would take it away from her. She wanted to guard with her life the things she loved, always afraid of losing them. It broke my heart.’’
“So she spent most of her time at the church, at school, or with you. Was there any other place she hung out regularly?’’
He shook his head. “She didn’t really have any friends. She wasn’t one to go to the mall. She didn’t care much for movies. We stayed around here mostly.’’
A silent tear traveled down the landscape of his face. He put his head down in his hands and sat, his breathing shallow and quick. She wanted to reach out and touch his hair, or take this boy in her arms and tell him that the pain goes away – that it fades like the memory of Shawna’s face will fade. But she was locked up tight inside, unable to give him what she was still unable to give herself. And besides, maybe it wasn’t even true. Maybe his pain would never go away; maybe every woman’s voice would echo Shawna’s for him for the rest of his life; maybe he would keep thinking he saw her in crowds; maybe the color green would forever remind him of Shawna’s eyes.
Lydia sat across the table from him, watching his big shoulders tremble. She was not at all surprised to learn of Shawna’s connection to the church. Since a few hours ago, when they’d put everything together, she expected each of them to have left a silken, spider’s-web thread leading her back to Juno. She just needed to find the point at which it all converged and the killer would be there, waiting for her.
“I’m sorry,’’ Greg said finally, raising his head and wiping the tears from his eyes.
“Please don’t be. I understand.’’
“You’re the first person to hear me out that hasn’t treated me like a criminal or a fool whose girl ran away from him.’’
“In the days preceding Shawna’s disappearance, did you notice anyone strange hanging around or did she tell you of anyone bothering her?’’
“No, not that I remember. And I think I would remember. I was pretty protective of her.’’
“Just think for a minute. Anything she said, even in passing, someone she found creepy or didn’t like?’’ She saw something flicker in Greg’s eyes.
“Well, it’s pretty stupid. I’m sure it doesn’t mean anything.’’
“What is it?’’
“The day before she disappeared we had a good laugh because Shawna made me promise never to buy a minivan, no matter how many kids we had. She said the past couple of days, she’d seen a green minivan a couple of times. She said, ‘Once you buy a minivan, you can kiss your youth and any hope you ever had of being cool again good-bye.’ But she never said where she’d seen it, or that she felt she was being followed.’’
“Did you see any other cars on the road that night when you went looking for her?’’
“Not one. Do you think someone was following her, Ms. Strong?’’
“It’s possible.’’
“Either I or her parents drove her almost everywhere.’’
“But she walked here often? From her house?’’
“Often enough.’’
Lydia pulled a card from her pocket and handed it to Greg. “If you think of anything else that might help, call me day or night.’’
She stopped the tape machine and put it in her bag, rose, and took his outstretched hand. There was a warmth and gentleness to his grip. It was easy to see why Shawna loved him. He was a protector.
“Do you think she’s dead, Ms. Strong?’’
“I don’t know, Greg. I wish I did.’’
He nodded, closing his eyes. “Thank you, Ms. Strong.’’
He walked her to her car and opened the driver’s seat door for her. “You’ll keep me posted?’’ he asked.
“Of course.’’
As she did a U-turn and drove up the road away from him, she saw him in the rearview mirror, just standing and watching her drive away. He looked so sad and alone, so powerless, like a child who had lost his grip on a helium balloon and was watching it float into the sky.
She gripped the wheel so hard her knuckles turned white. She was angry, so fucking angry. She’d never admitted to anyone, not even Jeffrey, how furious she felt after interviewing the grief-stricken loved ones, the other victims of murderers. They had to live with what had been done to the person gone, they had to try to keep from imagining what that kind of pain and fear must be like, to keep from wondering what the last moments were like. When someone you love dies in a car wreck or a plane crash, there is always the possibility they died instantly, that they never knew death had come for them, that one minute they were on their way for milk at the store and the next…nothing. The families of murder victims didn’t have that luxury, that chance for peace. They were haunted always, forever altered.
Who are you? And what do you want? she thought as she turned onto the main road and gunned the engine.
They always wanted something; these kinds of killers always had an agenda. The pedophile, the rapist, he was driven by an urge he couldn’t control. Nature or nurture, biochemistry or psychosis, whatever compelled him was as much a part of him as the blood running through his veins. But a serial killer like this always had a reason – vengeance, fame, punishment.
Jed McIntyre had wanted to destroy lives. The killing of his victims, though he enjoyed it very much, was only a means to achieving an end goal, which was to destroy the life of the child left behind. Just as Jed’s life was destroyed when his father had killed his mother in front of him and was sent to the electric chair.
Jed was alone with his rage for so many years, so isolated by his circumstances, by the horror he witnessed, by the impenetrable loneliness that surrounded him. He watched people go about their lives, fellow students, then co-workers, knowing that their perception of the world was so vastly different from his, knowing always that his life was forever cast in the shadow of his past. And as he grew older, his fury and his misery grew, too, and twisted like a vine of thorns, choking him and carrying him over the edge of sanity.
In a way, Lydia had grown to see him as someone fighting isolation, someone trying to create a community for himself, a brethren of misery. He had come to symbolize pure human evil to her. Not Evil in some cosmic sense, not the embodiment of Satan, but evil born of unspeakable psychic pain and cruel injustice, the victim become the victimizer with a vengeance.
But this killer…what was his agenda? What did these people mean to him? She was driving fast, taking the winding roads too hard as the faces of Shawna, Christine and Harold, and Maria swam in her mind. Usually it was so easy for her to see, like in the case of the Cheerleader Murders. All the girls were similar physically and, they later found out, just wicked, nasty young people. Once she knew what they shared in common, it was easy to deduce what type of person would want them, or want to be rid of them. But with these victims, even though she was sure that the church would be the point at which their lives intersected, she just couldn’t see what characteristic they shared, what attracted the killer to them.
A deep fatigue was setting in behind her eyes as she relaxed her grip on the wheel. Her hands felt cramped from gripping it so hard. She sighed, rolling her neck from side to side to relieve the tension gathering there. She had never denied being obsessive about her work. But this case was different; it was her heart and not her brain that was driving her. Maybe that’s what Jeffrey was sensing when he said he’d never seen her like this. She’d never felt like this. Rather than trying to solve something that had already happened, she felt inexplicably that she was racing to prevent something. Not only another murder, which was highly possible, but something even more than that. And that if she failed… well, she couldn’t fail. Failure was not an option.