Birthdays of a Princess (9 page)

Chapter
21

Seems I’m slowly easing into the daily routine of jail existence.
Mornings at school—where I make it abundantly clear that I need to be left
alone—lunch in my Living Unit, and an hour at the gym, scheduled around the doc’s
visit.

That hour in the gym is my favorite time of day. I do the full sixty
minutes on the stationary bike, working up a lather of sweat while sifting through
the debris of memories that are swept onshore by continuous rolling waves. It’s
amazing how the brain starts working when the body does repetitive movements.
The first ten minutes are excruciatingly painful—I hit the pedals hard and
fast, and I count the seconds to make sure I don’t give up too soon. I have no
time to think of anything, but when I reach six hundred, my synapses begin to
fire up. Soon after, I am journeying through my thought process like a wanderer
without a destination. The trip takes me around twists and turns and along ups
and downs, never on a straight line, and I connect the scenic points of the
memory-vista until the path I’m on becomes clearer.

That’s an excellent exercise, the bike-pedaling as well as the
mind-wandering, it structures my past, which makes it that much easier to write
it down in my journal later on.

Birthday Six

Not long after my fifth birthday Gracie announced the sponsor had
arranged for another photo session.

“This time, I’m coming along,” Mom said.

“Why’s that?” Gracie asked.

“You said those photo shoots can further her career. I need to be
involved in everything my girl is doing.”

My girl?
Gracie threw her car key at
Melissa.

“You drive her there then. I’m fed up being your chauffeur anyway.
No need for both of us to go.”

Mom had not applied for her American driver’s license and depended
on Gracie to take us to all the pageant towns from Arizona to Texas, New
Mexico, Mississippi, all the way to South Carolina, practically all over the
Southern States.

“You know I can’t drive.”

“Take the bus.”

Mom realized she had pushed it too far.

“Come on, Gracie, that’s not what I meant. I don’t want to go
without you.”

“And I don’t want you to come along. It’ll make the photographer
nervous and then the pictures won’t turn out good. I’m doing all this for
us
,
you know, for Tiara and you, so you can have a good life. God knows, I’m doing
all I can, and that’s the thanks I get for it.”

Gracie’s voice quivered, which made me run to her.

“Gracie, Tiara wants a love-hug,” I said to make her happy again.

“Come here, my mija. Come to your auntie. There you are. That’s it.
A big hug full of love for my most favorite girl in the world.”

Mom pulled a face as if she had bitten on a lemon, which made me
laugh.

Then Gracie laughed too, and now both of us were happy again. Gracie
grabbed my current glitz outfit and the make-up and hair-kit, and took me to
the studio to do that special shoot the sponsor had arranged for me.

On the way, she explained a few facts of my life to me.

“What we do there is our little secret. You mom mustn’t know. She doesn’t
love you like I do. She’s always so mean to me. Always angry with me. If she
hears that we take such nice pictures of you, she’ll get jealous and make me
stop. She’ll take you away from me. You’ll never be able to be with your Gracie
again. Do you understand?”

I tried, but I didn’t really. Gracie could see it in my face.

“Your mom mustn’t know, and if you tell her, the good Lord will make
me sick. Then you have no more Gracie to take care of you. Just think, nobody
to love you like I do.”

That scared me. Now I understood.

While she did my hair and make-up, she told me that she was very proud
of me.

“That’s my mija. Such a good girl, and so pretty. We’ll do some nice
pictures for all the fans you got. They want to see more of you. Just let the
photographer do his art and he’ll make you into the most beautiful girl in the
whole world.”

She talked non-stop and fiddled with my pageant outfit, pulling the
shoulders down and the skirt up as if she couldn’t decide what was right.

“Art is very important and his pictures will make you famous,” she
said. “And everybody will be so proud of you and just… love you to pieces.”

She promised me Disneyland again.

The photographer took a few test shots, then turned to Gracie who
leaned against the studio wall.

“I won’t need you here. Come back in two hours.”

Before she left the room, she gave me a big hug and whispered in my
ear.

“Be a good girl now. Remember, if you aren’t, the angels won’t
protect us and bad things will happen then.”

Soon after, somebody else came into the studio. Somebody without a
face. I was very scared. This was the person who would tell the angels if I
didn’t behave.

The photographer said: “Now, let’s get rid of her dress.”

The somebody without a face did what he ordered. I let it happen,
way too scared to object. Many different poses he wanted, while the other
person, the shadowy ghost-like somebody who didn’t say a word, arranged my body
in some sheer material. Some of the art pictures had me partly covered, some
not at all. I had to sit still for a long time, the camera staring at me until the
picture was art.

I have a very clear memory of feeling out of place, feeling not me.
Not wanting to be me. Although it wasn’t really cold in the room, something
made me shiver. I started to cry again, very quietly, because I wanted my Gracie
back.

The photographer friend clapped his hands together in delight.

“This is perfect! She looks so sad and lost. Those pics will sell
like goddamn hotcakes.”

“I don’t want to go to Gracie’s photographer friend anymore,” I told
Mom when we got back to our square house

 “Why not?”

I didn’t really know how to explain it because I didn’t understand
it, so I said, “he always takes so long with his pictures and I get so cold and
I still haven’t been to Disneyland.”

Gracie said: “If we don’t let him take pictures of you, we’ll all be
very poor and we can’t move to this wonderful house where each of us has their
own room.”

Mom looked sad and said, “she was soooo looking forward to this
house”, and I said, “but I’m always soooo cold.”

And then Mom said to Gracie: “Why the hell doesn’t that idiot turn
the air-conditioner down, if she’s cold!”

 “I’ll make sure he does, next time.”

From this session onwards, I started feeling like two kids. One that
hated artsy picture taking, and the other who wanted to do it right to make sure
Gracie continued to love me and wouldn’t die.

A few weeks after that photo session, we moved. The house was
perfect for us. A detached bungalow at the end of a cul-de-sac, in a good
neighborhood called La Marque, with a covered porch in front where one could
sit in the shade, and flowerbeds on either side of the driveway. Such a
perfectly perfect house.

My room was fit for a princess, but right next to it was a larger
room which was reserved for my practicing.

“We have to take it up a notch,” Gracie announced when we moved in, “the
sponsor said, with the extra money coming in from the pictures, we can afford
to hire a choreographer to come to the house and do routines with her.”

The practice room became my hate room. Mornings, Mom homeschooled me
in this large empty room with the wooden floor. Texas law requires kids to go
to school or be homeschooled from age six, but Mom had decided that it would be
better to start a bit early as we would lose so many days when preparing for
and attending the pageants.

I didn’t miss going to school. I had no contact with the outside
world beyond the borders of my family nucleus, so the concept of having peer
friends was not on my radar. My world was Gracie, and to some extent Mom, and
the crowns I was supposed to win for them, and the pictures I was posing for to
make sure the three of us could afford the house.

Gracie kept telling me how lucky I was to have all this, but I
didn’t think it was fun, at least not in the afternoons. The choreographer came
and tortured me in the hate-room, and there was no escaping him. He poked me
with a wooden stick when he wanted me to do a new step sequence and made me
practice for hours on end. I had to learn my routine. Dancing steps, posture,
different routines for different contests. I was now in the all-important age
group 4 to 6—the one that would catapult me into the pre-teen category—and
there the judges looked for personality, poise and confidence, not only
appearance.

My stage name was Princess Tia. The other mothers and their
daughters always shunned us, jealous of my unbelievable feat of having won the
Grand Supreme and the Ultimate Supreme four times in the last five pageants before
I even turned six.

On my sixth birthday we finally went to Disneyland. Gracie joined me
on all the rides. We stayed in a suite with a princess theme, of course, and
Princess Tia wore her sparkling tiara all day long. Every picture Gracie took
on this trip shows me grinning from one ear to the other, eating hot dogs and
ice cream, carrying a larger-than-Tia Mickey Mouse, having the time of my life!

It made up for the photo sessions, which I did nearly every week now.

Chapter
22

“She can’t be serious! She gives an interview without talking to us
or consulting with her lawyer first?” Macintosh was more surprised than
annoyed. “What’s the matter with that dumb bitch?”

He and Harding stood around the computer, watching a replay of last
night’s news clip, containing snippets of Melissa’s interview, to be aired in
full on one of the afternoon talk shows.

Harding shrugged. “They have run those teasers for days now, it
keeps the interest alive.”

“Great, that’s all we need. We are running in circles here, chasing
our own tail, and the press has a field day with the mother, who is
whitewashing herself like the inside of a church.”

Harding put his hands behind his neck and stretched. “We don’t have
a lot to go on.”

“Don’t just stand there. Relax, Harding, take the weight off your
legs, it might help you think. Sit down.” Macintosh said while slumping into
his own chair. “Let’s talk. What have we got so far?”

Harding did as he was told. “Suspect or victim?” he asked.

“Let’s start with the victim.”

 “Still comatose.” Harding glanced at his notebook. “The docs told
me she had her appendix out and she’s diabetic. Aside from that and guessing
her heritage, we got nothing. Nobody is missing anybody of her description.”

“What have we done to establish her identity?”

“We can’t fingerprint without her or a close relative’s consent, but
we gave the data as we know it to all hotels as well as the cruise ship
currently in the harbor. We have supplied the TV stations with it and they have
been good about it and mentioned it three days in a row.”

“And still nothing. That’s odd.”

“Yeah, it’s really weird, considering she was right in the center of
busy Metro Vancouver when she was attacked, so she wasn’t exactly hiding. Which
just about eliminates her being a courier of sorts. We alerted the border
crossings, thought maybe she was noticed coming over.”

“What are the chances she’ll come out of it so we can question her?”

“Slim, nobody can say for sure.”

“Damn it.” Macintosh shook his head and kept going to sum up their
existing knowledge. “The girl. What about her?”

“Not much there either.” Harding was still tense. He was sitting on
a wooden chair designed by a torture expert, which didn’t exactly relax his
back.

“Did you check her mother’s comments that she was a famous, sought-after
child model?”

“Patience, my friend. We checked with all major ad agencies down
south, but no Tiara Brown has been registered with any of them. We keep at it.”

“What about the drug test?”

Harding’s notebook was on his lap but he didn’t need to consult it.

“Surprisingly, the drug test came back negative.”

“Really? Maybe she was on something we don’t know yet. They come up
with new crap all the time,” Macintosh said.

“Stop being so paranoid.”

“Oh yeah? What do you know about drugs?”

“If she was using, she hasn’t been for a long time. We must assume
that she’s as clean as a whistle. She refuses to cooperate with us, but
apparently talks to the shrink at the Youth Custody Center in Burnaby, a Dr.
Stanley Eaton. That’s the guy who called us after his first interview with her
and asked for her full name because she repeatedly called herself Princess Tia.
Anyway, he must have managed to sneak into her brain. Court has asked for a
more comprehensive assessment of her mental health, and from what I understand
she wants to keep the same shrink. Maybe he’ll crack her.”

Macintosh stated the obvious: “And a fat lot of good that’ll do us.”

“I know, he isn’t allowed to give us anything until he has finalized
his report,” Harding replied. “Unless he cracks her so bad that she spills the
beans all by herself to anybody who wants to listen.” It had happened before.

“So we’re looking at another month, at least,” Macintosh said.
“Where are we with the eye-witness accounts?”

“Most have been to the station for their statements.” Now Harding looked
at his notes. “Twelve so far, ten customers and the two employees, so we only
got two to go. Nothing new there, and frankly, I don’t expect any spectacular
insight from those remaining two either. What we’ve seen on the video clips taken
by five of them is what we have to go on. Those clips show what happened a lot
more accurately than any of their verbal descriptions.”

“Everything, except the victim’s face.”

“Yes, that’s too bad.”

“Any discrepancies?”

“None whatsoever. It’s all smooth and clear cut. None of them had
noticed anything suspicious leading up to the attack, and several of them
confirmed that the victim was sitting at table four, reading a newspaper,
drinking coffee and eating a muffin when the alleged suspect came through the
door, looked around and walked straight up to her. All of them confirm that she
yelled something nobody could understand, just some blood-curling war cry I
guess, and started slicing the victim without any provocation. All the
customers present at that time watched, stunned at first, for a few seconds.
Five of them were talking on their iPhones at that precise moment and were
quick-minded enough to direct those devices toward the commotion.”

“Anybody recorded the war cry?”

“Sure, you can hear it in the background on several of the clips.”

“Did she say anything while attacking?”

“No. One high-pitched cry and then only serious grunting. She worked
it hard.”

Pete Macintosh had seen the clips, but it was always good to
summarize. Talking it over again gave him an idea.

“Have we sent the recordings to voice analysis? What sounds like a
war cry to us, could be the victim’s name.”

Harding shuffled his notes. “Already done. It’s just an angry cry.”

"What about the three guys who manhandled her? What are they
saying?”

“They all agreed that she was a tough cookie. Took a bit of
strength, but three against one and her being so tiny, it took only a few
seconds. That’s on the clips as well.”

Macintosh sighed. Everything was recorded, everything was obvious,
except the victim’s identity and the suspect’s motive. They had to be
connected. As long as they were in the dark on the ID, they should concentrate
on the motive. There had to be one. Of course he had come across cases where
the suspect had been clearly deranged, had been guided by voices from
outer-space or was a psychopath who loved killing for the sake of it, but those
were extremely rare. Usually there was motive.

“We have to dig into the suspect’s background.”

Harding shook his head.

“That freaks me out most. There is no information available. Not for
her or her mother. Word came back from the Texans that there is no birth
certificate made out to a Tiara Brown. However, as we knew from the mother that
she was born in August 1998 we checked the records of that month. On 21. August
1998 a certain Tiara Rodriguez-Brown was born at Houston General Hospital.
Other than that, they have checked into all sorts of government departments,
there is no record of a Melissa Brown or a Tiara Brown anywhere. The address
Melissa had given us, Caroline Road in Galveston, is a bit odd. Number 357
doesn’t exist, and she hasn’t been registered under any other number in that
street. There’s also no school registration of Tiara Brown, no driver license
for Melissa Brown, no nothing of anything. Those two didn’t live in Galveston,
and if they did, they were flying so much under the radar, it was practically
illegal. I don’t know why, but I wonder if Melissa gave us the correct
address.”

“I think we have to take everything Melissa Brown tells us with a
grain of salt. She stated in my initial interview with her that she worked down
there at different supermarkets, but now she tells the reporter that Tiara’s
father left her enough money when he died.”

“You mean Mike Brown?”

Macintosh frown.

“That’s odd—him having the same name as the grandmother.”

“Yeah.”

Macintosh immediately realized where he had gone wrong.

“Shit. Brown is Melissa’s maiden name. How could I assume it was her
married name?”

“If the name of Tiara’s father isn’t Brown, it could be Rodriguez.”

“You bet. Which means, Tiara Rodriguez-Brown is our girl and that’s
why we came up empty handed when checking the ad agencies for records of our
famous child model. None of them had a Tiara Brown on their list.”

“Right, I’ll check again and ask about a Tiara or Tia Rodriguez.”

Macintosh drummed an angry melody on his desk top.

“I don’t get it. Why the hell does the mother make such a secret out
of it? Why didn’t she just give us the girl’s name?”

 “Maybe you should try once more to talk to the daughter. Get her
side of the story.”

Macintosh glared at him.

“Seriously, I think it’s worth another try.”

Harding was right. Go and do your job. Don’t chicken out when it
gets uncomfortable.

“Sorry,” Harding said. “I know, it’s tough for you. I’d do it if I
thought it would help, but I don’t have your experience, and as it’s probably your
last case—”

“Right. You’re right. They move me into a corner for the last six
months and dump a bunch of files on my desk.”

“They certainly won’t put you in charge of a new homicide case.”

Macintosh snorted.

“So, make the best of what you got. I mean, maybe the girl couldn’t help
it. Maybe she had a good reason.”

“Like what?”

“She’s so young. I’m not saying she’s innocent, but we don’t know anything
about her background. You should give her a chance to explain herself.”

“She had her chance.”

“She’s had time to think by now. You should at least try once more.
Everything else is discrimination, and that’s not your style, never has been. What
would your daughter say to that?”

Macintosh’s face turned red.

 “Leave my daughter out of this.” He took a deep breath. “If you
think I pick and choose what I want to do, you still don’t know me. I’m gonna
see that girl, in my own good time, and give her a chance to explain herself
and that stupid goddamn crime she’s committed if it’s the last thing I do on
this earth.”