Little Girls Lost (9 page)

Sam shook his head slowly. "No, she wasn't my higher power. And I wasn't strong enough to be hers."

Sundquist took a slow, deep breath, as if arriving at what he had been seeking. He considered Sam in silence for a few beats, and then offered another question. "How was it, Detective, that you and your wife both descended into alcoholism at the same time? Or was that where you started? Did you meet her at an AA meeting?"

Sam shook his head. "We ... suffered a trauma. We lost our little girl, and neither one of us knew what to do with that. The loss, the anger, the sadness, the ... responsibility. So I drank, and she drank with me."

Norman cocked his head again. "When you stop a killer, Detective, do you feel that you're saving your daughter?"

Sam stiffened. He took two pained breaths, then consciously relaxed. "No ... and yes ... and fuck you for asking," he said, then left without another word.

Tyrone liked watching Pamela. Already in his head they were on a first-name basis, and he watched her work behind the counter of the soup kitchen as if he were spending time with an old friend.

It was hard for Tyrone to spend time in a homeless shelter, even five minutes. He had spent a few nights in places like this. It was the lowest point of his life, before he had found his way, and he still responded with an almost physical revulsion to the sights, sounds, and smells of such places. Every cell in his body screamed for him to get out.

Not yet, though. Tyrone had work to do.

Pamela was behind the counter and handing out food to the filthy and broken men and women who stood silently in line before her. Tyrone took pleasure in the thought that, in a way, he and Pamela were working on related things. He held his work in his head like a recipe. There were steps that needed to be followed in a precise order. There were ingredients that were necessary if it were to come out right.

Tyrone looked off to the side, out the window, and let his eyes slip out of focus. He drifted off into fantasy and felt the familiar warm and comfortable feeling come over him. In his mind, he and Pamela were working in a kitchen, side by side. They gave each other small and private smiles from time to time, and every now and then their hands touched. Tyrone relished the feeling of arousal that swept through him. He rode the adrenaline like a wave.

Suddenly ashamed, he stood abruptly and left, his hands in his pockets to camouflage his erection. He hated to think that Pamela had seen him like that, as if he was some sort of pervert leering at her, but he was pretty sure that he had turned his back before she looked up. It wouldn't be good if she saw him earlier than tonight, when he met her on the street. That would not be following the plan.

Outside, he walked down the block and checked the alleyway where he had parked his van. It was illegally parked, but Tyrone didn't worry about getting towed—there weren't many tow truck drivers who would come to this neighborhood. He checked his watch: still an hour before Pamela would be done dishing up food and finished with the cleanup that followed. Then she'd leave the building and walk down the sidewalk. Tyrone knew the path she liked to take. He had watched her many times walk past the alley.

Tyrone played the plan out in his head like a movie. He would stand at the entrance of the alleyway, where he could see the doorway but where, in the dark, it would be difficult for Pamela to see him. When she headed his way, he'd duck inside, open the back doors of the van, and get the gauze ready. He'd pull the gauze out of the plastic bag and be careful not to hold it too close to his face, where he might get woozy from the fumes coming from the chemicals that the gauze was soaked in. He would stand to the side of the alleyway, and then when Pamela walked by, he'd step behind her, place the gauze over her mouth and nose, and—when she went limp, which would be soon—he'd carry her back to the van.

Tyrone waited and planned. The recipe had already started. The first few steps had already been completed. He couldn't stop it now, even if he wanted to. He had some time to kill, though. He took a seat in the van, in the driver's seat, and let his eyes slip out of focus as he returned to the fantasy.

Another living room, smelling of stale cigarette smoke, sickly light streaming through the curtains over the front window. Another set of parents with tight, frightened faces.

Another array of uniforms on the other side of the room, there to help, making it worse. Sam scrubbed at his tired eyes with a fist and took a deep breath, looking for the part of himself that was ready for this conversation.
 

"It was a homeless guy. One of the ones in the shelter," Pamela's father said. He had dark hair and a few days' growth on his cheeks. Sam guessed that he had a razor somewhere he used to carefully maintain his unkempt look.

"Why do you say so, sir?" he asked.

"Who else would it be?" the man asked, looking around the room for support, anger and fear in his eyes. "Half of them are on drugs, the other half are batshit crazy. Christ, the stories she told sometimes..."

"Bobby," the red-haired woman said quietly, putting a hand on his arm to silence him. Pamela's mother might have been attractive at another time, in another life. Now she looked like she was ready to lay down and die, just as soon as she'd made sure that her daughter was safe.
 

Sam looked between them. "Did your daughter say anything about someone at the shelter bothering her? She volunteered there, I understand?"

The mother nodded wearily. "She helped out two or three nights a week, handing out food or helping to clean up." She began to mist up. "Pamela is a very passionate, generous girl," she said, ending on a tearful quaver.
 

Sam nodded, then brought them gently back to the question. "Did she have any trouble at the shelter? Anyone who had threatened her, maybe, or who hit on her?"

Pamela's father gave him a hard look. Sam could tell he did not like other people speaking of his daughter's sexuality. Finally he shook his head. "No. But that doesn't mean anything. Even if someone was giving her trouble, she wouldn't have said anything to us."

"Why not?"

He shrugged. "She wouldn't want to get him in trouble."

Bud, like most times, was silent at his shoulder, but this time he took a step forward. "Did your daughter have a boyfriend, or were there any other men she associated with?"

The mother shook her head. "Not that I know of. I know there's a boy named Joey who she liked, but not as more than a friend." After a pause she continued. "She was a very private person, though, particularly lately. I can't be sure that she would have told me."

"You said she's been particularly private lately," Sam asked, probing gently. "Why do you think that was?"

The woman looked out the window, as if checking to see if her daughter was standing on the lawn. "She's a teenager," she said at last. "Does there need to be a better reason than that?"

Sam shook his head. "Not at all, ma'am. Thank you for your time. When we learn something we'll be sure to tell you right away, and I hope you'll do the same. Anything that you see or hear that might help us bring your daughter home, I hope you'll tell us about it."

They nodded, and he turned for the door, Bud at his side. Outside, the air was crisp and the sun seemed too bright for the dark thoughts he was carrying.

"We should check out the shelter," Bud said quietly.

"Yeah, but I'm not sure it will help."

"Why, you don't think there's some asshole there who's capable of snatching a kid?"

Sam pulled open the passenger-side door of Bud's car and slid into the seat. "There are probably twenty assholes there who are capable of that and more."

"So what's the problem?" Bud asked, fastening his seat belt and turning the key in the ignition.

"A guy in the shelter makes sense for this case, but what about the others? What connects these three girls together? I can't find the link."

Bud gave him a long look. "And what makes you so sure that they are connected? Maybe we have three separate crimes. Maybe it's all a coincidence."

Sam sighed. It was a question he asked himself a hundred times a day. And he had to admit that maybe the three girls were not connected. Maybe he was looking for patterns where there were none. But if there was no connection, he had even less to go on than he thought, and for now at least he wasn't prepared to go there.

Hours later, standing on a street corner near where Pamela Wilson had been snatched, Sam was fighting against a rising tide of self-doubt.

He was beginning to suspect that the notion that the three abductions were connected, were the work of a single man, was nothing more than a convenient excuse he was using to simplify the facts in front of him. Sam was very much aware how inadequate his reasons were for insisting on a link in the cases. He had come here, to the latest crime scene, without his partner because he was already too busy fighting with the voices in his head to deal with his partner on top of everything else. Sam knew he had to get his head straight before he'd be any good in this investigation. There was a frightened young girl who desperately needed him to get out of his own way and decide what he was looking for.

The sun reflected in heavy waves off the pavement, and the reflections off of window glass made him squint. He could feel a headache coming on and raised his arm to shield his eyes from the glare. It was a dirty section of town, of course—that's where you found the homeless shelters. It was not the sort of place he would have wanted his daughter to walk around in, not if she had lived long enough to reach Pamela's age. For just a moment Sam could see an older version of Missy, standing on the other side of the street and looking back at him with frightened eyes. His chest tightened at the thought, and he felt a renewed wave of determination. He wasn't leaving here without something. All he needed was the scent, then he could follow that all the way to its source.

From where he stood he could see the shelter, across the street to his right, and the alleyway where Pamela had been snatched to his left. In between was a tall brick building, an apartment building full of people that, Sam already knew, were ready to go on record as seeing and knowing nothing. This was the part of town where no one ever saw anything.

He could hear faint traces of music piped into the department store behind him. He recognized the song. It was popular when he was in high school. He'd hated it back then, and it hadn't improved with time. He was just about to cross the street again to look for a worker at the shelter to talk to, when he was struck by a thought.

The department store security cameras showed everything that was happening in the store from 19 different angles, all arranged in a grid on a computer screen in the security guard's office. Sam locked onto the grainy footage with intense focus. He could feel the pieces moving on the board. This was it.

"You have an archive?" he asked the guard sitting in the chair, his hand on the computer's mouse as he navigated the security camera interface. The man hadn't wanted to let him in this room, he hadn't even wanted him to be in the store if he wasn't going to buy something, but Sam waved his badge around until it had the desired effect.

"Yeah, going back five days, but older than that is gone. We record over the old disks."

"That's OK. I'm interested in three nights back. Around 8:00 at night. And not from all the cameras, either. I want this one, the one that points towards the front of the store."

The guard clicked through a series of menus, searching for the right files. "You're looking for someone who came into the store?"

"I'm looking for someone who drove past it. Also, can you make the picture bigger? Just show me that one feed?"

The guard clicked on a boxes and windows until the 19 small frames were replaced by one large one, showing the registers at the front of the store, the front door, and—through the store's large plate glass windows—the street out front. A few more clicks and the live feed was replaced by a recording from three days before, the day that Pamela Wilson had been abducted.

Together, hunched over the desk and squinting at the screen, the two of them reviewed the archived footage moment by moment. Sam first had them review the period between 4:00 and 5:00, until at last he caught a grainy look at Pamela, through the window, as she walked towards the shelter to begin her shift. It was exhilarating. It felt like he was traveling in a time machine and had leaped back to the moment just before a terrible crime would be committed.

They stepped forward through the intervening minutes and hours, looking for something that seemed out of place. Cars and pedestrians passed by, and Sam tried to fix each of them in his mind. He didn't know what he was looking for, but every detail might become meaningful at some later point.

His mind was just beginning to grow fuzzy and his eyes were burning when they came to the point when Pamela walked back the other way, on her way home, not knowing what was waiting for her along the way. Sam wanted to shout at her through the screen, to warn her, but he watched silently as she marched towards something terrible. She moved from left to right past the edge of the screen and he let out a long breath, disappointed. Nothing, there was nothing. He'd examine the footage more closely later, but for now he didn't ...

His heart skipped a beat in his chest. Something at the very edge of the screen, a flurry of movement—could that have been two people struggling? Holding his breath, he had the guard replay the footage. It was too far distant, the resolution of the camera was too low to be sure, and there was no way this would be admissible as evidence in a court of law, but Sam was sure that he was seeing a sliver of a struggle. After that there was a pause, and then...