The Watcher in the Wall (5 page)

She never smoked when Earl was home. She never drank from the bottle of peach schnapps she kept hidden under the bed. She stuck to her best behavior, kept the music turned low, even though it didn’t matter so much what she did. She was Earl’s daughter after all. She was never going to get it half as bad as Gruber did.

It didn’t take much to set Earl off. Just a bottle of something strong and a perceived injustice, serious or otherwise. Then it was duck and cover. Run and hide. Listen to Earl’s heavy boots in the hallway and pray they didn’t stop at his door.

Most of the time, however, Gruber was shit out of luck. Earl seemed to reserve a special hate in his heart for his stepson. He’d kick open the flimsy door, come through piss-drunk and armed with some kind of blunt object. Take swings at Gruber for any reason he could think of—the dishes weren’t done, or Gruber watched too much TV, or he’d flunked his social studies quiz, or whatever.

“Runt,”
he’d say.
“Pip-squeak little shit-heel runt.”
He’d punctuate his words with his weapon of choice, bear down on Gruber, belts and backhanded slaps, Gruber hunched over and trying not to cry, because crying only made Earl worse.

“
Men don’t cry
,
” he’d tell Gruber. “You a man, son? Or are you just a pussy?”

•   •   •

There wasn’t much escape from the misery, even when Gruber got free of the double-wide. The local high school was small, mostly farm kids from the county. They didn’t like kids from the trailer park. They laughed when Gruber tried to call it a motor court.

“It’s a garbage dump,” someone told him. “Nothing but white trash and four-eyed hillbillies.”

Sarah didn’t have many friends, herself. Those she did have, she guarded. Wouldn’t introduce them to Gruber, wouldn’t let him talk to them. She hurried off to school before he could catch up, before he knew she’d gone. Gruber didn’t make friends. He stuck to himself. And it wouldn’t have been so bad—he’d done it before, back in town, lots of times—except now there was Earl, too, waiting at home. And Gruber was still young. He was small and afraid. He wasn’t strong enough to stand up to Earl, not yet.

Oh, but he ached to. He ached to do
something
, show the world he was more than just some dumb runt. The weeks passed, months, and nothing got any better. Earl kept bursting in, the drink on his breath. Kept beating Gruber. Nothing Gruber could do about it but dream of the day he could stand up for himself, the day he found an outlet for the frustration and hatred Earl was creating inside of him.

<
16
>

It was past midnight
when Windermere piloted her daddy’s old Chevelle out of the parking garage. Saturday morning, early, the last of the Friday-night partiers still straggling their way home. She drove across downtown, aiming for the interstate, ran into a roadside checkpoint just before the on-ramp. A handful of patrol cars were pulled over with their flashers on, cops with flashlights and reflective vests funneling cars into a long, single line.

Windermere examined her reflection in the rearview mirror. Checked her breath. She’d had, what, three beers? Felt fine, not even tipsy, but knew she shouldn’t be driving. Screw it. Too late to turn around.

She rolled down the window for the young cop who approached the Chevy. “Had anything to drink?” the cop asked her.

“One beer with dinner,” she lied, handing over her license and her FBI badge.

The cop studied the badge. “Working tonight?”

“Headed up to the office,” she told him. “Couldn’t sleep, so I figured I’d kick around some casework instead, you know?”

“No rest for the wicked, huh?” The cop handed the badge back, Windermere’s driver’s license. “Stay safe out there, anyway. Lots of crazies out tonight, especially this neck of the woods.”

“Don’t I know it.” Windermere rolled up the window, pulled ahead. Pointed the Chevelle north, trying not to think about what Stevens
and Mathers would have thought if the young cop had pulled her over for a breath test.

•   •   •

CID was quiet when Windermere walked off the elevator. Dark, just a handful of emergency lights, and the hum of the computers in the rows of cubicles. Windermere walked past a motion detector and the lights came on around her. She navigated through the department to the office she shared with Stevens.

She’d angled for her own office for three years before Drew Harris, her SAC, finally relented and made good on the promise he’d given her when he recruited her from the Miami field office. “Your own office. Plenty of room. Plenty of autonomy.”

Well, she had her own office, anyway. Had to share it with Stevens, though—and Windermere was pretty sure she’d still be working a cubicle if her BCA colleague hadn’t joined the violent crimes task force.

Adrian Miller’s laptop was where they’d left it, on Windermere’s desk, still connected to the Bureau’s network but otherwise forgotten. Come Monday, Windermere knew she and Stevens would be back tidying up the last of the sex-trafficking case, no more time to spend on Ashley Frey, wherever and whoever she was.

But that left Saturday and Sunday. And Windermere wasn’t ready to give up on the girl yet, not after seeing Adrian Miller’s parents, after talking to Lucas Horst. She pulled up her chair and flipped open the laptop, squinted at the screen, the bright electronic light. Brought up the chat logs Adrian had cached from the Death Wish forum. His conversations with Ambriel98.

Adrian had talked to Ashley Frey for four months before he hanged
himself. Windermere scrolled to the top of the logs, the very first conversation. Scanned the office, Stevens’s desk, the pictures of his wife and kids, looked out through the door to the empty cubicles beyond. Felt the pull of fatigue and craved a cigarette, wondered what she was doing here, middle of the night and a weekend besides.

Giving up already, Supercop?

She turned back to the computer. Settled in and started to read, the chat logs and Adrian Miller’s profile, Ashley Frey’s, anything that would help her get a fix on the girl.

Around dawn or so, she figured she’d found it.

<
17
>

Even Sarah couldn’t dodge
Earl’s reign of terror forever. She lost her family immunity about the time Earl figured out she had a boyfriend.

The boyfriend’s name was Todd McGee. He was a skinny kid with red hair, in Sarah’s grade at school. Drove a pickup truck, an old F-100. Todd would come by after Earl had gone out for the night. Honk his horn from the road, and Sarah would spring up from her bed, check the window, fix her hair in the mirror, and dash out the door before Gruber’s mother could stop her. Not that Gruber’s mother really cared.

Sarah timed her escapes just fine for the first month or so. She waited until Earl’d gone out with his buddies, until Gruber’s mother
was more or less catatonic on the couch, the shopping network blaring. Then she’d sneak out to Todd and they’d peel away in his truck. Show up back home around midnight or so, a little later. She’d creep down the hall and into her bedroom, like she was never gone at all.

Gruber never hated her more than when she came home from those dates. She would dance around the bedroom, humming to herself, smiling some secret smile. She would write in her journal, scribbling the words out fast, as if she were afraid she’d lose them if she didn’t write quickly. She would study herself in the mirror, fluff her hair, a normal girl, a happy girl. As if she never had to worry about Earl breaking her door down. As if she never had to wait as Earl reached for his belt.

Gruber hated her then, for being so normal. He resented that she was so
happy
, that her life was so different from his own, even as they shared space in the same shitty trailer.

But he never looked away. He watched her until she turned off the light, until she climbed into her bed in the darkness, and he would watch for longer still, listening to the rustling of the sheets as they clung to her body, wondering what it would feel like to slip between those sheets with her. When he was sure she was asleep, he would—reluctantly—move away, replace the painting against the wall, and retreat to his own bed, where he’d lie awake, replaying the images in his head.

<
18
>

“I don’t think
Ashley Frey killed herself,” Windermere told Stevens. “I don’t think she ever intended to kill herself at all.”

On the other end of the line, Stevens stifled a yawn. “It’s seven in the morning, partner,” he said. “How come you’re so awake?”

“Couldn’t sleep,” Windermere replied. “Went home last night and couldn’t stop thinking about Ashley Frey and this little problem we were having tracking her down. So I went back to the office and did a little research. Stayed up all night on this suicide forum.”

Nancy Stevens must have been nearby, because Stevens was talking to someone else, his voice muffled. Windermere waited, heard Nancy reply. Couldn’t make out the details, but she figured it didn’t matter.

“Sorry,” Stevens said, coming back on the phone. “So, sure. You stayed up all night. What did you figure out?”

“I was reading through the logs for some kind of clue,” Windermere told him. “Something that would help us place this girl. I got nothing. All Ashley Frey would tell Adrian is that she’s from Pennsylvania and she’s unhappy about the way her stepfather mistreats her.”

“Sure.” Stevens yawned again. “So?”

“So it’s not the chat logs,” Windermere said. “It’s the anonymizer thingy. That’s our key.”

Stevens paused, and she could tell he was struggling to follow. “I thought that thing was for hiding your identity.”

“It is,” Windermere said. “But Ashley Frey isn’t the only Death Wish
member trying to stay incognito. I was trying to figure out if maybe Ashley Frey had another username, a different account, some other way to find her, so I got a list of about sixty other profiles that exhibited the same cloaking patterns.”

“
You
got this list?” Stevens said. “You figured this out yourself?”

“Nenad helped,” Windermere told him. “He came in about an hour ago, had some homework to catch up on. I prevailed on him to help me out instead.”

“I bet you did.”

Windermere hunkered down in front of Adrian Miller’s laptop, her own desktop beside it, the file Nenad had opened with the list of usernames. “Check this out,” she told Stevens. “Ambriel98, that username Ashley Frey was using, it’s religious. It’s the name of an angel. There’s like eight other usernames that match the same profile.”

“What?” Stevens said. “Angels? Carla, I get that you’re trying to help this poor girl, but this is some mighty weak—”

“Yeah,” Windermere said. “See, that’s what I thought, too. But then I did some poking around.”

She brought up the list of usernames: Muriel94, Penemue96, Seraphiel97. Opened the Death Wish forum and brought up the first profile, Muriel94.
Sixteen-year-old with a death wish, Orlando, Florida.
An old username, opened three years ago last January. Real name: Ashley Frey.

“It’s not just angels, partner,” Windermere told Stevens. “These are Ashley Frey’s accounts. All of them.”

Stevens was quiet for a long moment. Windermere could hear a coffeemaker in the background. “I was going to drag the kids down to the river today, get some fresh air,” he said. “Guess I’ll give them a reprieve.”

•   •   •

Stevens showed up at CID about an hour later, eyes bleary and shirt rumpled, his thinning hair mussed. He handed coffees to Windermere and Nenad, looked over the tech’s shoulder at the laptop screen. The Death Wish forum.

“‘Muriel94,’” he read aloud. “‘Enter password.’ What the heck is this girl doing with all these accounts? Why make more than one?”

“The hell if I know,” Windermere told him. “But I figure maybe these other accounts could give us a way to track this girl down.”

Stevens nodded. “You sure we don’t need a warrant for this?”

Nenad glanced at him. “I mean, technically,” he said. “But considering this is more of a humanitarian mission, we can probably get away with it.”

Stevens looked at Windermere. Studied her for some sign, some reason why she’d taken up this crusade, of all the misery in the world. “Sure,” he said. “Just don’t let the SAC hear about this. I’m still kind of on Bureau probation around here, you know?” He leaned forward. “How are we doing, anyway?”

“Doing just fine.” Nenad typed something into the password box and sat back with a flourish. “I’m in.”

<
19
>

It was bound to happen.
One night, Sarah misjudged. Screwed up her timing. One night, Earl came home first.

Gruber was lying in bed, waiting, as usual. Heard a vehicle approaching, the pitch of the engine sounding a little off. The lights swept across the bedroom wall, the tires kicked up the gravel, too bright, too fast, all of it wrong. The screen door slammed open, no pretense of secrecy. The footsteps in the hall were too heavy—boots, not the heels she kept under the bed by the bottle.

Earl was home, and he was drunk. Gruber could hear him through the double-wide’s thin walls. Heard glass breaking in the kitchen, heard the TV switch on, the shopping channel, then sports, too loud. Heard Earl swear at his mother, heard another glass break. Then the boots were coming down the hall.

Gruber pulled the covers up, pretended to be asleep. Hid his eyes as Earl shoved open the door, waited without breathing as Earl looked him over. Heard the chuff of Earl’s breath, a muttered insult. Gruber could feel it coming in the worst possible way. Like when a kid told you he was going to fight you after school and all you could do was watch the clock tick toward the last bell.

Then Earl was at his bedside, shaking him, rough, rousing him awake. Cuffing him by the collar and dragging him to the floor, that awful, cheap-liquor breath in his face, demanding answers to some
question Gruber didn’t even know he’d been asked. He rolled away, fought to get free, caught a glimpse of the far wall, the little painting of the ship in the storm. Made a flash decision to save his own skin. Turn the tables, let Sarah get in trouble for a change.