“YOU CAN’T LET anyone know I leaked this to you,” Sonja said. She sat across from Rath in a dark booth at the rear of The Wilderness, the booth replete with forest green plastic cushions that squeaked like a gerbil wheel every time she or Rath blinked. The two perused plastic menus the size of billboards and tattooed with countless greasy fingerprints: a forensic nightmare.
Being 2:30 on a Monday, and The Wilderness was dead except for two waitresses rolling up utensils in green napkins and consolidating ketchup in ketchup bottles. The clack of billiard balls rose from the establishment’s lone pool table in the back bar. Country music played. Johnny Cash sang his rendition of “Hurt,” which Rath preferred to the original.
“I don’t have sway in Victory,” Sonja said, “but we pool depressing resources. And Lou’s my neighbor. But if he knew I was passing incomplete reports to an unofficial—”
“I get it,” Rath said. “Why not loop in Grout? It’s his investigation. He’s your superior. If this girl is Mandy, the state police will contact him anyway. As of midnight last night, Mandy was officially missing.”
“Because this has nothing to do with Mandy. Unless we, you, find something. My hands are tied, the girl being found outside my jurisdiction, and, well—”
Rath sipped his chocolate shake. Here he was, The Great PI, fifteen-hundred-calorie milk shake in hand, puzzled by The Mystery of His Middle-Age Flab.
Sonja slid a manila folder to Rath. He lifted the cover with his pinkie and glimpsed a ghastly photo, then let the folder fall shut.
“She’s not our girl,” Sonja said. “The body is partly decomposed.”
“I see that.”
“It was found in Sugar Brook, a tributary to the Connecticut. Wedged under a blow down.” She leaned on her elbows. “Here’s the thing—”
Rath pushed his shake aside as a stout waitress in her fifties clonked over, blowing a wisp of gray hair out of her weary eyes. “Decided?” she said, as if peeved customers would have the gall to come in during her dead time. Rath wondered if his mother had ever showed such irritation with customers. No, he decided. Never. “Well?” the waitress said.
“Chicken tenders,” Sonja said.
“You?” The waitress bobbed her head at Rath as if accusing him of a crime, perhaps something lecherous.
“A Barnburner Burger, rare, with chipotle sauce, onion rings. And a Molson.” Mystery of the Middle-Aged Flab solved.
They sent her on her way.
“Chipotle on a burger?” Sonja said.
“Salsa of the not-so-new millennium.”
Rath pushed a fist into his lower back, wishing he’d stopped to get his prescription filled on the way. “Go on,” he said.
“She wasn’t killed there. She wasn’t even left there. The way she was crammed up under the logjam looks like she was dumped upstream, maybe in a shallow grave near the brook. Then, along came the flooding we had to unearth her and carry her downstream. There are broken bones, her left zygomatic is crushed, right ulna and radius both shattered, and deep lacerations to the body suffered postmortem. Likely from the body’s being washed down the creek, getting stuck, then tearing free again.”
“Cause of death?”
“It will be awhile. The abdomen was ripped open, too. By very sharp rocks looks like. Animals had been at her organs and viscera.” Sonja twisted her wedding band absentmindedly. “Could be natural causes. Maybe she was hiking, got caught in a storm, and—”
“You don’t believe that.”
The waitress dropped their plates and walked away in a huff.
Rath stared at his still-sizzling onion rings, deciding to let them cool before he launched into them and burned his mouth as he always did. The burger was the size of a trash-can lid. “How old do we think this girl is?” he said.
“Sixteen to twenty.” Sonja peeled the fried breading from a chicken finger to lay bare a hunk of pale meat.
Is she really going to eat that? Rath wondered.
“Any idea on ID?” he asked.
“None.” Sonja took a bite of chicken, set it down, and pushed her plate to the side. She leaned in again, and Rath caught a scent of shampoo: faint and fresh, strawberry? He took a gulp of his shake.
“If this doesn’t have anything to do with Mandy, why am I here?” Rath asked.
“I did some digging. Looking for MP reports for girls roughly her and Mandy’s age, the last six months or so. Just. To see.”
“And?” Rath bit an onion ring. “Fuck,” he hissed, and spit out his onion ring. “Hot.” He ran his tongue along the roof of his napalmed mouth, tickling the tender spot of ruined flesh, knowing in the next few days that strands of dead skin would dangle down and distract him to the edge of insanity. He popped the lid off his shake and chugged what was left, waved his hand, “Sorry, go on.”
“You gonna make it?” She smiled, and there was nothing Rath could do to stop the blush that shot through his face.
“Go on,” he said.
“I came up with zip, within fifty square miles. But.” Sonja straightened. Rath knew the proud posture. A bomb was about to be dropped. “When I looked back over sixteen months and expanded the range to a thousand square miles. It sounds like a lot, but isn’t when you consider it being just twenty by fifty miles.” Sonja took a breath.
A country song played from the bar, the tremulous voice of a girl, all bubble-gum flirtation, singing If you wanna pick me up, you better drive a pickup truck. The girl didn’t sound a day over nine years old; probably wasn’t.
Sonja looked Rath in the eye, her pupils large in the dim amber lighting. Beautiful. She paused, savoring her private information for a moment. “Three girls in the greater region have gone missing in the past sixteen months and not been found.”
“Is that high?”
“It is for this region. In the ten years prior, only seven girls went missing and have never been located. In ten years. Before that, we had—”
“The Connecticut River Valley Killer.”
The song on the jukebox ended, and a silence fell on the place. Sonja shifted, and the booth’s vinyl seat squeaked.
Rath knew what Sonja was thinking. The CRVK had never been found even though the killings had stopped. To this day, Rath knew, Barrons returned to the case file again and again. At times, Barrons called Rath in the middle of the night to posit a theory.
That there’d been no prime suspect, let alone charges filed, had been Barrons’s greatest regret and career failure; the man had aged ten years and gotten divorced in the twenty months of the official investigation. And as much as Rath had wanted to stay on the case, on the force itself, in the aftermath of Laura’s death, his need to care for Rachel had left him depleted, scattered. He’d resigned.
That the killings had stopped had meant one of four scenarios: The killer was serving time on other charges; the killer had died; the killer had moved to a new territory, or, for some reason, the killer had been lying in wait to strike again.
“We’re talking girls here,” Sonja said. “Gone. I dove into the reports. The copies are in your folder. A cursory glance, and I could determine only one thing they had in common besides age. No one interviewed thought any of the girls had any reason whatsoever to run away.”
“Which means squat.”
“Sure, yeah. Nobody knows what’s going on in a teenager’s life. But none have ever used her cell phone or Facebook or other Internet pages again.”
“So why no investigation?”
“There was, for each. Separately. In the end, there was nothing to find. Zero.”
Rath’s mind wandered to Rachel, her silence.
“Dig into those reports,” Sonja said. “Each girl might be an outlier. A runaway. Who knows. But compare them to our dead girl and to Mandy. For any connection.”
“We know our dead girl isn’t one of these three?”
“Based on dental records and times of death. Yes.”
“So that makes four girls.”
Sonja nodded.
“You think they’re connected,” Rath said.
“I don’t think one way or the other.”
Sonja was treating Rath like he was a parent of a missing child, playing it tight. I don’t have a theory one way or another, Mr. Rath. We must keep an open mind. She was eager, ambitious, and she wanted a case to get her to the next level. Rath didn’t understand what she was doing in northern Vermont instead of Boston or Chicago. But the new industrial park and big box-store wasteland planned for the southern part of the county meant a stronger tax base. The force would get a piece of the pie, and Sonja was fierce. Her digging up old missing-person reports was not a whim. Most young detectives would never think to do it. And while she wouldn’t directly fuck over Grout, she’d give herself an edge over him; Rath saw that plainly.
“The flurry of missing girls might just be a random spike,” she said, covering her bases, playing a preemptive devil’s advocate before Rath could do it. “Like spikes in teen suicide. And sometimes runaways want to run away from everything and everyone, not just parents. Start clean. Explaining the lack of cell-phone and social-media use. Besides, Mandy might show any second. But. I don’t like it.”
“Why wouldn’t four missing girls get on the radar of Vermont State Police as possibly connected?” Rath was playing devil’s advocate now, poking at her theory to make her clarify her logic. The fact was, he didn’t like it either.
“They weren’t all from Vermont. Two were in New Hampshire. Poor communication. New Hampshire and Vermont State Police did make one effort to connect the dots. They even had the FBI look into it, since two states would make it federal. But, the Bureau said nada.”
Rath knew that scenario intimately. The Bureau had believed the CRVK was bullshit, too. Told Vermont and New Hampshire there was no solid evidence the crimes were committed by the same killer. Barrons had gone ape-shit: So, you want me to believe there are several perps out there who each decided to rape and strangle a girl on a whim, as a one-off, using the same MO, and it’s coincidence the girls have similar physical profiles? The Bureau had taken exception to his claim that the MO was exactly the same, and to his tone.
“I’ll dig into the reports tonight, before my dart game,” Rath said.
“Ah. The big night out.” Her eyes glimmered, teasing.
OUTSIDE, THE DAY had turned gray and mean, a north wind shrieking out of Canada. Rath pulled up the collar of his jacket and tugged his knit cap over his ears. He took out his cell and dialed Rachel. It stopped ringing on the second ring.
“Rachel—” He was cut off by a cold, automated voice: The voice mail for the number you have dialed is full. Please try back at another time. What the hell? He fumbled typing a short text message.
Are you OK? Let me know. Please. xxoo