RATH LOBBED A dart over Detective Test’s head to hit the triple 12 on the dartboard behind her.
“Watch it,” she said.
“Before we get to our pregnant dead girl,” Grout said, brusquely, “I have two things. First, I admit I may have been wrong. Maybe the girls are connected. And maybe it is something other than a straight-out rape killing. Second. A Mandy update. Larkin vacuumed all of her e-mails, interactions on Facebook, social-media crap. Zip. She only has six friends on Facebook, all girls, and has not posted anything since August. All her friends were girls. Plenty of guys sent friend requests. Larkin’s looking into them. But Mandy wasn’t active online. She had no computer. Good for her. That online shit’s pathetic. The older you are, the more so.”
“I’m on Facebook,” Sonja said.
“Right,” Grout said. “Anyway. She’s a loner. No close friends. Maybe because of the upheaval in her family life.”
“Anything there?” Rath said, “The coke-dealing dad?”
“A real winner, as you know,” Grout said. “Landscaper in the summer. Ski-lift operator in the winters. Not a sign of coke dealing when I stopped by to interview him. Your visit must have put him on high alert. He claims he was razzing you about pimping the girl because you, as he put it, were fucking her with your eyes.”
“I—” Rath said.
“Forget it. He’s a fucktard,” Grout said. “I grilled him like a sirloin about Mandy. He tried to come off as genuinely baffled why we’re even looking for her. Said she took off. That’s why she got emancipated after all. Called her a little bitch. She’s always done just what she wanted, according to him. Apparently, he doesn’t like people doing what they want unless it’s him. I think the girl, Porkchop, Abby Land, was covering for him though, as far as an alibi. There was definitely something there. She was scared.”
“I wonder why,” Rath said.
“I don’t,” Grout said. “Guy’s a fucking animal. His new wife, she’s been in Arizona the past two weeks because her mother’s dying. I don’t think Abby’s covering because she thinks he did something to Mandy. I asked her in private if she thought he did it. She looked me dead in the eyes and said no. She was telling the truth. But, I think she’s covering for him for something else. Maybe an affair. Or the coke dealing. It’s a fucked-up situation in that house. Much as I’d like to fuck this guy up, regarding Mandy, I think he’s a nonstarter, especially if the girls are all connected.”
Grout took a breath. Smiled. He handed a folder each to Sonja and Rath. He was taking control. Rath and Sonja had pissed him off in Barrons’s office, and it was fueling him to find focus and command. About time. Grout smiled again. “I ran down recent activity involving Satanic graffiti, sadism, the like,” he said. “I dug up these two model citizens.”
Rath opened the folder and looked at the mug shots from nineteen months prior of George Waters and Jeff Barber, both eighteen years old. Waters had the pale skin of a drowning victim pocked with acne craters and a nose that looked like a malformed tuber. His long hair was black and oily as hot tar and was plastered to his caved cheeks. His narrow eyes were black, the irises as dark as the pupils, reptilian. Peach fuzz traced his upper lip like a child’s scribble, and his left earlobe sported an earring: a silver pentagram.
The other mug shot showed a kid who looked somewhat normal in comparison, which wasn’t saying much. His hair was buzz cut; the first impression Rath had was skinhead. Odd how the same cut on another person might have made Rath think military or monk.
The kid’s bulging eyes gave him a startled, anxious look if you didn’t recognize symptoms of drug use. The kid’s eyes were jaundiced and set in a squeezed face that, paired with his sharp teeth, gave him a Nosferatu look. A sinister smile slashed his face, as if he thought getting a mug shot was a joke. Which he probably did.
“Real studs,” Sonja said.
“They were arrested for vandalism of a construction site. May of 2009. Along with—” Grout flipped a page of the report. “Desecration of a cemetery and animal cruelty.”
“Shit,” Sonja said. “These are the two lowlifes that killed that dog and left it on a headstone.”
Grout nodded. “Gutted the dog. And knocked over headstones with their pickup.”
“I should have thought of them. I missed the connection because I mostly remember the dog. Poisoned with hamburger laced with crystal Drano.”
Rath vaguely remembered something about the case now.
“But it didn’t die from that,” Grout said, “They sliced it open along its belly and pulled out all its insides while it was still alive.”
“They killed the puppies with a hammer,” Sonja said.
“Puppies?” Rath said.
“All five puppies,” Grout said. “Smashed to pulp with a hammer on headstones.”
“Practice for babies?” Sonja said, pale-faced.
“The graffiti they sprayed was of swastikas and pentagrams and goats’ heads,” Grout admitted, not without some regret. “It’s not as much that they painted the headstones as it is what they painted the headstones with.”
Rath read down the page. “They drained the dog’s blood into spray bottles?”
“Rust-Oleum red wasn’t good enough for these clowns,” Grout said.
This sort of viciousness wasn’t found in your average rebellious teen. It wasn’t even rebellion. It was an ecstatic pleasure taken from the debasement of other living creatures. Pure sadism. “So where are our two celebrated-citizen youths these days?” Rath said.
“Not in jail, where they should be,” Grout said. “They did Juvie. Community service. Same old shit. Blame it on their losing the parent lottery. Being minors. Give them a break.”
“No crimes committed since then?” Sonja asked.
“No arrests,” Grout said.
“Which isn’t the same thing,” Sonja said.
“Sick kids like these, how long do you think they still get their kicks from animal cruelty before they graduate to something better?” Grout said.
“They still in the area?” Rath asked.
“You’ll love this. Barber is in Afghanistan. Joined the fucking army. They’ll take anyone these days, apparently.” Grout said. “Waters is a house painter and is working on a construction site down in Bloomfield. I got a line on his address. But I might try to catch him off guard at work, first thing in the morning. I spoke to the general contractor, and he said the painters are in first this week, the electricians and plumbers done. I told him to have the other painters arrive about twenty minutes later than usual, so I can nab Waters alone. Brush up on how to remain neutral in the face of life’s shit.”