The drug counselor’s thick face spread into a smile. “I’m not surprised you had trouble figuring out who she was,” he said. “I worked with Rae-Lynn for three months, and in that time, she never used the same name for more than a week.” The counselor’s corn-rowed hair made him look like Stevie Wonder. He stared fondly at the picture. “One day she’d have a hippie name like Moonlight or, what was it…Zenshine. Next time she’d go sexy—Monique or Sasha. You know, the kind of names a little girl would come up with to make herself sound grown-up.”
“Jacqueline,” Caroline said quietly. She sat across from him at a long table in the dining room of the group home where Rae-Lynn Pierce had gotten treatment.
“Yeah, like Jacqueline,” the counselor said. “I liked working with her. A lot of these women come in and start playing you.” He nervously pulled at his lip. “When you meet someone like Rae-Lynn…I’ve always liked the kind of people who work hard to remain optimistic in the face of everything. You understand, Detective Mabry?”
Caroline handed the counselor a photograph of Burn and he stared hard at it.
“Yeah. This kid had a street name. I can’t quite remember it.”
“Burn?”
“Yeah. Burn. We do our best to keep anyone on the outside from finding the women in here.” He put the photo of Burn back on the table. “But the women get lonely and call these guys sometimes.”
“You think he came in to see Rae-Lynn like that?” Caroline rested her finger above Burn’s forehead.
“I just can’t remember. I’m sorry. It blurs. I’ve been doing this a long time.”
“But you do think this guy came here to see Rae-Lynn?”
He just shrugged, then his eyebrows raised and he clapped his hands together. “You know, there is one person. Chloe. She was here then.” He looked over his shoulder. “She might know more. Sometimes the women keep a better eye on each other than the staff does. I’ll see if she can talk to you.”
He stood to leave, but Caroline stopped him. She slid another photo forward, the picture of Shelly Nordling.
“How about this one?”
“Shelly.” He sighed. “That was really too bad about her. Shelly was here the same time as Rae-Lynn. I think they were even fairly close. Well, as close as people get in here, if you know what I mean.”
When Caroline didn’t answer, he went on.
“You have to remember,” the drug counselor said, “everyone in here has stolen from their parents or their girlfriend or sold their kid’s toys to get drugs. I mean, by the time they get here, they aren’t the most trusting people.” He stood to go check his files. “I’ll see if Chloe feels like talking.”
Caroline nodded and wrote on the notebook in front of her. “I’ll need as much information on both women as you have. Contacts, files, forwarding addresses, insurance information. Anything you have.”
“I can look.” He stood and walked through the kitchen toward the offices.
Caroline stood and walked around the dining room, two long tables with benches on either side, like a school cafeteria. The treatment facility was in a grand old house in Browne’s Addition, a neighborhood of nineteenth-century mansions that had mostly been carved into apartments or group homes. Breakfast for the twelve women in the house had been between seven and nine, and now at ten they were back in their rooms or off at jobs or in school, desperately trying to achieve the kind of lives—a service job and enough money to afford food—that most people would consider hard and unfair. Caroline paced around the long tables. On the walls were posters showing sunrises and kittens and waves at the ocean, each poster with some empty inspiration. But there was one that was more cryptic, and it caught Caroline’s attention: a poster of an old wooden bucket filled to the brim with water. The poster read, “Chop wood; carry water.” Caroline stared at it.
When she turned, a thin black woman in a wheelchair was in the doorway.
“Kind of makes you think, don’t it? What that might mean?”
Caroline turned to the poster and then back to the girl in the wheelchair. “You must be Chloe. I’m Caroline Mabry.”
“Chris said you wanted to talk to me?”
“Yes,” Caroline said. She gestured toward the table, where the small photographs of Burn, Rae-Lynn, and Shelly sat like a row from a high school yearbook. Chloe hesitated, then wheeled herself over to the table. She lifted herself out of the seat of her wheelchair, and Caroline saw cords of lean muscle in her tiny arms. She looked at the pictures on the table for what seemed a half second at most, sighed, and dropped back into the seat of the wheelchair.
“You came down here to show me dead people?”
“Are they all dead?”
Chloe tapped the pictures of Shelly and Burn. “She’s been dead five months and this one got pushed into the river by a cop.”
Caroline smiled at her interpretation of what had happened on the bridge, but she didn’t correct her. “What about her?” She pointed to the picture of Rae-Lynn, but Chloe didn’t even look down at it.
“If she ain’t dead, she’s gonna be.”
“You have reason to think she’s dead?”
Chloe smiled. “I have reason to think we’re all dead.” She lost interest in her own humor though and craned her neck to look into the kitchen. “I wonder if the coffee’s on.”
“This will only take a minute.” Caroline pushed the pictures closer to the woman in the wheelchair so that they hung slightly over the edge of the table.
Chloe looked down at the pictures. “You in some hurry?” she asked.
“Little bit.”
“Oh yeah? You gotta get home, take care of your kids?”
“I don’t have any kids,” Caroline said. “I’m going to a funeral.”
Chloe looked rather interested at this. “Whose?”
Caroline nudged the picture of Burn so that it teetered on the edge of the table. “His. They found his body in the river. The family’s having a service this afternoon.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Then you liked him.”
“No, it’s too bad they found his body. Fish could’ve eaten the fucker, all I care.”
“Did he do something to you?”
She shrugged. “Nothin’ out of the ordinary.”
“He wasn’t the one who…” And Caroline pointed to the wheelchair.
Chloe looked down at the big spoked wheel and figured out what Caroline was asking. “No,” she said, but didn’t volunteer anything else.
Caroline smiled. “You want to go?”
“To the funeral?” Chloe smiled. “That’d be pretty funny, huh?”
Caroline pressed the record button on the tape player and slid it into the middle of the table, right between them. “So?”
Chloe looked from the tape recorder to the pictures and then back again.
“Well,” she began. “Okay. For a guy his age, Burn did pretty good with the girls. Always had four or five. Rae there was only with him a couple weeks, but old Shelly, she ran with him a while.”
Caroline imagined Lenny Ryan arriving five months ago, asking the same questions she was asking now, finding out the same things she was finding out now. “Was Burn your pimp too?”
Chloe rolled her eyes. “It ain’t like little girls in thigh-high boots riding with some nigger in a Cadillac. Ain’t like that. Guy like Burn, he’s someone to party with, you know? Had a place over off Pacific. Nice. Me and Shelly were mostly doing car dates, or taking ’em into alleys or into the big boats on that lot on Sprague, before them security guards got all bent out of shape about it. About that time Burn said we could use his place. Four or five dates a night, you might get a couple hundred, give half to Burn and he’d hook you up with smack or whatever and make sure you get a burger and some fries before you spent all your money and crashed on his couch. You party with his friends and that makes him the Mac and if anyone doesn’t pay or tries to fuck you without paying, well, if you’re running with Burn, that ain’t gonna happen much.”
Caroline was concentrating, trying to keep up. “So can you tell me exactly when Rae-Lynn and Shelly were with him?”
Chloe waved off the question, as if measuring time would have been impossible, or at least irrelevant. “Shelly, everyone call her Pills.” Chloe looked around the group home self-consciously. “Had a real addictive-type personality. Needs someone to make her think she ain’t alone. She was always trying to hook up with some guy. Like she’s falling in love, just disappear off the street for a while. Then she come back, all sad, ‘He threw me out!’ It was like that with Burn, called him her boyfriend for a while. But a girl like Rae, I think she’s smarter, she knows a thing or two.”
“Was Shelly working for Burn when she was killed?”
“You asking me, did Burn do her?” Chloe raised her eyebrows.
“Yeah, I guess I am asking that.”
“I honestly don’t know.”
Caroline stared at the girl. “Did people assume it was Burn?”
“People? What people? Somebody do a poll?” Chloe stared at the foot pegs of her wheelchair. “He didn’t go around telling people it wasn’t him, that’s for sure. I mean, girl’s hawking stuff at pawnshops and sucking a little extra dick on the side and then tells Burn she doesn’t need his help anymore…shit.” She just let it hang there.
“Burn knew she was hawking things?”
“Oh yeah. He come off all sweet, but he keep track of your money for you.”
Caroline looked back at her notes. “You said she was turning tricks on the side. Why would she do that?”
“Save some money. Get out of town.”
“Burn didn’t want her saving money to leave town?”
Chloe nodded. “If you ain’t buying drugs from him no more, then you must be buying from someone else. You know?”
“That’s what happened? You think Burn got mad at her for going on her own and assumed she was buying drugs elsewhere?”
Chloe shrugged. “Told you, I don’t know what happened. But even if he didn’t do it, you see why it would be in his interest to let people assume he did?”
“So that was the theory—” Caroline hated to say it, like she was mimicking an old Starsky and Hutch episode, but there was no choice—“on the street?”
Chloe just laughed.
“Let me ask it this way. If someone was to ask around about what happened to Shelly”—she reached in her bag and brought out a photo of Lenny Ryan—“let’s say this guy. You think he’d get the same…hypothetical answer that you just gave me?”
Chloe took the photo of Lenny Ryan. “That’s the guy from the paper, huh? The guy doin’ all those women.” She stared at the picture. “Well, if he’s smart, he wouldn’t need to ask, but yeah, that’s what he’d hear. Girl cut. Still wearin’ her clothes. Whoever did it wasn’t interested in no freaky stuff. Not like this sicko.” She held up the photo. “A girl gets whacked on time like that? It’s either the guy paying for pussy or the guy she’s paying afterward. See? Ain’t a whole lot of other suspects to choose from. Ain’t the fuckin’ butler, you know?”
Caroline stared at the girl. She couldn’t weigh ninety pounds without her wheelchair and here she was explaining the world to Caroline.
“I mean, come on.” Chloe tapped her finger on the long dining table, as if she were diagramming a football play. “It don’t take a damn rocket scientist.”
On her notebook Caroline had written “Burn killed Shelly.” She underlined it twice. She had the sensation of watching a road emerge from the fog. She nodded to the picture of Lenny. “You ever see him before?”
Chloe looked down at the picture in her hand. “No. But I haven’t been on the street since…” She fumbled with the brake on her wheelchair. “I’ve been in here or in the hospital most of the last year.”
“Did Shelly ever mention having a boyfriend?”
“Shelly? Any guy with a wallet was Shelly’s boyfriend. Old guys, mostly. I know she moved here with some old guy.”
“Did she ever talk about a boyfriend from California?”
Chloe thought for a minute, then smiled. “Yeah. I remember something…some guy she was all hung up on. But hell, I couldn’t tell you anything. Every whore in here talks about the guy who treated her good. Gets pretty old. We’re all just waiting until we save enough money to go back to him. Or until he gets out of jail. Or leaves his wife.”
Caroline thought of herself and Dupree and flinched. The counselor came back into the room and handed Caroline two slim files, one with the name “Rae-Lynn Pierce” across the top, the other with Shelly Nordling’s name. He kept another envelope close to his chest.
Caroline dug into Shelly Nordling’s file. There wasn’t much in it, just an admittance sheet, a discharge sheet, and a couple of other reports. Caroline paused right away on the first page, at the address that Shelly listed when she was checked into this treatment center. The address was familiar. Just off the freeway in East Central. She thought about something Chloe had just said, that she failed to follow up on. “You said Shelly moved here with an old guy. Do you remember his name?”
“Shit,” she said and stared at the ceiling. “I can see the guy. Booted her out for using dope and stealing stuff. What was his name?”
“Albert,” said the counselor quietly.
“Yeah,” Chloe said. “I think that’s right. She used to call him Uncle Albert. Yeah. Right. I thought that was funny, you know, like the song?”
Albert Stanhouse. Shelly lived with Lenny Ryan’s uncle, and that’s why Lenny killed him. Suddenly Dupree’s random murders—his spinning top—seemed a lot less random. Caroline could imagine Lenny putting it together: Uncle Albert drags Shelly to Spokane, then tosses her out on the street where Burn pimps her. When she wants to leave she goes to the pawnbroker to get enough money to go back to California, but he shortchanges her on a bracelet. Lenny comes to town and kills all of them. So here was Caroline trying to punish a guy for murdering hookers who was punishing people for murdering a hooker. It shocked her, looking at all that Lenny Ryan had discovered by scratching around beneath the surface and how little they had discovered by working above it.
But something had been nagging at the back of her mind. If Lenny Ryan had reasons to kill his uncle and Burn and the pawnshop owner, then was he the same psychopath they’d been imagining, that Blanton and McDaniel had been dissecting? She had the urge to laugh just then, and she thought about Dupree and his contention that the best response in irrational situations was irrationality. She had another urge too—to find Dupree and tell him what she’d found.
She was startled when her phone rang; still thinking about Dupree, she didn’t even check the number. Instead, she held a finger up to the drug counselor and Chloe, turned her back, and took the call.
“Hey,” she said, fully expecting to hear Dupree’s voice on the other end.
“Ms. Mabry,” said Curtis Blanton. “My ticket insists this big Quonset hut is the Spo-Caine International Airport.”
“Because of Canada,” she said.
“Oh. Of course. I guess that makes sense.”
She felt two steps behind. “Wait a minute. You’re in Spokane?”
“Aren’t you going to ask what I’m doing here?”
“What are you doing here?”
“Good question. After we got off the phone I looked over your case again, and I thought of you with that sick twist McDaniel milking this thing for his next stupid book, and I knew you needed my help. So I caught the first flight out.”
Caroline rubbed her head. “You know, I’m in an interview right now. Can you rent a car? Or take a cab?”
“No need. I’ll wait here for you. But don’t tell McDaniel I’m in town. Okay? I want to surprise the big, neckless bastard. He’s gonna shit paper when he sees me.”
Caroline didn’t know how to answer, so she just turned her phone off. Everything was moving too quickly. When she turned back the counselor was bent down, showing Chloe the letter he’d taken from the envelope.
“What is that?” she asked.
The counselor straightened up and patted his corn-rowed hair in the back. “We operate on the same model as AA or NA here,” the counselor said. “Even the counselors here, most of us have been…are you familiar with the twelve steps, Detective?”
“Somewhat.”
The counselor handed her the short letter and the envelope. “One of the most important steps is the acknowledgment of the people we’ve hurt through our addiction. That’s one thing we do here. We have the women write letters to the people they hurt. Some apologize. Some just make excuses. Some aren’t even ready for that and they just hit their family up for more money or blame their parents for their problems.
“I worried about that with Shelly because she only wrote one letter. And when I tried to get her to mail it, she begged me not to because she didn’t want the man to know where she was. So I put it in her file and never mailed it. Normally, I wouldn’t think of violating a patient’s privacy like this. But…”
Caroline looked away from him then, down at the letter in her hands, which began, “Dear Lenny.”