D.D. nodded, stepped back. Rosa and Keynes did the same. While the manager, Ethier, remained standing there, looking like a woman who’d just taken a beating, and her work shift had yet to begin.
“One last question,” D.D. said. “Does this place use any glitter?”
* * *
RESTROOMS. Tonic offered up a basket of toiletries for its patrons, male and female alike. D.D. and Rosa did the honors in the ladies’ room, while Keynes took the men’s room. D.D. found what she was looking for almost immediately, a hair gel product laced with gold glitter. She gave Keynes a quick call to learn he’d discovered the same. Nothing like a bit of sparkle for the discerning clubber with a big night ahead.
She held the gel under the overhead lights, watching the way the various gold particles shimmered. As Alex had said, the pieces appeared individual, distinct. And sticky. Chances were, even after hand washing, showering, minute pieces of the gluey sparkle lingered for days.
Just waiting to be transferred from a kidnapper’s hands to a victim’s apartment, or even her body?
D.D. dialed Ben Whitely, who most likely was still exhuming the body at the nature park.
He picked up the call, as charming as ever. “Whatever it is you want, I don’t know. I didn’t know five hours ago. I don’t know now. And if you don’t leave me alone long enough to finish wrapping up the scene and transport the body to the lab, I may never know anything ever again.”
“I need you to check something for me.”
“D.D.—”
“It will just take a second. Can you shine the flashlight on the body’s hair? Look for gold. As in glitter.”
“The hair is brown and completely saturated in dirt. How do you expect me to— Wait. There do appear to be some reflective particles. It’s possible I’m looking at glitter.”
“Can you remove a small sample? I’m going to send a uniformed officer to you immediately for pickup. Thank you, Ben.”
D.D. clicked off the phone, stood there thoughtfully.
Rosa came up behind her. The woman appeared tired, but was in control as always. “The glitter is important?”
“Yes.”
“What does it mean?”
“It means . . .” D.D. shrugged, still fumbling her way through a case with more questions than answers. “It means my husband was right. Natalie Draga, Kristy Kilker, Stacey Summers, your daughter. All of their disappearances are connected.”
She looked at Rosa. “The glitter tells us so.”
Chapter 35
LAUGHING. JACOB HAD A JOINT. They passed it back and forth between the two of them, heads bowed close together, giggling like schoolgirls. I sat alone at the tiny kitchen table, rubbing my bare arms for warmth, watching them in the family room.
Turned out, the new girl wasn’t new at all. She’d recognized Jacob. Threw open her long, creamy arms in greeting. He’d wrapped her in a tight embrace. A hug. Jacob hugged her.
I hadn’t been hugged . . . in a very long time.
Not since the days of the woman who looked like my mother and wore a silver fox charm around her neck.
At first, Jacob had been reluctant to enter the yard. “Nah,” he’d said. “She told me, last time she caught me, that she’d call the police. That’d be it. Back to the slammer, and we both know I ain’t ever going back there.”
“Then it’s a good thing she’s not around,” the new girl had said, hands still on Jacob’s shoulders.
“Come on now. You don’t need this kind of headache. I was just . . . in the area. Wanted to say hey.”
“Hey,” she said, and I swore his eyes glittered with tears.
“I don’t mean to bother you,” he whispered. “You were right last time; I’m an ass. I should just stay away.”
But he wasn’t moving, and neither was she.
“I was mad,” she said suddenly. “Last time I saw you. The things you said. I wasn’t ready to hear. Maybe I didn’t want to know. But I’ve been doing some thinking since then. Sometimes, I even hoped you’d stop by again, so we could talk. ’Cause I think . . . maybe there’s some truth in what you said.”
“What d’you mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Lindy . . .”
“Come inside. Come on. Just have a visit. We’ll catch up. This time, I’ll listen. I promise.”
“But if she—”
“She’s not coming back. I’m telling you the truth. She’s gone, and she’s never coming back again.”
That seemed to do the trick. Jacob stopped resisting. He followed the beautiful girl across the burned-out yard. I trailed behind the two of them, already forgotten.
I hated this new girl who wasn’t new. I hated her long dark hair. I hated her gleaming brown eyes. I hated the way she smiled at me, as if she already knew things I didn’t. Such as I was the one just passing through. She would always be the real deal.
The house was shabby. Dirty stucco-colored linoleum in the kitchen. Tired cabinets with sagging doors. Furniture patched with silver splashes of duct tape. It made me feel better. Some basic female instinct: At least my house is nicer than yours.
Except, of course, I didn’t have a house. I had a coffin-shaped box in the back of Jacob’s sleeper cab.
I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t know why. My throat was closing up, my heart rate too high.
Jacob, holding the knife down at his side. Now drinking and smoking with this girl, the legendary Lindy whom he talked about in his sleep. They were together. Before. Now. Forever. She would always be his.
Which made me completely expendable. Gator food. Literal white trash.
I was going to be sick. Except I hadn’t eaten enough lately to vomit. My hands trembled, my left knee jogged uncontrollably. Stress, fear, fatigue, hunger. Take your pick. I suffered, suffered, suffered.
While Jacob sat on the sofa, and laughed and smoked dope with the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen.
I don’t know when I first moved. I just did. Stood up at the table. Not like they were paying attention to me. Walked toward the jumbled collection of broken-down drawers, sagging cabinets.
A ratty kitchen. A shabby kitchen. But still a kitchen. And every kitchen stocks similar items. Such as knives.
The paring blade, short and easy to conceal? Or maybe the butcher knife. Go full psycho.
In the end, I selected a model in between. Without ever truly thinking about it. If the new girl wasn’t really new, then I could make a decision without really deciding.
Giggles. High-pitched. Happy.
And just for one moment . . .
I am home. I am rolling on a bed, all tangled up with my mother, my brother. We are laughing, laughing, laughing. This is Mom. This is Mom, all cracked up!
The softness of the down covers, the smell of spring rain and loamy earth right outside the window. The sound of my mom, my brother, laughing hysterically.
Home. Home, home, home.
Snapping back, I looked down at my pale skinny arm. I studied my hand holding the kitchen knife. And I realized then, truly got it, that I wasn’t going home again. I would never roll on that bed. I would never laugh with my family.
I would never go to that place. I would never be that person.
That girl was dead.
All that was left was this moment, this place, this knife in my hand.
I held out my left wrist, studied the maze of red scars, blue veins. It would be so easy. One swipe here, one swipe there. Leave Jacob to clean up the mess.
Gator food. Literal white trash.
My mother never knowing what happened to me. Denied even the comfort of burying my body.
She deserved better.
So for her sake, as much as my own, I took my knife and drifted into the family room.
* * *
THEY DIDN??
?T SEE ME COMING. Too busy whispering and giggling, reminiscing about the good old days, whatever. Their heads were bowed, Jacob’s hair gray-streaked and greasy, hers dark and silky.
It made it easy to launch the first strike. My arm raising all the way up, just like every slasher film I’d ever seen, except this time, I was the crazy-eyed stalker instead of the doe-eyed college student.
Nobody wants to be a monster.
Or do they?
Arm coming down, down, down.
A scream, sharp and shrill. Mine? Nope. Definitely hers. The beautiful new girl came shooting off the sofa, blood blossoming down her back where I had raked the knife across her shoulder blade.
“Shit!” Jacob exploded, fear just beginning to penetrate his doper’s glaze. “What the fuck, what the f—”
I turned to him next. Arm up, up, up.
Arm coming down, down, d—
She launched herself at me. The new girl who wasn’t new fought like a hellcat. She tackled me down to the ground. Fingernails slashing down my face, going for my eyes. Screaming words at me in a language I didn’t know. Not Spanish. Something far more exotic.
As I heaved against her reflexively, forgetting all about the kitchen blade, which had scattered from my grip.
But she didn’t. Her gaze flashed to the knife, resting several feet away. Her face sharpening with a look of cunning.
I realized what she was going to do the second before she made her move. A fresh launch, this time from my chest, toward the blade. I turned with her, grabbing at her left arm, as if to hold her back.
She kicked at me without ever losing focus, stretching long, and just like that, she had the knife, turning back, looming over me. The smile on her face. Feral. Happy.
So Jacob wouldn’t be the one to kill me after all.
Interesting.
Knife. Not going up, up, up. What would be the fun in that? But instead twirling lazily in front of my eyes.
She spoke again, whispers of death in her exotic tongue. No translation required to understand she was going to slice me up. And she was going to enjoy doing it.
“Stop!” Jacob’s hand, snapping around her wrist. “Gimme that. Stupid bitches.”
She yelled at him. In English this time. Demanded the right to finish what I’d started. I didn’t speak. I didn’t move. My heart was beating too fast. I lay on the floor, the fallen gazelle trapped between two lions.
“She has her uses,” Jacob was arguing, the first time I’d heard him give me any credit. “Not for you to decide anyway. She’s mine. Get your own plaything.”
Then, after a long exchange that went over my fuzzy, blacking-out head—she was still sitting on my chest—a sudden change.
The girl stood, removing her weight and allowing oxygen to come flooding back. She tucked away the knife but still peered at me in triumph.
“You,” Jacob addressed me. “You got work to do.”
It took me a bit to sit up, climb shakily to my feet.
“You attacked my daughter,” he said.
Daughter?
“Violated her hospitality. Now you gotta pay. She demands a tribute. Since she can’t kill you, you gotta go out, find her a replacement toy.”
I couldn’t do it. I begged, pleaded. Jacob had tried before. Talk to that girl in that bar. Go chat up that woman in the corner. Bring her over to me.
Before, I’d always been able to distract him. Have another beer. Let’s go back to the rig. Let’s put a new song on the jukebox.
But now, he was adamant. I would go out with him and his daughter. I would befriend a girl of their choosing. And I would introduce the woman to them.
Or Jacob would leave me alone with his daughter and an entire collection of kitchen knives.
For emphasis, she produced the knife, then slid the blade down my forearm, both of us staring in fascination as the blood welled to the surface.
In the end, I caved. You tell yourself you will be strong. You tell yourself this is impossible, it can’t get any worse. You even tell yourself you’d rather die.
But the truth is, it’s hard to give up on life. I don’t know why. Surely giving up would’ve made more sense. I should’ve gone with my first instinct and slashed my wrists in the kitchen.
But I hadn’t. I didn’t.
I wanted to survive.
And now . . . this.
I bandaged Lindy’s shoulder. I’d hit all bone, leaving a long but shallow groove across her shoulder blade. By morning, she wouldn’t feel a thing.
Only my terror would go on and on and on.
She dressed in a deep purple, a shade so dark it was nearly black. I was given some of Lindy’s clothes, a worn pair of jeans, already falling off my bony hips, and a T-shirt tied beneath my breasts. Lindy had a car. A clunker to match her home.
Jacob drove. Lindy sat with me in the back, gloating over what was to come.
“How long have you lived here?” I tried to ask. “How often do you get to see your father?” I nearly tripped over the word father. But Lindy wouldn’t talk. She had her eye on the prize, a fun night out on the town.
The bar Jacob finally chose was a dive, a barely standing shack at the edge of a barely there beach advertising cheap beer. The kind of place that would make discerning patrons shudder and dedicated drunks cheer. The kind of place Jacob himself fit right in.
Lindy stood out. Too young, too beautiful in her purple-black dress and long, loose hair. Men stared at her in instant lust, women in instant hatred. She smirked at all of them, following her father through a maze of closely packed tables.
In contrast to her, I went unnoticed. Too pale, too skinny, too all-washed-up. Not even a drunk, more like a heroin addict.
I didn’t know what else to do, so I followed them to the worn driftwood bar, earning points by association.
Jacob ordered up shots of tequila. A round for all three of us, and an instant bloom of fire in my empty, shrunken stomach. I was glassy-eyed after the first shot. Barely standing by the second.
Willing me into compliance, or an act of compassion, as Jacob knew I’d do what he said anyway.
Nobody wants to be a monster.
But some are still born that way. And others, with bleeding cuts down their arms and enough tequila in their stomachs . . .
Lindy nudged my shoulder, her gaze darting to the corner.
A woman sat there, eyes heavily made up, tube top barely containing her voluminous chest. She was not young and pretty. More like middle-aged and fleshy. A pro, I recognized by now. Because bars like this attracted as many working girls as local drunks.
“Tell her we want to party,” Lindy instructed me. “We know a place, we have the cash.”
I didn’t move. So Jacob shoved me. “You heard her. Go.”
I staggered back from the bar, having to focus hard to keep my footing. One step in front of the other. Moving past the tables. To the shadows in the corner.
To the woman waiting there.
She eyed me expectantly when I approached. Even for me, it was hard not to stare at all the flesh spilling out from that much-too-tiny top. But I forced myself to find her eyes, to register they were hard and calculating and also brown. Brown eyes. Like her mother’s? Like her daughter’s?
Everyone is a person.
Only I have become an object.
“Run,” I heard myself say, my voice barely a whisper. Was I speaking to me? Was I speaking to her?
Now was the time. The last moment of truth.
“Girl?” she asked.
“My name is . . .” What is my name? Who am I? Molly. Not Molly. A monster.
“Please, go. Just leave. They . . . they . . .” I needed to say something. Very important. My head was swimming. Too much tequila, not enough food. I was going to be sick.
Suddenly, Lindy was at
my side, her hand squeezing my forearm where she’d sliced it earlier. Squeezing hard.
“We’re looking for a party,” she practically purred. “A private party . . .”
The woman agreed to come with us, her gaze going past us to rest on Jacob. The philosophical shrug of a woman who’d seen worse.
All of you? she asked, which nearly made me vomit.
No, Lindy corrected her, just the man. But I want to watch.
The woman shrugging philosophically again.
Don’t do it, I wanted to tell her.
But I couldn’t find my voice. I couldn’t find my will.
I only knew how to survive.
I didn’t know how to save anyone else.
Jacob drove. He headed to Lindy’s house and then . . . and then . . .
* * *
THERE WAS MUFFLED SCREAMING. It went on for a long time. There were grunts and groans, smacks and squeaks, all from a place I wouldn’t go, a room I never saw.
I sat outside Lindy’s house, in the backyard, my arms wrapped tight around my head, as if that would block the onslaught.
Eventually, I crawled far enough away to vomit up the tequila. Then I dry heaved. Then I picked at the scab on my forearm, if only to distract myself by watching the cut bleed again.
Hours later Jacob walked out wearing jeans, nothing else, his white flabby belly like an obscene growth. He smelled terrible. Sweet and sour. Sweat and sex.
I would’ve thrown up again if I’d had anything left.
He merely grunted, lit up a cigarette.
“Evening time, we’ll take her out to the swamp. Let the gators do the hard work for us.”
I said nothing.
He squatted down, peered straight at me.
“If it hadn’t been her, would’ve been you,” he said.
Brown eyes, I thought. Like her mother’s. Like her daughter’s.
“Do you have any more children?” I heard myself ask.
He laughed. “Nah. Just this one.”
“Her mother—”
“Hates my guts. Kept her from me for years. But that’s the thing about kids. They grow up. Get a mind of their own. Now, she wants to know her daddy. Can you believe it? All these years later . . .” Jacob grinned in the dark. “My little girl loves me.”