Among Prey (3 page)

Give a dog a Jennifer Aniston cut and it still looks like a dog.

Amber hated Jennifer Aniston so much. Jennifer Aniston was almost single-handedly responsible for her mental breakdown. The daily battle with ugly, neckless toad women requesting the “Rachel cut” began to wear her down. She fought with them beforehand, trying to get them to choose something more flattering to their “unique” features. Then she fought with them afterward when they wanted their hair fixed.

Somehow, despite hundreds of repetitions of this series of events, Amber managed to never tell a single woman what needed fixing was her hideous face, not her haircut. But she noticed her resting heart rate at work never fell below a hundred. She found taking a deep breath an almost unmanageable task. She found whenever the front desk woman pointed a customer toward her chair, she felt a sudden urge to fall and hit her head on the concrete floor. And with that thought, and the thought of being rolled past the client on a stretcher, came an overwhelming feeling of relief and joy.

So Amber went to a shrink and got prescribed various benzodiazepines for her panic attacks and an SSRI for her generalized anxiety disorder. She stopped taking the SSRI when she noticed it prevented her from getting the warm fuzzies when drinking or popping pills, which she learned was the feeling of the brain dumping a big dose of dopamine. Instead she began combining the pills and the booze for even better results. The SSRI had taken only the sharpest edge off a day, but the benzo/alcohol combo left her floating in a warm haze.

Amber wasn’t an idiot—she knew this drug combo was a temporary fix. Yet, she thought she might be an idiot, because she didn’t see any way out. She could only try to halt her downward spiral by not increasing the dose as often as she’d like. Luckily, a way out found her.

She walked into the back room at Good Snips one day and found everyone laughing over a help-wanted ad. LYLAS Dolls was opening a new in-store doll salon, and though cutting doll hair didn’t require a license, they preferred someone with cutting experience. Amber’s coworkers swore they’d never cut dolls’ hair under the direction of bratty, little children. For all their laughter, though, several of them had been looking in the help-wanted ads or they wouldn’t have noticed it. Nobody liked working at Good Snips.

Amber turned in an application that very evening.

She went to the interview under the influence of only one milligram of Klonopin—which for her was the equivalent of stone sober—and gave the miniature haircut of her life. After they offered her an hourly rate several dollars higher than what she made at Good Snips, the nib of her pen nearly set the paperwork alight she signed so quickly.

The situation wasn’t ideal, but the only ideal she could think of was lying in bed all day every day with a mountain of blankets pulled over her head and only a slight gap left for peeking out at the television. LYLAS Dolls was a lot better than Good Snips. Yeah, she dealt with some spoiled brats and some even more spoiled mothers, but the big difference was most of the customers enjoyed the experience. Amber liked making them happy, and liked the way happy people tended to treat her with a bit more respect than her Good Snips clientele. Yeah, it was just a tad bit completely humiliating cutting doll hair, and pretending to talk to the dolls while she did it, but when it got too bad, she just said, “Xanax, take me away.”

* * *

Amber hadn’t expected Bobby to return, but he darkened the LYLAS Dolls doorway only a week later. Amber always worked Wednesdays by herself, and she learned that Bobby had a standing Wednesday appointment with a shrink in the office across the street. It had long been tradition for Carol to take him for ice cream at the parlor a couple of shops down in the strip mall, but he began to occasionally turn into LYLAS Dolls.

Before long, Amber knew his idiosyncrasies well enough that she’d tell Carol to do what the other parents did: sit back and enjoy someone else occupying her charge for an hour. It didn’t take many visits before Carol would walk in and plop herself into one of the comfortable pleather-upholstered seats that lined one wall and do crossword puzzles or read a paperback while Amber and Bobby built a new friend.

It always surprised Amber how specific Bobby was in his concept. She’d suggest parts, clothes, haircuts, and Bobby would look right through them, then back to what he was doing. He didn’t seem to be working toward any specific pattern. His dolls were usually white, but not always. They could be blonde or brunette. Most were built from the parts representing grade-school children, but he made one from the toddler-proportioned parts, and one from the teen. Usually, once a customer had been in a few times, Amber would get a sense of their style, but not with Bobby.

The situation could have been very disturbing. Amber realized that most women would be uncomfortable helping a hulking man choose clothing for his naked dolls. But Bobby showed no sexual interest in the dolls whatsoever. That fact, along with his childish features and demeanor (and a few benzos washed down with schnapps) helped calm Amber’s nerves, and she actually found it more fun to help Bobby than most of the little girls who came into the store.

One thing that nagged at her, though, was that he continued the odd ritual that had begun on his first visit, in which he painstakingly created and decorated his doll, then half ruined it with markers. Neither she nor Carol could dissuade him from this odd behavior.

Also, on more than one occasion, he snatched a photo from the wall, refusing to let it go or to let either of them see it. Carol told Amber she’d get the photo once he went to sleep and return it, but Amber always said it didn’t matter, that a new photo going up required an old one to come down.

One Saturday a few months after Bobby’s first visit, Nora, the store manager, went back to the LYLAS Salon, where Amber was stationed on busy days, doing cut after tiny cut.

“Amber, can I talk to you when you’re done?”

Amber snipped her shears a few more times, brushed the doll clean and handed it over. Kids didn’t know when a haircut was done. “What’s up?”

Nora held out a handful of photos. “What are these? I checked the camera and they were all taken when you were the only employee working.”

Amber took the photos and flipped through them. They were all of Bobby and his dolls.

“That’s Bobby. What?”

“Does that grown man make dolls here?”

“Yes. And…?” Amber began to bridle. She knew what Nora was getting at.

“Were there other customers here?”

“There haven’t been, because, as I’m sure you could tell from the files, he always comes in early Wednesday afternoons when it’s dead. But so what if there were?”

“He would scare them.”

“How is that his problem?”

“It’s our problem, because I don’t want to lose customers over some giant creepy pervert. Next time, turn him away. We can deny service to anyone.”

“So you want to deny service to a mentally disabled man who has never caused a bit of trouble? Who has probably bought a thousand dollars’ worth of merchandise and never spoken a single word? How would you like me to phrase that?”

“He’s disabled?”

“Yes, if that matters. That woman is his nurse.”

Nora opened and shut her mouth several times, staring at the pictures and obviously trying to figure out how to keep the weirdo out of her store without seeming like an ass. After a few moments her shoulders slumped slightly. “He only comes in when it’s dead?”

“Yeah, so far. He has a weekly appointment across the street.”

“Okay, fine. But you can’t hang these photos up. They’re just—bizarre.” With that, Nora tossed the photos in the trash and walked back up to the front.

Amber took the photos out of the trash and brushed away the clinging hair clippings. In each photo, Bobby stood round-shouldered and expressionless, delicately presenting his doll in his cupped hands for the camera. Yeah, they were a bit odd, but they were adorable, and Amber wouldn’t just toss them out. She put them in her back pocket before gesturing to the next girl in line. But she didn’t speak to the girl. She crouched and spoke to the doll.

“What can we do for you today, miss?”

* * *

Amber sat a rum and Coke on the coffee table before flopping down onto her couch, ready to lose herself in a few drinks and a few hours of mindless television. She noticed a crunchy sound as she sat, though, and remembered the photos crammed into her back pocket. She leaned sideways and nearly suffocated herself in a throw pillow as she attempted to extricate the stiff photo paper from her denim pocket. When she finally pried them out, she spread the photos on the coffee table, being careful not to get them in the water sweating from her glass.

Looking at them all at once brought back the strange feeling she had when each photo was taken, as if she and Bobby shared some secret of which she wasn’t aware, as if she was supposed to know something, but didn’t.

Then she noticed that day’s newspaper upon which a couple of the photos were spread. The big headline was another missing little girl, the latest of seven. The small community was in an uproar. She didn’t think she’d ever seen the girl before. What jolted her to attention was the row of smaller pictures of the other six missing girls.

As her vision began to blacken around the edges, Amber fought to control her breathing. The adrenaline was taking over, making her sip at the air, causing her body to go rigid and the finger on her right hand to do that weird claw pincer thing that had become a tick when she worked at Good Snips, probably related to the way she worked her shears. She breathed as deeply as she could, filling her lungs all the way down into her stomach, holding it for a count, then slowly letting it out. Her vision returned, and she squared the newspaper on the table.

Beneath each newsprint picture of a girl she placed a photo of Bobby holding a doll. LYLAS Dolls made so many different parts to allow little girls to make a doll that looked just like themselves, or just like a sister. Each of Bobby’s dolls closely resembled one of the missing girls, right down to their haircuts. Haircuts she’d given them.

She went online and searched previous issues of the paper, which gave descriptions of what the girls had been wearing when they were last seen. Amber found what she knew she’d find: they’d been wearing outfits just like the ones Bobby had given his dolls.

And now the mud drawn on the clothing made horrible sense. The black and purple around the necks. Oh God, he’d practically been confessing to her. She imagined looking into his face as he left the store each time, feeling again that something was passing between them. Was it an expression of contrition, or a taunt? Did he want someone to catch him? His face, which was so inscrutable even in real life, expressed nothing to her, either in her memories or in the photos.

The bodies of the girls hadn’t been found. Everyone hoped they were still alive. But if the tale Bobby was telling through his dolls was true, the community was about to be devastated.

As the pieces of the puzzle twisted, turned, and placed themselves, an image coalesced. Then Amber remembered the photos Bobby had stolen from the wall on several occasions.

Amber leapt up, grabbed her keys and headed out the door. She turned back and, with shaking hands, collected the photos of Bobby and put them into her purse before she left for LYLAS Dolls.

* * *

Bobby was a monster. Somehow, because of her bleeding heart, because of her fear of being prejudiced, because of her love of the underdog, she had missed what was so obvious: that Bobby Milton murdered little girls. Standing in front of the wall of photos, flipping through the digital camera, she knew this without a doubt. She had taken his round, empty face as innocent, when the blankness was really the emotionless visage of a sociopath.

Amber found the photo preceding the space where one of Bobby’s photos had been on the wall, then found it on the camera. The next photo was of Veronica Gordon, who’d gone missing three weeks before. She matched another photo on the wall to one on the camera, then flipped one over and found a photo of little Madison, who’d disappeared a month ago. She found the third photo Bobby had snatched from the wall, and it was of another missing little girl. Amber didn’t know if he was trying to erase them more entirely from the world, if he was taking a trophy, or if anything at all logical was going on inside that round skull, but every photo he’d stolen had been of a missing girl. Maybe the entire situation was just an example of the one bad habit his nurse couldn’t break him of: taking whatever he wanted.

That was the last bit of evidence she needed. Right there from the store, Amber called the police. When they arrived, she showed them the photos of Bobby, described Bobby’s strange ritual of marking the dolls, and showed them the images on the digital camera of the photos Bobby had snatched of the missing little girls. The police were tall and mustachioed and wore matching blank expressions that Amber interpreted as disbelief.

Before they left, Nora arrived, looking frazzled and angry. As the police questioned her, she kept throwing Amber looks that said that everything was her fault.

“We can’t have the store associated with this,” Nora told the police, who were unmoved and continued their questions.

Then the manager of the entire strip mall stepped through the door of LYLAS Dolls. The police soon determined he knew nothing about the situation, and continued talking to Nora.