Collecting the Dead (15 page)

Her older brother, Larry, who’s studying to be an architect, helped her design the three-thousand-square-foot building, leaving room for growth down the road. It includes an exercise arena, a playroom, and speakers in every room that play soft, soothing music while the dogs sleep in their people-like beds.

That is Lauren Brouwer—dreams and hope and heart.

Tears follow smiles follow tears.

I find myself holding Alice’s hand, patting her arm.

I think of my own mother, Lovisa. After decades in America, she still speaks with a strong Norwegian accent and gets cross with Jens and me when we mimic her. When we were growing up, she was often stern, demanding, and disciplined. She set the bar high for us and accepted no excuses. But she’s also quick to laugh and to hug, and she leaves no doubt that she loves you with every ounce of her great Norwegian heart.

That’s my mother …

 … and it tears me up to think of the hell she would go through if Jens or I were missing or dead. I imagine she would be much like Alice Brouwer and too many mothers before her.

“No one said life is easy—or fair,” she often told us. “Life is life. There’s no scale to weigh out your days and make sure you get your share of the good.” She’s right, of course. We pass our years one yesterday at a time, hoping our days will be many but never knowing. In the end we strive for one thing: to make enough good days to outweigh the bad.

Alice and Lauren and Martin deserve some good days.

But life isn’t easy, nor is it fair.

As we step to the door and say our good-byes, Alice suddenly holds both her hands up. “Can you wait one minute … please?” She turns and hurries down the hall before either of us can reply, and we hear a shuffling noise, drawers opening and closing, and then she’s hurrying back with something in her hand.

Taking my left hand, she turns it palm up and places a silver heart-shaped locket in the center. Slowly, gently, she closes my fingers around it. “Give this to my Lauren when you find her. We gave it to her when she graduated high school. She wore it constantly, but for some reason she wasn’t wearing it the night … the night…” Her eyes go to water. “I just want to see it around her neck when I hug her and hold her.”

“I will.” The words lump in my throat and it’s hard to swallow.

Lauren’s shine glows through the gaps of my fingers.

Pulsing.

Pulsing.

Pulsing.

*   *   *

The rest of the day goes as expected; first to Red Bluff some sixty miles north of Oroville and home to Ashley Sprague. Or at least it
was
her home, until she went missing more than two years ago and hasn’t been seen since.

Unlike the others, Ashley was a feral spirit—wild beyond measure—so it wasn’t uncommon for her to drop off the grid for days or weeks at a time. So feral was her spirit that no one bothered reporting her missing for more than a month.

The report was taken reluctantly.

Red Bluff PD still hesitates to call her missing, believing instead the rumors that she tripped off to Mexico to bartend with some boyfriend in Cabo. Who can blame them? Ashley was the boy who cried wolf, only substitute
girl
for
boy
, and
partied hard and disappeared often
for
cried wolf
.

By the time she was eighteen—old enough to be booked into the county jail—she had been reported as a runaway fifteen times, had been booked into juvenile detention a dozen times, and had been through rehab three times.

Feral.

Capital
F
.

Her first stint in the county jail, exactly twenty-three days after her eighteenth birthday, was for DUI. It took her a few days to raise bail, which, as it turns out, wasn’t fast enough. Corrections officers found her bleeding and unconscious next to her bed on the second morning. No one was talking, but the word was she mouthed off to the wrong gangster girl and got a broken jaw and a concussion in return.

After that, Ashley seemed to straighten out. She held a variety of odd jobs, tried community college—it didn’t take—then, when she was twenty-one, she took a course in bartending and seemed to find something that suited her.

She was working her way through the legal maze to get her juvenile record sealed when she disappeared; she thought she’d have a better shot at getting a decent bartending job with better tips in Vegas or Reno if she could leave her juvenile baggage behind.

Every agency has their share of Ashley Spragues; scores and hundreds and even thousands of them, depending on the size of the agency and its jurisdiction. And every time they’re arrested they talk about how they’re going to change their life, how they have this plan, how they don’t need the drugs or the booze or the destructive boyfriend anymore.

Almost none succeed.

Almost none try.

Ashley Sprague
did
try—and
was
succeeding—but her juvenile record was hard to shake. Many of the officers and deputies in the city and county knew her on sight and had too much history with her to believe anything she said, so much so that when her coworker reported her missing they glanced through the missing persons report, saw her name, and then disregarded.

Never mind.

It’s just Ashley … again.

There was no search for Ashley Sprague.

No forensic examination of her car or her apartment.

She became one of the invisible missing, landing among the ranks of prostitutes and drug addicts. It wasn’t fair, but life isn’t fair.

There’s my mother in my head again:
No one said life is easy—or fair
.

Sadly, Ashley was reaping what she had for so many years sown … and it was a bitter harvest.

According to the case report, Ashley’s 1995 Hyundai was parked and locked in her numbered parking spot at Dorchester Apartments, a low-income housing project near the center of town. When she never returned, never paid the meager rent, and never picked up her car, it was towed and later sold at an impound auction for $325.

I’m not interested in Ashley’s apartment or the dumpy tavern with the gaudy red neon sign where she worked. I just want to see her car. I want to see if Sad Face touched it, sat in it, drove it, used the trunk. I want to see if Ashley’s shine is
in
the trunk.

Or did he just leave a sad-face circle on her window?

Perhaps Ashley
isn’t
one of Sad Face’s victims. It’s possible. Perhaps her age and height and hair are just a coincidence. After all, she doesn’t have much in common with the other victims—except Valerie Heagle, the prostitute.

Diane might be wrong on this one.

For Ashley’s sake, I hope so.

The California Department of Motor Vehicles shows her car currently registered to Jacob Aase, five-foot-seven, 155 pounds, brown hair, brown eyes. His driver’s license photo looks hollow around the cheeks and eyes. I recognize the look. His license is suspended due to unpaid tickets and his address is on the north side of Red Bluff.

Simple enough, right?

But when we pull to the curb in front of Jacob’s house, simple becomes suddenly complicated, and complicated becomes, well, frustratingly typical.

Planted at the edge of the dead lawn, snug up against a cracked and weathered sidewalk, is a red, white, and blue
FOR SALE
sign that looks like it may have aged and faded since being placed. The house itself looks naked: no blinds, no drapes, no ratty moth-eaten curtains. The large window to the left of the front door opens into a stark and empty house. The walls have a coat of fresh paint, but the lousy patch job on the abused interior walls leaves them looking pockmarked and worn.

Some would call it a quaint single-story bachelor’s pad, which is, no doubt, how the real estate agency listed it.

I call it a shack …

 … with an apology to shacks.

The house is barely nine hundred square feet, has a noticeable downward pitch on the southeast corner, and green paint on the exterior that’s so far gone it looks like some faded, curling, alien fungus. The front door is off-kilter and even from the road I can see the frame is damaged at the latch where it’s been booted open more than once—either by cops or crooks, maybe both.

And those are the better features.

The crowning glory is so redneck I don’t know whether to laugh, cry, or scream: someone has stapled a giant blue tarp to the roof. Bright blue. Big. Yacht-sized. It covers most of the backside of the roof and drapes over the peak by several feet, giving the house a fluorescent-blue Mohawk.

“Safe to say Jacob Aase doesn’t live here anymore,” I say casually.

“Safe to say,” Jimmy echoes.

We stand at the sidewalk a moment just staring at the house, wondering what our next move is. After a moment Jimmy says, “Tweaker TV,” and points to the front door. My eyes follow his finger and I see it, hidden above the door and tucked up under the eaves.

“There’s another one.” This time Jimmy points to the right front corner of the house.

“Probably a couple more in the back and one on the other side,” I say.

Tweaker TV
.

It’s a bit of a joke within law enforcement. Whenever you see a $500 house with $2,000 worth of surveillance equipment, it’s a good bet you’re dealing with drug dealers, meth cooks, or a nest of dope fiends. Sometimes it’s just one monitor and a single camera at the front door. Other times it’s a wall of monitors, each dedicated to a single camera.

The tweakers—meth addicts, so named because of their sudden, jerky, tweaky mannerisms—have a particular affinity for surveillance cameras, especially when they haven’t slept for days on end and paranoia and hallucinations are starting to kick in. When that happens, Tweaker TV is the best show on the box.

“Looks like they left in a hurry,” I say. “Didn’t even take the cameras.”

“Why bother?” Jimmy replies. “They can steal more.”

Both Jimmy and I know what this means. It’s not just that Jacob Aase has relocated, he’s likely an addict or a dealer, which means tracking him down is going to be problematic. It’s easy to get lost in the drug community. There are always flophouses, drug dens, motor homes, and transient camps to disappear into.

“What now?”

“Call Diane.” Jimmy sighs. “See what she can dig up. I’ll call the PD and see what they have on Jacob.”

*   *   *

Sometimes it all comes down to luck … or good timing.

I’m still on the phone listening to Diane churn through one database after another in a high-speed digital pursuit of the elusive Mr. Aase when Jimmy taps me on the shoulder, grins, and says, “We caught a break.”

Back in the car, Jimmy tries pulling a U-turn from the curb, but the rental—luxurious as it is—has the turning radius of a nine-legged pig. After three trips to drive and two trips to reverse we finally get straightened out, and Jimmy starts to fill me in.

It seems that Jacob Aase landed himself in the Tehama County Jail three weeks ago after multiple motorists called to report a naked man walking down the center of Manzanita Avenue swearing at cars as they passed by and sometimes cowering behind light poles talking to himself.

After a ten-day meth binge, Jacob was tweaking hard. The skin on his face and right arm was covered in red sores where he had repeatedly picked at the imaginary bugs under his skin—meth mites—until he was covered in scabs, then he picked the scabs. Then he picked some more.

By the time the cops found him on Manzanita he was in full meltdown. Recognizing immediately what they were dealing with, Red Bluff PD tried talking him down from his psychosis, but by this time the hallucinations were so vivid and frightening all he saw were blue devils with badges.

“They stole my clothes,” he screamed over and over and over again as he picked and picked and picked. Meanwhile, officers discovered a two-block trail of discarded clothing, starting with a particularly foul piece of underwear—officers dubbed it
the underwear that crawls
—that was unceremoniously draped over a fire hydrant. Working backward they found socks, then jeans, then shoes—a discount brand designed in the fashion of the Nike Cortez but without the quality. Farther on, they found his shirt stuffed under the windshield wiper of a Dodge Neon—he’s a tweaker, they do stuff like that—and his jacket was lying in the middle of the road thirty feet west of his backpack (which was filled with clothes even more stanky than
the underwear that crawls
).

He
didn’t discard the clothing, though.

He made that perfectly clear.

No.

They
stripped him naked and
They
stole his clothes.

Then, apparently,
They
—he was never quite clear on who
They
were—laid his clothes out behind him just to taunt him.

In the end it took four blue devils to restrain him and carry him off to hell … though in this case “hell” was the Tehama County Jail. Not pleasant, but by no means does it resemble the fiery abyss.

They even have ice.

And they only have three levels, not the nine described by Dante—though the first floor sometimes
smells
like the Malebolge, Dante’s eighth level of hell. It can’t be helped. That’s what happens when inmates paint the walls of their cell in their own feces.

Good times.

“His car was parked in the street a half mile away,” Jimmy says. “When he ran out of gas he just started walking … and stripping.”

“Okay, what’s scary is that he was
driving
in the first place.”

“Drug-impaired driving. Happens every day in every city across the country.” Jimmy shrugs. “The only thing worse is the drunk drivers; they still kill more people.”

“Yeah, but that’s just numbers. There are more drunk drivers than tweakers.”

Jimmy shrugs again but doesn’t say anything.

“So the car is in police impound?”

“The meth pipe on the front seat was enough to get a search warrant. The shotgun in the trunk and the three small baggies of meth in a hidden compartment in the door were enough to seize it. It’ll probably end up back at the same auction where Jacob bought it.”