Cut to the Bone (18 page)

CHAPTER 24

Kittredge

KITTREDGE FROWNED, RUBBING HIS
left hand across his mouth, the stubble on his upper lip and chin rasping like sandpaper across his fingers and palm. The stubble rubbing was the detective's version of a worry stone; the sound and sensation distracted his mind, turned down the distracting, unhelpful inner chatter. Kittredge rubbed his chin religiously, ritualistically, the way a baseball player might tap dirt from his spikes with the bat before stepping into the batter's box, focusing on his shoes instead of the cowhide-covered cannonball about to come screaming in at ninety-five miles an hour—and by distracting himself from it, giving himself a better shot at
hitting
the damned thing.

“I'm having a little trouble here, Ms. . . .” Kittredge stole a glance at the complaint form on his desk. “Ms. Mayfield. You're saying this man raped you. But you also say you got into his car with him. Agreed to have sex with him. For money. You see my problem here? How am I supposed to arrest a man for raping a woman who agreed to have sex with him?”

The woman looked away, appeared to be wavering. Probably deciding to cut her losses, Kittredge figured—just get up and walk out, knowing she was lucky to be alive. Instead, she turned and looked him in the eye. “But I
un
agreed,” she said. “I canceled the deal. I said no.” Now her gaze did not waver. “Look, Detective, I know I'm just a whore,” she said bluntly. “I sell my body on the street. I let strangers screw me for fifty bucks—twenty if I'm desperate.” She pressed on. “It's not much of a life, and you probably think I'm scum.
I
sure as hell do, lots of the time. But there's one tiny little scrap of dignity I still cling to, and you know what that is, Detective?” He could tell she didn't expect him to answer—didn't even
want
him to answer—so he waited. “It's that I get to decide. I get to say yes—and God knows, I say yes just about every chance I get. But every once in a great while, I say no. Out there today, I said no, and you know what happened when I said no? That sick sonofabitch damn near broke my arm, and then he busted my face open with a belt. And then he forced me to strip naked and kneel down at his feet and take his dick in my mouth. After I said no.
After
.”

She stared at her hands, which had started to tremble on the table, as silent tears rolled down her cheeks and plopped onto the metal surface. Kittredge expected to see sadness in her face, but what he saw instead was fury. Fury at what had happened to her out in the woods? Fury at how her life had gone off the rails so badly? Fury at her own complicity in annihilating goodness and grace from her life? “I said no,” she repeated through clenched teeth, still looking down, as if speaking to her quaking fingers. Then she looked up at Kittredge again and resumed speaking, her voice clear and strong now: “Tell me, Detective. If some strange man did that to you—knocked the shit out of you, and made you strip and kneel down and suck his dick, and tell him you
loved
it—how would you like it?”

Kittredge had never thought about it, and didn't want to think about it now, but there it was, the unwelcome and disgusting image in his mind, like some sort of brain STD he'd just caught from her. “I wouldn't like it,” he finally said. It was a vast, absurd understatement. Kittredge felt something shifting inside him—something besides the contagion of the image. Kittredge felt something opening up, making room to accommodate this woman's sense of injustice, enough to admire her for not giving up and just taking what the guy had done. “Honest truth, Janelle? I'd hate it like hell.”

“SO,” KITTREDGE SAID AS
they took the Asheville Highway exit off I-40, “left here?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Cross the river, then take the first right.”

Kittredge slowed to thirty crossing the Holston. The river was spanned here by a steel truss bridge, fifty years old if it was a day. The bridge was narrow and rickety, but Kittredge liked the angles and rivets, liked the way the emerald-green paint matched the color of the river below. He also liked being able to see through the railings and down to the water. Modern bridges, like the I-40 bridge that spanned the river a half mile downstream from here, blocked your view of the water; all you could see was the concrete sides. When Kittredge crossed a river, he wanted to
see
the river.

“They're tearing this bridge down next year,” he said to her, partly just to break the silence, but partly to make up for the way he'd treated her earlier. He'd been stingy with his humanity at first. He'd been unintentionally cruel, forcing her to expose herself to
him,
too—expose her pain and her shame—before he started treating her like a crime victim, like someone deserving of respect and compassion and at least some attempt at justice.

She glanced out at the antiquated girders strobing past. “If they want to tear this thing down, they better hurry. Looks like it might collapse before they get to it.”

“Naw,” he scoffed. “Keep this thing painted, it'll last another hundred years. The new one'll be wider and stronger. Safer, sure. But nowhere near as interesting.” He surprised himself then, stopping the car midway across. She seemed surprised, too—her head snapped around in his direction, her expression a mixture of puzzlement and alarm, her right hand edging toward the door latch. He pointed out her window. “See that little dip in the railing right there?”

She studied his face for a moment before turning to look. “Yeah?”

“I jumped off of there once. A long damn time ago. Night I graduated from high school.”

“You jumped from there? That's a long ways down. You drunk?”

He chuckled. “Shit-faced. Wouldn't've done it sober. Never did, anyhow—not before, not since. Glad I did it the once, though.” He let out a low
hnh,
a monosyllabic grunt. “If the Lord looks out for fools and drunkards, I had double coverage that night.” He glanced in the mirror and saw a truck coming up behind them, so he nudged the Crown Vic on across the bridge. He signaled and took the right onto John Sevier for a half mile, following the river downstream a ways before turning off the highway; before turning on to the back road that the map showed leading to Cahaba Lane, where she said he'd taken her. “This guy took you off the beaten track, that's for sure,” he said. “Was he just wandering around, looking for someplace private to park?”

“No. He knew right where he was going.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“He knew the roads. I could tell by the way he was driving. He knows his way around out here. Maybe he lives out here somewhere.”

“Could be,” Kittredge said. “I'll check with the gas stations and quick-stops around here, see if anybody knows the car. You said it's a Mustang, kinda old?”

“A '67,” she said. “Third year of production.”

“He told you that?”

“Didn't have to. I knew it.” He glanced a question at her. “I had one, once upon a time,” she said. “A long damn time ago.” Her words—“a long damn time ago”—were an echo of his.
Is she making fun of me?
he wondered.
Couldn't blame her. But maybe she's deciding to trust me.
“They widened the radiator grille on the '67,” she went on. “That's how you can tell it from the '65 and the '66. Made those fake air scoops on the sides bigger, too.” She took a long breath; blew it out. “It wasn't really mine. It was my stepfather's. I stole it when I ran away from home.”

“How old were you?”

“Fourteen.”

“
Fourteen?
Jesus. You must've wanted to get away from home mighty bad. How come?”

“Take a wild guess, Detective.” He winced, cursing himself for his stupidity, but didn't say anything; didn't want to risk interrupting her story again. “My mama worked nights,” she said. “He started in on my sister first. She was two years older than me, and she protected me. Took the bullet, so to speak. At the time, I didn't realize what a sacrifice that was. ‘Greater love,' and all that. But after a while she couldn't take it anymore. She ran away at fifteen; tried to talk me into going with her. I should've. Would've, if I'd known what it would be like once she was gone. Once I was home alone with him.”

“I'm sorry,” he said. “Took some guts to steal his car. How far'd you get?”

“Not far.” She laughed, surprising Kittredge. “I wrapped that car around a telephone pole about five miles down the road. Wasn't far, but it was far enough—I knew I couldn't go back. Not after what I did to his precious Mustang. That damn car was the only thing he loved in this world, far as I could see.” Kittredge nodded. “I crawled out through the busted windshield—neither door would open—and looked at what I'd done. The radiator was spewing steam; the gas tank was dripping gas. I had a pack of matches in my pocket, and I struck a match and threw it under the car—
whoomph—
and walked away. Just kept going. I burnt my bridges but
good
that day.”

“I guess you showed him,” Kittredge said, and she laughed again.

“I guess so; don't know, though. I hitchhiked to Miami, and never saw the bastard again.”

“Why Miami?”

“Why not? Warm all year. Pretty beaches. Men with money.”

“Why'd you come back, then?”

“My mom.” She looked out the window before turning back to him. “She got sick while I was in Miami. Ovarian cancer, fast and mean. By the time they tracked me down, she was just about dead. My asshole stepfather was long gone, of course—he split soon as she got sick. ”

They passed beneath I-40, where a pair of long concrete bridges spanned the Holston River and the road they were on. Just after they emerged from the underpass, they turned left. The small green street sign—C
AHABA
L
ANE
—was dwarfed by a big white sign that announced
S
UNNYVIEW
B
APTIST
C
HURCH
and pointed down the road. “This look right?” She nodded grimly. “And you think you can find the spot in the woods where he took you?”

“Be hard to miss, won't it? The spot with a pile of my clothes laying there. Can y'all get fingerprints off of fabric?”

“We'll ask the crime-lab guys. If your stuff's still there. Don't you think he might've taken it, though?”

“What, a souvenir? To remind him of our special first date?”

“Some guys do. The really creepy ones. But I was just thinking he might've taken it to cover his tracks.”

She shook her head. “Not unless he came back for it later. That dude was haulin' ass out of the woods, same as me. Chasin' me, at first. Gaining fast. But then those truckers stopped to help, and he jumped in his car and got the hell out of Dodge.”

He eased the car to a stop at the end of the lane, the tires crunching shards of broken bottles. Overhead loomed a faded C
OMFORT
I
NN
billboard, supported by rusting I beams, their bases like trash magnets, fringed with coffee cups, beer cans, and other debris. Kittredge narrowly missed stepping on a used condom that lay crumpled on the ground.
Nice,
he thought. Her door swung open before he got there to open it for her. She stepped out, glancing down at the condom, an expression of weary disgust on her face.

As they started up the narrow path that led through the posts and up the wooded slope, Kittredge felt a chill. He touched the holster on his belt, making sure his weapon was still there.

CHAPTER 25

Janelle

WALKING UP THE WOODED
slope, Janelle felt almost like two people; two Janelles. A TV ad from her childhood started playing in her mind—
“It's two, two, two mints in one!”—
and it wouldn't stop.
Two Janelles in one!

Janelle Number One was scared shitless, remembering the feel of the path under her feet, remembering the pain of the bent wrist and the twisted arm; remembering the humiliation of what he'd made her do after that.

Janelle Number Two, though, was mad as hell. Was something else, too. Brave? Strong? Those weren't words she felt entitled to use—not about herself, anyhow. But whatever the feeling was, she recognized and welcomed it; it was the same feeling she'd had the afternoon she'd run off in her stepfather's Mustang, the same feeling she'd had when she'd tossed the match beneath the car, when she'd decided to keep going instead of slinking back home, tail between her legs, to shut up and lie down and just
take
it, the way her life and her sack-of-shit stepdaddy had tried to teach her to do.

It helped that the cop, Kittredge, was treating her like an actual human being, not like some piece of shit that deserved whatever was done to her. Helped, too, that he was nervous out here, same as her—not that he said anything, but she saw him reach back and touch his gun when he thought she wasn't looking.
See,
she told herself,
you're not so pathetic. Big badass cop with a gun, and he's scared, too.

She was walking in front, the way she had a few hours before. She found the view disorienting, so she bent down, looked down, the way she had earlier in the day, when her arm had been twisted behind her. Looking down helped her remember. She felt the trail level off briefly—that felt right—then turn upward again. A memory floated slowly up toward the surface of her consciousness, like a bubble in hot pancake batter on a griddle; just as the memory bubble popped and her eyes and her mouth were opening, she stumbled—again—on a fat root that snaked across the trail.

“Careful,” said Kittredge from behind her.

“There,” she said, pointing down. “I tripped on that same root before. Right after that, we went thataway.” She turned to her left and struck out sideways, across the slope, her head up now, her gaze ranging far and wide.

“You sure?”

Instead of answering, she stopped and gasped, raising both hands in front of her, as if to ward off something; as if to ward off the ghost of Janelle Number Three. A hundred yards ahead of them—fifty yards beyond the clothing Janelle had scattered on the ground a few hours before—lay a dead woman. She was sprawled faceup, but much of her face was gone, and her legs—splayed on either side of a tree—had no feet.