Head Games (28 page)
Authors: Eileen Dreyer
Rhett immediately brightened and bounced over, a friend in tow. Molly was going to say something scathing, when she caught sight of all of him. She couldn't quite manage to speak or close her mouth.
“Happy holidays, Special Agent Kinstle,” he greeted Kathy. “And you, of course, Molly.”
Molly's reaction was a gurgle of laughter. Because, amazingly enough, it was the first time Molly had seen Rhett out of homicide uniform. And it had to be in a six-foot-tall green-and-red elf 's costume, with pointy shoes, bells hanging off his collar, and mistletoe tied to the top of his head with a red pipe cleaner. Molly damn near choked. Especially since his companion, a five-foot-three-inch blond girl about his age and half his size, was dressed as Santa.
“Christmas party?” Kathy asked with an admirably straight face.
Rhett scowled heartily. “Almost. I called Sam, who said I'd find you either here or Cunetto's. I tried here first.”
Molly was still struggling with her control. “Where do you have your gun?” she demanded, her voice high and silly.
Rhett scowled, at which point the blonde dug into her big, Santa belly and pulled out not only one gun, but two. “Tough to get a concealed holster in those tights,” she said with a sly grin.
“Oh, good,” Molly giggled. “Then he
is
just glad to see me.”
is
just glad to see me.”
She thought Rhett would go down for the count. Waving him over, she made him bend way down so she could grab him by the ears and soundly kiss him on the mouth. “Thanks,” she said sincerely. “You don't know how badly I needed this tonight.”
Rhett's face outshone the bright red collar with the bells on it. “In that case,” he managed. “I might as well give you the rest of the news.”
Molly let him go. “I've had my quota of bad news today,” she said. “I'm only accepting good news. If you have good news, pull up a chair. If not, take a hike. But leave Santa. I could use two guns right about now.”
Thankfully, both Rhett and his friend sat down.
“We could delay this until we get into the car,” Molly suggested. “I'm about to show Kathy the South Grand area.”
At that, the blonde perked up noticeably. “Really? Good. That's just what I was thinking.”
Molly didn't want to be rude enough to ask why, so she turned to her favorite homicide officer. “You were about to introduce us to your jolly friend here, Rhett.”
Rhett scowled. “I was getting to that. Lucia and I were just at the Third District Christmas party. We figured we might as well, since we wouldn't have anything else to do till tomorrow, what with them trying to figure out the search warrant for those old hospital records ⦠.”
Molly glared. “Hospital records?”
“You left before we got to that part,” Kathy said without so much as a blink.
“Which ones?” Molly retorted. “I worked in about ten, you know. All over the country.”
And damn if Kathy wasn't in the least upset. “We thought we'd start with St. Roch's. If we're right about our boy's age, he was born between '66 and about '72. You were back in St. Louis at St. Roch's between '76 and '81. As good a place as any, don't you think?”
Molly couldn't even manage an answer. God bless Rhett, who continued his thought as if nobody had interrupted. “ ⦠and since Lucia's our missing person's contact, we thought we'd share notes.”
Molly scowled. “I assume this is the introduction I was asking for before.”
The blonde held out her hand. “Lucia Caletti.”
Molly started smiling again. “Baitshop?”
The girl's responding grin was easy and bright. “The same. I asked Rhett if I could come along. I've been dying to talk to you.”
Molly shared a hearty handshake. “Feeling's mutual.”
She liked the girl. Half her age, still hungry, still quick and alert. A jock. The kind of girl who would have been on all the teams, with a natural sense of balance and self-confidence that translated into aggressive agility, and a brain that obviously clicked along even faster than her reflexes. Not a natural blonde. But a cute one, with big brown eyes and a mobile, bowshaped mouth. And, of course, the restless attention of a good cop.
“Baitshop?” Agent Kinstle echoed a bit more uncertainly.
Caletti grinned like a pirate. “I was undercover at Bill and Barney's Bass and Bud Bargain Basement down on South Jefferson. Ran a meth lab in the back.”
“She could bait a hook faster than anybody else in narcotics,” Rhett gloated for her. “She also took the place down with nothing more than a bullhorn, a fishing creel, and a pop-up display of Ed McMahon.”
“But that's a story for another time,” Baitshop demurred.
“I bet you'd like to come along and help tell Kathy all about South Grand.”
Baitshop damn near wiggled on her seat. “Love to. There are a couple of theories I want to share.”
“Like why nobody paid attention to girls going missing in town?”
“About who the girls are.”
Molly nodded, ready to get up.
“Not yet,” Rhett protested. “Not till you hear my news.”
The three women looked at him like teachers waiting for a fourthgrade book report.
Rhett all but preened. “It's just this, Molly. We got a good hit on somebody on your list.”
Molly sat abruptly back down. “What do you mean a hit?”
“Escalating pattern of offenses from weenie wagging to serious peeping to B&Es, to molestation, to suspicion of arson. Juvenile file. Possible psychiatric history.”
Molly sighed. “Little Allen.”
Rhett's grin was huge. “Nope. Lewis Travers.” He waited, but there was no answering light. “The morgue attendant down at the ME's office.”
Molly put her head straight down on the table, barely missing a plate puddled in syrup. “I can't take much more of this,” she moaned.
Rhett patted her on the shoulder. Kathy moved Molly's plate so she wouldn't wear the rest of her breakfast home.
“Evidently when they checked Lewis's desk at work tonight, there were several notes about you in there,” Rhett said.
“Death threats?” Kathy asked.
Rhett sounded uncomfortable. “Not exactly.”
Molly groaned again, refusing to lift her head. Lewis, Patrick's new best friend, who had showed him bodies. Who had been so polite and called Molly Miss Burke with that damn lisp and blushed. Lewis, who had access just about anywhere, and certainly the exposure to not only surgical instruments but practices.
Lewis, who thought the bones were so nicely decorated.
“What kind of notes?” Kathy asked.
Rhett actually blushed. “Um. Complimentary ones, okay?”
Molly groaned all over again.
“There's only one problem,” Rhett said.
Molly shot to her feet so fast she almost dented the top of her head on Rhett's chin. “No,” she snapped. “No problems. Tell me later. Right now we're going to take Kathy on a tour of the city.”
“Who's car?” Rhett asked.
“Yours,” Molly said, shrugging into her coat. “I refuse to be seen chauffeuring around an oversize elf and an undersized Santa.”
“Better they drive you,” Kathy said with a complacent nod.
“It's easier to hide if I don't have to keep my hands on the steering wheel.”
Rhett was, of course, driving a Chevy Caprice, with plenty of seat belts, legroom, and a police radio. Molly slid in behind Santa and buckled up.
“By the way,” Rhett announced as he backed out of his parking spot, “just so you know. There's a press conference being held tonight down at city hall.”
“Telling everybody they have a suspect in mind?” Molly asked, well familiar with the politics of public pressure.
“Trying to explain to all the parents of missing teenage girls who've been beating down the mayor's door, why they didn't hear the news sooner that a possible serial killer might be dropping an unidentified girl's bones on your doorstep.”
Molly's grin was almost feral. So the “let's bury it” attitude had come back to bite the colonel in the ass. “Press found out, huh?”
“Yeah. All hell's breaking loose. That minister who was egging on Mrs. Wilson is running this photo op, too. Police ignoring the concerns of disenfranchised citizens, that kind of thing.”
“Sometimes teenage girls
do
run away,” Lucia said pensively.
do
run away,” Lucia said pensively.
“Not, evidently, all of them. Not this time anyway.”
“Why aren't you down at the press conference, Lucia?” Kathy asked. “You're the missing persons person. Aren't you?”
Lucia's expression was not pleasant. “I am the unplanned second missing person's person. The real person got the nod to press his detective suit.”
“So missing person's not your usual gig?”
“No. There was a small misunderstanding with my last lieutenant.”
Since the South Grand area was actually east-northeast of Uncle Bill's, Rhett turned north on Kingshighway. Molly absently watched car dealerships and light industry give way to a section of tree-lined residentials just south of the highway.
St. Louis city proper was a patchwork of prosperity and poverty, where lush parks and solid, white-collar neighborhoods lay within blocks of crack houses, and rehabbed Victorian communities sat cheek-by-jowl with boarded-up flats. Molly's neighborhood was one such, her own house in a
sometimes precarious island of security in a still-unstable neighborhood. South Grand was another.
sometimes precarious island of security in a still-unstable neighborhood. South Grand was another.
To get there, Rhett turned east on Magnolia, which, in the four miles from Kingshighway to Grand, ran between two of the city's most beautiful green spaces, Tower Grove Park and the Missouri Botanical Gardens. Both were ringed in substantial, landscaped residential streets that screamed security and solidity. The gardens were closed this time of night, but Tower Grove was swathed in holiday lights.
Molly hadn't really noticed before how the patina of security wore thin the closer they got to Grand. Fewer trees maybe, the houses a little more careworn and more often divided into flats. From real stability to simulated stability. A toehold on normalcy only blocks from some of the more notorious violence of the city.
“Molly?” Rhett said, pulling her attention back.
“Sorry. What?”
He swung the car south onto Grand and slowed for the traffic waiting to see the light display in the park. “Don't be surprised if you get another whole spate of questions from the press.”
“How delightful,” Molly retorted drily. “I do so love bantering with them. And when they ask about the bomb, what do I tell them?”
“That Detective Davidson is the person to talk to.”
Molly stiffened in outrage. “Davidson? That jerk?”
It was Baitshop who turned around. “Ah, you fell victim to his charm, too, huh? If it makes you feel better, he is relentless.”
Molly snorted. “He has his nails manicured. Jack Webb would have had a stroke. Was he at the Christmas party?”
“Sure. Everybody who wasn't tucked up behind the mayor was.”
“What'd he come as?”
“The Grinch.”
There was a profound silence in the backseat. “Repeat that.”
Baitshop was laughing. “Actually Rhett would have looked better, but Fuzzy said he had a reputation to uphold.”
Molly leaned forward, sure she was hearing wrong now. “Fuzzy?”
Lucia was grinning. “As in, âWarm and'?”
“Uh-huh.”
Rhett finally wove past the traffic and headed south toward the next
expanse of Christmas lights that had been strung along the business fronts south of the park.
expanse of Christmas lights that had been strung along the business fronts south of the park.
“South Grand really starts about here,” Rhett was saying, motioning to the area just beyond the residential streets around the park. Only a few miles from downtown itself, South Grand had once been a thriving community. Like many of St. Louis's neighborhoods, it had seen boom and decline and rebirth since its first houses had been built in Victorian times. Now the area supported a rich mixture of residents, from rehabbers to immigrants to blue-collar families to a variety of less-stable inhabitants.
The business district itself, which consisted of the section of Grand Boulevard that stretched from Tower Grove Park to Pius X Catholic Church, was comprised of a potpourri of shops, restaurants, and family businesses. The keystone of a revitalization move in the area, the business district looked shiny and busy and marginally prosperous, selling everything from books to bongs to any variation of ethnic food and cutting-edge retro.
The side streets to the west retained the tree-lined sense of stability, with either single- or two-family dwellings. To the east, though, as Grand moved south, the side streets quickly degenerated from large brick Victorians to row after row of low-rent multifamily dwellings, identical and uninspiring, as if Grand itself was the icing disguising an uninspired cake.
“It's kind of quiet here now,” Baitshop was saying. “But in the summer, the sidewalks are usually pretty active. Lots of diversity. Vietnamese grandmas outside Jay's International Foods selling trinkets from blankets to yuppies, all the way to slackers cluttering up the coffee shops and retro shops.”
“Any prostitution?” Kathy asked, her head swiveling to take in the few people strolling through frigid streets, the traffic slowing and circling, the restaurants full and the banks empty.
“Yeah, sometimes, although it's better controlled than before,” Baitshop said. “It had been one of the three big areas down here. This, Cherokee, and Jefferson. They kind of move in a constant triangle when the cops and the Asian gangs toss them out. But around this area the prostitutes have been mostly gays. Tower Grove Park was kind of a traditional gay meeting place.”
“Well, that's one chapter I don't think our friend copied from Jeff 's handbook,” Kathy said. “Our boy does seem to like girls.”
Even in the winter, Molly could see some of the more marginal kids hunched over scratchy tables at the coffeehouses. Spiked hair, pierced lips, hungry eyes, and anxious hands. There were really two places in the St. Louis area kids hung out in concentrations. University City Loop, where protected kids celebrated safe rebellion, and South Grand, where kids really knew what living on the edge meant. Molly explained as much to Kathy, who nodded absently and watched the traffic.
“So it wouldn't be that much of a surprise if a girl did, possibly, run away from an area like this.”
Baitshop shook her head. “Not at all. I checked my files when I heard about the Vietnamese victim, and I have at least twenty open files on kids who were either last seen down here or had lived around here. Twelve of them girls.”
“Were any of them a surprise?”
Baitshop shook her head. “Every one of them has a history of juvy stuff and delinquency. I'm not at all surprised the local dicks put them off as runaways.”
Kathy nodded reflectively. “Then I think you're right, Molly. Immigrants and chronic runaways, maybe a hooker or two. It's the perfect victim pool. Has anyone talked to the parents yet?”
“I think they're still at the press conference.”
“How 'bout the local detectives?” Molly asked. “They only give the missing persons files to you when it's too cold to care, don't they?”
“Yeah. I'm in frequent contact with the Third District guys, and I think they do a good job. They also have lots of support in the area: community commitment, community policing, that kind of thing. The civilians are trying hard to hold on to the turnaround in the neighborhood. But there really is only so much you can do if you have kids in chronic trouble.”
“And a killer who's perfected the art of invisibility.”
They passed Pius X with its gray granite front and Right to Life sign, and the street deteriorated from active to struggling economy in a few blocks. The housing looked tattered and the storefronts half empty, with men loitering in untidy clumps in doorways to share their smokes and forties.
Rhett turned off Grand proper and wove in and out of the side streets, where much of the Third District violence was spawned, until they turned back onto Grand by the blue awning of Grand Books. Molly noticed as
they passed that the front window was decorated to advertise a book signing by a local mystery writer. A bloody mannequin in green scrubs was sprawled across sheets. In the mood she was in, Molly didn't quite appreciate the image.
they passed that the front window was decorated to advertise a book signing by a local mystery writer. A bloody mannequin in green scrubs was sprawled across sheets. In the mood she was in, Molly didn't quite appreciate the image.
“We're going to need to talk to somebody who's inside the Vietnamese community if we're going to get any info on the girl,” Rhett said, pulling her attention away.
“Nobody reported any missing Vietnamese teens?” Kathy asked.
Baitshop shook her head. “Nary a one. Not that I expected any. There is a Lutheran minister hereabouts who works with the community, though. He's a Nam vet. We could talk to him.”
“What about the Olivette area?” Molly asked. “Anybody from county canvassing that?”
“Not one missing person from the area,” Baitshop said. “South Grand is our baby. We just need to do some questioning.”
“You know Vietnamese, don't you, Mol?” Rhett asked. “I mean ⦔
“If it comes down to that,” she said, “I can ask about their health and their animals.”
“How would you like to talk to the other parents, too?” Baitshop asked.
“That's why they pay you the big bucks, honey,” Molly said.
“They don't pay me enough for any of this shit,” the young woman suddenly snapped. Just as quickly, she sighed and yanked off the scruffy little beard she'd been wearing hooked over her ears.
“You aren't enjoying your stint in missing persons?” Molly asked.
The girl's scowl was impressive for somebody her size. “If I can help break this, maybe they'll finally see my goddamn transfer requests and get me back on the streets.”
“You prefer the streets?”
Rhett laughed. “Baitshop was born for the streets. I'd rather have her than an entire canine team back me up in a crunch. The nine mil she pulled out of her belly is mine. The three-fifty-seven is hers.”
When the little blonde smiled, it looked like the entire front seat lit up. Rhett, concentrating on avoiding that Tower Grove traffic, missed it.
“Of course,” Rhett amended, “she's also one of the best missing persons dicks I've seen.”
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