Immoral (13 page)

T loves R
, she thought to herself.
Right
. She suspected R was a pretty sophomore, and T was a football player who figured jewelry was a great way to get into the girl’s jeans. Heather laughed. She put the bracelet on her nightstand and clicked off the light.

In the darkness, she tried to sleep, but instead she tossed and turned. A few minutes ago, she had barely been able to keep her eyes open. Now she was awake. A jumble of thoughts flitted idly through her brain. High school. Pretty girls making out behind the barn. An old woman dying in a fire. Football games. Gifts of gold bracelets. Young love. Young lust.

Initials.

She saw them in her head again.

That was when Heather’s eyes flew open, and she stared sightless into the black room. Under the blankets, a chill rippled through her flesh. She scratched blindly for the light, then blinked as it flooded the room.

She looked at the bracelet but didn’t dare touch it.

T loves R
, she thought again.

R
.

Stride stood on the dirt road outside the search area near the barn. The snow had been matted down into a slippery gray streak by the coming and going of police cars throughout the day. He dug in his boots, stiffening his body against the swirling wind. The cold felt like knives on the sliver of his face where the wool scarf left his skin exposed. He had a red cap pulled low on his forehead and the hood of his parka pulled over his head and tied closed at his neck. His hands were buried inside leather gloves. The wind chill was ten degrees below zero.

Nature wasn’t cooperating. Neither was Stride’s luck.

They had been searching since noon, and five hours later, it was almost night. All they had to show so far for the painstaking, backbreaking work in the bitter cold was dozens of overlapping tire tracks, broken glass, used needles, and a dizzying range of common trash. All of it went into plastic bags, carefully labeled to reflect the exact square yard within the grid where each item had been found.

If the tip from Heather Hubble had come two days earlier, they would have been able to search the field surrounding the barn with relative ease. Instead, the evidence, if there was any, lay hidden beneath three inches of snow. As his men searched each square in the checkerboard, they had to carefully brush away the powdery snow into a section of the grid that had already been searched. With each gust of wind, the snow drifted back. It was slow, cold work, but they had no choice but to proceed inch by inch, looking for details as small as a hair trapped beneath the white blanket, somewhere in the dirt and brush.

That wasn’t what really bothered Stride, though. The worse stuff lay ahead. More snow was predicted by morning, a storm that could dump another ten inches all over the northern woods. If that happened, they wouldn’t see the ground again until April, when there would be little evidence left to find. They had to work quickly. He had ordered in portable overhead lights, which were being set up now, so they could sift through the search area throughout the night. Even so, it wasn’t much time to do a thorough job.

Plus, of all places, it had to be the barn.

Anyplace else in the wilderness, they would have found nothing but birch bark and dead leaves. Here, they might as well have been in the parking lot behind the high school. He could only guess how many teenage couples had left behind irrelevant evidence that would have to be meticulously analyzed, researched, typed, and ultimately excluded. On the walkie-talkie, Guppo kept up a litany of the bizarre items they had already found. They had started near where the little girl, Lissa, thought she had found the bracelet and begun working their way outward. Along the way, they had already found a pair of panties (four sizes too large for Rachel), an orthodontic retainer, a cherry Life Saver, a king of spades with a naked blonde woman wearing a crown, and nine condoms.

He knew the odds of tying anything directly to Rachel were slim. Even so, Stride felt a sense of excitement. The Stoners had definitively identified the bracelet as belonging to Rachel. The initials cinched it: “Tommy loves Rachel.” The bracelet had been a gift from her father years earlier.

Kevin Lowry had already reported in his original statement that Rachel was wearing the bracelet when he last saw her in Canal Park. Now it had been found here, near the barn, their first solid evidence of where Rachel had been after her disappearance. But he tempered his professional satisfaction with the grim reality of what the discovery meant.

Emily Stoner’s face had gone white when she saw it. Stride understood. All along, she had still been harboring the hope that Rachel had gone off by herself, a runaway, part of a cruel practical joke. As Emily held the bracelet in her hand, that hope vanished.

“She would never have left it behind,” Emily said simply. “Never. Tommy gave it to her. She wore it everywhere. She wore it in the shower. She never took it off.” Then, with her husband looking on, she disintegrated into sobs. “Oh my God, she’s dead,” Emily murmured. “She’s really dead.”

Stride didn’t try to fill the moment with empty hope. He could easily have told her that finding the bracelet meant nothing in and of itself, but the truth was clear to all of them. For weeks, they had been searching for a live girl, trying to unravel the mystery of her life, hunting for answers to a riddle.

Now, they would begin a different search. For Rachel’s body.

Stride heard the slam of the van door and the shuffling of footsteps in the snow behind him. He glanced back. Maggie wore a black winter bowler cap over a pair of furry earmuffs. A red wool coat draped to her ankles. She trudged through the snow in her leather boots with square two-inch heels. She didn’t wear a scarf, but her golden skin seemed unaffected by the bitter assault of the wind.

Maggie stood next to Stride, reviewing the work of a dozen policemen hunched over with brooms, walkie-talkies, and evidence bags.

“You must be freezing your balls off out here,” Maggie said. “Why don’t you come back to the van?”

“Guppo’s in the van, right? I’m safer out here.”

Maggie wrinkled her nose. “I made sure he didn’t have any raw vegetables, and I cracked the window so we’ve got fresh air when we need it.”

“No, thanks. I’ve got to do the media circus soon anyway. It’s almost evening news time.”

Stride glanced down the dirt road. The police cars blocked travel about fifty yards away, sealing off the area. Beyond the roadblock, he could see the glow of media lights, where at least two dozen reporters waited for him, shivering, complaining, and shouting for attention. He couldn’t hear much above the wind.

He glanced at his watch. Ten minutes before five o’clock. He had promised them a live interview to kick off the news.

“So, you ever come out here when you were a kid?” Maggie asked.

“What do you mean?”

Maggie grinned. “Well, the woman who found the bracelet, she said this has been a hot make-out spot for years.”

Stride shrugged. “I took my girls to nice, safe dirt roads near the lake, thank you very much.”

“Then who came out here?” Maggie asked.

“The easy ones.”

“Is that a sexist remark I should be reporting as harassment?” she teased him.

“If you could convince a girl to take a romantic drive with you along the lake, well, maybe you stood a chance of getting to second base.”

“Tell me again what second base means,” Maggie said. She playfully caressed her teeth with her tongue. “We didn’t play baseball in China. Is that breasts, nipples, what?”

Stride ignored her. “But if you suggested going to the barn, and the girl agreed, you knew exactly what you were going to get. On the other hand, you didn’t suggest it unless you knew what kind of girl you were dealing with. Otherwise, you got your face slapped.”

“And you?”

“I recall mentioning the barn in passing to Lori Peterson,” Stride said. “She threw a Coke in my face.”

“Good for her,” Maggie said. “Does this mean Rachel was easy?”

Stride bit his lower lip. “That’s what everyone tells us.”

“Except we still haven’t found a boy who admits sleeping with her,” Maggie said.

“Yes, that’s interesting, isn’t it? Although who wants to step up to the plate and declare himself a suspect when the girl disappears?”

“So you think it was a date?” Maggie asked.

“Maybe,” Stride said. “She left Kevin just before ten o’clock and told him she was tired. Rachel doesn’t strike me as a girl who gets tired early on a Friday night.”

“So maybe she was meeting someone else. Someone who picked her up at her house.”

Stride nodded. “They go for a little romp at the barn. But something goes wrong. Something gets out of hand. And suddenly the boyfriend has a body on his hands.”

“We’re assuming she’s dead?” Maggie said.

Stride sighed. “Aren’t we?”

“So who is this mystery stranger? Another boy at school?”

“That’s the first place to start, Mags. Time to reinterview anyone who even smells like a boyfriend.”

Maggie groaned. “A whole day interviewing high school jocks with overactive hormones who think they’re God’s gift to everyone with a pussy. You give me the nicest jobs, boss.”

“Dress for the occasion, Mags. You’ll get more out of them that way.”

“Great,” Maggie murmured. “It’s not like I’ve got any cleavage to show off.”

“You’ll think of something.”

Maggie punched him in the arm, then turned and stalked back toward the van. Stride smiled. He started walking toward the media crowd down the road, bringing up his walkie-talkie in his gloved hand and shoving it up under his hood.

“What have we got, Guppo?” Stride asked.

Guppo’s voice boomed through the walkie-talkie. “What the hell is this place, Lieutenant?” he called. “Shit, we’ve got more crap in each grid box than I’d expect to find in a New York crack house. You had to pick this place as a crime scene?”

He heard something else, and then Maggie complained in the background. “Son of a bitch, Guppo, I’m back in the van for five seconds, and you have to do that.”

Stride chuckled. “Tell her to quit whining, Guppo. Ask her what she’s going to wear to work tomorrow.”

He heard a voice crackle in the background. “Fuck you, Stride.”

Stride transmitted again. “Look, Guppo, do we have anything that suggests a connection to Rachel?”

“Could be all sorts of things. Could be nothing. We won’t know until this stuff is tested. There’s plenty of evidence of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, but without fingerprints and blood work, it’s all speculation.”

“Nothing like a confession from a murderer tied around a rock?”

“Not yet. We’re still looking.” Guppo belched.

“Okay,” Stride said. He shoved the walkie-talkie back in his coat pocket. He approached the police cars and talked briefly with the two officers who were entrusted with the thankless job of keeping the media and spectators out. On the other side of the yellow tape, it was a mob scene, much as it had been on the night Rachel disappeared. Stride squinted as a series of floodlights illuminated him. The hum of voices escalated into a roar.

Stride pointed at one of the television reporters he knew. “Can your crew do the lights?” When the reporter nodded, Stride continued. “Okay, we’ll have one team light me up, and the rest of you, keep the flashbulbs off, all right? If I hear shouting, I’m out of here. You want to ask a question, you raise your hand, I call on you, you ask one question.”

“When did you get elected president, Stride?” Bird Finch retorted from the front of the crowd.

Stride grinned. “Listen up, everybody. Bird has already asked his one question. Move him to the back of the crowd.”

The reporters laughed derisively. A few of them tried to push in front of Bird and take his place at the edge of the tape, but the muscular ex-basketball player wasn’t giving an inch. He shot Stride an icy smile.

Stride felt the heat of the television lights burning on his face. It was the first time that day he had felt relief from the cold. Only his feet, damp and in shadow, still felt chilled. “You guys ready?” he asked. “I’ll make a brief statement, then take questions.”

He saw red lights flash on a dozen handheld television cameras. A few flashbulbs burst, despite his prohibition, blinding him.

“Let me tell you what we know right now,” he said. “Early this morning, we received a call on our hotline from a woman who had in her possession a bracelet she believed might be connected to the disappearance of Rachel Deese. We retrieved the bracelet, and Rachel’s mother positively identified it as belonging to her daughter. We believe that Rachel was wearing the bracelet on the night she disappeared. According to the witness who found the bracelet, it was behind the barn at this location. We are currently conducting a grid search of about one hundred square yards around the area where the bracelet was discovered. That’s all I have at this time.”

Three people shouted questions simultaneously, and Stride stared them down, not moving or answering. Bird Finch dramatically raised his hand. He was already a head taller than everyone else, and with his arm in the air, he looked like a black Statue of Liberty.

May as well get it over with
, Stride thought. “Bird?” he said.

“Do you now believe Rachel is dead?” Bird asked. He put just enough of an edge on the word “now” to suggest that Stride had been delinquent in understanding what everyone else had known all along.

“I don’t want to speculate on anything like that,” Stride said.

Before anyone else could get a hand up, Bird injected a follow-up question into the silence. “But you are going to be searching for a body now, aren’t you?”

“We are currently in the midst of a grid search for evidence. This is an intense, highly focused exercise that will take many more hours. Our next steps will be determined by what we find here, if anything. But the full analysis will take weeks.”

Another hand went up. Bird had shown them the way, and the others followed. “When you complete this search, you’ll also be searching the surrounding area, right? Are you hoping to find a body?”