The Body Reader (18 page)

CHAPTER 38

A
pparently people wrote to the dead. Uriah’s wife had close to two hundred unread private messages, the majority from people reaching out to her postsuicide, saying things like,
I’m sorry you felt it necessary to take your own life. I wish I’d known what you were going through. I wish you’d reached out to me.

S
ome messages were sent from “friends” who didn’t know she was dead. You’ve missed the last few book club meetings and it’s your turn to host.
Or guys hitting on her:
Hey, gorgeous. U R hot.
Most attached shirtless photos. There were also the same random attempts at contact from half-naked girls.

It took a while, but he finally got through everything to arrive at the ones she’d responded to when alive.

He frowned and leaned closer to the screen.

Page after page of communication with a guy named Joseph Johnson, a philosophy professor at the University of Minnesota. Since Facebook displayed the most current messages first, Uriah followed the thread back to the beginning.

It started out harmlessly enough. Talk about Socrates and Nietzsche. But it evolved into the professor asking Ellen to meet him for coffee. And later, hotel rooms. Trips out of town.

Heart slamming in his chest, Uriah made himself read everything. Every last fucking word of their correspondence. The reason behind Ellen’s attitude change, the reason she’d gone from hating their life in the city to loving it, seemed to be because of this guy.

Uriah looked him up on the University of Minnesota website.

As he read Johnson’s bio and class information, a calm settled over him. He closed the laptop and checked the clock. A little past six. He showered, shaved, put on his suit, along with his belt and badge. He checked his .40-caliber Smith & Wesson semiautomatic, making sure the magazine contained a full load before holstering the weapon. After exiting and locking the apartment, he took the seventeen flights of stairs to ground level.

Outside, the morning air had that city chill that came with the promise of a warm day. A night delivery truck pulled from the loading zone, engine laboring as it left a blast of diesel exhaust behind.

The corner café was opening.

Uriah was the first customer of the day. A large black coffee, tip in the jar, and then he was heading to the six-story parking ramp and his car. From there, he took the maze of streets through construction zones and one-ways, past the Vikings’ stadium to Interstate 35 and the University of Minnesota, where Joseph Johnson was teaching an early-morning summer class on ethics.

CHAPTER 39

U
riah crashed Professor Johnson’s class. He was able to get away with sitting in the back of the lecture room, way up at the top, in the corner.

He could see how Ellen might have found the guy attractive. He was cocky and sure of himself, and he spoke with conviction. But he was also a cliché with the shaggy hair, scruffy beard, horn-rimmed glasses, along with a paisley shirt and dark-brown tie. Age, maybe thirty-seven.

Uriah didn’t know what his intention had been in coming. At the very least, he’d wanted to beat the shit out of the person most likely responsible not only for Ellen’s happiness, but also for her suicide. But as he sat there in a world that wasn’t his world, a world that his wife had embraced, he was overcome with sorrow and guilt. For not seeing her. For not recognizing her needs. For leaving her by herself too much. For spending too much time working.

When the class was over and the students filed out, Uriah remained in the back waiting for the professor to finish talking to his assistant. A brief exchange, then Johnson was alone in the small auditorium. Alone except for Uriah.

“Are you all right up there?”

Johnson had spotted him. Or maybe he’d felt him sitting in the dark, staring. Uriah had the Smith & Wesson at his waist. How easy it would be to pull it out and fire. But that kind of response didn’t live anywhere inside him. Instead, somewhat to his own disappointment, he found himself getting to his feet and walking down the steps, all the while keeping his eyes on the guy near the podium. Uriah could smell the academia on him.

Ellen had been a part of this world. She liked deep, philosophical conversations Uriah found tedious. “Too much navel-gazing,” he’d told her. It made sense that this guy with the paisley shirt and brown tie and hair that fell over his collar would have interested her.

At the bottom of the steps, Uriah positioned himself under a light while continuing to watch the guy’s face. And damn, it felt good when Johnson recognized him and went pale. Uriah pulled his jacket aside and planted a hand on his hip, revealing his gun. “To answer your question, no, I wasn’t all right up there,” Uriah said. “And I’m not all right down here.”

Johnson lost all his cool. That was worth the trip.

“What are you doing here?” His accent said East Coast, maybe Boston.

“I want to talk.”

“I don’t have anything to say.”

“I think you might have a lot to say.” Uriah let his jacket fall closed. “How long were you and Ellen seeing each other?”

Johnson caved pretty quickly. Guns had that effect on people. “A few months,” he said. Once he decided to talk, everything poured out. “I know what you think. That I’m one of those instructors who takes advantage of his position.”

That was exactly what Uriah thought.

“She’s the only student I’ve ever had a relationship with. And it just happened. One afternoon after class I found her sitting in the back of the room, crying. She was lonely. She was homesick. I talked to her. Just talked to her. And then one day we went for coffee. Friends.” He shook his head. “Things just happened,” Johnson said. “I made her
happy
.”

“Not happy enough.” Uriah stared at him a long time, trying to call up rage and outrage. Instead, everything except for one thing finally made sense. “Why did she kill herself?”

“I think the guilt got to her. She was a small-town girl. An affair wasn’t even in her vocabulary. She loved you. I know that. She didn’t love me. I just happened to be there for her. I wanted to marry her. I wanted her to leave you.” He looked at Uriah with glistening eyes.

“Were you with her the night she died?” Pills and a hotel room in Saint Paul.

“I was. Before.” His voice shook. “She told me she couldn’t see me anymore, and she told me to leave. So I left. All I wanted to do was protect her. Instead, I made things worse. I’m the reason she’s dead.”

Uriah wanted to hate the guy, but he couldn’t. Truth was, if there was anybody in the room to hate, it was himself. Wordlessly, he turned and left.

CHAPTER 40

T
here.” Jude pointed at the monitor. “Can you scrub that image?”

It was the morning after she’d found the flash drive, and she and Uriah were in the tech center of the Minneapolis Police Department, standing behind the basement workstation of one of their specialists, a young guy named Trent. His skill was isolating audio, but he was also good when it came to sharpening images. Jude had already put in a call to Kennedy Broder, girlfriend of the dead crime-beat reporter, to see if she could shed any light on the video. The young woman knew nothing about it.

With a few key clicks and mouse movements, Trent erased the murkiness and lightened the girl Jude suspected might be Octavia Germaine. “This is the only face I can work with,” he said. “The others are too dark and far away.”

“I think it’s her.” Jude glanced at Uriah, who was watching the screen. He’d arrived at the police department disconnected and distracted, with a strange look in his eyes.

Trent cropped out the face, created a new file, then hit the “Print” button. Across the room, a machine came to life and cranked out two copies of the photo. “I’ll send a JPEG to your e-mail too.” More clicking of keys.

Jude sat down at a computer terminal, pulled up the image just sent to her, and ran it through facial-recognition software. “Octavia Germaine,” she said with satisfaction a couple of minutes later. “First person to pop up.”

She didn’t give herself time to savor the match. “What about anything else in the room?” she asked, returning to Trent’s monitor. “Something that might help us ID the location.”

“Obviously an indoor pool,” the tech said. “Not a school. Probably a private home.” He enlarged an area. “Here’s a window. Looks like some kind of sitting area. See the television?”

Uriah leaned closer. “What’s on the TV screen?”

After some manipulation, they decided it was a syndicated sitcom that could also be found on Netflix or DVD. Didn’t mean anything. “Too bad it wasn’t the news,” Trent said. “That would have helped us date the video. As it is, the footage has no time stamp. I’ll send the flash drive over to digital forensics. See if they can find the creation date in the metadata, but metadata isn’t always accurate, especially when it comes to something that would have been uploaded to a computer before it was put on the drive.”

“What about sound?” Uriah asked. “Can you isolate anything?”

Trent brought up the audio track, clicked some keys, hit “Play,” then shook his head when nothing really jumped out at him. “Sorry. I’ll keep working on it, but I’m feeling doubtful.”

“The walls are unconventional for a pool room,” Jude said. “Did you notice that? Maybe made of stone or marble. And that sconce wall light . . . That’s not something you see every day.”

“I have a buddy in construction,” Trent said. Key clicks. “It’s a long shot, but I’ll send him an image.”

“Thanks.” At the printer, Jude removed the photos from the tray; then she and Uriah left the room.

“That’s really not much of anything,” Uriah said as they headed down the hall toward the elevators. “I know you think it is, but it’s not. Trent couldn’t date the video, and even if digital forensics finds something, I’m not sure how much help that’ll be. This isn’t anything to do with us. You need to turn everything you have, slight as it is, over to Missing Persons and forget about Octavia Germaine. I don’t have anything against a detective following up on something outside Homicide when we aren’t working a high-profile, urgent case, but you have no business letting this clutter your head right now.”

“You seemed okay with it last night.”

He halted in the center of the hallway to face her. In that millisecond, she placed the scent she’d been struggling with for so long.

“I wasn’t okay with it. I was never okay with it,” he said. “I was just humoring you. And you know what? You aren’t the only one dealing with personal shit. I’m dealing with personal shit. A lot of personal shit.”

“Your wife. I know. But I thought you didn’t want to talk about her.”

He gestured with both hands. “That’s because your story, what you went through, is so huge. It makes everything I’m dealing with trivial by comparison. I can’t talk to you about what’s going on in my life. I can’t.”

Something had happened between the time he’d left her apartment early that morning and their meeting with Trent. “I’m sorry you feel that way. I guess I understand even though I don’t agree.”

“Good.” Relief. “So let’s focus on our own cases.”

“All right.” A lie. She planned to visit Octavia Germaine’s parents as soon as possible. She pressed the elevator button. While they waited, she said, “It’s books.”

“What’s that?”

“The scent I haven’t been able to place? It’s old books. I kept thinking it was some manufactured concoction used in soap or aftershave, but it’s paper and leather and glue and mildew and ink. I don’t know why it took me so long to figure it out. It’s in your clothes, in your suit.”

The rapid change in his expression, going from confusion to annoyance, was like looking at a flip-book. He wrapped up his reaction by tilting his face to the ceiling and dropping his shoulders. “Oh, fuck me.”

The elevator dinged and the doors parted.

CHAPTER 41

I
read about you in the paper,” Ava Germaine said.

Twenty-four hours had passed since Uriah told Jude to forget about the Octavia Germaine case. “About what happened to you,” Ava said. “And I thought if you were still alive, if you got away, then maybe my daughter might still be alive. Maybe she can get away.”

“I know you’ve gone over this many times,” Jude said, flipping a notebook cover and clicking her pen. “I’ve read the transcripts, but I’d like to hear it from you.”

Just that morning, Jude had brought up the issue to Chief Ortega, and Ortega had warned her about pursuing a fresh line of inquiry into the cold case. Not a homicide. Not their job.

“Teenage girls run away every day,” Ortega had said. “If we were to dig up every case, we’d have no time to pursue homicides. Leave it to Missing Persons.”

Five minutes after speaking to Ortega, Jude looked up the number for Ava Germaine and told the still-distracted Uriah that she was leaving for a dental appointment. Now here she was, sitting in a tiny Section 8 house located in the Frogtown neighborhood of Saint Paul, a few blocks from the light-rail. Fairly high-crime area, but the woman on the sofa across from her didn’t seem to care about anything, least of all crime. She looked unwell, emaciated, wearing baggy gray sweatpants with food stains. Her dark-blond hair was dry and lifeless, pulled back in a ponytail. She might have been on something, because in the middle of a sentence she’d just stop talking, her face going blank.

Jude had done her homework. She knew Ava Germaine had been a well-respected psychologist with a thriving practice in the upscale Fiftieth and France business district of Minneapolis. Online photos revealed a nice-looking woman who appeared confident and in control of her life. There was nothing left of that person.

As the direct result of evil, Jude had gone through a life change, so she kind of understood.
Kind
of understood, because no one could ever fully understand what Ava Germaine was going through without experiencing it. Lola Holt’s father had asked if it ever ended, like a ride gone bad that he wanted to get off. Ava Germaine was living a nightmare that would never stop. The not knowing had to be another level of hell.

With trembling hands, the woman shook a cigarette from the pack on the table, lit up, tossed the plastic lighter down, and blew smoke toward the ceiling.

“Tell me about the day your daughter disappeared,” Jude said quietly.

Ava seemed eager to launch into the details—more proof that a parent never got over it, and proof that there was no need to tiptoe around the subject. It wasn’t as if Jude’s questions would remind her of that day. There was no way to remind her of a day she could never forget, a day that was always in her head.

She talked.

Octavia Germaine went to school but never came home. As Ava spoke, she frowned in concentration while plucking tobacco from her tongue. Jude thought about how nobody had seen the abduction. There had never been any reports of any unusual activity. Same as the Holt case.

“Something like this is hard on a marriage,” Ava confided. “My husband left about eight months after Octavia vanished. I lost my business. I used to be a psychologist.” She laughed. “Can you imagine?” She gestured toward herself, a sweep of hands from head to toe.

“I’m sorry,” Jude said.

“I couldn’t help anybody. I couldn’t listen to their problems. And I couldn’t leave home for work. What if she came back? But, since I wasn’t pulling in any money, I lost the house in Minneapolis. Now if she comes home, I won’t even be there.” She took a deep drag. “I left instructions with the new owners, but for all I know someone else could be living there now.” Tapping the cigarette against an overflowing ashtray, she thought a moment. “It’s hard for me to keep track of time. I wonder how long it’s been. That’s something I should know. A good mother would know that.”

“About three and a half years.”

“That’s right.” A nod. “She’d be almost twenty now. I called the police department after I heard about your escape on the news. I asked to talk to you.”

“I didn’t get the message. A lot of people were trying to contact me.”

“It wasn’t just me trying to reach you. It was other mothers too.”

“Other mothers?”

“I’m not the only one. I’m not the only mother with a daughter who’s gone missing.”

“Are you talking about members of the national organization? The Missing Children’s Network? They can be very supportive.”

“I belong to that, but I’m talking about missing girls here in Minnesota.”

Jude tried to keep her voice level, tried not to sound alarmed. “How many mothers are in this group?”

“Five. There used to be seven, but it ended up one of the missing girls, Florence, ran away. And poor Katherine . . . Her body was found.”

“Unfortunately, teenagers do run away. It makes it tough to sort out crime from disobedience. From the behavior of a rebellious teen.” Jude placed her pen against the tablet in her hand. “This Katherine . . . Do you know how she died?”

“Suicide. Just like Virginia Woolf. She filled her pockets with rocks and walked into the lake.”

Jude struggled to keep her expression neutral. “She drowned?”

“Yes. Something about her boyfriend dumping her. Girls that age are so dramatic. Everything is life and death.” She let out a false laugh. “Life and death.”

“What was her last name?” Jude asked.

“Nelson.”

Jude wrote it down.

“Why do you care about her?” Ava stubbed out her cigarette. “She’s already dead. It’s my daughter you should be focusing on.”

“Send me an e-mail with the names of the other women in your group,” Jude said. “Phone numbers and e-mail addresses too.”

“None of the others are from around here,” Ava said. “Most are from northern Minnesota. I think one is from the south, near the Iowa border.”

Which would explain why the cases hadn’t been flagged. Communication between police departments was an ongoing issue, one that CISA, Criminal Information Sharing and Analysis, was trying to remedy. A data system that all law enforcement and all agencies within the state could access.

“Anything else you can think of?” Jude asked.

“I want to talk about you. How did you get away? That’s what I want to know. I heard nobody rescued you, that you did it by yourself. But then, you’re a cop. I suppose that helped.”

“It was luck. Just luck.”

“You killed him, didn’t you? The man?” She was watching her with hope in her eyes. “The man who abducted you?”

“Yes. He’s dead.” Jude sat there, thinking about what Ava had just shared. Was there a connection between the missing girls? She closed her notebook and got to her feet, handing Ava a card with her contact information. “I’m going to look into this,” she promised.

“Everybody always says that.”

“But I mean it.”