The Body Reader (5 page)

CHAPTER 7

H
is girl.

He called her his girl.

On the second day of her captivity, he found out she journaled, so he brought her a stack of blank books. The cheap kind you could get at the Dollar Store. The pens were shitty too, not the gel ones she liked. The glide of a good gel pen across paper was part of the whole thing.

But what difference did ink make when she was being held in some windowless prison where nobody could hear her screaming for help?

The number of blank journals had been alarming. It meant he planned to keep her a long time. But the number was also a good sign, because she took it to mean he might not kill her, not as long as he kept bringing her journals and she kept filling them.

At first she wrote constantly, keeping track of the passage of days, faithfully winding the clock that had been ticking away in the corner that first day when she’d come to on the mattress. When the month of her seventeenth birthday rolled around, she wrote about how she would have celebrated if she’d been home.

Later she even wrote about the miscarriage, and about how he began supplying her with birth-control pills so it wouldn’t happen again. She wondered what he’d done with the fetus. Had he buried it? She obsessed about it, playing out different scenarios in her head.

She wrote about all of that.

Back there in the world, she’d been a bit of a geek. She’d liked poetry and politics and animals. Her senior year of high school she’d raised $1,000 for Walk for the Animals, and she’d marched for marriage equality. She wrote about that too.

One day she realized one of her journals was gone.

He was taking them. He was reading them.

Her deepest thoughts.

For a while she quit writing completely, but pouring out her feelings was the only thing that kept her from losing her mind, so she began writing again—with the knowledge of her audience of one.

She would play with him.

That had been her plan, her objective. To mess with his head, to make him feel remorse for what he’d done and what he was doing, to maybe make him feel guilty enough to let her go.

That was the dream, her fantasy . . .

He had a nice voice. Weird to think that, but it was true. And his body, while it didn’t belong to a teenager, wasn’t gross. He always smelled clean. But she had no way of knowing what he really looked like. When he brought her food, when he came to retrieve the piss bucket, he wore a black ski mask.

Even though she’d never seen him, she began to imagine a handsome face. And she began to obsess about his visits and about how she could please him and how she would make him fall in love with her.

She wrote about her adoration, and how much he meant to her, and how she lived for the sound of the key in the lock and the sound of his voice and the feel of his hands on her body. But the trick was on her, because she began to believe the words she wrote. Pretty soon,
she
was the one falling in love.

She wrote about that too.

She also wrote about how much
he
loved
her
, and how sad he was about the miscarriage. She wrote poems about him and drew pictures of two people together. She drew pages of hearts.

One day she got up enough nerve to ask him his name.

“What would you like it to be?” he asked.

“Harrison.” She thought a moment. “No, Colin.”

“That’s my name, then.”

When they made love—made love was what she’d begun calling it—he’d douse the battery light and remove the mask.

She touched him then, because he let her. Fingers across the whiskered skin of his face. The hair on his head wasn’t very long, his lips were soft, his body firm and hard. He had a scar on his right biceps.

“How did you get this?” she asked him one day, her fingers tracing the raised flesh.

“How would you like me to have gotten it?”

“In a shoot-out. In a bank robbery. In a car wreck where you were the only survivor.”

“How about a plane crash?”

“That works.”

She wrote about that too. The plane crash and how he’d landed the Cessna in the mountains and walked out. It took days, barefoot, in snow, without food, but his arrival in a small village made him a local legend.

These were the stories she created for them, for her, in order to survive.

He was her hero, and she loved him.

He took the journals, but he also brought them back. And pretty soon they were her best record of the passage of time, because she’d lost track of individual days long ago.

The journals grew. They lined the floor and crept up the walls of her windowless room. The stacks became so tall they sometimes tumbled to the floor and she had to restack them, with care, by number, because they were all numbered. Instead of being inside the room for a month or a year, she’d been there for ten journals or twenty journals. And finally two hundred journals.

CHAPTER 8

W
hat do you have against working with Fontaine?”

The question from Chief of Police Vivian Ortega brought Uriah back around, and he reeled in his mind drift—something he found himself doing a lot lately. He turned away from the office window and his contemplation of the streets below. Behind him, the desks were empty, the other detectives having already hit the streets for the day, Ortega’s plan being for Fontaine to arrive late in order to ease her in gradually. She’d also nixed the idea of the “welcome back” cake suggested by Vang.

Just a regular day.

“I’ve accepted the idea of her working here,” Uriah said, “but why not give her a desk job? I wouldn’t trust her to not crack in a highly stressful situation. Or even a not-so-stressful one. And I sure as hell don’t want her as a partner.” He didn’t know why the chief kept trying to pair him up with unlikely people. Maybe Ortega saw this as a way for Uriah to keep an eye on Fontaine—the last thing he wanted to do.

“Fontaine’s been cleared for duty,” Ortega said. “And we need the manpower. She’s been recertified for everything. Taken extra firearms training. Self-defense. Four months has given the media a chance to die down and move on to the next big story.” She braced her hands against her hips.

Some thought Ortega dressed too sexy for Homicide, with her loose dark hair, long nails, tight skirts, and cleavage-exposing tops, but Uriah gave her credit for doing what she wanted. And Ortega was a role model when it came to balancing life and a job that could be unrelentingly dark.

In the face of everything, she was the epitome of normal. House in a nice neighborhood, two smart kids, two goofy yellow Labs, and a husband who adored her. There was even a push for her to run for mayor. Not a bad idea, Uriah thought.

“Also, let me point out that I keep suggesting partners and you keep turning them down,” Ortega said. “I’m not asking anymore. It’s our policy that detectives work in pairs.”

“What about Vang? Didn’t his partner just quit? And he and Fontaine used to work together. Seems the obvious choice.”

“I’m not going to defend my decision.”

“I just want you to know where I’m coming from. I think it’s a bad idea. I’ve been dealing with her off and on, and she still has that thousand-yard stare.” Not to mention the way she continued to examine him whenever they had a conversation. Like she was sniffing out the scent of his soap and counting every hair on his head.

Even though they hadn’t had a blackout in months, it was still a war zone out there. People kept comparing the recent increase in crime to the eighties, when Minneapolis was dubbed Murderapolis. Back then, crime had been rampant, and hardly a day had passed without a few shootings. Now, in this throwback world, Uriah needed someone he could trust, someone who’d have his back.

That person wasn’t Fontaine.

He regretted that his investigation had been unsuccessful. No DNA match from her abductor’s clothing, no full, usable fingerprint, no gun trace, no flagged reports of shots fired, no hospital reporting a gunshot victim on the night of her escape. The cab driver who’d given her a ride never came forward, even though the department had asked for the public’s help. After months of investigation, Uriah had been forced to move on, and Jude Fontaine was once again a cold case. Failed her again.

Ortega eyed him thoughtfully. “Thousand-yard stare? You could be describing yourself.”

“I’m fine.”

Ortega shrugged in disagreement and returned to the bigger issue. “We might be a city in crisis,” she said, “but we owe it to the residents to do our best. If we all do our parts, we can get back on our feet.”

The chief thought they’d recover. Thought they could hit the “Reset” button. Uriah was beginning to think otherwise. People had reached a tipping point, and the city no longer felt safe. How did you recover from that? People, even good cops, were moving away from the area, and Uriah couldn’t blame them. What Ortega hadn’t said, and something that was probably closer to the truth, was that they had to take help where they could get it, even if it meant Fontaine.

Ortega glanced across the open floor plan that was Homicide. “Here she is.” A warning.
Act normal. Act like we haven’t been talking about her.

Fontaine’s height always surprised him. She was tall, lean, wearing clothing more appropriate for undercover work—jeans, an ancient leather motorcycle jacket—and carrying a black helmet. Apparently she’d checked the motorcycle off her to-do list.

“I like to be out in the open,” she explained.

Had she read his mind, or was he getting too damn transparent?

She tucked the helmet under her arm and offered more information. “I like to feel the sun and the wind.”

Three years was a lot of sun and wind to catch up on.

He’d heard she was living in what some dramatically referred to as the crime zone—an area southeast of downtown in a neighborhood that had once been on the rebound but now, thanks to the blackouts and an increase in crime, was in need of new blood and revival. Something the mayor was working on, but his promises were beginning to sound more hollow all the time. Decent citizens were leaving. Criminals were staying. And then there were the people like him and Fontaine, the ones who probably had nowhere else to go.

But she wouldn’t be around long. He’d give her a week, tops.

CHAPTER 9

W
hile the disapproving shadow that was Uriah Ashby loomed nearby, Jude shook hands with Chief Ortega and thanked the woman for letting her return on a trial basis.

“Good luck on your first day back,” Chief Ortega said. “Take it slow. Communicate with me. Keep me in the loop.” Pausing on the way to her office, she said, “And remember. Even though you two are partners, Detective Ashby is in charge.”

Having her assigned as his partner had to be his worst nightmare. The old Jude would have thought the whole thing funny since no one had been more adamantly against her return than Ashby. In the past, she would have immediately set about proving him wrong. Today’s Jude accepted the pairing without feeling the need to prove anything to anybody.

“You can have that spot.” Ashby pointed to a gray metal desk tucked away in a corner. The location was probably meant to be some form of punishment or an insult, but she wouldn’t have wanted her old desk in the middle of a sea of people.

As she moved toward the corner, he continued: “Just got a report of a female body found floating in Lake of the Isles.”

So much for taking it slow. He was testing her. A body before she’d as much as put a notebook or paper clip away.

“It’s in a high-crime zone,” he added.

“I’m not afraid of high-crime zones.” Something told her this wasn’t news to him. She settled the helmet on her desk and attached her badge to her belt. Turning back to him, she said, “I
live
in a high-crime zone.”

“Is that wise?”

“I need space. Skyway living isn’t for me.” She couldn’t imagine herself in some glass-enclosed human Habitrail even if the elevated walkways did connect most of the downtown buildings. “Suburban living isn’t for me either.”

“So you’d rather be out there, with the criminals?” he asked.

She nodded. “Yep.” She watched him, unblinking.

“I don’t live
in
the skyway,” he said. “My apartment complex is attached to the skyway. It’s easy. Convenient. And I don’t like cold weather.”

“Minnesota isn’t an ideal place to live if you don’t like brutal temps.”

“I transferred here.”

“From where?”

“Southern Minnesota.”

“Farm boy?”

“Farm country.”

“Cold in southern Minnesota too.”

“Not as bad as Minneapolis.”

They left the office and walked side by side down the hall toward the elevators. They made an odd pair with him in his suit, her in jeans and leather jacket. “Truth?” Uriah asked. “I don’t like breaking in new partners, which means I’m looking for a long-term relationship. That ain’t gonna happen if you live in a high-crime zone. Why invite trouble?”

She got the feeling that where she chose to live wasn’t his biggest gripe. He expected her to fail. He expected her to be out of there in a few days, and he thought the harder he pushed, the more quickly it would happen. “I have no plans to die soon, and I don’t have to prove anything to you. As you pointed out, after being held prisoner for three years I still had the resourcefulness to escape. I’d say that’s all the résumé you need from me. And it’s not as bad out there as you think.”

“I know how bad it is. And four months isn’t enough time to recover,” he added. “I’d still have my doubts after a year.”

She had her own doubts, if she was honest. If people could see inside her head, some might consider her unsound. Maybe that’s what he was getting at. A sound person wouldn’t be living where she was living. “I passed my mental-health evaluation.”

He smiled slightly. “Not that hard to do.”

Jude wasn’t like Ashby. She understood that. Not only because of who she was and what had happened to her and what those events had done to her core being, which was to muffle her and dilute her and forever change her, but also because the damaged substation that had led to the blackouts and the destruction of parts of the city was the very thing that had set her free.

Ashby had mentioned her safety, but the thing was, most people tended to leave her alone. Like the crazy person wearing headphones to block out the voices, she gave off something that bothered people, something that told them she was different. And when everything was boiled down, maybe she had nothing left to fear. Maybe that’s what really set her apart from everyone else. Her fearlessness born of ambivalence, not bravery, because she’d lived through some of the darkest stuff a person could live through.

Been there, done that.

Three Years of Torture and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt.

From the corner of her eye, she caught a blur of movement as a body hurled itself at her, arms wrapping around, holding tight. Her mind recoiled, threatened to shut down. She reached for the gun at her waist, then stopped, realizing the arms belonged to someone she knew.

“Jude. My God, it’s good to see you back,” Grant Vang said. “I tried to call you. I left messages.”

“I got them.” She didn’t explain that she’d been avoiding him since his hospital visit. That she’d lost the skill of casual conversation and speaking to Grant on the phone would have been uncomfortable. She might find herself pretending for him, trying to channel the person she once was. For him. She couldn’t allow that.

Grant set her away from him, hands still on her arms while Ashby stood to the side, watching the exchange.

Ashby had been right about her and Vang sleeping together. A mistake, something that had happened before she and Eric got serious. “I’m glad you’re still in Homicide. Ashby tells me a lot of people are leaving.”

He smiled. “Where’m I gonna go? I grew up in Saint Paul—city dude through and through.” He linked his thumbs in his belt. “I tried to talk Chief Ortega into pairing us up,” he said. “Figured since we were partners before, but she wouldn’t budge.”

That had been Jude’s doing. She’d asked to work with someone who didn’t know her, someone who wouldn’t compare her to the Jude Fontaine she used to be. She just hadn’t expected that person to be Uriah Ashby.

The elevator dinged and the doors separated. Jude recalled past social skills and managed to tell Grant good-bye as she and her new partner stepped inside the elevator to take it to the parking garage.