The Girls She Left Behind (15 page)

The smoke hadn't gotten any thicker overnight. But all it would take was a stiff breeze to whip things up again. “I'm going to take Peg with me down to the motel. Maybe my little pal Janie, or whoever she is, left something behind.”

Like a notarized affidavit saying what the hell she's up to,
Lizzie thought. But that was too much to hope for.
If she's left anything in that motel room, I'll bet I'm not going to like it.

Which for ordinary life was way too pessimistic, of course. But when a murder cop expected the worst, in Lizzie's experience he or she turned out to be correct more times than not.

Like this time, for instance.

W
hen you've worked in a medical center for as long as I'd worked at the one in New Haven, you can do almost anything in it: take showers and change into clean clothes, find food, watch TV, or even sleep overnight in a bed if you're careful and you know how to pick your spot. It's like a small city, containing everything needed for life.

You can learn almost anything about any of the patients in there, too, especially if you're the one creating their medical records, like I was. Place and date of birth, all the vital statistics, next of kin, medical or surgical history, any drugs prescribed now or in the past, allergies and precautions…it's all recorded, and not just in their charts.

Because the thing is, when I typed a report I made a hard copy that would be returned to a physician, a social worker, a therapist…whoever had sent in the dictated report in the first place. But it wasn't the only place the information went; as I sat at my keyboard and typed in the material, a computer file was also being created.

That computerized file could be retrieved and sent anywhere in the world electronically; for instance if you developed a heart problem or any other illness or condition while you were on vacation, the doctor wherever you were could consult your file via computer. It took a password to do it, of course. You couldn't just waltz in off the street and snoop in there. But the needed credential was gained easily by emailing a request for one to the database administrator.

Or by being me.

I actually was one of the administrators, and I accessed the medical database all the time, to create, update, or correct a medical record. As a result it was simple for me to access the data of anyone who had ever been a patient in the network, to request anything I wanted, and—in a near-instantaneous twinkle of electrons—get it.

Or change it, which I thought might come in handy once Cam and I began working on our plan. That was why, soon after Cam and I had set up the orderly Finny Brill to get Henry Gemerle out of the forensic hospital for us—and while Cam was in the very same medical center where I worked, recovering from her brain surgery—I tried altering a few things in the medical records on my own.

To find out, I mean, whether or not I could get away with it. And when I did, I got more ambitious. For starters, I decided to try ordering a few drugs.

S
itting beside Lizzie in the Blazer that Thursday morning, Peg Wylie said nothing as they drove out of town. Instead she gazed silently at the dried-out winter landscape that was coming to be the new normal around here: cracked mud in place of pasture ponds, dust where there should be snow.

The sky went on brightening, revealing old fence posts now weathered to silvery gray with shreds of rusty barbed wire still clinging to them and nests of bittersweet vine crowning their tops. Then:

“I lied to you,” Peg said suddenly.

A hawk soared above, wings outspread, then dove fast, some rabbit or other small, soft mammal in the dry weeds having a bad morning suddenly.

“About Tara's father, I mean,” said Peg.

Lizzie wasn't sure if the shriek as they passed was real, or if she'd imagined it. Either way, though: Bye-bye, rabbit.

“I had a boyfriend, and I got pregnant,” Peg said. “And then I got married. I was sixteen.”

The road south of Bearkill ran along a high, narrow ridge with views east across the St. John River to New Brunswick, Canada, and west to the northern reaches of the Appalachians. At this early hour the mountain peaks were indistinct humps against a dull sky, their eastern slopes covered with now-leafless hardwoods.

Lizzie pulled into a scenic bypass overlooking the river. The land past the trash cans and picnic tables dropped away to a vista of water and small islands far below, stretching to the horizon north and south. Directly to the east, a pale-pink line appeared on the horizon.

“Okay,” said Lizzie. “And then what happened?”

Peg lit a cigarette. Her blond hair was bleached, a line of darker roots showing her natural color, which was light brown with a few gray streaks, and her eyes in the growing dawn were blue.

Pale, not-a-cloud-in-the-sky blue. She dragged nervously on the smoke. “And then his unit got called up. Military, he was in the National Guard. They got sent to Iraq.”

Lizzie nodded, waiting. The pink line to the east turned pale yellow. A breeze, freakishly warm for this time of year and smelling freshly of the river, sucked the rank cigarette smoke out the passenger-side window.

Peg took another drag, pinched the butt with her thumb and index finger, then tucked it into her cigarette pack—there were no ashtrays in vehicles anymore, and around here lately no one flicked cigarettes out windows, even on gravel parking lots.

But finishing the cigarette seemed to have shut off Peg's speech-switch, too. She fell silent again, her face desolate.

“So?” Lizzie prompted finally, restarting the Blazer as a thin orange disk peeped up from the trees on the far side of the river. Then it jumped up, its light turning the hills to the west to gold while she turned back out onto the highway, once more heading south.

On the outskirts of Houlton they pulled off onto a side road, drove half a mile, and found the wide gravel driveway of Treetops. The colonial-style house, white-clapboarded and with the traditional green shutters at the windows, was the central hub of an elaborate series of more recent additions: a two-story brick unit housing the lobby and combination bar and restaurant—
HOT BEEF SUB WITH AU JUICE SAUCE!
read the yellowing placard propped in the window—and three one-story windowed spokes radiating outward from the central brick section, each spoke containing a dozen guest rooms.

At the rear, just visible over the guest-room sections, was what Lizzie assumed was the pool building, a blue-domed structure resembling a miniature covered sports arena.

Peg had stayed silent for the last part of the trip but now the sight of the motel seemed to get her going again from where she'd left off.

“Then he came home.” She sighed. “Freaked out, hooked through the gills on heroin, and all pissed off at the whole damn world. At me, too. Tara was three months old.”

Peg stopped, turning to stare out the window. Lizzie decided to give the woman a minute to collect herself. She hit her phone's auto-dial.

“Missy, do me a favor? Drop the New Haven cops a request for more records. Any priors on Henry Gemerle, and ask them for all of the unsolved stranger-rapes in the area from—” She specified the years she wanted. “Oh, and you know what? Ask them if there's a yard behind the Gemerle house, too, and was it investigated at all.”

She listened a moment. “Yeah, investigated as in dug up, or if cadaver dogs were ever in it. Or,” she added, “GPR.”

Ground-penetrating radar was a near-prohibitively expensive way to look for evidence. But Yale was in New Haven and probably had an archaeology department, so the cops there might have access to the technology without having to buy the gear.

She turned back to Peg, who'd straightened in her seat looking ready to talk again. “So then what happened?”

Around the back of the motel, four huge metal dumpsters and an industrial-sized propane tank formed an L-shaped service area. She parked next to it and got out, fishing around in her bag for a magnetic-stripped rectangle of plastic.

The employees at Treetops were just as cash-strapped as the minimum-wage workers back in the city had been. Getting the extra key card from the desk clerk last night had cost two folded twenties wrapped in a ten—the same price as Boston.

Lizzie hadn't even been sure at the time why she'd done it.

Force of habit, probably. But now she was glad.

“Then I left,” said Peg, as if this must be obvious. “He was just getting impossible to live with.”

The key card opened the motel's rear outer door. Inside, the hall stank of chlorine from the indoor pool.

“Last time I heard he'd just gotten out of jail again. And I don't want him to find us here. Not ever,” Peg went on.

“Right,” Lizzie said tiredly, but she didn't believe a word of it. What Peg had just told her might be a decent reason to keep your head down, keep your troubles from going public. A guy with a heroin habit was no one's idea of fun.

But it wasn't enough when your kid was missing. Lizzie punched her phone's
REDIAL
button. “Yeah, Missy, one more thing. Sorry about this, but call the New Haven cops again?”

She turned to Peg. “What's his name? Your ex, his last—”

Peg looked startled. “Zimmerman, his name is Mitch—”

Lizzie repeated this to Missy. “I'll hang on,” she added, then listened while Missy relayed the information from the NHPD: brown/blue, six foot two, 190, muscular build, forearm tattoos.

Right now he was in custody on armed robbery charges, Missy said. So at least Mitch Zimmerman existed. Peg might even have been married to the guy like she said, not that it mattered. She was still lying; for one thing, the story was so harmless that if it were true, she'd have offered it earlier.

The room Lizzie had checked Jane Crimmins—or whoever she really was—into the day before was the last one on the corridor, adjacent to a whirring, clattering compressor of some kind, perhaps connected to the pool.

She slid the key card in and the door swung open; as the standard motel-room interior with its heavy drawn curtains came dimly into view, Peg stopped.

Lizzie did, too, glad suddenly for the chlorine reek. “Stay behind me, don't come in.”

“Tara?” Peg's voice rose. “Oh, my God, is that—”

“No.”
I hope not, anyway,
Lizzie thought
.
She flipped on a light switch. The room was a battle scene: chairs overturned, lamps broken, blankets torn off the bed.

The heavy ceramic lid from the toilet tank lay near the far wall. Lizzie crouched next to the bloody heap by the dresser, her heart slamming in her chest. Being a murder cop was like being an ER physician sometimes, she supposed: You could cultivate all the calm exterior manner you wanted.

But as Emily Ektari had said earlier, no one ever got used to the sight of a lot of blood all of a sudden.

A
lot
of blood.

L
izzie looked up at Peg's horrified face. “Take it easy. It's not Tara, okay? I don't think anyone's here at all.”

Lizzie scanned the carpet, looked under the beds, noted the disarrayed bedclothes, and checked behind the overturned TV.

Nothing. “Peg, go down to the lobby and ask to use the phone, okay?” Lizzie scribbled on the desk pad.

“Call this number, a guy named Dylan Hudson should answer. When he does I want you to tell him that you're with me and that I need him to come out here.”

Peg nodded dumbly but made no move to obey.

“Hey, you okay?” Lizzie peered into Peg's shocked face. “ 'Cause this really isn't Tara, you know that now, don't you?”

“Yeah,” Peg managed shakily. “Just blood.” Her gaze flitted around the room. No clothes or other personal items were visible, and nothing was on the bathroom counter but unopened soap and the standard tiny bottles of motel toiletries.

“But whose blood?” Peg whispered.

That was the big question, all right. “Just go, Peg. You want to help Tara, you do what I asked.”

Finally Peg obeyed, and once she was gone Lizzie knelt and peered under both beds again, into the entryway closet, and all around the bathroom. She checked all the dresser drawers and the bedside table, too: Bible, a sheet of TV instructions, and a menu from the motel's restaurant, nothing else.

In the wastebasket she found the unopened pack of pajamas and the toothbrush that she'd bought for Jane at the dollar store on the way here yesterday. In the desk was nothing but a few sheets of paper with the Treetops logo on them, a silhouette of a fancy cart with two high-stepping black ponies pulling it.

Nothing else; no shred of evidence to say what the pill-popping not-Jane Crimmins had been doing in here, or what had led to this scene of carnage. Then, just as Lizzie dropped to her knees again and spotted something she'd missed, a voice interrupted.

“Can I help you?” In the doorway stood a tall, pear-shaped man with a receding forehead, droopy eyes, and a ratty mustache. He wore baggy tan slacks with sneakers and a plaid collared shirt. The small button pinned to his frayed gray sweater-vest read
LIVE LONG AND PROSPER.

He leaned forward, his eyes avid, taking in the scene of past violence like it was vital oxygen. “I'm the manager. What's going on?”

Lizzie stood up. “I'm a cop. This is a crime scene.”

Unlike Peg, the motel manager seemed unfazed by the blood. But then who knew what he got used to, working here; all it had taken to give Lizzie a permanent motel-room phobia was a single demonstration of a forensic device that made body-fluid stains glow in the dark.

“I checked a woman in here yesterday,” she said. “By the name of Jane Crimmins. Now she's gone, and I find this.”

She waved at the mess. “So was there any disturbance? Did anyone complain about noise, a fight, anything like that?”

But probably that loud compressor next door had muffled it, she thought. The manager drew himself up primly.

“Now, Officer, I'm very sure this motel has no responsibility whatsoever for what any of our guests may choose to—”

Lizzie's patience for fools, never well supplied anyway, fizzled out abruptly. “Hey, dickwad, how about you just answer my question and save the legal opinions for later, okay? You had any complaints for anything at all, like maybe a visitor from the Planet Vulcan you haven't felt like mentioning? 'Cause it looks to me like somebody got all of the blood let out of 'em here. You sure you don't know anything about how that happened?”

The plump hands pressed together in a praying gesture. “No! I most certainly don't—”

Peg stepped past the motel manager. She looked as if she had managed to calm herself somehow, and sure enough those were booze fumes on her breath; the bar here opened early, apparently.

“Detective Hudson's coming,” she said. “Ten minutes.”

Lizzie turned back to the manager, whose ghoulish eagerness had evaporated. “Go on back to the front desk and stay there,” she told him.

A flash of rebellion at being told what to do showed in his glance, but he went. “Peg, d'you want to go get the yellow tape from the Blazer?”

Kneeling once more, she peered under the desk chair. Taped under the seat was a large tan manila envelope. Dry-mouthed, she pulled the envelope out, opened the loose flap, and peered inside.

Pill bottles, the small orange plastic pharmacy kind like the one the supposed Jane Crimmins had taken from her purse earlier, filled the envelope. Without touching them she could see that the labels were of two kinds: Some said diazepam, which was the generic name for Valium, and others were for methylphenidate.

Which Lizzie knew was pharmacy-speak for Ritalin, an often-abused stimulant used for attention deficit disorder. Emily had said it could cause false positives on tests for amphetamines.

There were perhaps a dozen small bottles labeled for each drug in the envelope. Uppers and downers, in other words; a mental picture of a woman who was so badly agitated that she couldn't take questioning from Dylan popped into Lizzie's mind.

“What are you doing?” Peg stood in the doorway again, yellow tape roll in hand.

Jane had taken pills from a bottle like one of these back in Lizzie's kitchen, she recalled, saying they were for a headache.

“Just making sure we haven't missed anything.” Lizzie caught the tape Peg tossed at her and laid the envelope casually on the dresser.

Maybe Jane had crammed all of her pills into just a few bottles so they'd fit in her purse, then put the emptied bottles in the envelope and hid it; speed freaks were compulsive that way sometimes, Lizzie knew. Jane would have meant to get rid of the bottles more permanently, but whatever went on here had happened before she could.

That was one theory, anyway. “On second thought, let's just let the state cops handle it,” Lizzie added, glancing around a final time at the bloody mess. “It's their department.”

Outside, she moved the Blazer around to the front parking lot so Dylan would see it when he arrived. Getting out, Peg pulled a cigarette from her purse and managed to light it.

“Did Tara get hurt in there? Do you think—?” She blew out a plume of smoke.

“I don't know.” Lizzie punched her phone's buttons again. Time to give her own boss a call, assuming Mister Magoo out there at the front desk hadn't done it already.

But then from the corner of her eye she caught sight of something odd in a car parked by the motel's restaurant. There was someone inside it, small fists hammering at the window of the midsized sedan.

Hurrying toward the car, she shoved her phone back into her bag. “Help!” the child in the vehicle cried as Lizzie assessed the youngster: female, moderate distress, no obvious injuries, maybe ten years old. Her hair, pulled into a ponytail, was light blond.

Nicki's hair was blond, too. And she'd be the same age…

“Help, they locked me in here! Let me out, help!”

The little girl wore a white blouse and navy vest, like part of a school uniform. Scanning the child's face, Lizzie looked for the tiny birthmark Nicki had just in front of her right ear.

A fairy's touch, Cecily had called the mark. But through the tinted glass Lizzie couldn't see well enough to tell for sure if it was present on this child.

“Peg, go on inside the restaurant,” she said. “See if someone there left a kid out here in the car.”

The vehicle's doors were all locked. “Hang on, kiddo,” she told the little girl, “I'm a police officer, I'll get you out.”

She knew the odds of this being her own long-dead sister's missing child were heavily against.
Still, stranger things have—

Peg returned shaking her head. “Nobody in the restaurant at all.”

Or in the parking lot, either. “Okay, then, go on back to my vehicle. Inside you'll find a windshield hammer under the driver's seat, you know what one looks like?”

Peg nodded briskly and obeyed at once, about-facing yet again back toward the Blazer despite her own ongoing distress. Under other circumstances, Lizzie thought—ones in which Peg was not lying her head off, for instance—the Bearkill woman would make a good team member.

“Help!” the little blond child cried hysterically. “I can't unlock the doors! They left me in here, I've been here for hours and I'm suffocating, help me!”

“Calm down, I'll get you out.” The girl wasn't suffocating, clearly. But she seemed thoroughly frightened, and besides, Lizzie wanted—needed—a better look at her.

Peg returned with the hammer. “Okay, now,” Lizzie told the child, “you cover your head with your arms and close your eyes.”

The car's door locks were electronic. She raised the hammer. “Wait!” A man strode hurriedly out of the restaurant. “Wait, what are you doing, that's my car!”

Sport coat and slacks, white knit polo shirt, wristwatch. Behind the man hurried a woman in a navy pantsuit, wearing a lot of jewelry and a heavily sprayed platinum hairdo.

“Wait, wait, what's going on?” she cried anxiously.

Lizzie lowered the hammer. Inside the car, a fleeting look of thwarted malice crossed the little girl's face and was gone.

The man rushed up, pressing his key fob. The car's window lowered: no birthmark, and the girl's eyes were hazel, not blue.

So: not Nicki. Lizzie quashed disappointment; after all, what had she been expecting?

“What the hell?” the man demanded as the door locks popped. The woman yanked the rear door open and seized the little girl's arm firmly.

“What did you do?” she demanded of the child. “For heaven's sake, I leave you here for five minutes and when I come back—”

Lizzie produced her badge and identified herself while the woman dragged the unwilling child out of the car. When the kid's feet hit the ground she started yelling again; close up, she did not look so angelic.

“Liar! They left me for hours!” She jerked from the woman's grasp. “You hurt me! Help! These aren't my real parents!”

She looked, actually, like a world-class brat. Lizzie turned back to the man, whose flat, sad expression said this wasn't the first such scene he'd endured. “Sir, I'll need to see some—”

“Identification,” he finished for her. “Sure.” He produced a driver's license, handed it over with an air of resignation. “My daughter,” he added quietly, “is disturbed.”

Meanwhile the woman spoke evenly but furiously to the child. “We were in the restrooms, for heaven's sake. And I warned you when we got here, if you made a big fuss in the restaurant you'd have to sit out in the car. Didn't I?”

Lizzie handed back the man's license, about to tell him that she hoped he understood but she would have to check further.

Because she was pretty sure she understood the situation now, but that wasn't enough when a kid was involved.

“It's okay. I know them,” Peg said quietly. The man looked gratefully at Peg. “He works for the highway department, based out of Houlton, and the little girl goes to a—”

“Walthrop School,” the man put in. “It's a residential place for emotionally disturbed girls. In New Hampshire.” He glanced over at his wife and their child. “We were bringing her home for a visit.”

Then he looked down at his shoes. “I guess maybe that wasn't such a good idea,” he added. “I'm very sorry for the trouble.”

On the other side of the car, the little girl stamped her feet, then hauled off and took a solid swing at her mother, who sidestepped it expertly. “I hate you!” the girl shrieked.

“Excuse me,” the man said, hurrying over. Moments later he had his arms wrapped tightly around the child, restraining her while she kicked and struggled; with his wife's help he at last got the girl back into the car and her seatbelt fastened.

As they drove away, Lizzie watched with a mixture of painful emotions. It hadn't occurred to her to wonder what she would do if she found Nicki and the child had significant problems.

But now it did. “She was hurt in there, wasn't she?” Peg quavered, pulling Lizzie back to the present. “All that blood in the room. It's Tara's, isn't it?”

Lizzie finished leaving a message on Sheriff Cody Chevrier's voicemail. “We don't know that.”

But Peg wasn't having any. “Oh, come on. You think I'm that stupid? Somebody bled to death in there, bled like a—”

Dylan's car pulled in. Lizzie turned to Peg. “Okay, then. You're right. Someone's dead, probably. Or nearly dead. I don't know who or why.”

Dylan parked and got out, sliding on his dark glasses as he crossed the parking lot.

“But what I do know is that this whole morning, you've been trying to feed me another load of horsecrap about your daughter.”

Caught,
said the sudden expression on Peg's face.

“Not only that, but I don't know where
you
were or what
you
were doing when whatever happened in there went down.”

Peg looked shocked. Too bad, Lizzie thought. She took a deep breath to calm herself, let it out slowly.

“You know, Peg, everyone working on this case has their own reasons. Things that
they
want, besides finding Tara.”

Watching Dylan stride toward her, his black topcoat swinging open over his dark wool suit and his oxblood wing tips glinting in the morning sun, she added: “Maybe it's good for their career, or they just want a perfect case-clearing score, whatever.

“All but me,” she went on. “I can't benefit from Tara's case. I'm not even assigned to it.”

She plucked the cigarette from Peg's fingers and dragged on it. “I'm just a lowly sheriff's deputy, so all I'm in it for is to try to help.”

The smoke was like a kick to the head; another drag and she'd be hooked again. Some primitive self-preserving instinct stopped her from taking it.