The Silent Girls (11 page)

Chapter 20

C
HIEF
B
ARRONS
PROVED
to be in high spirits, launching into the misfortune of his hot, sunny week on North Andros, fly-fishing for bonefish by day and putting down Kaliks and conch fritters by night. According to deprived Barrons, October wasn’t the best time for bonefishing in the Bahamas: hurricane season, and all that, a chance of clouds and wind that made for piss-poor fishing. But this year the bonefishing gods had graced him with sunny, windless days. “A bonefisherman’s wet dream.”

Before he let his underlings get down to business, he showed them photos on his iPad of the first permit he’d ever caught on a fly, a bonus that had made his trip.

Now, Barrons sat at his desk, his meaty fingers clasped behind his big, square, bald head, his eyes closed, supposedly listening to Sonja make a case that Mandy’s disappearance was linked to the other girls’ and needed official backing though Barrons looked to Rath like he was daydreaming about bonefish.

Sonja leaned toward Barron’s desk from her chair. “We think the missing girls
may
be linked. Including Mandy.”

Grout shot Sonja a look that could fell a redwood for taking the lead on the conversation. “I don’t think that,” he snipped.

“
May
be linked?” Barrons ran a palm over his skull, not opening his eyes. “How?”

“What are the odds that these girls—” Rath started, but Sonja snapped him a cold look, and he sat back feeling like a puppy smacked on with a newspaper. Police-force protocol was to let whoever was making their case make it. Never interrupt. Then again, Rath wasn’t force.

“As Mr. Rath was saying,” Sonja said. “What are the odds that these girls go missing without a trace, then we find this dead girl? And Mandy? And
none
are linked?”

“We don’t even know if Mandy is —” Grout started and suffered the same hard smack on the snout from Sonja. He was livid now at Sonja’s jockeying.

“What’s the farthest distance from the missing girls?” Barrons asked Sonja.

“Seventy-eight miles,” Sonja said.

“Christ. That’s more than half the length of the state,” Barrons said dismissively. “And some of these girls are in New Hampshire?”

Grout folded his fingers behind his head, relishing Sonja’s slap down.

“But. State borders aren’t going to stop a sicko,” Sonja said.

“
But but but.
” Barrons blinked his eyes open. He smoothed his mustache with an index finger and thumb. “No
buts.
I’m not saying there isn’t a connection. God help us if there is. But you need proof. That’s your job.”

“Exactly,” Grout jumped in, shooting his own bitter look at Sonja. “What I’m requesting is the ability to focus on Mandy’s case. She’s our priority.”

“Mandy a relative?” Barron’s cool gray eyes settled on Grout.

Grout rolled his tongue along the inside of his cheek. “Yes, sir.”

“Family can cloud your judgment.” Barrons glanced at Rath. Before Rath had resigned from the state police, he’d insisted he be part of Laura’s murder investigation. Barrons had flatly refused. For good reason. Though at the time, Rath had wanted to strangle him.

“I don’t even know the girl,” Grout said, defensively. “She’s my wife’s cousin’s daughter. I met her mom once, at a funeral.”

“Just watch playing favorites,” Barrons said. “We can’t be spending valuable—”

“I’m
aware,
” Grout snapped. He cleared his throat. “That’s why I brought Rath in, sir. To get a start while it was fresh but unofficial. He’s been doing it pro bono, for fuck’s sake.”

“Don’t get riled,” Barrons said.

“I’m not riled. The fact is, she’s sixteen and missing.”

“She’s emancipated,” Barrons said.

“Yes, but.”

“No
buts.
We’re police officers. Emancipated means she’s a legal adult. She fought for that status. She’s entitled to go wherever she likes without telling anyone or cops hounding her.”

Barrons’s stickler approach rankled Rath more with each word. Perhaps Barrons sensed it because he clapped his hands together, and said, “Look. I don’t like it either. And, she’s officially missing as an adult now anyway. So I’ll grant resources. We treat it officially as a suspicious disappearance until proven otherwise. We’ll get her photo in the media to the general public, and I’ll give a presser. At least I got a nice tan for the cameras. What I
won’t
do, publicly or privately, is tie Mandy or this new body to each other, and certainly
not
to the other disappearances. Not without proof. Murder investigations are headed by the state police, we work only in a support role. For now, we deal with this dead girl under the radar, using Rath. He has more leeway. And he’s cheaper.”

“Thanks,” Rath said.

“And see to it that you do get paid
,
” Barrons said to Rath. “You can’t work for free. Make it official. A 1099 form, all that. Find evidence to connect any of them, you’ll get more support.” He glanced at his iPad, the slide show of his trip.

Ass,
Rath thought, though maybe Rath was jealous. Nothing was stopping Rath from going to the Bahamas for a week. Hell, a month. And even though he’d been a spin fisherman chucking bait his whole life, he’d always been tempted to try fly-fishing.

Rath’s cell buzzed in his jacket pocket. He eyed the screen. A text. From Rachel. At last.

I’m sorry to be so lame. I’ve just been swamped. I’ll call you soon. I promise. Love you, Rachel

Relief rushed through Rath.

“What do you think?” a voice was saying.

Rath blinked to see the three cops staring at him.

“Hmm,” he said, feeling as though he were in grade school, caught daydreaming at his desk. “I was following a thread in my own head,” he said.

The cops stared. Never bullshit a roomful of detectives.

“What do you think?” Barrons said.

“I don’t think we’re talking just a sexual predator. Sonja’s gut that they’re connected feels right. This new girl. It doesn’t feel sexual.”

“I disagree,” Grout said.

Barrons nodded for Rath to continue. “It suggests a psychotic mind, driven by a concrete, logical, if insane motive,” Rath said. “The motive is the link. The
why.
There’s something about these girls, dissimilar as they seem, that ties, makes them similarly attractive to the same predator.”

“Find it,” Barrons said. “Any theories from any of you on the
why
?”

“Some sort of cult,” Sonja said, “judging by the goat’s head.”

“Bull.” Barrons picked up a photo from Sonja’s folder on his desk. “This doesn’t even look like a goat’s head. How do we get a goat’s head out of this mess?”

“Lou McCreary—” Sonja said.

“Loony Lou? He’s suddenly an expert on occult flesh carvings?” Grout barked a laugh.

“Well. No,” Sonja said, “I think it looks like—”

“You
think. Looks like?
” Barrons said. “You need to do better. Satanists. Christ.”

“Not Satanists,” Sonja said, prickling. “Not exactly.”

“What, exactly?” Barrons said.

“I don’t know,” Sonja said.

“You do know, it just has to come to you,” Rath said. “I feel it, too.”

“Jesus
,
” Grout muttered. “You two and your feelings. Join a commune.”

Barrons fired a look at Grout. “You got a theory rattling in that gourd?”

“Mandy’s not connected. If the others are connected, it is sexual. A twisted perv. Who’s to say that”—he caught Rath’s eye—“mutilation, carvings, cutting out the heart, aren’t a sexual turn-on?”

“If they’re connected,” Sonja said, “we haven’t seen anything like it since”—her eyes caught Barrons’s—“the Connecticut River Valley Killer.” There. Somebody had said it out loud.

“Well,” Barrons said, cracking his knuckles and stretching as he stood. He grimaced at Grout. “You’ve checked back a few years to crimes involving occult symbols or any of that shit, just in case, to at least eliminate it, I gather?”

“I just got the information,” Grout said. “Detective Test just decided this morning to communicate it to me. But, I was thinking that I’d do that.”

“Don’t think. Do.” Barrons’s gaze swung on Sonja. “And you. Share everything with your superior. Got it. And put together something I can use at Mandy’s presser. I’ll avoid any connection to Victory’s dead girl. If it gets big, we’ll have those turds from NECN up here, national stringers after that. I go away for one week and I come back to a shit storm . . .”

Sonja and Grout made to leave the room. Rath followed, reading Rachel’s text again. He smiled. Then, a feeling struck him, that—

“Rath,” Barrons said. “Stay.”

Rath stared at Barrons.

“I want to talk about your rates,” Barrons said.

“Good luck bleeding that stone,” Grout said, as he and Sonja made down the hall.

“Shut the door,” Barrons said.

Rath shut the door.

“Sit,” Barrons said.

Stay. Sit. Good dog.

Rath sat. Barrons sat. He turned the iPad to Rath to show a series of photos he hadn’t earlier, grip-and-grins of his prized permit, fly rod clenched in his teeth. “That’s a fish,” Barrons said.

“That it is,” Rath said, “you son of a bitch.”

“They fight like a fucker,” Barrons said, spreading his arms expansively. A late middle-aged divorced man, full-blown and magnanimous with ease and self-satisfaction, his two kids having flown the coop and his ex having remarried to absolve him of all guilt and responsibilities toward anything but his own pleasure and work. But something worked at the corner of his eyes when he smiled: a splinter of what? Regret?

“And are they ever
hard
to get to take a fly,” Barrons continued. “You’d love it. You’re out there on the flats, and those flats
are
wild. Let me tell you. An hour by boat, twenty miles from the nearest shack. Nothing but mangroves and flats as far as the eye can see. Monstrous sea turtles gliding beneath you, terns drifting above, and the lemon sharks. Holy Jesus. Sharks all over the place. I had one-in-every-three bonefish get mauled by lemon sharks right at the boat, or right at my leg when I was wading. Bitten clean in half. A bloodbath.” He grinned, his teeth stained the color of antique piano keys. “And the permit, you
hunt
them. See maybe three a day and get maybe one good shot and likely no take. But when you do get a take, it’s like hooking into a bee-stung bull. Wild. The natives, too, the females, wild. Real welcoming, the native ladies.”

“You don’t have to work at all at being an asshole, do you?” Rath said, and smiled.

“Practice, practice.”

“You keep me back just to rub my face in your adventurous life?”

“Mostly.” Barrons looked at Rath, his eyes hard and the lines in his face deepening. “What do you think you’re doing?” he said.

“Doing? Trying to help on a case.”

“Not that. With your life?”

“What the hell is this?”

“You’re forty-five.”

“Forty-
two.
”

“Unemployed.”

“I work plenty.”

“But you keep coming back to help us.”

“You need help.”

“Don’t I know it. So. Come back.”

Rath laughed, the sound of escaping air after being sucker punched. “Why would I ever do that?”

“You got nothing better to do. You’re all alone now. You don’t have something to sink your teeth into, you’ll end up pathetic. And because it’s in you. It’s not like you left because you hated it.”

“The way I work now, it’s my way.”

“
Chairman of the Board
here.”

“No politics, no protocol.”

“What if you didn’t have to put up with protocol? One of the new positions is going to be Senior Detective.” Barrons lifted a fly reel from his desk and worked its handle. It made a soft, purring
clickclickclick.

“You’d want me to just jump ahead of those two?” Rath said.

“Why not?”

“You’re not that stupid.”

“Sure I am.”

“I’d be despised by two good detectives.”

“What vet isn’t? They’re good. But. He
still
needs time. A mentor. They both do.”

“You served me OK.”

“I got another eighteen months, and I’m Bahamas bound for good.”

Rath was taken aback. Could Barrons be fifty already? He did the math. Shit, he was, and he was taking the earliest retirement possible with a pension at fifty-two? “So, I’d be left with some new asshole chief,” Rath said.

“By then, I could anoint you chief. Interim anyway.”

“This gets worse and worse.”

“You saw how I had to lead Grout by the nose on digging up past petty crimes with links to ‘Satanic’ symbols. The thought hadn’t even occurred to him.”

“He’d have got to it—”

“Eventually.”
Clickclickclick.
“Not good enough. You really think these girls are connected? Mandy, too?”

“But I don’t know how, yet,” Rath said. “When you give your presser and announce a girl has gone missing and it’s learned another girl’s body was found, what’s the first question by the media?”

“ ‘Are they connected?’ ”

“Why?” Rath said.

“Because they probably are. But I won’t say it aloud. It’s
you
who dares say it aloud without a lick of proof.”

“Detective Test did, too.”

“Junior Detective Test. And she hedges. ‘
But but but. I think. May-be.
’ They both pussyfoot, weigh their options. Their jobs aren’t to
appease
me. Their jobs are to push the fuck back. Jesus. They don’t even know
that
much yet.”

“She wasn’t appeasing when she brought up the CRVK—that was a good jab.”

“There are good jabs, then there’s swinging wildly, like a girl.”

Rath shrugged.

“You don’t think this has anything to do with the CRVK—” Barrons started.

“No,” Rath lied. “I don’t.”

“You never tried to appease anyone. You say it like you mean it, even when you don’t.”

“If I were on the payroll, I wouldn’t speak up as much; I wouldn’t have that freedom.”