Vanished in the Night (10 page)

“Not sure.” Tina bit her lower lip. “I felt like I’d seen her somewhere before. You sure she didn’t ring any bells for you?”

“I’ll look at her chart later and see if I can figure it out.” If Tina said she was familiar, chances were she was familiar. The question was, what difference did that make? Regardless of who she’d been in life, she was tits up now.

*     *     *

Matt Cassell stood by his rig out in the ambulance entry and reminded himself to breathe. When he’d moved to Sacramento, he’d thought he was moving farther away from his past. Then tonight he’d landed smack-dab in it.

“You doing all right out there?” Matt’s partner, Jason, stuck his head out of the back of the ambulance.

“Great. Terrific,” Matt replied.

“Then what say you hop in here and help me clean up some of this mess?” Jason’s spiky-haired head disappeared back in the rig.

Matt climbed in and began to pick up some of the trash left behind after desperately trying to revive Susan Tennant.

He had tried, hadn’t he? He went over everything he’d done. Would anybody be able to fault him? Would they be able to say that he’d let her die? That he’d watched her choke on her own vomit and hadn’t felt one ounce of pity or remorse?

No. He was pretty sure he’d covered all the bases. From the second that he and Jason had gone into the house, he’d done everything he was supposed to do.

It had been quite a shock, though. He hadn’t laid eyes on Susan Tennant for twenty years, and she most
definitely had not been the one who’d been restrained in their last encounter. Obviously someone else in town knew exactly how Susan had treated boys at the Sierra School.

“You’re kind of quiet,” Jason observed.

Matt glanced up. He didn’t want there to be anything suspicious about this night. “I was just thinking about the two nurses I met in there. Late twenties, maybe. One looked Latina, with curly black hair. The other was a short reddish-haired chick.”

Jason laughed. “Oh, you got an eyeful of the Tina and Veronica show. Careful, buddy, you wouldn’t be the first one to step on his dick rushing toward that goalpost.”

“Is that so?” Interesting.

“Oh, yeah. They’re a feisty set. I hear they’re worth it, though.”

As Jason continued to talk, Matt tried to figure out what the hell he was going to do about Susan Tennant.

7

Zach looked over the missing persons report that Janice Lam had faxed to him. There wasn’t much to it. The kid had been there at lights-out, but was missing the next morning. The school staff searched for him for a few hours before they called it in.

He stretched. He hadn’t had the most restful night’s sleep. Everything about this case bugged him. From the fact that this kid had been dead for two decades without anybody realizing it, to the effect Veronica Osborne had on him whenever she was nearby.

And then there were the parallels with his own life. What if things had turned out differently for him? What if
his
mother had gotten remarried to some alcoholic asshole who had wanted him out of
the picture? Max Shelden’s bones came with more than a little taste of “there but for the grace of God” for Zach, and he didn’t want to contemplate those pathways.

He picked up the phone and called Lam. “You get the report?” she asked after he tracked her down through a couple of telephonic gatekeepers.

“I’m looking at it right now.” What there was of it.

“There’s nothing I can add. That was long before my time.”

The date on the report was before his time, too. He would have been what? Nine? Ten? His world had been perfect then. Oh, he would have whined about Ms. Reeves, his teacher that year. She hadn’t liked Zach and the sentiment was returned many times over. Still, life had been pretty much perfect. He’d had a mother and a father, three older sisters who doted on him, and a roof over his head. He hadn’t known how good he had it.

He did now, and he tried to be thankful for it on a regular basis.

Zach turned his attention back to the report. “Yeah, I figured you wouldn’t know much about it. The officer who took the case, Ray Stoffels, he still around?”

“Yeah, he’s around. You want to talk to him?”

“Sure.” It seemed like grasping at straws, but you never knew. A lot of stuff happened that never made
it into reports. The odds of Ray Stoffels remembering that particular case and that particular kid weren’t great, but it was worth taking a chance. “What’s this Stoffels guy like?”

“Ray? He’s okay. He’ll talk your ear off, but he’s all right.” Lam snapped her gum.

That described most of the retired cops Zach knew. There was nothing they loved more than swapping old war stories, and hopefully Stoffels was the same. “Any chance I can get his number?”

“Let me give him yours instead. He can call you if he feels like it. I don’t like giving out people’s personal information without their permission.”

Zach bit back a growl of frustration. He was a cop looking for information, not a telemarketer trying to sell magazine subscriptions. But arguing with Lam wouldn’t help. He gave her his number and hung up.

“We get anything new from Dinsmore?” he asked Frank.

Frank riffled through his notepad. “Not really.”

Zach rubbed his face. “You dig anything up on that school?”

Frank shook his head.

“We’re running out of places to look, Frank.” They needed to drum up some more leads. “I keep hoping somebody saw that kid when he came back here.”

“Yeah, but who? The coach didn’t see him. The
stepfather. The sister. We can go talk to the high school buddies, but they were just kids then, too.”

“Let’s do that tonight.”

“It’s a date.”

Lyle Burton stared at the copy of the
Sacramento Chronicle
sitting on his desk. Susan Tennant was dead. Murdered in her home last night.

A cold bead of sweat slid down his back. Maybe it was just a weird coincidence. A woman living alone was an automatic target for weirdos and rapists. Then there was the nurse thing—lots of guys had things for nurses. Hell, the kinky stores were filled with sexy nurse uniforms.

Lyle understood that. He remembered quite well how Susan had looked in a white nursing uniform back in the day. Someone could have fixated on her and followed her home. Someone could have been watching her, waiting for her.

Slowly and carefully, he folded the newspaper shut. There was nothing he could do about this right now. It might not have anything to do with him. He’d have to wait and see what happened next, and then he’d make a plan.

This might even be the end of it. Already, the news of Max Shelden’s bones had faded off the front pages
of the newspapers and off the TV news. He might never hear the names Susan Tennant and Max Shelden again. He definitely might never hear them uttered in the same sentence.

He smiled. This was right in his wheelhouse. He knew how to wait and plan, and strike when the moment was right.

Feeling back in control, he dumped the newspaper into the wastebasket and went back to work.

Gary smoothed out the pages of the newspaper that he’d pulled from the trash. So the Whore was dead. The newspaper didn’t go into detail, although it did mention that she’d been tied up.

He should feel bad; he knew that. He was pretty sure he would later. It would sink in. But not right now.

She’d fought against the rope used to bind her wrists and feet. She should have known that was pointless. How many times had she told the boys she tied up not to fight? She’d tied them so tight that their wrists and ankles would be marked for days. You always knew by the angry red marks which kids had been to see the Whore.

Gary rubbed his wrists as if those marks were still there. For a second they seemed to burn again, the way they had all those years ago. There was nothing
there, though. Those wounds had healed a long, long time ago. There weren’t even any scars there.

The Whore had tied Gary up only a couple of times—restrained him, was what she’d called it. That made it sound more refined, but it was like being trussed up the way you’d truss up a pig for slaughter. Gary hadn’t been the kind to fight back. The defiant ones, those were the ones who walked around with marks on their wrists and ankles all the time.

He still remembered it, though. He remembered the terror. Lying there, tied up, unable to even wince away from anything they might want to do to you—and they wanted to do a lot to you.

There were boys who were so scared that they did exactly what the Whore had done—threw up. She’d put them on their sides and wipe their faces off with a rag when that happened.

It had choked her when she’d done it.

Gary had never understood how those men could have done what they did. They weren’t protecting themselves. Even the biggest of the boys, like Max, weren’t big enough to take on a whole group of big, powerful men with ropes and bats. He supposed if they’d all ganged up together they could have done something, but the boys weren’t like that. They didn’t group together. The men pitted them against each other in so many ways. Gary understood that now.
He hadn’t then. He’d just known he couldn’t trust anyone, that the other boys would turn on him in a flash. None of them could be trusted. Except Max.

Strong, handsome Max with the easy smile. Max, who had been kind to Gary, who had protected him, who had talked to him. It had been such an incredible thing to have someone to talk to. Someone who wasn’t constantly putting him down or terrifying him or getting information to be used later.

Max had tried to make the other boys see. He had tried to get them to protect each other, stop turning each other in, stop fighting, stop picking on each other. Gary shuddered when he remembered what it was like in that dormitory. The lights would go out and the terror would start all over again. Whatever mistreatment one boy had received that day was passed down to a smaller, weaker boy, one like Gary.

He shook his head. You would think that knowing what it felt like to be a victim, a person wouldn’t want to make anyone else feel that. Why would anyone wish that gnawing shame on someone else? Why would they wish the pain, the humiliation, the terror on anyone else?

But they did. They did it all the time.

No one wanted to feel like a victim. Everyone wanted to be the big, strong one. He had never wanted to be like those men, though. They sickened him.

Gary wasn’t a religious man. He had spent too many hours praying for rescue as a child, first at his own home and then at the Sierra School, to think there was anyone or anything out there watching over him. At least nothing benevolent. If there was a higher power out there, it didn’t give a rat’s ass about Gary and Gary didn’t give a rat’s ass about it.

Nor did he believe in fate. Shit happened. That was all. A person could spend days and weeks trying to make it make sense, and it still would just be random.

This, however, felt different. The Whore had choked on her own vomit, tied hand and feet. Something was leading him. But what? Who? Max was nothing more than a pile of bones. A pile of bones couldn’t tell anyone anything, could it?

He would have to think about that. Gary rubbed his thumb over Susan Tennant’s watch, in his pocket, and headed home.

Okay. She had a list of names. Veronica had managed to remember first and last names for three of Max’s old basketball buddies.

She flipped on her computer. Google was an amazing and terrifying tool. Could anybody really hide anywhere anymore? It didn’t seem possible. We all left too many trails behind us in cyberspace and on paper.
She found listed phone numbers for two of them. She could call. That seemed somehow wrong, though. “Hey, I don’t know if you remember my brother, but they found his remains in a construction site. I was hoping that maybe you’d seen him.”

No, it should be done in person. She hit a few more search buttons and found an address for one of the two guys she’d found a phone number for. It looked like he still lived in the old neighborhood, possibly in his parents’ old house.

Veronica took a deep breath. Did she have the guts to do this? Then she thought about the cops crawling all over her father’s house, and her own lingering doubts. Could she live like that? Not knowing? Not being sure? It didn’t seem like much of a choice.

A few hours later, Veronica shivered inside her car and watched Jimmy Delacroix’s house. Once the sun went down, everything turned dark and cold. Normally she didn’t mind it, but sitting in her cold car, watching the lit-up house in front of her, made her feel frozen from her head to her toes. Golden yellow light poured out of every window. She could see all the people inside as they went from room to room, carrying drinks and bowls of food between the kitchen and the living room, slapping each other on the back and laughing.

It looked like a whole group of her brother’s old
friends was there. She was a little surprised. It had been twenty years, after all, and not everyone wanted to live in Sacramento forever. She sure hadn’t.

Max had loved coming to this house. She knew how happy he was whenever he got an invitation to have dinner there or spend the night, or just hang out and watch a movie. Jimmy Delacroix’s parents had been his benchmark for what parents should be. At one point, her father had slapped Max across the mouth because he’d heard the words “Mr. and Mrs. Delacroix” one too many times in one evening. Max had stopped saying their name, but Veronica didn’t think it changed the way he felt.

Mr. and Mrs. Delacroix now apparently lived in a condo a few miles away. They’d “sold” their house to Jimmy when he’d started his family. Jimmy had space for his two little girls to run around, and his father didn’t have to mow the lawn anymore.

Jimmy might have his old basketball buddies over to watch the game. That had been the way it was back in the day, too. This was the house that all the kids had hung out at. The one where the mom baked cookies and kept an eye on things. Not the one where the mom might lurch into the living room and vomit on the floor right when the game was starting.