False Mermaid (15 page)

Nora raised herself to peer over the log, watching Janelle check her makeup in a compact. When the shot was set, the cameraman gave the signal to go, and Janelle’s face was suddenly transformed. If Nora hadn’t watched her put it on, the look of concern might have seemed real.

Janelle was in top form. “A young woman’s skeletal remains were found in a shallow grave here at Hidden Falls three days ago. Her identity is unknown, but she could be one of several women still listed as missing. Police are comparing details from this case with several other unsolved murders. Should local residents be concerned about a serial killer on the loose? We’ll have the full story at ten.”

The full story. Hacks like Janelle Joyner never had the full story on anything. They weren’t even above dragging a victim’s reputation through the mud if it could get them into a bigger television market.

Janelle seemed pleased with the take. “Got that, Rog? Okay, let’s pack it up—we’ve still got to get that two-shot with the head of regional parks. People want to know if it’s safe to bring their kids down here.”

The cameraman muttered something inaudible, and Janelle turned on him: “Hey, I wouldn’t go bad-mouthing the brand if I were you. Channel Eight’s all about news you can use.”

Still hiding behind her fallen tree, Nora glanced over to see if the fisherman had taken in the whole Janelle Joyner spectacle too, but he had vanished. For a split second, she wondered whether she’d seen him at all.

Heading north on the river road from Hidden Falls, Nora only meant to drive past Peter Hallett’s house, but found her foot shifting to the brake almost automatically. She had stopped in this same spot more than once, taking advantage of its shielded view of the driveway and front door, as well as the adjoining terrace. The house stood well back from the road, across a deep wooded ravine. Peter had designed the place himself; with his signature modern style favoring strong horizontal lines and lots of glass, he had made sure his creation stood out from the neighboring houses, with their staid neo-Georgian brick faces and fan windows. Transparent walls had always seemed to Nora a somewhat paradoxical predilection for someone who led a double life. He’d left the house with furnishings, artwork, everything intact when he moved to Seattle—as if he knew he’d be coming back.

A sudden flash in the rearview mirror signaled a silver-blue Mercedes convertible rounding the curve behind her. Nora watched the car turn up the driveway, then flipped open her glove compartment and reached for the camera she’d stashed there. She focused the high-powered lens on Miranda Staunton climbing out on the driver’s side—Marc’s younger
sister was in her mid-twenties now, with thin bronze arms, blonde hair perfectly cut and coiffed, eyes hidden behind a pair of stylish sunglasses. Nora zoomed the camera in closer, and braced for the jolt of seeing Peter Hallett again.

He was, as expected, still shockingly handsome, with a vital energy that she could feel, even across the distance that separated them. She watched as he turned and flashed his megawatt smile at Miranda, who reached out and led him up the steps and through the front door. Nora felt her body go cold. Beyond the chill there was something else—after five years of chaos and frustration, she sensed that things were beginning to align in some new and fateful way. There was the discovery of Natalie Russo’s body—and her own arrival here, at the very moment Peter returned from Seattle. It was as if the last piece of the puzzle was about to be laid out on the table. But where was Elizabeth?

As if on cue, her niece’s head suddenly appeared from behind a headrest in the backseat. Amazing that a child could even squeeze into that tiny space—the Mercedes was built only for two. Left to fend for herself, Elizabeth struggled to move the passenger seat forward, but couldn’t quite reach the lever. She pushed herself up and vaulted over the right rear wheel, landing awkwardly on both feet. Nora could not look away. Elizabeth was not a little girl anymore, but an ungainly adolescent, shoulders already beginning to slump with attitude. She had her mother’s coloration, and Nora knew that, up close, the child’s face would be lightly freckled like her own.

Elizabeth opened the trunk and pulled out a backpack. As she set her pack on the ground, a wavy curtain of copper hair fell across her face. Both hands came up, automatically pushing the thick tangle behind her ears. Nora tightened her grip on the camera lens. Where had that gesture come from? Elizabeth couldn’t possibly remember Tríona doing that. And yet there it was, an identical reflexive gesture, a distinct echo of her mother that was completely natural, completely unconscious.

Instead of following her father and Miranda into the house, Elizabeth ventured onto the terrace that overlooked the ravine and the steep riverbank beyond. She let her hand trail over the rough stone wall, stopping at the front steps at a shallow stone basin that held a mound of river rocks. Elizabeth picked up one of the stones and began to examine it. Eventually she set it back in the bowl and moved on. As far as Nora knew, no one had ever really explained to Elizabeth what had happened
to her mother. How do you begin to explain such things to a six-year-old? A few days after the funeral, Nora had taken her aside, to ask whether she understood what it meant when someone died. Elizabeth had thought for a moment, and then asked if it was like the bird they’d once found on the sidewalk. A tiny fledgling, still and cold, pushed too soon from the nest.
Yes,
she had answered.
It is like that
. And she had held Elizabeth tight, feeling the child’s rapid heartbeat right through her skin and bones.
So fragile,
she had thought.
We are such soft, fragile creatures
.

What had Elizabeth believed all these years since the murder? She was just now reaching the age of awareness, starting to see things beyond a child’s perspective. And she probably knew more than anyone wanted to admit.

Now Elizabeth placed her hands flat on the broad limestone wall and peered over the edge, perhaps trying to see the water through the trees. A curious expression crossed her features, as though she’d caught a scent that brought back a memory. She put one knee on the wall and climbed up to stand on it, tottering under the weight of her backpack. Nora’s heart leapt.

Peter’s voice carried through the trees: “Elizabeth! Get down from there!”

Teetering precariously once more, Elizabeth jumped down from the wall as her father strode across the terrace and pulled her roughly by the elbow. Nora had to hold her breath and strain to hear snatches of their conversation:

“What were you thinking?”

“I just wanted to see the river—”

“When are you going to learn to think things through? What have I told you?”

“I wasn’t going to fall.”

“Don’t let me see you up there again, do you hear me?”

Peter’s fingers tightened on the child’s arm. When she tried to twist away, he held her fast, bringing his face down to her level and speaking very slowly, as if she might have trouble taking his meaning. “Inside—now.”

Someone else, someone ignorant of the facts, might see in Peter Hallett only a concerned father, taking a dreamy child in hand. But Nora was not ignorant of the facts. She had seen the defiance in Elizabeth’s eyes. And it wasn’t safe to defy Peter Hallett.

After a quick stop at the apartment to change and remove the dirt and grime from Hidden Falls, Nora headed to Lowertown, the warehouse district east of Saint Paul’s city center. She circled Mears Park on one-way streets until she came to the entrance of an underground parking garage. She drove past slowly, suddenly claustrophobic, unable to turn in at the entrance. When the driver behind her honked impatiently, she pulled ahead and parked at a meter on the next block. Returning on foot, she slipped past the ticket dispenser and started circling down the steeply graded concrete into the depths of a man-made cavern. At the lowest level, she crossed to the far corner and stood staring down at the floor at a large painted number, 114. This was the spot where Tríona had been discovered, three days after she disappeared. Where all hope and speculation had come to an end.

Four stories below street level the temperature was at least twenty degrees cooler than the air outside. The only illumination came from the glare of bare bulbs, and the concrete walls seemed to soak up their minimal light. Nora reached into her bag for a small flashlight, listening to the sounds that ricocheted off the unforgiving concrete and echoed in the shadows. Hardly the safest spot to explore alone, even at midday. But she had to stand once more in the place that had become Tríona’s monument and tomb.

She shone the light on the number painted on the floor, and remembered wondering whether the number was significant to Tríona’s killer, or whether any space would have done. There had been no useful evidence here, only a small amount of blood with the body in the car trunk; Tríona had clearly been attacked elsewhere and moved here. But why this place? If they could just figure that part out—if her death had been the result of a random carjacking, then why on earth would the killer have parked in a garage, when it made more sense just to leave the car somewhere along the street? If Tríona had been killed at Hidden Falls, why not just leave her and the car there?

Perhaps because of Natalie Russo. Because the killer needed to draw attention away from the river, and the other body—or bodies—buried there. Still, a parking garage meant people walking by, security cameras, a level of scrutiny even the most dim-witted criminal couldn’t possibly overlook. But as they’d soon discovered, the cameras in this garage weren’t functioning at the time of Tríona’s death—the whole security network was down for several days while a new system was being installed—there was no video of anyone coming or going from this ramp from two days before the murder to two days after. What were the chances that the killer had just been lucky? It seemed far more likely that the person who had chosen this place had done so deliberately, to avoid being caught on tape, despite leaving the car in such a public place. It was almost as if he wanted to make sure the body was discovered quickly. Looking at it that way, the location came across as a provocation, a deliberate catch-me-if-you-can. Not only did that fit Peter Hallett’s personality, it also suggested a chilling degree of premeditation.

But Nora had spent weeks digging for a connection between Peter and this parking garage—whether it was owned by any of his friends or acquaintances, located near any restaurant or business or gallery he frequented. There was no proof that he’d ever been here. Nothing. So how could he have known about the security system?

The flashlight beam bouncing off the walls caught his attention on the monitor. Truman Stark pulled his chair closer to the bank of screens to study the picture. He watched the female subject crouch down to examine the floor and felt an irresistible flicker of interest, the pulse-quickening of the first sighting. All sorts of possibilities. His work might be boring most of the time, sitting in this tiny security office and staring at monitors for hours on end, but he liked watching how people behaved when they thought no one could see them. He reached for the joystick that let him maneuver the camera and zoomed in on the subject. Not bad-looking. Looked like she could handle herself. What the hell was she doing down there?

Pushing back from the monitors, he felt for the reassuring weight of the holstered gun on his hip and left the booth, making sure to pull the door shut behind him. It wasn’t exactly standard procedure, leaving the office for something like this, but he had seniority and figured he was entitled to bend the rules once in a while. His shift was nearly over
anyway. The cashiers could get him on the walkie-talkie if they ran into any trouble.

He enjoyed ranging around the building, checking the stairwells, making sure all the doors that were supposed to be locked actually were. The starched shirt and heavy shoes, they were all part of it too. He liked the noise his brogans made on the concrete floors, especially in the echoing stairwells. It felt almost like walking a beat. Sometimes he almost forgot it wasn’t real.

His whole life, all he ever wanted was to be a cop. The desire had lived inside him every single day since he was a kid, a dream that kept him safe, protected from real life. He’d practiced swearing the oath, imagined himself answering calls on the radio, in uniform. The physical stuff wasn’t a problem. He’d practiced with nightstick and cuffs and genuine police-issue sidearm until he knew how to use them blindfolded. It was the other stuff that tripped him up, all the reading and writing. That was the part he hadn’t expected. He’d tried cracking a few books that summer before community college. But the words got turned around like they always did, and trying to decipher them made his head hurt. He thought being a cop would be different, but it was all just more of the same bullshit. Books and studying and sitting in classes—it was all so flat, so foreign to him. And what good was any of that when you were out on the street?

He felt the elevator vibrate, imagined the cables and the hydraulics through the walls, riding in a box to the basement. The worst thing hadn’t been washing out of school, but going back home again. His mother was okay, but the old man couldn’t resist rubbing it in. Truman had been told so many times that he’d never make anything of himself, that he must be some kind of moron. He knew his father would make him wallow in his failure, force him to eat it every day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. But it must be true that meanness could give you cancer, because it was right about that time that the old man got sick. Just shriveled up, got smaller and smaller and smaller until he died. Nobody felt sorry for him, not then and not now. Not even close. What they all felt was more like relief.

On the whole, things had been better since then, but lately Truman had been feeling a new restlessness in his blood, a dissatisfaction that hovered somewhere between an itch and an ache. It wouldn’t go away. Something inside him had changed. He used to look up to cops, study the way their handcuffs and holsters fit on their belts, how the uniforms
made them look bigger, bulkier than they really were. He couldn’t recall the exact moment his attitude had begun to turn. He only noticed one day that he felt something new as he walked past a squad car on his way to work. He could feel the cops sizing him up, checking the security company patch on his shoulder, and exchanging a dismissive glance. Now, every time he passed a police car parked on the street outside the ramp, he was almost overcome with one desire: to reach in through the open window and haul them out, to wipe those smug looks from their faces.