The Darker Side (27 page)

I sag in my chair.
Dear God.

“Oh baby. Why?”

“I—I—just what we talked about before. I want to do what you do. I saw the stuff on the news and I went and found a site that had them and watched some.”

“How many did you see, honey?”

I hear her swallow. “Just one at first. It was this girl. Her name was April. That guy made her talk about hurting her baby. I got sick. I’m such a dork,” she mumbles. “I was really upset with myself about getting sick, so then I went back and watched some more.”

“How many more?”

“Maybe thirty.”

“Jesus, Bonnie!”

“Don’t be mad, Momma-Smoky. Please don’t be mad.”

Mad? That’s the last emotion I’m feeling. It hadn’t even occurred to me until she mentioned it, but in the midst of my concern, it’s an idea that gives me pause. Should I be mad at her?

I realize that I’ve never really disciplined Bonnie. Not because I’ve been lax with her, but because she’s never needed it. I think maybe, just maybe, she needs it now.

“I’m not mad, Bonnie, but…” I think fast, looking for an appropriate punishment. “I’m going to restrict your computer privileges for a while. You should have asked me or Elaina about this before doing it, and I think you know that.”

She sighs. “Yeah. I knew.”

“And?”

“I knew you wouldn’t let me.”

The honesty of this makes me smile.

“That’s generally a tip-off, babe.”

Another sigh. “I know.”

“Okay, so no Internet other than what you need for schoolwork for the next two weeks. Got it?”

“Yes.”

Okay, okay, enough of that, how is my baby?

“How are you doing, sweetheart? Are you okay?”

“I don’t know. I think the thing that bothered me the most was the things he said, that they made sense. That stuff about truth. A man like that, who does things like that, he shouldn’t make
sense,
you know?”

“I do, babe.”

“That’s what really stays in my mind. The women, the things they went through, the things they did, sure, those were bad, but the worst thing is agreeing with him on
anything
.”

“If you do what I do, you’re going to run into that a lot. Actions—the things people do, like murder or rape—can be in black and white. But people themselves? All kinds of shades of gray there, babe. That’s why it’s actions that matter the most.”

“What do you mean?”

“You can have a guy say that he believes that being a good father is the most important quality that a man can have, who then goes home and beats his kids. Or, even more complicated—maybe that same guy counsels other people’s children, perhaps he’s a therapist. He’s done that for years, and maybe he’s even helped a lot of kids. But the only thing that matters, from the perspective of my job, is that he goes home and beats his
own
children.”

She’s quiet, mulling this over.

“I need to think about that some more.”

And she will. Bonnie is like a waveless lake, placid and still. But there’s a lot happening underneath, where the sun can’t reach and the crayfish hide.

“Will you talk to me about this some more? When you’re done thinking?”

“Okay.”

“Promise?”

“I promise, Momma-Smoky. I feel better now. I’m sorry for doing something you wouldn’t want me to do.”

I note the bending of phrase to her will. She’s not apologizing for the action itself, she’s apologizing for the fact that the action upset me. I let it pass.

“Apology accepted. But remember—two weeks.”

“I will.”

“Now let me talk to Elaina. Too much.”

“Way, way too much,” she replies.

A moment passes and Elaina comes on the line.

“Oh, Smoky.” She sounds so miserable, I want to reach through the phone and hug her.

“Don’t beat yourself up, Elaina. We’ve been lucky up to now with Bonnie. I think we were due.”

“I suppose you’re right, but still—I feel so guilty. She was on her laptop, using the wireless Internet connection. I haven’t been sleeping well, and I decided to take a nap and it really got away from me. I slept for a few hours. She watched the clips while I was sleeping. I’m so sorry, Smoky.”

“Elaina, please. You’re her second mother. You’ve taken on her homeschooling, you keep her there when my hours get crazy—you do a
lot
. Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

“Appreciated, but how would you feel if you were in my position?”

I’d feel like crap.

“Point taken. You know, Bonnie’s not a baby. It’s not like we forgot to lock up the laundry detergent when she was a toddler and she ate it or something. She knew we wouldn’t approve of what she was doing, and she deliberately hid it from us.” I tell her about the two-week moratorium on Internet usage.

“I’ll help enforce that, you can be sure.”

“Somehow I don’t think it’ll be an issue. She didn’t raise a fuss about it. Not a peep.”

“Hmmm.” I’m happy to hear some amusement leak into Elaina’s voice. “Maybe that should worry us more than anything else.”

“Good point. Now stop beating yourself up. I love you.”

She sighs in agreement. “I love you too. Give my husband a kiss for me. Bonnie wants to talk to you again.”

“Put her on.”

“I forgot to tell you something,” Bonnie says, a little breathless.

“What’s that?”

“That man? The one who calls himself the Preacher?”

“Yes?”

“Catch him and put him in jail forever. I want him to die there.”

It’s not a request, it’s a pronouncement. Bonnie saw what he’s done, and whatever else she’s wrangling with about it, the blacks and the grays, the moral maybes, one certainty has arrived: his freedom is unacceptable.

“I will, sweetheart.”

“Good.”

She hangs up without another word. I stare at the phone for a moment, bemused and disturbed. Bonnie has always been both a simplicity and a complexity in my life. The simplicity is my love for her. It’s unfettered, it’s depthless, it’s pure. The complexity is Bonnie herself. She’s got the brightness of a child, but she’s also layered like an adult, full of private places I’m not sure I’ll ever get to see. She’s learned how to keep her own secrets and, perhaps more significant, how to be comfortable about it. Sometimes this bothers me, most times it doesn’t. It just is.

Now she’s about to turn into a teen, like a werewolf under a full moon, and with that, it seems, comes the ability to sneak and the willingness to lie. This by itself wouldn’t bother me; it’s the way of things. The problem is Bonnie hasn’t chosen to sneak or lie about smoking or kissing or driving too fast; she applied her stealth to viewing the last, terrible moments of all those poor women.

There’s nothing, I reflect, quite like motherhood to make you feel more helpless or inept.

I head out of my office. The maelstrom awaits.

“THIS KIND OF CASE REALLY
exposes all the holes in our missing persons system,” Alan grouses. “Did you know that NCIC contains about a hundred thousand missing persons cases, but AFIS has less than one hundred of those on file?”

NCIC is the National Crime Information Center. AFIS is the Automated Fingerprint Identification System. The other two major databases that figure into what we do are CODIS, the Combined DNA Index System for missing persons, and VICAP.

“You only got about fifteen percent of unidentified human remains that have been entered into NCIC. CODIS has been around since 1990, and it’s growing, but it’s still just a drop in the ocean.”

CODIS was a stroke of brilliance. If someone goes missing and has not turned up within thirty days, a DNA reference sample is obtained. This can be either a direct sample from something belonging to the missing person (hair, saliva from a toothbrush) or a comparison sample from a blood relation. The DNA gets analyzed and the profile is loaded into the database. If a body turns up, it can often be identified via CODIS. There have also been cases of a child missing for years being located alive because of CODIS.

The problem with all of these databases comes down to cooperation, time, and money. They’re all voluntary. If the local departments don’t fill out the forms or collect the DNA, it doesn’t end up in the right database. Even when the information is provided, someone has to enter it.

It’s a flawed and incomplete system, but it’s better than nothing for sure. We’ve broken cases using these various databases. They might be limping, but they’re still assets.

“What have we found?”

“We have name matches on forty so far. Computer crimes is assisting on this flat out. They’re extracting still images of the victims’ faces from the clips, which we’ll then shoot to the respective local law-enforcement agencies. They’ll take the photo and name to the families and get positive IDs. My guess is we’ll be looking at ten out of ten on that. Too big a coincidence that the name from one of these videos would match up with a missing persons case.”

“I agree. By the way, your wife says to give you a kiss.”

“Thanks.”

“Keep on it. We’re going to go till about eleven.”

“Joy.”

I head over to James, who is just hanging up the phone.

“The tips Jezebel is fielding to us are paying off,” he says. “We’ve had almost eighty people come forward to identify victims on the clips.”

“Wow.”

Some might wonder why so many so fast. I don’t. In many ways, the missing are far far worse than the dead. The missing are a maybe: Maybe they are still alive. Maybe they are not. The missing prevent closure, disallow true grief. That maybe ensures that the families are always looking, forever grasping at straws of hope.

I brought the news to a mother, once, that a daughter who’d gone missing three years earlier had been found dead. She wept, of course, but it’s what she said that cut me the deepest.

“It’s been so hard not knowing,” she’d stammered through her tears. “One time—oh God—one time I remember being weak, and just wanting it to end, even if that meant she was dead.”

I had watched her eyes widen as she truly saw what it was that she’d just said, that she’d wished, however briefly, for her daughter’s death. The impact of this realization on her is something I’ll never forget.

Keening is a kind of vocal lament that is traditional in Scotland and Ireland. In older days, before it was outlawed by the Catholic Church, it was done as a part of the wake. A woman or women would be hired to list the genealogy of the deceased, to praise them, and to emphasize the pain of the survivors. She (or they) would do this vocally, often wailing, and using physical movements such as clapping or rocking back and forth. It was a verbal expiation, designed to do justice to the fact of the loss of life. I thought of this then, because that’s what I watched this woman do. She keened.

I think of it now, all those families. Keening. Eighty, just an incredible number, impossible to really get your mind around in terms of the human impact.

“I’m following up with all of the local law enforcement,” James says. “I’ve made myself the sole point of contact. I’ll have them assume any of our confirmed missings are a homicide, and get them to put their best detectives on it. Anything found will get funneled through me, and I’ll collate it and add it to our database on these victims.”

“We have a database?”

He points to his computer. “I wrote one.”

“Good work, James.”

“I know.”

He turns away from me, a dismissal.

The door to the office swings open and Callie comes marching in with a big map of the U.S., mounted on foam-core. Kirby is following her, jabbering away.

“So we’re good on the flowers? The price is fine?”

“The price is wonderful, Kirby. How about the cake?”

“I’m not fucking the cake guy. He’s got back hair.”

“Very funny. The pricing?”

“It’s under budget. Oh, and good news on the photographer. There’s a guy I used to know. We worked together, stuff like that. He used to do surveillance, but he’s good with a camera and, hey, it’s kind of the same thing, right?”

I watch Callie mull over the wisdom of letting Kirby bring an old work buddy to her wedding, given Kirby’s background.

“Fine.”

“Bridal pragmatism wins again,” Alan opines. “That’s going to be some wedding. Kirby will have fucked or threatened half the vendors, and the rest will be a collection of ex-mercenaries she used to know.”

“Not ex,” Kirby says. “A lot of them are still on the market.”

“I hate to break this up,” I say, “but—Callie?”

“Hey, I’m outie,” Kirby says, “I know what I need for now. See you later Callie-babe.”

“Yes, please call me later.”

“I’m only up till four in the morning,” Kirby chirps. “Girl needs her beauty sleep, you know?”

Callie holds up the map for us to see.

“I got James to print out a list of all the locations of our victims for me, and I marked them with pushpins.”

We crowd around to get a look.

“I see we have a few clusters,” Alan says. He points to Los Angeles, where there are over twenty. “And here.” Las Vegas, Nevada.

“Sun and sin,” Callie says.

The rest are spread out among the Preacher’s other target states. Some are in cities anyone would recognize, others are in small towns I’ve never heard of. The overall effect is sobering.

“Like a fucking forest,” Alan growls, an echo of my own thoughts.

“Excuse me,” Kirby says. She hadn’t left, after all. “Why is this name on this board?”

She’s pointing to one of the Los Angeles victims. Willow Thomas.

“Why?” I ask.

The smile she gives me is mirthless and terrible. It puts me on immediate alert.

“Please answer the question.”

Her tone is mild. She could be someone asking about the weather. But the leopard eyes have appeared, and they are cold, cold, cold. This is the absolute indifference of a hired killer, the kind who shoots a man not because he was a particularly bad man, but because someone wanted him dead and was willing to pay to make it so.

“Haven’t you been watching the news, honey-love?”

Kirby flicks her gaze at Callie, then back to me.

“Now, if I’d been watching the news, I guess I wouldn’t be asking the question, would I, Callie?”