Below Zero (11 page)

She found no major crimes in Cheyenne or at Mount Rushmore, she said. But when she looked at the road atlas for South Dakota, she noted how many small communities there were around the monument. Hill City, Custer, Keystone, and Rapid City, the only city of any size.

“Keystone,” Joe said, sitting up. “Wasn’t that where—”

“Yes,” she said, leaping in. “That’s where that old couple from Iowa were found murdered a week ago in that RV park. Remember that they thought those poor old people had died because their motor home caught fire while they were sleeping, but they later found they’d been shot first?”

“With a small-caliber weapon,” Joe finished for her.

He sat back, his head swimming.

“This proves nothing, I know,” Marybeth said, spinning in her chair to face Joe, whipping her glasses off. “But you’re right—we need to ask April more questions.”

As they looked at each other they both came up with the same thought.

Marybeth returned to the keyboard and the Google home page, typed ASPEN + MURDER, and directed the search within the last twenty-four hours.

Joe observed her as she read the screen. Suddenly, she gasped, sat back in her chair, and covered her mouth with her hand.

He stood up and leaned across the desk. There were only four hits.

The first one, from the Aspen
Times
said:

 

MURDER IN ASPEN: COUPLE SLAIN ON EVE
OF WEDDING WEEKEND

 

 

STENKO HAD SAVED HER. SHE OWED HIM; SHE WAS LOYAL. Her journey from that frozen campground on fire in Wyoming to Chicago had been cruel and difficult, consisting of movement with no destination in mind. Until Stenko.

As Stenko and Robert argued back and forth in the front seat of the SUV as they drove north toward Wyoming again, she reviewed how she got to this place at this time and let their voices become nothing more than a discordant background soundtrack.

After the fire, after the raggedy soldiers of the Sovereigns had thrown her across the back of a snowmobile and raced away from that campsite under cover of smoke, confusion, and automatic weapons fire, she’d been bounced around the Midwest to family after family. Indiana, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, finally Illinois. All were Sovereign sympathizers, but that didn’t mean they were necessarily sympathetic to
her.
She’d learned to expect nothing from anyone and to have no aspirations. She became what each family expected of her, which was a nonentity attached to a monthly check issued by the social services people. She’d had twenty or more “brothers” and “sisters” along the way. She matured early and was taller, softer featured, and more voluptuous than her mother had been, although when she looked into the mirror and squinted or made an angry face she saw the hard, flinty, cold-eyed face of her mother looking back, as if Mama were inside her trying to break out.

She’d smoked her first joint at age eleven and had sex for the first time at age twelve with foster brother Blake in Minnesota, who’d also taught her how to shoplift from Wal-Mart. The act took place in her basement bedroom while Blake’s friends watched through the window well and hooted. It hurt, she hated it, and afterward she found out quick that most boys despised what they said they wanted most, and that was an important thing to learn. When her foster parents found out what happened they blamed her, called her names, shipped her out of there to the next family.

That’s how she wound up with the Voricek family on the South Side of Chicago. The Voriceks supplemented their income by taking in foster children. She was one of ten. Ed Voricek, her foster father, was a pig-like man with a slight mustache and a comb-over, and he smelled of cigarettes, motor oil, and bacon. He held a series of jobs in the short time she was there, which turned out to be his pattern. He had so many jobs that if anyone at school asked her what her father did, she had to stop and think for a moment what uniform shirt he’d been wearing last. Midas? Grease Monkey? Jiffy Lube? He was chronically in and out of work. His wife Mary Ann was as stout as Ed but meaner, and the children lived in absolute fear of her. Any transgression—not making their beds, not eating every bit of food on their plates, talking back to her, sulking—was greeted with a threat to send them back to the agency. So she learned to do what she had to do, not talk, and live in her own head. Her only companion was a foster sister the same age who had come from the same place, and they used to sneak into each other’s rooms and whisper about running away together. Her foster sister had stuck by her when she screwed up and protected her when a drunk Ed Voricek hovered outside their bedroom door one night when there was no good reason for him to be there. Not that Ed suggested anything or made any moves, but the fact that he was there, leaning against the wall next to their door, said enough in itself. She could still recall the stand her sister took when she opened the door, stared the man down, said, “Why don’t you get the hell to bed?” Ed slunk away.

Ed Voricek was a gambler. She didn’t understand very much about it at the time, but she and all the other children heard the furious arguments between Ed and Mary Ann about his losses. Mary Ann would scream at Ed, beat him with her fists, threaten to leave him if he ruined them, if the social workers found out that he’d lied about his employment status and took the children away.

She was surprised the evening Ed knocked on her bedroom door and told her to get dressed. “Wear something nice,” he said. “Something cute.”

So in her best second- or third-hand dress and sandals, she followed him out to his car. Although he’d told her not to pack a bag or bring anything along, she took a small leather pocketbook with a few papers and one-dollar bills—her savings. She knew Mary Ann was out for the evening—Thursday was her bingo night—and when she reached for the handle of the back door, Ed had said, “What’re you doing? You can sit up front with me.”

She thought she knew what would come next. She was wrong. But it turned out to be worse.

They drove through downtown Chicago and out the other side in Ed’s rattletrap station wagon. They crossed the river to the west side, and she saw a battered street sign that read DIVISION and she thought about that. She turned around in her seat and watched out the back window as the sun dropped and the buildings downtown burst with color, the glass and steel towers lighting up fire orange and magenta. The vibrancy of the colors reminded her of sunset in the mountain west and how long it had been since she’d seen one like that. Then, as suddenly as it started, the light and colors doused as if a curtain had been pulled and the buildings became buildings again. Dark, metal, and cold.

Ed was saying, “This is all for the best, all for the best.”

“Are you taking me back to the agency?”

“Something like that,” Ed said.

She was scared but resigned to whatever would happen next. She wished her foster sister were with her. But, as always, she was alone.

He parked on a street of old buildings. There were women in revealing clothes on the corners and knots of young black and Hispanic men on stoops and playing basketball on a cracked court with chain nets that sang when a ball passed through them. When she and Ed got out of the car, a couple of the boys saw her, stopped playing, and hooted like those friends of her “brother” outside the window well.

“Follow me,” Ed said, taking her hand.

They went through a heavy door and up narrow stairs. At the top of the landing was a single bare bulb. She detected a new smell on Ed to go along with the cigarettes, motor oil, and bacon: whiskey. He held her hand too tightly, and she tried to jerk away.

He turned on her, his eyes blazing.
“Follow me,”
he said.

“You hurt me.”

“Don’t try to run,” he said.

“Where would I run?”

“And cheer up. Try to look cute, like I told you. Wet your lips.”

She licked her lips.

“Okay,” he said.

At the top of the stairs Ed rapped out a series of taps on a door that could only have been some kind of code. She heard locks being thrown and the door opened.

“I’m Eddie V,” Ed said. “I’ve got her with me.”

A tall man in a suit with shallow, badly pockmarked cheeks ignored Ed and peered around him to look at her. But he didn’t so much look at as size her up, the way a man looks at a car he might buy. His eyes narrowed and he nodded to himself, humming. Then, “Come in.”

The tall man shut the door behind them. The room was nothing like what the building and the hallway suggested it might be like. There were soft lights and empty chairs and couches upholstered in buttery leather. There was a desk with a green shade. Music played in the background from invisible speakers. A bar in the corner had dozens of bottles on it and the liquid in them looked warm and delicious.

The tall man continued to look her over. He walked around her, appraising.

“We can do business,” the man said to Ed.

Ed let out his breath, obviously relieved. He turned to her and bent forward, lightly grasping her arms, and stared into her eyes.

“You’re going to be staying here for a little while, do you understand?”

She nodded.

“We’re doing this to protect you,” Ed lied. “Mary Ann was going to send you back to the agency anyway. She feels threatened by you—she told me that a bunch of times. She doesn’t like the way you look at her. This is for you. Do you understand? This way you can make some money and go on with your life.”

She nodded.

“If anyone asks, you ran away,” Ed said. “That’s what we’ll say, too. Do you understand? We’ll even file a report with the agency people and the police to make it official.”

She nodded.

“So don’t even think of turning yourself in,” Ed said, showing his yellow teeth. “Don’t forget, we still have that special ‘sister’ of yours. You wouldn’t want any harm to come to her, would you? Like sending her back so you’d never find her again? You wouldn’t want that, would you?”

“No.

“Well, neither would I, kiddo.”

Ed left her standing there in her dress and sandals while he and the tall man went through a door behind the desk. In a few moments, Ed came back out patting his breast through his jacket, as if he’d just put something there. She saw the corner of a thick white envelope as he passed by her. He said, “Take care of yourself, kid,” and left.

“What’s your name?” the tall man asked after the door closed and Ed went home with his pile of money.

She couldn’t bring herself to speak. Her legs felt weak and her mouth was dry.

“Can’t you talk?” the man asked her.

“Yes.”

“Then what’s your name? Don’t worry, we can always change it.”

She refused to say the name Voricek, or use the name they’d called her.

“April Keeley,” she said.

“Nice,” the tall man said. “And you’re what, eighteen?”

She was confused. “No, I’m . . .”

The man stepped forward shaking his head. “You’re eighteen,” he said with finality. “You just look younger. You have nice legs for your age, you know. And a good face. You need a manicure, though. We’ll take care of that, don’t worry.”

She quickly hid her hands behind her back.

“That’s a good look,” the tall man said, “it makes your breasts stand out and makes you look all innocent.” Then he chuckled and put his arm around her shoulders.

“We’ll take good care of you here,” he said. “We take good care of our girls. Ask them if you don’t believe me. You’ll be part of the family. And we take care of our family.”

A door on the far wall opened and a man came out, adjusting his tie. He was heavy and his face was flushed. When he saw her, he stopped and looked her over.

The tall man said, “How was everything, Mr. Davis?”

Mr. Davis said, “Fantastic, Geno. Great as always. And who is this fresh-faced young flower?”

“Meet April Keeley,” Geno said to Davis. “She’s just joined the family.”

Davis said, “Welcome aboard, April.” Then to Geno, “They just keep getting younger, don’t they?”

 

 

 

FOR THE FIRST WEEK,
she lived with the women in their rooms upstairs, which were nothing like the rooms down the hall from the reception area. Upstairs, the sleeping rooms were cozy, messy, personal, and feminine. There were posters of rock and rap bands on the walls and stuffed animals on the beds. During the daytime, they
were
a kind of family. They cooked for each other, went shopping, gossiped. Two of the women took a particular liking to her and bought her clothing and ice cream. One of them, a beautiful tan/black woman named Shawanna, did her hair and nails and told her to insist on protection no matter what and to never back down on that despite what the man said or offered or threatened.

“You’re a sex worker,” she told her, “you’re not a whore.”

Geno took fully clothed photos of her for the Internet site. He told her to wet her lips like Ed had and to pout and to pretend she was hungry. Shawanna urged her on, and the photo session was kind of fun as long as she didn’t think ahead to how the photos might be used.

On the night of her debut—they called it her “debutante ball”—she wore a tight maroon dress and new high heels and she followed Shawanna out into the reception area with four other girls when the buzzer rang. She wondered if she would be chosen. They emerged to find a man squaring off with Geno. Shawanna whispered to her that the man was called Stenko. “He’s a big man,” Shawanna said. “He’s one of the owners of this place.”

The six girls were to lounge in the chairs and couch, see if Stenko was interested, let things develop from there. She stuck close to Shawanna. But Stenko barely looked at any of them.

Stenko said to Geno, “Why did you call them out? I didn’t ask to see them.” He sounded exasperated.