Forgotten Girls, The (19 page)

“Arthur,” Mack began, but he was
cut off.

“You’re barking up the wrong tree,
Jimmy, and it ain’t gonna happen. Not with me around. Let’s go.”

Arthur stood and motioned to
Marion it was time to leave. She sauntered out of the room, but not without
shooting Bella a death stare.

John Hausner, who had been
listening outside, strode into the room when they were gone and closed the door
behind him.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” he
blasted. “Did you just suggest she knew Jenna from Dunmore? Are you out of your
mind? Based on what?”

 “You sound like her defense
lawyer, John. Don’t forget what side you’re on,” Bella countered.

“I didn’t forget anything. It’s
because I am so clear that I am so angry,” he answered. “You drag Weber in here
and focus on Jenna? Based on what this waitress saw? You don’t even know for
sure the woman in the diner is Weber, let alone Jenna, whose motive would be
what exactly?”

“That’s what we’re trying to
figure out, man,” Mack retorted, defending Bella.

“You asked if someone might be
setting Weber up.” Bella was exasperated. “We have a witness who saw her kissing
a woman fitting Jenna’s exact description. Jenna is nowhere to be found.”

“Why in hell would Jenna kill
three people?”

“The woman’s been seething about her
daughter not getting into Vanderbilt, jealous as hell that the Freed girl did. The
girls who died were going there too. Coincidence?”

“So she killed them over it? Then sadistically
butchered her friend? That’s your theory?” He was incredulous. “And Weber went
along for the ride? Are you purposely trying to ruin my career?”

“Sorry, but I wasn’t thinking
about your career,” Bella snidely responded. “As far as I know, jealousy has
always been a pretty reliable motive.”

“I asked you who might want to set
Weber up and this is what you come up with, Bella? A suburban housewife upset
her daughter didn’t get into the college of her choice?” John railed.

Bella was on her feet. “And you
don’t find it noteworthy that this poor little suburban mother may have locked
lips with a demented psychiatrist who shielded a notorious rapist for years at the
exact same hospital the crests on our victims came from?”

Bella didn’t like being spoken to
like she was an idiot. She was fuming.

“Oh yeah. And now she just happens
to have skipped town to dial it down, as her husband suggested. Dial it down
from what? You haven’t met this woman, John. She’s not normal,” Bella yelled.

“You need to give me something
concrete here, Bella! Your theories aren’t tangible,” John yelled back.

“Come on, man,” Mack intervened.
“Ever hear of circumstantial evidence?”

“Yes, it just so happens I have
heard of it. Thanks, Mack,” John said sarcastically. “But while you were
sleeping away the last eighteen months a little case called Holver versus Troy
was decided limiting how you can use it. It’s light reading—I suggest you brush
up on it if you’re gonna be back in the game.”

Mack kept his cool. “No need to be
a prick and make this business harder than it has to be,” he replied quietly.

“It’s pricks like me who keep you
from wasting precious time and resources on trips to nowhere,” John responded. “I
don’t want to hear about Jenna Jordan anymore. Go talk to Kempner and see what
you can learn about the missing girl. Weber was evasive enough right now to
arouse my suspicion, and her connection to Dunmore and the crests is
verifiable.”

He exhaled loudly, grabbed his
files off the table, and turned to look at Bella and Mack once more before
leaving.

“Focus on the girl in the photos.”

Kempner was nodding off in his
rocking chair on his front porch when Bella and Mack pulled down a long,
straight, gravelly driveway toward an eighteenth-century farmhouse surrounded
by acres of land as far as the eye could see.

For a man of eighty-three years
old, Kempner looked to be in decent physical condition. He had thin white hair,
weather-beaten skin, and a big belly, but rose easily from his chair and walked
at a quick clip, though he used a cane and bore the weight of a slight limp.
They followed him into the turn-of-the-century house straight into a small kitchen,
where they sat themselves at a rectangular pine kitchen table. Kempner put a
teakettle on the stove to boil water. Once brewed, he brought out a bowl of kale
chips, sat down, and regaled them with his life story. They soon learned he had
been one of five psychologists who worked in the men’s ward during the years
leading up to the hospital’s closing, and that he remembered well the scandal
with Barker.

“How could I forget? It’s what shut
us down,” he said, frowning.

“Were you aware of the rape and
abuse going on at the hospital at the time?” Mack asked.

“No. I had no idea,” Kempner
answered and shook his head. “I was disgusted when I learned of it.”

Something about the way he averted
his eyes when he answered made Bella feel he was lying.

“You had no idea, huh?” Bella
queried. “Hard to imagine that would be possible, Doctor.”

She and Mack had agreed Mack would
run the interview and she knew he would not be happy with her interruption, but
she just couldn’t help herself. Kempner didn’t like her insinuation either.

“It was a long, long time ago, my dear,”
Kempner replied sadly.

Here it was, Bella noticed. The “my
dear,” “my little lady,” “sweetheart”—endearing terms used by men when they
wanted to keep her in her place.

“Yes, it was,” she responded.
“There must have been rumors though?”

Mack shot her a look as Kempner
shook his head no. She nodded for Mack to do his thing and she reluctantly sat
back, signaling she would let him take control. Mack began:

“Dr. Kempner, as I mentioned on
the phone we are in the middle of a homicide investigation. There have been
three murders, all in the same town. All three victims were female. All three had
ribbons hanging around their necks with a unique crest at the bottom. We traced
these crests to Dunmore. Apparently, they were Barker’s. He handed them out to
girls at his parties.”

Mack let the good old doctor take
that in for a minute.

“Have you ever seen these crests
before?” Mack asked as he slid a photograph over to Kempner. The doctor shook
his head no.

“OK,” Mack continued. “During the
course of our investigation we learned that a patient at Dunmore, a girl who
should have been transferred to State with the others, never made it there. We’ve
traced her paperwork, but have come up empty. She would have been nineteen at
the time. We are hoping to find her.”

Kempner acted surprised.

“I am very sorry to hear this. I
don’t know anything about it,” was all he said. Again, Bella did not believe
him.

“Well, Doc, you see, we read her
discharge papers. It seems you are the one who signed off on her release, into
the custody of an uncle.” Mack looked at Kempner as if to say his time was
running out.

Kempner gave a small cough and
looked up at the sky as though trying to remember.

“If that’s what the paperwork says
then that is what I did,” Kempner replied stoically. “I signed off on releases.
That was one of my roles.”

“Yes, I understand. The problem is
that this uncle of hers—he never existed. He was fabricated.” Mack said this
slowly, as if to emphasize his point. Bella did all she could not to interfere.

Dr. Kempner looked at Mack with
caution.

“What are you implying, sir?”

“We are simply curious about
whether you might know anything about this matter. As you were the one who
signed her out,” Mack said in a casual, no-nonsense way.

It was so quiet you could hear a
pin drop. Kempner looked at both of them and didn’t say a word.

“While you are trying to remember,”
Mack went on, “I just want to point out that we also learned you were fortunate
to come into a large sum of money right around the time Dunmore closed. How
lucky.” Mack smiled. “We assume it is what enabled you to buy this beautiful
farm, and to retire.”

Bingo. He planted it. Point made.
Bella held her smile and stared at Kempner to read his reaction. He remained
composed but looked far away, and sad, as though a moment he had long been
dreading had just come down upon him.

“I don’t know what you want me to
say,” he said quietly.

“We want to know what happened to
this particular girl,” Mack said quietly in return. “It is very important we
find her.”

Kempner looked at Mack, this beefy
Cuban sipping tea in his kitchen. Mack smiled and shrugged.

“Time to talk, Doc,” he said.

Kempner nodded that he understood.
His eyes became misty and remote, almost as though he might cry. Mack looked sorry
for the guy, but Bella felt impatient. She wanted answers and was convinced he had
some.

Kempner bowed his head and, in a
hollow and frail voice, began talking. He admitted to signing a fake release
and acknowledged there was no uncle into whose hands this girl went. He did it for
the money, plain and simple—a chance to leave the world of the criminally
insane for good.

“The years at Dunmore were a
nightmare. The place was right out of a horror movie--violent, unpredictable, dangerous.
The patients and the staff were more like inmates left to their own devices.”

He described Dunmore as a prison,
not a hospital. Patients routinely locked in seclusion, shrieking and wailing
all night. Suicide attempts made every day in every way imaginable. Gangs of
nurses roamed the halls, beat, kicked, and strangled vulnerable patients,
stripped them naked, poured ice water on them. Two starved to death during his
tenure.

“You name the brutality. We had
it,” he whispered.

“So you were paid to get her out?”
Mack asked.

Kemper nodded.

“By whom?” Mack urged.

“Bobby,” he said simply.

Bella and Mack looked at one
another.

“Why?” asked Bella.

“Because she was his girl. They
had been together for years. It was an open secret. She could have buried him on
a silver platter and threatened to. I guess he bought her silence. She never
testified against him. She just disappeared.”

“What was she in for?” Mack asked.

Kempner looked back and forth
between the two of them, his face flushed.

“She killed her mother with a
butcher knife when she was sixteen,” he answered solemnly. So this was the girl
they had heard of.

“Do you have any idea where she
went when she got out?” Mack asked.

“That I do not know. I didn’t ask,”
Kempner replied.

“Did Bobby help her when she was
on the outside?” Mack pressed.

“I assume so,” he answered. “He
paid me to sign the papers and remain silent. It was enough money that I was
able to retire.”

“What do you remember about her?”
Mack asked quietly.

Kempner took a deep breath and
exhaled loudly. He squinted, looking pained.

“What don’t I remember about her? She
was a kid when she arrived. A damaged one, that’s for sure. A very, very sick
girl. But a girl nonetheless.”

“Wasn’t Dunmore a facility for
adults?” Mack looked perplexed.

“It was for patients eighteen and
older. But word was she had relatives locked up in the place, some there since
it opened its doors. She knew the place well. Had visited many times as a
child. She actually requested it. Crazy judge agreed.”

“She asked to be sent to Dunmore?”
Bella said with disbelief.

“Sure did. She would tell everyone
it was her real home.”

The three of them looked at one
another somberly.

“Do you remember her name?” Bella
asked.

Kempner almost looked scared.

“Emilie LeCourt.”

“Was she even close to fit for
release when you let her go?” Mack asked. Bella knew the answer before she even
heard it.

Kempner paused, shook his head no,
then closed his eyes.

“She was one of our most vile patients.
A true psychopath. The girl was truly, truly crazy. Spending all that time with
Bobby only made her more so.”

“How so?” Mack asked.

He answered solemnly. “She joined
the nurses when she wanted to, preyed on the more vulnerable patients in every
which way. One time a female patient called her a name—snaggletooth, something
like that. Emile beat her so badly she fractured her skull in four places. The
woman was in a coma for months before she died. No one ratted Emile out. They
were too scared.”

“Why snaggletooth?” Mack wanted to
know.

“She had one very crooked tooth on
top. It was horrible.” He looked down in his lap when he spoke.

“So she killed her? And the staff
kept quiet?” Bella was shocked.

“She was one of the forgotten
girls, Detective. Come to think of it, so was Emile.”

“The what?”

“The forgotten girls. That’s what
we called them.”

Bella looked quizzically over at
Mack then back to Kempner.

“Why?”

“There wasn’t a soul left in the
world that cared what happened to them,” he said plainly.

He saw the look of disapproval on
Bella’s face.

“These girls—they were lunatics,”
he rationalized, still, so many years later. “Bobby protected Emilie. He was
the hospital’s savior. I had a wife and kids to support.”

What a coward, Bella thought. She
would have left the place and returned with the cops.

“There were rumors her psychiatrist
and her had a thing,” he continued. “Before Bobby showed up, that is.”

Bella thought about the notes in
Weber’s file, the rumors of an affair with a young patient. So the shrinks at
Dunmore were in on the party too.

“Who was the psychiatrist? What
was his name?” Bella asked.

“Her name, you mean.”

“Her?”

“Yes. Her.”

He looked embarrassed.

“So Emilie liked women?”

“So it seemed.”

“And her female doctor liked her?”
Bella raised her eyebrows. Pieces of the puzzle were coming together.

“What do you remember about this doctor?”
Mack jumped in.

Kempner closed his eyes again.

“She was a big, ugly woman. I
remember that.”

Bella caught Mack’s eyes and
Kempner noticed it.

“If we showed you a photo of a
girl, do you think you would be able to identify whether it is Emilie?” Mack
asked.

“I will try,” Kempner said
quietly.

Mack went to the car to get Weber’s
photos and Bella stayed at the table with Kempner.

“Anything else at all you might remember
about Emilie?”

Bella knew they were pretty much
at the end of their rope. Kempner looked tired and frail to her now.

He closed his eyes deep in
thought.

“The only other thing that stands
out in my mind was she loved gardening. I do remember, very vividly, that she
was a real horticulturalist. She spent hours in Dunmore’s makeshift garden and
really turned it into something.”

Bella nodded, interested.

“But she was a different girl once
she got inside. Believe me,” he shivered, his hand gripping his arm tightly.

“Did Bobby ever say anything to
you that might shed light on where Emilie went? I know it was a long time ago. Think
hard,” Bella requested.

Kempner gazed out the kitchen
window, his old worn hands cupped around the rim of his mug. “I don’t really recall.
I do remember hearing he got her some surgery, her teeth fixed like she always
wanted.”

“Braces?” Bella asked, surprised.

“Nahh, not braces.” Kempner
brushed off this suggestion. “A whole new set of teeth. I remember hearing she
got a mouthful of pearly whites that didn’t look natural, something like that.”

He sounded sorrowful as he said, “She
was a pretty girl until she smiled but, when she did, it was hard not to stare.
Bobby liked it though. He had a nickname for her. I can’t remember it,” he said,
looking as though he were trying to remember. He rubbed his chin warily.

“Hey, at my age dentures are a
given,” he chuckled solemnly. “But ever see anyone that young with a mouth full
of fake teeth?”

As a matter of fact, she had. Mack
came back in with three photos in his hands. He lay them down on the table.

Kempner looked at the pictures they
had retrieved from Weber’s memory box—in one, the girl sat alone in a chair and
in the other two she sat with Weber.

“Well, I’ll be dammed—that is Emilie.
And that’s the shrink I told you about.”

They were in the driveway a moment
later when Kempner appeared at his front door waving his cane. “Wait! Wait!” he
yelled after them. Bella and Mack walked restlessly back to his front porch and
stood on the bottom step.

“What’s wrong?” Mack asked.

“I just remembered Bobby’s
nickname for her,” he said, looking at Bella.

He took a moment and leaned on the
screen door with one hand and his cane with the other, to steady his balance.
The he looked Bella right in the eye.

“He called her Fangsy.”