Highway 61 (13 page)

Erica paused to stare at Vicki’s photo some more.

“That was the last time I saw her,” she said. “I figured Vicki went off to Cornell like she said. We weren’t close friends or anything. She didn’t owe me a good-bye. I wrote on her Facebook wall, but she never got back to me. I thought she was so busy in college that she didn’t do Facebook anymore. That’s okay. Like I said, it’s not like we were close friends. I didn’t think anymore about her until…”

“Until your father mentioned that he was having problems.”

“He said he got into a little trouble up in Thunder Bay during the Fourth of July weekend. A very wise man once told me that he didn’t believe in coincidences.”

“That would be me.”

“That would be you. Is my father in trouble because of Vicki?”

“Yes, I think he is. I just don’t know how much trouble.”

“Enough that people are shooting at you?”

“That might be completely unrelated to this.”

“Are you saying it’s a coincidence?”

“I’m saying … I don’t know what I’m saying.”

“Will you still help my father, McKenzie? Will you please, even after what happened?”

“I’ll try, Erica.”

“I’ve always liked that you call me that. Rickie is a child’s name, and I’m not a child anymore. My mom, my dad, my oldest friends, they’ve known me since I was a child, so I pretty much have to take it from them. Only you’ve never treated me like a child. To you I was always Erica. You don’t know how much that’s meant to me.”

Nina called from the kitchen.

“Are you two done conspiring? Is it okay for me to come back into the room?”

Erica closed the laptop and stood.

“It’s all right, Mom,” she said.

Nina entered the room empty-handed.

“Where’s the iced tea?” I asked.

She was looking at her daughter when she said, “I must have forgotten.”

“I’m sorry, Mom,” Erica said. “Sorry to keep things from you. I made promises I shouldn’t have made.”

“What can you do? He’s your father.”

Erica walked to her mother and hugged her with one arm while keeping the laptop pressed to her side with the other.

“What’s this for?” Nina asked.

“Nothing,” Erica said. “Nothing at all.”

She spun around and headed for the stairs. She called to me as she climbed them.

“You know, McKenzie,” Erica said, “I didn’t get a choice of parents. I don’t know if I would have changed anything if I had.”

When she was out of sight, Nina said, “What did you and Rickie talk about?”

“Honestly, Nina,” I said, “you should stop calling her that.”

*   *   *

I hadn’t planned on punching Jason Truhler; hadn’t considered it once during the sixty minutes it took to drive from Mahtomedi, the suburb northeast of St. Paul where Nina lived, to Eden Prairie, the suburb southwest of Minneapolis where Truhler lived. Yet when he opened the door to his town house, looked at me with a mystified expression on his face, and said, “McKenzie, what the hell do you want at this time of night?” I lost it. Granted, in Minnesota it’s considered extremely discourteous to call or visit after 10:00
P.M.
On the other hand, I had nearly taken a bullet for this lying bastard. So I drove my fist into his midsection just above the cloth belt keeping his robe closed.

The force of the blow drove Truhler three steps backward and down onto the carpet, his knees drawn up, his hands clutching his stomach. I entered the town house, closing the door behind me.

“What … what…?” Truhler coughed and gasped for air. For a moment I thought he might vomit. “It’s not … it’s not…”

“It’s not what?” I asked.

I caught movement in front of me. I looked up just as the girl started to scream. She was standing under the arch that led to a darkened corridor, wearing only pearls around her neck and high heels on her feet. She looked like she’d started high school last week.

Truhler rolled to his knees and slowly stood up, using an outstretched hand for support. I noticed for the first time that he was naked beneath his robe.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” I said.

“It’s okay … okay,” Truhler said. He moved toward the girl. “Don’t, don’t … be frightened. It’s just a minor misunderstanding.”

The girl must have believed him, because she soon stopped screaming and started to giggle instead.

“I thought you were just showing off when you said you were involved with dangerous people,” she said.

Dangerous?
my inner voice asked.
You got that right, honey.

Truhler took a deep breath, regained some of his composure.

“Everything is fine now,” he said. “Go back to bed.”

“What about…?” The girl gestured at me with her chin. At no time did she make an effort to cover herself.

“I know who he is. It’ll be fine.”

“He looks so mean…”

I do not. Do I?

“The scratches on his face.”

Yeah, well …

“It’ll be fine,” Truhler said.

The girl giggled some more. I thought I saw her wink.

“Will he be staying?” she asked.

Truhler seemed annoyed by the question.

“No,” he said. “He’ll be leaving in a minute. Now go back to bed.”

The girl was reluctant to leave, and Truhler had to take her elbow and escort her down the corridor and out of sight. Words were exchanged. The girl giggled again.

I sat on a plush sofa pushed against the wall. There was a glass coffee table in front of it. On the coffee table I found a razor blade, a short straw, and a small mirror. The mirror looked as if it had been licked clean. I pointed at the drug paraphernalia when Truhler returned to the living room.

“You’re a cliché, you know that,” I said. “How old is that girl, anyway?”

“She’s legal,” Truhler said.

“By legal do you mean she’s eighteen?”

“What do you want, McKenzie?”

I had no intention of looking up at Truhler while we spoke.

“Sit down before I knock you down,” I told him.

Truhler found a chair as far away from me as he could get and still be in the same room.

“What happened at the drop?” he asked.

“Besides getting shot at and having my car destroyed?”

I gave him the basics. When I finished, Truhler looked at the ceiling and sighed with the same dramatic flourish as he had in my kitchen.

“I take it you didn’t get my money back,” he said.

“Golly gee, Jason, I’m really sorry ’bout that.”

“So why are you here?” he asked. “You could have told me all this over the phone.”

“Does the name Vicki Walsh mean anything to you?”

“Oh.”

“Oh. Did you think I wouldn’t find out who she was?”

“I didn’t think it mattered who she was.”

“That’s an interesting attitude to take. I’m sure the cops will be very impressed.”

“I didn’t kill her.”

“You took her to Thunder Bay.”

“Yes, but…”

“But what?”

Truhler glanced at the opening to the darkened corridor. He left his chair and moved to another, this one across the coffee table directly in front of me. He folded his hands in his lap, leaned toward me, and whispered. Guilty people do that. They whisper even when there’s no one around to overhear.

“I didn’t kill her, McKenzie. You’ve got to believe me.”

“Why? Because you’ve been so truthful up until now? You made reservations at the Prince Arthur Hotel for two—in May.”

“I took Vicki to Thunder Bay, I admit it, but I didn’t know I was going to take her when I made the reservations. I didn’t know who I was going to take.”

“The blackmailers made their reservations four days after you did. They knew who you were going to take.”

“McKenzie, I didn’t tell you about hooking up with Vicki because I knew you wouldn’t approve.”

“She was your daughter’s friend.”

“See, I knew you’d react that way, a straitlaced guy like you. That’s why I didn’t tell you. Everything else happened exactly the way that I said it did, though. I woke up and she was dead. I know you think I’m lying, but it’s true.”

There’s that tell again,
my inner voice reminded me.

“You left her there,” I said.

“What else was I going to do? It’s not like we were a couple or anything.”

“I got a long lecture from the cops today about doing the right thing. You should have heard it. It might have done you some good.”

“C’mon, McKenzie. She was a tramp.”

“She was eighteen years old.”

“Yeah? So? McKenzie, Vicki wasn’t some innocent kid that I seduced. You know how we hooked up? We hooked up on the Internet. I found her on a Web site for prostitutes that a friend told me about. I didn’t even believe it was her when I first saw the picture. At the fencing tournaments, she always had her hair in a ponytail and she wore one of those white tunics, jackets, whatever they call it, no makeup. In the picture on the Web site, her blouse was open so you could see her tits, and her hair was down and her lips were red and—”

“What Web site? What are you talking about?”

“C’mere. Let me show you.”

Truhler led me from his living room into a home office. He had an L-shaped desk; an eMachine had been positioned on the base of the L. The power was on. Truhler called up a search engine and typed in an address. The page that popped up on the monitor displayed a shot of an attractive young woman; I would have placed her age at about sixteen. She had dark eyes and black hair that fell to her bare shoulders. There was something extraordinarily touching about her. Beneath her photo was an empty field labeled
MEMBERS
and another that read
PASSWORD
. That was it—no explanation of the site and no directions on how to become a member.

Truhler typed in his name—ColdWeatherFriend—and a password that appeared as bullet points. A moment later a new page filled the screen. This one had the title My Very First Time. Beneath it were photographs of twenty women displayed in a grid, four down, five across. Each of the women was identified by a first name only; all of them seemed impossibly young. They were posed provocatively, with shirts unbuttoned and skirts hiked to there, yet despite that they exhibited a kind of innocence that I found intriguing—a trick of the photographer’s light, I decided. That opinion changed abruptly when Truhler moved the cursor to the woman called Tasha and clicked his mouse.

In attempting to define pornography, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said, “I know it when I see it.” Tasha’s page left no doubt. There were a half dozen photographs of her, each of them more raw than the one before. A prop was placed in each photo to emphasize the woman’s youth—a doll, a teddy bear, a plaid private school skirt, a canopied bed trimmed in pink. Yet any semblance of innocence was gone baby gone.

According to the copy beneath the photos, Tasha had earned a four-out-of-five-star rating from her clients. There was a navigation key that allowed viewers to read the woman’s vital statistics, another that displayed comments posted by her clients, and still another that allowed clients to post a comment. Beneath that, there was a navigation key that read:
ARRANGE TO MEET TASHA
.

“Show me Vicki’s page,” I said.

Truhler leaned away from the computer screen.

“It’s gone,” he said. “They took it down a few weeks ago.”

“Not after Thunder Bay?”

“No, but I checked a couple of times since I got back, and there didn’t seem to be any activity. No new guys were posting comments after being with her.”

“Tell me how this works.”

“The Web site? Well, you just can’t sign up, that’s the first thing. You have to be recommended by a friend who’ll vouch for you. Then the company checks you out to make sure you’re not a cop, not a degenerate, and that you have money to pay before they give you a confidential membership name and a password.”

“Apparently their definition of degenerate is different from mine.”

“Are you going to judge me now?”

“They’re kids, Truhler.”

“They’re not kids. They look like kids, but they’re not. They’re all older than eighteen. They’re all adults.”

“To a twelve-year-old eighteen might be an adult. Not to guys our age.”

“The law says—”

I held up a hand to stop him.

“I don’t want to hear it,” I said. “I really don’t. Just tell me who does the checking for this company, who’s in charge.”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

“It’s run by a woman. Her name is Roberta. She’s about fifty years old. That’s all I know. The company is very security conscious. Names aren’t exchanged.”

“You’re saying they know who you are, but you don’t know who they are.”

“It’s not important for me to know.”

“Truhler, did it ever occur to you that these are the people who are blackmailing you?”

He shook his head as if the idea were just too outrageous to contemplate.

“They wouldn’t jeopardize their business. They wouldn’t kill their own employees,” he said.

“First of all, their business is making money from shnooks like you. Second, Vicki Walsh isn’t dead.”

“What?” Truhler stood and stepped away from the desk. “What?”

“The stain on the carpet where she was supposedly killed was caused by theatrical blood—the stuff they use in slasher films.”

“What? What?”

“You’ve been played, pal.”

Truhler sat down again.

“I don’t believe it,” he said.

“Are you sure you can’t identify your friends at—what is this Web site called, My Very First Time?”

He shook his head.

“Well, then you’re screwed.”

“Not if we can find Vicki. If we can find Vicki—”

“We?”

“McKenzie, you’ve got to help me.”

“You keep telling me that.”

“Please.”

I didn’t want to help Truhler, a man who abused children; the only people who should be involved with eighteen-year-old girls are eighteen-year-old boys. Erica—I figured it would crush her to learn about her father, only he was a jerk and she was going to find out sooner or later. Probably she knew already; she’s the one who put me onto Vicki Walsh. Vicki; she looked so young, so sweet. A prostitute. A year older than Erica, she had to be nineteen by now, maybe twenty. She had to know what she was doing. My Very First Time, exploiting young women, pimping them to old men. Someone should do something about that. I could pick up a phone, give Bobby a call. An online prostitution ring, surely that constituted a major crime, right? And what about the guys who shot up my car, who nearly shot me? They didn’t need to do that. That was unnecessary. Someone should do something about that, too.