The Fort (17 page)

“I’m going to take your gag off now,” said Hooper. “And if you scream, no one is going to hear you, but you will be punished. I already owe you a lashing for yesterday, so think it through.” He gently loosened the straps on the back of the gag, and she fell upon the water he’d cruelly left her the night before. In his injured state, he hadn’t realized the glass would just provide torment, as she would have been unable to drink it. She drank greedily at first, and then seemed to consider the idea that she should make it last. She set the cup down half empty, then began to eat the dry toast.

“This will be our arrangement for a few days,” said Hooper. “If you keep up the good behavior, I’ll bring you more to eat than just bread and water.” He looked at the slowly drying spot on the floor where she had pissed, and grabbed an empty five-gallon bucket from under the steps. “You can use this as a toilet—again, at least until I know I can trust you.”

“Does your leg hurt?” Amy asked him in a timid, kind-sounding voice.

“It does,” he said. “I was hurt in the war, by shrapnel, and this feels a little bit like that,” he said, then chuckled. “Maybe a little worse. I was a much younger man then, and they had me on
painkillers almost immediately. Walking is easier than I expected it to be, so that’s a blessing.”

“What are you going to do with me? If you let me go, I won’t tell anyone what’s happened, and I don’t even know where I am, not really.” She was smiling at Hooper, but unlike when she kindly asked after his injury, this was not a smile to be nice. She was trying to manipulate him. He walked behind her. She didn’t turn to follow him, though he was sure she must have wanted to. Hooper grabbed the chain with both hands and yanked, jerking her back into the pole and making Amy grunt with pain. He dropped the chain and walked to where she could see him again. She was crying, looking at the floor while sobs wracked her body.
It’s not my fault that I need to discipline her. She tried to run away, that’s how this whole mess started, and if I’m not stern enough, problems like that will persist.

Hooper knelt in front of her, then tenderly lifted her head by the chin. “You need to understand some things, Amy. You belong to me now. There is no going back to what you had before. This is your life now. The sooner you accept that, the better for both of us.” He smiled, and she smiled back, but he knew it was forced. Her eyes were red and puffy, her face bruised slightly from the fall down the steps, he assumed. “Do what you’re told, and things will get better, do you understand?”

She nodded and said quietly, “Yes.”

“Good. Now I’m going to go back upstairs, so give me your hands and then sit against the pole.” She did as instructed, and as a reward, he cuffed them behind her, but not around the pole. She was plenty well secured to it without that, anyway. Next, he replaced the ball gag in her mouth and then tightened the straps. When she looked at him now, all defiance, all hope even, was gone from her face. Hooper smiled at her and then shuffled up the steps, returning her to darkness and locking the door behind him.

The business with Amy taken care of, Hooper walked to his room. He’d decided that there was something else that
needed doing, regardless of his injured state. He went to his closet and pulled out a set of olive drab fatigues, pants, and a long-sleeved shirt. He put the pants on slowly, then pulled on and buttoned the shirt, before taking a matching flat-brimmed hat down from the top of the closet and mashing it onto his head. If someone saw him, he might think Hooper was being a little nutty, but if pressed on the matter, Hooper planned to ask if that guy could still fit into his clothes from twenty years ago. His neighbors were good folks; they’d just think he was screwing around. He tucked the small revolver into a pocket and headed for the sliding door.

It was odd being in the backyard again. The last time, leading Amy with the gun, still seemed surreal. He walked to the gate, opened it, and walked into the woods. Someone had been hunting him yesterday, and he wanted to know who. There was a bullet in his calf, and Hooper deserved to know who had put it there. He backtracked his steps as well as he could remember, following the broken path of popples back to where he’d been shot. There was no blood to show him where it had happened, the rain would have seen to that, but somehow Hooper just knew when he was in the spot.

The moment had been frozen into his memory, and he could picture the day before with astonishing clarity. This was where he’d forced Amy into the thick trees, his calf burning with pain. Turning slowly, he oriented himself both to where he had been and to where his back would have been facing. Hooper almost jumped when he saw the fort through the trees.
How did I not see it before?
The stress of the day must have dulled his normally excellent situational awareness.

The fort was made of weathered lumber and was attached to three trees, one much larger than the others. On the side closest to him, Hooper could see a window cut into a plywood wall. It made him nervous. That was undoubtedly where the shot had come from.

He advanced on the fort as though approaching an enemy emplacement, for that was just what it was. Carl had mentioned something about helping his son with a fort back in the woods, Hooper recalled as he crept up on it. This was probably the same one.
And I bet Carl’s fucking kid was one of the ones who shot me.
The thought set off a burst of black rage in his head, tempered only slightly by relief that the boy clearly hadn’t recognized him.

When he reached the fort, Hooper peered up at its floor and listened. Hearing nothing, he put the foot of his good leg on the bottom rung of one of the ladders leading up to the fort and began to climb. When he put weight onto his injured leg, though, his body shut down, his calf betraying him, and Hooper fell a few feet to the forest floor, landing on his ass.

He was OK, but his dignity had taken a beating. It was for the best, he decided as he brushed himself off, feeling ridiculous in the old, musty-smelling clothes. He couldn’t hear the kids up there, but for all he knew, they could be there, armed and waiting on him. Though if they were holed up there as silently as this and were still armed with what he assumed was something stolen from Carl’s ridiculous gun collection—a .22, judging from the hole in his calf—they would have heard his tumble from the ladder and already taken a shot at him. Still, as he walked away from the fort the same way he’d come, he was cautious, even more nervous with his back facing the maw of the window. He might not see to them today, but he would teach those kids respect, and soon.

34

Van Endel was sitting at his desk, contemplating another cup of coffee, when the phone rang. “Van Endel,” he said. There was a moment of silence, then a clicking sound, and Tracy was on the line.

“What’s shaking, Mr. Detective?”

“Nothing, Tracy,” said Van Endel, and he meant it. Since the body had been found, he hadn’t been able to put his hands on one shred of evidence. It was beyond frustrating, but Tracy calling could mean that there had been a breakthrough at the coroner’s office. “What do you have for me?”

“A little bit of interesting news—maybe good; not my call—and a big old chunk of frustrating news. You got a preference?”

“I’ll take frustrating.”

“I’ve got nothing on dental so far,” said Tracy. “Big fat zilcho, and I don’t see that changing.”

“So you still can’t say with any certainty that this actually is Molly?”

“Nope, sure can’t. I took a bunch of pictures to share with my old professor. He has some contacts in New York, said he can see if they can help. I’m good, but these teeth are something else. If the
guy was deliberately trying to disguise who she was, he couldn’t have done a better job of it. I’m guessing that’s exactly what his goal was. I’ve heard of Mob guys doing stuff like that, burying Jimmy Hoffa with no head, hands, or feet, that sort of thing. Whoever did this knew that fire would destroy her fingerprints and footprints, and that hammer he used, I’m damn sure on that, plain old claw hammer, you can tell by the impre—”

“I’ll take your word for it, Tracy.”

“All right, whatever,” Tracy said, sounding a little miffed that Van Endel didn’t share his enthusiasm for the bloody nuts and bolts of his trade. “Anyways, I got the teeth thing headed out of state, so we’ll see what those guys have to say.

“Now the other thing, though. The interesting one. She had a leather wallet in a back pocket, it was basically seared into her. At first I thought it was just more skin. You want to guess what was in there?” The line was silent for a minute, and Tracy sighed. “Won’t even try. You just know you can’t get it right, so you won’t even play.”

“Tracy.”

“All right, all right. Latex residue, along with some ruined foil. I got them under the microscope, confirmed on both.”

“Condoms.”

“My man gets the assist, anyway,” said Tracy. “So here’s how I see it. You either accept that Molly might have been planning on having a little safe fun, and things got out of hand, or that something else is going on.”

“Like what?”

“Shit, I don’t know,” said Tracy. “You’re the detective, I’m the lab rat. I can tell you what, where, and when it was done to her. You’re the one who figures out the who and why. One thing, though: I can’t think of any reason for anyone to kill Molly Peterson and go to all this effort to keep her identity a secret, can you?”

“No,” admitted Van Endel. “There has to be some explanation, though. You’re right: disguising the body like this took time, and he ran a hell of a risk burning it like he did, too. I can’t see why anyone would do it just to do it.”

“Is the mom clean?”

“Stick to the what, where, and when, Tracy. That was one of the first things I looked into. Mom works a steady job, drinks a little, doesn’t date.”

“So no Mob ties or gambling debts?”

“Let me know what you hear on the teeth, all right?” Van Endel hung up the phone, frowning at nothing, and looking at and through his desk.
There has to be a reason.
The problem was that one of the truths he’d learned as a detective was that there didn’t have to be a good reason. Husbands beating wives to death for the hell of it, kids putting shotguns in their mouths because of heavy-metal songs, moms drowning infants in shallow bathtubs. Bad things happened often and never needed to schedule an appointment before they dropped on in.

And still he kept grinding at the why. Could the guy—it had to be a guy, anything else was impossible to Van Endel—who did it have been so ashamed by what he’d done that he’d needed to try his hardest to destroy the evidence? Van Endel didn’t believe it. There had to be more to why someone would murder a teenage girl and then destroy the corpse beyond recognition.

35

Tim walked quietly down the hall toward Becca’s room. He wasn’t sure what the rules were concerning him and his sister fraternizing during their respective groundings, but he figured the less his folks knew at this point, the better. He tapped twice on the door, waited for a response, and then tapped twice again. “What?” Becca called from inside the room. “I’m just in here reading.”

“It’s Tim. Can I come in?”

“Why?”

“I need to ask you something.”

“You’re lucky I’m bored.”

“So I can come in?”

“Yes, hurry up.”

He’d rarely seen the inside of his sister’s room in the past few years, and he took in the sights the same way a traveler voyaging to forbidden lands would. The walls were covered in posters for bands like Mötley Crüe and Guns N’ Roses, and all the people on the posters looked as though they were going insane. Men dressed like women, with big, teased-out, dyed hair. They wore very little clothing—what there was was mostly leather and spiky—and
were covered in tattoos. As Tim lived in a household sans MTV, it was a small culture shock.

“Stop staring at everything,” Becca said from atop her covers. “What do you want?”

“I want to ask you some questions about what happened the night Molly got taken.”

“Nope,” said Becca, her eyes returning to the hardcover book she was reading. “I already told Mom, Dad, and the cops everything that happened. Not that it’s any of your business, and not that anything I could tell you is going to help you out of the hole you’ve lied yourself into. Trust me, if you go to Mom with any more stories, you’re just going to get in more trouble.” She turned a page in her book violently. “If that’s even possible.”

“Maybe I can get in more trouble, maybe I can’t,” said Tim. “But I do know one thing. You could get in way more trouble if I tell Mom what you were really doing.”

“I was at the movies, duh. Best of luck. Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.”

Tim gave her a look that she met and matched. He knew that he needed to get her attention, and do it fast, or he was never going to hear the truth. “Aren’t you even worried about Molly?”

She threw herself upright against the headboard, the book closed, forgotten on her lap. “That’s a shitty thing to ask me, you little turd. Of course I’m worried about Molly. Not that it’s doing any good. The cops think she’s dead.”

“I don’t think you are,” said Tim, treading in shark-infested water. “In fact, I think you and your friends are sort of hoping maybe she won’t come back, and then none of you will get busted for what really happened.”

“You shut up. You can’t just barge in here saying all this awful shit. My friend got kidnapped, and you and your stupid friends got jealous and made up some dumb lie that you immediately got caught telling, and now you want to bring me down to your level.”

Tim took a deep breath. It was time to go for the kill. Becca was teed up for it. “You aren’t even considering one thing,” he said in a measured tone. “My friends are telling the truth, and so am I. I’m telling you, we saw Molly with a dark-haired guy in the woods. He had a gun to her back. A black gun, and Molly was scared out of her mind.”

Becca grimaced slightly at that. It was barely there, but Tim saw it.

“Well, good job, Becca. You and all your friends lied, and now one of your best friends is going to die. That detective might think he caught the real liar, but he’s wrong. You haven’t told anyone the truth.”