Vanished - A Mystery (Dixon & Baudin Book 1) (8 page)

16

Baudin waited until evening, filling out paperwork on another case. The chief had given his word that they weren’t supposed to be given anything else, but Jessop didn’t care. He knew they wouldn’t go complaining to the chief about it, and he sure as hell wasn’t going out himself to investigate a convenience store robbery or credit card theft.

Baudin looked up and saw Dixon concentrating on his screen. He leaned forward casually and pretended to need something at the far end of his desk, but he actually glanced at Dixon’s screen. It was the Wikipedia page on the Tuskegee experiments. Baudin grinned and leaned back in his chair, pushing the credit card theft case file away from himself.

“What ya reading?” Baudin asked.

“Nothin’. Just bullshit to pass the time.”

He nodded, not taking his eyes off him. “You staying late?”

“Nah, I’m gonna head home and have a beer, relax on the couch and just forget about chicks with their vages missing.”

“You haven’t seen many vics, have you?”

“Homicides? I’ve had some. Maybe ten. Nothin’ like this, but still homicides. Most murders in this town are drunken brawls that ended bad. I had one that might’ve been somethin’ like this, but I don’t know.”

Baudin put his hands behind his neck, revealing the sweat stains under his arms. “What was it?”

“Girl from the strip club, the Eastern Exposure. Don’t exist no more. The owner went under ’cause of back taxes, but it was big business years ago.”

“What happened?”

“We found one of the girls—I can’t remember her name, but her stage name was Diamond, I remember that—we found Diamond in the backseat of her car in the lot, dead. Just starin’ up like a fish that’d just been caught and thrown in a cooler to suffocate. Just starin’ up. We found some track marks, and her system was filled with so much smack it woulda killed a horse. It was ruled overdose, but… I don’t know.”

“Just didn’t sit right in your gut, huh?”

“No. Never. Not even now. Somethin’ about the way she was looking. They found semen and evidence of rape, vaginal tearing, but her previous boyfriend said she liked it rough.”

“You look into him?”

“For three months. I followed him around so much he filed a complaint against me. I was ordered to back away. Before I could do anything, he took off. Left the state. I let sleeping dogs lie after that.” Dixon stared off into the distance for a moment, and Baudin could tell he was gone, in some distant place considering distant possibilities that no longer mattered. “What about you?” he said after a time.

“I’ve had similar, but nothing this brutal. Sometimes in the canyons you’d find bodies. We found a young mother once who was pregnant. He’d torn out her throat like an animal. Left teeth marks in the flesh. Real vicious. I started scanning the open-unsolved files, mostly because I had nothing. Nobody saw anything, nobody reported her missing, no relatives. So I’m scanning the files and I come across a woman from 1975 who was killed in an identical way. Throat ripped out, teeth marks, but the vic had been sodomized and mine hadn’t. That was the only difference.”

“You ever find him?”

Baudin nodded as he took a sip of coffee out of a Styrofoam cup. “Some uniforms went into a house because the neighbors reported a bad smell. They found the owner, Randall Dupas. He died of congenital heart failure. When the uniforms were going through his stuff, waiting for the paramedics to call it and get the ME out there, they found photo albums. Like, five of ’em. They were filled with women, pictures he’d taken of ’em… after he’d bitten out their throats. About twenty women over a forty-year period. But he was a long-haul trucker, so I bet that figure’s closer to one or two hundred. He didn’t sodomize my vic because he was too old at that point to get it up.”

Dixon didn’t say anything. Baudin was now the one staring off into space. He blinked several times as though wiping memories away and said, “Better to leave ghosts alone.” He rose, finishing his coffee and tossing the cup in the trash. “Need me to bring anything tomorrow?”

Dixon shook his head. “No. There’ll be plenty of everything.”

Baudin turned and walked away. As he neared the glass doors heading out of the detective’s floor, he could see Dixon’s reflection in it. He was staring at him, all the way until the moment Baudin had opened the door and gone through.

Baudin ate a slow meal at a Mexican restaurant. He sat in the corner by himself and called Molly. She didn’t answer but called him back after a few minutes.

“How is she?” he asked.

“Sulking. Listening to some awful music in my bedroom.”

“Can you make sure she eats something? If you don’t push it, she won’t eat.”

She chuckled. “I raised five of my own, you know.”

“I know. And I can’t tell you how appreciative I am, Cousin.”

“Well, bring me a burger and fries, then. From Shakey’s. None of that cheap fast-food garbage.”

“You got it.”

He hung up and put the phone down next to his plate. He’d only taken a few bites of the meal but couldn’t eat. Food was hard for him to get down, and it seemed to be getting harder, as though his body were rejecting it the older he got. An image of himself withering away would sometimes come to him. His ribs stuck out, his face gaunt and blackened with malnutrition. When he didn’t feel like eating, he would picture that and then take another bite.

“Excuse me,” he said to the waitress. “Could I get a beer, please? Corona with lime.”

The beer was warm, but he didn’t mind. He sipped it slowly and kept his eyes on the people around him. Personal intelligence, the ability to read and understand people, was, in his view, the most important type of intelligence. But they didn’t teach it in college, and they didn’t measure it in IQ tests. That was why people like the man who crucified Jane Doe could get away with things like that for so long: no one suspected them, because they were geniuses of personal intelligence. They could fit in and seem no different from the people they were around, just part of their world.

When darkness came, he left cash on the table and went out to his car. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, leaving the keys on his lap. Rest wasn’t something that came easily or often, but sometimes it would come in fleeting moments that would make everything else melt away.

Baudin wasn’t sure how long he’d sat there, but when he opened his eyes he knew he’d been asleep. He started the car, and pulled away.

In Los Angeles, sometimes he would just go for long drives. Take the Santa Monica Freeway and drive until he was someplace new, someplace he’d never seen. He’d roam the neighborhoods with a small colored spotlight and shine it on houses in the dark, lighting them up a soft blue. He could spend hours driving around the city and still feel like he hadn’t seen anything.

Cheyenne wasn’t like that. The city wasn’t sprawling with hidden nooks to explore. The streets were laid out plainly, and the people were even plainer. Everything had the appearance of being straightforward here, although he knew what lurked beneath that veneer. He’d seen it really close, felt it, tasted it on his tongue… and every city had it.

The Motel 6 parking lot was so packed that there were no spaces available. He had to park across the street in the lot of a payday lender. He stepped out into the warm night air and lit a cigarette, taking a puff before he began the trek across the intersection.

The girls were already out, more of them than before. The new ones were more beautiful and didn’t have the worn appearance of junkies and alcoholics. Housewife hookers… women who came out part time to sell themselves, usually behind their husbands’ backs. In his time in the vice squad, Baudin had even busted a medical doctor who would sell herself through Backpage when she grew bored. Baudin didn’t fully understand it but believed it came from some need to degrade themselves. He tried talking to them about it, but their insights into themselves were clouded with layers of rationalizations and denial. Most of them hadn’t the slightest idea what they were doing out on the streets.

He passed groups of women who smiled and asked him innocuous questions, awkwardly gauging his interest. Keeping his head low, he sucked at his cigarette, amazed at his sudden realization that there was no litter on the sidewalks.

One of the women he recognized from the other night. He stopped and offered her a twenty-dollar bill. She took it without asking what it was for and shoved it into her bra.

“Where’s Candi?”

“You ain’t heard?”

“Heard what?”

“She outta the game for a while. Got beat up by some john and spent the night in the hospital. Gave her thirty stitches in the face. Ain’t no one gonna hire a whore lookin’ like Frankenstein.”

Baudin tossed the cigarette. “Where is she?”

“Home.”

“I need to know where that is.”

She folded her arms in a gesture of defiance. He took out another twenty and handed it to her.

“She’s at the motel. One of the rooms on the first level. I don’t remember which one.”

He hurried back, pushing his way through two girls who stood in front of him, asking him something about a party. A man with glasses was eating Chinese food out of a carton in the motel office. Baudin stepped to the counter, but the man didn’t look up from his food.

“Excuse me,” Baudin said, showing him the tin. “Candi Carlson, please.”

“What you want with her?”

“None of your damn business.”

“Well, then, maybe her room ain’t none of your damn business.”

Baudin chuckled. The fact that this man was fighting him on this at this time was unbelievable. Life, he had always been convinced, had a sense of humor.

“Your tongue has a green tint.”

“Yeah, so?”

“So there’s nothing green in that fried rice you’re eating. Weird thing for a tongue to be green. Only thing I ever seen do that is someone smoking a joint. Burns the tongue a light green in some people for a good half hour afterward. How much weed am I gonna find I start going through this desk of yours?”

The man swallowed and set the carton down. “She’s in 112.”

“Thank you for your help.”

Baudin left the office, pushing the door so hard it hit the wall and bounced back. He strode to room 112 and put his ear to the door, hearing a television—canned laughter from a sitcom coming through at regular beats. He knocked with the back of his fist, but no one answered.

“Candi, it’s Ethan Baudin. Answer the door.”

For a good thirty seconds, nothing happened. Then he heard the chain slide off the door and the lock click open. The door opened a crack, revealing a bruised and battered face.

She had a large black eye, the bruising reaching halfway down her nose. Her lips were swollen and cut, and down the side of her cheek was a pattern of stitches like two pieces of cloth sewn together badly.

“What happened?” he said.

She swallowed, unable to look him in the eyes. “Just the cost of doing business, I guess,” she said gently.

“That’s bullshit. Who did this?”

“I don’t want no trouble with him. He’s a big man around here. He owns a lotta businesses, knows the mayor personally… I don’t want trouble with him. It’s done and over with, anyway. Arrestin’ him ain’t gonna do nothin’.”

He exhaled, watching the way the light reflected off the eye surrounded by bruising. “You need money?”

“I got a little saved up. Hopefully won’t be too much of a scar that I can’t cover with base.”

Baudin nodded, looking over as someone left their room and hurried to their car. “Who’s the bigwig? I promise I won’t arrest him. Just wanna know who he is so he’s on my radar.”

“Ted Holdman. He owns a buncha gas stations. That’s how he made his money.”

He reached up slowly, gently laying his fingers on her cheek. She kept her eyes low.

“Will you… I mean, do you want to come in?”

“No, I got work to do. I came by to see if you got a chance to show those pictures around.”

“Oh, yeah, I was gonna call you before… well, before everything. One of the girls said she saw something.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. I think she said she saw a picture in some john’s car. Picture of that girl.”

A quick shot of adrenaline raced through him as if he’d injected it. “What girl?”

“Dazzle. She should be on the corner now. She’s black, straight hair, real pretty.”

“Dazzle?”

“Uh-huh.”

Baudin took out his wallet, but she put her hand on it. “No,” she said. “You don’t need to pay me. I just… well, you’re nice to me.” She smiled shyly. “I think you’re the first person in my life that’s been genuinely nice to me.”

Baudin held her gaze, absorbing the sadness and tragedy of her words. He leaned in close, kissed her on the cheek, and rushed back to the street.

Several girls stood near the motel. He wasn’t in the mood for niceties and conversation. He grabbed the first one, spun her around to the shock of the other two, and slapped cuffs on her. One of the women pulled out her phone, and he held up his badge.