Little Girls Lost Read online

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Afterword

  LITTLE GIRLS LOST

  Jonah Paine

  Copyright © 2015 Jonah Paine

  All rights reserved.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The food court was mostly empty on Thursday afternoons, but not empty enough for the huddle of teenage girls who perched on green-painted chairs and sucked on their diet sodas.

  Jasmine wrinkled her nose at a nearby table, where three heavy-set men were eating their lunch.

  "Disgusting," she pronounced. "His fat ass is hanging almost halfway out of his pants. It's like, dude—buy a belt!"

  Jasmine's trio of attendants twittered on queue. They were all on the cheerleading squad, and they were all pretty and popular, but Jasmine was the undisputed queen of their court.

  "That is so gross," Brandi agreed, tossing her black hair. Brandi always made a point of being the first to agree with Jasmine. She thought of herself as the second in command of their little clique, and in her mind that meant she needed to be particularly ready to show her support for their queen. "I'm already having a hard enough day without seeing his disgusting body."

  Tanika giggled. "You guys are so bad," she whispered under her breath. Tanika always made a show of being nice and sweet, but her blue eyes flashed with delight. She could never hide how much she loved making fun of other people.

  Jasmine reviewed the girls at the table. "What do you think, Melissa?" she asked of the pretty brunette.

  Melissa had been quietly sipping on her soda straw, and she looked up with a startled look in her eye. "What?" she asked a little desperately.

  Jasmine smiled the way a cat might smile at a mouse. "I was wondering what you thought of Mr. Fat Ass over there. We're all talking about it, but you don't have anything to say. Maybe you don't approve of us?"

  Melissa looked nervously at the other girls. "Oh, no. No. I'm not ... he is fat."

  Jasmine continued to smile at her friend, wondering whether she should take it further. She could remember when they were all friends in grade school, and how they had played a cruel game with one another by which one girl was always on the outside and excluded by the others. Jasmine had been very good at that game. She had an almost instinctive knack for making sure that she was never the one on the outside. That game had taught her skills that had served her well, and for a time she considered—for old times' sake - playing it one more time and putting Melissa on the outside. It would be fun, and it would teach pretty little Melissa who was boss, but then Jasmine thought better of it. She would do it, but not today.

  Instead she sniffed and turned away. "This town is so lame. Everyone's fat and ugly and stupid. I can't wait to get out of here."

  Brandi leaned forward conspiratorially. "Did you get it? Did you get in?"

  Inwardly Jasmine cursed. Brandi was asking about her application to USC, and no—she hadn't received the acceptance letter that she was sure she was going to get. Now she had to admit it, and she kicked herself for making herself vulnerable.

  "I'm not sure film school is for me," she said archly, deciding to turn the bad into a good. "It seemed like it might be fun, but I'm not meant to be behind a camera. I should be out front."

  "Totally!" Tanika breathed, her eyes wide with enthusiasm. Jasmine didn't miss the quick and dark look that Brandi gave the other girl.

  "Honestly, I don't know that school—any kind of school—is really in my best interests. I need to get in front of cameras, not sit in a lecture hall and listen to some old man drone on and on."

  Brandi snorted loudly. "That is too funny, Jasmine!"

  Jasmine ignored her. She really couldn't stand Brandi and her constant sucking up. It wouldn't surprise her if the girl showed up one day with her hair bleached, just so she could look more like her idol. Jasmine knew that she should feel flattered, but mostly she just felt bored: with Brandi, with the rest of her friends, with this stupid food court in this stupid mall that they hung out in because there was nothing that wasn't totally lame in this ridiculous little town. She was so tired of it all that she thought she might actually vomit. Really, she couldn't get out of here soon enough.

  Off to the side, outside the circle of tables and under the shelter of a potted palm tree, someone watched Jasmine. He watched her very closely. He watched, he waited, and he thought to himself: "Soon."

  CHAPTER TWO

  Sam Patton had learned that mornings were something to be endured.

  He moved through the dark and dingy kitchen mechanically, setting the coffee maker going and half-heartedly moving dirty dishes into the sink, where they joined the dishes he had collected the previous night before he went to bed. The entire house felt like it was filled with mud that he needed to force his way through, as if he had gone to sleep on Earth but awoken on some strange and distant planet where the atmosphere was thick and everything was difficult.

  Behind him, he knew, sat Patty, and in the silence he could feel her eyes on his back. Sam knew from long experience what he would see if he turned around. His wife would be hunched over her coffee cup, the cup that he knew contained strong liquids that were not coffee, and she would not speak to him as he moved silently through the thickness of the atmosphere between them. Sam knew these things without looking, and he had long since ceased to look. If there was a shred of hope left in him, it was in the part that chose not to look too closely at his wife, particularly in the unforgiving light of morning when everything seemed so cold and clear.

  When it came time to leave he came up behind her and awkwardly kissed the top of her head. "I'm off. I'll call you if I'm going to be late. Let me know if you want me to get anything at the store on the way home." Patty turned half towards him, which had become her way of saying goodbye, and he headed for the door. He tried not to feel too relieved when he was out the door and could breathe fresh air into his lungs.

  Bud was waiting for him out front, in a car that reeked with the memory of a decade's cigarettes. Sam got into the passenger seat and exchanged nods with the driver.

  He and Bud weren't friends, exactly, but they had worked together long enough to have moved into a special space reserved for those who knew each other t
oo well to wonder whether they liked what they saw.

  "Nice way to start the day," Bud growled as he pulled the car out into the street and headed south, towards the edge of town. "Not very considerate of whoever's responsible," he added.

  Sam shrugged. "It will be about as bad as it usually is, I expect. Not much to do about it but go there and see what we can see."

  Bud sighed but didn't say any more for a few minutes as he maneuvered through the morning traffic. Finally he looked over at his passenger. "And how are things?"

  Sam looked at him. "Things?"

  Bud looked back at the cars in front of him. "You know. Stuff. Patty. How's it going?"

  Sam quirked a half-smile. It wasn't like Bud to ask about anything personal. "Patty is Patty, same as she always is. Things are things, and it seems like they'll stay things for the foreseeable future."

  "Foreseeable," Bud said, sounding the word out as if he was testing its flavor on his tongue. "Fore-seee-able."

  Sam scrunched down in his chair and stared out through the car window. "You don't like the words I use?"

  "Half the time I have no fucking idea what you're talking about, is what I think. How did you end up a cop anyway, with the words you use?"

  "Cops can use any words they want."

  "They can, and they don't use words like 'foreseeable,' which is my point. And then there's you."

  "And then there's me." Sam knew that something was up with Bud, but he was too tired and too short of caffeine to try to get to the bottom of it. It would come up soon enough, and he was willing to wait for it to surface on its own time.

  As they drove the traffic gradually began to thin out, until they hit the edge of town and the urban landscape gave way first to strip malls, then to factories, and finally to the first long stretches of open farmland. Sam stared out the window at the fat cows scattered through the threadbare fields and wondered about the life lived out here. Was it nice, to wake to the daily rhythm of milking the cows and cultivating the fields, or were the farmers chained to their own private, shit-stained hells? The cows offered no answers, and eventually he could see a metal bridge stretching over the muddy river that was their morning destination.

  CHAPTER THREE

  If by some chance they hadn't known where they were going, the cluster of police vehicles and the ribbons of yellow police tape that clustered along the river and beside the bridge would have been a sure sign.

  Once, years before, it had occurred to Sam that the investigators crawling over a fresh crime scene looked like ants on top of an anthill, and ever since he hadn't been able to get the image out of his head. If he thought too long on the analogy he began to feel slightly disgusted, particularly at the thought that the body that had been discovered early that morning was almost certainly swarming with real insects by now.

  The crowd at the bridge was dominated by black-uniformed officers, but Sam's eye was caught by a man who didn't look like the others, decked as he was in a blue track suit and baseball cap. Crawling out of the car, he headed over to where the man was speaking with the officers. Nodding at the uniform cops he extended his hand.

  "Good morning, sir. I'm Detective Patton. And you are?"

  From where the man was sitting the sun was behind Sam's head, and he squinted as he delivered his response. "Bill. Bill Bailey. I was jogging here this morning when..."

  "Where were you, exactly, when you saw the body? Details matter," Sam interrupted. Memory was a tricky thing, he knew, and this witness was reshaping what he remembered every time he told the story. Sam wanted to get the core of the story out of him before it was buried under embellishment.

  Involuntarily the man glanced back at the bridge. "I was crossing the bridge, but I didn't see it at first. I smelled it." He grimaced at the memory.

  Sam nodded grimly. He didn't need to ask what the man had smelled - it was filling his own nostrils at that very minute. "So you smelled something bad as you were jogging across the bridge. What did you do then?"

  The man's face grew a little pale as he was thrown back into the stream of his memory. "At first I thought it was just roadkill, but the smell kept getting worse as I got closer to the end of the bridge, and I was really starting to wonder what it was. So I looked over the side of the bridge and I ... I saw her."

  Sam looked to the uniform at his side to fill in the details. The officer looked through the pages in his notebook as he called out the details. "Woman, late teens, looks to have been in the river for some time."

  "Cause of death?" Sam asked, knowing that there was unlikely to be a solid answer. A body comes out of the river filled with unanswered questions.

  "The examiner is with the body now. He doesn't know yet if they're pre- or post-mortem, but there are several deep slashes that could be stab wounds."

  Sam nodded. He knew that much already; he and his partner wouldn't have been called to the scene if it looked like some girl had too much to drink and accidentally drowned. Stab wounds meant criminal intent. They meant this was likely a crime of passion. They meant that somewhere there was a murder weapon, and they implied—though he couldn't be certain—that the victim had been killed somewhere else and dumped in the river after the fact.

  After more than ten years in homicide he couldn't stop his mind from clinically ticking off the presumptive facts of the case. Sam didn't like that part of himself. He had seen too many investigations screwed up because the detective on the case jumped to a conclusion and was too sure that he was right. Sam made a point of cultivating uncertainty, a fact that drove his partner crazy but also made him one of the best cops in the city.

  Turning, he located Bud in the crowd and motioned with his head. It was time to examine the body.

  The remains of what had once been a young woman with a bright future had presumably been drifting slowly along in the sluggish river on its way into town when it snagged on some branches and debris that had collected at the base of one of the pilings on which the suspension bridge was constructed. There it had rested, partly in the water and partly out of it, until time, heat from the sun, and the tireless work of countless microorganisms had rendered its flesh so rancid and noxious as to draw the attention of a jogger who was nearly a full city block away.

  Sam could never quite get used to the stench of a body that had been dead and neglected for far too long. He knew that it was wrong, both cruel and illogical, to be angry at a corpse for stinking, but knowing it didn’t stop him from feeling that way. Over time he arrived at a compromise, hating the rotting flesh but focusing his sympathy and his concern on the human soul that had once occupied it. "Hate the stink but love the stinker," Patty had joked once, when he had shared the thought with her. She giggled at the idea for days afterwards, but Sam could never bring himself to laugh at it. There wasn't anything funny about being dead. He knew that better than most.

  The body had been photographed from every angle, detangled from the river debris, and moved to the river bank by the time they arrived. The medical examiner was wearing his trademark powder blue gloves as he went over the body with a fine-toothed comb. Sam got his first look at the victim over the ME’s shoulder. The river hadn't been kind to her, but even so he could tell that she had been young and pretty, with long brown hair and a face that in better times might have been called sweet. She deserved better than this, but that wasn't saying much. Most everyone deserved better than what she'd received.

  Bud held his nose and carefully maneuvered to a standing position where he wouldn't get mud on his freshly-polished shoes. "Christ, I hate river rot," he muttered loud enough for Sam to hear. "It sticks in your nose for days." To the examiner, he added in a voice pitched to carry: "What've we got, Bobby?"

  Robert Wilson looked over his shoulder with a look of irritation. He hated the nickname "Bobby," which was precisely why Bud insisted on calling him that. "We have a dead Caucasian female, looks to be mid to late teens. I count seven stab wounds. May be post-mortem. I'll know more when I get her back to my
lab."

  "Time of death?" Sam asked.

  Robert shrugged. “Judging by the extent of decomposition I'm going to say 48 hours. Give or take."

  Sam ran his eyes over the surroundings, taking in the river, the bank along which it ran, and the hulking metal bridge that stretched overhead. "I'm thinking this wasn't where he did it."

  "Nah," Bud agreed. "Maybe he dumped her from the bridge?"

  Sam looked up, considering, recreating the scene in his mind. "Could be. But a car stopped in the middle of a bridge is conspicuous, and the body would make a hell of a splash after that drop. That would make him nervous."

  Bud ran his fingers through his short beard, considering. "You're giving him too much credit. A guy stupid enough to kill a girl and drop the body where we're sure to find it is stupid enough to be noisy.”

  "Yeah," Sam agreed. He knew that Bud had a point, but there was something about it that didn't feel right. Still, they had to check every angle. He made a mental note to tell one of the uniforms to ask around, see if someone who lived or work in the area saw something suspicious on the bridge a couple nights back.

  With Bud, climbed back up the steeply-sloping bank to the road. In his mind, he saw the investigation stretch out in a series of steps before him. He hated every one of them.

  Late that night a cab let Sam out in front of his house, and after the car pulled away he stood still breathing the night air and taking the measure of his house. He watched the windows, looking for movement. There was nothing.

  The lights were out on the second floor, which meant Patty had gone to bed, but she had left the light in the kitchen on for him, which was a good sign. A light on in the kitchen meant that she was thinking of him, and wanted him to have some small greeting when he came home from work. No lights on would have meant that she was mad at him, and that he’d catch hell in the morning. All the lights on would mean that she had brought a friend home. Those were the worst nights of them all.