In spite of the day’s heat, Holly felt cold. Given more time, she might have investigated those empty places. There was no danger; the outsider was long gone from Ohio. Very likely gone from Flint City, too.
She snapped four pictures: the train station, the boxcars, the factory, the deserted car wash. She reviewed them and decided they would do. They’d have to. She had a plane to catch.
Yes, and people to convince.
If she could, that was. She felt very small and lonely just now. It was easy to imagine laughter and ridicule; thinking of such things came naturally to her. But she would try. She had to. For the murdered children, yes—Frank Peterson and the Howard girls and all the ones who had come before them—but also for Terry Maitland and Heath Holmes. A person did what a person could.
She had one more stop to make. Luckily, it was on her way.
2
An old man sitting on a bench in Trotwood Community Park was happy to give her directions to the place where the bodies of “those poor gals” had been found. It wasn’t far, he said, and she would know it when she got there.
She did.
Holly pulled over, got out, and gazed at a ravine which mourners—and thrill-seekers masquerading as mourners—had attempted to turn into a shrine. There were glittery cards upon which words like SORROW and HEAVEN predominated. There were balloons, some deflating, some fresh and new, even though Amber and Jolene Howard had been discovered here three months earlier. There was a statue of Mary, which some wag had decorated with a mustache. There was a teddy bear that made Holly shudder. Its plump brown body was covered with mold.
She raised her iPad, took a picture.
There was no whiff of that smell she had gotten (or imagined she’d gotten) at the cemetery, but she had no doubt the outsider would have visited this place at some point after the bodies of Amber and Jolene had been discovered, sampling the grief of the pilgrims to this makeshift shrine like a fine old Burgundy. Also the excitement of those—not many, but a few, there were always a few—who came to meditate on what it might be like to do such things as had been done to the Howard girls, and listen to their screams.
Yes, you came, but not too soon. Not until you could do so without attracting unwanted attention, the way you did on the day Frank Peterson’s brother shot Terry Maitland.
“Only that time you couldn’t resist, could you?” Holly murmured. “It would have been like a starving man trying to resist a Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings.”
A minivan pulled in ahead of Holly’s Prius. On one side of the bumper was a sticker reading MOM’S TAXI. The one on the other side read I BELIEVE IN THE 2ND AMENDMENT, AND I VOTE. The woman who got out was well-dressed, plump, pretty, in her thirties. She was holding a bouquet of flowers. She knelt, put them beside a wooden cross with LITTLE GIRLS on one arm and WITH JESUS on the other. Then she stood up.
“So sad, isn’t it?” she said to Holly.
“Yes.”
“I’m a Christian, but I’m glad the man who did it is dead. Glad. And I’m glad he’s in hell. Is that awful of me?”
“He’s not in hell,” Holly said.
The woman recoiled as if she had been slapped.
“He brings hell.”
Holly drove to the Dayton Airport. She was running a bit behind, but resisted the urge to exceed the speed limit. Laws were laws for a reason.
3
Having to fly on the commuter planes (Tin Can Airways was what Bill had called them) had its advantages. For one, the final leg put her down at Kiowa Airfield in Flint County, saving her a seventy-mile drive from Cap City. Leapfrog travel also gave her a chance to continue her researches. During her brief layovers between flights, she used airport Wi-Fi to download as much information as she could, and as fast as she could. During the flights themselves she read what she had downloaded, scrolling fast and concentrating fiercely, barely hearing the dismayed yelps when her second flight, a thirty-seat turboprop, hit an air pocket and dropped like an elevator.
She arrived at her destination only five minutes late, and by putting on a burst of speed, was first to Hertz, earning a dirty look from the overburdened salesman type she beat out with a final sprint. On the way into town, seeing how close she was shaving it, she gave in to temptation and broke the speed limit. But only by five miles an hour.
4
“That’s her. Got to be.”
Howie Gold and Alec Pelley were standing outside the building where Howie kept his offices. Howie was pointing to a slim woman in a gray business suit and white blouse trotting up the sidewalk, a big totebag banging against one slim hip. Her hair was cut close to her small face, with graying bangs that stopped just short of her eyebrows. There was a touch of fading lipstick on her mouth, but she wore no other makeup. The sun was sinking, but what remained of the day was still hot, and a trickle of sweat ran down one of her cheeks.
“Ms. Gibney?” Howie asked, stepping forward.
“Yes,” she panted. “Am I late?”
“Two minutes early, actually,” Alec said. “May I take your bag? It looks heavy.”
“I’m fine,” she said, looking from the stocky, balding lawyer to the investigator who had hired her. Pelley was at least six inches taller than his boss, with graying hair combed straight back, tonight dressed in tan slacks and a white shirt open at the neck. “Are the others here?”
“Most,” Alec said. “Detective Anderson—ah, speak of the devil.”
Holly turned and saw three people approaching. One was a woman, holding the remains of her youthful good looks quite well into her middle age, although the circles under her eyes, only partially concealed by foundation and a bit of powder, suggested she might not have been sleeping well lately. To her left was a skinny, nervous-looking man with a cowlick coming loose from the back of his otherwise rigidly controlled hair. And on her right . . .
Detective Anderson was a tall man with sloping shoulders and the beginnings of what would probably become a paunch if he didn’t start exercising more and watching what he ate. His head was slightly thrust forward, his eyes, bright blue, taking her in from top to bottom and stem to stern. It wasn’t Bill, of course it wasn’t, Bill was two years dead and never coming back. Also, this man was much younger than Bill had been when Holly first met him. It was the eager curiosity in his face that was the same. He was holding the woman’s hand, which suggested she was Mrs. Anderson. Interesting that she should have come with him.
There were introductions all around. The slender man with the cowlick, it turned out, was Flint County district attorney William (“Please call me Bill”) Samuels.
“Let’s go upstairs and get out of this heat,” Howie said.
Mrs. Anderson—Jeanette—asked Holly if she had had a good flight, and Holly made the appropriate response. Then she turned to Howie and asked if there was perhaps audio-visual capability in the room they would be using. He told her there certainly was, and she was welcome to use it if she had material to present. When they stepped out of the elevator, Holly enquired about the women’s room. “I could use a minute or two. I came directly from the airport.”
“Absolutely. End of the hall, turn left. Should be unlocked.”