Milt was silent for a long time.
Newt twirled the pencil in his fingers. So, she might have been tortured and left out there. He had a mental picture of her hair, already shrinking away from her scalp, and her nails. The hair was silky and looked like it had been expertly colored; the nails were painted a delicate pink. This was no biker’s girl with crudely bleached hair, roots an inch thick, and black nail polish.
“The thing is,” Milt went on. “You know how ME’s are when we get together. We talk about unusual cases. I have a friend down in Twentynine Palms. A few months ago he had a similar case, a girl burned in the chest with something like a brand and left in the desert. Nobody took too much notice. It was a Mexican.”
“Christ.” Newt groaned.
“I know he photographed the burn for the pattern. In case another one came up. I’ll have to get his report. Now I’m not saying two burns make a trend, but it looks like another one may have come up—” His voice trailed off.
Slowly he got to his feet.
“When can you have the data for me?” Newt asked. He wanted to get the data into the surrounding jurisdictions as soon as possible. They had to identify her before they could start investigating what happened to her.
“Soon,” Milt promised. “They’re working on the X rays and dentals now.”
“Good.” Newt was so distressed by the thought of his California desert getting littered with the bodies of tortured young women that he followed Milt out of the building and watched him drive away.
11
Troland felt bad. He didn’t think he had ever felt so bad. He couldn’t even go to work because of what she did to him. She had been the prettiest, nicest girl in the whole world, the only girl he ever really liked, and he had saved her. He couldn’t stop thinking about how he saved her. He, Troland Grebs, saved her. And now she made a fool of him like it didn’t matter to her at all that he held her in his heart all these years. He hated her.
She was the only girl who was so perfect he had to make special rules just for her. He remembered every one: He could look at her, but not when she was on the beach. He could write letters to her, but not send them. He could draw pictures of her, but not let anybody see them. The most important thing was he couldn’t touch her no matter what. And he never did. He had been good all these years, and she had to humiliate him, curse him, break every rule like the worst whore that ever was.
He lay on the sofa in his apartment two, three days; drinking, staggering to the bathroom, vomiting, passing out—drinking some more. He couldn’t go to work. When he finally got up and cleaned the apartment, he didn’t know why it smelled, why there was vomit on the floor. He just knew he was going to take back all the things he had ever done for Emma Chapman, one at a time.
12
It took Detective Woo three days to find Connie Shagan at a friend of a friend’s house in Florida. It wasn’t easy to locate her with no one in the dorm or the administration office to give her names and numbers. She didn’t work the case on Monday. This week Monday was her day off. She spent it studying for a psych test that evening. She had to take the subway both ways from Queens, since she was without a car, but she thought she did all right on the test.
On Tuesday April had a chance to go back to the dorm and get into the girls’ room. She took Ellen’s photograph with her and held it in her hand as she looked around. She had done this with another missing girl two years before. Lily Dong was twelve, and disappeared from her kitchen in Chinatown when she was home from school having lunch. The whole precinct looked for her. It was the kind of thing that got in the newspapers. A kidnapper called once. Then when he didn’t call again, the family called the police. Three days after the child disappeared, April found a pile of junk in a courtyard across the street. Underneath was a dirty sleeping bag. April hated thinking about unzipping that bag, and seeing the sneakers. She didn’t have to see anything else but the two sneakers to know. The girl was wearing them when she disappeared and was wearing them when she was found. She had been strangled in a panic. It took April a long time to look at any kind of sneakers without feeling terrible about Lily Dong. Very rare for an Asian to kill someone. It was the guy across the hall, Burmese.
Ellen Roane’s dorm room was small, just big enough for two twin beds with plastic cartons between them, two small wooden desks, two chairs, two reading lights, two chests of drawers. The bathroom was shared with the room on the other side. The girls seemed to have made an effort to leave the place neat when they left. Or maybe they were just like that. There were no piles of little things—hair things, makeup, trinkets—either on the surfaces or in the drawers. No nail polish, lipsticks. The drawers were stuffed with clothes. Much of it seemed to be blue jeans and sweaters. Must be very serious girls. April’s own room was messier. She liked small colorful things, had a lot of cosmetics.
She found Connie’s home address and telephone number in a small book in the girl’s desk. Then she turned her attention to Ellen’s side of the room. Ellen Roane had a CD player and many discs. She had put her name on it with one of those plastic guns that shoots out letters. She also had a computer to write her papers on, and many books. All the books she seemed to be working in were in neat stacks on the floor by her desk, and on her bed. Both beds had the same comforters on them. April wondered if the university gave out flower-printed comforters, or if the girls had bought them together. Probably bought them so the room would look coordinated. There was also a small rug of a matching color in the middle of the floor.
April tried to imagine what it might be like to have such expensive toys at seventeen, and no responsibilities but to read the books and know what was in them. She couldn’t resist sitting down at Ellen’s tiny school-issue desk with the computer on it and turning it on. A list of files popped on the screen. French, Biology, Psychology. Hah, something familiar. April was taking psychology. She punched Psychology and a list of papers came up.
April didn’t see anything she recognized. At John Jay they taught her class psychology along with history. So she got the Napoleon complex in conjunction with the conquest of Russia. She didn’t know too much about Freud, but she knew Napoleon was exiled to Elba in 1814 and came back to Paris to rule a hundred days before his final defeat at Waterloo in 1815. And she had a pretty good idea what the complex was all about.
There were no short stories or diary notes in the computer, and there was absolutely no indication that the girl didn’t plan to come back. It looked like she left her best stuff.
When April got back to the precinct, she called Connie’s parents. They knew where their daughter was. It took three calls to Florida to get Connie on the phone.
“No, I don’t know where Ellie went. Is something wrong?” a very young-sounding voice said when April identified herself.
“We’re just trying to locate her,” April said vaguely.
“I don’t know where Ellie went,” the girl repeated solemnly. “She said she wanted to go someplace warm.”
“Florida?” April asked. “I get the feeling she’s running away from family troubles. Is she with you?”
“No. We asked her but she didn’t want to come,” the girl said quickly.
“You could get in trouble if you’re not telling the truth,” April pressed. “You don’t want to hamper an investigation, do you?”
There was a pause. “She’s not that good a friend.”
“Oh.” April waited for more. She glanced down at the picture on her desk. The parents had given her several. The one on her desk was a color photo of a girl in shorts with a tennis racket in both hands. Ellen Roane was a pretty girl. Lot of hair, like her mother. Only hers was much lighter. Blue eyes, big smile that showed nice even white teeth.
“Why not?” April asked after a minute.
“I don’t know. She’s nice …” The voice trailed off.
