Spilled Blood

The son of a bitch didn’t know that Kirk was the dealer behind the business. Their relationship was a one-way street. All the sick fuck knew was that a little boy called him every few months to arrange the cash drop, and then his latest precious package arrived in the mail the following day.

All secret. All anonymous.

He didn’t know that Kirk was the man who controlled his life. Who knew his most horrible secret. Who could destroy him on a whim.

But I know who you are, Kirk thought as he dialed, and his mouth folded into a grin. Oh, yeah, I know you, Daddy.

His phone rang.

It was the special phone, the unlocked, pay-as-you-go Samsung flip phone that he kept in the locked drawer. It was the phone that separated his angels from his demons. It was the phone that enabled his disease. Buy an access card for cash in any drugstore, and you were good to go. Make calls, or get calls, and no one knew who you were.

He hated the phone. He dreamed of destroying it. More times than he could remember, he had taken it to the river to throw it into the rapids. He had held a hammer over it to smash it into bits. He had stared at the fireplace and tried to throw it into the flames. Every time, he bowed to reality. He couldn’t give it up. If he did, time would pass, and the urge would come back, and he would start again. He’d been a slave to the cycle of depravity his entire life.

There was another choice. The permanent choice. You kill yourself, and you kill the disease. He’d bought a gun to do it. The gun was in the locked drawer next to the phone. Loaded. There were always two choices for him. The gun or the phone.

He unlocked the drawer and opened it and saw both of them. Reaching in, he stroked the butt of the gun with his fingers. He told himself for the millionth time: Do it. In a millisecond of light and pain, he would be free. The black hood would be lifted. He wouldn’t endure the guilt that kept him in a vise. He wouldn’t have to do terrible things to protect himself. He could finally kill the thing inside him once and for all.

Ring ring ring ring ring, went the phone. Laughing at him. As if it knew exactly what he would do.

He answered the phone, clutching it as if he could crush it with his hand. Tears pushed out of his eyes. He cringed, awaiting the hideous voice. It was always the same.

‘Hello, Daddy,’ the strange, hollow, false child said to him.

He wanted to scream. ‘Stop that,’ he hissed. ‘Don’t use that voice.’

‘Are you mad at me, Daddy?’

He beat his fist against his skull and wished again that he were dead. Hang up. Pick up the gun. It was so easy, but he couldn’t do it.

‘Your latest order is in. It will make you very happy, Daddy.’

‘I don’t want it. Stop calling me that.’

‘You owe me money, Daddy, and you need to pay.’

‘Fine, I’ll pay, forget the delivery.’

‘It doesn’t work like that, Daddy.’

He heard childish laughter. It sounded wicked, coming from this stranger’s mouth.

‘Tomorrow morning. Seven a.m. You know where. Throw the red backpack with the cash into the field. Turn around and go back the way you came. Your package will be waiting in your box.’ The child laughed again. ‘Don’t be late, Daddy.’

‘This is the last time.’

A childish giggle. ‘Oh, you always say that, Daddy.’

That was true; he swore every time that he was done, but it was a hollow boast. They both knew it. The man on the other end of the line knew he would make the drop and pick up the package. He couldn’t walk away.

‘I know what you did to me,’ he whispered into the phone. ‘Why? For God’s sake, why?’

This time, the child’s voice was silent, which was almost worse than his taunting. He wished he knew who the caller really was. He wished he could find him and kill him. Maybe that would end this torment.

‘Why?’ he repeated, hating the crack in his voice. ‘Why did you have to destroy me?’

‘Why not, Daddy?’ the child replied.

The line went dead.

21

The box of evidence supplied by Michael Altman took Chris back to the early hours of Saturday morning.

The first responder was a Spirit County sheriff’s deputy, whose emotionless report from the crime scene belied the horrifying reality of what he’d found. It was strange that an act like murder, which was bound up in so much emotion, could be distilled to bloodless facts.

I responded to a referral from a 911 emergency operator that a teenage girl, identified as Ashlynn Steele, seventeen years old, of Barron, was potentially stranded in the ruins of the unincorporated town of Bell Valley. I arrived in the town at 5:43 am and discovered an orange Mustang convertible, license plates 489 BAW. The vehicle was unoccupied, and the driver’s side rear tire was flat. Registration of the vehicle was to Florian Steele of Barron. I made several verbal announcements of my presence in an attempt to locate the missing girl. When I received no response, I began a search of the area, including the unoccupied buildings. Seven minutes later, I observed the body of a woman in a park approximately one hundred yards from the vehicle. I determined that the woman was deceased and noted a gunshot entry wound in the center of her forehead. Her face matched the driver’s license photograph of Ashlynn Steele. I saw no sign of a weapon at the scene of the crime. At that time, I reported the incident and remained on-site to secure the scene pending the arrival of investigative and medical personnel.

That was all it took to mark the end of a young life and begin the ripples that threatened to destroy many more.

Chris removed the police material page by page and organized the documents into piles on the table in the hospital lounge. Olivia was talking with the counselor Hannah had hired, and Chris passed the time by reviewing the chain of events that had led from Rollie Swenson’s 911 call after Tanya awakened her father on Saturday morning, to the arrest of Olivia two days later.

He laid out witness statements and interview reports. Diagrams and crime-scene photos. Early test results. Warrants. Records pulled from Ashlynn’s life. Records pulled from Olivia’s life. Reading between the lines, he could see an overarching theme emerging from the first minutes of the investigation.

This was an open-and-shut case.

The police knew who did it. They had Tanya’s statement about Olivia and Ashlynn. If you already had a theory of the crime, you looked for evidence to support your theory, and you tended to play down evidence that pointed in other directions. Rather than widen the search, the police focused on making sure that the evidence gathered against Olivia would hold up in court. No screw-ups in the chain of custody. No procedural errors. No technicalities. Not with the daughter of Florian Steele as a victim.

Chris looked at the evidence from a different perspective. A perspective where Olivia was innocent, not presumed guilty. A perspective in which Ashlynn was alive when Olivia left her in the ghost town.

In the early hours of the police investigation, there was no suspicion that Ashlynn’s personal life was a contributing factor in her death. She was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, with a St. Croix girl who was obsessed with the blood feud against Mondamin. The initial interviews with Florian and Julia revealed nothing about Ashlynn’s relationships or her pregnancy. Either her parents didn’t know or they didn’t divulge it. No one mentioned Johan.

That changed after the autopsy. The follow-up interview with Julia reflected shock and horror that Ashlynn had been pregnant and that her daughter had made the decision to terminate the fetus. According to the interview notes, Ashlynn’s mother had flatly refused to believe the coroner’s findings. She told police that her daughter would never make such a godless choice, no matter what the physical evidence showed about her body. However, faced