Chapter 21
T he middle-class neighborhood into which Carla Mellin had relocated was a tract development at least fifty years old. Some of the houses had been updated; most needed to be.
Carla’s was one of the latter. The house wasn’t terribly unkempt, but it signaled desolation, as though the bitter unhappiness of its resident had seeped through its walls from the inside out.
The officer who’d done the research for John had told him that Carla was currently staffing the admissions desk at a twenty-four-hour medical emergency care center. Her shift was from four o’clock in the afternoon until midnight.
It was early to be calling on someone who probably slept late because of her work hours, but he and Beth were never going to have a welcome mat rolled out for them, and this was their best chance of finding her at home.
He turned off the car. “Well, here goes nothing.”
“Maybe I should go first. Alone. She’ll be caught completely off guard. I’ll be less—”
“Mean-looking.”
She smiled. “Intimidating.”
He gestured her toward the house and wished her good luck.
As she made her way up the walk, he took a phone from the plastic bag and called Mitch. As soon as his friend answered, John said, “Guess who.”
“A fugitive from justice.”
“So you’ve heard?”
“Deduced. You’re on the lam? Someone from the PD called my office, said the matter was urgent, left a number for me to call back. I haven’t yet. What do you want me to tell them?”
“To fuck off.”
“Happy to oblige.”
He imagined Mitch’s grin through the dreadful mustache, but in all seriousness, he said, “The warrant’s for assault. I think that’s a formality. Barker’s unleashed the ogre. Be careful.”
“Same goes, bro.”
“Later.”
During the rushed exchange, John had watched what was playing out at Carla’s front door. It seemed an age between the time Beth had rung the doorbell and it was answered.
Carla opened the door only a quarter of the way. Through the crack, she scowled at Beth. He could tell the instant Beth introduced herself. Carla’s reaction was swift and hostile. She was about to close the door in Beth’s face, but whatever Beth said caused her to hesitate.
She listened, then looked beyond Beth toward the car. Beth said more, Carla said something back, then closed the door. Beth returned to the car, and when she got in she was slightly out of breath.
“No soap?” he said.
“She’s agreed to see us, but I think I woke her up. She wasn’t dressed. We’re to give her a few minutes. She’ll let us know.”
“That’s better than I expected.”
“Yes, but I warn you, she’s spoiling for a fight. With me because of the show. With you because of what she called the botched investigation.”
“She has every right.”
“It’s not you she resents as much as Tom Barker. She asked if you still worked for ‘that jackass.’”
“Did you relieve her of that worry?”
“No. I left that for you to tell, if you choose to.”
“Word of the arrest warrant is out. I called to give Mitch a heads-up that they would undoubtedly try to contact him, looking for me. They already had.”
“John, you can’t get arrested.”
“The hell of it is, I can. Let’s hope I’m able to avoid it.” He hitched his chin toward the house. “She’s waving us in.”
When they reached the front door, Carla greeted them by saying, “I didn’t get to bed until two o’clock this morning, and I have to be back at work by noon.”
John said, “I thought your shift was from four to twelve.”
“They changed it. As of today, it’s noon to eight P.M .” Then she turned her back to them and started down a dim hallway.
She had dressed in an ’80s era track suit, terry cloth scuffs on her feet. She hadn’t bothered to groom herself at all. The aroma of fresh coffee filled the house. She had a mug of it, but they weren’t offered any as she led them into a small living room and ungraciously pointed them toward a sofa. She sat down in a recliner but kept it upright.
John began. “I apologize for getting you up early.”
“Well, I’m up, you’re here, what do you want?”
“We wouldn’t have bothered you at all if we didn’t think it was important.”
“Have you found Crissy?”
“No.”
“Then I don’t know what you have to say that would be of any interest to me.”
To hell with this. He didn’t have time to spar with her. “There’s a possibility that Crissy’s abductor is going to strike again, tomorrow night, if he’s not identified and stopped in time.” He paused and blandly added, “If that’s of any interest to you.”
She divided a look between them, landing back on John. “Where’d you get that notion?”
“From Ms. Collins. I’ll let her explain.”
Beth scooted forward on the sofa cushion in order to shorten the distance between them and try to establish a rapport. “Ms. Mellin, do you know what a blood moon is?”
Carla looked at John as though asking him if she’d heard right, then went back to Beth. “It turns orangey. What about it?”
“There was a blood moon the night Crissy was taken.”
“There was? News to me.”
“There was cloud cover here, and the eclipse occurred in the wee hours.”
Beth spent the next several minutes explaining why the phenomenon might be significant. John interjected only a few comments. Carla said nothing but listened intently, especially when Beth began telling her about the other women who had vanished just as Crissy had.
Beth finished by saying, “Louisiana lies in the swath of the US where tomorrow night’s blood moon will be a total eclipse, and, weather permitting, the viewing should be ideal.”
Carla looked at John. “You’ve talked to your counterparts in those other cities?” He nodded. “What were their reactions to your prediction?”
“Skeptical.”
“Doesn’t surprise me. This moon business sounds real far-fetched.”
“When Beth first bounced it off me, I thought so, too,” he said, having decided that complete transparency would be the best tack to take. “Those detectives haven’t dismissed the eclipses out of hand, but they lean toward them being coincidental. Also, no one has isolated a common trait among the four victims, which is rule of thumb for serial criminals.
“An even bigger snag for those who’ve worked those cases is that Galveston has their culprit in prison, as he was when Crissy was taken. Ours is dead by suicide. That cancels them out as possible suspects in Jackson and Shreveport.”
“Billy wasn’t your culprit,” she said flatly. “I kept telling that buffoon Barker he wasn’t. That poor boy wasn’t clever enough to pull off something like that, even if he’d wanted to, and he wouldn’t have wanted to. He and Crissy were friends, and friends for him were hard to come by. Gracie had homeschooled him, which was good in some ways, but it had made him socially awkward.”
“We were aware of all that,” John said. “I’m not defending Barker’s stubborn belief that Billy was guilty, believe me. I’m simply pointing out facts that we, as investigators, couldn’t discount.
“Billy’s grandmother took him out of school in the middle of second grade because of behavioral issues. In his public school records there were numerous reports of aggression against teachers and classmates, general unruliness. He may not have misbehaved around you and Crissy, but—”
“No, he didn’t. Know why? Because we treated him kindly, didn’t make fun of him, call him a dummy. All those incidents were his reaction to being bullied. They failed to put that in their damn reports.”
Patiently, John continued. “There was another red flag. We discovered a number of pornography websites bookmarked on Billy’s computer. Some of it very graphic.”
“He had the typical urges of boys that age,” Carla said. “Didn’t you like looking at pictures of naked women when you were sixteen?”
“Still do.”
Beth cut him a sharp glance.
Carla harrumphed, but he could tell that because he wasn’t patronizing her, he was gaining ground.
He said, “He lived next door to you. That proximity was another factor we couldn’t ignore. I was in their house on several occasions that week. You could see Crissy’s bedroom window from Billy’s. Did she ever indicate to you that he made her uncomfortable? That he might be watching her? Anything like that?”
“Never. Not once. If he’d been creepy, would she have taken him places with her? Walmart, grocery shopping, a movie sometimes. Little outings like that.”
Gracie Oliver had told John the same thing. Billy idolizes that girl because she befriends him and treats him with dignity .
In his and Mitch’s interview with Billy, he told them that Crissy had invited him to walk with her to the convenience store that night. He’d blubbered, “It was raining, so I didn’t go. Why didn’t I go? If I’d only gone…”
Carla was saying, “If Billy had been of a mind to, he could’ve done something bad to Chrissy at any time. He never laid a hand on her. I’ll stand by that till the day I die. Billy didn’t harm anybody.” Her lip quivered. “Except himself. And poor old Gracie had to hear all those awful things said about him even after he was gone.”
John never would have expected a demonstration of such a tender emotion from this hard-shell woman. He looked at Beth and saw that she was equally surprised.
She said, “We don’t believe it was Billy, either, Carla. We believe the guilty person has gotten away with it, which will give him confidence to do it again. We’re running out of time to even identify him.”
“Well, I don’t know what you expect me to do about it.” She glanced at a wall clock. “And I can’t sit here any longer jawing about it. If I’m not on time, it’ll piss off the person I’m relieving.”
When she made a move to get up, Beth raised her hand to stay her and pressed on. “For the moment, let’s assume the same individual took all four girls. Let’s assume that the eclipses were significant to him, that he was adhering to a superstition, or observing a religious ritual. Was Crissy acquainted with anyone who had a fascination or preoccupation with anything like that?”
“Most of her friends go to mass.”
Beth fought to contain a smile. “What I had in mind was a ritual that’s a little more untraditional.”
“Stargazing? Moon cycles? How about voodoo? Now, there’s a preoccupation.”
John said, “Carla, please. I know this sounds off the wall, but—”
“Sounds plumb crazy. I’ve got better things to do than listen.” She stood up.
A second later, Beth was also on her feet. “What about zodiac signs?”
“What about them?”
“Did Crissy read her horoscope?”
“Lots of people do.”
“So she did? Was she obsessive about it? Did she plan around it? Had she had someone prepare her natal chart?”
“What the hell is that?”
“It shows the position of the sun, moon, planets at the exact moment of a person’s birth. Some believe it’s a forecaster of—”
Carla waved her hand in front of her face as though swatting at a housefly. “I never heard of such, and if Crissy had a chart like that, I didn’t know about it. Frankly, Ms. Collins, this all sounds like hocus-pocus you cooked up for your TV show. Which, by the way, I didn’t want any part of, and resented my tragedy being turned into entertainment for couch potatoes.
“The only reason I consented to giving that interview was to get you people off my back. I wouldn’t watch that program if you tied me to a chair and propped my eyelids open with toothpicks. And you .” She turned to John. “You had your chance to find the person who took my girl. But you didn’t.”
“That’s right,” he bit back. “I was pressured to stop looking, and I did. It was a self-serving decision that I’ll regret forever.”
“Well, you’re more than three years too late for regrets, aren’t you?”
“Too late for Crissy, yes. Too late for Billy. I don’t want to be too late for someone else.”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass if you get absolution or not, Mr. Bowie.” She sneered, “You all were so proud of yourselves, waving around that false confession.”
“I wasn’t proud of it, Carla. I think Billy was bullied into writing that confession by the men who interrogated him.”
Her eyes narrowed with malicious satisfaction. “Billy didn’t write that confession at all, you fool. He couldn’t have. He was dyslexic.” She snickered, adding, “Surprise!”