Chapter 15 Flight Risk
Flight Risk
To my frustration, no one was found at the park.
To add to it, I called EPA. After some time with considerably soothing hold music, I finally reached a pleasant-sounding person, who took my report but wouldn’t take my sample.
She said EPA had to take their own readings, and she’d forward my request to an agent, but she warned me that they were facing a backlog of requests.
Even though this request was from law enforcement, there would be a wait.
It didn’t sound hopeful, at all. If I were honest with myself, the evidence I’d shared with her wasn’t great…just some dead animals. That was pretty thin, and my dreams and hunches just weren’t something I could put in a report.
I ground my teeth and called Nick to see if I could drop the sample off at the hospital lab instead. He agreed, and I dropped it off. Fingers crossed. If they found nothing, maybe I could convince myself that my memories meant nothing and that everything was fine.
I was on the way back to the house when an APB came out over the radio:
BEEP. “…missing juvenile. White female, age sixteen, five feet six inches tall, one hundred and thirty pounds. Blue eyes and brown hair. Leah Susanna Sims was last seen on County Road 13, hitchhiking…”
Shit. That was Pastor Sims’s daughter. Her last known location was on the other side of the county, and I was sure it would be crawling with cops.
I parked, and fished Leah’s phone out of my purse. I hadn’t gotten anything back about her messages yet, but I could see if she had wiped her location history.
She had location services turned off. Damn.
I went to her pictures. Maybe there would be something here that I hadn’t noticed before.
I scrolled through the photos that Leah had taken of herself and her friends.
They seemed like pretty ordinary photos: the girls at a playground, swinging on swings.
The girls working on homework. Pictures of an herb garden, with the plants neatly labeled.
I looked at the backgrounds. Many were the living rooms of houses, judging by carpeting and couches.
I recognized the park as a community park downtown, beside the courthouse.
Many pictures had a stage behind the girls, where they were working on some kind of art project with costumes.
The church, I supposed. Maybe getting ready for a Christmas pageant.
There were a few photos, though, that gave me pause.
They were selfies of Leah, outdoors, in low light.
She was gazing at the camera with a sense of knowing, with a come-hither look.
The top buttons on her dress were open, and her right hand was in her hair.
Her hair was undone, wild around her shoulders.
I detected makeup: eyeliner, lipstick, mascara.
These pictures were meant to depict her as sexy. For herself…or for someone else?
I found a few more like them, her playing with her hair. Some were at the golden hour, looking across a barren parking lot.
I stared at the background: an overgrown field, a gravel lot with weeds growing through it.
An abandoned place. One of the pictures showed her laughing, and behind her was a corner of a building with chipped paint.
And there was a picture of her looking at a road, with the shadow of a gas pump outlined in a sunset before her.
“Gotcha,” I whispered.
—
I zipped down backcountry roads. Gibby sat beside me, in the passenger seat, panting. He knew we were chasing something, and his tail thumped his excitement.
“We’re going to find her,” I told Gibby. But I wasn’t sure what else I was going to find. I just knew I had to get to Leah first. Kids didn’t run away out of fits of pique. Most of the time, they ran away from something serious…like what I’d seen happen at Rebecca’s botched exorcism.
I drove to the outskirts of the county seat, to a closed-down gas station.
As a cop, I knew where all the twenty-four-hour gas stations were in the county, and remembered when they closed down.
The lights were out at this one, but I pulled into the cracked concrete parking lot.
The station had been vandalized with graffiti, and trash was strewn around.
Windows had been boarded up, and the place looked deserted.
It had been at least two years since Monica and I had gotten our caffeine fix in the middle of the night here.
I shut off the engine and went to the door.
It was locked. I regarded the graffiti on the door with narrowed eyes.
The ouroboros was drawn in black paint. It was reasonably fresh, too, painted over anarchy symbols and a colorful portrait of an animated dragon.
There was no number here, so I didn’t get the impression that the symbology was here as a threat, necessarily. Maybe some personal sigil?
I went around to the back. Gibby followed me, tail wagging. Everything was locked up there, too, but I noticed cigarette butts beside the back door. They, too, looked reasonably fresh, the filters still intact and not disintegrated by rain or the sun.
I inspected the back door. It was locked, but the plywood covering the bottom panel was loose. I plucked at a corner of the plywood, and pulled away easily. I shone my flashlight into the station. My light picked out old metal shelves and paper on the floor.
On my hands and knees, I crawled inside and stood up. Gibby wiggled in beside me.
“Hello?” I called into the dark. “Leah?”
I smelled cigarette smoke. I followed the smell past the restrooms, to the main sales floor. It was completely trashed, with rodents scuttling in the periphery of my vision. Gibby peeled away to chase one.
I exhaled. “Leah.”
She was sitting cross-legged on the old counter, behind the empty lottery machine and cigarette displays.
She was wearing a T-shirt and shorts, her hair long and loose over her shoulders, and she hugged a duffel bag to her chest. Winged eyeliner adorned her eyes, and lipstick glossed her lips.
She seemed much older now, almost an adult.
She froze when she saw me, ash dripping from her cigarette. “Did my dad send you?”
“No,” I said. “I’m not here because of him. I’m here because I thought something might have happened to you.”
She made a face. “I’m trying to get out of here. Can you…can you maybe pretend you never saw me?”
“How are you going to get out of here sitting in a gas station?” I asked.
Bored of mice, Gibby trotted out of the shadows and headed behind the counter. He snuffled at Leah. She rubbed his nose. “Is he a police dog or something?”
“Gibby’s not a police dog. He’s my pet.”
“He’s cute.”
I waited for her to speak again. It was a tricky thing, waiting for a victim to open up.
Leah had things to say. I didn’t think I got the full story from her the night Mason nearly drowned—she was too focused on that, and she didn’t know if she could trust me.
She didn’t dare say much in front of her father, angry as she was.
But now…it was just her and me and the dark.
She was in huge trouble. She knew it. And maybe she didn’t have anything to lose.
She eventually sighed. “My boyfriend’s supposed to pick me up here, and we’re gonna run away to the city.”
I pulled up a wobbly stool and sat down. “Your boyfriend?”
“Well, I thought he was my boyfriend.” She stared at the ceiling, blinking back tears. “He didn’t show up. And he left me on read.”
“I’m sorry, Leah.” She must have had a burner phone.
“Yeah, me, too.” She scrubbed her arm across her face, smearing her makeup. She wasn’t wearing her standard-issue pearl purity ring. “There’s gonna be hell to pay when I go back, that’s for sure.”
“What do you mean?”
She focused on Gibby. “My dad will be furious that I tried to run away. He’ll be humiliated, and if he’s humiliated, he’ll take it out on me. Last time I embarrassed him, he locked me in the basement.”
“Leah, that’s not right.”
She shrugged. “Yeah, well…nobody’s gonna stop him, you know? My mom didn’t.”
“How long has she been gone?”
“She died when I was eight.” Leah’s fist clenched, and she radiated wrath. “Dad—I mean, he’s really my stepdad—wouldn’t let her see a doctor. Said that God would heal her. He didn’t. I stopped believing in God then.”
“I can see why.” I exhaled. “Where’s your biological dad?”
She shrugged. “No idea. Don’t remember him.”
“Leah, did you call 911 yesterday, about screaming from the church?”
She looked away. “Yeah. I couldn’t…I couldn’t stand the screaming.”
“Did you know what they were doing?”
She nodded. “Girls get rebaptized if they’re disobedient. It’s a thing. Purified.”
My heart hammered. If I could get her to say this to CPS, then I could keep Rebecca safe. And Sarah and Elizabeth. And maybe more girls…
“Do you believe in God?” she asked me.
I was taken aback by the question. I mulled it over. “I don’t believe in a god, no, not the way there’s one in the Bible.”
“I didn’t think you did. If you were in my dad’s church, you wouldn’t be able to be a cop.” I thought I detected a moment of longing in her voice.
“Leah. Is your father abusing you?”
She pressed her crimson lips together. “I’m supposed to do what he says, since he’s a man. And God talks to him. I get sent to the basement if I misbehave. Away from God’s light, he says.”
“Does he hit you?”
“Sometimes. When I get mouthy.” She picked at a piece of dirt on the countertop. “It’s not hard, not enough to leave a bruise. People would notice.”
“Does he make you uncomfortable? Touch you in a sexual way?” I hated to ask, but I had to.
She looked away, and that told me what I needed to know. Rage thudded through my temples.
“I’m so sorry, Leah.”
She stared at her hands, a tear dripping down her nose. “Nobody cares. I mean, nobody but the other girls.”
“Do the girls at school know?”