Chapter 32
Maggie was relentless. She called every police
district and every agency in every town where Alan Hayes had ever
lived, meticulously going back over the list of murdered or
still-missing girls she had compiled earlier. She logged in their
descriptions, asking for lists of what they had last been seen
wearing, begging overworked detectives for details of any unsolved
murders that might match the evidence found in the Hayes basement
or fit the profile of the Hayes and Meeks murders. What she found
only made her more frantic—a growing list of girls whose bodies had
been discovered discarded among the weeds in remote locations, some
with ritualistic cuts marring their bodies, others with signs of
ligature around their wrists, ankles, and neck. Her notes revealed
a portrait of an evolving obsession, but in the end, while the list
mapped out a path of mental, moral, and physical destruction, it
did nothing to help Maggie link Alan Hayes to any of the murders,
or any of the possible victims to items in his box of trophies. Too
much time had passed. He had been too careful with the items he
chose to keep. And no one had reported a missing loved one or
murder victim who had been wearing garnet earrings in silver cross
settings.
Even worse, a call came down from Peggy in late
afternoon: none of the evidence examined had yielded any traces of
DNA that could be tested against the control samples. The only
possible evidentiary connection between the murders of Alissa Hayes
and Vicky Meeks remained the silt and rock sediments.
“It’s not enough,” Maggie said. “We can’t let this
go. He could get his daughter back, even if we brought abuse
charges against him. If he finds out we have nothing, he’ll surface
again. Both to taunt us and to take his daughter. He’ll say we’re
harassing him because we have no other suspects. Sarah could be
compelled to live with him until the charges are resolved. I’ve
seen it happen before, and who knows what the stepmother might say?
She’ll back Hayes. She’ll say Sarah cut herself. All that woman
wants is to keep her home in the suburbs. She’ll say anything to
keep it.”
Whatever Peggy said in response calmed Maggie. “I
know,” Maggie answered. “You’re right. I skipped lunch, too. Want
me to pick up something for you while I’m out? What about the
others?”
She wrote something down on a sheet of paper and
folded it absently into her pocket. The long day of hopes raised
and then dashed again had taken its toll. I could feel her
spiraling out of her steely self-control and I knew she might break
soon. But I also sensed she would prefer to display her human
weaknesses in private. I watched as she collected her things, never
once betraying frustration or fatigue to her coworkers. I followed
her as she walked out to her car, and she was alert enough to scan
the parking lot to see if Danny had showed up for work. He hadn’t.
I did my part and checked the parking lot for signs of Alan Hayes
or his SUV, finding nothing.
I joined Maggie in the front seat of her car, a
silent witness to what her outer resolve masked. Alone in her car,
hidden from the eyes of others, Maggie wept, out of sorrow and out
of fear for Sarah Hayes. Those tears were followed by tears of
frustration that a killer might get away with his killing, and
anger that she could not stop him.
Maggie wept silently, unwilling to make a scene,
even in solitude. She held her hand over her mouth to stifle her
cries while tears ran down her face like tiny waterfalls of
diamonds tumbling over smooth rock, each tear a treasure, each one
swelling as it reached the curve of her cheekbones before it
gathered and broke to run in rivulets over her fingers.
I did not know what to do and I was infuriated by
my helplessness. Her strength had drawn me to her, but it was her
human frailty that kept me by her side—her ability to feel what the
victims had felt, her understanding of what their loved ones were
going through, her despair that the world held evil and such
innocence, side by side, with no way to separate the two. It was
her overwhelming desire to protect the good in this world that
drove her to do what she did, but it was her fury at the evil that
made her fight back. But to get from one to the other, she had to
release her fears and make room for fearlessness.
I felt honored to be a part of her cleansing
ritual. As her tears flowed, a great constriction in her loosened,
as if, in releasing her tears, she had found a way to release the
burden of many sorrows while receiving strength in return. She was
rejecting the power of evil and acknowledging what it was that
mattered most to her: love, respect for life, joy at being here, a
desire to protect the helpless—all those things that humans cannot
see, but that remain more real than any tangible object could ever
be.
As her strength returned, Maggie ran out of tears.
She tucked the hair that had fallen across her face back behind her
ears and fumbled in her knapsack for a tissue. More evidence my
Maggie was resolutely human: she searched her knapsack for makeup
and used a small brush dipped in powder to repair the signs that
she’d been crying. I knew from watching Connie over the years that
it was makeup intended for evening wear: the powder contained
miniscule sprinkles of glitter unnoticed except by the closest
inspection. I stared at the sparkles, fascinated, imagining them as
the tears of her tears, the tiniest traces of her sorrow worn as a
sign that she remained uninvaded by evil.
I felt another presence. Peggy had come out the
front door, cigarette in hand, intending to take a quick break. But
she changed course and headed for Maggie’s car when she saw it. She
knocked loudly at the window and Maggie rolled it down,
perplexed.
“Give me your keys,” Peggy said, cigarette dangling
from her orange mouth. She held out a hand. “I’ll get the food.
Gonzales has been looking for you. He wants you in his office now.
He’s been calling all over and he sent someone up to the lab
looking for you. By the way, your cell phone’s off. Again.”
Maggie scrambled from the car and handed Peggy her
keys. “What does he want?”
Peggy shrugged. “Beats me. The real question is,
what do you want? Better eat while you can.”
Maggie glanced at the station house. “I’m not
really hungry anymore.”
“I’ll get you what I get,” Peggy decided in her
raspy voice. “And I’m going to make sure you eat it, too.”
As Maggie strode back toward the front door of the
station house, I followed—but stepped unexpectedly into a pocket of
darkness so profound it almost brought me to my knees. I stopped,
overcome with fear, unable to follow Maggie into the
building.
Hayes had been there. I was sure of it. And though
he’d left before I spotted him, I knew he had seen Maggie get into
her car and that he may well have seen her crying and reveled in
her despair.
If so, he’d know that Maggie had weakened. He’d
know that no progress had been made on his case. He’d know he
remained unstoppable.
It shook me to my core.