Chapter 54

My plane landed in Tulsa at a little after seven o’clock in the morning. I had turned my cell off for the flight and powered it on as I drove across the Kansas state line.

The DNA on Daniel Pollard had been a rush job but worth it. A full match to Elaine Remington’s rape, the Grime unknowns, and the tears left on Miriam Hope’s bedsheets. Diane would break the story sometime tomorrow. There would be a press conference after that. Then it would go national, and it would be crazy. For a minute I thought about Bennett Davis. He’d either eat a bullet or be in cuffs by tomorrow night. I was rooting for the former. My cell phone buzzed. It was Rodriguez.

“Hey.”

“You getting there?” he said.

“I think so.”

“You sure we don’t want to call in any help on this?”

“I got it. You worry about Davis.”

“Speaking of which, we got the rest of the CODIS run back on Pollard.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “Nothing.”

“How did you know?”

“Bennett told me Pollard took Grime’s advice, started using a condom years ago.”

“How many do you think he did?”

“Lots,” I said.

“Just rape?” Rodriguez said.

I thought about Miriam Hope, talking to Daniel Pollard, trying to save her life, trying to buy a few more decades of loneliness.

“He knifed the old man in the apartment,” I said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more.”

“Yeah, the cold squad is going through its old homicides. See if they can find any more links.”

“Has anyone talked to Grime yet?”

“Not yet. We’ll pay him a visit this week.”

“Okay. I should be back in Chicago tonight.”

“No chances on this, Kelly. You want me to move here, you call.”

I flipped my phone shut and passed a sign that read SEDAN, KANSAS, 22 MILES. I pulled over and took out the street file. Elaine’s hospital admittance form had a name for next of kin but no address. My client herself had provided the town the night I picked her up in Cal City. Not a lot, but enough to give it a try.

I pulled in to Sedan a half hour later. It wasn’t much of a town, a mile’s worth of boarded-up storefronts and a load of dust. At the end of the strip was a five-story hotel that took up an entire block. It was boarded up, too. I cruised right through, didn’t see a soul.

Down the road a bit, I pulled up behind a couple of cowboy hats. They were sitting in a pickup, waiting for the light to change. Problem was, there was no light. Just two country roads, intersecting in a field of mud. I got out of my car and walked forward.

“Looks nicer in the summer. When it’s full of corn.”

The driver spoke without turning his head. I realized their pickup was actually stopped, turned off. No key in the ignition.

“You guys just hang out here?” I said.

The passenger leaned across and grinned. He had the blackened remnants of teeth at either end of his smile and a carbuncle on his nose worthy of its own reality show. In one hand, he held a Starbucks mug. In the other, a pretty good-looking Danish.

“Coffee right here. Most mornings. You’re welcome to join us.”

I wondered just where the Sedan Starbucks might be located. I had a different agenda, however, and stuck to it. The locals knew exactly where I needed to go.

Five minutes later I pulled down a dirt road and stopped in front of a farmhouse that creaked in the wind. A barn stood off to one side. A few chickens scratched out the morning in between.

I slammed the car door shut. A horse whinnied. Whoever was inside heard me because a curtain twitched and then the front door opened. The man inside was on the shaded side of fifty-five. His face was long, lean, and tough. The eyes were brown, color of the fields he had spent a lifetime working. The man took me in at a glance and moved a toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other.

“Help you, sir?”

He spoke without suspicion but with authority. He didn’t know me and didn’t expect any trouble. If it came, though, he had no problem with that, either.

“Name is Michael Kelly. I’m a detective. From Chicago.”

Something moved between us and the man inside the farmhouse flinched.

“My name is Sam Becker. I expect you know that.”

I nodded. He opened the door.

“Well, come on in.”

He walked back toward a solitary light, burning inside a lamp on a kitchen table. Beside the lamp were the remnants of a solitary breakfast. Strip steak with some eggs and coffee. Sam Becker cleared away the half-eaten meal, and I took a seat.

“Coffee?”

He poured me a cup and gave himself a refill. Becker motioned to the living room. I followed as he settled himself in a leather chair. I took the couch. There wasn’t much between us but a low table. The walls were bare here. Much like the kitchen. In the corner of a bookshelf I caught a wink of gold in a panel of light. The line of a picture frame. Becker followed my eye and took down the photo.

“If you’re from Chicago, I expect this is what you’re here about. Almost ten years now. Hell of a long time.”

He put the picture down and I picked it up. I figured the photo to be from a high school class picture. Sixteen, maybe seventeen. At any age she was blond and beautiful. At any age, however, she wasn’t the woman I knew as Elaine Remington.

“This is Elaine, Sam? The girl who was attacked?”

Becker’s face hardened around the eyes.

“She was murdered, mister. Attacked on the day before Christmas 1997. Died a few weeks later.”

I kept my gaze steady and didn’t wait to reply.

“I have to ask you something, Sam. Maybe it’s going to get me thrown out of here. And maybe you’ll want to take a shot at me. I respect that. But I got a job to do, and I’m going to have to ask. Did you ever see her body?”

“What the hell … ”

I held out a hand.

“Let me explain. Most of the records in Chicago have disappeared. The ones we do have show a woman was attacked but not killed. I guess it’s unclear exactly what did happen to her. That’s why I’m asking.”

Sam got up and went to a china cabinet along a far wall. He returned with a brown file folder, a bit tattered and bound up with string. He opened it up, and out fell the pieces of a young life. First I saw a couple of newspaper clips on the attack. Local stuff that had slipped under the radar of my research. Then the police reports I had already seen. Finally a coroner’s report I had never seen. From a hospital in Chautaugua County, Kansas. Elaine Remington had died from multiple stab wounds to the chest and back. The date of death was three weeks after the attack. There was also a picture of the corpse. It was the girl in the photo, a Y-incision across her chest and down her belly.

“That’s how you find out she’s dead, Mr. Kelly. And that’s why you keep it around. Just in case you start to not remember. You open up the folder and there it is.”

I lit a cigarette and offered one to Becker. He accepted and we filled up our mugs. The file lay between us.

“Sam, I got a problem.”

Sam wasn’t dumb and had already figured that. So I told him about John Gibbons and the letter. I told him about my client, my own personal blonde named Elaine Remington. Then I told him about the nine millimeter that had killed, by my count, at least five people. Sam took it in and then stood up.

“Come with me.”

The farmer walked stiffly up the stairs, down a dark hallway, and into what was once a young girl’s bedroom. He pulled a year-book off the shelf. The spine read SEDAN HIGH, CLASS OF‘94. Becker flipped through the book, back and forth, as if he were confused. I waited for him to settle. The farmer found the page he wanted and put the book down on the bed.

“That what you’re looking for?”

The girl was a cheerleader and president of the Theater Club. Voted “Most Likely to Be a Drama Queen,” she wanted most of all “to live among the lights.” The girl was smiling and easily the best-looking face on her page. The girl was my client. The woman I knew as Elaine Remington.

“Her real name is Mary Beth. Two years younger than Elaine.”

We were sitting on the bed now. The farmer and myself. The yearbook between us. I ran a finger across the picture. Sam told me the story.

“Remington was their mom’s maiden name. She was found dead at the bottom of a well. Face beat in with a hammer, but everyone said she just took a bad step. Mary Beth was ten when her mom died. Now that might sound bad to you, Mr. Kelly, but that was actually the best part of this girl’s life. When she turned twelve, her daddy took her. In the barn back there. Wanted to be the first one in. Before he rented her out to his friends, you see.”

Sam stopped for a moment. Then he started up again.

“Mary Beth ran away. Came to Oklahoma. I was a bachelor. Thought I was hard to find but damned if my niece didn’t track me down. Turns out her father came back for seconds one night. She was ready this time and fought like hell. He cut her with a knife. To this day she carries a scar right under her collarbone. Mary Beth returned the favor. Put a pitchfork through his neck. The old man bled out right there. Then Mary Beth patched herself up and ran to me.

“I fixed it with the sheriff and Mary Beth came back to Sedan. I came with her, did my best to be a father. Over time, I found out the old man had done the same thing to each of his girls when they turned twelve. Coming-of-age sort of thing.”

Now Sam unwrapped a sad grin and shifted in his seat.

“Truth be told, as a dad, I was a better uncle. Elaine couldn’t wait to cut loose. Can’t blame her. Not a lot of good memories. She took off right after high school. Got herself as far as Chicago. Then she got herself dead. Mary Beth followed suit. Sounds like you know a lot more about her than I do. The oldest is the only one who ever kept in touch. Nothing more than a Christmas card, but it means something when you get old.”

“The oldest?”

“Yeah, the third girl. First one to be taken by Daddy. She was the smartest. Probably the toughest. And that’s saying a bit. Put herself through a local college. Got her degree and got out of Sedan. Determined to overcome. Never asked for a goddamn thing.”

Becker pulled out another yearbook, this one from 1988.

“Here she is. Editor of the school newspaper.”

I took a look at the oldest of the three sisters. Five minutes later I was on the road, headed back to the airport, both high school yearbooks on the passenger seat next to me.