Sketched Page 2

  Kingston shrugged, rolling the candy around his teeth so that it made tap dancing noises in the suddenly silent room.

  His mother lashed out with her other hand, knocking her son’s handful of sweets to the floor.

  “Do you want to get fatter?” Her whisper was venomous. Quicker than Megan could follow, she’d grabbed her son’s face and was squishing it between her manicured fingers. What little skin he had folded under her grip and he grunted in pain and humiliation as she squeezed his mouth open. “Spit it out.” Her mouth was set in such a wide, determined grin that Megan could make out the silver in the back of her molars. “Spit. It. Out. You disgusting pig. Greedy, ugly thing.” Kingston pushed the candy out of his mouth with his tongue and it bounced against his t-shirt before falling with others, leaving a caramel colored stain on the otherwise perfectly white cotton.

  Her face still hardened with fury, his mother took the bag she held in her other hand and shoved it into her grown son’s now empty mouth. Her knobby fingers working, she pushed the plastic in, seemingly determined to get it all the way down his throat.

  Megan watched as Kingston slapped at his mother, his body rigid with what she recognized instantly as fear. Although the same size as his mother, he was suddenly as weak as a kitten in her hands. Megan felt herself begin to panic even further as the sick relationship between the two of them made itself apparent. How was this the same man who had beaten and dragged two teenage girls into a basement only a short time ago?

  Satisfied that the bag was deep enough in her son’s throat, she released his mouth and pushed him back against his table. The force of his body knocked the lamp to the side, sending the tools he had just picked up back to their sprawled positions. Kingston began to gag violently and doubled over as he dragged the moist bag out of his mouth.

  His mother, her narrow chest rising and falling with exertion, stepped back and watched her son struggle.

  “You’re out of control, boy.” She was breathless. “It’s obvious you can’t handle any more. Your laziness is going to get us both caught. This dreadful business of yours is over. Mother is done covering it up and cleaning up your messes. Kill her now. I’ll be waiting upstairs.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  * * *

  July 23, 2012 11:25 am - Approximately one hour prior

  Dixon City Police Department

  The girl hadn’t spoken to anyone. The only way they knew her name was Beth was because of the tattered wallet they had found tucked into the back pocket of her jeans. It had taken two of them to hold her down long enough to get it out, her terrified shrieks seeming to bounce off every corner of the Dixon police department and back again.

  They hadn’t touched her since.

  Beth McDonald sat in the interview room, having pushed herself back as far into the corner as possible. Her heavy legs, freckled and scraped bloody were tucked up into her body, her knees around her chin. Her face was lost in the darkness of her hoodie. The cameras positioned throughout the room recorded her stillness. From their cunning vantage points, they broadcast her image into the other room where Detective Harrison and the other officers were gathered around the computer screens watching.

  “She hasn’t moved since you took the wallet,” Harrison said, "not an inch. I can’t even tell if she’s breathing.”

  The officer behind him was still rubbing his shoulder where she had twisted it an hour ago. For a teenage girl, she was surprisingly strong. It was hard to believe the static girl on the screen was the same wild eyed creature from earlier.

  “I’ve had an easier time with the grown ass crack heads that come through here than with that one,” he mumbled.

  His fellow officer, unharmed and highly amused, slapped him on the shoulder.

  “I can’t wait to tell everyone how you were almost taken down by a teenage girl. It’s priceless, really. The mileage I’m going to get out of this? Unbelievable.”

  Detective Harrison frowned, cupping his pointed chin in his hand and staring hard at the screen. Beth McDonald’s copper hair fell out of the hoodie and down onto her chest like limp tentacles. She was so motionless that the image on the screens looked more like a painting than a live feed.

  She was giving him nothing to work with. Something awful had happened, that was obvious from the state of her, but beyond that, he was completely lost.

  Something awful had been happening quite a lot lately.

  Dixon city was dying. Rather than going gently into its death however, it was going out with a bang. With over half of the population out of work, crime rates were higher than he’d ever seen them. There were jokes around the office that they were finally in the end times. ‘The End is Nigh’ had become a familiar catch phrase after what seemed like endless calls for assistance began to come into the woefully understaffed office. Harrison didn’t think it was all that funny.

  The young girl rolled into a seated fetal position in the interview room was just one more file on his desk. The number of missing girls and boys had been growing steadily over the last decade. What had begun as a few isolated incidences had increased alarmingly. These days it seemed they were being picked like fruit from the half-abandoned neighborhoods and mini-malls, placed carefully in some monster’s basket.

  There were over twenty-five photos in different files on his desk. A few of those faces were lucky enough to have families that called his office weekly, demanding progress and answers. Most of them were already forgotten.

  As soon as they had gone through Beth’s wallet and found her school ID, he had a few of his junior detectives try to track down her parents. Not surprisingly and sadly typically for Dixon, they were nowhere to be found. Besides combing the local pubs and strip clubs for whatever guardians she might have had, his only other option was sending a few officers down to the frozen yogurt store she had a loyalty card from. Of course, he was pretty sure that place had closed down last month, too.

  “How many times do you work out a week, there Jim? Six? All that weight lifting is really paying off, isn’t it?” The uninjured officer was relentless in his teasing, his jolly tone beginning to cause the back of Harrison’s neck to prickle with irritability.

  “Jesus, have some respect,” Harrison snapped without turning around, the sharpness of his voice enough to instantly silence the men behind him. “We need to find out what happened to this kid. Whatever it was, I’m guessing it was a hell of a lot worse than a pulled muscle.”

  “Get someone in there to sedate her, that might work,” Officer Jim mumbled sarcastically, still nursing his shoulder. There was a sulky tone to his voice that Harrison chose to ignore.

  “I’m not going in there to do that,” the uninjured officer said. “Fire it at her in a blow dart like they do to wild animals.” Harrison spun himself around in his chair. Both officers stiffened and stepped back when he faced them.

  “You’re fucking amateurs, both of you,” he said, getting to his feet. “Twenty-five kids missing. Snatched right out from under our noses. Under your noses.” He looked from one officer to another. He glared at their middle-aged bodies pressing out against their uniforms and their cheeks dappled with stubble from careless shaving. “I don’t care if the city is burning around us. Whoever is taking these kids has got us over a god damn barrel. We’ve got nothing. We’ve had nothing for the last ten years. That girl in there? The one you think needs to be fucking sedated? She might be the one thing able to at least point us in the right direction. If you two could just do your jobs.”

  Slack-jawed and morose, they both began to mumble apologies. Even after his outburst, Harrison could still feel irritation humming behind his eyes. At that moment, he hated them both so intensely he could hardly stand being in the same room. They were useless. He could even smell them, a heavy mix of coffee breath, cigarettes and the unmistakable tang of masculine sweat.

  That was it.

  His eyes cleared with a sudden revelation. The hum stopped.

  He pushed past the two oafs tow
ard the door.

  “What’s wrong, Detective?”

  “Piper,” Harrison said, pausing at the door. “Is Piper here today?”

  *********

  Piper sat across from the girl in the interview room. She could feel the camera behind her, her body rigid with the knowledge that she was being watched. She fidgeted with her pencils, arranging them in symmetrical rows beside the notebook that sat on the desk between them.

  Harrison had sworn that they had exhausted all their other options. He’d explained to Piper that the on-call social worker that they normally called had quit. She’d deserted the sinking ship that was Dixon City like most of the others, jumping into whatever life boat was closest when the balance between money and work started to tilt out of her favor.

  They’d even called all the usual psych staff, but they were all either out of town or sharing the lifeboat with the absent social worker. As he practically pushed her down the hallway toward the interview room, Piper had reminded him that she was a composite artist multiple times. He appeared not to notice. Frankly, he appeared desperate. He knew as well as she did that although she had sat through many interviews over the years, enough to know most of the tricks, she wasn’t formally trained to do anything but draw.

  “She won’t talk to any of us. It’s like she’s shut down,” Harrison had said, his close-set eyes looking more grave than usual. “Trust me, Piper, if I had another choice I’d make it. I mean, look at them.” He had motioned back to the hulking, oblivious looking officers behind him. “If you were a traumatized teen, would you want to talk to those guys? We’re on a skeleton crew here. Everyone else is out trying to put out the fires of hell.”

  “But Detective Harrison, really…what can I do?”

  “One right word from her and we might finally get what we need to move forward on the…” Harrison had paused. The press called the kidnapper the Dixon Demon. There was a romance to the name that made him irate. He didn’t even like to say it. It was that repulsive to him. The city had enough interest to give the madman a sensational name, but not enough motivation to gather the police manpower to do anything about it.

  “Piper, you can get her to speak. That’s what you can do. We’ll be right there, watching. If I think at any time you’re out of your depth, I’ll be there.”

  Beth’s face was barely visible beneath her veil of hair, frizzy with drying sweat. She was as lifeless as a statue. Although much larger than Piper, she could only be in her mid-teenage years at most. She was so freckled that Piper couldn’t help but think of the pale underbelly of a rainbow trout.

  “Beth?” Piper cleared her throat before speaking. The knowledge that Harrison and others were watching her performance made her more than slightly uncomfortable.

  Did she even possess the ‘female touch’ that Harrison had said the girl needed? She wasn’t even sure that she possessed a ‘human touch’ most of the time. She was a professional fly on the wall for god’s sake, it was practically her job to be non-existent.

  “It’s Beth, right?” she asked carefully. “Beth McDonald?”

  Piper was surprised when the girl grabbed her hood and pulled it back. The thin lids that covered the girl’s eyes flickered and lifted. She met Piper’s gaze directly, staring at her with eyes that were rapidly glazing over with tears. She nodded, causing more of her hair to fall into her face. She was so young.

  “Detective Harrison asked me to come in and have a little talk with you,” Piper said, her voice characteristically even despite her nervousness. “Actually,” Piper leaned toward the girl slightly, lowering her already soft voice so that the audio in the room would have trouble picking it up. She worked on a conspiratorial tone, hoping the ‘girl talk’ angle might get her out of the room sooner. “He said you managed to take a bit of a chunk out of one of the officers. They are big guys; how did you pull that off?”

  Her chummy tone had the exact effect she wanted. The tears that had been building in Beth’s eyes slipped down over her cheeks, carrying the last of the girl’s mascara with them like silt in a river. The girl leaned forward, echoing Piper’s posture. Her lips were cracked and they trembled as she struggled to speak. It was as if her throat had closed in on itself and locked tight.

  “Do you want water? Let me get you some water,” Piper said, alarmed at the girl’s distressed noises. Idiots. Had no one noticed the way the poor girl’s lips were practically tiled with dry skin? They might have considered making her comfortable before subjecting her to an intrusive pat down and then throwing her into an empty room. You wouldn’t have to be traumatized to want to lash out at that.

  When Piper rose to her feet, Beth’s arm shot out with shocking rapidity. Piper froze, half out of her chair, surprised at the strength in the girl’s hand where she grabbed her forearm.

  “She’s still there,” Beth said. There was fear shuddering beneath her words like the waves of some dark ocean pounding impatiently against her hull. “With him.” Beth contained a sob. “I ran away and left her there. I had to get out. I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t want to die.”

  Piper sat back down, Beth’s hand still clutching at her across the table.

  “Who Beth? Who is still there? Another girl?”

  Beth nodded her head rapidly.

  “My best friend, oh my god, my best friend, Megan. She didn’t want to go to the house in the first place and I…I left her there. I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t know.”

  “It’s ok, Beth.” Piper glanced back at the cameras, nervously checking to see if the green recording light was still on. “You’re here now. You’re safe and you can tell us where to find her. The officers can help her if you tell us…”

  Beth interrupted her with the same shocking rapidity with which she had grabbed her, her voice now a shaking, shrieking roar.

  “I don’t know!” she cried. Piper winced at the volume. She couldn’t help but pull back against Beth’s grip. Noises tended to affect Piper more than most and the girl’s deranged cries ran through her body like electricity. Beth continued, pulling her across the table toward her. “His address was in my phone. I’ve been trying to remember where my phone is. But I can’t…I can’t remember. I don’t know where she is. A basement? I can’t remember. I can’t remember anything. I don’t even remember how I got here.” Her voice continued to increase in volume as the words tumbled from her, throbbing painfully in Piper’s ears. She looked back at the camera again.

  Where were they?

  The girl continued her miserable refrain. “I can’t remember anything! Why can’t I remember anything? You need to help me! Please help me!”

  The throbbing in Piper’s ears worsened, as if they were filling with hot water. She could feel a sickening tightness running down the sides of her neck and into her chest. Her heart picked up its pace and was thumping along with the fullness gathering in her head.

  She’d been here before. She knew what was next.

  “Beth,” Piper managed. She tried to pull away, but Beth was too strong. The girl’s eyes were wild and unblinking, staring into Piper’s as if she were her last hope.

  She felt her chest become strangely tight as the room started to grow darker around her, creeping in from the edges of her vision. She tried to look back at the camera again, to signal for help but she found herself locked into Beth’s gaze. The beating of her heart increased when she realized she couldn’t move her head at all. In fact, she couldn’t move much of anything.

  The teenager grabbed her arm with her other hand and Piper jumped as she felt lightning strikes of heat roll up through her. Her heart felt like it had paused. She was trapped in Beth’s eyes, as deep and as dark as the blackness that was shutting down her vision like the click of a camera’s iris.

  “He’s going to do awful things to her. He’s going to kill her. He’s going to kill her.”

  ********

  When Piper regained consciousness, she was immediately disappointed.

>   Wherever she had just surfaced from had been so peaceful, like a bed as soft and sweet as a summer hammock. The couch she found herself lying on now couldn’t have been more the opposite.

  She blinked, trying to clear away the dark that had swallowed her up what seemed like only a few seconds ago.

  Harrison was staring at her. His shaggy brown hair had flopped over his forehead and his face was set with what could only be described as guilty intensity.

  “There you are.” He attempted a relieved smile but failed. Smiling never suited him. His sharp, fox-like features handled moody preoccupation much better. In the ten years that Piper had known him, she’d only seen the curious sight of one of his ungainly smiles a handful of times. It was almost always followed by some kind of bad news.