“No, nothing like that. He wants me to work for him on a new case. He wants me to go undercover again.”
I had told Karen about the Roberts case. If I hadn’t talked to someone other than the shrink they assigned me, I would have gone crazy. “Can you do that?” she asked. “Will the department let you after what happened last time?”
I waved away some of her secondhand smoke. “The department practically gave me to them. They could care less.”
Karen reached over to the bowl of candy on the coffee table and popped a chocolate into her mouth. “You know what I say?”
I rolled my eyes. “No. What?”
“To hell with them.” She sat straight up and gave me a hard poke in the chest with one of her bony little fingers. “If it weren’t for you, Terry Roberts would still be killing students and drinking their blood. You almost got killed. And what did it get you? A one-way ticket back to patrol in South Buffalo. You’re just another beat cop to them, nothing special. If Bill Walters wants you to work for him, do it. At least he knows and appreciates what you did.”
Karen was a force of nature when she got going. She worked as a nurse at the Erie County Medical Center in the trauma unit and had pretty much seen it all. She looked like a bimbo: long hair extensions, colored blue contacts, fake boobs. The only thing left on her that was real was her mouth. She talked like a truck-driving psychiatrist. We had met in college when we were both students at the University at Buffalo. I had dormed for one semester before deciding it was a waste of money, and she had been my roommate. Now she was my rock. She always gave it to me straight, no matter what.
“You’re right. I know you’re right. All I want is someone to know what happened. For my coworkers to know that I’m not useless.”
“And then what? If they can’t see it now, who cares?”
“I do. I know I shouldn’t care, but I do. I went above and beyond, and the only person who knows it is you.”
“Well, I hope it all comes out soon. I’m getting really tired of you moping around feeling sorry for yourself. You’re obsessed, and it’s getting boring.”
“Thanks.”
She tucked an arm behind her head. “What you really need is a man. What about Ben? He’s nice and he’s got a job.”
“He’s a bouncer and he lives in his mother’s basement.”
“No one said you had to marry him.”
“Thanks anyways, best friend.” I got up, grabbing the file with me.
I wanted to go over it undisturbed, so I twisted up the staircase to my loft bedroom and flopped onto my king-sized bed. Our cat, Boyd, lay curled up next to the heat register, purring like a revving semi, nose tucked under his tail.
I opened the file and fanned everything out across my bed.
Kelly’s Falls was a small town on the Pennsylvania border. It had one small factory that made office supplies, which employed a few of the general population. There was also a lot of old money in the town. Once there had been oil in those hills. Nothing major, a couple rigs around the turn of the century, but enough to make a few families very wealthy.
Once those dried up, a new source of income had come to a lucky few—natural gas. There were huge deposits of it that stretched across the Pennsylvania border. Since Governor Cuomo had banned fracking in New York a lot of people were making a ton of money crossing the border into Pennsylvania to do business there. Over half the town’s population drove twenty miles every day to work in the fracking industry, bringing their paychecks back over the state line at the end of the week. Which was a little nuts, considering New York State’s high taxes.
With those things going for it, Kelly’s Falls was a middle-class town, no different than any other upstate burg. The only thing of note to have happened in the last twenty-five years was the girls’ disappearance.
Over a month and a half after they were last seen, there were still no leads. As far as I could tell from what Bill had given me, local law enforcement had reached out to the state and Feds right away. The families had organized search parties, set up a reward fund, and scoured the woods that surrounded the town over and over again. They’d held press conferences and begged for information about the girls’ whereabouts. The national media had been all over the story the first month; then a tot had gone missing from her bedroom and the mother’s boyfriend was arrested, changing their focus. Leads had come and gone. Nothing had panned out.
The girls were just gone.
Bill had been right. It was interesting. Interesting enough for me to want to look into it. Three girls. Threes. The irony was not lost on me. Terry Roberts had murdered three girls. I rolled over on my bed and watched the sun set over the gingerbread rooftops. As the sky changed from gold to red to orange, I turned over the situation in my head. If it were my friends, my family, my neighbors, wouldn’t I want the authorities to do whatever was necessary?
That might help me sleep at night, but that wasn’t why I was going to say yes.
I was a glutton for punishment.
The next morning, against my better judgment, I held a raw steak over my purple eye and made a phone call to Bill Walters. Just like that, I was a transfer student at Harris Community College in Kelly’s Falls, New York.
Saturday, March 18th
The morning after St. Patrick’s Day, with my eye as good as new, I found myself being driven by Bill Walters to my new identity. I would be posing as an eighteen-year-old college freshman, just like the missing girls.
Registered at Harris Community College under the name Shea Anderson, I would be staying with the town police chief’s friend, who ran a boardinghouse. We were going on the premise that I was the chief’s niece from the city whose parents had just been killed in an auto accident. The town police chief would be the only person who knew who I really was. The boardinghouse was next door to his own house. I would be staying there under the pretext that he was an unmarried man who lived in a one-bedroom home and had no experience with raising teenagers.
I wasn’t crazy about that cover story, but Bill insisted that people would ask fewer questions about a girl who had just lost both parents.
“Aren’t we stretching this a little far?” I asked when he laid it all out for me. “And thank you for giving me the whitest white-girl name ever.”
“Kelly’s Fall’s isn’t exactly diverse. Things aren’t so liberal in small towns,” he assured me. “We had your records sent. You start school on Monday.”
“What records did you send?”
He glanced over from the driver’s seat with a raised eyebrow. “Why, yours, of course. From North Side High School. You’re still on record there as a former student. I have you transferring from the Erie Community College West Campus. I have a friend in admissions there; he set it all up.”
“You amaze me sometimes.”
I had to admit, I was nervous and excited. I didn’t want Bill to see, to let him know how I was feeling. That my stomach was in knots. Because I was feeling useful and this was important. Those girls needed to be found. It was a ton of pressure, but I thrived on that. Truth be told, I had spent the last few weeks looking forward to this day, to jumping in again undercover and seeing this through.