“A hurricane should pay this place a visit and do the town a favor.”
“Our town is unique that way; we got rich and we got poor, and there ain’t too many in between.”
He rolled up on a particularly horrible dwelling at the bottom of a dead-end street. Sitting out front on some small steps was a woman in her late forties. Her hair was dirty and limp and hung in her face as she smoked a cigarette. Two little dark-haired boys played trucks on the muddy lawn in front of her. When she saw the vehicle pull in, she waved, and the chief waved back.
“Hi, Chief. What brings you out to see me today?” She didn’t get up.
“Hello, Brandy.” The chief hopped out and motioned for me to follow. “I just stopped by to see how you were doing.”
She stared at him for a second, then looked over at me. “Who the hell is that?”
“This is my niece, Shea. She’s come to live with me. This is Brandy Santana.”
I gave her a smile. “Hi.”
Brandy, who was still sitting, took a long drag of her smoke. “That was real smart. You can’t find my girl, but you’ll bring another one into this shithole town. Real fucking smart, Roy.”
“You been drinking again?”
“Yeah.” She had smoked her cigarette all the way down to the filter. She stubbed it out and flicked it across the yard.
The chief hitched his thumbs in his gun belt. She glared at him with red-rimmed, bloodshot eyes. “Too drunk to look after your boys?” he asked.
“Nope. Just one beer after the baby went down for his nap.” She fished a pack of smokes out of her coat pocket and lit another one with a disposable lighter that fell out with it. “So what? You gonna arrest me?”
“No, I’m not going to arrest you.” He sighed. “I was just checking up on you. Come on, Shea, let’s go.”
“Yeah, go home,” she called as we got back into his truck. “Have fun with your niece. If you’re not looking for my daughter, get the fuck out of here.” The boys never looked up once from their trucks the entire time we were there, not even when we started to pull away.
“Pleasant lady,” I remarked. “I see she’s taking it pretty hard.”
“Brandy has always been a drunk. She likes to frequent the bars around town. I’ve arrested her twice for DWI since I’ve been here. The father of her boys isn’t around much.”
“Not the same guy as Skyler’s dad?”
The truck got stuck for a moment in the ruts that passed for a road, and he threw it into reverse and forward again to rock it out. “No. Skyler’s dad took off years ago. Brandy hooked up with a guy named Will Garrette. He likes to make kids but not take care of them.” The truck finally found some traction and shot forward, away from Skyler’s trailer.
“Where to now?” I twisted in my seat to watch Brandy Santana stare off into space while her boys played in the mud.
“The cemetery.”
The chief turned us around and got us out of that hellhole of a trailer park. After a minute or two, he turned down the road to take us to the cemetery. “It used to be a real beautiful place, until the kids started to have their parties here,” he said as he turned onto a gravel road. He didn’t risk pulling off into the mud, so he parked the truck in the middle of the road, and together we walked down to the entrance.
A huge padlock secured the rusty wrought-iron gate. The chief picked out a key from the many that hung on his huge key ring.
“They used to keep it open all the time, so you could drive in, but ever since Joe Styles went crazy in there, they keep it buttoned up tight. It’s only open to the public one weekend a month until we get it back into shape, or if there’s a funeral.”
Twisting the key in the lock, it popped open. The chief let it and the thick chain wrapped around the two halves of the gate fall to the ground. He cinched the key ring back to his belt and pushed the gate open enough for us to get inside. The wrought iron squeaked loudly, startling a bird from its perch on top. It flew away with a screech.
As soon as I walked in, I could see what the chief meant. Spray paint covered some of the old tombstones, and a lot of them had been toppled over and cracked into pieces.
“What kind of a twisted sicko would do all this?” I asked in amazement, turning in a circle to get the full view.
“Little Joey Styles,” he replied. “Watch yourself. Be careful.” He grabbed my hand and helped me over a fallen tombstone. A lot of the damage was still evident, but you could also see brand-new stones mixed in. Families had had to entirely replace their loved ones’ headstones. They stuck out: black shiny granite blocks next to their weathered, defaced neighbors.
“The town is trying to help restore and maintain this place, but the money just isn’t in the budget, and all of our local volunteers are focused on finding the girls right now.”
He led me through the cemetery to the mausoleums tucked far into the back corner. I noticed trash and beer bottles littering the ground in front of well-kept graves topped with wilting flowers. A few had American flags stuck in front of them. I felt sorry for the families who had to visit their loved ones there. The place was a mess.
We stopped in front of a large tomb. The name SCHULTZ was written across the top in the pitted concrete. Its door was new, though, and locked, with an iron gate in front. Crisscrossing the door was bright-yellow crime scene tape. Posted in red letters was a plastic sign that read: Crime Scene. Do Not Enter. All Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted.
He walked over to the gate. “It was here that Joe Styles, who was high on crystal meth at the time, brought Skyler Santana one night about four and a half months ago. He broke open the door and proceeded to build a sort of mosaic with the bones. Skyler agreed to testify against him.”
“That’s really sick.”
“We had to dismiss the case when Skyler disappeared. Lack of evidence, so he walked.”
“Is he the same age as the missing girls?”
“He’s twenty and only made it to the tenth grade and dropped out. You’ll see him milling about the Harris campus. He’s taking adult GED classes, but mostly he hangs around in the student union, selling weed and pills, so rumor has it. Campus security is always having problems with him.”
I looked around. “Let’s get out of here. I’ve seen enough.”
He motioned over at the tomb. “We’ve had to keep this one sealed up because it’s still a crime scene. Just in case we ever get enough evidence to go after Styles again.”
Even though it was daytime, the whole place had a dark and gloomy feel to it. “Yeah, well, this place is giving me the creeps, so let’s go back.”
We picked our way through the uneven lines of tombstones and jumped in his truck. I was glad to leave the crumbling, desecrated cemetery behind us.
We rode back into town, stopping to have lunch at Maronetta’s Cafe on Main Street. I sat across from the chief and watched as the waitress flirted and filled his coffee mug every two minutes. I was willing to bet his Tinder account was full of Super Likes.
There was a short silence between us, as if we were both thinking about what we’d just seen. I sat back and sipped my coffee. That was one thing I had to have: coffee. I drank it every day, all day long. And I took it black. Another one of the many bad habits I’d picked up as a police officer: coffee addiction.