Cruel but controlled.
One of the girls I spoke to had been a fellow student in Annika’s English lit class the previous spring. She used words like master manipulator and sociopath, and I felt the knots in my stomach twist harder and harder.
“She even had our professor under her thumb. I don’t know what she said to him, but he was so cowed by her that she got an A after missing half the semester. The days she was there, she’d sort of saunter in and bully people,” the young woman told me. “I always thought that one day she might just come in and start shooting.”
I was at my desk, the phone to one ear, taking notes with my free hand. “What do you think made her tick? Why did she act that way?”
Silence on the other end and then the young woman sighed. “Honestly? I think she was bored.”
Chief Chavez checked in before he left for the night. There’d been no word from the kidnappers. I caught him and Finn up on the latest with Annika.
“Do you know what you’re saying? This is totally nuts,” the chief said.
I knew it was nuts. The whole case was nuts.
I said, “I’ve talked to dozens of people. They all say the same thing-and these are people she kept as contacts in her phone! No one crosses Annika Bellington, certainly not back East. Maybe she’s different here, at home, but there? Half these people are scared to death of her.”
Finn added, “She manipulates them to get what she wants and then lords their weaknesses over them. Classic bully behavior, Chief. Narcissism to the extreme.”
Chavez sighed as he loosened his tie, and then removed it completely. He took a seat at the edge of my desk, his hiked-up pant legs exposing a pair of mismatched socks. He held the tie in his hands, his fingers running back and forth along its silk edges.
We still hadn’t told him our suspicions that Frank Bellington was the Woodsman. I didn’t know why we were waiting, Finn and I, except that when we did break the story, we wanted to tell the whole story.
And without knowing who kidnapped Annika, or why, the story was incomplete.
“Okay, okay, I get it, Annika’s not the nicest person around. Look at her mother, the girl probably never had a chance,” the chief said. “What’s your plan?”
Finn and I looked at each other and then answered in unison, “Work the case, Chief.”
It was soon too late to continue calls to the East Coast due to the time difference. I decided to make one last call, to a Peter Dillen, whose phone number was saved in Annika’s phone contacts list under the nickname “Honey Bunches.”
I figured he had to be the notorious garage band boyfriend Pete, so I left a message and asked him to call me back as soon as possible.
We reconvened at nine o’clock the next morning. As I walked into the station, Finn met me with a cup of tea in one hand and a piece of paper in the other hand.
“For me?”
Finn handed me the tea and the paper. I took a few sips and read the scribbled message: call Joe Fatone at the circus A.S.A.P.
“We’re leaving town, Deputy,” Fatone said when I got hold of him ten minutes later.
I leaned back against the counter and cradled the phone against my shoulder, peeling an orange. I’d found it in the staff lounge next to a snack-size package of crackers I planned to eat next.
“On whose authority?”
“Chief Chavez’s,” Fatone continued. “He cleared us this morning. He said you all got what you needed from the crime scene and that he’d get in touch if you needed anything else.”
I sighed. Yes, we had what we needed evidence-wise, but the thought of the circus packing up and leaving left me glum. There were unanswered questions there. I’d never know the real truth between Lisey and Tessa, if all their drama really was about a complicated love triangle.
“Well, c’mon by, then, if you’ve got time,” Fatone said. I heard ice clink in a glass and he swallowed, the sound loud and clear through the phone. “I’ve got something for you.”
Chapter Forty-four
If a circus coming to town is the greatest thing on Earth, a circus leaving must surely be one of the saddest. The workers and performers looked happy to be moving on to their next destination, but there was a sense of finality to the scene, a sense of ending, that made me melancholy.
“Where will you go next?”
Fatone and I walked the perimeter, him stopping every few yards to check on rigging or instruct a worker to change how they were doing something. Decaying food and bits of trash were ground into the dirt below our feet, the remnants of one great, big party.
“We have a contract in Santa Fe, so we’ll make our way down there and stay a few weeks, then head west to Arizona,” Fatone said. “We stayed here too long as it is.”
“I’m sorry. That couldn’t be helped,” I said. “What about Tessa? And Lisey?”
He shrugged. “What about them? They’re like sisters, fighting like cats and dogs one minute, hugging and crying the next. One big family, that’s what we are. They’ll be fine. They always are.”
I wasn’t sure if he meant the girls specifically or the entire lot of them.
“I’ve got big plans for Tessa,” Fatone said. He bent to pick up something sharp and rusty and tossed it into the woods, overhand like a baseball pitcher.
“I want to put her in a one-person act and make her the star. She’s ready.”
“Can you do a trapeze act with just one person?”
Fatone squinted into the distance, looking east toward Kansas. “Do you think those pioneers would have crossed all those thousands of miles if they knew what monstrous mountains awaited them?”
I shrugged. Above us the sun grew higher still, rising up on the waves of the very heat it pulsed down.
“Hell, who knows, but we’re going to try. It might revolutionize circus acts for time immortal,” he said.
“You said you had something for me?”
Fatone nodded and took my elbow, tugging me toward his trailer. “A box of Reed’s-Nicky’s-things. I just found it so your cop friends must have missed it. It was sitting under the bed in his cabin.”
Nicky hid a lot of things under his bed, I thought.
The inside of the trailer was as warm and airless as I remembered. In the window, a fly buzzed against the closed pane, a few fallen comrades like desiccated raisins in the sill beneath it.
Behind me, Fatone gently closed the door. “It’s there, that shoe box, on the table.”
I sat and he leaned across me, pushing open the window. The fly sailed out on the first breeze, and I removed the lid from the box, staring at the objects that lay inside.
“Did you look inside?” I asked Fatone.
I knew he had, he must have, but he shook his head and shrugged.
“It didn’t feel right. I knew it was his, being under the bed and all, and I didn’t want to handle it more than I needed to,” he said, taking a seat across from me. “It’s a dirty business, all around.”
It was an interesting choice of words, considering what the box contained.
There were half a dozen Polaroid shots of Nicky and Tessa in various stages of undress, limbs and clothes draped strategically over their bodies. The pictures didn’t contain anything you wouldn’t see in a bathing suit, but there was a sense of intimacy to them that made me feel as though I was violating something sacred.
Under the photographs was a stack of vintage postcards, from what looked like the 1950s and 1960s, each with a cute saying or cheesy line. They were all addressed to Reed-Nicky-and signed Tessa. None had been mailed, though, and I imagined she collected them, and then left them for him, maybe on his pillow, or in a book.
A surprise, from a girlfriend to her boyfriend, and I wondered who had taken the photographs. The angle seemed impossible for a tripod.
“Do you think I should have given the box to Tessa?” Fatone asked. He pulled a cigar from his front pocket and wet the tip of it with his tongue, but didn’t light it.