“Neal Hathorne was adamant. She wasn’t working for them.”
Lon shrugs. “The information is sketchy, all of it coming from her boyfriend, this kid out in Beaumont. I personally don’t understand why they’re taking his word on every goddamned thing. But that’s all I got out of Bartolomo. I don’t know if that’s the Chronicle’s angle, or the cops’. But that’s the current line of pursuit. It’s a hot story, right in the middle of a runoff campaign. The boyfriend, they were in high school together, at Jones. He says the school had a candidate forum in the spring, for their government classes. Acton was the only one who came in person. The others sent reps from their campaigns. But there was definitely some amount of recruiting going on, you know, ‘Come work for us, see the process from the inside,’ that sort of thing. The boyfriend, he says Alicia really was into it, taking a couple of business cards.” She exhales slowly.
Jay can hear the TV inside, a Coca-Cola commercial.
“What about the other girls?”
“That’s the thing that’s weird,” she says. “I mentioned the names Deanne Duchon and Tina Wells to Gregg Bartolomo, and I got nothing. Here he is reporting on a missing person case, in the same neighborhood where two other girls went missing, and he acts like he’s never heard their names before. Either he’s fucking with me, still playing keep-away, or he honestly is as shitty a reporter as I remember. It’s like it’s not even a thing for them. The Chronicle isn’t putting it all together, not on paper, at least.”
“Can I?” Jay says, reaching for her stack of notes.
“Yeah,” she says, handing it over. She brushes back a lock of hair hanging loose from her ponytail. It’s a fair, nutty color, and greasy at the roots. Across the table, she watches Jay flipping through the pages and pages of her cubelike print handwriting. He pauses over a couple of crude drawings, each showing the bare outline of a human form. “Resner, in the Northeast Division, he wouldn’t give me a copy of the autopsy reports, but he was kind enough to leave me alone with them, long enough for me to make my own rough copy.”
“It’s a Detective Moore working this one.”
“That’s what I heard,” she says. “Res and I, we spoke this morning. He was cagey about the whole thing, telling me to direct any questions to Moore.”
Looking down, Jay cringes at the crudely drawn silhouettes of Deanne Duchon and Tina Wells. Here on paper, they are mirror images of each other. Each figure has an X marked across the throat, and the following notation, in Lonnie’s handwriting: fractured hyoid bone (strangulation). Down the arms and legs, there are more notes: little to no bruising (no defensive wounds), followed by a question mark. And the worst of it, the words scribbled near the tight V between the legs: semen on the inner thighs (no sign of vaginal penetration). Jay feels a sour heat at the back of his throat, his dinner threatening to come back up.
“Jesus,” he mumbles.
“He messed with them, using their little bodies to get off. But they weren’t raped, not according to any legal definition of the word,” Lonnie says, stubbing out her second cigarette. “Tina Wells’s hymen was still intact.”
Fifteen, Jay thinks.
“But check out the time of death,” Lon says. “Both girls.”
According to the autopsy report, Deanne Duchon was alive as little as eight hours before she was found in the creek. With Tina Wells, it was estimated at as little as five hours before she was discovered. “He didn’t kill them right away. They were alive somewhere for five days,” Lon says. “And found on the sixth.”
“You mentioned there was a suspect?”
“Yes, a guy by the name of Alonzo Hollis.”
The patio lights go out.
Jay waves a hand overhead, and the lights come on again. He should go inside and switch the setting, he thinks, and maybe pour a whiskey. He could use a drink right now. “How’d the cops come to Hollis?”
“Eyewitness statements,” Lon says. “Mike Resner, when he was working the cases, he walked the streets of Pleasantville. HPD was slow to react to the abductions, I’ll give you that, but I’ll never say Res didn’t take the cases seriously. He talked to everybody out there, trying to put together any last sightings. The girls’ families, their friends, the whole heart of their lives was in Pleasantville. So he worked it out there. And one thing came up in both cases.”
“What was that?”
“A trucker.”
“A trucker?” Jay says. “Was it one of Sterling and Company’s?”
Lonnie was just searching for the name in her notes. “You know it?”
Jay sighs.