The Drowned Girls (Angie Pallorino Book 1) Read online

  He led them into a mess room with a kitchen. The walls had been strung with paper-chain Christmas decorations, the kind Kjel had once made in kindergarten. An ornamental Christmas tree decorated with odds and ends brightened up a corner near an empty hearth, and a banner above a serving table blared:

  REPENT AND YE SHALL BE FORGIVEN

  THE LORD LOVES ALL HIS CHILDREN

  A selection of religious pamphlets were fanned out on a shelf beside copies of today’s newspapers. Leo continued to let Kjel do the talking while he ambled around the room, hands in pockets, checking out the religious slogans on the walls.

  “What happened to Faith?” the pastor asked again, and Kjel caught the fast dart of the man’s eyes toward the newspapers as he spoke.

  “You read the morning news, Pastor?”

  The man swallowed, looking ill. “She … she wasn’t the … the one found in the Gorge, was she?”

  “Yup. Naked. Wrapped in plastic. Big-ass tattoo—a Medusa head with serpents for hair—inked right over her shaved pelvis.” Kjel made a circular motion with his hand near his groin.

  The pastor reached for the back of a chair, and Kjel figured the man had either seen Hocking’s tattoo himself, or he’d heard about it.

  Leo snagged a pamphlet off the religious pile. “What denomination is this place, anyway?” He glanced up at the pastor.

  “We’re an ecumenical, Christian-based volunteer organization. In addition to providing the lost with a hot meal and a bed where possible, we also open to them a route unto the Lord. Some have chosen that path and come clean. Left the streets.”

  “But which is your church?” Leo paused, those clear blue eyes steady, intimidating. “Pastor.”

  The man cleared his throat. “I worship at Fairfield United—my wife and I do.”

  “Worship? Not preach or administer or whatever it is that pastor persons do?”

  “Technically, I’m not exactly a pastor. The kids just call me that. And they have for years, ever since I first started volunteering here.”

  “And when would that be?”

  “Eight years now.”

  While Leo was taking his turn needling Pastor Markus, Kjel walked over to a corkboard that was pinned chock-full with photographs that had clearly been taken over the years. Various seasonal and religious holidays. Several of the pastor laughing or engaging with kids, his arm around them in some images. Nearly all the street kids on this board were female. Young. There was one with a young woman sitting on his lap where the “pastor” was dressed as Santa. Then one photo in particular caught Kjel’s eye. His pulse quickened. He peered closer.

  “You like the girls young, don’t you, Pastor?” he said quietly.

  “Excuse me?”

  Kjel moved away from the board, picked up a newspaper. Him and Pallorino on the cover. Him looking like a freaking tweaker himself. Thing about meth is that people who did it long enough, even when they did quit, they were left so damaged that they retained the characteristics of a tweaker for the rest of their lives. Fidgety, darty. Paranoid.

  “All on the streets are vulnerable, boys and girls, both.”

  “But the girls, they’s … special.”

  “In our society, unfortunately it’s the females and the young who are especially vulnerable and at most risk, and in need of safe sanctuary—”

  “So, you likes to save them?” He nodded at a slogan on the wall: SINNERS SHALL BE REDEEMED. “You gets them to renounce Satan and all that.”

  “What do you want from me?” The pastor shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his loose brown cords, his neck muscles showing tension.

  “Faith Hocking. I want to know where she went after she used to stay here.”

  “She came clean. She got a job.”

  “What job?”

  “McDonald’s on Main. For a while.”

  “Where did she go after Mickie D’s?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How about some of the other kids—they seen her around, talk about her maybe? Mention how nice her expensive, fixed pearly whites look?”

  “What?”

  “Her teeth.”

  “I—” A knock sounded on the door. “Look, I really need you to go. I’ve got to prep—”

  “That a yes, a no?”

  “I have not seen her. And I don’t know anyone who has.” He marched to the door as he spoke, opened it into the passageway, and headed for the front entrance.

  “And you wouldn’t tell us if you did know,” said Kjel following the man, Leo coming slowly behind them.

  Pastor Markus unlocked and opened the front door. Wet air blew inside. “I told you, these kids eschew bureaucracy. The system has let them down. Most have been bounced in and out of foster care their whole lives before landing on the streets. They don’t want to go back. Won’t even go to a clinic to see a doctor if they need to, because it could land them back in the system.” He paused. “And cops, especially—they won’t talk to cops.” He met and held Leo’s steely blue gaze a moment. “Not all cops are good cops, and they know that, too.”

  “You do realize this is a homicide investigation,” Kjel said. “You could be withholding information that in turn could help save other victims. More of your kids, even.”

  “Then do your work, detectives, and let me do mine.” He showed them out, shut the door, and watched them from a window.

  Kjel paused under the eaves to pull up his collar and light a smoke, cupping his flame against the wind. Rain pattered into puddles and dripped off the eaves.

  “What’s your take on him?” Leo said, lighting his own cigarette. “Fake pastor. All that religious shit about sinners, saving girls? Don’t trust weirdos like that.”

  Kjel watched the rain for a moment. “Did yous see that board of photos in there?” he said quietly as he blew out a stream of smoke. “Faith Hocking was pictured in two of them. In one she looked just like her mug shot, crappy teeth, scabby. Skinny. In the other she was all nice white teeth and clean hair, and she was with that young woman we saw earlier.”

  “That tweaker ho?”

  “Yeah.” He started to walk.

  CHAPTER 24

  “This is Gracie’s room,” Lorna Drummond said, opening the bedroom door.

  Maddocks allowed Pallorino to enter ahead of him and to ask the questions while he observed. He wanted a better handle on this detective who’d so brazenly propositioned and slept with him, almost leaving him cuffed to the motel bed for the night. He’d also been asked by Buziak to keep a close eye on her performance because of an application she was making to join the homicide unit. She was going to get resistance, though—he’d heard enough from the guys already, especially from Harvey Leo.

  Part of him didn’t want her in homicide, either. Why? Because that part of him was still thinking he might enjoy the challenge of getting her back into bed. And having a relationship with someone in your unit, or worse, with your partner, was a no-go. Relationships like that screwed with objectivity, clouded judgment in high-risk situations. And if she so desperately wanted to get into homicide, she wasn’t likely to risk blowing it by having sex with him again.

  Mostly he just liked to watch her. Lithe limbs, a catlike quality to her movements, long, dead-straight, dark-red hair hanging in a ponytail down her back. Pale, translucent skin. And those cool gray eyes that gave away nothing. She intrigued him—a very attractive and accomplished female who hunted heinous sex offenders by day and sought anonymous sex by night. How often, he wondered, did Angie Pallorino actually hit that club? How safe was her habit? What in the hell had he been doing there, anyway? He should have left when his buddy hadn’t shown up, not gone with her to the room.

  He stuck his hands deep into his pockets, remaining near the door while he took in Drummond’s bedroom.

  It was neat and feminine, decorated in tones of green with dark-pink accents. On her bed a mountain of colored pillows had been topped with a stuffed bear. Above the bed, motivational slogans had
been mounted on poster board, and on the wall near her desk a calendar hung alongside a wooden crucifix with a bronze Jesus nailed to it, the Lord’s head bowed under his crown of thorns. Atop the desk was a hardback novel, a MacBook, an iPad, and what appeared to be a necklace of pearly beads plus a thin gold chain with a gold pendant attached. The closet doors were sliding mirrors, and one side was plastered with photographs.

  Pallorino walked over to the desk, touched the gold pendant, then moved the beads gently with her fingertips, exposing a pearly white cross. It was then that Maddocks realized it was a rosary. His partner’s attention went from the rosary to the crucifix with its Jesus on the wall, then to the motivational slogans. She moved over to a map mounted above a bookshelf at the base of the bed.

  Gracie’s mother wrapped the ends of her long sweater closer over her chest. She wore jeans, no makeup, hadn’t showered or fixed her hair. A secondary victim—the survivor of the crime—the one left behind.

  “Gracie wanted to travel,” Lorna Drummond said as Pallorino leaned closer to examine the pins in the map. “She stuck pins into all the places she was going to visit. She … she wanted to see the whole world. She had plans. So many …” Lorna Drummond sniffed, wiped her nose with the base of her thumb. “So many plans.”

  Pallorino trailed her fingertips over the spines of the books on the bookshelf. “All alphabetically arranged,” she said. “And nearly all of them hardcover. Gracie obviously liked to read.”

  Lorna Drummond cleared her throat and nodded. “She loves … I mean, she loved her books. Took really good care of them. Could swallow a whole tome in a day—mostly big fantasy books, which she reread often.”

  “Did you buy these for her?”

  “No, she bought them herself.”

  Pallorino went to the iPad, opened the cover. “It’s one of the newer ones with fingerprint ID.” She glanced at Lorna Drummond. “We’re going to need to take these electronic devices into evidence—”

  “Why? Why do you need them?”

  “Personal records including phone calls, emails, addresses, voicemails, contact lists, calendar entries, and websites that she visited could all be vitally important. They could tell us what Gracie was doing, where she was going, how she might have encountered the person who decided to hurt her.” Pallorino opened and closed desk drawers, then went over to the closet and slid open the mirrored door.

  She moved the hangers, taking note of the victim’s clothing. “Your daughter liked designer clothes, Mrs. Drummond. There are some really high-end labels in here, price tags still on a few.” She looked over her shoulder. “Where did she get all these clothes?”

  “I … I don’t know. Online shopping mostly?”

  “She was only sixteen—did you authorize use of a credit card?”

  “No. I … I don’t know how. She had a job. She bought things.”

  “You never asked her about her clothes?”

  “Not really.”

  “And the iPad, laptop—she buy those, too?”

  Maddocks noted that Drummond was beginning to look panicked, rubbing her arm.

  “You said she just worked the one shift a week at the Blue Badger?” Pallorino said.

  “Yes.”

  “You sure Gracie wasn’t getting money from somewhere other than her work at the bakery?”

  “Look, I don’t see why you people need to be in here anyway. This is my daughter’s space. Her privacy. Shouldn’t you be out there looking for her killer, not in here going through her closets and judging me as a mother?”

  Pallorino’s eyes softened as she turned to the victim’s mother. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Drummond. I know how tough this is.” Her voice gentled—her whole persona seemed to morph in front of Maddocks’s eyes. A chameleon. Most good detectives were shape-shifters, could mix with anyone, from high society to scum on the street. But who, he wondered, was the real Angie Pallorino when she was home? The babe in the club? The cold and dispassionate cop? The accomplished female detective—a calculating interrogator trying to squeeze the most out of her subjects to meet her own ends?

  “I know you said that she hasn’t seen her father in a while, but is there a chance he, or someone else, might have authorized a credit card for her? Without her telling you?”

  “No. No …” Lorna Drummond buried her face in her hands and scrubbed her skin hard. “I don’t know. I … I don’t.” She looked up, complexion raw and blotchy. “Gracie worked hard. I work hard. I got her through school. She got good grades. She went to church on Sundays. She could sing like an angel. She’s … she was a good, decent girl.”

  “Things are not always what they seem, Mrs. Drummond. There are most likely things you don’t know about your daughter.” Pallorino paused. “We all have our secrets.”

  “So that’s what you do—come into people’s bedrooms, peel their lives apart? Expose their secrets?”

  “Come, why don’t we sit down for a bit?” Pallorino seated herself on Gracie’s bed, and Lorna Drummond reluctantly lowered herself onto the edge beside her. Maddocks took the opportunity to go study the photographs on the mirror.

  “When did you first notice these nice things appearing?” Pallorino said, her voice calm, soothing. “The fancy clothes, the laptop, iPad?”

  “Slowly, I think. Six to eight months ago, maybe. Or … less. Certainly it was after she started working at the Badger.”

  “Which was when?”

  “Just over a year ago now.”

  “Did you notice any other changes in Gracie around that six-to eight-month time frame, in her appearance, her mood?”

  “She seemed happier. She started to lose some weight. She’d always been on the plump side as a child and struggled with diets.”

  Maddocks’s thoughts turned to Ginny, and his chest tightened. Gracie looked an awful lot like his Ginn in some of these photos, too. He had his own guilt about not being present during his daughter’s growth. Would he have noticed nicer clothes?

  “Gracie was always a bit bullied at school, but things had definitely started to change. She appeared more confident, started wearing makeup. I thought she was just growing up, getting over her awkward, geeky stage.” Drummond blew her nose.

  “She have a boyfriend?”

  “She used to go out with a boy from school—Rick Butler. They broke up.”

  “When?”

  “I … uh, it was maybe eight months ago. Or nine. Or … I’ve lost track of time.”

  Pallorino took her notebook from her pocket and wrote down the kid’s name. “Amicable breakup?”

  “No, it was quite nasty. Gracie was devastated. But then she met someone new at the Oak Bay Country Club, where Rick goes for tennis coaching. He’s an excellent player but would never be able to afford that club. A European coach, Serge Radikoff, sponsors his membership there. He’s kind of a mentor as well as Rick’s coach. Gracie used to go watch Rick practice.”

  “So she was currently dating this new guy from the club?”

  Drummond heaved out a chestful of air. “I’m not sure how official the relationship was. After initially mentioning him, she didn’t really talk about him again, but he did come pick her up here once when I was home. Drives a small black BMW.”

  Pallorino and Maddocks exchanged a glance—the source of Drummond’s money, fancy things?

  “And his name?” Pallorino said.

  Guilt flickered through the woman’s face. “Oh jeeze, I don’t know. I’ve been working too much. Jack. John. No, John Jacks, that’s it.”

  Pallorino recorded the name in her book.

  “Is he in any of these photos here?” Maddocks said.

  Drummond pushed herself to her feet and came over. Pallorino joined them. Drummond peered at the photos, and a sob hiccupped through her. She covered her mouth with her hand, tears pooling in her eyes. She shook her head, took a moment to gather herself, then said, “No. I don’t see him. But that’s Rick Butler there.” She pointed.

  “And these other photos
?”

  “That one was a beach picnic for the Blue Badger staff last summer. That’s Gracie with her choir group from Duneagle Secondary—they went on a trip to Toronto last year.”

  There were several pictures of Gracie with a brunette, lots of curls, cute smile, dimples. They appeared to have been friends over the years.

  “And this person, she looks like a close friend?”

  “Lara. Sings like a nightingale. She’s a year and a half older than Gracie and is now a student at UVic. They met in the school choir when Gracie was in grade three and have been friends since. Lara introduced Gracie to a college choir, and she’s been singing with them.”

  Maddocks shot Lorna Drummond a keen glance. “Even though she’s not at college she sings in a college choir?”

  “The choirmaster accepts some high school teens with special talent, especially if they’re planning on attending college the following year.”

  “Do they happen to practice at the Catholic cathedral downtown?” he said. “Thursday nights?”

  Surprise flittered through Drummond’s features. “You know it?”

  An unspecified anxiety tightened through Maddocks, his thoughts boomeranging back to Ginn and their conversation at the Blue Badger. “I recently heard mention of it. Was Gracie at practice last Thursday?” he said, wondering whether his daughter’s path had intersected with that of Gracie Drummond four days ago.

  “No, not last Thursday. She said she was going out with a friend instead.”

  “John Jacks?” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I … don’t know. I went out with Kurt that night.”

  “Kurt?”

  “Kurt Shepherd, my new partner. I was trying to have a bit of my own happiness. I thought Gracie was on track, old enough to be left alone more …” Her voice cracked. She blew her nose again, her Kleenex turning ragged.