“Understood.”
“Chat could hear the door open, then Jonas pounding up the steps three at a time, calling out her name. Kenny rolled onto his side and gripped the knife tight in his hand, telling my sister to smile her best smile. That’s when Chat reached down, under the bed.”
I could see the murder charge steamrolling down Interstate 70, headed straight for Chastity Grant.
“I’m not supposed to like this part of the story. It’s not very Christian of me, but I don’t mind telling you that it’s all just fine,” Faith said. “Chat’s been on the receiving end of bad business for way too long.”
“We understand that.”
“Jonas kept a gun on the floor, in a box beneath the bed. Locked and loaded, like they say back home. Chat picked it up — she’d been around guns all her life — and the minute Kenny pressed the knife back into her side and started to rape her again, my sister fired the gun.”
“Where?”
“No chance for a miss, Alex. One shot, right against Kenny Trimble’s ear.”
I was silent, steadying Faith’s trembling hand with my own.
“And she got cuffed for that?” Mike asked.
“Arrested, indicted, and tried for murder. Even Jonas turned on her. He couldn’t fathom why she hadn’t resisted, and why she was willing to drag him into her old feud with Kenny.”
“Willing? Resist a man who’s beaten you up before and now has at you with a butcher knife in your ribs?”
“People don’t really understand the crime of rape, do they?”
“No,” I said. “Most people don’t get it at all. Especially when it comes to an estranged lover. If the same story happened with a stranger as the assailant, the whole town would have thrown a party for Chat.”
“Thank God — and I do mean that — the jury listened to her, believed her, and finally acquitted her of all the charges.”
Mike checked his cell. “That’s why Peterson’s not coming up with any mug shots of her.”
“No, you won’t find those arrest photos. I hired a good lawyer for her. The entire record’s been expunged. It’s her only chance to start clean.”
“I hope she’s still packing heat right now, Faith,” Mike said, trying to add some good cheer to a dark situation. “Make my day if she gets our perp for us.”
“Then I’m sorry I’ve been such a good influence on Chat. All she packs now is a pocket-size copy of the Bible. Can that stop a madman?” Faith said, her spirits clearly flagging.
“You know better than I do. I’m sure you’ve saved your share of wretches like me — or worse. Just takes amazing Faith.”
“Grace,” she said softly as he drew a reluctant smile from her.
“My money’s on Faith. You stay strong for us today, you hear me?”
Her eyes locked on Mike’s handsome face, falsely reading in it a promise of some sort of hope from his fortitude and energy.
“I’ll do anything you tell me to do. You just find Chat.”
“Have you got a recent photo?” I asked. “Something more current than that newspaper picture with Ursula and Naomi that we can get out to the public?”
“Yes, of course. Right here on my computer,” she said, turning to her files to open a series of shots of Chat in the courtyard of the seminary. “I just sent them to my mother last week.”
“May I forward those to headquarters?” Mercer asked.
“Please,” Faith said, moving aside so he could get to her desktop. She picked up a slip of paper next to the computer. “And if it’s any help, Alex, the dean gave me the contact information for Jeanine.”
“Jeanine?”
“Yes, Reverend Portland — the ordained minister who’s also in the photo with Chat the night they went to Ursula’s play. You asked me about her this morning.”
I reached for the slip of paper and was startled to see the 508 area code, which was the same as the code for my home on Martha’s Vineyard. But the prefix for the phone number began with a two, not the six of all the Vineyard accounts.
“Is she at a church on Cape Cod?” I asked.
“Nantucket.”
“You’d better call, Coop. Let’s make sure she’s okay and see what she knows,” Mike said, jerking his thumb as a signal to Mercer to get moving.
Jeanine Portland needed to be warned — and perhaps assigned police protection — since she was the only one of the four women in the Christmas photograph as yet unharmed.
“Would it help if I come with you?” Faith asked, standing up with us.
“I need you to stay right here, no matter what temptation comes your way,” Mike said. “You can help your sister by doing what you do best. Give it every prayer you got, Faith.”
“But you don’t know where Chat is. It might be useful if I—”
“No offense, but I’ve got technology as reliable as you to lead me out of the wilderness,” Mike said, answering his vibrating cell phone. He turned his attention to the caller. “Loo? They pull up a hot spot?”
Peterson was telling Mike the general location of the cell tower that had transmitted Chastity Grant’s aborted phone call.
“We got the bridge, Coop. It’s the George Washington. Chat made her call from a rail yard in Secaucus, New Jersey.”
I was belted into the backseat of Mike’s car as he rocketed out of the parking space, up Broadway toward the entrance to the GW Bridge at 178th Street and Ft. Washington Avenue.
“Peterson’s got the local cops ready to shut down the town. Get us backup from the State Police if we can figure out whether she’s still in the area. What does our time look like, Mercer?”
“Give it twenty minutes from the bridge,” he said, checking his watch. “Say Chat called two hours ago. No telling where she is now.”
“Why Secaucus?” I asked.
“Remind me to ask Chat after we find her, Coop.”
Mercer was thinking it through. “If somebody is on the move with her, Secaucus is the perfect transportation hub. You’re directly across the river from Manhattan. You’ve got the north-south stretch of the Jersey Turnpike, which is intersected by local highways up and down the entire line. And acres of rail yards.”
“Amtrak?” I asked.
“Freight. Not passengers. It’s a major transfer station for truckers too. Our killer could be scatting in or out of there any which way. I wouldn’t hold out a lot of hope that Chat’s sitting in a terminal waiting for us.”
“I got a worse thought than that,” Mike said. “Secaucus used to be the hands-down winner of the most odorific stinking town in the US of A. Back before it became a destination shopping-outlet strip mall.”
The town had long been infamous for its foul smell, a stench so powerful that even as kids riding down the turnpike in the family car, we literally had to hold our noses for miles and miles along the drive.
“What causes the odor?” I asked. “My father used to tell us it was sewage.”
“The doc was sparing your sensitive nature, kid. Didn’t want to disconnect your olfactory nerve from your big brain.”
“Pig farms, wasn’t it?” Mercer asked.
“That would have been the part of town closest to the Chanel counter at Bergdorf ’s. The rest of the distinctive Secaucus fragrance came mostly from rendering plants.”
“Rendering. You don’t mean — animals?”
“Oh, yeah, Coop. Yes, I do. The process that converts waste animal tissue into useful materials — everything from lard to tallow.”
My fingers reflexively pinched my nostrils. We were high above the Hudson River on the upper deck of the bridge as Mike weaved in and out of the heavy flow of traffic heading to New Jersey.
“Butcher-shop trimmings, expired grocery-store meats, dead-stock,” he went on, listing things I didn’t want to envision. “Blood, feathers, hair. What? You think the Mob used the old Meadowlands as a dumping ground for dead bodies ’cause they were Giants fans? A murder victim could get good and ripe before anyone in town suspected a stray whiff of death.”
“The girl was alive two hours ago,” Mercer said. “Fingers crossed.”
“Be careful what you wish for. Being alive in this guy’s hands isn’t likely to be time well spent.”
“Freezing,” I said. “What about the freezing cold she described?”
“Take off your long johns, blondie. It’s twenty-six degrees outside.”
“Her silk long johns, you meant to say.”
“Now how would you happen to know that, Brother Wallace?” Mike asked with a grin. He had cut off two cars at the exit as he careened onto the southbound highway.
“ ’ Cause Alex was kind enough to give some to Vickee for Christmas, for that ski trip we took in January. Now I’m expected to keep my wife in silk underwear.”
“Coop dresses so she don’t know from freezing. The wind blows off the Hudson, that cold air can bite like a king cobra. That’s freezing.”
“So Secaucus is remote, industrial, and a ghost town at night. But just a short hop into Manhattan,” I said. “Trucks and trains and the smell of death in the air — maybe Chat wasn’t all that confused when she called Faith.”
“I’m telling you, Coop. This town is a natural killing ground.”
I tried the number for the Reverend Jeanine Portland as Mike sped south. My message went to voice mail, and when I rang the landline at the Nantucket church office, I reached a secretary who told me that the minister was off-island until later in the evening. She was sorry, she told me, that she had no idea where Portland’s trip had taken her.
“You’d better call the police department there, Mercer,” I said. “Someone is bound to have a relationship with Portland. I’d like them to track her down and make sure they sit on her for the night.”
“What time’s the last boat?”
I knew the Woods Hole to Martha’s Vineyard ferry schedule cold, on- and off-season, for all of the years that I had been summering there with my family, before my late fiancé and I bought our home. Nantucket was even farther out to sea, and many fewer ferries ran there from the Steamship Authority dock in Hyannis.
“Probably eight tonight. If she’s traveling by car, there should be a reservation in the computer that will give us a clue to her travel plans.”
Mercer was on the phone, patching through from Information to the small police department that watched over the winter population of ten thousand. He explained the situation to a duty detective, who knew Portland and promised to track her down. He would have her met on the Cape side, escorted onto the ferry, and not left alone until we contacted him about the status of our hunt for the killer.
We took the Secaucus exit and at the bottom of the ramp were joined by two patrol cars from the local department. Lieutenant Peterson had given their boss the coordinates of the only triangulated call and sent his men to guide us to the area that was most likely the cell source. Mercer got out of the car to introduce himself and listen to their suggestions.
“Follow these guys,” he said when he climbed back in. “They’re going to take us to the spot our tech team plotted from the cell-tower coordinates.”
Not far from the highway, the cops led us off the local streets and onto a dirt road. It was lined with amber reeds, tall and willowy, that waved in the strong wind and made it impossible to see far on either side of the trail.
Mike drove for more than a half mile before the landscape cleared. Strong odors rose in intensity the farther from the highway we went, unless it was my imagination that had taken hold of all my senses.
The Crown Vic rattled as we rode over a series of gravel-lined railroad-track beds. The tracks themselves trailed off in both directions, crisscrossing back and forth as far as I could see. Old freight cars, with rusted metal trim and weathered paint chipped off the sides, stood at dead-ended points along the way as though they’d been abandoned years earlier.
“Where the hell are these guys headed?” Mike asked, honking his horn at them to slow down. “It’s the ass end of nowhere out here. We’re going to need an army to search.”
“Peterson says he’ll give us one.” I leaned forward, peering over Mercer’s broad shoulders as we rounded a curve, crossed the tracks again, and came upon a sea of white trucks, maybe thirty of them.
Mike pulled up even with the second patrol car. “What have we got, guys?”
The caravan of commercial vehicles were all the same shape, double the size of vans but only half as large as eighteen-wheelers. They were painted a glossy white, with strips of metallic silver material outlining their sides and tops. Unlike the vintage freight cars we had just passed, this looked like an entirely new fleet of trucks.
The cop in the passenger seat pointed with his right hand, and I followed the tip of his leather glove. “That’s a warehouse parking lot.”
“Active?” Mike asked, opening the door and stepping out of the car. Mercer and I followed suit.
“Yeah. It services one of the food-delivery companies based in Newark.”
Close, but not so close that anyone in the main warehouse would be stationed in this lot at all hours.
Mercer and I walked up behind the last van and around its side. Like all commercial vehicles, its name and logo were stenciled on it in bright red lettering.
The words ALDEN’S ANGUS appeared above a picture of a cow grazing in a pasture, blissfully unaware of its fate.
“Are these trucks refrigerated?” I asked Mike, who was on his knees examining the underside of one of them.
Chat Grant had complained of the cold when she called her sister. I knew Mike had that on his mind.
“Beef delivery trucks? Count on it, Coop.” He stood up and turned to the Secaucus cops. “Get your boss to call the main shop in Newark. Somebody needs to get over here yesterday and open every one of these up.”
The driver got back in his patrol car and radioed headquarters.
Mike kept shouting questions. “Find out how many trucks like this there are in the company. How many are supposed to be here. Somebody has to tell us if any of them are missing.”
“I’m not waiting for that answer,” Mercer said, stepping away to make his call. “I’m telling Peterson to get out an APB right now. Use it with the photo of Chastity Grant. I-95 runs from Maine to Florida and passes right through the ’hood. If she isn’t in one of these trucks right here, then our boy is on the run with her.”
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Mike?”
“A mobile abattoir. A slaughterhouse on wheels.”
A chill went through me. We had lost the afternoon sun and the March wind was showing off its strength.
“Help yourself to one of these trucks and you could travel all over the city — any city — and you’d just be one more frigging deliveryman, no matter what time of the day or night. The refrigeration would keep a body cool. No one would make much of the sight of a little more blood inside the rear, and it would be damn impossible to hear anything from within these walls,” Mike said, slamming his hand against the side of the heavy vehicle.
