Over dinner I realized a hole in my thinking. I couldn’t make Zery talk to the police, not of her own free will. But I could bring the police to her. I could tell the police about the Amazons without revealing who and what they truly were.
Half truths. A new art I seemed to have mastered.
I went to bed with the knowledge I was going to make use of it tomorrow.
I called Reynolds first thing the next morning and got voice mail offering a cell-phone number. I called it. He was already in his car and on his way over. It would have been flattering if I hadn’t gotten the distinct feeling he was fingering his handcuffs as we chatted-and not in a let’s-have-some-fun way. When I told him I was ready to talk but wanted to do so on neutral ground, he named a coffee shop not far from campus.
“I was a member of a cult.”
Reynolds set his coffee cup down without taking a drink. “A cult?”
“Well…” I twiddled a plastic stir stick between my fingers. “I wouldn’t call it a cult.”
“You just did.”
“I know.” I tapped the stick against the paper cup. “It’s just hard to put a term to it.”
“Closed group with a charismatic leader who keeps the members cut off from outside society?”
I bit into the stick, flattening it with my teeth, then dropped it back into my cup. “The point is-I was part of a group that’s a tad shy.”
“Secretive.” He reached in his jacket pocket and pulled out a notepad.
“They don’t surround themselves with barbed wire or anything.” Wards were a lot more effective. “And members come and go all the time.”
“So do Hare Krishnas.”
I snorted. “Believe me, none of these women are selling flowers at the airport.”
“They sell fortunes instead?” He looked at me without raising his head from the notepad.
“That’s not illegal.”
“Depends on how it’s done.”
“Listen.” I swished the stir stick around a few times, then jerked it out and dropped it on the table, leaving a little snake of coffee in its wake. “Do you want to hear what I have to tell you or not?”
He leaned back, one arm propped on the back of his chair, and made a circular motion with one hand. “By all means. That’s why I’m here.”
“I left the group ten years ago.”
“Any reason?”
I gave him a glare. He held up his hand in surrender. “Tattoos are…important to the group. Everyone has them. Girls get them sometime during puberty-preferably right at the beginning. When you brought me the pictures…I didn’t recognize the girls, but I recognized the tattoos, the style anyway. I knew they were from the group.”
“But you didn’t do them?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t tell if he believed me or not.
“Address?”
“For what?”
He lowered his pencil. “The whatever you called it…camp.”
“You don’t need to go there.” I wanted him to talk to Zery, not drop in unannounced on Alcippe and company. My horror must have shown.
“Why not? What could happen?” He had that tense look again, like the barista behind me had pulled a gun and he was trying not to show he’d noticed.
“Nothing. I mean, some of the group, the leader, in fact, is at my shop.”
“I thought you left.”
“I did, but with the girls…some bonds are hard to break, okay?” I sounded frustrated, guilty, and apologetic all at once. And I was pretty sure all the emotions were targeted not at him, or even the Amazons, but at myself.
“Why didn’t they come forward before this?”
I sighed. “They didn’t know.”
“Didn’t know what? That the girls were missing? How do you not know that? One of those girls looked about fourteen.”
He was showing his age. To me she looked every one of her seventeen years or more; to the bartender who served her downtown, she must have looked older. Even the greediest of bar owners wouldn’t serve a fourteen-year-old, fake ID or not.
“Or that they were dead?” he continued. “They not watch the news…read a paper? It’s been everywhere. If my teenage daughter went missing, I’d be scouring every inch of ground from here to the borders-of the U.S., not Wisconsin. And if I didn’t find her, I’d keep going. You mean to tell me they saw all the coverage and didn’t even think it might be their girls? What are they hiding?”
“You have a daughter?” I asked. It was an inappropriate question, cutting off his passionate diatribe, but I was curious. I hadn’t seen him as having kids, or a wife.
He blinked. “Two. One’s married. One lives with her mother-in Rockford.”
Divorced. That intrigued me too. Since Amazons never committed to a relationship with a man, the whole marriage thing confounded me. I’d have loved to ask what drove him to commit, then what drove him-or her-to walk away. But I didn’t. I had used my one inappropriate and personal question for the day-maybe forever.
There was no reason to think Reynolds and I would have any kind of conversation after today. I would introduce him to Zery. He’d understand what a tiny role I’d had (or was pretending to have) in this mess, and he’d back off. Go back to doing whatever he did to solve this crime.
He rapped his notebook against the table. “So, he must know about the girls now-if he’s staying with you.”
“She.” The pronoun came out harsher than I’d meant it to, but it annoyed me that he’d assumed Zery, the person with power, was a man. It was an unfair judgment on my part; he was victim to his own society’s norms, not the ones I’d been raised with. And I had my own issues-obviously.
“She?” The corners of his mouth curved down, in surprise or thought…whatever, it was obvious he hadn’t expected the female bit.
“The entire group is.”
Still digesting my previous revelation, it took a minute for him to catch my latest.
“Is what?”
“Female. No men.”
“No men at all?” His expression morphed from surprise to shock. “How do they work that? I mean there are kids, right? Or is it a new group? Only been around a few years?”
“No, not new.” I really hadn’t foreseen the need to explain the Amazons like this. I was beginning to get a sick feeling in my stomach. “It’s just a group, okay? None of that matters, does it? You just needed to know how I was connected, and I told you. Now you know where the girls came from, maybe it will help you with the case.”
He raised a brow. “It doesn’t work like that. You don’t get to tell me what you want me to know and expect me not to ask anything else. Two girls were murdered.”
“I know.” I sat against the back of my seat hard. “Listen, I want to stop the killer. I have a daughter too, you know.”
“Are you worried about her?”
I almost threw my coffee on him then. Of course I was worried about her-some things didn’t need to be said.
“When we started, I asked if I gave you something if you could give me something in return. I gave you something-two somethings.” I picked up the printout from the Web site that I’d brought with me.
He didn’t move, just stared back at me with his eyes shuttered, not giving away any of his thoughts.
“I want to know who put those pictures out there.” I held out the printout.
“Why?”
I opened my mouth, then closed it.
“You’re not involved, right? And even if you were, there’s no reason for you to know that. You or one of your not-a-cult friends wouldn’t go looking for the person, right?”
I shifted my eyes to the side and took a breath. When I looked back, I was calm, kind of. “I want the killer stopped. We all do. It’s about the only thing me and my ‘group’ have in common anymore. But I don’t want them harassed. They’re private. If I’d thought you were going to dig into every aspect of who they are, I wouldn’t have told you about them.”
He smiled, his eyes understanding, but sad. “I get that, but it doesn’t matter. You don’t get to pick and choose what I use. I don’t even get to pick and choose. I just follow whatever lead I can.”