Chris Collier returned to his car. He’d come so close. He knew that the young woman in the circle knew something. She’d mentioned Cherrystone. She had the unmistakable look of recognition on her face when she saw the photo. It was something. Not as much as he hoped. But better than a complete zero. As he started to back out, Britannia Scott’s lacquered nails rapped on the passenger’s window. He struggled to find the window release.
Damn rental car!
“I’m quitting this job Friday, so I don’t care if Ms. Davis fires me today. I’ve been here six months and that’s half a year too long.”
“No kidding. About the photo? You recognized the man, didn’t you?”
“Yes. I think so. I’ve followed the case from the beginning. I’ve seen Mitch Crawford on TV. That’s him in the photo, right?”
Chris pointed at the photo. “Is he a customer here?”
Britannia looked back at the bank’s front doors. “Like I said, I don’t really care if I get fired. But, no, he’s not a customer here. I see everyone who comes in. I’m in the ‘Customer Circle.’ I’d know.”
“Maybe under another name? Banking under a company name?”
She let out a sigh and shook her head in an exaggerated manner that was meant to drive the point of her exasperation to the moon. “That’s all I can tell you. I have fifty balloons to blow up. God, I hate this job.”
He thanked the young woman and she disappeared inside the bank. He could see Ms. Davis descending on the younger woman and giving her the “what for” for going outside to speak to him. Britannia’s eyes met Chris’s as she stood in the circle, being read the riot act by her boss. For a second, Chris caught a slight smile on her face.
Chapter Fifty-eight
Garden Grove
The desire to kill can gestate like an evil spawn. Michael Barton could feel his rage and hate grow, darker and deeper, the summer before the sorority girl killings started.
The summer he found his sister. The summer he lost her.
For those who kill for sport, it was easy to see why prostitutes are such an easy target. They’re always lurking in the shadows, as if just waiting to be killed. “Like shooting fish in a barrel,” a 1960s serial killer once famously said of strangling hookers. Michael Barton could see it. Hookers put themselves at risk every time they hopped into a guy’s car and slid over to complete the transaction that brought the customer relief and the hustler the dough. Unless they have a pimp that keeps them on an electronic monitor—as some of the more tech-savvy had started to do in South Florida—they do what they want, when they want, who they want. There’s no one to worry about them, no one to mourn them when they vanish.
Just an angry pimp with a slot to fill.
Michael thought of killing prostitutes when rage fueled the desire to kill, when he’d outgrown mowing a kitten or stabbing a tortoise with a screwdriver. One time when he was cut off by a snot-nosed debutante in a midnight blue BMW on Sunset in L.A., he saw a young girl in a too-short skirt, her white thighs sticking together in the heat of a summer’s day.
She’s Midwestern. Corn-fed. A cow. I could kill her and grill her bones on a hibachi, he thought. If I was that type. If I was like the others with the compulsion. But I’m not. I’m not. I am, most emphatically, not.
He was proud of his ability to contain the compulsion. He knew that by containing it, part of who he was inside was dying, but that was fine. He was a father, a husband, but he could tell no one what else he was.
What else he’d been.
By holding back, by not killing a hooker who caught his eye or a waiter who gave him lousy service, Michael felt he was doing his family a favor. Nothing, he knew, was more important than his family. That meant Olivia and the kids. And his sister.
He had to find Sarah.
Despite the fact that he knew his way around complex computer systems, how to find back doors that programmers sometimes left just for the sheer fun of it and how to dig so deeply in a system yet remain undetected, he failed at every turn. The state’s records were in deep encryption because a teenage boy had hacked into the California Department of Social and Health Services to find his birth mother. He did. The story might have ended up happy enough, the boy meeting his long-lost mother. But not this one. Trevor Wilson was pissed off. He found his mom all right. He also set fire to the house she shared with her husband and three children in Tarzana. Two of the children died; the husband was burned on more than 60 percent of his body.
It was not a happy reunion.
Michael figured he’d have nothing to lose by going the conventional route. He placed an ad on the Finda Relative. com site:
MISSING A SIB
Brother looking for Sister. My name is Michael. Your name is Sarah. We were abandoned by our mom at Disneyland when you were little. We were in foster care before you were adopted out. I love you. Write to me in care of this site.
A few private investigators contacted him within days of the posting—reminding him of the days after he and Olivia went to a Wedding Expo in Anaheim and stupidly entered a drawing for a discount honeymoon.
“Never,” he said to Olivia, “give your address or e-mail or phone number to anyone whose sole purpose is to reach into your wallet.”
Olivia urged her husband to continue his search. She prayed on it whenever they went to church. She knew that Michael had been hurt deeply by what his mother had done. She wasn’t sure that he’d been abused, but she knew some terrible things had happened to him when he was so very young.
“A piece of his heart is missing,” she told herself. “Maybe Sarah can help put him back together.”
It was after eight, and Olivia had just put Carla to bed for the third time when the landline phone in their spotless kitchen chimed its too-loud ring. She and Michael always let the phone go to voice mail, because the only people who seemed to use the old house number—and not their respective cell phones—were charities and election organizers.
As the announcement played, she ran the tap into the tea-kettle. It was Michael’s voice.
“We’re not in right now. If you’re selling something we’re not interested. If you’re telling us who to vote for, we’ve already made up our minds and we don’t need any suggestions. If you must leave a message, please do so. At the tone.”
“Michael,” the voice said, a woman’s voice, tentative, and soft, “I hope I have the right number. I’m Sarah, your sister.”
Olivia bolted for the phone and sprung it from its cradle as fast as she could.
“Sarah? This is Michael’s wife, Olivia. Is this his sister? Is it really you?”
The young woman on the other end of the line gulped. “Yeah,” she said, “it’s me.”
“Oh, how I’ve prayed for this—how we’ve prayed for this!”
“Me, too.” Sarah’s voice was soft, tentative.
Olivia felt a surge of adrenaline. “He’s not here. He’s away on business. He’ll be back tomorrow night. Do you want his cell number? Or, wait, let me get your number and I’ll have him call you.”
“I’ll call back. My folks don’t know that I’m trying to find my brother.”
“I see. OK. No problem.” Olivia’s heart was aflutter. Her husband, whom she loved more than anything had found his missing piece. He’d be able to be whole.
Sarah had called. Thank God! Whatever connection he needed from his past was there.
“You have no idea how much this will mean to him,” Olivia said, a tear rolling down her cheek as the kettle, now hot, finally whistled.