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  Dead Girls

  By Russ Trautwig

  A Tree District Books Publication

  DEAD GIRLS. Copyright © 2019 by Russ Trautwig.

  All rights reserved. Except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews, no part of this publication may be used, reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Tree District Books, LLC is the publisher. It holds the license with respect to this work and any derivatives thereof on a worldwide basis. Please visit www.treedistrictbooks.com for more information or to contact the publisher.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-7338853-2-4

  Dedication

  For all the women and men who dedicate their lives, mind, body, and spirit, to catching the bad guys.

  Acknowledgments

  My heartfelt thanks to my wife, Jennifer, for always being my first and best sounding board, to my children for their support and cheers, to Elizabeth for helping me move time, and to Christina and the team at Tree District Books for being dreamers and believers.

  Prolog

  A Forest Dark

  1853

  In the dream, he split his father’s face in half with the long-handled ax, while the dog watched with shrewd hungry eyes. Thick, mucous-like drool dripped from the corners of its toothy canine grin.

  “Lijah?” his father’s angry voice called from the big room, rousing him from a state somewhere between dream and hallucination. “You gow-na sleep the whole day away? Goddam boy, needs to get some fishin done so’s we can et tonight.” Elijah Elder sat up and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. He winced at the sharp and sudden pain in his ribs, a quick reminder of yesterday’s beating. The room he slept in was barely closet-sized and when he was sitting, his head brushed against the logs that provided the upper perimeter of his tiny bedroom. His mattress was straw on dirt and the door was nothing more than a scrap of old canvas from someone’s long ago discarded tent. When he parted the stiff cloth to slip out, the first rays of early dawn poked through dirty windows to give a smoky illumination to the one austere room that made up the Elder family’s cabin. It smelled of earth, fried animal fat, and burnt pine. His mama, still sleeping, wheezed a low coarse snore through whistling lips and his father had already rolled over and gone back to sleep. It was the same every morning, the unchanging routine of a moonshiner.

  Elijah’s first chore every day was to get a fire started in their small stone fireplace and then head down to the creek to catch some walleye or bass. Their cabin was in a clearing on a sandstone bluff, surrounded by a dense pine forest. It overlooked an ancient gorge, created when a glacial lake melted fifteen thousand years ago unleashing a catastrophic flood. Sometimes, in drought periods, the creek would run too low for fish, then the boy would have to walk another mile and a half to the river that snaked its way through the forest. In some ways, he liked those days best, despite the walk. There was an island there, surrounded by the river that forked around its northern tip and came back together at the southern end on its way to the gorge. Elijah considered that island his sanctuary. He escaped there whenever the burdens of his world became unbearable, when the beatings were too bad, when the teasing was too real, when the voices in his head began to make sense.

  The old floorboards groaned and creaked as Elijah made his way to the front door and slipped out into the cool, damp Wisconsin morning. A cloud of mist lay just above the pine needle carpet, veiling the view as far as he could see. His ribs ached with every step. It was early June and the afternoon would be warm enough to swim if the sun came out, but the morning chill seeped through the diaphanous barrier of his hand-me-down rags; worthless cast-offs from his father’s meager wardrobe. As he walked toward the woodpile, he was wrapped in the memory of the schoolboys he had run into yesterday and how they had taunted him. They were boys from the nearby town of Newport, and they all attended the one-room schoolhouse there, paid for by their parents. Most of them were about his age and although they all knew each other, Elijah was an outcast, a pariah. His parents had no use for school and even if they did, they had no money for it.

  He had come across the boys the day before, five of them, when he was fishing in the creek. It still swelled from the melting winter snow and they were all coming down for a swim. On opposite banks, he had watched them disrobe and jump naked, laughing and screaming, into the cold water, while he remained as quiet as possible, hoping not to be noticed but fearing he would be. He was not afraid of them physically. Although he was gaunt and lean, his muscles were solid and strong, and he knew he could hold his own against any of them, maybe all of them if he had too, even with his bruises. He was a head taller than the biggest boy there, and he doubted if they even knew how to throw a good punch. Elijah had learned all about how to take a beating from his father and reckoned he’d know how to give one too if the time came.

  No, it was their words that he feared. The things they always said to him about his mama and papa, while they laughed and patted each other on the back. Those were the things that cut to his core, the things that caused the nightmares. The nightmares were coming with greater frequency now. They were always the same, that man and that dog, the old man with the gray beard and those eyes, deep set in bony sockets, the eyes that looked but maybe didn’t see. Elijah would bolt awake, wide-eyed, sweat dripping from his brow and a feeling in his heart that he did not want to face. Yes, the dreams were almost nightly now, and they were so real. He smelled the old man’s putrid decaying flesh in those dreams.

  He wanted so badly to be on his island right now that in his mind he escaped there. He was with some pretty girl and she was cooking in the cabin he had always dreamed of building there. She was making a stew from a rabbit he had trapped and the smell from the steaming pot was enough to make the saliva begin pooling in his mouth.

  His introspective thoughts had absorbed his consciousness and blocked out the external noise until that noise became his name. “Eeeliiijaaa,” it came, in a unison singsong from the handful of boys now out of the water and standing on his side of the riverbank. At first, it was a voice in the distance, a far-off calling which incorporated into his daydream. The girl was calling his name as she undressed. But with each repetition, it grew closer and louder and clearer and it pulled him from his daydream.

  They stood there naked, looking up at him. Thomas Belding was the first to speak. He used his hand to ruffle the blond curls on his head, shaking off the excess water. He reached down between his legs and started rubbing his penis. “Comere Elijah, I wanna see if you can suck this as good as your mama can,” he said, with no trace of humor in his voice. The rest of the boys, however, thought it hilarious and they all started grabbing themselves and imitating Thomas.

  “Lord knows your drunk pappy ain’t no good at nothin but falling down and sleeping, so’s maybe this is something you get from your mama’s side,” he chided.

  Elijah had stood up and started twirling his fishing line around the pole, wanting to show the boys he was not interested in any trouble and he would be leaving. Thomas did not seem to notice. “I know you think, I’m just joshin, but Willy and me, we give your mama two bits, and she sucks us dry, right there in that little shed you got behind your house, the one with the rusty ol’ still in it. She’s really good at it too, probably worth three bits.”

  Again, the raucous, knee-slapping laughter erupted. Elijah tried hard to block out the words, but they drove through his defenses, penetrating deep down inside, and s
lamming home inside his brain. How would he know about the still, was Elijah’s overriding thought. He started walking away as the derisions continued.

  The last thing Thomas said to him was, “I put a dot of red paint on that two-bit coin I give her last, you go on and check when you get back to your shit hole cabin, boy.”

  That afternoon, when Elijah had come home without any fish, his father punched him in the face knocking him down and knocking out one of his two front teeth. After he was down, his father kicked him twice, bruising his ribs and fracturing one. His father had then walked off toward the shed. When he went inside, his mama had offered no sympathy, complaining that she would now have to use some of the salted venison they’d been storing up for winter, and maybe Elijah didn’t need no dinner at all. She had headed out the door as well.

  Elijah pulled the ragged shirt up over his long brown hair and eyed the purple and black stain that spread across his midsection. He touched a finger to it and bit his tongue when he grimaced from the pain. The taste of fresh, salty blood invaded his mouth, it tasted warm and metallic, it tasted…good. He stood and walked toward his mother’s bed to get an old piece of cloth to wrap around his midsection and there, on his mama’s old trunk, glinting in the sunlight that poured in through the cabin’s only window was a silver quarter with a dot of red paint on it.

  A dog barked somewhere and jogged him out of his memory. He was standing in front of the woodpile on a chilly June morning with shafts of sunlight just beginning to seep down through the canopy of trees, chasing away the fog. A rustle in the woods behind him made him turn quickly and pain shot again from his ribs up into his brain. It was a medium-sized muddy-brown dog with matted hair in patches on skin stretched tightly over old bones. It was a mutt of some sort, a mongrel with muscular hind legs and a big bear-like head. He walked up to Elijah and lay down at his feet like a pet that had just come home from a romp in the woods, chasing squirrels. He looked familiar to Elijah and it took a moment before the small hairs on the back of his neck stiffened, a chill raced up and down his arms and he realized it was the dog from his nightmares.

  From somewhere deep inside him, a voice he trusted told him it was time to follow. Elijah grabbed the long-handled ax from the chopping block and headed back toward the house. Out of the corner of his eye, an old man with a long gray beard and dark, deep-set eyes stood in the shadow beneath a gnarly old oak tree that was littered with dead brown leaves. He didn’t move but his gaze followed Elijah as he walked. Their eyes caught once, and a smile briefly crossed the old man’s face, which made Elijah smile in kind.

  When Elijah came out of the house, he was covered in splatters of blood and brains. The ax was gone, and his hands were thrust deep down into his pockets. The right one was empty but in his left hand was a seated liberty quarter and he rubbed his thumb back and forth across the dot of red paint that was on it. It was all he owned in the world and yet the boy was content, and his face showed neither joy nor sorrow, but he was at peace with what he had done. He moved inexorably forward toward a destiny that was neither pre-ordained nor absolute, but now, because of events that he ultimately set in motion, had become inescapable. The boy walked a straight line to the old man, who kneeled when he arrived with that mangy mutt trailing at his heels.

  The man smelled like dead animals, as his house did a few days after his mom had skinned a kill. It was an unnatural odor of rot and decomposition, but Elijah was not repelled, he was drawn into it. The old man’s skin was the ash gray of death, it pulled taut against his bones and gave him the appearance of a recently dug up corpse. His sunken eyes were devoid of color. He opened his arms in a welcoming gesture and Elijah folded into the man’s embrace. The blood that covered him smeared the man everywhere. The old man did not seem to mind and when Elijah lifted his eyes to look at his face he looked to be in prayer with his head turned up to the sky and his eyes closed. They never spoke but the boy felt a kinship, a partnership, as he never had before. He sensed there was to be something special in this joining and for the first time in his life, he knew he was safe.

  The man motioned for Elijah to sit beneath the tree and wait, which he did, and then the man went into the cabin with the dog. Elijah had no sense of the time that passed, it could have been minutes or hours or days, but when the man and dog came out it was dark. Elijah had a queer sense that the dog was leading the man, directing him, the one in charge. In his arms, the man had a bundle of bones that he carried to the clearing near the cliff and tossed off. The splashes as they hit the water reminded Elijah of the many times he would sit at just that spot, with his legs dangling down, and toss rocks into the river rushing by below. It was time for him too, to follow the dog now, and so he fell in line behind the man and they walked.

  Part One

  In the Shadow of Death

  2018

  Chapter I

  Maybe, it was what she did for a living or maybe it was just who she was inside, but the reasons why she did the things she did, never seemed important to her, she didn’t really care. Sometimes, she thought herself a sociopath: unwilling to develop any lasting relationship, uncaring how many men she used, indifferent to planting anything that would generate roots. It was her work, she told herself, her dedication and devotion to solving the mysteries of these girls that occupied all her time, energy, and focus. Nights like this were a rarity and something that she saw as a diversion, a necessary psychological and physical outlet, it was nothing more than biology.

  Kimberly Watson was rarely the most beautiful woman in the room, but she had an animal magnetism that men were drawn to. Sometimes, the gun in her holster chased them away but more often than not, it drew them in, quicker and deeper. She had flowing auburn curls that danced on her shoulders and penetrating dark eyes that twinkled mischievously when she smiled: They could also rebuke without words when she was cross. She was tall at 5’9 and slim, with an athletic body that made you think she was a beach volleyball player or marathon runner but she was neither.

  If you asked her, she would tell you her nose was a little too big, her eyes just a bit too small and her cheekbones, well, they really didn’t show at all. Her deep V-neck sleeveless black sweater showed off most of her small breasts, the cleavage displayed to entice those brave enough to overlook the finely toned muscles of her biceps and shoulders, which the sweater likewise flaunted. This was where she shined, this was her thing. She was a moonflower, blooming once the sun went down. She took a sip of the chilled Tito’s and looked around the room from her perch at the bar, wondering if tonight she would do the choosing, or be chosen.

  She had graduated Quantico first in her class, perhaps first ever; first in academics, first in PT, first in marksmanship. Her IQ was a staggering 188 and if not for her penchant for doing exactly what she always thought best and damn the consequences, she would have been much farther along the chain of command, at least a Field Office SAC. Instead, she had bounced from the Philadelphia headquarters to the Springfield one in various posts far too simple for her elegant intelligence. Independence bred discomfort at the Bureau.

  Two years ago, she volunteered for an assignment in Milwaukee, working as a team of one, and had finally found a challenge that tested her relentlessly. She reported directly to the Executive Assistant Director for Criminal, Cyber, Response and Services Branch, two hops to the top man himself. She was the only Special Agent in the entire Bureau reporting directly to an EAD.

  Kimberly Watson had been orphaned at the age of eight and by the time she was twelve, had lived in four different foster homes. Kidnapped when she was thirteen and targeted for sale into the underground sex trade, she had been rescued and later adopted by an FBI agent, the woman she called mom. Mom had been a 44-year-old widow at the time, her FBI Agent husband was killed in the line of duty two years prior. Theirs had been a childless marriage by choice.

  Despite the good fortune of having landed in such a stable home, she never lost her fears and awoke most nights in a cold sweat fro
m nightmares of what her captors had made her do. Nevertheless, as time passed, mercifully, the nightmares waned, and her self-confidence began to outpace her doubts. Mom raised Kimberly to be equally strong in body and in mind and to be fiercely independent, just like her.

  As a result, the girl had grown into a woman of purpose, with strong convictions and unwavering self-confidence, two powerful personality traits that masked a childhood of horror and abuse. Like an oyster, she kept applying layers of pearl over the memories, her grain of sand, so that the outside looked strong and beautiful, while on the inside she was cold and hard; she trusted no one, needed no one. She had few friends and no lover had ever had her twice. Despite years of therapy, she could still only think of sex in terms of biological release, not emotional attraction.

  In her current position, she had access to all the databases maintained by the FBI and she was constantly searching for patterns and ties in a very specific group of unsolved cases. Her penchant for logic and her mathematically oriented mind gave her the ability to discern patterns where countless computer programs had failed. AI was great for sorting and categorizing the data but uncovering the connections between them sometimes required a leap of faith that computers were not willing to take. She had the freedom to follow unsubstantiated hunches and to flesh out curious coincidences. She was a rogue, working within the system, a contradiction in living color.