Consumed (12 page)

“Nope.” Mark shook his head. “You’ve got that look of defiance on your face. I’ve seen that same look a million times. You have food in the fridge and no reason to go out, but somehow I know you will anyway. I’m not risking you being stupid. Cough up the keys.”

Richard said nothing.

“Keys! Now! I don’t have time for this shit!” Mark dug his palms into his eyes.

Richard reached into the pocket of his jeans, pulled out his car keys, and tossed them onto the coffee table—he had another set in the kitchen drawer beside the silverware.

“Where are the spares?” his brother asked.

“Whatever,” Richard said.

“Where is the spare set?”

“Don’t have one.”

“Bullshit. I’m not that stupid.”

Richard rolled his head to the side. “Fine. They’re next to the silverware in the drawer by the sink.”

Mark scooped the keys from the coffee table and jammed them into his pocket. Then he disappeared from the living room. Richard could hear his brother opening the drawer in the kitchen and taking the spare keys.

Mark returned to Richard. “I’ll stop by tonight or tomorrow to check in on you. Clean this place up.”

“Mmm hmm,” Richard said.

Mark left the living room. Richard heard the screen door open and then bang shut in the kitchen. He stood and went to the back bedroom, fished through his sock drawer, and pulled out another spare key for the truck. He went back to the living room to look out the window and watch his brother leave. Mark got into his sheriff’s SUV and pulled out.

Richard walked to the basement door, opened it, and went down. He grabbed his mother and carried her back upstairs.

“Did Mark just leave?”

“Yeah,” Richard said.

“What did he want?” he heard his mother ask.

“He came to boss me around like usual. One of these days, he’s going to get it.” Richard set her on the couch and spread the window blinds with his fingers to make sure Mark was gone. “I’m going to gut him.”

“You don’t talk like that about your brother. He knows what’s best.”

“He doesn’t know shit,” Richard said. “Come into my house and order me around… I’ll show him.” He looked at the truck key in his hand and smiled.

We watched the range of emotions take over the woman, spending the better part of fifteen minutes watching her quietly as she cried. Neither Beth, Tom, nor I had yet to hear who the woman in the photo was. That question needed to be asked. Even though the woman was grieving in front of us, we needed to know who the woman in the photo was, what her relationship was to the crying girl called Roxy, and what information Roxy could provide us.

I cleared my throat. “Miss, what was your relation with this woman?” I asked.

Roxy choked away tears. Her bottom lip quivered. “She was my little sister.”

“Biological?” Beth asked.

Roxy nodded.

“What was her name?” Tom asked.

“Annie. Annie Darden.”

I pulled my notepad from my pocket and wrote the name down. “Did she work with you here?”

Roxy sniffed and shook her head. “I haven’t seen her in a few months. What… What happened?”

I couldn’t come up with the right words to tell her that her sister had been stabbed countless times, had her throat cut, and been dismembered, so I said nothing. Beth took the other photos of the woman and went to Roxy’s side. She said a few words quietly to Roxy and walked the girl to the far side of the lobby, where the two sat. Tom and I looked on as Beth seemed to be both equally consoling the woman as well as questioning her.

I looked at Mr. Spieth, still sitting on the bench. “Can you tell us anything about this Annie Darden?”

He shrugged. “She used to work here. We had to let her go about three months ago. She started coming in in pretty rough shape.”

“Define ‘rough shape’ for me?” I asked.

“Meth,” he said.

“Anything else?” Tom asked. “Know where she went prior to leaving here?”

“Don’t know. We don’t keep tabs on the women when they leave. If they get themselves cleaned up, well, we might bring them back to be masseurs, but that rarely happens. I just have to say, again, we run a legal operation here. There is zero prostitution on these premises.”

“Yeah, you’ve made that real clear,” I said. “What can you tell us about girls going missing? Ever hear anything like that?”

“Girls come and go,” he said. “No one sticks around forever. Most of our masseurs here have been in our employment for a while.”

“Nothing as far as multiple girls leaving with a John and not being heard from after?” Tom asked.

“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Spieth said. “That’s not what we do here.”

I nodded. The guy wasn’t going to give us anything.

“Did you guys need anything else? Otherwise, I’m going to need to get back to doing the books.”

“No. We’ll be out of here as soon as Agent Harper and the woman here are finished,” I said.

He pursed his lips, nodded quickly, and disappeared into the back. I looked over to see Beth handing a business card to the woman named Roxy, who took it and walked past us, looking down. We left through the front doors with Beth. The three of us rounded the corner and stopped at our cars along the curb.

“She tell you anything, Beth?” I asked.

“A bit. Her sister, Annie, was younger by three years, making her twenty-three. She had a drug problem and worked the streets down on Murfreesboro Pike.”

“Second time we’ve heard about that area,” Tom said. “Could be our guy’s hunting ground. Should we go check it out?”

I glanced at the time—right around three o’clock. The chances of finding girls walking the street that early in the day was slim, and I still wanted to get over to the other massage parlor and the Medical Science building. I looked at Beth. “Did you want to try to do that later tonight? Ten or eleven or so? Probably our best chance of getting girls on the street to talk to.”

“That’s fine,” Beth said.

“Did you guys want me with?” Tom asked.

“Up to you. I know we’re an hour or so away from you. I’m sure the two of us can handle it. I guess I don’t really know what you have for a home life. Wife and kids probably wouldn’t be too jazzed with you spending all night walking the street, looking to talk to hookers.”

“Just a girlfriend and a pair of dogs. They won’t mind if you need me. I can shoot home for a bit and meet you guys somewhere later.”

“We’ll let you make the call,” I said.

“Sure,” he said.

“Okay. I’ll make a couple of calls and get what we can on this Annie Darden while we’re driving to this next parlor here.” I looked at Beth. “How far is the next one?”

“Hold on. I’m bringing it up on my phone.” Beth paused for a minute. “Nine miles north. From there, it’s just a quick ride over to the Medical Science building,” she said.

“All right, I’ll follow you guys,” Tom said.

The three of us got in our cars and headed out—the navigation said our drive was going to take us just under twenty minutes, cutting through the city.

I dialed Ball back in Manassas. He answered on the second ring.

“Ball,” he said.

“Hey, it’s Hank.”

“We’re still working on finding anything here on your Owen Matheson’s family. Looks kind of like they fell off the face of the earth. The twins are on it, though. Hopefully they get something.”

“Well, keep me updated. I need you to grab a sheet plus anything else you guys can come up with on a name and e-mail it over to my phone.”

“Sure, what’s the name?”

“Annie Darden,” I said.

“Is Annie short for something?” Ball asked. “Roseanne, Annebelle?”

“One second.” I cupped the mouthpiece of the phone and asked Beth, who said the name was just Annie. “I guess it’s just Annie,” I said.

“Address, DL number, social, anything else?” Ball asked.

“Hold on.” I cupped the mouthpiece again. “Beth, you get anything else from her? Address, DOB, social, anything?”

Beth pulled her notepad from her pocket, held the steering wheel with one knee, and flipped to the page. She handed me the notepad.

I brought the phone back to my mouth. “Okay, ready?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Ball said.

I rattled off the girl’s DOB and last-known address—Beth had gotten a street but not a house number. Ball said he would get everything e-mailed over as soon as he could. I thanked him, clicked off from the call, and handed Beth her notepad back. “He’s going to e-mail over whatever he finds.”

Beth nodded and continued driving north.

We pulled onto the street that The Geisha was located on and then into the parking lot of the strip mall where Beth’s navigation told us the business resided. We found the white sign for The Geisha at the end unit of the long, single-story complex. Beth parked our rental, and we stepped out. Tom pulled in beside us, parked, and got out.

“This is the place, huh?” he asked.

I looked over at the single-story tan building. It had a peaked red roof with faux dormer windows above the businesses. Each business’s sign had the same style, brown with white lettering in the same font though each sign advertised that individual business. I looked left to right—a pizza place, a laundromat, a liquor store with bars on the windows, and The Geisha taking up the end. The Geisha had two large glass windows with what looked like soap lettering advertising full-body massages, foot massages, Asian massages, and the like. Beth, Tom, and I walked across the parking lot to the front doors. The neon Open sign hanging above the door wasn’t lit. The lights inside were off. I pulled the front door’s handle—locked. Their hours, listed on several stickers, were noon to nine o’clock, every day of the week.

The time of day was too late for a company lunch, and I had a hunch that they would still be open, minus a phone call from the other parlor.

“Supposed to be open,” Tom said.

“Yeah, supposed to be,” I said.

“Think the other place called over here and told them to close up shop?” Beth asked.

“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” I said.

I cupped my hands over a window and looked in but didn’t see anyone inside. Tom banged his knuckles on the glass door beside me. We waited—no one came.

“Let’s take a quick walk around the back,” Beth said.

I nodded, and the three of us rounded the building. The back of the strip mall came into view as we made a left at the corner. A bunch of cars were parked behind the place—directly behind the massage parlor were two late-nineties economy cars and a shiny new black Lexus. We walked to the green metal back door of the business and banged on it—still, no one came.

“What do you think?” Tom asked.

“I think there are probably ten people or more inside, waiting on us to leave.”

“What do you want to do?” he asked.

“Ah, screw it. I think we got about as much as we needed from the first place. I’m not really up for waiting people out, especially people that probably have been strictly informed to not give us anything. What do you think?” I looked at Beth.

“I’m fine with leaving. Like you said, even if we wait them out, I’d say our chances of getting anything out of anyone are slim.”

“Okay, let’s roll,” I said. “On to the Medical Science building.”

I got nods from both Beth and Tom.

We headed back around the building and got into our cars.

The stop at the Medical Science Building was brief. Dave had found multiple samples of blood on each woman. Some of the samples he just described as older. It led him to believe that the women were either being killed or dismembered in the same spot without the location having been cleaned. He said he would need at least a day to sort through what he’d collected. Tom had headed back to his house a few hours prior, but he was going to return and meet Beth and me at our hotel within the hour to head down to Murfreesboro Pike and see if we could get any information from some of the women for hire. The time was pushing ten o’clock. My last four hours had been consumed with Beth and me grabbing a bite to eat, a conversation with Karen, another conversation with Ball, and Beth and me trying to make heads or tails of everything we’d gotten so far on the investigation. The latest body dumps were added to the map we’d been creating—I also added the names of the victims. It still wasn’t telling us much, other than the area south of Clarksville and the town itself were still free of remains. Going to each individual site was still on my list of to-dos.

The sheets I’d gotten from Ball had been printed off from my e-mail a half hour prior. The girl, Annie Darden, had quite a bit of a rap sheet for being only twenty-three—four or five arrests for solicitation and a number of drug-related offenses. Beth had informed me that Roxy, the sister, was to call her the following day and schedule something for a full interview.

Someone knocked on the hotel-room door.

“That’s probably Tom,” Beth said.

I stood from the lounge chair near the window and walked over. After a quick look out the peephole, I opened the door. Tom entered.

I looked over at Beth. “Are you ready to go?”

“Yeah, one second,” she said. Beth finished putting together a file of photos that she wanted to bring with when we spoke with people. She stood from the lime-green office chair and tucked the folder under her arm. “Ready.”

Beth and I left the hotel and rode with Tom the ten minutes to the area I had written down—Murfreesboro Pike, between Plus Park Boulevard and Wilhagan Road. The street was two lanes in each direction with a grass median. I looked left and right. Most of the businesses took up the right side of the road with just a few scattered on the left—what wasn’t cleared for businesses on our left was mostly trees and underbrush. All the buildings in view looked a bit rough. A few older hotels and motels stood pushed back behind the immediate roadside businesses.

“Do we want to park somewhere, or what?” Tom asked.

We passed a car dealership on our right—the place was small, and every car behind the barbwire fence seemed to be four thousand dollars or less, judging by the neon-green price stickers on the windshields.

“Um, keep going for a mile or so, and then we’ll find someplace to kind of observe for a little bit,” I said.