Lost Girls (8 page)

''About the lake.'' He sweeps his knuckles over his lips. ''They liked stories.''

''That's fine. But what I'm looking for here is a sequence of events starting, oh, I don't know, say, from the
beginning,
and going to the
end
. To your drive to the lake, if there
was
a drive to the lake.''

''A regular water rat, that's what my mother called me. I was such a good swimmer.''

''How about the girls? Were they good swimmers too?''

He presses his lips together so tightly, they disappear altogether except for the bloodless white crease they leave halfway between nose and chin.

''There's not much . . .''

''Not
what
?''

''. . . not much I can say without . . .''

Then the tears again, a splashing deluge that falls onto his face but affects no other part of his body. No shaking shoulders or trembling lips. It's as though they arrive on their own for reasons that are either unknown to him or so well known he has ceased to supplement them with any other expression.

''Please, Mr. Tripp,'' I say, pushing back the impatience rising in my voice. ''It's apparent that you're under a great deal of stress. But frankly so am I, and you're not helping very much. If I'm to act for you, there are some things I need to know. At the moment I don't have much: girls went missing on Thursday, May the twelfth; a fruitless search over the course of the following weeks; warrant issued for your apartment and car a couple weeks later that yielded cutout catalog pictures of girls in pajamas on your bedroom wall, muddy pants in the laundry hamper, muddy shoes at the door, and a few bloodstains in the backseat. Two months later you're under arrest. There's an
outline
of a story there, and certainly a whole number of potential
inferences,
but I think it needs some fleshing out, so to speak. Don't you?''

Sarcasm may not be the best approach under the circumstances, but the truth is I'm finding Tripp more recalcitrant than the usual. Clients are rarely forthcoming at first and even more rarely articulate, but if this guy's la-laland routine is as intentional as I suspect it is, I have to let him know I'm not convinced. So I sit for a time with pen poised over notepad and wait. Count to thirty in my head and wait some more, although I lower my eyes for the next thirty because I have the feeling that if I got into a staring match with this guy I'd lose. And in the end he wins anyway.

''Okay, Thom. Let's try just yes or no. Did you drive the girls
anywhere
that Thursday?''

''It's not me you want to ask.''

''There's nobody else to ask, is there?''

''They always told me what to do.''

''And they told you to drive them to Lake St. Christopher, is that it? They wanted to go?''

''I don't know what they wanted. I just . . .''

''Just took them there?''

''Always talking about it. 'What about the lake, Mr. Tripp?' Those two! 'Tell us about the lake.' I had a choice about it at first. And then after a while it didn't matter.''

His voice isn't a whisper, doesn't travel as whispers do, but is so soft I strain for every word.

''There are some things you can't fight, Mr. Crane.''

''By 'things' I take it you mean 'urges'?''

''I mean the will of others.''

''Are you telling me--are you
trying
to tell me that there's another party involved here? If so, I need you to tell me now. Give me a name.''

The tears have been stemmed once more, but Tripp's head now hangs down to meet his chest and his arms have fallen inward so that he takes up as little space as he can, as though he would pull his entire body up into himself and disappear if he could.

''Whoever it is, you can't help them now,'' I continue, keeping my voice even. ''It's time to think of yourself, Thomas. And I can help you--we can help each other--if you just give me a name.''

He wriggles his shoulders as though invisibly bound. An audible smacking of eyelids sounding out an unreadable code.

''Can you hear them?'' he whispers.

''I can hear you and me and an inmate barking for a smoke down the hall. What else are you referring to?''

''They change.''

''Change?''

''From one to another.''

''Well, that's the basic structure of conversation, isn't it? An exchange between more than--''

''They talk to
each other
.''

''Mr. Tripp. Are you trying to suggest to me your suitability for the defense of insanity? If this is your plan, you need not pretend with me. I'm your
lawyer
. It's essential that you realize we have shared interests. Now, if you prefer the idea of lifelong hospitalization to the possibility of lifelong incarceration, you just tell me how you'd like me to go about it, and we'll--''

''I can
hear
her!''

Tripp pulls himself up, leans across the table, and hisses this at me, his face a mask of goggle-eyed desperation. Hands gripping the edges of the table hard enough to turn his knuckles an instant white, shoulders braced as though in anticipation of a physical blow from behind. And now bigger than I thought, as though another, larger man were swelling within his skin. Pushing out bands of vein across his forehead, slithering pulses down his neck.

There's something about this new turn to his performance that gives me serious pause. An urgency I didn't recognize at first, a sharp edge that could cut through whatever lay before him. Fear. But a fear that could be translated into other extremes. And just as these possibilities begin to cloud together around him he retreats into the depths of his chair, his eyes returning to their usual appearance as two undercooked eggs.

''Her?'' I ask. ''And what 'her' would we be speaking of?''

''I don't care if you believe me.''

''Nor do I, Mr. Tripp.''

I stick my bare notepad back into my briefcase and rise to knock for the guard.

''I urge you to consider the seriousness of your situation,'' I say to his back from the safe distance of the door. ''Perhaps the next time we speak you'll have come to appreciate the fact that I'm on your side. That I'm the
only
one on your side.''

The guard's rubber soles squeaking down the hall to let me out.

''A strange one, I told ya,'' the leprechaun guard says as he walks me to the front doors, but seeing as I have to agree I end up not saying a word.

As I walk through the two hundred yards of downtown Murdoch to the Empire, I'm thinking that Tripp should count himself lucky to have the law on his side. Unless something nasty bobs to the surface of Lake St. Christopher over the next few weeks, there's still no evidence that anyone is dead. No bodies, no
actus reus,
no murder. And although I'd rather rely on a believable alibi to support a defense, a strong legal argument is still very nice, thank you. All the Crown's main facts are easily rebuttable, and each at the very least gives rise to a creamy dollop of reasonable doubt. Pictures of girls in undies ripped from the Sears catalog and pinned up on the accused's wall show a depraved loneliness and suspect libidinal preoccupations, but hardly murderous intent. And the bloodstains in Tripp's car--they could be anybody's. As for the muddy shoes and pants, you can't cross the street up here without treading through something soft and brown. Add it up and all you've got is circumstantial will-o'-the-wisps and nothing more. So what if Tripp is an uncoachable loony who'll bring about utter disaster if he ever gets within twenty feet of the stand? All I require is for Mr. Weird to sit there nice and quiet and keep the waterworks in check. We've got the law on our side.

How're you doing today?'' the concierge greets me as I step into the front hall. I squint over in the direction of the voice and find his slouching silhouette behind the desk, his teeth chipped piano keys in the dark.

''Is there something you want to tell me, or is that just your way of saying hello in the necessary form of a question?''

''Well, now you ask, I guess I'd say a little of both.''

''Then tell me.''

''Got a couple messages here I took for you over the phone.''

''Let's see them.''

''I'm not sure you're gonna--''

''Give me the fucking messages, if you don't mind.''

''Don't mind at all. Just that they weren't those kind of messages.''

I slide forward over the carpet until my shoes thud against the front of the desk.

''What kind were they?''

''Prankster stuff. Kids. Girls mostly, funny enough.''

''Hilarious.'' I lay the back of my hand down on the desk. ''So what'd they say? You write them down?''

''No, sir.''

''Why not?''

''Didn't ask for you in particular.''

''Why are you telling me, then?''

''People know who you are. Who you'd be working for.''

He says this without an edge of criticism. He says it without anything at all.

''Get names next time,'' I say. ''I'll lay charges.''

''For what?''

''Uttering threats.''

''I didn't say nothin' about threats.'' The skin of the concierge's head glows in the blue from the computer screen.

I step back to go up the stairs, but pause at the bottom.

''How many?''

''A good few.''

''Oh, yeah? Well, after this, don't bother letting--''

''Not a word.''

The concierge looks up at me and shakes his head blue black, blue black, across the line of shadow and light.

By the time I shut the door and glance out the window at the day's intestinal clouds I'm having doubts. Not about the thinness of the evidence against Thommy Boy, but about the soundness of the whole nobodies-no-murder thing. I
think
I remember some law school prof in a cheap suit (no help--they all wore cheap suits) stating that no murder conviction had ever been obtained in Canada without the evidentiary assistance of the victim's discovered remains. But the voice of Graham Lyle nevertheless singsongs through my head as it always does when the necessity of legal research raises its pernickety head:
My dear Barth, didn't your mother ever warn you about hanging
your hat on loose pegs?

So I pull out the laptop, hook up the modem to the phone beside the bed, and connect with the Canadian Criminal Database, through which every single reported case in the nation can be reviewed at a cost of $320 per on-line hour. A little dear, I suppose, but far handier than having to schlepp the firm's library up to this wasteland or call down to Toronto to have a paralegal pull together a memo that, in the end, is invariably wrong.

The afternoon gradually darkens in the space outside the computer's screen as I scroll and click through the cases summoned by my search terms, variously arranged:
homicide, remains, evidence,
actus reus,
discover(y)
. By the time I have to turn on the bedside lamp to see my fingers, it appears that my original assumption was correct. And then I come across
R
v.
Stark
. I read the whole decision before exhaling, a pain in my head like two birds pecking their way out at the temples.

The facts annoyingly similar to those at hand. A teenaged girl goes missing in rural northern Ontario and the police boil the suspects down to one Peter Stark, the father of one of the girl's school friends. He admits that he picked her up in town, but says he dropped her off at a gas station after he bought her lunch because she wanted to make a phone call. However, when Stark returned home at the end of the day his wife recalled his having mud and leaves stuck to his clothes. They never found the body before the trial, but the Crown proceeded against Stark anyway with little more than muddy jeans. Then he made his big mistake. In the court's holding cells just before the trial was to begin he bragged at length to the fellow who occupied the lower bunk about how he'd raped the girl and then used an ax on her afterward to ensure she wouldn't tell, and then dumped her somewhere in the middle of the Manvers Township swamp. Although he stuck to his gas-station drop-off story at trial and the police never managed to uncover the body, Stark was convicted and sentenced to life.

I close the laptop and fix my eyes on the halo of mist around the streetlight swaying outside the window. What does Mr. Stark have to say about the present case? Nothing good. But there's one fact missing in Tripp's situation that still clearly distinguishes his from Stark's: he hasn't confessed to anything. And so long as Tripp remains isolated in his bug-eyed state he isn't likely to reveal concrete details of the crime to his own lawyer, let alone the guy across the hall.

Nevertheless, there's one thing about today's discovery that is quite unavoidably bad: although they certainly help, it appears that bodies are not necessary to put a man away for murder after all.

The next morning finds my head buried in the complicated tunnels of my garment bag. I'm not feeling so hot. Not true--I'm in the grip of a death fever, I'm black leather in the sun, I'm a kettle boiled dry on the stove. And there it is, my home away from home tucked into the plastic bag designed for carrying shoes. Zip back the zipper and pull it up into my arms, give it a teary kiss as though a hard-won trophy. It even looks like a trophy: a silver thermos of burnished aluminum, roughly the size and shape of a nuclear warhead. Enough coke to entertain 150 movie producers and their dates for an entire night, a volume carrying a street value equal to an only slightly used Japanese sedan. Screw off the cap and spoon a line out onto the bedside table. Without sitting up I wrench my neck into an angle that enables me to accommodate the procedure, and with an efficient snuff (I
snort
only when drunk or subject to an especially monstrous craving, and almost never before noon) the day begins. Everything you need and then some. A witty conversation resumed within yourself, a Gene Kelly spring to the step, two inches added to your height. A nearly perfect simulation of what I can only assume to be hope, fluttering and shy in my chest.