Molly Brown - Tommy Connell Mystery #2
Tommy Connell’s playing with the bad guys again, but this time the rules have changed...and he still hasn’t learned to play nice!
Connell’s keeping the wolf from the door, routing out bad cops for his buddy Gerry Gesting. He’s handed in his badge, turned his back on all that crap, but...
When a weird little kid disappears into the night and no one gives a damn including the cops, he reckons that maybe someone should take another look.
The good cops are busy hunting down a serial killer...good.
The bad cops are busy hunting down Connell...not so good.
The serial killer, well he’s looking for victim number twelve, which is... definitely not good.
And little Molly Brown is about to throw an almighty spanner in the works.
Connell’s dabbling in things that he shouldn’t and it’s not the first time...
Available here:
Amazon UK
Amazon.com
Read the first chapter here
Chapter One
The child’s bedroom sat at the end of the hall, where the draft from the badly fitting front door and the smell from the filthy bathroom mingled, filling the tiny space and creating an odor of neglect.
To call it a room was an exaggeration. It was little more than a closet. If he’d stretched out his arms he could have touched each wall with ease. The ancient floral wallpaper was peeling, there was a growing pool of water around the decaying window frame, and a patch of black mold was flourishing like an indoor garden. Connell inhaled. He could almost feel the microscopic particles invading his lungs.
Within the miniscule space, a neatly made bed squeezed itself against the wall. The worn, patchwork comforter was tightly tucked between the sagging mattress and frame. The stained pillow still bore the imprint of a small head. A badly painted closet half-blocked the tiny window, its door hanging from one hinge. Despite the lack of curtains, the room was dim, the morning sun struggling to make it through the grimy glass. He tried the light switch, and glancing up, realized the futility. An empty wire hung where the bulb should be.
The little space left was occupied by books, a whole bunch of books. Connell picked his way carefully between neat piles stacked knee-high on the wooden floor, unwilling to disturb the arrangement. There was method to it, though he couldn’t quite grasp what it was. It took conscious thought to create order, and he needed to understand the order, because he needed to understand the mind that had arranged this sad tiny room.
He pulled open the closet door. There wasn’t much in it: a child’s winter coat with sleeves that had been let down, two pairs of jeans with holes in the knees and a selection of faded t-shirts. A shoe box on the floor held rolled up graying socks that had started life white. A pair of black school shoes lay neatly by the box, dusty and scuffed. He checked the size. They weren’t much bigger than his son, Joe’s, and Joe was a little kid.
Squatting down by the side of the bed, he gently pulled back the cover. The sheet beneath was dirty, hadn’t been washed recently and gave off a sour odor. He lifted the pillow, found pink pajamas, similarly unclean and worn out, but folded neatly nevertheless. He sighed and felt an immense sadness deep inside. A child should be cherished. This child obviously was not.
Carefully wrapped inside the pajamas was a dog-eared paperback book - The Wizard of Oz. His sadness was joined by an inexplicable stirring of unease, as if something very strange and very bad had just whispered cold breath against his skin. Connell gave himself a shake. He was giving himself the creeps.
He stood and glanced around. For a ten year old, she was an advanced reader. Some of these books were pretty large and all seemed well read. There were no toys. No mess, just books. How many books could a kid read? Judging by how many were crammed into the room, she must have read a book a week since she first learned how. This kid was starting to look a little odd.
Picking up the paperback, Connell opened it where it was marked by a homemade bookmark. Dorothy had just met the cowardly lion. He wondered briefly if that was significant, then discarded the book and studied the strip of card. She’d written her name in elaborate script, colored it brightly with magic markers and edged the card with silver glitter. On the back she’d printed her name and address in small, neat, even letters and after her name, in brackets, she’d noted her age ten and one quarter. He smiled. He remembered being eight and a half. The half had been very important. He’d been four years behind his brother, couldn’t understand at the time how he would ever catch up. Maybe this kid wasn’t odd, maybe she just liked make believe. He got that. Sometimes the real world was all too real.
He replaced the bookmark and slipped the book inside his jacket. Stuffing his hands into the pockets of his pants, he stood in the center of the sad little room and wondered. The local cops had been and gone; he knew because he’d sat outside in his car and waited for them to leave. They’d taken their statements and made up their minds and he’d a good idea what they’d thought when they’d seen the room. This whole situation was strange and a little weird. Ten year old girls didn’t just walk out the door and disappear, not without a very good reason.
Catching a whiff of stale, sickly-sweet perfume he turned slowly and realized he wasn’t alone. The girl who hovered in the doorway was maybe fifteen or sixteen and trying to look older. Last night’s makeup overdone. Lashes clogged together, lip stick smeared comically and hair tousled. With a too short skirt, and a too low neckline, she attempted a ridiculously provocative pose.
“Hiya,” she slurred. “Who the hell are you?” She blinked slowly, eyelids heavy, more than a little hung over.
“One of the good guys,” replied Connell. He weighed her up and swallowed his dismay. Here was a kid headed for trouble.
“Oh yeah, we’re pretty short on good guys in this neighborhood. Why are you here?”
He shrugged, held her gaze and asked himself the same question. “Why do you think?”
“The cops have been and gone. They didn’t find anything. There was nothing to find.” She blinked again even more slowly than before and he thought for a moment that her eyes weren’t going to re-open, that she’d fallen asleep in the doorway. He was about to reach out and prod her awake, when she pulled herself back with a start and remembered he was there. “You need to get out and look for her. She’s not here. She’s not hiding under the bed.”
Good point. He should have looked there first, and would have done if she hadn’t interrupted him. “Does she do that often?” he asked, and the girl raised a quizzical brow and stifled a yawn. So, he was keeping her up - tough; she wasn’t the only one who’d had a rough night.
“Huh ... do what?”
“Hide?”
She was a little slow on the uptake. Her pupils were dilated and her movements deliberate and exaggerated. She scowled at him. He recognized teenage attitude when he saw it, along with the scent of marijuana.
“No, she didn’t. She’d no reason to hide. I told the cops all this already.”
“Maybe you did, but I’m not the cops.” Not exactly, anyway, but it was too complicated to explain to a kid with mush for brains. “I’m just here to help find your sister. You can help me by telling me about the last time you saw her.” Which again, wasn’t entirely true - he was supposed to be checking up on the cops, not the kid, but something wasn’t quite right here and he’d sensed it the minute he’d stepped in the room.
“I just got done telling the cops.”
“You said that already.”
“So why repeat myself?”
Tommy Connell smiled and settled down for the long haul. It seemed it was his lot in life to always get the ones who had something to hide? “Humor me, kiddo, we’re on the same side.” He gestured with a sweeping hand to the interior of the small room. “Why all the books?”
“She likes to read.”
“No kidding. What about friends?”
“Molly doesn’t have friends, not regular ones, anyway.”
A ten year old without friends, now that was odd. His own little guy Joe was only six, but he had friends and fellow junior trouble makers by the dozens if the sound level at his last birthday party was an indicator.
“Why not?”
The girl gave a noncommittal shrug and the movement caused her to overbalance slightly on her stiletto heels. She attempted to correct the wobble by shuffling her feet and leaning heavily against the door frame. She was wasted. Maybe that was why the child’s disappearance hadn’t been reported sooner. Connell bit back a sharp comment. She was a kid. Kids did stupid things. He remembered doing plenty when he was her age. Difference was, he’d never mislaid a sibling while he was busy doing it.
“I dunno,” she said finally. “She’s not the friendly type. She doesn’t mix. The other kids think she’s weird.”
“Weird?”
“Yeah ... you know ...” She crossed her eyes and tapped at her own head. “Crazy. They’re scared of her and it doesn’t help that she stinks.” She wrinkled her nose to add weight to her words.
Connell narrowed his eyes. Okay, maybe she was a little odd. Who was he to judge, he’d never met the girl. But if the poor little kid smelled bad it was because she slept in a dirty bed and nobody cared enough to make sure her clothes were clean. “You don’t have a washing machine?”
“Huh?”
He shook his head. He was wasting his time. “What about you, do you think she’s weird?” He was starting to think this whole setup was off-center. The parents were out of town, they’d left their ten year old in the care of a spaced-out teenager and hadn’t even come home when their daughter disappeared. Maybe this wasn’t unusual. Maybe little Molly regularly slipped on her sneakers and sneaked out the door.
“She’s my little sister. Of course I think she’s a freak.”
Okay, so that was a pretty normal answer. He was a little brother himself and his brother, Will, still thought that he was from another planet. Maybe he was. He’d done some pretty crazy stuff in his time. “You were the last person to see her. You need to tell me what happened.”
She stuck out her chin belligerently. “I already told the cops everything I know.”
Connell took a step towards her. He really didn’t have the time or the energy to negotiate the twists and turns of the teenage psyche. He’d just pulled an unpleasant all-nighter, following up on a pair of low-rent cops who thought it was cool to play around with the law to their own advantage. Connell didn’t agree with their philosophy and he didn’t much like all-nighters. Maybe it was time to up the ante.
“Okay. So, you’re a little distracted this morning, but just to keep you focused, here’s the deal, Lydia. It is Lydia, isn’t it? You tell me what you argued about with your sis, you tell me what made that little girl run off into the night, or I’ll haul your ass downtown and book you for possession.”
“I thought you weren’t a cop,” she replied slyly, obviously unfazed by his threat.
“I can still make things happen that you might not enjoy.” He narrowed his eyes, gave her his don’t-mess-with-me look, which was a slightly censored version of his usual look. She was still a kid after all.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she exclaimed with exaggerated annoyance, but she took a hesitant step back nevertheless.
Everything about her behavior was over-the-top and Connell found it irritating. He’d also had about enough of it. “Fine, have it your way. Which is your room? You got your stash under your pillow?” He watched as she weighed him up slowly, realized he wasn’t kidding around and was immune to any feminine charms she might have imagined she possessed. He made to brush past her in the narrow doorway and she caught at his sleeve and stopped him.
“Okay ... okay, chill out. What’s the big deal? You never smoked a little?”
He was starting to feel old and he was barely thirty. He looked pointedly at her hand on his arm and she removed it with a dramatic sigh.
“Okay, so we had a fight ... I mean I yelled at her a little bit but Molly doesn’t argue. Molly doesn’t fight back. Molly doesn’t do much of anything really.” She pulled a joint out of her pocket and stuck it between her lips. “Got a light?”
Connell shook his head in weary disbelief, pulled the weed from her mouth and dropped it to the floor, grinding it beneath his shoe.
“Hey, I had to pay for that,” she whined.
“You were telling me about Molly.”
She shrugged. “She’s a pain, always hanging around bugging me. We told her to get lost. We didn’t mean it literally but Molly takes everything literally. She sees things as black and white, right and wrong, good and evil, nothing in between. It’s all the reading she does, it’s messed with her head.”
Oh yeah, somebody’s head was definitely messed, but standing there listening to Lydia’s explanations, Connell wasn’t entirely convinced it was little Molly’s.
“She believes real life is the same as in her books - every story has a happy ending,” continued Lydia. “But life’s not like that, is it?”
It was a long speech with a measure of malice mixed in. She had issues with her baby sister. She’d also said ‘we’ not ‘I’.
“So what did you say to her?” Connell asked.
“Does it matter?”
“I think you know it does. We’ve got a little girl who’s been missing over twenty four hours. Everything matters.”
Lydia hesitated, bravado and fear warring for position on her pinched face. Suddenly she stopped trying to look older and looked very young. Connell cocked his head and decided to cut her a little slack.
“Look, you’re not in trouble. You want to fry your brain with drugs? Go ahead, knock yourself out. You want to have underage sex with your boyfriend? None of my business. I just need to know what was in your sister’s head when she left. Whether she intended to take off and maybe hide out to give everyone a scare, or whether someone else is involved.”
The girl pulled herself together and gave a final see-if-I-care shrug. “Who said I’m underage?” she said slowly and gave him a half-hearted come on.
Connell ignored it. “So she caught you with some boy and was going to tell Mom?”
“Not exactly.”
“So tell me, exactly.”
The girl looked away, and though he couldn’t be sure, Connell thought she was blinking back tears. Her eyes were clear when she turned back.
“She wasn’t supposed to come out of her room. I told her not to - not when I had company.” She paused, dropping her gaze to her feet. “She’s only little ... in here.” She tapped at her head. “Like I said, weird. She’s not exactly sociable, gets scared at loud noises and crowds. I was going to have people over and have some fun, smoke a little, mess around a little, you know. Like I said, she was supposed to stay in her room and out of my way.”
“But she didn’t?” Connell was starting to see the picture and didn’t much like it.
“No, she didn’t. The battery in her flashlight died, she couldn’t read her book. She came in to ask for another - like I carry a package of batteries around with me.”
“And?”
“And she kinda interrupted us.” She gave him a knowing look and he ignored it. She was a child pretending to be a grown up. He found the whole situation disturbing. “She just stood there ... staring ... like she does, and Terry got mad and shouted at her. Scared her, I guess.”
“Terry?”
“Yeah.” She checked her pockets, seemed to realize he’d destroyed her last joint and crossed her arms nervously across her chest.
“Who’s Terry?”
“Just a guy.”
Just a guy - a guy who got off on scaring little girls. Connell didn’t much like guys who scared girls, no matter what how little they were. “How old is this guy?”
“Huh?”
“How old is your boyfriend?” This was hard work. He bit at the inside of his cheek to sharpen his focus and to stop him from snapping back at her.
She shook her head. “I’m not sure. He’s older than me.”
“You’re not sure? Well, does he go to school, college? Does he work?”
“I dunno.”
Connell sighed. She didn’t know much about the guy she’d brought home. “Where does he live?”
“I dunno.”
“You don’t know much.”
“Whatever ...” she replied, bored again.
“Did you know him before you brought him home?”
“No. I’d seen him before, around the bar, but I didn’t know him.”
She had the grace to look a little shamefaced and Connell wondered if she had any idea how dangerous the game she was playing actually was. Maybe he should take the time to explain. He checked his watch. Time was something he was short of and he doubted she would appreciate it anyway. He took a breath.
“So let me get this straight: your mom and dad are out of town, you decide to have a party and you go out and score drugs. You pick up some strange guy in a bar you shouldn’t be in, in the first place because you’re underage, then you bring him home and score a little action while your little sister sits in the dark alone in her room.”
She hung her head, studied the cracked patent leather on her shoes and the chipped polish on her toe nails. “I guess.”
“Pretty shitty, huh?”
“I guess.”
He was glad she thought so, even if it was in hindsight.
“What did this Terry guy say to her when she caught him with his pants down?”
She stifled a quick smile. Connell didn’t share the humor.
The smirk disappeared as quickly as it came. “He wasn’t very nice.”
“He wasn’t very nice,” repeated Connell, slowly. What was she doing with guys that weren’t very nice? He wanted to shake her but reckoned shaking wasn’t very nice either. “What did he say?”
She shot him a glance and looked away again, to compose herself maybe? He wondered if she was actually as wrecked as she made out or whether it was an act she was hiding behind.
“Terry told her she was a little freak and he’d burn her books and slit her throat if she didn’t disappear.”
Definitely not nice. “And do you think he would’ve?”
“Would’ve what?”
“Slit her throat.”
She shook her head. “Come on. It’s just something you say when you’re mad, isn’t it?”
Oh sure, maybe in the world according to Lydia Brown, but not in any world he knew. He recalled wryly the times when Joe had interrupted him at an inopportune moment. That little guy had built-in radar but slitting of throats didn’t come into it. “How’d he know about the books?”
“Huh?”
“How did he know about the books? Did he go into her room?”
She shrugged. “I dunno, I guess so ... I was pretty whacked out.”
Connell started counting back in his head and tried to remain calm. He wasn’t sure whether his alarm bells were ringing because she was hiding something or simply because the whole situation stank.
“Did Terry stay all night? Was he still here when you noticed that Molly had gone?”
“I don’t know what time it was when he left. When he was done, I guess. I was high. It was about lunchtime when I realized she’d gone, and I gave her till dinner to come home. When it started to get dark, I began to get a little worried because Molly doesn’t like the dark.”
She didn’t like the dark and yet there wasn’t even a light bulb in her excuse for a room. God, he knew deep down this could only get worse. He just didn’t want to think about it.
He thought instead of Lizzie and the feel of her warm restraining hand on his arm. He needed her, but maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to think of the love of his life when he was caught up in a case and hadn’t been home in four days.
He returned his attention to Lydia. “What about the other guests?”
“There were no other guests.”
“Some party ...”
She pulled a face. “We had fun.”
Oh sure, so much fun that she couldn’t remember any of it. “You didn’t call your folks?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
She shrugged again, a little sadly this time. “Because I don’t know where they are.”
Well that didn’t surprise him; she didn’t know much at all.
So, that was last night and Molly had probably been gone twelve hours already by then. He added it up in his head, whichever way you looked at it, that little girl had been gone a long time.
“You phoned the cops and they came straight over?”
“No,” she replied in a voice that suggested she thought he was as stupid as her crazy little sister. “They came this morning, said they’d look out for her, and to let them know if she turned up.”
Connell had sat outside in his car and watched them leave. He’d assumed it was a return visit, hadn’t realized it was the first response. “They weren’t worried?” Since when did cops think it wasn’t a big deal when a child went missing?
“Kids go missing, most of them come home ... that’s what they said. Maybe there was a game on, or a sale at Dunkin Donuts. They were in a hurry.”
Oh yeah, they’d be in a hurry when he caught up with them. “Did you tell them about Terry?”
She avoided his gaze. “They didn’t ask.”
He glanced back at the pathetic little room and thought of the child who’d slept in that bed, imagined how she must have felt curled up under thin dirty covers with no light and no comfort. He couldn’t bear the thought of Joe in similar circumstances.
But that wasn’t why he was there or what he was getting paid for. He should just leave it to the locals and back off, but he’d never been very good at backing off, even when he’d been told to.
He turned back to the girl with a sigh. “Have you been smoking today?”
“Some.”
“You need to stop now. You need to get your head in gear and go get cleaned up. You need to be ready when your sister comes home. Is there someone who can stay with you until your parents come back?”
“I’m doing okay on my own.”
Connell looked her up and down and shook his head sadly. “No, kiddo, you’re not. You let strange guys into your home. Think about it, you let me walk in off the street and you still haven’t asked for ID. Strange guys have a habit of doing strange things and they usually won’t be good things. How long have your parents been gone?”
She shrugged, looked away and he realized they weren’t on a trip. They’d been gone for some time and Lydia had been playing mommy, unsuccessfully as it turned out. “Who’s been paying the rent?” he asked, though he already knew the answer.
“I have,” she answered with a defiant glare.
“For how long?” Maybe Lydia wasn’t putting on an act. Maybe she had to be stoned to do what she’d been doing.
“I don’t know, weeks, months, maybe two months.”
Two months! What’d they do, go out to the store for cigarettes and forget to come back? Okay, so it wasn’t uncommon for guys to run off and leave their women, or ladies to take off on their men, but it was unusual for both to walk out the door without saying goodbye to their kids.
“They happen to mention where they were going?” asked Connell and she answered with a shake of her head. “… or when they’d be back?”
“They left in a hurry. I guess they’d had enough of her too.”
“Enough of whom?”
“The Bookworm, who else?”
“And what did Molly think about it?” She was a kid. Her mom and dad had disappeared and her sister was probably a whore. He was getting a bad feeling about this whole situation.
“Molly doesn’t say much. Like I said, she reads a lot.”
“But she does understand that they’ve gone?”
“Who knows? She doesn’t exactly sit around making small talk.”
“Do you think she may have gone to look for them?” It was a possibility but the thought of a little kid wandering around the city, looking for her parents, did things to his gut that hurt.
“I doubt it. We’re better off without them.” Lydia reached down, and with one hand securing her to the door frame, she undid her shoes, slipped them off and shrunk by four inches and a couple of years.
“Why? Because they’re bad parents or because they walked out on you?”
“Both.”
Connell acknowledged that she was right. Good parents didn’t walk out on their kids. Of course that was supposing they had walked out and weren’t currently laying unclaimed in a drawer at the morgue.
He shot a final glance at the little room. “Where do you think she is?”
The girl cocked her head and gave a sad smile. “Well that’s pretty obvious ... she’s off to see the wizard.”
“Huh?”
“Haven’t you been paying attention? Didn’t you notice?” She gestured to the books. “Some cop you are ...”
“I told you already, I’m not a cop. What should I have noticed?”
“They’re all the same shitty story.” She tapped her head again. “Don’t you get it? Molly lives in a world of her own. Molly lives in the wonderful world of Oz. She’s off to see the Wizard.”
........................................................................................................................
Tommy Connell’s playing with the bad guys again, but this time the rules have changed...and he still hasn’t learned to play nice!
Connell’s keeping the wolf from the door, routing out bad cops for his buddy Gerry Gesting. He’s handed in his badge, turned his back on all that crap, but...
When a weird little kid disappears into the night and no one gives a damn including the cops, he reckons that maybe someone should take another look.
The good cops are busy hunting down a serial killer...good.
The bad cops are busy hunting down Connell...not so good.
The serial killer, well he’s looking for victim number twelve, which is... definitely not good.
And little Molly Brown is about to throw an almighty spanner in the works.
Connell’s dabbling in things that he shouldn’t and it’s not the first time...
Available here:
Amazon UK
Amazon.com
Read the first chapter here
Chapter One
The child’s bedroom sat at the end of the hall, where the draft from the badly fitting front door and the smell from the filthy bathroom mingled, filling the tiny space and creating an odor of neglect.
To call it a room was an exaggeration. It was little more than a closet. If he’d stretched out his arms he could have touched each wall with ease. The ancient floral wallpaper was peeling, there was a growing pool of water around the decaying window frame, and a patch of black mold was flourishing like an indoor garden. Connell inhaled. He could almost feel the microscopic particles invading his lungs.
Within the miniscule space, a neatly made bed squeezed itself against the wall. The worn, patchwork comforter was tightly tucked between the sagging mattress and frame. The stained pillow still bore the imprint of a small head. A badly painted closet half-blocked the tiny window, its door hanging from one hinge. Despite the lack of curtains, the room was dim, the morning sun struggling to make it through the grimy glass. He tried the light switch, and glancing up, realized the futility. An empty wire hung where the bulb should be.
The little space left was occupied by books, a whole bunch of books. Connell picked his way carefully between neat piles stacked knee-high on the wooden floor, unwilling to disturb the arrangement. There was method to it, though he couldn’t quite grasp what it was. It took conscious thought to create order, and he needed to understand the order, because he needed to understand the mind that had arranged this sad tiny room.
He pulled open the closet door. There wasn’t much in it: a child’s winter coat with sleeves that had been let down, two pairs of jeans with holes in the knees and a selection of faded t-shirts. A shoe box on the floor held rolled up graying socks that had started life white. A pair of black school shoes lay neatly by the box, dusty and scuffed. He checked the size. They weren’t much bigger than his son, Joe’s, and Joe was a little kid.
Squatting down by the side of the bed, he gently pulled back the cover. The sheet beneath was dirty, hadn’t been washed recently and gave off a sour odor. He lifted the pillow, found pink pajamas, similarly unclean and worn out, but folded neatly nevertheless. He sighed and felt an immense sadness deep inside. A child should be cherished. This child obviously was not.
Carefully wrapped inside the pajamas was a dog-eared paperback book - The Wizard of Oz. His sadness was joined by an inexplicable stirring of unease, as if something very strange and very bad had just whispered cold breath against his skin. Connell gave himself a shake. He was giving himself the creeps.
He stood and glanced around. For a ten year old, she was an advanced reader. Some of these books were pretty large and all seemed well read. There were no toys. No mess, just books. How many books could a kid read? Judging by how many were crammed into the room, she must have read a book a week since she first learned how. This kid was starting to look a little odd.
Picking up the paperback, Connell opened it where it was marked by a homemade bookmark. Dorothy had just met the cowardly lion. He wondered briefly if that was significant, then discarded the book and studied the strip of card. She’d written her name in elaborate script, colored it brightly with magic markers and edged the card with silver glitter. On the back she’d printed her name and address in small, neat, even letters and after her name, in brackets, she’d noted her age ten and one quarter. He smiled. He remembered being eight and a half. The half had been very important. He’d been four years behind his brother, couldn’t understand at the time how he would ever catch up. Maybe this kid wasn’t odd, maybe she just liked make believe. He got that. Sometimes the real world was all too real.
He replaced the bookmark and slipped the book inside his jacket. Stuffing his hands into the pockets of his pants, he stood in the center of the sad little room and wondered. The local cops had been and gone; he knew because he’d sat outside in his car and waited for them to leave. They’d taken their statements and made up their minds and he’d a good idea what they’d thought when they’d seen the room. This whole situation was strange and a little weird. Ten year old girls didn’t just walk out the door and disappear, not without a very good reason.
Catching a whiff of stale, sickly-sweet perfume he turned slowly and realized he wasn’t alone. The girl who hovered in the doorway was maybe fifteen or sixteen and trying to look older. Last night’s makeup overdone. Lashes clogged together, lip stick smeared comically and hair tousled. With a too short skirt, and a too low neckline, she attempted a ridiculously provocative pose.
“Hiya,” she slurred. “Who the hell are you?” She blinked slowly, eyelids heavy, more than a little hung over.
“One of the good guys,” replied Connell. He weighed her up and swallowed his dismay. Here was a kid headed for trouble.
“Oh yeah, we’re pretty short on good guys in this neighborhood. Why are you here?”
He shrugged, held her gaze and asked himself the same question. “Why do you think?”
“The cops have been and gone. They didn’t find anything. There was nothing to find.” She blinked again even more slowly than before and he thought for a moment that her eyes weren’t going to re-open, that she’d fallen asleep in the doorway. He was about to reach out and prod her awake, when she pulled herself back with a start and remembered he was there. “You need to get out and look for her. She’s not here. She’s not hiding under the bed.”
Good point. He should have looked there first, and would have done if she hadn’t interrupted him. “Does she do that often?” he asked, and the girl raised a quizzical brow and stifled a yawn. So, he was keeping her up - tough; she wasn’t the only one who’d had a rough night.
“Huh ... do what?”
“Hide?”
She was a little slow on the uptake. Her pupils were dilated and her movements deliberate and exaggerated. She scowled at him. He recognized teenage attitude when he saw it, along with the scent of marijuana.
“No, she didn’t. She’d no reason to hide. I told the cops all this already.”
“Maybe you did, but I’m not the cops.” Not exactly, anyway, but it was too complicated to explain to a kid with mush for brains. “I’m just here to help find your sister. You can help me by telling me about the last time you saw her.” Which again, wasn’t entirely true - he was supposed to be checking up on the cops, not the kid, but something wasn’t quite right here and he’d sensed it the minute he’d stepped in the room.
“I just got done telling the cops.”
“You said that already.”
“So why repeat myself?”
Tommy Connell smiled and settled down for the long haul. It seemed it was his lot in life to always get the ones who had something to hide? “Humor me, kiddo, we’re on the same side.” He gestured with a sweeping hand to the interior of the small room. “Why all the books?”
“She likes to read.”
“No kidding. What about friends?”
“Molly doesn’t have friends, not regular ones, anyway.”
A ten year old without friends, now that was odd. His own little guy Joe was only six, but he had friends and fellow junior trouble makers by the dozens if the sound level at his last birthday party was an indicator.
“Why not?”
The girl gave a noncommittal shrug and the movement caused her to overbalance slightly on her stiletto heels. She attempted to correct the wobble by shuffling her feet and leaning heavily against the door frame. She was wasted. Maybe that was why the child’s disappearance hadn’t been reported sooner. Connell bit back a sharp comment. She was a kid. Kids did stupid things. He remembered doing plenty when he was her age. Difference was, he’d never mislaid a sibling while he was busy doing it.
“I dunno,” she said finally. “She’s not the friendly type. She doesn’t mix. The other kids think she’s weird.”
“Weird?”
“Yeah ... you know ...” She crossed her eyes and tapped at her own head. “Crazy. They’re scared of her and it doesn’t help that she stinks.” She wrinkled her nose to add weight to her words.
Connell narrowed his eyes. Okay, maybe she was a little odd. Who was he to judge, he’d never met the girl. But if the poor little kid smelled bad it was because she slept in a dirty bed and nobody cared enough to make sure her clothes were clean. “You don’t have a washing machine?”
“Huh?”
He shook his head. He was wasting his time. “What about you, do you think she’s weird?” He was starting to think this whole setup was off-center. The parents were out of town, they’d left their ten year old in the care of a spaced-out teenager and hadn’t even come home when their daughter disappeared. Maybe this wasn’t unusual. Maybe little Molly regularly slipped on her sneakers and sneaked out the door.
“She’s my little sister. Of course I think she’s a freak.”
Okay, so that was a pretty normal answer. He was a little brother himself and his brother, Will, still thought that he was from another planet. Maybe he was. He’d done some pretty crazy stuff in his time. “You were the last person to see her. You need to tell me what happened.”
She stuck out her chin belligerently. “I already told the cops everything I know.”
Connell took a step towards her. He really didn’t have the time or the energy to negotiate the twists and turns of the teenage psyche. He’d just pulled an unpleasant all-nighter, following up on a pair of low-rent cops who thought it was cool to play around with the law to their own advantage. Connell didn’t agree with their philosophy and he didn’t much like all-nighters. Maybe it was time to up the ante.
“Okay. So, you’re a little distracted this morning, but just to keep you focused, here’s the deal, Lydia. It is Lydia, isn’t it? You tell me what you argued about with your sis, you tell me what made that little girl run off into the night, or I’ll haul your ass downtown and book you for possession.”
“I thought you weren’t a cop,” she replied slyly, obviously unfazed by his threat.
“I can still make things happen that you might not enjoy.” He narrowed his eyes, gave her his don’t-mess-with-me look, which was a slightly censored version of his usual look. She was still a kid after all.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she exclaimed with exaggerated annoyance, but she took a hesitant step back nevertheless.
Everything about her behavior was over-the-top and Connell found it irritating. He’d also had about enough of it. “Fine, have it your way. Which is your room? You got your stash under your pillow?” He watched as she weighed him up slowly, realized he wasn’t kidding around and was immune to any feminine charms she might have imagined she possessed. He made to brush past her in the narrow doorway and she caught at his sleeve and stopped him.
“Okay ... okay, chill out. What’s the big deal? You never smoked a little?”
He was starting to feel old and he was barely thirty. He looked pointedly at her hand on his arm and she removed it with a dramatic sigh.
“Okay, so we had a fight ... I mean I yelled at her a little bit but Molly doesn’t argue. Molly doesn’t fight back. Molly doesn’t do much of anything really.” She pulled a joint out of her pocket and stuck it between her lips. “Got a light?”
Connell shook his head in weary disbelief, pulled the weed from her mouth and dropped it to the floor, grinding it beneath his shoe.
“Hey, I had to pay for that,” she whined.
“You were telling me about Molly.”
She shrugged. “She’s a pain, always hanging around bugging me. We told her to get lost. We didn’t mean it literally but Molly takes everything literally. She sees things as black and white, right and wrong, good and evil, nothing in between. It’s all the reading she does, it’s messed with her head.”
Oh yeah, somebody’s head was definitely messed, but standing there listening to Lydia’s explanations, Connell wasn’t entirely convinced it was little Molly’s.
“She believes real life is the same as in her books - every story has a happy ending,” continued Lydia. “But life’s not like that, is it?”
It was a long speech with a measure of malice mixed in. She had issues with her baby sister. She’d also said ‘we’ not ‘I’.
“So what did you say to her?” Connell asked.
“Does it matter?”
“I think you know it does. We’ve got a little girl who’s been missing over twenty four hours. Everything matters.”
Lydia hesitated, bravado and fear warring for position on her pinched face. Suddenly she stopped trying to look older and looked very young. Connell cocked his head and decided to cut her a little slack.
“Look, you’re not in trouble. You want to fry your brain with drugs? Go ahead, knock yourself out. You want to have underage sex with your boyfriend? None of my business. I just need to know what was in your sister’s head when she left. Whether she intended to take off and maybe hide out to give everyone a scare, or whether someone else is involved.”
The girl pulled herself together and gave a final see-if-I-care shrug. “Who said I’m underage?” she said slowly and gave him a half-hearted come on.
Connell ignored it. “So she caught you with some boy and was going to tell Mom?”
“Not exactly.”
“So tell me, exactly.”
The girl looked away, and though he couldn’t be sure, Connell thought she was blinking back tears. Her eyes were clear when she turned back.
“She wasn’t supposed to come out of her room. I told her not to - not when I had company.” She paused, dropping her gaze to her feet. “She’s only little ... in here.” She tapped at her head. “Like I said, weird. She’s not exactly sociable, gets scared at loud noises and crowds. I was going to have people over and have some fun, smoke a little, mess around a little, you know. Like I said, she was supposed to stay in her room and out of my way.”
“But she didn’t?” Connell was starting to see the picture and didn’t much like it.
“No, she didn’t. The battery in her flashlight died, she couldn’t read her book. She came in to ask for another - like I carry a package of batteries around with me.”
“And?”
“And she kinda interrupted us.” She gave him a knowing look and he ignored it. She was a child pretending to be a grown up. He found the whole situation disturbing. “She just stood there ... staring ... like she does, and Terry got mad and shouted at her. Scared her, I guess.”
“Terry?”
“Yeah.” She checked her pockets, seemed to realize he’d destroyed her last joint and crossed her arms nervously across her chest.
“Who’s Terry?”
“Just a guy.”
Just a guy - a guy who got off on scaring little girls. Connell didn’t much like guys who scared girls, no matter what how little they were. “How old is this guy?”
“Huh?”
“How old is your boyfriend?” This was hard work. He bit at the inside of his cheek to sharpen his focus and to stop him from snapping back at her.
She shook her head. “I’m not sure. He’s older than me.”
“You’re not sure? Well, does he go to school, college? Does he work?”
“I dunno.”
Connell sighed. She didn’t know much about the guy she’d brought home. “Where does he live?”
“I dunno.”
“You don’t know much.”
“Whatever ...” she replied, bored again.
“Did you know him before you brought him home?”
“No. I’d seen him before, around the bar, but I didn’t know him.”
She had the grace to look a little shamefaced and Connell wondered if she had any idea how dangerous the game she was playing actually was. Maybe he should take the time to explain. He checked his watch. Time was something he was short of and he doubted she would appreciate it anyway. He took a breath.
“So let me get this straight: your mom and dad are out of town, you decide to have a party and you go out and score drugs. You pick up some strange guy in a bar you shouldn’t be in, in the first place because you’re underage, then you bring him home and score a little action while your little sister sits in the dark alone in her room.”
She hung her head, studied the cracked patent leather on her shoes and the chipped polish on her toe nails. “I guess.”
“Pretty shitty, huh?”
“I guess.”
He was glad she thought so, even if it was in hindsight.
“What did this Terry guy say to her when she caught him with his pants down?”
She stifled a quick smile. Connell didn’t share the humor.
The smirk disappeared as quickly as it came. “He wasn’t very nice.”
“He wasn’t very nice,” repeated Connell, slowly. What was she doing with guys that weren’t very nice? He wanted to shake her but reckoned shaking wasn’t very nice either. “What did he say?”
She shot him a glance and looked away again, to compose herself maybe? He wondered if she was actually as wrecked as she made out or whether it was an act she was hiding behind.
“Terry told her she was a little freak and he’d burn her books and slit her throat if she didn’t disappear.”
Definitely not nice. “And do you think he would’ve?”
“Would’ve what?”
“Slit her throat.”
She shook her head. “Come on. It’s just something you say when you’re mad, isn’t it?”
Oh sure, maybe in the world according to Lydia Brown, but not in any world he knew. He recalled wryly the times when Joe had interrupted him at an inopportune moment. That little guy had built-in radar but slitting of throats didn’t come into it. “How’d he know about the books?”
“Huh?”
“How did he know about the books? Did he go into her room?”
She shrugged. “I dunno, I guess so ... I was pretty whacked out.”
Connell started counting back in his head and tried to remain calm. He wasn’t sure whether his alarm bells were ringing because she was hiding something or simply because the whole situation stank.
“Did Terry stay all night? Was he still here when you noticed that Molly had gone?”
“I don’t know what time it was when he left. When he was done, I guess. I was high. It was about lunchtime when I realized she’d gone, and I gave her till dinner to come home. When it started to get dark, I began to get a little worried because Molly doesn’t like the dark.”
She didn’t like the dark and yet there wasn’t even a light bulb in her excuse for a room. God, he knew deep down this could only get worse. He just didn’t want to think about it.
He thought instead of Lizzie and the feel of her warm restraining hand on his arm. He needed her, but maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to think of the love of his life when he was caught up in a case and hadn’t been home in four days.
He returned his attention to Lydia. “What about the other guests?”
“There were no other guests.”
“Some party ...”
She pulled a face. “We had fun.”
Oh sure, so much fun that she couldn’t remember any of it. “You didn’t call your folks?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
She shrugged again, a little sadly this time. “Because I don’t know where they are.”
Well that didn’t surprise him; she didn’t know much at all.
So, that was last night and Molly had probably been gone twelve hours already by then. He added it up in his head, whichever way you looked at it, that little girl had been gone a long time.
“You phoned the cops and they came straight over?”
“No,” she replied in a voice that suggested she thought he was as stupid as her crazy little sister. “They came this morning, said they’d look out for her, and to let them know if she turned up.”
Connell had sat outside in his car and watched them leave. He’d assumed it was a return visit, hadn’t realized it was the first response. “They weren’t worried?” Since when did cops think it wasn’t a big deal when a child went missing?
“Kids go missing, most of them come home ... that’s what they said. Maybe there was a game on, or a sale at Dunkin Donuts. They were in a hurry.”
Oh yeah, they’d be in a hurry when he caught up with them. “Did you tell them about Terry?”
She avoided his gaze. “They didn’t ask.”
He glanced back at the pathetic little room and thought of the child who’d slept in that bed, imagined how she must have felt curled up under thin dirty covers with no light and no comfort. He couldn’t bear the thought of Joe in similar circumstances.
But that wasn’t why he was there or what he was getting paid for. He should just leave it to the locals and back off, but he’d never been very good at backing off, even when he’d been told to.
He turned back to the girl with a sigh. “Have you been smoking today?”
“Some.”
“You need to stop now. You need to get your head in gear and go get cleaned up. You need to be ready when your sister comes home. Is there someone who can stay with you until your parents come back?”
“I’m doing okay on my own.”
Connell looked her up and down and shook his head sadly. “No, kiddo, you’re not. You let strange guys into your home. Think about it, you let me walk in off the street and you still haven’t asked for ID. Strange guys have a habit of doing strange things and they usually won’t be good things. How long have your parents been gone?”
She shrugged, looked away and he realized they weren’t on a trip. They’d been gone for some time and Lydia had been playing mommy, unsuccessfully as it turned out. “Who’s been paying the rent?” he asked, though he already knew the answer.
“I have,” she answered with a defiant glare.
“For how long?” Maybe Lydia wasn’t putting on an act. Maybe she had to be stoned to do what she’d been doing.
“I don’t know, weeks, months, maybe two months.”
Two months! What’d they do, go out to the store for cigarettes and forget to come back? Okay, so it wasn’t uncommon for guys to run off and leave their women, or ladies to take off on their men, but it was unusual for both to walk out the door without saying goodbye to their kids.
“They happen to mention where they were going?” asked Connell and she answered with a shake of her head. “… or when they’d be back?”
“They left in a hurry. I guess they’d had enough of her too.”
“Enough of whom?”
“The Bookworm, who else?”
“And what did Molly think about it?” She was a kid. Her mom and dad had disappeared and her sister was probably a whore. He was getting a bad feeling about this whole situation.
“Molly doesn’t say much. Like I said, she reads a lot.”
“But she does understand that they’ve gone?”
“Who knows? She doesn’t exactly sit around making small talk.”
“Do you think she may have gone to look for them?” It was a possibility but the thought of a little kid wandering around the city, looking for her parents, did things to his gut that hurt.
“I doubt it. We’re better off without them.” Lydia reached down, and with one hand securing her to the door frame, she undid her shoes, slipped them off and shrunk by four inches and a couple of years.
“Why? Because they’re bad parents or because they walked out on you?”
“Both.”
Connell acknowledged that she was right. Good parents didn’t walk out on their kids. Of course that was supposing they had walked out and weren’t currently laying unclaimed in a drawer at the morgue.
He shot a final glance at the little room. “Where do you think she is?”
The girl cocked her head and gave a sad smile. “Well that’s pretty obvious ... she’s off to see the wizard.”
“Huh?”
“Haven’t you been paying attention? Didn’t you notice?” She gestured to the books. “Some cop you are ...”
“I told you already, I’m not a cop. What should I have noticed?”
“They’re all the same shitty story.” She tapped her head again. “Don’t you get it? Molly lives in a world of her own. Molly lives in the wonderful world of Oz. She’s off to see the Wizard.”
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