Girl, Forgotten (Andrea Oliver 2)

“She kept looking at—”

The door opened. Stilton got into the cruiser.

Andrea looked at her phone in case Star had somehow managed to do something while the screen was unlocked. She checked her email. Messages. Texts. Notes. Missed calls. Calendar. Thirty seconds wasn’t that long. She had looked down at the phone and seen it exactly where she had left it. Maybe Star had pushed it away as a kind of fuck off.

Stilton cranked the engine. He turned to Bible. “Told you so.”

“You sure did, Chief. That was a big waste of time.” Bible sounded agreeable, but Andrea knew better. “Now riddle me this, what’s the history with you three fellas? Seems like I caught some attitude between you and them.”

“We went to high school together.” Stilton seemed to think that was the end of it, but then he changed his mind. “They’re bad people.”

“That sounds accurate.”

“They lie and cheat, but they’re smart enough to never get caught. Nardo learned from his father. The guy spent five years in federal prison.”

Andrea felt a bell go off in her head. She had found a Reginald Fontaine of Delaware during one of her aimless internet searches. There was no mention of family, but the man had been arrested in the Savings and Loan Scandal. He’d spent five years at Club Fed. The timing was around the same time that Bernard Fontaine had become the Junior Bean King to his former high school PE teacher.

Bible said, “Chief, I’m gonna be real honest with you here. I feel like you left out some details about the hippie-dippie farm.”

Stilton swung the cruiser around the chicken coop.

Bible said, “We got some ladies wearing the same uniform, I guess you’d call it. All got the same long hair. All, and you’ll excuse me for saying this, my wife’s got me trained better than to comment on a woman’s figure, but they ain’t just skipped a few meals.”

“Nope,” Stilton said.

“They look like they’re being starved.”

“Yep,” Stilton said.

“You got a theory on this?”

“My theory is the same as yours,” Stilton said. “They’re running some kind of cult. But you know as well as I do, Marshal, that being in a cult isn’t against the law.”

Andrea had felt a shiver at the word cult. She clenched her teeth to keep them from chattering. Of course it was a cult. The signs were all there. A bunch of lost, hopeless young women looking for meaning. A couple of dirty old men willing to supply it at a cost.

“Well,” Bible said. “Can’t disagree with you there, Chief. Cult seems about the right way to describe it.”

Andrea unlocked her phone. She opened the photos. She found the close-ups she had taken of Alice Poulsen. The sharp bones. The bedsores. The chapped, split lips. The painfully tight ankle bracelet that had cut into her flesh.

Cult.

Alice had chosen to wear the yellow dress. She had chosen to grow out her hair. She had submitted, most likely, to the band being clamped around her ankle. She had starved herself nearly into oblivion.

And then she had walked into the field and swallowed a bunch of pills and died.

Bible told Stilton, “Seemed to me like you knew that girl in the house. Star, was it?”

Andrea looked up from the photos. She had totally missed this.

“Star Bonaire,” Stilton provided. “Her mother’s been trying for years to get her out.”

“And?”

“Does she look out to you?” Stilton finally sounded angry. “Tell me what to do, Marshal. They may look like girls, but they’re all adults. You can’t go in and kidnap a bunch of grown women. They want to be there.”

Bible asked, “Where does Star’s mom live?”

“Couple of miles from downtown. But she’s crazy,” Stilton warned. “She tried to abduct her daughter last year. Drove her Prius right up to the bunkhouse and dragged her out by her arm. Had a cult deprogrammer waiting at the motel.”