Vanishing Girls Read online

  “Did Isabelle Coleman do that to your eye?” she asked.

  The leering smile playing on his face collapsed. Anger flared in his eyes. He took a long swig of beer and looked her over, as if deciding what he wanted to do to her first. She never felt such revulsion in her life. It was like a thousand insects trying to crawl out of her skin. He held the can of beer in one hand and, with the other, loosened the belt of his jeans. Did she have the strength and stamina to rush him? Her eyes panned the room again, looking for weapons. She could use one of the lamps, perhaps. They didn’t look heavy, but the cords could wrap around his disgusting fat neck. Gosnell was big though—husky and round and probably strong with it. She realized she would have to get him talking if she was going to have time to figure out just what the hell she was going to do, and how she was going to do it.

  “Did Sherri watch?” she asked.

  The fingers fumbling for his zipper paused. He smiled at her. “What?”

  “Your wife. She helped you. Did she like it? She brought you the girls, right?”

  “She brought me girls because that’s what I told her to do. She didn’t like to watch. I made her watch sometimes, but she didn’t like it. She knew better than to say anything. Sherri was a good girl.”

  His hand moved away from his pants and motioned toward the wallpapered cell doors. “How about you? Do you like to watch?”

  Her head turned in the direction of the doors. When she looked back at him, she noticed his face was flushed. He looked excited, hungry. He put his beer down and came to the foot of the bed. One of his hands touched her ankle, his fingers sliding under her pant leg to touch bare skin.

  “Don’t fucking touch me,” she said, kicking at his hand.

  He moved quickly for a large man, climbing onto the bed and straddling her. The weight of him on top of her crushed her hips. She tried to buck him off but she was too weak. He held her wrists in his hands, squeezing so hard she could feel them bruising.

  “I said, don’t touch me,” she gasped.

  “Nobody tells me what to do,” he said.

  Get him to talk, a voice in her head commanded. Against every fiber in her body screaming to fight, she forced herself to relax a bit. He smiled down at her, his hands still gripping her wrists.

  “I do whatever I want,” he said proudly. “Not just in here. Out there too. I never pay for anything anymore. Never get a speeding ticket. I punched some guy out in a bar last month and never even got arrested. Cops came and saw it was me and let me go.” He laughed. “Guy needed seven stitches in his face. Get my taxes done free. There’s one bar I drink at—always drink for free there. Everywhere I go, it’s like I’m a king.”

  “Because they want to keep coming back…”—she nearly choked—“… for more?”

  He rocked back and forth on top of her, grinding into her. She couldn’t keep the repulsion from her face, which only made him laugh. “Well, sure, but mostly because they’re afraid of what I got on them. They all got wives and girlfriends and families and shit.” He let go of one of her wrists and pointed toward the door to outside. Josie could just make it out over his shoulder. “There,” he said, pointing to a small black camera affixed to the wall above the door. “My camera takes their picture as soon as they walk in. I have a record of who comes and how many times and what they do while they’re here.”

  He took hold of her free wrist again and pinned her hands to the bed above her head. His breath was hot and smelly against her cheek as he laid himself on top of her. “And no one wants to be the one who takes me down.”

  She turned her face away from his, so she didn’t have to see his beady eyes. Just keep him talking. As one of his hands reached down into the waistband of her pants, she forced out a question. “Where did you come up with it?”

  “Jesus Christ, you talk a lot,” he complained. He sighed heavily, sat back up and let go of her hands. She immediately held them up in front of her. The relief she felt at having a bit of distance between them was palpable. “My dad,” he said. “It’s kind of a family business.” Her waistband momentarily forgotten, he reached down into his undone jeans, working his hand inside of them.

  Josie thought of Alton Gosnell nestled safely and comfortably inside Rockview, just a few doors down the hall from her grandmother, and wanted to retch. So his father had started it. Taking his larynx seemed the least Sherri could do. “And your mom?”

  His hand froze. A shadow passed over his face. After a few seconds he heaved himself off her and retrieved his beer. Josie scrambled up onto her knees.

  Gosnell said, “She didn’t help. She didn’t know how to act. My dad had to put her down.”

  “But you didn’t have that problem with Sherri,” she prompted.

  His smile returned, faintly. “Sherri was a good girl.” The shadow returned. “Then that little cunt killed her.”

  “June Spencer?”

  “I let her out. We had the new one anyway. There wasn’t enough room. Sent her up to Donald. Then she goes and kills my Sherri.”

  So June had been here.

  “Was Donald one of your…”—she searched for the right word, every choice making her cringe, and settled on—“… regulars?”

  He sipped the beer, suddenly in no hurry to get into her pants. He was enjoying this, she realized. Bragging about his sick enterprise. “Yeah, he was. Took a liking to June. When her time was up, he asked if he could take her. I told him he had to pay me for her. Two thousand dollars he offered. I took it. Easier than digging a hole.”

  A fresh wave of dizziness washed over her. So, he killed them. What else would a man like Gosnell do with his chattel? “Was she the only one you sold?”

  “Yeah. I didn’t need to get into all that. I make enough here with my girls.”

  He started to leer at her again, his hand working harder inside his pants this time, so she said, “It must have been hard. Losing Sherri like that.”

  His face colored with anger. The beer can hurtled toward her face, glancing off the wall beside her head. He leveled a finger at her. “Shut up already, would you?”

  He took a breath, turned away from her, and stumbling, headed back to the fridge, next to the cabinet of vials and needles. Josie wondered how drunk he was and forged onward. “Sherri administered the drugs, didn’t she? To your girls? She was a nurse. She would have been used to giving needles.”

  He took another beer from the fridge and slammed the door shut. He snapped the beer can open. “I said, shut up. You fucking talk too much.”

  “Where did you get the drugs?” Josie asked, trying to keep him talking so he wouldn’t touch himself anymore—or, more importantly, her. “You must have needed a pretty steady supply. Your regulars—you had to have a doctor or a pharmacist, maybe more than one, as regular clients. Who’s your supplier?”

  He ignored her, chugging his beer down but keeping one eye on her.

  “You can’t do it, can you? Administer the drugs without Sherri?”

  This beer can, fuller than the last one, hit her shoulder as she tried avoiding it and landed on the bed, its contents spilling onto the sheet. “You don’t listen for shit, do you?” he growled.

  “What will you do now?” she pressed on. “You and Sherri never had kids. There’s no one to help you carry on the family business.”

  Shaking his head, he went back to the fridge to get another beer. “You better shut up about my wife,” he muttered.

  “What happened? She couldn’t have children? Or she didn’t want to have children with you? Or was it you? You couldn’t give her children?”

  Josie narrowly avoided the full beer can as it smashed into the wall above her head, leaving a gash in the drywall and spraying liquid all over her. He advanced on her, again pointing accusingly. “I told you to shut the fuck up. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Sherri had a tumor when she was nineteen. They had to tie up her female parts. There’s not a goddamn thing wrong with me.”

  She felt a small kerne
l of sympathy for Sherri, which was quickly pushed aside by fear and disgust as Nick freed his penis from his pants and pumped it a few more times. He climbed onto the bed. On her knees, Josie shrank back, away from him. “I’ll show you how good it works,” he said. “No more talking. Now you’re gonna do what I tell you.”

  She hoped he couldn’t see her trembling. She was staring into his good eye. She would have to let him get close again. It was the only way. If he couldn’t see her, he couldn’t catch her. From a drawer in one of the end tables he pulled a length of rope, which he used to tie her hands to the nearest bed post at the head of the bed. She struggled, fingers flying at his face, trying to reach his eyes, then balled into fists trying to hit any soft or sensitive target she could. He slammed her head into the wall until she stopped, stars floating in front of her eyes. Then he finished tying her wrists and started yanking her pants down. A gateway in Josie’s mind creaked open. The place she went when bad things happened. She hadn’t needed it for many years. She never thought she’d need it again. As Gosnell climbed on top of her once more, she stepped through it.

  A pounding on the door froze them both in place.

  Chapter Sixty

  “Nick Gosnell,” a loud male voice boomed from the other side. It sounded familiar, but she couldn’t place it.

  He glanced back at the door. The pounding intensified, rattling the door in its frame. “What the fuck?” Nick muttered.

  “Gosnell,” came the voice again. “Answer the door. I know you’re in there.”

  He looked back and forth from her to the door, as if trying to decide what to do.

  “Gosnell, get out here right now, goddamn it!” the voice growled. It was then that she knew who it was. The chief.

  Nick zipped his pants up as he moved toward the door and stopped at the refrigerator, reaching deep into its recesses for something her addled brain couldn’t process right at that moment. Then she heard the sound of a round being racked into a chamber. A pistol. He opened the door a crack. Daylight flooded in.

  “Help you, Chief?” he said.

  Chief Harris’ voice came back low and furious, the way he sounded whenever one of his officers did something monumentally stupid. “I know what’s going on up here, Gosnell.”

  Nick said, “I’m not sure what you’re implying, Chief.”

  She saw Nick lose his footing momentarily and then brace his body against the door. The chief was trying to get in. “Let me in, goddamn it.”

  Nick said, “I don’t know what you’re playing at, but you better get the hell out of here. This is private property.”

  The struggle with the door continued. She could hear the chief throwing himself against it. “I’m the police, Gosnell.”

  “The law don’t have no jurisdiction here. Get off my land.”

  “You’re in my town, Nick. You think I didn’t know something was going on? I couldn’t prove anything until today.”

  “If you got something on me, where’s your team? Why’d you come alone?” Nick taunted, trying to keep a handle on his pistol and keep the chief from bursting through the door.

  “There’s only two people in this town I know I can trust. One of ’em’s me and I’ll bet my kidney you’ve got the other one in there. Now let me in!”

  Josie’s heart sailed. “Chief!” she screamed.

  The door snapped off its frame as the chief burst through, shoving Gosnell to the side and onto his back. He lifted his department-issue Glock 19 and swept it across the room. Josie had a glimpse of the chief’s furious red face in the second it took for him to turn and spot Gosnell on the floor. Gosnell kicked the chief’s knee with a booted heel, causing the gun to go off, the shot missing Gosnell high and wide. The chief fell, nearly toppling onto Gosnell as he rolled away and found his own gun, whipping it back toward the chief. The chief fired again. The bullet grazed Nick’s arm, sending slivers of the fabric from his shirt flying. Gosnell fired and the chief went down.

  “Chief!” she shrieked again, but he lay face down and limp.

  She pulled desperately against her restraints until she wore away a layer of skin on her wrists. She couldn’t hear above all the screaming, screaming like someone was stabbing a woman to death. It took Josie a moment to realize it was her before she stopped. She heard Gosnell moving around, muttering every curse there was under his breath as he propped the door back in place and surveyed the mess. Now her only hope was to get her hands free.

  Then he was behind her, pushing her against the wall so he could untie her. She screamed again. “Will you shut the fuck up,” he barked.

  But she wouldn’t. She couldn’t. The chief was clean, and Gosnell had shot him right before her eyes. He could be dead. Luke, Ray, the chief. How much more was this man going to take from her?

  “You’re going back in there with your boyfriend until I get this shit cleaned up,” he told her.

  She started to kick at him until she realized that it was to her advantage for him to untie her. She would have a few precious seconds to try something. He was larger than her and armed. She was shackled and injured. She couldn’t put herself in a position where he could overpower her or injure her so badly that she couldn’t fight back or escape. She needed the upper hand.

  She heard Ray’s voice then, as surely as if he were standing at the foot of the bed. Calm down, Jo. The darkness can’t hurt you.

  She stopped struggling and took a long, shuddering breath, allowing Nick to free her hands. He reached for her hair again, his preferred method of moving women from place to place. Without hesitation, she reached up with both hands and grabbed the sides of his face, as though she was going to draw him in for a kiss. For a split second, his face registered delighted surprise. Then she drove her thumbs into the soft orbs of his eyes, holding onto his head while he howled and bucked and swung his arms, desperate to get away from her.

  He fell away, off the bed and onto the floor. She leapt over him, landing painfully on her knees, and found his gun discarded on the floor. She stood, pain shooting through both her kneecaps, and trained the gun on his writhing form. He held his palms against his eyes. “My eyes!” he screamed. “My eyes!”

  “Gosnell,” she shouted.

  “My eyes! You bitch. My eyes!”

  “Stop moving,” she told him as she stepped closer to him.

  “You fucking bitch!” he shrieked.

  “This is for Ray,” she said and fired a shot into his left kneecap.

  More howls. His hands scrambled for his obliterated kneecap. He curled onto his side. Following his jerky movements, she placed the barrel of the gun against his right kneecap—steel against bone—and fired again. Blood and bone sprayed up into her face. She used her forearm to wipe it away. The sounds coming out of him were like nothing she had ever heard before—not from a human—but she was dead to it. “That was for the chief.”

  She kicked him, rolling him until he was flat on his back, grinding her heel into the crushed knee closest to her. She leaned over so that she might be heard over his cries. “This is for the girls,” she said and fired a shot into his groin.

  She tossed the gun away and ran to where the chief lay, face down. She touched his shoulder and he coughed. “Josie,” he choked.

  She dropped to her knees. “Chief!”

  “Don’t move me,” he said, his voice raspy. Every word seemed a monumental struggle. She strained to hear him. “I think the bullet severed my spine. I can’t feel anything. It’s hard to… hard to breathe.”

  She lay down next to him, her face inches from his, so he could see her eyes. He tried to smile, but a tear slid out of his eye and rolled off the bridge of his nose. They stared at each other for a beat. The relief that Josie felt was subsumed by the grief that was already overwhelming her. Nothing would ever be the same again.

  “Listen,” he whispered. “This is important.”

  “Chief,” she squeaked.

  “Trust Fraley. He’s clean. I’m promoting you to chief. You’r
e reinstated and promoted. Don’t… don’t trust anyone else. You’ll… you’ll have to bring in… new—”

  “I’ll bring in new people,” she promised.

  “Watch your… watch your back.”

  “I will.”

  His eyelids fluttered. “Call…”

  She touched his cheek gently. “Chief?”

  “FBI.”

  “Okay, I will.”

  His eyes opened wide and he held her gaze with a penetrating intensity that made goosebumps erupt over her entire body. “Get them,” he said. “Get them all.”

  Then he exhaled for the very last time.

  Chapter Sixty-One

  She covered the chief with a sheet from the bed as reverently as she could in the godforsaken hellhole they were in. Nick’s body had gone completely still amongst the wide and extensive blood and bone spatter all around him. She let herself sob for several minutes beside her mentor, holding her knees to her chest and rocking back and forth like a child. She wailed and keened and let herself feel the unfathomable loss she had just experienced for a few private moments. Then she wiped her tears away and hauled herself to her feet. She found her pants and put them back on. Then she surveyed the room. She had to think. She had to be smart about this.

  First things first. She had to open the doors. Dread was a heavy brick in her stomach. She didn’t know which door Gosnell had taken her out of so she would have to check each one. She started with the closest one and worked her way down. Much to her relief, the first cell was empty, although it looked as though it had been recently vacated. A crumpled blanket lay on the wooden cot, and a discarded fast food bag lay on the floor. When she opened the second door, she saw Ray’s boots and closed it again. She couldn’t bear to see him. Not like that. Not yet.

  She sucked in a breath and opened the third door. Empty. Behind the fourth door a thin, waifish form curled cowering in the corner of the cell. She balled herself up tighter when Josie stepped through the door. “Hello?” Josie called. The woman shot upright and scurried away from her, one pale thin arm covering her eyes. “No more,” she said, her voice hoarse. Josie didn’t think it possible but the rage she felt toward Gosnell for all the horror he had inflicted on so many innocent young women burned even hotter.