The Unseen - A Mystery (The Baudin & Dixon Trilogy Book 2) Read online

  Baudin was silent for a moment. “He kills the girls after they rape them?”

  McFarland shrugged before glancing around. Then he stuffed the cartons and the cookies under his shirt. “Who the hell knows? That’s just what the chief thought. Said he’s probably killed somewhere around a hundred girls over the thirty years since he founded the frat.”

  Baudin thought of that conversation as he stood now in front of a picture of Sandoval and stared into his eyes. That number—one hundred. One hundred lives had been destroyed, and hundreds of children and grandchildren were blinked out of existence because of Mike Sandoval.

  Baudin took a step back, looking at the list hanging next to the photo. He’d made a list of everyone in Cheyenne who held or had held a public position and had belonged to Sigma Mu. A name toward the bottom of the list drew his attention. He thought he must’ve been imagining it, so he took a step closer and stared at the name.

  He took the list down, closed his eyes, then opened them again, but the name was still there: Roger Walk.

  19

  Dixon lay in bed and stared at the ceiling. It was nearly three in the morning, but he knew sleep wasn’t coming. So instead, he drank. He’d drunk every beer in his fridge and thought about going to the store to get more, but that sounded like too much of a hassle. He wondered if Jenny had booze, but as he thought about going back over there, his phone rang. It was Baudin.

  “Don’t you let a man sleep?” Dixon said.

  “I just wanted to see if you were up.”

  “I’m always up.” He sighed. “You got any booze? Bring some over. I’m too drunk to drive.”

  “Yeah, that’s not gonna happen.” He paused. “Guess who’s an alum of Sigma Mu?”

  “The President? No, the Queen of England?”

  “How about Roger Walk?”

  Dixon was silent for a second. “You’re kiddin’.”

  “No. If he’s the one doing this, that’s why he’s gotten away with it for so long. The DA and the chief of police were looking out for him. He’s one of them, Kyle.”

  “Still don’t mean he did it.”

  “You really believe that?” A long silence followed. “That’s what I thought.”

  “So what’s the next play? He won’t tell us shit.”

  “I set up twenty interviews for tomorrow at Grade A. We’ll start crossing some names off, but I think Walk’s good for it. The next play is we start talking to everybody in his life, see what we turn up. And if he’s after working girls, we should take his photo around and see if anyone recognizes him.”

  “How come you always do that?”

  “What?”

  “Call hookers ‘working girls’?”

  “Because they are. My mother was a prostitute. The state put me in foster care when I was ten, but I still remember her.”

  “I didn’t know. I’m sorry.” He rubbed his forehead. “She still…”

  “I don’t know if she’s alive or dead. Never checked.”

  “Hmm. Seems like the kinda thing I’d want to know.”

  “Well, you’re not me.”

  Dixon realized he’d touched a nerve. He swung his legs out of bed and went to the bathroom to urinate. “Sorry. Didn’t mean nothin’ by it.”

  “I know. It’s just late. Try and get some sleep. We gotta be at Grade A at nine.”

  Dixon tripped over his garbage can in the bathroom and fell over the toilet. He caught himself against the wall, but not before slamming his head into it and leaving a dent. “Shit.”

  “You all right?”

  He pulled himself up and noticed his body swaying in the mirror. “Better count on me comin’ in at ten.”

  Baudin chuckled. “I’ll wait for you.”

  20

  Baudin woke early and made eggs for his daughter. Heather came into the kitchen and sat down at the table. He scooped some eggs with sour cream onto her plate then got her a glass of organic orange juice. He sat across from her and watched her eat.

  She noticed and smiled. “What?” she asked.

  “I just remember when you were a little girl and would pee the bed. You’d run into my room and slip underneath the covers, trying not to wake me so you wouldn’t get into trouble. I always knew you were there, but I let you think you were getting away with it.”

  She blushed and turned back to her eggs. “Don’t be such a dork, Dad.”

  He reached across the table and lifted her chin so she was looking him in the eyes. “I love you, baby.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes, Dad, I know you love me. I love you, too.”

  Someone honked, and Heather shoved more eggs in her mouth then got to her feet. Baudin followed her outside and saw Keri in her car, her daughter in the backseat.

  Heather shouted, “Bye.”

  “Bye,” he said. Keri waved to him, and he waved back.

  Baudin watched them drive away. Heather’s childhood had flown by. He could hardly remember when she’d grown up. Next year, she would be getting her driver’s license, and they would spend even less time together. He sighed and went back inside to get his firearm and jacket.

  Grade A opened at six in the morning, and by the time Baudin got there at nine, several groups of men were already on break. They smoked and ate snacks outside, drinking coffee out of tin cups like he imagined cowboys had a century ago out on the plains. He nodded to them as he parked and got out. They nodded back.

  Inside, the room had been set up as he had asked: just a table, three chairs, and nothing else. Interviewing the employees at work was a courtesy he was extending to them. He could’ve easily demanded that each employee come down to the station and be interviewed individually, but that would mean the men would miss pay. He hoped his attempt to not inconvenience would make them more willing to give him information.

  He sat down and pulled out his digital recorder, making sure it was fully charged. He then took a yellow legal pad from his satchel and placed the recorder and the pad on the desk. The clock on his phone said it was just past nine. He closed his eyes and focused on the color blue.

  When Dixon finally walked in, he looked disheveled. His shirt wasn’t buttoned at the top, his tie had a stain on it, and he had missed a loop with his belt. Even from across the room, Baudin could smell the liquor on his breath.

  “Late night?”

  “Didn’t sleep.”

  “So you drank instead?”

  “Everyone’s gotta be doin’ something.” Dixon pulled one of the chairs to the corner and sat down. He crossed his legs and rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. “Who’s first?”

  Baudin rose and went to the door. He opened it and yelled out, “Elliot Lua?” A moment later, a man slowly marched into the room. He was wearing a denim jacket, and his jeans and work boots were stained from top to bottom with old blood. Baudin motioned for him to sit down, and he did.

  Baudin sat across from him. He looked into the man’s eyes, and Lua didn’t flinch. He didn’t avert his gaze or begin to fidget. He wasn’t a man who could be intimidated easily.

  “You know why we’re here?” Baudin asked.

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  “Tell me what you know.”

  “Nothing. I came later, and they told me a body was found in one of the machines. A girl. That’s it.”

  “How long you worked here?”

  “Two years.”

  “Anything like this ever happen before?” Baudin asked, leaning back in his chair.

  “No. Nothing. We had a guy lose a hand, couple guys lose fingers. You gotta be careful, and some of ’em come in drunk. You can’t work and drink at the same time.”

  Baudin resisted the urge to look over at Dixon and see if he’d heard that. “Where were you the night before they discovered the body?”

  “With my wife and kids. You can talk to them and ask.”

  “We will. Do you have a criminal record?”

  Lua no
dded. “A DUI and some public intox.”

  “Anything violent?”

  “No, never. Not once.”

  Baudin held his gaze. The man didn’t even look nervous. “We’ll follow up with your wife and then see if you told us the truth on your history. That’s all for now.”

  Lua rose and left the room.

  Dixon said, “That’s it?”

  “What else can we do? They’re not gonna confess. I just want to see how they act.”

  Dixon exhaled. “Fine. Get the next one so we can get through this. I’ve got a fuckin’ migraine.”

  21

  The interviews took all day, and by the end, Baudin felt as if he’d run a marathon. Every muscle ached, and several times, he’d walked to the bathroom just to get some movement. They ordered lunch in, some sandwiches from a nearby place, and ate quietly in the room. Dixon seemed to grow worse before he got better. He left for the bathroom once, and Baudin could tell he’d gone to vomit, not urinate. When he came back, he collapsed into his chair and said, “How many more?”

  “Just Henry.”

  Baudin called him in. Henry sat down at the table. Baudin could see a trail of breadcrumbs on his shirt and what looked like a cola stain. Henry cleared his throat and hacked phlegm into his mouth before swallowing it.

  “You need a drink?” Baudin asked.

  “No. Let’s just get this over with.”

  “Where were you the night before the body was discovered?”

  “At home. Watchin’ TV. The Tonight Show.”

  “Can anyone verify that?”

  “No. I ain’t got no wife or nothin’.”

  Baudin scribbled down on a pad underneath Henry’s name that he was unmarried. “Were you ever married?”

  “No.”

  “Any criminal history?”

  Henry hesitated. It was only a moment, but that was long enough to pique Baudin’s interest.

  He looked up, holding his gaze. “Henry, any criminal history?”

  “Man can never really move on with you people, can he? They tell me I did my time, and that’s that, but that ain’t true, is it?”

  Even Dixon looked up from his phone and watched the man.

  Calmly, Baudin leaned his elbows on the table and stared into Henry’s eyes. “What do you have on your record, Henry?”

  He ran his tongue along the inside of his lip. “Forcible sodomy conviction from some near fifteen years back.”

  Baudin hesitated before saying, “What happened?”

  “Some crazy bitch I was datin’. She called me over to her house and said she wanted me to fuck her in the ass. That she was ready. I went over there, and I find her in the tub and the lubricant is there. She brought that out. And so I do it, and then we have dinner like nothin’ happened. She just says that it was hard for her to sit ’cause it kinda hurt. Next day, detectives are at my house, saying I’m under investigation for rape.”

  “But you got convicted. How’d that happen?”

  “I was lookin’ at life in prison. DA said if I pled, I’d do a year and be out. My fuckin’ public pretender said I needed to take the deal ’cause she was gonna get up on that stand and cry, and the jury would believe her. Then I wouldn’t ever be let out.”

  “What’s the girl’s name?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m gonna call her—that’s why.”

  He hesitated and didn’t say anything.

  Baudin put down his pen. “If I have to go out and find her myself, I’m gonna be really upset, Henry. You would save me at least two hours of searching by just giving me her name. I’ve shown you a courtesy by allowing you and your men to do the interviews here. You need to show the same courtesy for my time.”

  Henry looked down to the table. “Her name’s Michelle Chesley.”

  Baudin wrote down the name. “Anything else on your history?”

  “Some minor things. Nothing big like that.”

  “How’d you avoid the sex offender registry?”

  “They knocked the charge down so it was just the ten-year registry instead of life. I shoulda fought the damn thing. I didn’t do nothin’ wrong.”

  Dixon chimed in, “You visit prostitutes at all, Henry?”

  “What? What kinda question is that?”

  “So if I took your photo around to the girls down Main Street, they wouldn’t recognize you, huh?”

  “Hell, no. I don’t need to pay for it. I’m in AA, and I meet all my women there.”

  Dixon glanced at Baudin then said, “We have the forensics people searching the body for DNA. We find even one cell of yours on her, and you’re cooked.”

  “You ain’t gonna find shit ’cause I didn’t do shit.”

  Baudin said, “Who was on?”

  “What you mean?”

  “You said you were watchin’ The Tonight Show. Who was on the show?”

  He looked from one of the detectives to the other. “Don’t remember.”

  “You remember you watched the show but don’t remember who was on?”

  “No. I’m an old man. Memory ain’t what it used to be. Now, are we done? I gotta get back to work.”

  Baudin hesitated. “Yes, we’re finished.”

  Henry rose and left.

  Baudin turned to Dixon. “I think we need to pay a visit to Ms. Michelle Chesley.”

  22

  The day couldn’t have ended sooner. Dixon left the plant with a promise to Baudin that he’d follow up with Chesley the next morning and find her current address so they could speak to her.

  Grinding pain pounded away in his head. He’d taken enough ibuprofen to put his stomach into knots, and he thought he should get something to eat, though he didn’t feel like it. Instead, he drove to a park in the heart of Cheyenne, Lion’s Park. He’d gone there sometimes after a shift to decompress before going home. There had to be a demarcation line between work and home. The work was too damaging.

  Dixon remembered one case where a mother, addicted to meth, had tied her young son to a chair. The child, no older than a year, kept crying, and so the mother put duct tape over the child’s mouth. When the police found him, he was on the verge of death. Deprived of light and food for days, he was so emaciated that Dixon could see his ribs as though he were a skeleton with a thin film over the bones. He couldn’t go home after that, pick up Randy, and pretend everything was okay. He needed to get those thoughts out of his head first.

  The park was empty. The moon wasn’t out yet, but the sky was darkening quickly. He sat on a bench and looked out over the small pond. A cluster of ducks floated lazily near the edge. They showed some interest in him, but when they realized he wasn’t going to feed them, they drifted away.

  Tears flowed down his cheeks. He hadn’t even felt them. He only knew they were there because a few drops dripped onto his hands. He placed his elbows on his knees and leaned forward. Pain had a purpose. It had to. Pain was the body’s way of telling the brain the body had an injury. Dixon knew that. But what was psychological pain? His body trying to tell him to deal with something that was bleeding inside?

  Leaning back on the bench, he stared up at the sky then decided he couldn’t take the loneliness anymore. He got up, rushed back to his car, and drove.

  Pulling up to the house, he was filled with an anxiety that numbed him. He stopped in front and put the car in park. Then he chewed gum, hoping to mask the smell of alcohol on his breath. He kept his eyes on the house, on the light in the living room, then got out of the car.

  His stomach dropped when he saw the condo across the street. He had killed a man there. Before Chris had died, he’d told Dixon that Hillary and Randy were his family. The rage inside him made him pull the trigger, but looking back on it now, he knew it wasn’t rage. It was hurt because he knew what Chris had said was the truth. In a single moment, Dixon had lost the most important things in his life.

  Dixon turned away from the condo and trudged up the driveway. Standing in front of the door, he felt as if
he couldn’t breathe, as if something were crushing him. He swallowed, popped his gum, then knocked.

  When Hillary answered, he thought he might pass out. He hadn’t seen her in eight months. The only thing that had changed was her hair, which was shorter. The gleam in her eyes, the pearly white teeth, and the supple breasts that thrust out of the tight shirt she was wearing hadn’t changed at all.

  Dixon felt embarrassed that his first thought upon seeing her was sexual, and he looked away, down at the pavement. “I…”

  He didn’t actually know what he wanted to say, and now that he was there, nothing came to him.

  She reached out and held his hand. “I’m glad you came.”

  Gently, almost imperceptibly, she pulled him into the home. The house smelled the same. The furniture hadn’t changed—nothing had changed. His world had fallen apart, and nothing made sense anymore. But there, the only place he’d ever really considered home, the world couldn’t penetrate. Everything had stayed the same.

  They sat on the couch, and Hillary waited for him to speak first. She just held his hand and kissed him lightly on the cheek. Dixon had to pull away. He turned his head, and she touched his thigh, letting him know it was okay to look.

  “I can’t even begin to say I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re the person I love most in the world, and I hurt you in the worst way.”

  Dixon opened his mouth to speak, but no words came. Instead, he buried his head in her shoulder and wept.

  After a long time, he composed himself and said, “Is he asleep?”

  “Yes.”

  Slowly, he rose then waited for an objection from her, but none came. He crossed the living room and went into the child’s room. As he opened the door, the smell that he’d forgotten about struck him—the sweet smell of a child. He waited at the door for a long time before building up the courage to go stand by the crib. He looked down.

  Randy looked so much bigger. He wasn’t wrapped anymore, but he had a blanket and a pillow. The sight of him made Dixon’s knees almost buckle, and he had to grip the crib with both hands as he wept silently.