Undressed At Sea: A Psychological Thriller (Drew Stirling Book 2) Read online

  “Okay,” Chip said. “Let’s go forward and see. I think it gets better. I tried to get some help, even then, even back then I knew where all this could lead.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “My father died. I was seventeen. I hated him. Really, I did. More than anyone on the planet. He was cruel, vicious, and he fucked up my head. But he was my fucking dad. I loved him, too.” Chip had tears forming in his eyes. He didn’t want to cry. He paused, wiped his eyes, and breathed in deeply.

  “I had a few problems with the bank, but I was eighteen before anything could get resolved, and I had my dad’s ATM card. I had enough cash to eat, to put gas in the car. I finished high school with high honors and aced the SAT. I got my BA at UC Irvine and then did post-graduate work down here. I eventually settled down and got married. You know that story.

  “Going back to that last part of my senior year. I didn’t know how to call up a prostitute, and I think I would have been too embarrassed to even try. I suppose there were hookers on the street, but I never looked. I simply got more into porn. I didn’t need to buy any after my dad passed. I had to clean shit up and organize the house and garage. Man, did I find some crazy stuff. You wouldn’t believe some of the tapes he had. I still can’t believe it.”

  “Okay. I don’t need details or specifics about what exactly you watched. But how did it affect you? How did you feel about it? And in what way do you think it still negatively affects you? Or positively affects you, if you feel that way?”

  “Oh, it’s mostly negative,” Chip said. “But, it still gets me through bad days sometimes. It’s a weird thing. I’m ashamed of how wicked some of this shit is. Was.”

  “So you feel that sometimes watching porn, for you, sometimes it’s a like a crutch? Or a glass of wine, I think you’ve said? A release of tension?”

  “Yeah. You could say that. I’d never actually do any of the stuff. I mean the bad stuff. Sure, I’d like to have sex with some... I mean—I’m not sure what I mean. I’m just saying. Most of its harmless fantasy. And the really sick things? I wouldn’t actually do that stuff.”

  “But you still watch it and fantasize about it?”

  Chip was silent.

  Hawkins felt he was holding back, but therapy is a long process and forcing a client to talk about specifics at any given point in time is usually counterproductive. Slow and steady wins the race.

  “Okay, let’s take a for instance,” Chip began. “I like to watch porn where a woman gives a man a blowjob. It’s something I only experience in fantasy. That’s not perverted or sick or anything. But I watch that and experience it vicariously.”

  “You can’t experience that in a real relationship?” Hawkins asked him.

  “No. I can’t. Ever since that first experience, with that woman, the hooker from the first time. I feel that way again if anyone tries.” Chip looked down. He slumped. His embarrassment stood out like a nasty pimple in the middle of his forehead.

  “Have you talked about this with your wife? Or is that too hard for you bring up?”

  “I’ve never told her the story, no. But she hates oral sex anyway. I think she had a bad experience herself. So, it’s not like she’s dying to give me head and I’m denying her. We have an unspoken understanding I guess. It’s not really an issue. She’s okay in bed otherwise, I mean, the few times we have sex. Which isn’t very often. Maybe that’s normal. I don’t know. I was just trying to explain the porn. I’m not worried about fixing the sex thing with my wife.”

  “Okay, we don’t have to go there. You like to experience the fantasy of oral sex, and as you’ve pointed out, that’s a pretty normal and regular fantasy. But you’ve also alluded to some dark stuff. Things not so normal. Would you like to talk about that?”

  “No. Not today. I just want to say that I know the difference between fantasy and real life. I know there is a difference. I fantasize about a lot of things that I would never do.”

  “Okay, fair enough. We all do. Everyone fantasizes about things they’d never do. But there is a difference between a fantasy about a movie star or an attractive woman at work or even a stranger you see at the grocery store and a fantasy about doing harm to someone. Those kinds of fantasies—ones involving children, rape, or torture—those kinds of fantasies aren’t so good to dismiss as just a normal fantasy. I’m not condemning here. Rape, for instance, lots of regular people report having rape fantasies. It’s not like if you have a fantasy about rape, you are going to act on it. It doesn’t necessarily mean you really want to rape someone. But it might be something to talk about.”

  “Yes, I understand.” Chip didn’t say anything after that.

  Hawkins waited for him to speak.

  “I know I can’t blame my father. I have a firm grasp of that, mentally speaking. Intellectually, it makes perfect sense. Adults are responsible for their own behavior. But there are things done to children that change them in ways they cannot even see, understand, or even know they need to change. I guess...”

  Hawkins waited for him to continue.

  Chip didn’t speak. He stared at his feet.

  Hawkins broke the silence. “Okay, Chip. We know that things are done to children. But I can’t be a therapist to the category children. I can only be a therapist to an individual. To you. You understand?”

  Chip nodded his head.

  “So.” Hawkins asked him after a pause, “Would you like to talk more about the things that were done to you as a child? Things that might be challenging you today?”

  “I’ll try.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  The study of the victim is called victimology because everything sounds better with and ology tacked on the end.

  ~ Ben Aaronovitch

  There came a point where I just wished they’d find her body. Then I’d break down and cry bitterly, guilty for giving up hope that she might still be alive.

  ~ Anonymous family member of Jillian McCormick

  ...................

  Detective Jerry Turner hung up the phone. He collected the loose papers spread out on his desk, and he placed them, orderly, into a file. He dug in a drawer for one dollar bills and quarters. He walked to the vending machine; he had ten minutes to kill before his sit-down with his boss. Like other government buildings he’d worked in, this one had annoying, inadequate lighting. Sounds bounced around in odd ways so that he never really felt comfortable, regardless of whether it was noisy or relatively quiet.

  There were silent spots in drab hallways and other places where the din of office talk and telephones created an innocuous, irritating buzz, like the white noise he remembered from his childhood black and white television set. Before the advent of cable, before the world changed, television didn’t deliver the details of every hideous crime straight to your living room. Things were different now, but murder and rape were still murder and rape. Time hadn’t changed that.

  He remembered learning to type on an actual typewriter and recalled a time when all the reports he carried in his folder would have been hand-typed notes, onion skins, and Xerox copies that carried a distinct chemical smell he could still recall. Technology had changed all those things. Hell, he thought to himself, solving a murder will soon be as simple as asking Google.

  “How’s it hangin’?” A young cop—Smith, Jones, Rodriguez—somebody, he couldn’t remember, broke his silent premonitions about the future of crime solving.

  It was a question that actually meant: Any new breaks on the missing girl?

  He answered the same way he’d answered similar questions a thousand times, regardless of the actual status of the case, “I’m making progress.” He believed in positive thinking; claiming progress was the truth. Sometimes the progression was backward, true enough, but cases always moved, one direction or another. Many of them, too many, went to the cold case file storage, but here was no point in dwelling on files that were stagnant.

  Come on Google, get your shit together.

  Hell, not every crime w
as solved or even solvable, even if Google partnered with Siri and Alexa. Sometimes the bad guys got lucky. Sometimes, he imagined, they were just really skilled. No clues. No evidence. No indictments. It was part of the game.

  The cocky young buck that had spoken to him rummaged for a doughnut.

  Turner had been that self-assured and arrogant once. A long time ago.

  The buck slapped Turner on the back, as if they were friends, and said, “Good luck.”

  “Thanks,” Turner said before he disengaged. High profile cases brought attention. Most of it was distracting, and he did his best to ignore it. If you weren’t helping, Turner believed, you should keep your mouth shut. He didn’t need or want cheerleaders.

  He entered the office of Lieutenant Hernandez and noticed he had installed better lighting; Hernandez had live plants. Jerry touched one of them to be sure; the fake ones often looked more realistic than live ones. The plants were real, and they gave the office an odd, and out-of-place comfort; like the waiting room at a dentist’s office. A patient would know something painful was coming, but his dentist thought if only he had an aquarium filled with tropical fish... Yeah, maybe it worked on ten-year-olds, but Jerry doubted it. The plants gave him no comfort, either, and he stood uncomfortably until his direct supervisor told him to sit.

  Turner sat across from him and looked up.

  “I’m giving you this,” Hernandez said. He handed him a new case file.

  REED, MADISON was written in large block letters on the file folder.

  “We have a body?” Turner asked. Then he added, mostly to himself, “News to me.”

  “No,” the lieutenant said. “It’s still a missing person at this point. However, that said, I want you to look into it. She’s too similar to the McCormick kid. They could be sisters.”

  Turner opened up the file and started reading. Both young women had last been seen on Friday nights, the Reed girl three Fridays ago, and McCormick a little over a month before that. They were both students at the same University, UCSD, one of them a Freshman and the other a Sophomore. It was true they looked very similar. Not necessarily like sisters, Turner thought, but close enough to understand exactly why he’d caught the additional file.

  “They both look like high school girls,” Turner said.

  “We are getting external pressure on this already. It’s not just local press either. We have the national guys sniffing around. You know the deal, two missing white girls. Good-looking, wholesome, middle-class families, everybody wants to save a pretty white girl. Now we fucking have twins. Trust me, the guys above us are getting pressure from the politicians and shit is already running down here. Cross your fucking T’s on this one Turner. Make me look good.”

  “I always do, boss.”

  “Expect the press. Be on guard.”

  “Makes sense, enough. These aren’t crack addicts or hookers. Hell, Jillian had a 3.7 GPA. Religious parents. They offered a big reward. Lots of family. I get several messages daily. It’s one of those heartbreakers, pushing six, seven weeks now. No body. No witnesses. No leads. I think she was still a non-drinking, drug-free virgin from what her friends have told me. Nothing to go on.”

  “That’s part of the reason I want you to jump on this Reed case. If there’s any connection between the two—”

  “Understood.”

  Turner took the file back to his desk and read through it. Little to go on. Madison Reed had left a party on Friday night. Last confirmed interaction with someone on record was approximately eleven-thirty. Sometime before midnight, she’d talked to several people who were sober enough that they could remember seeing her, but everyone that had seen her that night had been drinking. Not exactly the best witnesses.

  Nobody remembered her leaving. Nobody knew if she had left with someone or alone. She hadn’t been heard from since. This could turn from plain old shit to a major shit storm. High pressure, media attention, career ramifications. Nightmares. Turner was close enough to retirement that career considerations were meaningless to him, but he had adult children who still resented his marriage to the police department and his divorce from their mother. A major case that stopped a killer? That would at least help them empathize with why he’d done the things he’d done. Maybe.

  Turner returned to his desk and called Madison’s father, Jack Reed. After introductions over the phone, Turner explained to him that he was working on his daughter’s case.

  “You think the newspapers are right?” Jack Reed asked.

  “Nobody is saying that,” Turner answered.

  “But the press?”

  “Fu—Never mind the press, sir. They say things to get people worked up. They are selling a product. We don’t have any reason at this point to believe the two cases are related or even that they are—”

  “Except that they look alike?”

  “Yes. Except that they look alike.”

  Despite his belief in positive thinking, Turner wasn’t an overly optimistic person, but he wasn’t a total cynic either. He hated lying to people, but he also didn’t want victims and families of victims to lose hope prematurely. It was a tough balancing act. People were unique, cops unique, situations unique, reactions unique. The dead, however, were simply dead.

  “I’ll do anything I can to help,” the father said. He was trying to sound strong, but Turner could hear the fear and uncertainty that made his voice shaky.

  He wanted to give him a ribbon of hope but thought better of it.

  Turner asked him if there was a way to contact the missing girl’s mother. As it turned out, the mother had left the family when Madison was a baby. The father thought she was back east somewhere.

  “I can try to find her through Facebook,” Reed said. “I haven’t talked to her in years.”

  “It’s worth checking out. Any other relatives or out-of-town friends that I can contact? Someone out-of-state she might have connected with? Boyfriends, ex-boyfriends, anybody you can think of? Even the weakest links, I’d like to hear everything and anything that could be related or helpful.”

  The father had nothing new.

  Turner told him he’d be in touch and set the desk phone back into its cradle. He checked his cell phone for any urgent messages. There were none. He went back to the file and re-read it. Maybe something there could, even very remotely, be considered a lead.

  Fucking hell.

  Turner closed the Reed file and opened the McCormick file.

  Jillian McCormick had a big family and many friends. Most of them lived close to San Diego. He’d already talked to all of them twice because Hernandez had pulled some strings last week.

  Maybe the Lieutenant was the killer?

  Or maybe he had a premonition that this case would end up being a homicide and an overall shitty and very public case?

  Nobody had a clue about where she would have gone if she’d left on her own. There was no indication she had any reason to run away. And there was no evidence of an abduction.

  There was no indication that Jillian had been having trouble with a boyfriend. Nobody had heard her say anything about a strange man contacting her, stalking her, or bothering her. She’d simply disappeared.

  Alien abduction, maybe?

  Her parents had gone through her computer before the police had been called; they went through it again with Detective Turner. They’d given him permission to send the computer to the forensic department. Technically, her parents owned the computer, all the warranties were registered in their name, so forensics was able to search it without a warrant or any red tape, but it had not revealed any secrets.

  There wasn’t anything remotely suspicious on her computer, and no piece of information that could be a considered a lead, she appeared to be an All-American, religious, college girl who loved her parents, horses, and Jesus, too. Fuck.

  Jillian McCormick had been, it seemed, snatched off the street late on a Friday night.

  Unless Madison Reed showed up in the next couple of days the likelihoo
d of there being a connection would seemingly be higher. The protocol with extreme crimes—multiple kidnapping victims—serial killing or rape—could dictate FBI involvement, especially when the press, or politicians, became involved.

  Turner had hoped it wasn’t going to come to that, but his gut told him it was time to initiate the first contact. Another thing to check off on his list of things the press would ask about later if this case became national news. Fucketty-fuck.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Who we are cannot be separated from where we're from.

  ~ Malcolm Gladwell

  I always wanted to be a cop. Had I known the cost I would have gone to cooking school instead.

  ~ Jerry Turner

  ...................

  Turner closed the door to the conference room and took a seat. In the room, already seated were four other men. Lieutenant Hernandez and Turner’s partner, Detective David Beck, were talking with two agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The San Diego branch of the FBI, being on the international border with Mexico, always had a full range of cases involving smuggling—both humans and contraband—as well as potential terrorist plots which were always moved to the top of the priority list. Nobody wanted to be the weak link when the next major act of terrorism happened on American soil. The FBI also handled cases involving bank robbery, organized crime, kidnapping, and extreme violence, especially anything that reached the national press. The FBI agents had heard about the McCormick-Reed connection and the potential major case it could become through media coverage before they’d been officially assigned to work it.

  “You were already on my calendar to call,” Agent Rick Stevenson had said to Turner when he took his call the day before.

  Turner started the conversation after he was formally introduced and shook hands with Stevenson and his senior partner, Agent Jimmy Tamboli.