Incarnate Read online

  “Oh,” Cherise said dolefully. “Well, she was, like, a role model for me.”

  “Was?” Zack echoed. Maybe he was finally getting somewhere.

  But Cherise just wiped away a tear, clearly putting on a show, while Starlatta chewed vigorously on the tip of one of her long fingernails.

  “She’s not coming back, is she,” Cherise said, her voice full of soap opera drama. “I mean, if you guys don’t find her in the first hour, it’s, like, she’s statistically dead, right?”

  Zack sighed. “I take it you’re a fan of CSI,” he said.

  “I mean, I’ve seen it a few times,” Cherise hedged.

  Starlatta rolled her eyes in disgust. “Okay, look,” she said, sitting up straighter. “We were with Brad that night, like I told you. And it is really terrible that Izzi’s gone missing. But if you’re thinking he did something to her—” She gave a shrug that managed to convey that Zack was the most dim-witted man she’d ever encountered.

  “Help me out here,” he said. “Why do you think Brad’s innocent? I’m not going to come down on you for anything.” He held up his palms and resisted adding “Scout’s honor,” an urge that had been hammered into him during the four years that Holt had served as his troop’s scout leader. “I’m just trying to get to the bottom of what happened to Izzi. We all want to bring her home safe, okay? So now’s the time to share what you know.”

  He leaned forward, elbows on the table, and gave the girls his best sincere, vulnerable gaze. “For all we know, she’s out there alone, in trouble. The three of us, we have a chance to do some good here,” he added, disgusted with himself while hoping this would work.

  “Izzi’s into some bad stuff,” Cherise blurted. Before Starlatta could stop her, she added, “I mean, not that I blame her, right? She’s had it tough. But I mean, the videos . . .”

  “Videos . . . ?” Zack held her gaze with everything he had. He was in—as long as Starlatta didn’t interfere. “Tell me what happened, Cherise. I know it’s tough, if you’ve been . . . swept up in things that got out of hand. But I want to help.”

  Cherise’s heavily mascaraed eyelashes trembled. “I don’t think she ever meant it to go as far as it did,” she allowed.

  “Oh, fuck,” Starlatta said, pulling out her vape. In seconds she was blowing bilious clouds of steamy vapor.

  “Start from the beginning,” Zack said, setting down his notebook, the better to focus on his potential star witness; he was, of course, recording the entire conversation anyway.

  “I mean, all I wanted was a good fake, you know? I’ll be twenty-one in two months, but when I met Izzi it was, like, over a year off and she set me up and didn’t even charge me. Said I reminded her of her at that age. Which was kind of sweet, you know?”

  Zack nodded, working hard to keep the skepticism from his eyes.

  “So she got me this ID that said I was twenty-two—Oregon, you know, so they don’t look too close—but then she was, like, you have something special, Cherise, you could really do well for yourself with just a few hours a week. And I mean, I was all ears. I have two roommates; one roommate doesn’t even speak English and she puts her disgusting plates back in the cabinet without washing them, so yeah, I was totally interested.”

  Cherise was really warming to her story now. She’d dropped her affected pose and was leaning over the table, earnest. “And it wasn’t like I had to do anything with a guy or whatever.” She fluttered her fingers. “Just me and the camera. Izzi always says, just imagine it’s some hot guy, but you always know it’s just a camera, right?”

  “You should shut the fuck up,” Starlatta suggested. “Detective Trainor, for the record, I personally never let Izzi record me for remonsteration.”

  “I think you mean remuneration,” Zack suggested. “You’re saying you never videotaped yourself?”

  “Never for money.” Starlatta smiled.

  Zack smiled back. “Look, even if you did . . . which I’m not saying you did, because clearly you’re a good girl, it doesn’t matter, because as I said, I’m only trying to gain insight into Izzi’s habits.”

  “Wouldn’t know.” Starlatta huffed. “Other than my study group and worship on Sundays, I pretty much keep to myself.” She smiled again. “Because I’m a good girl.”

  Zack resisted the urge to roll his eyes. After another hour of talking in circles, he escorted the girls out, sure he’d heard everything Cherise knew. He’d gotten what he needed—confirmation that Izzi was in way over her head.

  And confirmation that Brad hadn’t been anywhere he could prove on the night Isabel Wilcox disappeared.

  * * *

  FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER, ZACK was attempting to relay this new information to Holt, as he paced back and forth in the conference room in front of the Wilcox case evidence board. Pinned to the board was everything they had managed to gather pertaining to Isabel: selfies from her various social media accounts, many of them taken at the community college; family photos with her parents, and several of her and Brad together. Nothing out of the ordinary for a young woman, but they didn’t tell the whole story. They’d missed something huge; Isabel had been wrapped up in Brad’s business, and when drugs and girls were on the line, he could have any number of reasons to want her gone. Now, at last, they might have something to work with, if he could convince Holt that Brad’s alibi didn’t hold water.

  “These girls, Starlatta and Cherise—I think they might be pros,” Zack began.

  Holt rubbed the soft belly of the sleeping dachshund on his lap. He’d been bringing Tubbs in to work ever since the elderly dog started requiring medication in the middle of the day.

  “Well, Chaplin wouldn’t be the first guy around here to pay for sex. Maybe not even the second.”

  Zack nodded, point taken. “Yeah, I know, but I think Isabel Wilcox is the one who recruited them.”

  Holt’s eyebrows shot up. “How are you suggesting she did that?”

  “I think she lured them in by supplying them with fake IDs, then convinced them to make amateur porn. She had access to young girls over at the community college, and it would have been fairly easy to send them down the slippery slope, once she got their attention. Now, I’m not saying it was her idea. If Brad was the guy behind the operation, and Izzi wanted out—or was threatening to turn him in—that would give him a compelling reason to get rid of her.”

  “Hmm,” Holt said, gently nudging the dog from his lap before standing to take a closer look at the evidence board. “Do you have any hard evidence Isabel was involved in Chaplin’s drug enterprise? Maybe setting up a channel for him over at the college?”

  “Well—nothing yet. But, in my gut I know—”

  “We need more than that to build a case, son. You need to find me something real that we can go on, more than just your gut feeling.”

  “Brad is behind this.”

  Holt just stared at his protégé, a blank wall.

  Zack finally relented. “Okay, I know it’s just my gut.”

  “And you hardly got a gut to go off of.” Holt shook his finger at Zack’s hard waistline before patting his own belly. “But don’t worry, in time . . .”

  But Zack didn’t give him the satisfaction of a smile, his frustration boiling over. “She’s been missing two and a half weeks. When do we start doing more than tacking up flyers?”

  Holt sighed. “I hear you. But what do you suggest we do? We have a lot of resources directed toward this investigation. We’re going to continue to monitor Brad’s whereabouts, but at some point, unless we can find more evidence . . . more hard evidence . . .” He shook his head. “Personally, I’m still hoping she’s backpacking across Europe.”

  “More likely she’s dead in a ditch somewhere.” Zack paused, staring at a picture of Isabel sitting on Brad’s lap, holding a frosty cocktail. “Brad Chaplin knows something. Kid’s a lowlife.”

  “He also claims he’s got an alibi for the night she went missing.”

  “Come on, Holt, he�
�s not on the bar tapes from that night. Those girls just admitted to making amateur porn. You think they wouldn’t lie for a few dollars more?”

  Zack’s phone rang, and he glanced at the screen: Milton. Zack glared across tops of the cubicles to the other side of the station, where he could see Conrad Milton perched on his stool. It wouldn’t have killed the guy to walk a dozen yards and tell him whatever it was in person, but Milton always called instead. “Yeah, what,” he answered.

  “A Danielle DeWitt is here, Detective. She wants to file a missing-person report. Says her husband was due back from his hunting trip two days ago and she hasn’t heard from him.”

  “Another one?” Zack looked back at the sea of images of Isabel Wilcox pinned to the wall. “Can’t we go a single month around here without someone going missing?”

  His words were met with wounded silence, and Zack regretted the outburst immediately. After all, it wasn’t Milton’s fault. Besides, a majority of missing-person reports ended up being closed when the disgruntled teen or errant spouse turned up, even in Jarvis, which had more than its fair share of missing-persons cases for a town its size. A casualty of living on the fringes of civilization, Holt always said, though Zack knew it needled him, too.

  “I’m still working the Wilcox case. Send her on back to . . .” He cast his eyes around the station. Phil sat at his desk. An uneaten sandwich lay on his desk as he scrolled through news coverage on Isabel’s disappearance, absentmindedly running his fingers through his gray hair. He didn’t look busy, but then Zack was still wary of giving too much at once to Phil. He was a lifer, been on the force nearly as long as Holt, but he’d had a breakdown early last year after botching a heroin ring sting. He’d taken a six-month leave and was still getting his sea legs back. That left . . . “Evelyn.”

  “What was that about?” Holt asked as Zack set down the phone.

  “Missing person. Husband on a hunting trip. Probably just lost track of time, or something.”

  They stood in the open door of the conference room, watching a middle-aged, pleasantly round blond woman in a yoga outfit make her way to Evelyn Skorczewski’s desk. Her carefully applied makeup didn’t disguise the fact that she had been crying. Zack felt a twinge of guilt about his callousness.

  When Mrs. DeWitt reached Evelyn, she seemed to hesitate, a typical reaction when people came face-to-face with the latest officer to join the department. Nearly six feet tall, with a mound of platinum-blond curls, wide blue eyes caked with as much mascara and eyeliner as Holt would let her get away with, and curves that even a polyester uniform couldn’t disguise, Evelyn was hardly a typical officer of the law. But Holt had hired her sight unseen based on her scores from the academy, as well as the recommendation of her first training officer, who promised that she’d never seen a recruit more committed to upholding the law than Evelyn.

  All of which was true, though she didn’t mention that Evelyn, a former beauty queen from Sitka, was a preacher’s daughter, the only girl in a family of six brothers, and she could cuss like a trucker while quoting scripture in the same sentence. She was hell-bent on seeing as much action as she could, and she had chosen Jarvis because of its recent upticks in meth and heroin busts, as well as sex trafficking, porn, and illegal gambling.

  “That’s Danielle DeWitt,” Holt said, as Evelyn invited the woman to take a seat. “I’ve known her husband for ages. Give you five-to-one that George is sleeping off a bender in the back of his truck in the Walmart parking lot.”

  “Come on, Holt, you know we aren’t supposed to gamble on the citizen’s time.” Zack conveniently forgot that he’d just advanced a theory on the man’s whereabouts not two minutes ago.

  “Hmm. Okay, well, let’s pick this up in ten. I’ve got to go see a man about a horse.”

  As the chief lumbered off toward the men’s room, Zack decided to stretch his legs a bit, maybe eavesdrop on the new case. He patted the now-asleep Tubbs gently on the head, then ambled over until he stood a few yards away from Evelyn’s desk, pretending to read the notices on the missing-persons board while Evelyn patiently offered up Kleenex to the sobbing wife.

  “Was your husband in any disputes recently?” Evelyn was asking. “Anyone who might have had a beef with him?”

  “Well . . . ,” Mrs. DeWitt said, peering uncertainly at Evelyn’s long, lacquered nails as the officer took notes. “I mean, sometimes I wonder if he’s really going where he says he is. Like, he’ll say he’s going to the store for cigarettes, but he comes back an hour later and forgot to buy them. There’ve been calls to the house where, when I answer, the caller just hangs up.”

  As Zack listened to Evelyn interview an increasingly upset Danielle DeWitt, his gaze fell on a faded, curling notice that had been there ever since he’d first joined the force. Rose Gulliver, a leathery old crow of a woman who’d terrified him and his sister Brielle as children, chasing them down her front walk with a garden rake. After she’d disappeared, they’d found her basement crammed full of unopened merchandise from every department store in the state, most of it with the tags still on.

  Zack touched the flyers, straightening a few, re-pinning one that had come loose. So many flyers . . . so many missing citizens. What was it with the town of Jarvis? There was no unifying thread, no hint of what had happened to them. Men, women, rich, poor, old, young, newcomers, and old-timers.

  They were all just . . . gone.

  SEVEN

  In the morning, with an entire day off ahead of her, Kim took a long look at Ethan’s old scrub shirt, abandoned in a puddle on the floor, before deciding it was past saving and tossing it into the trash. Invigorated, she sorted through a couple of moving boxes she’d somehow never gotten around to opening and put together a respectable outfit. She took her time getting ready, shaving her legs and plucking her brows while she thought about her various obligations: to the hospital, to Kyle, to Scarlett. It seemed impossible to satisfy everyone.

  But only Scarlett seemed defenseless against the things that were happening to her. Only Scarlett had asked Kim for nothing—except to be believed. But what possible explanation would Scarlett have for impersonating a missing girl? No, it was almost certain that Scarlett truly had alters inside of her. And one of them had latched on to this idea of Isabel, the missing girl, creating a grisly tale. To what end? Perhaps the idea of being lost was the connection—Scarlett seemed lost emotionally, so her alter focused on that physical reality, exploring the idea of being lost literally as well as psychically. . . .

  Kim set down her hairbrush and stared at her reflection in the mirror. She’d irritated a lot of people in her life, infuriated several—but she’d helped some, too. And she had a chance to help someone now. If no one else would believe that Scarlett’s alters were real, Kim had to find a way to prove it, and help the girl reclaim her life as her own.

  She’d barely convinced Kyle not to reassign Scarlett to Andrea Kaston, the other psych resident whom Kim shared an office with. He’d grudgingly agreed to let her continue talk therapy but made it clear that if there was one more incident like the one in his office, where she lost control and endangered herself or anyone else, Kim would no longer be allowed to treat the girl, even though Kim had repeated that the broken coffee table was the result of an accident. He also forbade her to prescribe any medications without consulting with him first, which was fine with Kim, because she wasn’t convinced Scarlett needed to be medicated in the first place.

  Kyle hadn’t said anything about speaking with Scarlett outside their scheduled appointments, however; probably because he knew that Kim was aware that this was strictly off-limits. But at least this way she wouldn’t be directly lying to him. Before she could change her mind, Kim called Scarlett and asked if she could come over. This was not something that Kim would ordinarily consider with a patient in her care, but her instincts told her that if she had any hope of helping Scarlett, she was going to need to work with her outside the confines of a clinical office.

  On the dri
ve over, Kim recorded an update to her case notes on her iPhone.

  “Identity based on actual people rather than constructed from patient’s own experience. Highly atypical. Strike that, make that unprecedented.” She made a note to confirm that there were no other confirmed cases of an “invading” secondary identity, one based on an actual person unknown to the patient.

  “If patient is manufacturing the alternates . . .” Kim forced herself to consider this angle and thought about the possibilities for a few moments before continuing. “Possible narcissistic personality disorder? Psychosis with delusions? Compensating for unknown trauma?”

  A car horn blared, and a woman in an Explorer swerved and flipped her off. Kim realized she’d rolled through a stop sign. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” she mumbled, pantomiming a mea culpa at the angry driver. She needed to focus on her driving, but there was one more thought that she wanted to make note of for later, an unpleasant but necessary possibility to explore.

  “Need to consider treatment bias and my own personal investment in outcome. Consider . . . reassigning the case.”

  It would be a blow for Kim to be removed from this case, but it could be catastrophic for Scarlett. The girl had a long history of not being believed, and though Kim considered all her colleagues competent, she knew that none of them had experience in alternate therapies of the type she was considering. And judging from the unfavorable reactions Kim had received from the review board, Jarvis Regional was not exactly eager to employ experimental treatments. All of which meant that if Scarlett were reassigned to Mackie or any of the other staff psychiatrists, she was probably going to be right back on the treadmill of misdiagnosis and ineffective and potentially harmful drugs.

  She needed to do whatever she could to make sure that didn’t happen. And that meant visiting Scarlett at home and getting to the bottom of what was really going on with her alters.