The stretch of I-70 between Kansas City and St. Louis was hours and hours of pure ugly driving. Flat, dead-yellow, and littered with billboards: a fetus curled up like a kitten (Abortion Stops a Beating Heart); a living room turned red from the glare of ambulance lights (Take Care Crime-Scene Cleanup Specialists); a remarkably plain woman giving fuck-me eyes to passing motorists (Hot Jimmy’s Gentlemen’s Club). The billboards ominously advising love of Jesus were in direct proportion to those advertising porn liquidators, and the signs for local restaurants consistently misused quotation marks: Herb’s Highway Diner—The “Best” Meal in Town; Jolene’s Rib House—Come in for Our “Delicious” Baby Back Ribs.
Lyle was in the passenger seat. He’d debated the pros and cons of joining me (maybe I would have more rapport with Krissi alone, us both being women; on the other hand, he did know this part of the case better; but then again, he may get too excited, ask her too many questions, and then blow it, he sometimes got ahead of himself, if he had one flaw it was that he sometimes got ahead of himself; then again, $500 was a lot of money and he felt somewhat entitled, no offense, to come along). Finally I’d snapped into the phone that I’d swing by Sarah’s Pub in thirty minutes, and if he was out front, he could come. Click. Now he was fussing next to me, flicking the door lock up and down, fiddling with the radio, reading each sign out loud, like he was trying to reassure himself of something. We drove past a fireworks warehouse the size of a cathedral, and at least three bundles of fatality markers: small white crosses and plastic flowers gathering dust on the side of the road. Gas stations made themselves known with signs skinnier and taller than the wilting weather vanes of nearby farms.
On one ridge was a billboard with a familiar face: Lisette Stephens, with that joyful grin, a phone number below for information on her disappearance. I wondered how long til they took it down, drained of hope or money.
“Oh God, her,” Lyle said, as we passed Lisette. I bristled, but my feelings were similar. After a while it was almost rude to ask you to worry about someone who was clearly dead. Unless it was my family.
“So Lyle, can I ask you, what is it that makes you so obsessed with the … this case?” As I said it, the sky got just dark enough to switch the highway lights on, and all in a row, into the horizon, they blinked white, like my question had intrigued them.
Lyle was staring at his leg, listening sideways like he usually did. He had a habit of pushing one ear toward whoever was speaking, and then he’d wait a few seconds, like he was translating whatever was said into another language.
“It’s just a classic whodunit. There are a lot of viable theories, so it’s interesting to talk about,” he said, still not looking at me. “And there’s you. And Krissi. Children who … caused something. I’m interested in that.”
“Children who caused something?”
“Something to happen, something that got bigger than they were, something that had unintentionally major consequences. Ripples. That interests me.”
“Why?”
He paused. “Just does.”
We were the two unlikeliest people to charm information out of someone. Stunted human beings who got awkward every time we tried to express ourselves. I didn’t really care if we got much from Krissi, though, as the more I thought about Lyle’s theory, the more it seemed like bunk.
After another forty minutes of driving, the strip clubs started showing up: dismal, crouched blocks of cement, most without any real name, just neon signs shouting Live Girls! Live Girls! Which I guess is a better selling point than Dead Girls. I imagined Krissi Cates pulling into the gravel parking lot, getting ready to take off her clothes at a strip club that was so entirely generic. There’s something disturbing about not even bothering with a name. Whenever I see news stories about children who were killed by their parents, I think: But how could it be? They cared enough to give this kid a name, they had a moment—at least one moment—when they sifted through all the possibilities and picked one specific name for their child, decided what they would call their baby. How could you kill something you cared enough to name?
“This will be my first strip bar,” Lyle said, and gave his pert-lipped smile.
I pulled off the highway, to the left, as Krissi’s mother had advised—when I’d phoned the only club listed, a greasy man told me he thought Krissi was “around”—and rattled into a pasture-sized parking lot for three strip bars, all in a row. A gas station and trucker park sat at the far, far end: in the bright white glow, I saw the silhouettes of women scuttling like cats between the cabs, doors opening and shutting, bare legs kicking out as they leaned in to line up the next trick. I assumed most of the strippers ended up working the trucker park once the clubs were done with them.
I got out of the car and fumbled with the notes Lyle had given me, a neat, numbered list of questions to ask Krissi, if we found her. (Number One: Do you still maintain that you were molested by Ben Day when you were a child? If so, please explain.) I started to review the rest of the questions when a movement to my right caught my attention. Far down in the trucker park, a small shadow dislodged itself from the side of a cab and started toward me in an intensely straight line, the kind of straight you walk when you’re wasted and trying not to look it. I could see the shoulders pushed forward, far out ahead of the body, as if the girl had no choice but to keep moving toward me once she started. And she was a girl, I saw when she reached the other side of my car. She had a wide, doll-like face that glowed in the streetlight, light brown hair pulled back in a ponytail from a domed forehead.
“Hey, you got a cigarette I could bum?” she said, her head jittering like a Parkinson’s patient.
“You OK?” I asked, trying to get a better look at her, guess her age. Fifteen, sixteen. She was shivering in a thin sweatshirt over a miniskirt and boots that were supposed to look sexy but on her looked childish, a kindergartner playing cowgirl.
“You got a cigarette?” she repeated, brightening, her eyes wet. She gave a quick bounce on her heels, looked from me to Lyle, who was watching the pavement.
I had a pack somewhere in the back of my car, so I leaned in and rummaged through old fast-food wrappers, an assortment of tea bags I’d swiped from a restaurant (another thing no one should ever buy: tea bags), and a pile of cheap metal spoons (ditto). The cigarette pack had three cigs left, one of them broken. I doled out the other two, flicked a lighter, the girl leaning in crookedly, then finally hitting the flame, Sorry I can’t see a thing without my glasses. I lit my cigarette, let my head do its heat-wave dance after that first rush of nicotine.
“I’m Colleen,” she said, sucking on the cigarette. The temperature had dropped quickly with the sun, we stood across from each other bouncing up and down to keep warm.
Colleen. It was too sweet a name for a hooker. Someone had once had different plans for this girl.
“How old are you, Colleen?”
She glanced back toward the truck park and smiled, hunched down in her shoulders. “Oh, don’t worry, I’m not working there. I work over there.” She pointed to the middle strip club with her middle finger. “I’m legal. I don’t need to …” She nodded back toward the row of trucks, all of them immobile, despite what was happening inside. “We just try to keep an eye out for some of the girls that do work it. Sisterhood thing. You new?”
I’d worn a low-cut top, assuming it might make Krissi more comfortable when I found her, signal I wasn’t a prude. Colleen was looking at my cleavage now with the eyes of a jeweler, trying to match my tits to the correct club.
“Oh, no. We’re looking for a friend. Krissi Cates? You know her?”
“She may have a different last name now,” Lyle said, then looked away toward the highway.
“I know a Krissi. Older?”
“Mid-thirties or so.” Colleen’s whole body was humming. I assumed she was on uppers. Or maybe she was just cold.
“Right,” she said, finishing her cigarette in one aggressive pull. “She picks up some day shifts at Mike’s sometimes.” She pointed to the farthest club, where the neon said only G-R-S.
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“It’s not. But you gotta retire sometime, right? Still it sucks for her, because I guess she spent a lot of money on a boob job, but Mike still didn’t think she was primetime anymore. But at least the boob job was tax deductible.”
Colleen said all this with the perky ruthlessness of a teenager who knew she had decades before such humiliations touched her.
“So should we come back during the day shift?” Lyle asked.
“Mmm. You could wait here,” she said in a babyish voice. “She should be done soon.” She motioned back toward the line of trucks. “I need to get ready for work, thanks for the cigarette.”
She trotted, again with that push of the shoulders, toward the dark middle building, flung the door wide, and disappeared inside.
“I think we should go, this sounds like a dead end,” Lyle said. I was about to snap at him for going chickenshit on me, tell him to just wait in the car, when another shadow climbed out of a truck far back in the line, and began heading toward the parking lot. All the women here walked as if they were pushing against a monstrous headwind. My stomach lurched at a lonely image of me trapped here or somewhere like it. It wasn’t so unlikely, for a woman with no family, no money and no skills. A woman with a certain unwholesome pragmatism. I’d spread my legs for nice men I knew would be good for a few months of free meals. I’d done it and never felt guilty, so how much would it take to find me here? I felt my throat tighten for a second, and then snapped to. I had money coming now.
The figure was all shadow: I could make out a halo of ruined hair, the jutting edges of short shorts, an oversized purse, and thick, muscular legs. She came out of the dark to reveal a tanned face with eyes that were set slightly close together. Cute but canine. Lyle nudged me, gave me a searching look to see if I recognized her. I didn’t but I gave a quick wave just in case and she stopped jerkily. I asked if she was Krissi Cates.
“I am,” she said, her vulpine face surprisingly eager, helpful, like she thought something good might be about to happen. It was a strange expression to see, considering the direction she’d come from.
“I was hoping to talk to you.”
“OK.” She shrugged. “About what?” She couldn’t figure me out: not a cop, not a social worker, not a stripper, not her kid’s teacher, assuming she had a kid. Lyle she only glanced at, since he was taking turns gaping at her or turning almost entirely away from us. “About working here? You a reporter?”
“Well, to be frank, it’s about Ben Day.”
“Oh. OK. We can go inside Mike’s, you can buy me a drink?”
“Are you married? Is your name still Cates?” Lyle blurted.
Krissi frowned at him, then looked at me for explanation. I widened my eyes, grimaced: the look women give each other when they’re embarrassed of the men they’re with. “I got married, once,” she said. “Last name’s Quanto now. Only because I been too lazy to change it back. You know what a pain in the ass that is?”