Girls Like Us(9)

Today it’s a festering crime scene. I can envision the headlines already. The tabloids will eat this up: a dead girl, dismembered and buried amid multimillion-dollar oceanfront mansions. It’s hard to imagine a more glamorous burial ground. Once the press connects this case to the body found last summer in the Pine Barrens, the floodgates will open. A murder is one thing. Serial killings catch national news interest. Web forums light up with chatter. Conspiracy theorists and true-crime junkies take notice. The killer himself might even crawl out of the woodwork, unable to stay away from the media circus. It might inspire him—or someone else—to kill again.

It wouldn’t be the first time. Long Island has always been a breeding ground for men who hunt women. Joel Rifkin killed at least nine women back in the nineties. Robert Shulman killed five. The Long Island Serial Killer—said to be responsible for anywhere from ten to sixteen murders over the past twenty years—still remains at large. And that’s to say nothing of the scores of cold cases that remain in boxes on the shelves at SCPD headquarters and the bodies that never got found at all.

“How does it feel to be home?” Lee says.

I give him a look. “This isn’t home.”

“I mean, the island. Did you miss it?”

“No.”

“How long has it been?”

“Ten years.”

Lee whistles. “You left for college and never came back?”

“Yep.”

“Whatever happened to Tommy Street?”

I must look shocked because Lee turns crimson. “Sorry. Too personal?”

It is too personal, but Lee doesn’t know that. He’s just trying to make casual conversation. Tom was my high school boyfriend. The first and perhaps most important relationship of my life. We started dating at the beginning of sophomore year and broke up at the end of senior year, right after I got pregnant by accident. Tom wanted to get married. I considered giving up my scholarship to MIT and staying put in Suffolk County so that we could get married. Dad told me he’d disown me if I did. Lee doesn’t know that, despite my father’s outrage, I decided to keep the baby only to lose it a few weeks later. He doesn’t know that all of this changed the course of my life irrevocably. I stopped speaking to Tom, though none of it was his fault. I stopped speaking to my father, too. I packed up my secondhand Civic and drove myself up to MIT without saying goodbye.

“I don’t know about Tommy. We’re not in touch,” I say, though it’s only half-true. I’ve kept tabs on Tom’s life over the past decade. He still lives in Suffolk County. He’s married to a woman named Beth, who looks like me except she’s always smiling. They have twin girls, Hannah and Ellie, who wear matching outfits. He’s an insurance broker, just like his father. He coaches Little League on weekends. They have a rescue dog named Hester. They look, on social media anyway, well-adjusted and happy. Occasionally, I wonder what would have happened if I’d stayed. Could I have been Mrs. Thomas Street? What if we had a little girl or boy, now ten years old? Would I have felt trapped, like my father had? Or is it possible that, like Beth, I would be smiling in every photo?

“I always thought you two would get married,” Lee says. “Everyone back then did.”

“It was high school. Puppy love.”

Lee shrugs. “Looked real to me.”

“It was ten years ago.”

“You and your dad fell out of touch, I take it.”

“Something like that.”

“Did he ever talk about the Pine Barrens case?”

“He didn’t talk much about anything. At least, not to me.”

“He talked about you.”

I turn, surprised. “He did?”

“Yeah. He was proud of you. Of the work you do. He’d bring you up every chance he got.”

We’re both quiet for a minute. “We didn’t speak for years after I moved away,” I say quietly. “I wanted nothing to do with him.”

“And yet you ended up in law enforcement, just like him.”

“True. It’s in my blood, I guess. Dad came down to DC a few years back. We patched things up a bit. We’d talk now and then. Not recently, though. We hadn’t spoken in months.”

Lee nods like that doesn’t surprise him. “Last year was tough on your dad. Pine Barrens shook him up. It was a horrible case. The girl was young. Just turned seventeen. Your dad took it real personal. He told me once that he felt like he was the only one who seemed to care that she was dead.”

“Did anyone care?”

Lee shrugs. “There wasn’t exactly a media frenzy. She was a working girl from a bad neighborhood. You know. Same old story.”

“Where was she from?”

“Brentwood.”

“Latina?”

“Yeah.”

“And killed the same way as this one?”

“Shot at point-blank range in the head. Cut up and wrapped in burlap like a goddamn Christmas tree and buried way out in the middle of nowhere. Ria Sandoval was her name.”

“Sexually assaulted?”

“Hard to tell. Animals got to her pretty bad. She’d been dead for more than a month when some hikers found her.”

“When did she go missing?”

“Over July Fourth weekend, last summer. Told a friend she was going to work a job out east. Never came back. No one bothered to file a missing persons.”