Chapter 11

Susan Marsh lived in the suburbs of Jersey City, not far from Ronald Reagan High School. She was younger than Mrs. Beacham, in her late sixties, and lived in a nicer area of town than Mrs. Beacham did. The suburbs were old, with most of the houses going back to the fifties, but they had yards and the occasional family walking down the sidewalk instead of fenced-in yards full of junk.

Where Mrs. Beacham had been spry for her age, Mrs. Marsh looked like she’d traveled every mile of her sixty-eight years the hard way, wearing ragged house shoes and a faded housecoat, her short hair unwashed and stringy, a cigarette hanging limply from her lips.

“Mrs. Marsh?” Taylor asked.

“Yeah.”

“I’m John Taylor, with the FBI,” Taylor said, holding up his credentials. “I wanted to ask you a few questions about your daughter.”

“She’s not dead then?” Mrs. Marsh said, taking a long drag on her cigarette and blowing out the smoke.

“I don’t think so. Can I come in and talk to you about her?”

The woman shrugged and stepped back, allowing Taylor inside. Everything in the home felt worn and old. The couches were in a floral pattern that might have been nice thirty years before, but now were moth-eaten and browned from dirt and age.

“When was the last time you saw your daughter?”

“November tenth, nineteen ninety-seven.”

“You remember it to the day?”

It wasn’t unusual for parents to remember the day their child disappeared, but this wasn’t a usual family. In his searches into Chelsea Marsh’s history, one of the things that stood out to him was the lack of any kind of missing persons report. She might not have been a minor, but that wouldn’t stop most families from filing something if their kid disappeared. The local police might not do anything about it, but there should have been a filing of some sort, even one not followed up on.

“Sure. That was the morning after Frank crashed the car. I had to take a bus to work for almost a year after that idiot got tanked and ran into the street light out front. He couldn’t get to work, so he lost his job and we damn near lost the house ‘cause of it. It’s when all the troubles started.”

“Was something said that night that might have caused her to leave?”

“She and Frank got into it like they normally did when he was drinking, but nothing other than that. I just assumed she’d gotten pregnant or moved in with her drug dealers, or something like that.”

“She did drugs often?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Did she and her father get into fights often?”

“Stepfather.”

“Okay, did she and her stepfather get into fights often?”

“I guess. Frank would get drunk and she’d mouth off and he’d have a go at her. Course, she never learned her lesson about it.”

“Where is Frank now?”

“Dead. Car accident in oh-two. Surprised it took him that long, driving around drunk as a skunk all the time.”

Taylor’s first thought was that there was a good chance the accident wasn’t actually an accident, but something bothered him about Chelsea killing her stepfather. He didn’t put it past her and making it look like an accident was certainly in her wheelhouse, but he couldn’t see her waiting so long to do it.

One of the things consistent in all of Taylor’s readings was that, while there were some environmental factors to how sociopathy and psychopathy presented themselves, it wasn’t something you just got. Chelsea would have been born a psychopath, which made the idea that her stepfather could beat her for years without any kind of retaliation from her difficult to believe.

“There wasn’t any kind of retaliation from her when he went at her? She didn’t try to get back at him? Maybe hurt him afterward?”

“No. She barely even reacted to it. Sometimes, I kind of got the feeling she liked it. We’d all be eating dinner quietly, no one arguing, and out of nowhere, she starts poking at him, trying to get him to react, which wasn’t that hard. She knew right where to hit him to get a reaction, too.”

“You never tried to intervene?”

“No,” she said, looking away, seeming embarrassed for the first time during the interview.

“You didn’t want to help her? She was your daughter, and you let her stepfather beat on her?”

“If I stepped in, he’d just beat on me too, besides...” she said, and then stopped, reconsidering.

“Besides what?”

“It kept her in check. Sometimes, when Frank was away working, which wasn’t often, she’d get bored. And when she got bored, she’d get mean.”

“You were afraid of her?”

“Hell yes. She had this look sometimes ... did you know we had to stop having pets? Over the years we had a couple of cats and dogs, and they all died or disappeared. There was always a reason for it, but I swear I got the feeling it was really Chelsea. She never cried when our pet would go missing, or accidentally eat something it shouldn’t, or get hit by a car. Sometimes, I swear it seemed she even kind of smiled when we told her. Eventually, I stopped having any animals in the house. Neighbors’ pets sometimes ended up dead, though.”

That, at least, was in Taylor’s reading about psychopaths. Animal mutilation was one of the key signs of the onset of psychopathic tendencies. It was how these budding killers worked out their first impulses and learned that they liked killing. It was curious how she managed to end up a professional killer rather than a serial killer. All of Taylor’s research on her suggested she was telling the truth when she said she didn’t kill someone unless she was getting paid for it.

That was a lot more controlled than any psychopath Taylor had read about. He’d been prepared for there to be something else, something that might have suggested how she turned out so different from the people who end up in true crime books, but everything he was hearing was practically textbook serial killer; early animal mutilations, lack of empathy, cross-wired emotions, and domestic abuse and neglect.

It was curious she ended up how she did.

“What about her biological father? Is he still around? Do you think she’d have any reason to contact him?”

“No idea who her biological father is. I ... I wasn’t very picky when I was younger. I was working in a club, dancing, and sometimes I’d go out afterward with one of the customers. I saw a lot of men back then, so it’s hard to narrow it down. Besides, even if I did, I wouldn’t know how to contact him. It’s not like I ever learned their names.”

“And you’re sure you haven’t heard from her since she ran away?”

“Nope. I didn’t even know if she was alive or dead until you asked about her.”

“Okay. Well, thanks for your time,” Taylor said, excusing himself.

Taylor made his way out to the street where he’d parked the SUV he’d borrowed from the local offices, trying to figure out his next move. Whitaker was continuing the database searches for her, but Taylor didn’t hold out much hope.

Chelsea was a ghost and her mother had been his last real shot at tracking her down. Now that he knew her real name, he didn’t have much else to go on. She was clearly living under an assumed identity, but short of the woman calling him up and telling him the name she was currently going by, there was no chance of finding her. Unlike her real identity, which she couldn’t avoid being connected to, her fabricated one could be literally anyone. Knowing what she looked like helped, but there wasn’t a database of photographs of all dark-haired women living in Jersey City he could run it against. If she hadn’t been arrested under this new identity, there wasn’t much he could do short of looking up every woman living in Jersey City in nineteen ninety-seven.

He was out of leads, and it was frustrating. Pulling open the car door, he slid into the driver’s seat of the vehicle, which is when he heard it. A noticeable click, separate from other sounds he’d expect to hear when getting into a car. It was foreign enough that he froze, trying to work out if he really heard something or not, when a new noise started. This one was significantly louder and impossible to miss. A steady beeping sound. Taylor froze in place.

The beeping was too regular and odd to be part of the car and, considering who he was looking for and her actions since disappearing as Chelsea Marsh, Taylor’s first thought was a car bomb. He hadn’t started the engine and he’d heard the click the moment he’d sat down, which meant pressure plate. It was probably set to blow if pressure let off the plate, which meant he couldn’t get out of the car, or even shift around very much.

Reaching into his jacket, he pulled out his phone to call for the bomb squad when it suddenly rang. His nerves were high enough, thanks to the thought of sitting on top of a bunch of explosives, that he almost jumped when it did. Taking a few slow, steady breaths to calm himself, Taylor answered.

“Do I have your attention now?” Chelsea’s voice said.

“You do, Chelsea,” Taylor said.

“That’s not my name,” she said, heat in her voice.

“Then what should I call you?”

“You shouldn’t call me anything. I told you to stop poking around into my past, but you wouldn’t listen. Now you’re sitting on a pound and a half of C4.”

“So why am I not dead?”

“Because killing you would just bring more of your people down here. I could give a shit how much you bother that woman, but I don’t need to be looking over my shoulder. This is your last warning. Stop looking into my past. Stop talking to people related to me. Stop trying to find me.”