Angel Fire - Lisa Unger [8]
On Saturday night they proceeded to get her drunk on Orange Blossoms, a sickly-sweet combination of orange soda and cheap vodka. When she passed out, they stripped her of her clothes and left her on the lawn of her parents’ home. Virtually every “popular” kid in school was witness to her humiliation. And for those who weren’t, there were color photographs available. Wanda had not returned to school since the incident, two weeks prior to the disappearance of the first girl.
Lydia’s heart ached for Wanda. “Imagine the rage, the shame,” said Lydia sadly, showing Jeffrey the horrible photographs procured from a cooperative student.
“I don’t know,” Jeffrey had replied. “Sounds like a normal high-school Saturday night to me.”
But all joking aside, he could see where she was going. Lydia felt that Wanda or somebody close to her was behind the disappearance of the girls.
“You really think a teenager could be capable of this?” asked Jeffrey.
“I do.”
The motive was there, certainly. And in view of the total lack of evidence surfacing against the other suspects, Jeffrey and Lydia went to question the girl, accompanied by local police with a warrant to search the premises.
And in fact Lydia’s theory proved to be right.
With the help of her mother, a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, Wanda Jane had abducted each of the girls in her mother’s station wagon, tortured and then killed them. The bodies were found in freezers in the basement of the Felix home. The girls had been mutilated, golden hair shaved, pretty eyes gouged out, pearly teeth smashed with a hammer. Apparently, though, Wanda’s mother, Kara, had done all the killing. Wanda, Kara later confessed, would have been satisfied with disfigurement. But Kara could not forgive the ugly deed done to her daughter, and finished each of them off with a .22 caliber bullet to the temple.
It was their first formal case together, though Jeffrey had consulted Lydia many times in the past, often breaching ethics to share facts with her and gain her opinion, her insight. She had taught him respect for things unseen, for intuition, for “the buzz,” as they called it. It was a good match. He kept her grounded; she took him places he might never have gone without her.
The Cheerleader Murders was a typical Lydia Strong story, one she would have wanted to investigate and write about had she come across it in her endless scanning of the nation’s newspapers. Lydia chose local cases with a peculiar twist, something that called to her, like a child abduction that wound up leading to a child-slavery ring or the unsolved murder of a local Florida woman that was shown to be tied to Santeria. She seemed always to be searching local papers and the Internet, looking for something that gave her “the buzz.” Her only criterion was that the case be as dark and twisted as possible. The focus of her books was never the victims, though she believed they were often the key to the solving of crimes. In fact, critics had accused her of treating the victims as incidentals in her work, of treating them as evidence rather than as people. But what drove her was the mind of the killer, the details of the crime, and the process by which it was solved.
Jeff knew it was a search for answers, that she was trying always to understand why some people did the evil they do and what turned them into demons. As if by understanding them and exposing them to the light, she could make the monsters smaller and less frightening.
He looked at the phone a final time before rising, grabbing his black cashmere coat from the hook by the door, and leaving the office. He braced himself against the unseasonably cold fall air as he pushed through the glass doors and walked up West Fifty-seventh Street toward the