Landeta turned down the music’s volume. “I said, maybe it’s time I had a partner.”
Louis hesitated then came back to the sofa. He set the books down on the coffee table. “I haven’t eaten all day. Is there a pizza place around here that delivers?” he asked.
“Yeah, Fast Eddie’s down the street.”
“Pepperoni and extra cheese. No anchovies. And you’re buying. Where’s your john?”
Landeta pointed to a door. Louis went to the bathroom. When he came back, Landeta was hanging up the phone.
“I got green peppers,” Landeta said.
“I hate green peppers,” Louis said.
“You can pick them off.”
The music stopped and for a moment, the room was quiet, just the drone of the air conditioner in the window and a car horn somewhere outside. Ray Charles started into “Them That Got.” Landeta turned the volume down until the music was just a whispering stream.
“Where do you want to start?” Louis asked.
“With the missing girls,” Landeta said. “You never made me copies of your interviews with their families. I’m in the dark, so to speak.”
Louis remembered back to the night Landeta had come to his cottage. Landeta had refused to look at them and wanted to take them with him. “Who do you want to start with?” he asked.
“Emma Fielding,” Landeta said, settling into the Eames chair.
Louis pulled out the reports he had written on each girl. “Emma disappeared in 1953. She was sixteen.”
“So Frank was already with his wife then,” Landeta said. “It was a year after Diane was born, in fact.”
“Serial killers often have wives or girlfriends,” Louis said. “Some have families and lives that look normal.”
Landeta was staring off at the white wall. “Families,” he said quietly. “What was Emma’s family like?”
“She was sexually abused by her stepfather,” Louis said. “Her mother and older brother both knew about it, and when the older brother finally ran off, Emma wanted to go with him. He kind of abandoned her.”
Landeta nodded thoughtfully and said, “Let’s move on to the others.”
“Cindy Shattuck, 1964.” Louis looked at his notes. “She lived with her mother in Matlacha. The mother kicked her out of the house because she thought she was flirting with her husband. No boyfriend, but Cindy worked in a restaurant in town where she could have met someone.”
“That’s all? You can do better.”
“Well, her mother is a piece of work. Told me if we ever found Cindy to tell her she was dead. And she said Cindy took only one thing with her —- an old sock monkey.”
“Good. Go on,” Landeta said.
“Paula Berkowitz. 1965. High school graduate, honor student, lived with her parents until she left home suddenly at age twenty without telling anyone. She only took one suitcase and they never heard from her again. Her aunt said she was overweight and possibly depressed or suicidal.”
“Job?”
Louis scanned his notes. “Cashier at a Winn-Dixie near her home on Pine Island.”
Landeta looked over at him, as if expecting more.
“She desperately wanted kids.”
“Next”
“Mary Rubio. Vanished in 1973. She was a foster kid who was placed in fifteen homes in two years. The foster mother I talked to only had her a few months but told me the girl was strange. Said Mary used to cut herself.”
“Really?” Landeta said.
“Her foster mother said it was a cry for attention.”
“It is and it isn’t. Kids who do that are looking for a sense that they are alive, and to prove it they cut their skin.”
“To see if they bleed?”
“To see if they can feel. What else?”
“The foster mother told me Mary would never have a real home with her and Mary knew it, so she left.”
Landeta’s eyes closed briefly. “Tell me about Angela.”
Louis picked up the last report “Angela Lopez, disappeared in 1984. Daughter of a Mexican migrant worker in Immokalee,” he read. “She was close to a woman she worked for, a woman named Rosa, who told me Angela made a date to go to Fort Myers and never came back.”
Landeta looked at him and Louis could read the message: You can do better.
“Angela told Rosa once that she never wanted her kids to grow up in Immokalee,” Louis said.
Landeta nodded slowly. “So, what do you see? What do you see in all these girls?”
“They were all running away from something,” he said.
“And they were all desperate to feel connected to someone.” Landeta paused. “That’s a powerful human need.”