Free Lost Girls by Andrew Pyper

invariably wrong.
    The afternoon gradually darkens in the space outside the computer’s screen as I scroll and click through the cases summoned by my search terms, variously arranged: “homicide,” “remains,” “evidence,” “ actus reus ,” “discover(y).” By the time I have to turn on the bedside lamp to see my fingers it appears that my original assumption was correct. And then I come across R v. Stark . I read the whole decision before exhaling, a pain in my head like two birds pecking their way out at the temples.
    The facts annoyingly similar to those at hand. A teenaged girl goes missing in rural northern Ontario and the police boil the suspects down to one Peter Stark, the father of one of the girl’s school friends. He admits that he picked her up in town, but says he dropped her off at a gas station after he bought her lunch because she wanted to make a phone call. However, when Stark returned home at the end of the day his wife recalled his having mud and leaves stuck to his clothes. They never found the body before the trial, but the Crown proceeded against Stark anyway with little more than muddy jeans. Then he made his bigmistake. In the court’s holding cells just before the trial was to begin he bragged at length to the fellow who occupied the lower bunk about how he’d raped the girl and then used an ax on her afterwards to ensure she wouldn’t tell, and then dumped her somewhere in the middle of the Manvers Township swamp. Although he stuck to his gas station drop-off story at trial and the police never managed to uncover the body, Stark was convicted and sentenced to life.
    I close the laptop and fix my eyes on the halo of mist around the streetlight swaying outside the window. What does Mr. Stark have to say about the present case? Nothing good. But there’s one fact missing in Tripp’s situation that still clearly distinguishes his from Stark’s: he hasn’t confessed to anything. And so long as Tripp remains isolated in his bug-eyed state he isn’t likely to reveal concrete details of the crime to his own lawyer, let alone the guy across the hall.
    Nevertheless, there’s one thing about today’s discovery that is quite unavoidably bad: although they certainly help, it appears that bodies are not necessary to put a man away for murder after all.

S EVEN
    T he next morning finds my head buried in the complicated tunnels of my garment bag. I’m not feeling so hot. Not true—I’m in the grip of a death fever, I’m black leather in the sun, I’m a kettle boiled dry on the stove. And there it is, my home away from home tucked into the plastic bag designed for carrying shoes. Zip back the zipper and pull it up into my arms, give it a teary kiss as though a hard-won trophy. It even looks like a trophy: a silver thermos of burnished aluminum, roughly the size and shape of a nuclear warhead. Enough coke to entertain 150 movie producers and their dates for an entire night, a volume carrying a street value equal to an only slightly used Japanese sedan. Screw off the cap and spoon a line out onto the bedside table. Without sitting up I wrench my neck into an angle that enables me to accommodate the procedure, and with an efficient snuff (I snort only when drunk or subject to an especially monstrous craving, and almost never before noon) the day begins. Everything you need and then some. A witty conversation resumed within yourself, a Gene Kelly spring to the step, two inches added to your height. A nearly perfect simulation of what I can only assume to be hope, fluttering and shy in my chest.
    “Good morning, Mr. Crane,” I say to the paintbubbled ceiling, but my voice sounds distant and thin through the air of the room. In fact it seems the entire hotel absorbs all sound but that which it creates itself. The chattering of the windows, muffled yawning within the plaster walls and the groans of the hallway floorboards echo for long moments, while a cleared throat or spoken voice is