Criss Cross

Chapter 15

We were stalled in the Kissy Raider investigation for another week, and then files and reports came back from labs and in response to requests we’d made to the FBI and various law enforcement agencies in Florida and California. I sat at my desk and read.

It was interesting to me that each of the three victims had had a bad relationship with the father of her child. Each woman had decided to go off on her own with her young son.

Althea Marks, the woman found in Newport Beach, had a six-year-old son. Samantha Bell, the victim found in Boca Raton, had a five-year-old boy. Kissy Raider’s son, Max, was five when his mother was strangled to death.

Kissy’s sister, Crystal, had come north almost immediately to claim her nephew. Crystal had been as forthcoming with information as she could be, given that her sister had run away from home at sixteen to be with Ricco, her biker boyfriend, who’d “treated her like crap and knocked her up.”

Crystal said that once her sister had seen Ricco’s true colors, she’d walked out on him and gone to a shelter to start a new life. And she was proud of it, even if she’d had to work in places like the Stallion Club to support her son.

I checked to see if the other two women had worked in strip joints, but they hadn’t. Althea Marks had been a waitress in various restaurants for years; her last stint was at a burger joint in Laguna Niguel, California.

Samantha Bell had worked in everything from retail to construction to bartending at a Hooters.

To my surprise, the Hooters was in Laurel, Maryland. According to a report I got from the Florida detectives working the case, Ms. Bell had been in the Washington, DC, area three years before. She’d left the job at Hooters ten weeks prior to her strangulation.

I went back to Marks’s file from the Newport Beach detectives and then to an FBI dossier Kyle Craig had sent over. I found her application to the burger joint and looked at what she’d listed as prior employment.

Five months before her death, Marks had left a job at a Hooters in Fairfax, Virginia, after spending nearly a year in the area.

Feeling like I might be onto something, I started digging madly through Kissy Raider’s files. I found her job application for the Stallion Club, but she’d written Not applicable to the question about previous employment.

So I called Crystal Raider in Florida.

When Kissy’s sister answered, I could hear kids yelling. “This is Crystal,” she said wearily.

“This is Detective Cross.”

“Yes?” she said, perking up. “Have you found him?”

“We’re still hunting,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, disappointed. Then she asked anxiously, “How long will it take to find him? You don’t know what it’s like waking up day after day not knowing.”

“Actually, I do know,” I said. “My wife was murdered several years back, and her killer is still at large. Just like my wife’s case, Kissy’s investigation will take as long as it takes. We don’t give up on capital crimes. Ever.”

She sighed. “How do you live with it? Not knowing?”

“You learn to box it up and put it away until it has to be opened.”

“I can’t do that yet.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to.”

Crystal sighed again. “How can I help?”

“Did Kissy ever work at a Hooters? I mean, before the Stallion Club?”

“No, I... wait. Yeah, maybe. I think she said she was there only a couple of weeks. Some creep kept hitting on her, so she quit.”

“To go work at a strip bar?” I asked.

Crystal’s voice was colder when she replied. “Kissy felt safe at the Stallion Club. They had bodyguards for the girls. Far as I know, that’s not the case at Hooters.”

“I’m sorry if I sounded snarky there. I’m just trying to understand the situation.”

There was silence before she said, “Okay.”

“Do you remember which Hooters she worked at?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere around DC. How many can there be?”