The Body Keeper

by Anne Frasier

  She read the bio and history of the missing child, a boy named Shaun Ford. The more she read, the more she felt it was a false lead, that this was not the boy in the ice, but it was a lead all the same, and it needed to be checked out.

  Uriah wasn’t back from the morgue. She called his cell phone.

  “Got an image hit,” she told him when he answered.

  “Missing person?”

  “Yeah, but it’s only sixty-five percent. And I think you’ll find this interesting. It’s for a boy who went missing from Minneapolis twenty years ago.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Gail Ford had given birth to her son when she was thirty. The pregnancy had been hard, and she’d had to quit working the last trimester because the baby was sucking the life out of her. She spent three months in bed, reading and watching television while trying to tell herself everything would be okay.

  He was born healthy, but Gail ended up losing her job. She tried not to resent him for it, and she told her husband they’d figure something out. She could stay home with her son while her husband worked, keep a closer eye on the baby, protect him from danger. Because if anybody knew about danger, it was Gail. The world was full of bad people doing bad things. But as aware as she was about raising a child in that world, she’d never imagined that her child would one day be another statistic, one of those kids who vanished into thin air.

  Gail and her husband had been the prime suspects. She didn’t blame the cops for that. It was common to suspect the parents, especially in their case. No witnesses. Nobody saw anything. She would have suspected her too. But she always felt she’d see Shaun again, even long after her husband left and eventually died. If the phone rang in the middle of the night, she’d reach for it with a sense of expectation combined with dread. She never lost the feeling that one day a voice on the other end would call her Mom.

  Deep in her heart, she knew his story. He wasn’t dead. Instead, he’d been clothed and fed and cared for by a stranger, who might have even pretended to be his real father, someone who might not have abused him. In her mind, she created a safe haven for him where he’d been loved and cherished. In that idealized place, someone had taken loving care of her boy. Maybe even better care than he would have gotten with her.

  When the doorbell rang in the middle of a heavy snowstorm, she had a feeling today would be different. This might be it. This might be him returning home. Gail was no longer young, and she worried about what he’d think when he saw her again. She was sixty-one, and stress had aged her another several years. Vain of her to even care, but she did.

  The peephole revealed not her son, but a man and a woman wearing dark clothes and looking like a couple of crows against the whiteness of the world. She opened the door. The man pulled out a badge.

  “Mrs. Ford? I’m homicide detective Uriah Ashby.” Just like somebody in an old movie, he flicked the leather case closed and tucked his badge away. “And this is my partner, Detective Jude Fontaine.”

  Homicide. That wasn’t right. That didn’t fit.

  “We’re hoping you might be able to help us,” Detective Fontaine said. “I don’t know if you’ve been following the case of the body found in the lake, but we have a few questions we’d like to ask you.”

  What did that have to do with her? “I saw something about it this morning.”

  “Keep in mind that what we’re going to propose is a highly unlikely scenario,” Detective Ashby said. “We’re just following up on a lead, checking things off our list. We ran a photo of the person found in the ice through facial-recognition software and came up with a sixty-five percent match. Sixty-five is not proof of anything. It’s just a chance.”

  “The match was my son?”

  “Yes.”

  Her heart beat erratically while her mind struggled with the logic of the situation. “He’s been gone twenty years. He would no longer be a child. He’d be thirty-one now. I thought the news said it was a child.”

  Over the years, the police had hired composite artists to age her son. They’d run images on local news and national programs. But even at that, it had always been hard to think of him as a young man rather than a child.

  “I know this is hard,” the female detective said as Gail motioned them in and closed the door. “But we’re hoping you can help us, maybe eliminate the chance of the body belonging to your son.” She produced an image from somewhere, large, in color. “It’s not very clear due to the ice.” Jude Fontaine. Gail knew who she was. Fontaine had her own sad story. So many sad stories.

  Gail held the photo in her hands, her heart pounding, then said quietly, “I think it’s him.”

  They seemed surprised by her answer, and why wouldn’t they?

  “I have to see him in person to know for sure.” She passed the photo back.

  “We have other ways to do this,” Detective Fontaine said. “Other ways for you to ID a body. You don’t have to physically be there.”

  “I want to. I have to. I’ve been waiting twenty years.”

  “At least let us drive you,” Detective Ashby said.

  She agreed, grabbing her coat.

  “It’s still snowing,” Fontaine said. “You’ll need boots.”

  Gail looked down and saw she was wearing house slippers. She laughed nervously, changed, and struggled to open the door. “It sticks when we get rain or snow.” After some tugging, the male detective was finally able to open it.

  In the car, Ashby behind the wheel, Fontaine explained a little more about the frozen lake and ice-skaters. She sat sideways so she could look over the seat at Gail. “Thank you for doing this,” she added once she’d gotten Gail up to speed. “I know it can’t be easy.”

  Detective Ashby turned off Chicago Avenue and pulled into the parking lot behind the morgue, which sat in the shadows of the downtown Minnesota Vikings’ stadium. Snow was still falling, and a small garden tractor with a blade was trying to keep the sidewalk clear.

  Outside the building, Detective Fontaine spoke into the intercom system and a door unlocked, letting them in. They stomped off snow, then moved down a brightly lit hallway, all the while Gail wondering if it could be true. Was it Shaun? Had he been dead this whole time?

  She took notice of strange things, like thick white paint chipped off door latches, and cages over ceiling lights, and how Ashby’s skin had an unhealthy pallor, how he had a red scar on his forehead and perspiration on his upper lip. Suddenly they were in a metal-lined room, so cold their breath was a mingled cloud. There was a large stainless-steel table with wheels in the center, positioned over a floor drain. Drip, drip, drip. On top of the table was a block of ice. Inside the ice was a dark form.

  Gail let out a little gasp, and her feet felt like they were nailed to the floor. But she wanted, needed to see. As if understanding, Fontaine gripped her elbow and gently urged her forward until Gail was looking down into the ice.

  And she saw him.

  Saw that face, his face.

  “I don’t believe it,” she whispered, putting a shaking hand to her mouth. She let out a sob and bent forward, trying to get as close as she could to the body, pressing her own face against the ice. “I’m so sorry,” she told him. “So sorry.”

  “Mrs. Ford?”

  Time had become unimportant, and she gradually realized Fontaine was trying to get her attention. Gail looked at her.

  “Do you think this might be your son?” the detective asked.

  “It’s him. It’s my little boy.”

  Ashby made a sound of surprise and dismay, turned, and left the room. Gail thought about how pale he’d looked earlier and wondered about his strange exit, but she didn’t care, really. That had nothing to do with her.

  “This is a highly charged situation,” Fontaine said. “Sometimes hope can make us believe things because we want to believe them so badly. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  Gail nodded.

  “I’m sorry to tell you that we can’t just take your word for it,” Fon
taine said softly, apologetically. “A visual ID is only part of the protocol.” Her words might have seemed too blunt if not for the softness of her eyes and the compassion in her face. People like her were more in tune to the heartbreak of others. She understood pain and suffering.

  “This is my child.” Gail looked at the boy again, reached out, and ran her hand across the ice. “It wasn’t supposed to end like this.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Jude watched the mother stroke the ice with a gesture that managed to convey both longing and regret. Jude was sure that Gail Ford would have swept the child into her arms if she’d been able to. She gave the woman a few moments, then touched her shoulder, pulling her back from her grief, enough for her to understand that they needed to exit the cold locker even though she wanted to hold vigil, stay with the body. Impossible, even under normal conditions.

  “I don’t want to leave him,” Gail said. She was standing up straight now, looking at Jude.

  “You should go home while we work to establish the child’s identity.”

  “Why do you need further proof? I’ve told you he’s my son.”

  “You haven’t seen him in twenty years,” Jude reminded her gently.

  “Haven’t seen him in twenty years?” Gail’s voice rose. “I’ve seen him every day and every moment of my life since he vanished.”

  Sometimes the dead or missing could be more real than the people right in front of you. Jude chose her next words carefully, hoping to avoid coming across as unsympathetic or patronizing. “We can’t positively ID the body without proof from dental records, fingerprints, or DNA. Maybe all three. As you are probably aware, DNA is rarely collected for missing persons cases. And it would be hard and probably impossible to get any from old belongings. Right now, all we can do is follow protocol. Until then, the body is still considered a John Doe. But I promise to keep you updated as things progress. And you can call me if you have any questions or think of anything you’d like to tell us.” Jude knew this wasn’t the outcome any mother wanted, and a positive ID would bring Gail a fresh and raw kind of pain. “And going forward, I’d like to hope you can find at least a little bit of peace from the closure this will bring.”

  After Gail’s DNA was collected, she was sent home from the morgue in a cab with an important assignment. Arrange for the transfer of her son’s dental records, which a quick phone call had determined were still archived. The release would require contacting her dentist and signing consent forms, much faster than a court order. From there, Shaun Ford’s X-rays could be emailed to the medical examiner’s office, where Jude and Uriah would enlist the assistance of a forensic odontologist.

  Once Gail was gone, Jude and Uriah returned to the walk-in cooler, this time with Chief Medical Examiner Ingrid Stevenson. The compartment was unusually large, the morgue a repurposed food-storage facility. It had been a great idea years ago—a single walk-in cooler that could store several bodies at once. Now it was no longer enough space. They were up to 1,400 autopsies a year. Almost everyone, from the mayor to morgue interns, agreed the facility had outgrown itself.

  “I’ve called in a forensic paleoradiologist from Duluth who’ll head to the cities when the snow lets up,” Ingrid said. “According to the forecast, it looks like there’ll be an eight-hour window between bands, so he’s packed and waiting for that break.” She bent close, hands in her pockets as she tried to peer through the ice, then straightened with a sigh. “A frozen body presents a multitude of challenges. None involve speed. The body has to be thawed slowly, over days and in stages. The paleoradiologist will help with that. His specialty is actually mummies, but he was instrumental in helping to identify a couple found in a northern lake a few years ago.” She also related an incident of a man who’d fallen off a boat into near-freezing water only to float to the surface perfectly preserved two years later.

  There was nothing to do but wait, so Jude and Uriah left to head back to the Homicide Department and upload reports. Outside, people were holding vigil even though it was snowing. Battery-operated candles lined a low wall, along with bouquets of frozen flowers. Reporters were set up in vans, waiting for the announcement.

  “You might as well go home,” Uriah said, repeating what Jude had told Gail. “We don’t expect to have a positive ID for days.”

  A few people let out a groan, but most seemed relieved to be able to get out of the cold.

  Back at Homicide, their colleagues were talking about the brunt of the winter storm still heading their way. “Have you seen the footage?” someone asked. “Snow up to the rooftops. People in South Dakota stranded without food or water, no electricity. National Guard has been called in.”

  Four hours later, long after most of the day shift had gone home and the lights had automatically dimmed for evening, a coworker announced that the parking ramp had closed due to the snow. “No vehicles in or out, and the buses are going to quit running soon.”

  Jude grabbed her jacket off the back of her chair. “I have to get home and feed my cat.” Strange words, considering a few short months ago she’d refused to risk any form of attachment.

  Unable to retrieve her car, huddled under a streetlamp as she waited for the bus, Jude was reminded of a similar snowy night when she’d escaped from captivity almost a year ago. While in that intolerable situation, kept in a cell in the dark, she’d clung to the hope that there would be better days ahead. Maybe not tomorrow or next week, but somewhere in her future. She wondered if that small spark of hope would have continued to burn if she’d known these were the better days.

  CHAPTER 7

  The woman behind the wheel had hoped to beat the worst of it, but by the time she got the boy in the car, the snow was coming down so hard she could barely see out the windshield. She adjusted the vents and turned the heat all the way up.

  With the car running, she slipped out to swipe at the snow. It was heavy and wet, the temperature around thirty degrees. She cleaned off the wiper blade, just on her side. By the time she was done, her gloves were soaked through. She pulled them off and tossed them in the back seat, then settled herself behind the wheel.

  “Can I make a snowman?” the boy asked. He’d managed to buckle himself in while she was dealing with the wiper.

  “No.” He always asked that whenever he saw snow. She’d let him try a few times while she sat inside the house, smoking. He didn’t know he had to start with a ball and roll it until it was big. She didn’t bother to tell him. His snowmen were always small, just piles, really. But he didn’t care. He was one of the happiest kids she’d ever been around. One time she even gave him a carrot for a nose, and he’d shoved it into the pile, then jumped up and down in excitement like it was the best damn day of his pathetic little life.

  “It’s dark. I can make a snowman in the dark, can’t I? Please?”

  Dark was the only time she let the boy go outside anymore. She’d learned her lesson about that fast. Early on, she’d taken him with her to public places, in the bright light of day, especially when he was an infant, figuring nobody would notice them. Wrong. Babies attracted attention.

  And then one time in a department store, she almost ran into someone from a nearby farm, a woman she knew from church. That close call had been it for her. She decided it was best to leave him in the care of a boyfriend when she went out. But in truth, the kid was better off by himself. She’d learned that pretty fast too. She didn’t have the best taste in men. So after the boyfriends didn’t work out, she’d leave once the kid was asleep, and she’d usually get back before he woke up. But a few times she’d stepped into the house to hear him screaming at the top of his lungs, rattling his cage. Good thing nobody lived very close to them.

  After being almost spotted that one time, she started driving far away to shop for anything related to children, like clothing and food kids liked to eat. She didn’t buy much. If anybody asked, she could always say it was for a relative. No more toys. No books. He’d never even seen a doctor as far as she knew, not
even at birth. Luckily he was a pretty healthy kid. Maybe because he hadn’t been exposed to many germs. But sometimes she felt bad for him, and a few times she’d even taken him to a park to swing in the middle of the night.

  “Stars, Nana! Stars!” he’d said like he was seeing magic for the first time.

  “That’s right, Boy. Stars.”

  He didn’t have a name when he came to her, and she was told she could give him one, but she’d always just called him Boy. He didn’t care, and it was better that way. Made it so she didn’t feel as close to him in case the time ever came to set him free.

  Like now.

  He was a decent kid, and she’d probably miss him for a while. But her husband and loser boyfriends were long gone, and the guy who’d paid her to take care of the boy was dead. She couldn’t afford to keep him anymore. Just the way it was. She’d been planning this awhile. It wouldn’t be hard, and she was confident it would be okay. The boy wouldn’t be able to tell anybody anything. Where he lived, who he lived with. Nana—that was all.

  She’d considered and even attempted to kill him. Put him in a tub and held him down. She’d gotten close to finishing him off, but at the last minute she’d been unable to make herself hold him under the water long enough to do the trick. She’d started to shake and maybe even cry a little, to her shame.

  “I don’t want a bath,” he started saying whenever she suggested it now. He’d cry, and she’d let it go. She couldn’t remember when he’d last had a bath, poor kid. And then she’d come up with this plan. Nobody would be able to connect him to her. He was a blank slate, with no birth history and no medical records. No anything. He had no past. As far as anybody else was concerned, he didn’t exist.

  She’d deliberately chosen tonight. Genius, she thought. The snow would cover a lot of sins. Her make and model of car. Her plates. Not many people on the roads. Nobody out. Nobody to see her. It was a damn good idea.