by Dan Chaon
VERONICA VELLA, Daily News Staff Writer
Posted: December 4, 2012
Bryce Lambert is still trying to understand what could have happened. It was a normal Friday night, Lambert said. He and his childhood friend Slade Gable were celebrating their Thanksgiving vacation with a few beers at a local pub. Lambert had no idea that his friend was about to disappear without a trace.
“There was nothing unusual about his emotional state,” Lambert said. “He seemed happy. We talked about how he felt very positive about the way his classes were going, and he was excited because there was an indoor track and field meet scheduled for the first week in December.”
When Slade didn’t come back from a trip to the bar for more beer, Lambert wasn’t that surprised. Maybe Slade “got lucky” and went home with a girl, Lambert thought. At worst, he had passed out somewhere and there would be a funny story in the morning.
But when Gable didn’t turn up for classes the next Monday, Lambert became increasingly concerned. On Tuesday, November 27, he called Gable’s parents in Pennsylvania, who contacted the police.
“This is like one of those weird news stories,” Lambert told the Daily News. “But you never think it would be a person you’re close to.”
Now Lambert is one of many northeast Ohio residents combing the Painesville area for Gable, who seemingly vanished into thin air early in the morning of November 24. Police have brought search dogs in and are looking high and low, including areas around the local river.
Gable, 21, was last seen at Nemeth’s Lounge on N. State Street. He was wearing jeans, a green Lake Erie College Storm sweatshirt, and tennis shoes. He left his coat in the bar, in the booth seat across from Lambert.
“I should have known something was wrong when he didn’t come back for his coat,” Lambert says. “But I didn’t think that much about it at the time. Slade is not a person you worry about. He’s a guy that you figure can take care of himself.”
Gable, a pole-vaulter for the Lake Erie Storm track and field team from Elysburg, Pennsylvania, is six foot one inches tall and 180 pounds. He has dark blond hair and blue eyes. At this time, no one has come forward to say that they saw Slade leaving the bar. Lambert was the last person to see him.
“It’s hard to believe that it’s real,” Lambert says. “I keep thinking it must be a bad dream.”
STUDENT ATHLETE REPORTED MISSING BY MOTHER
Posted: December 5, 2012
By: Timothy Rasheed
HIRAM, Ohio—
Hiram and Garrettsville police confirm they are searching for a missing Hiram College wrestler.
Investigators say 20-year-old Keegan Brewer of Worthington was reported missing on Saturday by his mother, Susan Brewer.
Keegan Brewer was last seen at about 2:00 a.m. early Thursday morning, November 29.
His mother says he was in his Bancroft Street apartment with his roommates from 11:00 a.m. until about 2:00 a.m., when he told them he was going to go for a walk.
According to his mother, his phone was last pinged in the area of Garfield Road and Highway 305. Brewer is described as being five feet nine inches tall and 170 pounds, with a weight lifter’s build. He has fair skin and short, curly black hair, and was wearing a blue Columbia ski jacket, jeans, and hiking boots. Brewer did not show up for team practices on Thursday or Friday.
He was not carrying his wallet or ID and did not take his car, so he was presumed traveling by foot or was picked up by someone.
If anyone has any information regarding the whereabouts of Keegan Brewer, please contact Hiram Police.
DECEMBER 6, 2012
“SO WE’RE CLEARLY coming up on December twelfth,” Aqil said. “And they’re crafty motherfuckers, aren’t they? Two missing guys. Same basic profile. I almost feel like they’re taunting me, you know? And how is it that no one else in law enforcement has noticed? How the fuck is it possible?”
I cleared my throat. “Yes,” I said. “It’s troubling.”
“Troubling,” he said. “I love that.”
We were in my office in Kent, and I felt as if I was focused on him, on what he was saying, I could hear it perfectly—though there was a small voice that seemed to be emitting from a distant radio station, barely audible.
Wait wait wait
“They may have got both of them,” Aqil said. “But I think maybe the fact that there’s two is just a weird coincidence. My strong feeling is that it’s the Painesville one. There’s not a good drowning river in Hiram, or at least not that I can see on a map.”
I rubbed my eye sockets with my thumb and forefinger, let the sparking kaleidoscope swirling play for a moment. The high, jet-plane slice of metal in my left ear. I hadn’t had an episode like this in years, not really since college, since I got married, this kind of possibly experiencing panic attack or mixed state mild schizoaffective symptoms?
“I imagine that they are holding them,” Aqil was saying. “One or both of them—somewhere in the vicinity. We’ve got about six days, Doctor. Because I guess that they are going to be drowned on December twelfth. Probably at midnight.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” I heard myself say. “That seems like pure speculation on your part. But I do think that yes, alarming. Pretty certain that and seems clear to me that this is the time to contact the I don’t think there’s any doubt that obviously”
Aqil smiled tightly. “Dustin,” he said. “We talked about this a long time ago. I went to the FBI long before I ever went to see you. They’re not interested. They’ve dismissed it. To them, the Jack Daniels stuff is an urban legend.”
He put his hand over my hand, and his dry fingers tightened on my wrist. “The only way we’re going to get the feds in here is if we have it already figured out and laid out for them. We need to lay it out for them on a fucking platter, right?”
“Uh-huh,” I said, and I glanced up and I saw that we were in the car driving, and Aqil was in the passenger seat, and I was behind the wheel.
DECEMBER 7, 2012
PAINESVILLE IS A town of approximately twenty thousand people, a half hour east of Cleveland on the coast of Lake Erie. We drove there that morning without saying much. Without discussing what we hoped to accomplish, without questioning whether it was a good idea, I was at the steering wheel and Aqil was in the passenger seat, silently reading something on his phone. And I was looking out at the interstate, at the horizon.
—
There was a kind of dimness about northern Ohio as it approached the winter solstice, a kind of suffocating lack of direct light. On days like this, you could scope the sky for the sun but couldn’t pinpoint its location, the cloud cover was so thick. It made me think of the neurology class I took in college, the professor talking about eigengrau—intrinsic gray, brain gray. It was the color you “saw” when light was totally absent, a kind of visual noise, like snow static on a television. That was the color of the sky above us.
But Aqil didn’t look up from his phone toward the landscape outside. “Lake Erie College was a women’s college up until 1986,” he reported. “Now it’s about fifty–fifty male–female. Their most popular major is called ‘equine studies.’ Horses, right?”
“Yes,” I said. “I would assume so.”
“That’s weird,” Aqil said. “Why would that be something you have as a college major?”
I shrugged. It was raining a little, and the wipers smeared through the freckles of water that appeared on the windshield.
In Painesville, Slade Gable’s family was cooperating with police to organize a Saturday-morning search party, which was what we were going to observe. “I have a buddy on Painesville PD,” Aqil said. “We went to the police academy together.” And this turned out to be true.
We stopped the car near the park, where a center contact point had been set up, a card table with coffee and donuts, manned by an oddly jolly old woman and a hollow-eyed preteen girl.
>
I sat in the car as Aqil hopped out and strode toward a pair of policemen in uniforms. They looked up from their Styrofoam cups and conversation, and I watched as Aqil threw his arms up in a “hands up, don’t shoot,” and he and one of the cops clasped hands and shook enthusiastically and I watched out of the windshield.
“Sometimes I think I’m cursed,” I told Jill once, back when we were first together. “I don’t know anybody that’s had as many weird, tragic things happen to them.” We were sitting on a sofa on a porch, outside of someone’s small house party. Dance music was coming from inside, and we were watching cars drive by on the street. My first year of graduate school.
“You should intern for a while with a public defender,” Jill said. “You wouldn’t believe the shit that rains down on people.”
And then she put her arm around me. “You grew up poor, honey. Poor people don’t have good luck.” I rested my head against her shoulder, and her fingertip brushed the tip of my ear.
“We live in capitalism,” she said. “For better and worse. Disproportionate numbers of bad things happen to people who are economically disadvantaged.”
Aqil made a laughing face. In any other mammal, you would think it was a snarl. But the other men copied the gesture. It was a kind of masculinity that reminded me of growing up in Nebraska—I was awkward and unathletic, eager to please and easily tricked—and that kind of laughter made me think of jock bullies from middle school, of Rusty and his stoner friends, the way the noises they made sounded like pack animals. That distinctive sound Rusty taught himself to make when he thought he was funny. Fuh huh huh. The edges of his mouth pulled up in sharp points, and I had to wonder where he was right now. Still in Chicago, still homeless? Could he possibly know about Jill?
I rubbed my finger against my ear. There was a sharp feeling against the helix, a kind of pinch, and it reminded me of the way that Jill used to bite me, the way my body tingled and shuddered. The mind offers these little snapshots up to you when you least need them, slaps you with them, tases you with them. And you wonder why did I just think of? And then Aqil gestured toward me. Come over here! And I took a breath and turned off the ignition and got out of the car.
“I wasn’t poor!” I said. “We had a lot of money for a while. My dad had a settlement. Because of his arm.”
“Dustin,” she said. “You went to college on a Pell Grant. Those are for poor people. Right?” She bent down and put her mouth on my ear. She took the cartilage very lightly between her teeth then let go. “I don’t want to use the term ‘white trash,’ but,” she said. “Everything you’ve told me is just—yikes.” She began to knead my shoulders, and she pressed her teeth against my ear again. The pleasant sensation that she could bite a piece off, and trusting that she wouldn’t, and my back arching as the teeth tightened on the helix. I held my breath, and felt the tip of her tongue run along the groove. “You know what you learn when you study the legal system? Poor people pass down damage the way rich people pass down an inheritance. Most of their children don’t get out of that, Dustin. But you did. You got away. And now you’ve got a really mean, crazy lawyer bitch who is madly in love with you. And she is going to watch out for you. Nothing is going to hurt you while I’m around.”
“This is my friend Dustin,” Aqil said. “Doctor Tillman,” he said, and emphasized the “Doctor” with an ironic gravitas. “He’s writing a book about missing college students. He has this kind of wacky theory about how they may be connected, and I’ve just been consulting with him on it. Trying to keep his feet on the ground.”
Aqil put his hand on my shoulder and gave me a conspiratorial look out of the corner of his eye. But for a moment his casual lies left me speechless. It took me a few beats to realize what he was up to.
“Consultant—that doesn’t sound like a bad deal,” said the cop named Ellison, squinting at me skeptically. “Anything you wrote ever got made into a movie?” he asked me.
“I’m not really a,” I said. “Well,” and I glanced at Aqil, but he didn’t make eye contact. Officer Ellison seemed not to notice my awkwardness.
“Maybe if you were writing a movie you could make something out of it,” he said. “But this isn’t going to be anything interesting. Nine out of ten, he just went off somewhere without telling anybody. He’ll call his mom from some state in Mexico and ask for money to get home. Or else a corpse will show up. There’s a river a hundred yards down that way; maybe he fell in and drowned and got washed downstream. It wouldn’t surprise me.”
The other officer, Synnott, shook his head. “These kids,” he said, with the tinge of a Dublin accent. “The level of binge drinking we see with these college kids. There’s no mystery.”
“I don’t think they got a big turnout for their search party, unfortunately,” Officer Ellison told Aqil. “Under ten, I would guess. The family’s from out of state, and the college kids are in the midst of their final exams, so…”
“I don’t know what they’d find, anyhow,” Synnott said. “We had dogs out here. We already spent a lot of man-hours walking that riverbank. It’s not like they’re going to find a bloody glove or a mysterious footprint or some CSI bullshit.”
“Well,” Ellison said. “It’s their loved one. Sometimes the family needs to do it, just to have something to do. I understand that.”
Synnott nodded grimly, and he gave me a look up and down. “So what’s your theory, Doctor? You been reading all that stuff online about the serial drowner preying on poor helpless drunken frat brothers?” He patted me on the shoulder, and I smiled, though I also flinched a bit. He showed his teeth at me. “I think the killer’s name is Darwin,” he said.
—
We stood there at the edge of the park and watched the cops drive away. Aqil lifted his hand and his grin fell off. “Dicks,” he said to me confidentially. “Darwin! You know, it’s interesting. You hear comments like that, you go online and read the comments on the news stories, and there’s just not a lot of sympathy. From any quarter. People are kind of, almost, amused. Happy. I’ve heard that Darwin joke a couple of times now. Also—the serial killer’s name is Binge Drinking. The serial killer’s name is Stupidity. And then I realize that these murderers were so so smart to pick this particular demographic.”
I cleared my throat. “Listen,” I said. “Aqil, why did you do that?”
“Do what?” he said.
“Why did you transfer your theories to me, instead of taking ownership of them? That was very strange to me, that you wanted me to be the mouthpiece. And it made me very uncomfortable.”
He shrugged. “Well,” he said. “I thought they might take you more seriously. You’ve got the Doctor in your title. And there’s enough rumors about me going around in the law-enforcement community as it is. I mean, if you’re writing a book and I’m consulting, that seems a lot more legit than you’re my life coach.”
I just gazed at him. Nonplussed. There were maybe a few things that I should have broached at this point, things about the relationship between the therapist and the health-care consumer that could have been opened for discussion. But of course we were beyond that.
“I’m just saying,” I said. “If you feel that role-playing is important to this—uh…I think you need to make that more clear to me. I felt a little taken off guard, and”
“Okay,” he said. He flicked his finger against his forehead, like it was a melon. “My bad.”
And he turned to gaze at the long grassy field that stretched out behind us, the woman and the girl sitting at a folding table with their sad box of donuts and their coffee urn. “Hey there, young ladies,” he called. “Is this where we volunteer for the Slade Gable search?”
—
The Kiwanis Recreation Park appeared to be a few acres of cleared floodplain, a flat expanse with a baseball field for Little League and a small football stadium and a stretch of mowed green space that ran along the western bank of Grand River. A flock of Canada geese had settled on th
e lawn and observed irritably as we walked past, but didn’t rise to their feet. In the distance, a lone figure was tottering along the edge of the cyclone fence wearing a Day-Glo vest, and we watched as he bent and appeared to examine something on the ground.
“Come on,” Aqil said. “Let’s go look at the river.”
—
The edge of the park met the river just above the bridge of Main Street. There were some weeds and rocks, and the riverbank was lined with large broken slabs of cement. Pieces of sidewalk? A line of geese marched single file up from the muddy banks, and Aqil paused to watch them curiously.
“That’s like ducklings—the baby brothers and sisters follow each other like that, right?” he said. “That’s so cute.”
“Yes,” I said. “Goslings.” And then he strode toward the water’s edge, his arms swinging cheerfully at his sides. Manic? He seemed so happy. I watched him alight on one of the cement blocks with a graceful leap, and he shaded his eyes and peered up at the traffic passing by on the bridge above the river.
It was not an impressive river, in my opinion. About as wide as a suburban street, and the same dirty gray shade as the sky. Not water you would drink from. Eigengrau. It ran mildly across its silty bed, and there were narrow shoals of rocks and sticks and detritus. A ragged black plastic bag hung off a log, writhing dreamily in the current. Not a place to drown in.
“Aqil,” I said. “This seems like it’s too shallow to”
But Aqil only raised a finger, beaming at me. He pointed toward where a fly fisherman was standing, fifty yards down. The fisherman was in the middle of the river, which was about knee-deep, wearing hip waders and a black stocking cap. We watched as he cast his loose line and it unraveled with a sleepwalking slowness.
“Hello!” Aqil called. Cheerful and full of enthusiastic charm. “Hey!” he said, but the man kept fishing as we walked down the edge of the bank toward him. “Morning!” Aqil cried aggressively, and at last the man looked up. He was Caucasian, mid-fifties, with hard blue eyes and deep-etched frown lines.