Borderline Insanity

by Jeff Miller

  “My uncle raves about you,” Beamer called over as he scooped up a paper cup and placed it into an evidence bag.

  “He was a big help to me a few months ago.”

  “He says all he did was get out of your way.”

  “That’s my favorite kind of help.”

  He chuckled. “I wish I could give you that kind of help.”

  “I wish so, too.”

  He scooped up a cellophane wrapper and bagged it. “You think there’s any chance that the people who had these phones are still alive?”

  “If there were ten phones, or twenty phones, maybe there’d be some chance. But you can only hide a hundred people if they’re dead.”

  “That would make this the biggest serial murder case in this state since . . .” He paused. “Maybe ever. And right now, there are four of us working the case, two of whom are traffic cops.”

  When the mixture had the consistency of pancake batter, Dagny stopped stirring it. She held the spatula a half inch over the print and slowly poured the plaster so that it landed on the spatula before it trickled into the dirt.

  “Why do you do that?” he asked.

  The kid wanted to learn, which was a good thing. “If you pour it in, the force of the mix hitting the dirt alters the print. You want it to trickle in, so it doesn’t mess up the impression.”

  Once the print was filled, she ran the spatula up and down the top of the plaster, mashing out air bubbles. It would take about fifteen minutes to harden, so she moved to the next print and repeated the process.

  While they collected evidence, she filled Beamer in on everything she had learned, recounting her meeting with the families the night before, the interview with the boys in the morning, and their tracking of Adelmo’s phone to the woods. She asked if he had heard a rumor that someone bragged about killing immigrants on The Hank Frank Show, and he said he had not.

  After two hours, she was satisfied that they had the bulk of what they could get. In a perfect world, a team of fifty agents would have shut down the park for days so they could comb the place for evidence. This wasn’t a perfect world.

  CHAPTER 15

  Officer John Beamer lived in a small brick house on a street crowded with them. He pulled into the carport next to the house, and he and Dagny carried sacks filled with evidence to the front door. Sliding the key into the hole, he turned to her and said, “Please excuse the mess. I didn’t expect my house to be commandeered today.”

  “You’re single and, what? Twenty-seven?”

  “Twenty-eight.”

  “Then you live like a college student, except you frame your posters instead of taping them to the wall. I’m not expecting you to be tidy.”

  He pushed the door open, and she stepped into the small foyer. A Star Wars poster was framed on the wall. She smiled at him.

  “It’s an original from 1977. Hung in the glass box outside the Bilford Movie House,” he said defensively. “And it’s in great condition.”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “It’s a work of art.” He led her to the kitchen. An empty pizza box lay on the counter. Dishes were stacked in the sink. He caught her eyes inventorying it all. “Look, I told you I didn’t clean up.”

  “John, I haven’t said a word.”

  “You don’t have to say anything when you think as loud as you do.” He opened the door to the basement and flipped on the light. They carried the bags down the steps.

  The basement was small and lightly finished. The floor was carpeted, the walls were plastered, and drop panels and fluorescent lights covered the ceiling. In one corner of the room was a large flat-screen television and a love seat. PlayStation controllers lay on the floor between them. Seven long tables were set up along the walls circling the rest of the room, covered by an elaborate electric train set that wound its way through model towns and countryside. Dagny walked closer to study it. Hand-painted figurines performed the work of the townsfolk. A mailman was sliding a letter into a mailbox. A painter stood on the top of a ladder in mid-brushstroke, touching up the sign on a restaurant. A policewoman was placing a ticket on a car windshield.

  “This is incredible,” she said.

  He smiled with pride. “I’ve been working on it for years. Look at this.” He reached behind the barbershop and flipped a switch. The barber pole on the front of the shop began to spin. “I did that last night.”

  “You’re a complete nerd.”

  “Well, I don’t think, I mean—”

  “I mean it in the best possible way, from one nerd to another.”

  He harrumphed. “A pretty girl isn’t a nerd just because she got good grades.”

  “Well, sincerely, I think this,” she said, gesturing to the train set, “is fantastic. Remarkable, really. I love it.” She paused for a moment. “It’s a shame we need these tables, and it all has to come down.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “We need these tabletops. There’s a lot we need to lay out and mark.”

  “But—”

  “Do you have any other folding tables? Another room we could set them in?”

  He shook his head. “But—”

  “It’s a fantastic train display. On the other hand, we’ve got something like a hundred murders to solve.”

  “It doesn’t just come off—it’s all screwed down. The mountains are plaster of paris.”

  “I promise I’ll help you put it all back together when this case is over. We’ll be careful with the mountains and rebuild anything that breaks. I’ll even fix the barber pole so it spins the right way.”

  “It spins the right . . .” He paused to study the pole. “You really think it’s supposed to go the other way?”

  She nodded.

  Dagny snapped photographs of the train display so they would have a guide for reassembling it. They spent the next two hours taking down the train set: placing each box in a marked plastic bag, inventorying them, and arranging them carefully in cardboard boxes that stacked under the tables.

  Once the tables were cleared, she put on a pair of latex gloves and opened the bag with the phones. Using the tips of her index finger and thumb, she pinched the top phone—a Motorola Razr flip phone—at the bottom corners, which seemed to be the part least likely to have been touched. She carried the phone to the first table and set it down carefully.

  “John, I need you to put a Post-it with numbers, starting with one, in front of each phone that I set down. Get a notebook and start keeping a page for each phone, listing its number, make, and model. Leave the rest of the page blank—we’ll fill it in more once we’re able to extract information from the phone.”

  “This is going to take us a while,” he noted.

  “You have some Clone Wars episodes you need to watch or something? Or do you only care about canon?”

  He shook his head. “Clone Wars is canon. Rebels, I’d argue, isn’t, although many would disagree. Where do you stand?”

  “I don’t even consider the prequels to be canon. See, I told you I was a nerd.”

  “You’re not a nerd if you only like the original trilogy.”

  “I liked The Force Awakens.”

  “Not a nerd.”

  It took them nearly an hour to unpack and number the phones. Diego arrived with a dozen bags of cables and cords as they were marking the last of them: number eighty-one.

  Eighty-one phones. Altogether, they covered almost every square inch of Beamer’s train tables. Each one represented a young man who was most likely dead.

  “How can this be?” Diego said. “How can this many people disappear before anyone cares?”

  No one answered, because there was no good answer. They stood in silent contemplation of the scope of the crime. She wondered where someone could hide eighty-one dead bodies.

  If they were going to do something about it, there wasn’t time for moping. She turned to Beamer. “How are your printing skills?”

  “I have excellent penmanship.”

  “I m
ean fingerprinting.”

  “Good,” he replied, with some hesitation.

  “We can dust these phones for prints twice as fast if you start from one end and I start from the other.”

  “I can do it.”

  Cops were better than special agents at getting people to talk. They knew their communities. They noticed when things were wrong. They were capable of empathy and knew how to employ it in service of their job. But when it came to matters of evidence handling and chain of custody, cops were terrible. Some of them lacked the patience for it. Some of them figured they’d make their case on witness testimony. Some of them knew that the medical examiner or coroner would cover for them, blessing their shoddy work in court. And some of them didn’t know they were doing it wrong every time they did it. Beamer didn’t seem like that kind of cop, but Dagny needed to be sure. She dug into her bag for her kit and tossed it to Beamer. “Show me what you can do on number one.”

  He walked over to the Motorola Razr on the first table and opened the kit. “So, I have to pass a test?”

  She nodded.

  He looked at the phone, and then at the various powders in the kit. The Razr was silver, and he was trying to decide whether that meant he should use a white or black powder, she figured. After moving his hand back and forth between them, he picked black.

  “Wrong.”

  “I was going to pick white.”

  “Black is fine. But before you do any dusting, you have to photograph the phone. You might catch some prints that way, especially on the screen.”

  He nodded and set the kit down. “Hold on.” He ran upstairs and came back with a desk lamp and a camera.

  “For each one, snap a picture of the Post-it with the number on it first, so we know which prints came from which camera.”

  “Okay.” He followed her instructions and took several photographs of the first phone. Then he opened the canister of black powder and applied it to the phone. A couple of good prints appeared. He lifted them with tape and placed them on a transfer card. Dagny inspected his work. It was fine.

  “Print your name, the number, the location, and the date on the card.”

  He spoke as he wrote it. “John Beamer, Number One, my basement . . .”

  “The location where we found it,” she said.

  “I was joking,” he said. “The fact that you didn’t know tells me how dumb you think I am.” He held up the card so she could see it. Under location, he’d listed the coordinates from the park where the bag of phones had been found. “Really dumb, it seems.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “It’s a reflex.” She turned to Diego. “I need you to set up the power bricks and extension cords, so they’ll be easily accessible at each table. Then try to find a cord that will power each phone after we lift prints from it. Touch the phone only with gloves, as little as possible, at only the bottom corners of the phone. As soon as they power on, switch them to airplane mode and power them down. We’ve got to keep them from being contaminated with new data.”

  Diego nodded. “You weren’t kidding when you said this would be tedious. It’s almost like—”

  “A Catholic Mass?” she said.

  “Like a thousand of them,” Beamer replied.

  He started with the first and Dagny with the last, and they worked their way toward the middle. Diego followed behind them at each end. By eleven thirty they had finished dusting for prints. About half of them had yielded usable results. They were able to power all but two of the phones, which seemed to be particularly obscure, foreign models.

  Before leaving, she took the men through a task list. The most important items were to extract all usable information from each telephone, run the prints through IAFIS, and interview Hank Frank and Jessica Marigold. Pulling the phone data was crucial, and it was likely to take days. Beamer wasn’t free to keep shirking work to assist, and Diego could assist in small tasks but couldn’t undertake much on his own. If this case were going to be cracked, it was all on Dagny.

  Beamer gave her an extra key to his house and walked them to the door. When they walked outside, a car was parking in front of the house. A short, bald man stepped out of the car and walked toward them, carrying a Cellebrite in hand.

  She smiled. “Ron Beamer, so good to see you.”

  He gave her a hug. “You, too, Dagny.” Turning to his nephew, he said, “Johnny, Johnny, what have you gotten yourself into?”

  “It’ll be in all the papers eventually,” the young cop replied.

  “That bad?”

  “Worse than you can imagine.”

  Ron handed her the Cellebrite. It looked a little like a larger, heavier version of a Nintendo Game Boy. “These things cost fifteen thousand dollars, so—”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  “Cheap for Feebs, but expensive for CPD.”

  She smiled at him. “Thank you, Ron.”

  While the Beamers caught up with each other, Diego handed her the keys to his Corvette. “Take it,” he said.

  “I’ll give you a ride.”

  “I’m not far from here. I can walk.”

  “It’s no problem,” she said.

  “I need to process everything,” he said. “It will be good for me.” He started down the sidewalk and then turned back. “I can do a lot, Dagny. Use me. It’s not all on you.”

  She nodded. “Get some sleep. We’re both useless if we’re tired.”

  He started walking again toward home.

  She climbed into the Corvette and started the engine. Her phone buzzed, which meant that Victor had sent his nightly text reminding her to enter her points into the Weight Watchers program. There were no points to enter, of course, since she’d gone the entire day without eating. This, she knew, was a bad habit to start. No matter how frantic the pace of the case, she had to stop for meals. Two a day, at least.

  She drove around the streets of downtown Bilford. Boarded-up storefronts were plentiful. So were convenience marts and dollar stores. There was not a drive-through to be found. The entire town seemed to be asleep.

  It was a twenty-minute drive to New Bilford and its plethora of parking lots and Applebee’s. Box stores, full and empty. Gas stations on every corner. And plenty of fast-food restaurants, all of them bustling.

  McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, and Wendy’s were all open. She chose the least awful of them and pulled into the Wendy’s drive-through lane. Scanning the menu board, she assessed the calories and calculated what she needed for a full day.

  “I’ll have a Double with everything, large fry, and a medium Frosty.”

  She drove foreword, paid the tab, and took the bag and cup from the cashier. It was heavier than any bag of dinner should be, she thought. She pulled into a parking space and took out the burger. It was a mess. Ketchup was dripping off the side. The cheese hadn’t been centered, so a good part of it was stuck to the inside of the foil wrapper. She scraped the cheese off the foil with her finger and put it in her mouth.

  It was after midnight, and she was alone in the parking lot of a Wendy’s in New Bilford, Ohio, forcing herself to eat a disgusting bag of meat and grease. This was her life. Constantly battling anorexia. Suspended without pay from her job. Heading back to a filthy motel room. No one knew where she was at this moment because no one cared. She was thirty-five years old and had nothing to show for it, and no one to show it to. And there was no reason to think this would ever change.

  She started to cry as she stuffed the edge of the burger into her mouth. Moments like this seemed to come too often these days.

  She thought about calling Dr. Childs. Instead, she turned on the radio and listened to classic rock while she ate. First, a Zeppelin tune played, then one from Pink Floyd. The third song was Nirvana. The music Dagny had listened to in high school was now classic rock. She flicked off the radio and finished her meal. On her way out of the parking lot, she drove up to a trash can and pitched her bag and cup.

  Driving to the motel, she fretted over the impossibil
ity of the task at hand, because despairing over a case was always easier than despairing over life. Her troubles were trifles compared to the losses suffered in Bilford.

  As she pulled into the motel parking lot, she noticed the silhouette of a man sitting in front of her door. She grabbed her gun and walked up the steps.

  When she stepped onto the landing, Victor stood and walked toward her.

  He was exactly what she needed. She holstered her gun, threw her arms around him, and gave him a hug. “You’re supposed to be in New York.”

  “The Professor still thinks I’m there, so don’t say anything to him.”

  She broke the embrace and smiled at him. “What are you doing here?”

  “I finished my case and figured you could use some help.”

  “You finished it?”

  “I’ve been through all the documents. I told the Professor it would take me a couple of more weeks, but I’m done. Everything labeled and tabbed, even marked as exhibits for a trial. All tied up in a bow.”

  “And Brent?”

  “He’s still interviewing witnesses, taking statements. As far as he knows, I’m still at the document warehouse.”

  “How did you put everything together so fast?”

  He shrugged. “Sifting through and making sense of massive amounts of information is my idea of fun, Dagny.”

  She smiled. “Well, then, I’ve got the job for you.”

  CHAPTER 16

  The thin man sat in his parked Ford F-150 pickup, taking swigs from his flask, trying to make sense of the scene playing out on that second-floor landing. The woman had hugged the man waiting at her door and then invited him in. What was their relationship? A lover? There was no kiss. Family, perhaps. A brother, maybe. Or her partner.