The Body Box

by Lynn Abercrombie

  Then he spoke. “Here it is. I guess the Chief told you why this unit got started. Political thing. Chief intends this unit to fail. They stuck me down here with this bird, Dickie Showalter, who was just looking to ride out a few months to his pension. So I figured until I got somebody I could work with, I’d spend a few months going through every unsolved homicide in the past twenty-five years, work me up a list of priority cases. I try to be thorough, not go off half-cocked. Took longer than I expected. But when I was going through the files, there was some things that popped out at me. That thing with the bones—the decalcification of the bones—it popped up in a bunch of child abductions, not just Evie Marie Prowter’s. As you figured out, there was bone decalcification in Marquavious Roberts’s autopsy report, too. But that’s not all. In several of the autopsies, the victims had unusual calluses on their backs and necks, usually situated above the fifth cervical vertebra, or along the superior posterior aspect of the scapula. And all of these were cases where a brother or a stepfather or a family friend or whatever was suspected but never charged. I looked into the bone thing, figured out it indicated malnutrition. Pattern appeared to be the same in each case. Child was starved for a period of time, then apparently put back on food, then when their weight was restored, they were killed.

  “Each case, the MO of the murder itself was different. Sometimes the kid was shot, sometimes stabbed. One was burned. Some the bodies were dumped in plain sight, some of them were hidden. At first I figure the malnutrition is some kind of coincidence. I mean it was only six cases over a period of a decade and a half.”

  “Six?” I said.

  “Like I say, I wasn’t sure at that point. So I decided to widen the universe. Started checking the papers for child disappearances. Thing about child abductions is they happen all the time. And ninety-nine percent of the time, it’s a marital breakup situation, custody dispute, one parent stealing a kid from the other. So it took a lot of winnowing to narrow it down to the right cases. Eventually I found seventeen. Marquavious, Evie Marie.” He waved his hands over the files on the desk. “And these.”

  “All in Georgia?”

  “Mostly. One over in Anderson, South Carolina; one in Bessemer, Alabama.”

  “Could there be more?”

  Lt. Gooch shrugged slightly. “I looked pretty hard. Tennessee, North Carolina, Florida. Didn’t spot anything there. Could of missed a couple, though. And I could be wrong about a couple of these, too.”

  “So have you, ah, developed a picture of this guy? A profile, whatever you want to call it?”

  “The perp? No. I got a better picture of his victims. Children, age five to nine. Prepubescent, I guess would be the word. Race, no barrier. Sex, no barrier. We got a black boy, we got white girls, we got a Mexican kid. The common thread, they’re all poor. Poor, or at least what you might call lower middle class. Working people, mostly the kind of folks you’d find on the rolls for WIC and AFDC, free lunches at school, Section VIII housing, that kind of thing. Mostly broken homes, disorganized family lives, third-rate parents.”

  “The kind of people who cops won’t take seriously when they say their little girl just disappeared,” I said. I felt the hair come up on the back of my neck as I was saying it. “The kind of people the police are liable to think their real daddy came back from Ohio, took the kid off to some other state, that kind of thing?”

  “Yep.”

  “So this person, he’s organized, chooses his victims very carefully.”

  “Yep.”

  “What else?”

  “Last thing, maybe it’s just my judgment, but they’re all good-looking kids, big smiles, bright little faces, photogenic. Easy on the eyes.”

  I felt something squirm in my stomach. “Any feel for the perp? Other than that he’s smart?”

  “My guess, he’s a traveler. Professionally, I mean. He gets close to people, scopes out the family. Let’s assume he’s got a job. For him to find a victim, scope them out, then take the time to get close to the family . . . Well, it’d be hard to do that on a weekend-field-trip-type basis.”

  “Vernell gave me some big yarn about this bug man.”

  Gooch nodded. “It seems like it’s part of the pattern. But it’s hard to say for sure. About half the files report some kind of mysterious stranger hanging around, somebody that made them nervous. And not one single time did an investigator seem to take those reports seriously. As far as I can tell, nobody ever fingerprinted this alleged stranger, nobody ever photographed him, never put him in a lineup or a photo array.”

  “So have you done any fieldwork yet?”

  “Nope. Just paperwork. Studied the case files. I haven’t talked to any of the detectives yet.”

  “How come not?”

  “I was waiting on you.”

  I blinked. “Me, personally? Or just any warm body besides that other detective, the short timer.”

  “You. Specifically.”

  I studied him dubiously. “I don’t believe you.”

  The cool blue eyes surveyed me. “Believe it, or don’t. Don’t make no difference to me.”

  “You’re full of it. Sir. The first day when I got here, you remember what you said? You said, ‘Who are you?’ You’d never seen me before in your life.”

  A ghost of a smile. “That’s what those of us in the detective business call dissimulation. You may have heard, it’s one of them fancy interrogation techniques they teach at the CIA interrogation workshops and whatnot. I searched through two hundred personnel files, narrowed it down to three people. I talked to a bunch of people who’d worked with you. Then I observed you.”

  “You spied on me? When?”

  “When you were up there pushing paper? Gay Lesbian Whatever-it-was Coordinator?”

  “Liaison.”

  “Like I say, whatever. Point is, I was keeping an eye on you. Seeing how you interacted with your fellow law-enforcement professionals.”

  “I never saw you.”

  “You never noticed me. Different thing.”

  I sat back in my chair. “So? How did I get on with my fellow officers?”

  “Not well.”

  “Why not just . . . Why not just interview me? Like any normal person would.”

  “I just didn’t.”

  “So why me? Why me, specifically?”

  “Had to be the right person.”

  “Oh, now suddenly we’re getting down to flattery.”

  “Not flattery. Facts.”

  “So, explain it to me. Exactly how you knew I was right.”

  “First off, I needed somebody with people skills. You didn’t get on well up in Admin because them people are idiots. You’re results oriented; they’re keeping-their-jobs oriented. Everybody in Narcotics sang your praises up one side and down the other, how you had a special touch with people, getting people to talk, that type of thing. Case you haven’t caught on, touchy-feely ain’t my strong suit. But I needed more than that. I needed a particular kind of person. Nothing to lose, no husband, no kids, no, uh, entanglements. I don’t need nobody down here that wants to spend the weekend fishing or doing yardwork or taking the kids to Chuck E. Cheese. I need somebody who’s gonna live this case, somebody who don’t have no life.”

  Somebody who don’t have no life. I was mad at the manipulative bastard, but at the same time secretly impressed that he seemed to have read me so clearly.

  “You knew about my baby, too, didn’t you?” I could feel a little tremor in my voice.

  Hank Gooch looked away without speaking.

  “You thought that would give me, what, some kind of special motivation? Huh? My mind all tuned into the missing children wavelength? Huh? Man, you make me sick.”

  “I never claimed to be no nice man.”

  I suppose I could have let my anger at the man spoil the moment. But the truth was, I was intrigued. Lt. Gooch had deliberately set me up, sucked me into this thing, opened the door into the dark room, pointed the way. And I couldn’t help myself: no
matter how mad I was, I was already through the door, already in the room he’d prepared for me, no going back. He had me.

  “One thing you haven’t mentioned,” I said.

  “And that would be . . .”

  “DNA. Have you run the DNA on these cases?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “And?”

  Gooch looked at something over my shoulder for a while. “Mixed bag,” he said.

  “Meaning what?”

  “There’s lost samples in two cases. The first four murders all match each other, but no match to any perps in the database. A couple of the other murders have common DNA. Then three of the cases are already considered to be solved. Four, if you include Marquavious Roberts. Three men are already serving time in these cases, straight-up DNA matches.”

  I wrinkled my forehead. “Hold up. You’re saying some of these cases are already solved?”

  “In theory, yes. Open-and-shut cases.”

  “And you think the people who got convicted didn’t do it?”

  He nodded. “Yup.”

  “That all sounds a little hard to swallow.”

  “Does, don’t it?”

  I took a few long breaths. This all sounded like a fool’s errand to me. But what if? Seventeen missing kids. If Gooch was right, this would be the case of a lifetime.

  “So what’s the first move?” I said.

  “Since you already opened the case, let’s talk to Tanya Prowter, Evie Marie’s mama. After that we gonna start at the beginning, start with Victim One, work our way forward.”

  SEVENTEEN

  I am a product—and not an entirely happy one—of what we used to call the black bourgeoisie, though that term is a little out of fashion these days. Truth is, we bourgeois types are the biggest snobs on the planet. Even though I’m kind of a failed member of my clan, I still have its prejudices to some degree.

  People like me look down on the folks who live in housing projects at least as much—if not more—than the average white country-club Republican. All those things that you hear white people saying about the “inner city” folks—shiftless, lazy, low moral standards, and the rest—you’ll hear us black bourgeoisie saying, too. We close ranks when the white folks are around, but when the doors are closed and it’s just us sisters and brothers, we say it, believe me. We despise those bedraggled black folks sitting on the stoops of those awful rows of sad brick buildings, we despise them terribly. But it’s a complicated thing, because we know that in despising them, there’s some kind of tinge of anguish or fear, some sense of, there but for the grace of God go I.

  But a white person in a down-at-the-heels trailer park or a housing project—well, the members of my clan have a special reserve tank of disgust and hatred for them, a nice pure thing that is unmediated by any of the complications of racial solidarity. You can’t know the depth of pleasure I feel when I call somebody “white trash.” Maybe it’s not right, but it’s how I feel.

  The white woman sitting on the stoop up in Perry Homes was short and stocky, with a drinker’s flush, puffy eyes, a thin slash of mouth, and a rat’s nest of hair that hadn’t seen soap in a good stretch. She was holding a tall water glass with a fading picture of Minnie Mouse on the side. The woman matched the photo of Evie Marie Prowter’s mother in the file, a mug shot taken from a solicitation arrest.

  We pulled over to the curb, parked. Seeing the unmarked car, the white woman stood and started walking away.

  “Hey, Tanya!” I said. “Where you going, girl?”

  “Yo, I ain’t did nothing,” she said sullenly. She was white, but she talked black. I suppose being the only white person in a two-mile radius, it came naturally to her, but it sounded laughable to me coming out of those skinny lips.

  “We’re here to talk about your girl, Tanya,” Lt. Gooch said.

  “What that li’l ho Denise done now?”

  Lt. Gooch shook his head. “Not, Denise. I’m talking about Evie Marie.”

  The woman on the stoop looked up at us for a moment with no particular expression. But her skin had gone another shade paler. “Who the hell y’all people is?”

  “My name’s Detective Deakes,” I said. “Cold Case Unit. We’re reopening her case.”

  Elise Prowter looked around vacantly, then took a drink from her Minnie Mouse jelly glass. “How come?” she said finally.

  “We got new information,” Lt. Gooch said.

  She looked at us for a moment. “What new information?”

  Gooch shook his head. “I can’t tell you about that.”

  “Well.” She gazed stoically off into the distance. “What you want, then?”

  “Just a couple questions. I wanted to go over what happened when she disappeared. In the statement you gave to the detective at the time, you indicated that your brother Lonnie Driggers had come to visit that afternoon, that he was playing with your daughter.”

  “He ain’t my brother.”

  “I thought he was.”

  “Maybe he was. But I don’t claim him no more. He killed my baby. I done fell apart after that. Look what he done to me.” She waved her Minnie Mouse glass in a wide arc that took in the whole of the bleak Perry Homes landscape, then looked at me with hard, challenging eyes. Her eyes, I noticed, were the same color as Lt. Gooch’s. “I come all the way down to nigger level.”

  “You want to catch a slap upside the head, sister?” I said.

  Gooch looked at me coldly, but I looked right back. I wasn’t having any of that. Finally he turned back to Tanya Prowter. “What you’re saying, you think Lonnie Driggers kidnapped your daughter and killed her.”

  “He done took her down to that fishing shack of his and kilt her.”

  “You have any proof?”

  She glared at Lt. Gooch. “Proof? I got all the proof I need right here.” She put her hands over her heart.

  Gooch kept looking at her.

  “What?” she said. “How come y’all don’t believe me? Y’all just like that other sumbitch.”

  “Who you talking about?”

  “That other po-lices.”

  “What other policeman?”

  “The one that done the investigation. Back when she done got kilt.”

  I remembered the name from the file. “Roy Bevis. Lt. Roy Bevis.”

  Tanya Prowter shrugged listlessly.

  I held my composure this time. “Are you saying that Lt. Bevis didn’t think your brother was guilty of the crime?”

  “Hocus-pocus,” she said vaguely.

  “What’s that mean?” I said.

  Lt. Gooch held up a hand to me, waving me off impatiently. “Let me ask you this. Let’s say it was your brother done it. But let’s also s’pose, just for the sake of argument, that there was somebody else who helped him.”

  Tanya Prowter took a delicate, prim sip from her tall water glass. As she set it down on the cracked concrete I noticed from the way the “water” clung to the sides of the glass that it wasn’t water at all. It was straight vodka, a good solid half pint of it in there. “What you mean, help?”

  “Anybody hanging around? Anybody that seemed suspicious? Any adult males in the vicinity who showed an unnatural interest in her?”

  Tanya Prowter looked disgusted. “You people.”

  Gooch just stood over her. She started to take another sip of her vodka, but the lieutenant’s leg flashed out so fast you almost couldn’t see it, catching the glass with the toe of his cowboy boot and kicking Minnie Mouse twenty feet in the air. Minnie shattered against the wall.

  “You showing disrespect to me,” Gooch said. “You showing disrespect to my partner. Being you being a broken-down welfare drunk, where you claim the right to do that?”

  “Shit, man,” Tanya Prowter, waving sadly at the wet stain on the wall. “That’s the last I had.”

  Gooch stared at her.

  After a while she said, “That other cop ast the same thing, if there was somebody hanging around. I tole him there was this dude use to come ar
ound. Claimed he was Lonnie’s parole officer, be looking for Lonnie, you know what I’m saying. Only later when I ax Lonnie about him, Lonnie tole me he ain’t know who he was.”

  “And this parole officer. He seemed suspicious to you somehow?”

  “He come around three, four times, say he Lonnie’s parole officer, say he looking for Lonnie. Then he joke around with me, come in the house, make hisself at home. Then he horse around with Evie Marie.”

  “And he did this more than once.”

  “That’s what I’m saying. He seem nice enough, though.” She hesitated. “He brang me a bottle of Tanqueray once.”

  “That sound like something a parole officer would do? Bring somebody a bottle of top-shelf gin?”

  She looked away, didn’t answer.

  “The day Evie Marie disappeared. This here parole officer fellow, did he come to your home?”

  Again, there was no answer.

  “Was that the day he brought you the Tanqueray? Hm? Did he give you the Tanqueray and then maybe go out in the yard, horse around with your little girl while you was drinking up that bottle?”

  “It was Lonnie,” she said listlessly.

  “You got drunk and fell asleep, didn’t you? While that man was playing with your girl.”

  Evie Marie Prowter’s mother started shaking her head back and forth, back and forth, a slow insistent motion.

  “What did he look like, Ms. Prowter? What did the man look like?”

  She shrugged. “Normal looking. Blond hair.”

  “A white man,” I said.

  “Yeah. White dude.”

  “You remember his name?”

  “Nah. But I know he parole officer. He done show me his badge.”

  “Anything else about him? What kind of car did he drive?”

  “How the hell I’ma remember a thing like that? Ten years later. Shit.”

  When we got back in the car, Lt. Gooch said, “Check the file. You got the sheet on Tanya’s brother in there?”

  I riffled through, found a police file on Lonnie Driggers. “Yeah.”

  “Was he on parole in 1992?”

  I studied the sheet. “Nope,” I said finally. “1988, went in for three on possession of burglary tools, some other things. Served nineteen months. Finished his parole in ’91. After that he was clean.” I felt the tingling between my shoulder blades again. “Whoever was hanging around with that little girl, he was no parole officer.”