The Body Box

by Lynn Abercrombie

  By three o’clock in the morning, I was losing my edge, and the coffee wasn’t hacking it anymore. I was about halfway through 1985. My vision was getting blurry, my eyes felt like balls of rock, my butt was getting sore, and a sense of dread and despair was rising inside me. All these dead children. All these dead children I’d never be able to help.

  I opened my purse, took out the school picture of Jenny Dial that her mother had given me, stared at it. Cute little white girl with freckles on her nose, one tooth missing, big grin, messy brown hair. Was there anybody else on the planet who had even a half-decent shot at saving this girl from ending up in the same pile of news articles that were spilling out of my printer? I leaned the little picture against my computer, picked up a printout of another story, tried to read it. But I just couldn’t concentrate. I was too wrung out.

  The dread was filling me up like water rising up out of a swamp. I knew what was going to happen next, but I just couldn’t stop it from going down. I tried, I swear, but I just didn’t know what else to do. I went out, got in the car, took a short drive.

  The house was over in Little Five Points, a two-story Victorian that would have been worth a lot of money if anybody had bothered to maintain it in the past thirty years. I knocked on the door, banging it hard with my flashlight.

  After a while the door opened and a skinny white kid with lank dyed-blond hair and black eyebrows answered. He was wearing only a pair of boxer shorts. A large tattoo ran across his chest that said APOSTLE. He appraised me for a long time, one pale hand digging idly around inside his shorts. The other hand was behind his back, almost certainly holding a gun. Something hit me: back when he’d been my dealer, I had found this guy moderately attractive, nearly ended up in bed with him a couple times. How was that possible? Looking at him through sober eyes, he just looked like any old trailer-park loser.

  He looked at me for a long time. “Ain’t seen you in a while,” he said. “I heard you got busted.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Come on in,” he said. “We’ll get you hooked up.”

  I still just stood there, my heart beating fast in my chest.

  “Look, dude—in or out, huh?” the boy said. “It’s late.”

  “Never mind,” I said. “I made a mistake.”

  The boy looked at me for a long time, then said, “Pss!” Dismissing me. He slammed the door.

  I drove home fast, taking the corners so hard the tires on my Chevy squealed. Something about seeing the other road my life could have gone down, it had re-energized me. When I got back, I was full of enthusiasm for the task.

  I poured another huge cup of coffee, jumped back on the computer, printed out a few more articles, and started reading.

  It took me until five in the morning before I finally found the article. I’d been thinking that it would be hard to spot, that there would be something subtle about it, that finding the pearl would take a lot of ingenious thinking and careful observation and brilliant intuitive deduction. But I was wrong. There was nothing subtle here at all.

  The article, when I finally found it, practically hit me over the head. I read through it a couple of times, and the triumphant feeling from deciding not to buy crank from that boy, it just up and disappeared, sinking and sinking, covered up by a thick blanket of self-disgust and fear.

  When I finally couldn’t stand reading the story anymore, I walked back into my bathroom and threw up in the sink.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Just before sunup, I could feel a crash coming on. I’d drunk so much coffee that my hands were trembling, and I felt jumpy, my thoughts running off in disconnected little jerks. All I wanted to do was sleep. I’d reached that point where you either stumbled into bed and lost a whole day, or you just kept plowing ahead. I decided to go for a run in the semidarkness to see if I could revive myself. At first I felt like I’d been beaten by a stick, but by the time I’d gone a few miles, the sun was coming up and my head started to clear. I started trying to make some connections based on the unsettling discovery I’d made during the night. As I was heading back into my house something struck me: all three of the early cases in Atlanta—which had run from 1988 through 1992—had been investigated by the same detective. His name was Lt. Roy Bevis, Jr.

  I waited till nine o’clock, then called the Admin office.

  “Officer Danley, Administration,” a woman said.

  “How you doing, Officer. It’s Detective Deakes from the Cold Case Unit. Could you do me a favor, look up the phone number for a retired detective, Roy Bevis, Jr?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She put me on hold for a while, finally came back on. “Um. Ma’am? He’s deceased.”

  “I realize that. Does he have a wife? Somebody that gets his pension check?”

  “Oh.” She put me on hold for a while, then finally came back with a number. I wrote it down on the palm of my hand, then hung up the phone.

  I dialed the number, and a white woman with a county-sounding accent answered. I explained who I was and asked if I could speak to her.

  “Right now?” she said.

  “If it’s not inconvenient.”

  The woman sighed. “I guess,” she said grudgingly.

  Roy Bevis’s wife lived in Stone Mountain, in a slightly seedy development called Bonanza in what had certainly been all-white area when it was built back in the sixties, but now most everybody who lived here was black. All the streets were named for characters in the old TV show—Hoss Road, Little Joe Drive, Cartwright Circle, like that. Yee-hah.

  I knocked on the door, heard three or four latches and locks being unfastened, and then the door finally swung open an inch or two. Two eyes looked at me suspiciously through the gap. “Mrs. Bevis? It’s Detective Deakes. I just spoke to you?”

  The eyes kept looking for a while, then finally the door swung open.

  Mrs. Bevis locked all the locks again after I’d entered, then led me silently into a living room that had the feel of a museum. Everything looked like it had been purchased from the same store about ten minutes after the house was built. Lots of avocado green upholstery, lots of streaky faux antiquing on all the exposed wood. The walls were knotty pine. A picture of a thin-faced, serious-looking young man in a police uniform hung on the wall over the brick fireplace.

  “This is just lovely,” I said. “It makes a room feel so homey having all the family pictures.” A bank of gloomy-looking white people stared down at me from the wall, most of them in black-and-white photographs that looked to have been taken a long time ago.

  “Thank you.” Mrs. Bevis sat, perching on the edge of her chair. She didn’t offer me anything to drink, didn’t look like she was in the mood for small talk. “You didn’t say on the phone what this was about.”

  She was a fat woman of about sixty-five, but not the jolly fat type. She was the sagging, depressive fat type. The fat hung off of her as though her skin had been filled with bird-shot, all the weight of it stretching at her until loose folds of flesh hung from every part of her body, from the sides of her face, her chin, the backs of her arms. A powder blue sweater was draped over her shoulders like a shawl. It was July, but the air conditioning didn’t seem to be on, and the air was stifling and still, with an unpleasant odor to it that reminded me of chemical fertilizer.

  “I’m not entirely sure where to start,” I said. “I’m with a new outfit in the department called the Cold Case Unit. We’re investigating old cases, unsolved cases. Several of your husband’s cases have come up.”

  Mrs. Bevis looked at me without replying.

  “And so . . . I realize that your husband has . . . deceased. But what I was wondering is if you could tell me anything about the cases, anything your husband might have passed on to you, or anything that he might have kept at the house or—”

  Mrs. Bevis pursed her lips. “I expect you’d have to tell me exactly which case you’re talking about then.” She had a clipped, schoolmarmish way of talking, each syllable squeezed ou
t very precisely.

  “There are three of them, actually. Mindy Reese, D’Juan Farmer, and Marquavious Roberts. Children.”

  Mrs. Bevis looked at me silently. Finally she stood up and opened the avocado drapes and stared out the front window. A bunch of kids, all of them black, were playing on their bikes in the street. I wondered how she felt about that, a certain kind of life that she’d grown used to passing away right in front of her eyes. Probably living on her husband’s little pension and a tiny Social Security check, feeling trapped here in her own house, a white prisoner in a black world. But then, maybe not: It’s hard enough to figure out what’s going on in my own head, much less somebody else’s.

  “Mrs. Bevis?”

  Mrs. Bevis reached up and put her hand in front of her mouth, as though she were about to cough, then put it back down. “I’ve been waiting,” she said finally. When she turned around, there was a sad smile on her face. “I’ve been waiting for almost ten years, dear, for somebody to come and ask me that question.”

  My eyes must have widened a little. “Oh?”

  She nodded slightly, and the smile became bitter. “They told me he committed suicide. They told me Roy pulled his car over in a rest stop halfway to Tennessee, took out his revolver, and killed himself.” The smile faded. “Anybody who knew my husband knew that he could never kill himself. Never. And even if he had, he would have had the decency and the respect for others not to have done it such a terrible fashion. Why, doing it like that—it could have been seen by children!” She said this as though that would have been a worse sin that killing yourself.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “He’s not the first policeman to have trouble handling the stress.”

  Mrs. Bevis eyed me coldly, pulled her pale blue sweater around her shoulders as though, despite the closeness and heat of the room, she was about to catch a chill. “Apparently you never knew my husband.”

  “No, ma’am, I didn’t.”

  “In the months prior to my husband’s murder—”

  “Murder?” I said.

  She pronounced it as though it were two distinct words: “Mur. Der.” She looked at me for a moment, lips pressed together again. “Murder. In the months prior to my husband’s murder, his fellow detectives said that he had become ‘agitated. ’ ” She wiggled two fingers on each hand, making quotation marks in the air. “They said that he had become ‘secretive.’ They said that he had become ‘difficult.’ They said that he had become ‘unreasonable.’ ” She went back to the couch and sat down. The late afternoon sun was pouring in the window now, doing no kindnesses to her sagging face. “And for these reasons, they said his death was consistent with a suicide.”

  I nodded.

  “But only I understood what was going on. You see, Mr. Bevis loved his work. He loved being a detective. It meant everything to him. Probably more to him even than I did.” She said this matter-of-factly, with only a hint of bitterness. “In the months prior to his murder, my husband had determined that he had uncovered a serial killer. Was he secretive and unreasonable and difficult and agitated? Well, perhaps he was. But if so, it was because he was excited. Every day in the months before his murder, he got out of bed eager to get to work. I had never seen him so excited by a case as he was by those three cases.”

  “I assume that your husband’s superiors knew that he believed these to be serial homicides?”

  “No. I believe he didn’t inform them of his suspicions.”

  “After he died, did you bring up that fact to his fellow detectives?”

  Mrs. Bevis shook her head. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Mrs. Bevis looked at the floor. “I’m not a strong woman,” she said. “My health situation is quite precarious.”

  I didn’t quite see the relevance of that, but I figured I’d let it pass. “Okay, fair enough. But what I don’t understand is this: how is it possible for him to pursue an investigation, presumably over a course of many months, without his superiors or his co-workers knowing what he was doing?”

  “How is it possible? Because he didn’t tell them.”

  “You mean he just—”

  “As you know, unlike in New York City or the various other jurisdictions that one sees so often portrayed in police dramas on the television, Atlanta homicide detectives do not have partners. When you work a case in Atlanta, it’s your case. You may have other detectives help you on the case, but the assignment is yours and yours alone.”

  “That’s true,” I said.

  “So he played this case close to his vest.”

  “Why?”

  Mrs. Bevis studied my face. “Did I understand you to say that you’re not with the Homicide bureau?”

  “That’s right. I’m in the Cold Case Unit. It’s a new unit, completely separate from Homicide.”

  “And is anybody outside of your unit aware of your investigation?”

  I felt something prickling on the back of my neck. All of Lt. Gooch’s secrecy, and now this. “No,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

  “I’d keep it that way.”

  I frowned. “Hold on, hold on. You’re really saying what I think you’re saying? You’re saying that your husband believed this case involved a law-enforcement officer.”

  “Yes.”

  “And whoever it was, they found out he was investigating them? And they killed your husband? That’s what you’re claiming?”

  “Claiming?” Her eyes were cold. “I’m telling you.”

  “Are we talking about somebody in Homicide?”

  “That I don’t know.”

  “He never told you who he suspected?”

  Mrs. Bevis ran her hand slowly across her sagging face. “I don’t know that he had a specific suspect. Not until the very end, at least. If he did, he never told me.” She paused. “He must have been close, though.”

  I was suddenly conscious of how hot it was in that room, of the sweat that was pouring out of me, sticking my blouse to my back, and I wanted to get out of there. “Did he keep any records here? Anything that wasn’t in the files at the station?”

  Mrs. Bevis looked around the room with a vague expression on her face. “I’m not in the best of health,” she said. Dodging my question, it sounded like.

  “Mrs. Bevis? Did he? Did he keep anything here?”

  “No,” she said, after a brief pause. “No, I don’t believe he did.”

  “Because there’s no indication in the file that he was pursuing anything along the lines you’re saying. He had to have documented what he was doing, but it’s not in the file.”

  Mrs. Bevis’s lips stiffened slightly, like she’d come to a decision. “Well, I don’t know anything about that.”

  “You’re sure.”

  Her eyes flashed briefly. I was almost sure she had something, but it seemed clear she wasn’t going to give it to me.

  “He’s still out there,” I said. “There’s another little girl out there.”

  The fire seemed to go out of the woman, and the evening light caught every fold and swag of skin. “I’m really not well at all,” she said. “I think you’d better go.”

  I put my card on the table by her elbow. “I’ll see myself out. But if you find something, please call me.”

  As I opened the door, I took another look at the long row of pictures on the wall. In one of them, Roy Bevis was standing in the middle of a row of four or five men, all of them obviously plainclothes police. Bevis had his arm around another cop. A much younger Lt. Gooch.

  Lt. Bevis’s widow called out to me. “You be careful, dear. You be very careful who you talk to.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  “Cold Case, Gooch speaking.”

  “Hey, Lieutenant, it’s me.” Silence. “Mechelle.”

  The line remained silent.

  “Sir? Lieutenant? Sorry I didn’t make it in this morning. I don’t know what it is, but I’m sick as a dog. Must have eaten something bad last night. I’m hoping it’s just food poisoning, but
I’m throwing up, I’ve got diarrhea, I’ve got all this junk coming up that—”

  “I don’t need a stool sample, Detective. Just get better by tomorrow. We got work to do.” The lieutenant hung up on me.

  “Thanks for all your concern and everything,” I said to the dead line.

  After that I made a couple more phone calls, then got in my car and started driving.

  Fort Benning, down on the Alabama border, is a massive place, bigger than half the counties in Georgia. In fact, it’s one of the biggest army bases west of the Mississippi, a major training station for the infantry, with all kinds of schools including ranger and airborne training as well as the infamous (and recently renamed) School of the Americas, which is often accused of training South American right-wing death squads. The Army’s Criminal Investigation Division maintains a regional CID headquarters battalion, as well as a unit called the 86th Military Police Detachment, which has investigative responsibility specifically for Fort Benning.

  The country is flat and hot and heavily forested around Columbus. July had been unusually dry this year. There was a big forest fire burning to the west as I drove down the interstate, and for twenty miles before I reached Columbus, I could smell smoke.

  The head of the 86th MP Detachment at Fort Benning referred to herself as special agent-in-charge, rather than by her military rank. Special Agent-in-Charge Rose Ellen McGahah was a small, solid white woman with hair cut so short it verged on crewcut length. She had a frank manner, a strong Boston accent, and a square face with pale, clear skin and big freckles.

  “I wasn’t entirely clear from our conversation on the phone what you were looking for, Detective,” she said as she led me back to her cramped, anonymous-looking office. There were no particular decorations in the place other than a couple of plaques on the wall that showed she’d won practical pistol marksmanship awards.

  “I was deliberately vague, Agent McGahah,” I said. “I felt this was something that I ought to take up with you in person.”