The Body Box

by Lynn Abercrombie

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Once he’d seen my badge, the Kroger security guard was nice enough. He prevailed on the Alpharetta cop to take off the handcuffs and accepted my explanation that the wine bottle had slipped my mind, that I’d forgotten to pay for it in my hurry to answer a call on my radio. Turned out he was trying to get a job in law enforcement. I handed him my card and I gave him some pointers about taking the Atlanta PD exam, told him feel free to give me a shout if he needed help greasing some skids downtown.

  The security guard went back inside, leaving me with the Alpharetta cop, a young white boy with a flattop crewcut, an attitude, and a plug of chewing tobacco in his cheek. “Yeah, well,” he said, after the security guard had disappeared back into the store. “You can snowjob that nitwit all you want. But I still got to make out a report.”

  “Hey, sure.” I started walking away.

  The Alpharetta cop shifted his tobacco plug to the other cheek. “I don’t want to see you out here again.”

  “Feel free to call me Detective,” I said.

  He met my eye, gave me the old sleepy-eyed cop stare. I gave it right back to him. “Don’t think I don’t I see your pupils,” he said. “You’re speeding like a by-God racehorse. Detective.” Then he spit a long stream of brown juice onto the hot tarmac.

  Which is when it hit me what I needed to do.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  When I got to the Cold Case Unit office, the light was off. I let myself in with the key and switched on the overheads. The flourescents snapped and hummed ominously. I locked the door behind me, then went over to Lt. Gooch’s desk. I tried the bottom drawer, but as I’d expected, it was locked. From out of my purse I pulled a small pry bar.

  My pulse was racing. Whatever that stuff was in those pills, it was stronger than I’d expected. When you take stimulants, there’s always a point where the initial euphoria brought on by the chemicals in your bloodstream starts to tip over into another, not-so-comfortable feeling. When I was in the residential treatment program up in Minnesota, I had had a lot of time on my hands. I’d spent a good deal of that time reading up on the pharmacology of addiction. Basically, stimulants mimic the natural fight-or-flight responses of the body. Point being, there’s a close relationship between euphoria and terror. When the euphoria side of the fight-or-flight mechanism starts wearing off, that’s when tremors, paranoia, terror, night sweats, and all the other pretty stuff starts kicking in.

  As I inserted the pry bar into the lip of the drawer, my pulse was racing, and I could hear the keening whine of the flourescents and the groan of the boilers in the room next door with unusual clarity. The sounds seemed malignant to me then, like auditory masks behind which something terrible was hiding.

  I leaned on the pry bar. Nothing much happened other than a squawk from the metal. I slid the pry bar over until it hit something that might or might not have been the lock mechanism. I leaned on it again. The metal folded, but still the drawer didn’t move. Paint was coming off in small, dandruff-like flakes. I moved the pry bar again, jerked on it a couple of times, and finally the drawer came free.

  I slid it open. My heart was pounding as I pulled out the Dixie cup full of disgusting brown liquid. It smelled so strongly of tobacco that I almost gagged as I poured off a quarter inch of Lt. Gooch’s foul spit into a plastic urine-sample container I’d lifted from the Narcotics unit upstairs.

  When I was done, I screwed the lid back on the sample container, put it in my purse. Then I looked down at the drawer, and my heart sank. I’d smashed the lip of the drawer terribly, flaked off all kind of paint, bent the entire front of the drawer. Gooch would see it immediately. I tried to bang it back into some semblance of its former self, but it was no use.

  What would I do? Then something struck me. There was a guy in maintenance who I used to flirt with all the time back when I worked in Narcotics. Maybe he could help.

  I called his extension from the phone at my desk. “Rodney! Hey, child,” I said, “it’s Mechelle. No, baby, question is, how you feeling today? Uh-huh? Uh-huh? Oooooo, don’t make me have to spank you.” We played a while, and I laid it on thick, doing my little low-down-and-nasty-girl thing. Then I told him I needed his help fixing something. “Yeah, that’s right,” I said. “And some gray paint, too?”

  Rodney said he’d be right down, it’d be taken care of before I got back from where I was going.

  Mark Terry, the civilian tech over at the GBI crime lab, saw me coming through the door and came out to greet me.

  “Mechelle, Mechelle!” he said. “Always busy, always working.”

  I grinned. “You know how it is.”

  “I told you about getting too skinny,” he said. “All that hard work’ll wear you down.” He looked me up and down, slowly. “No, that’s just fine. Right there. Uh-huh. Stay like that and don’t ever change.”

  I gave him a pouty look over the shoulder, cocked my hip, tried out a couple of poses on him.

  “Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Work it, Mechelle.”

  We both laughed. I kept laughing a hair too long. Suddenly he was looking at me a little funny. “You okay?” he said.

  “Hey, it’s nothing. I’ve been up all night, starting to get giddy.”

  “So what you got for me?” Mark said, leading me back to his cubicle.

  “Well, here’s the thing . . .” I put my purse on his desk, took out the plastic sample container full of Lt. Gooch’s spit, set it next to his computer screen.

  Mark frowned slightly. “I don’t mean to be getting persnickety about procedure and all,” he said, “but you know that vial should have a seal and a label on it.”

  “That’s what I’m getting to, Mark.”

  The lab tech looked at me dubiously.

  “What I got here is a sample. Saliva. For which I need you to run DNA.”

  “Without a seal. Without a label. Without a case number.”

  I picked up a paperweight off his desk, turned it around and around in my hand. I could see my fingers trembling from the energy pills. “I’ll be honest with you. This sample has been illegally obtained. It has no legal status. Never will. It’s not going to be used in court. What I need is to determine whether I’m on to the right person. Or not. You see what I’m saying?”

  “You’re saying you have a suspect, but you’re just not sure he’s the right man.”

  I nodded.

  “And you’re saying that we’ve already run a sample from a crime scene, and you want to see if there’s a match so that you know whether to proceed with investigating that suspect, or whether you can eliminate him. Him? It is a him, I assume?”

  “What it is,” I said, “is we have a real confusing case. We have guy who, if he knew I suspected him, he’d be liable to do something terrible. So I need your help here.”

  Mark Terry cleared his throat, looked uncomfortably at the wall. “Yeah. I see. Only this lab runs on procedure. Big time. I mean, if we start goofing around with procedure, all kind of bad things can happen. Look what happened with the FBI lab a couple years back. One guy started getting slipshod, it came to light, and suddenly every defense attorney on the planet gets to call into question every federal conviction from the last ten years.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “I mean, I do this kind of thing, and it comes to light? Hey, not only will I lose my job, I’ll lose my entire career. Being a lab tech is out the window forever and ever, amen.”

  I spread my hands. “I’m not joking when I tell you lives are at stake. As we speak, a human life is in jeopardy.”

  Mark shook his head. “Look, Mechelle, me and you, we go back a ways. We got a fun little thing going and all that. But seriously, you saying this is life and death or whatever? That’s not hacking it. I need you to give me something more, say . . . tangible.”

  The way he said it, it was obvious he wasn’t saying no. He was saying something else, saying it but not saying it, hoping to force me into speaking the actual words. I let my mind float across
the possibilities. What would satisfy him? I’d been playing this flirty game, showing him some leg for a long time. Was I willing to take this one step further to make this case? Or was that even what he was aiming for?

  “So, what,” I said. “Maybe me and you could grab a drink later? Something like that?”

  Mark Terry looked at me impassively. “A drink?”

  “Well, shucks, baby.” I gave him a randy little smile, the rotten jittery feeling banging around in my chest. “One step at a time, huh? Start with a drink, see where it goes from there.”

  His eyes widened. “Wait, wait, wait. You thought . . .”

  It was obvious from the look in his eyes that I’d misconstrued what he was angling at. I slumped back in the seat. “Then I . . . I’m sorry . . . I misunderstood what you were implying.”

  Mark Terry kept looking at me, then finally a big grin spread across his face. “Not that I’m not interested. But all I was saying is, you want me to route an under-the-table DNA job for you, you got to be square with me what you’re talking about. You got to tell me what you’re working, whose life is at stake, that kind of thing.”

  I felt a flush run across my skin. “Oh, man. I thought . . .”

  We both laughed.

  I slid the sample vial across the desk. “You have got to swear to me. I mean on a stack of Bibles, on your mother’s grave, the whole nine. Because this absolutely can’t get out.”

  Mark Terry raised his hand solemnly. “Scout’s honor.”

  I waited for a moment, let a little drama build in the room. Drama is good. Finally I said, “We’re working a serial killer. A child murderer.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Yeah. He’s been out there for over a decade. About twenty victims.”

  Mark Terry stared at me. “No wonder. I was racking my brains, trying to figure out why y’all been running all that old DNA. Figured maybe you were just using the shotgun approach on some old cases or something.”

  “I can’t tell you all the details. But the bottom line is that he’s snatched another little girl. He holds them for a long time, that’s part of the MO. So we’ve got to get him before he kills her.”

  Mark Terry’s face grew slightly pale. “You know this for a fact?”

  “We’re pretty sure.”

  “My God. So I guess y’all must have a whole task force going and everything.”

  I shook my head.

  The lab tech frowned in puzzlement. “But . . . then who is working it? Just you and Gooch?”

  I nodded.

  “Why?”

  “Our suspect is law enforcement. We don’t want this getting out.”

  Terry ran his hand over his face nervously. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. I don’t know, Mechelle. I don’t want to get in over my head.”

  “Please.”

  “Maybe I should call Gooch.”

  I shook my head, very slowly.

  Mark Terry stared at me. He must have seen something in my eyes. He blinked. “Wait a minute. Wait a goddamn minute! Are you saying . . . Whose saliva is this?”

  “Oh, no, no nah, hey, no. I mean, come on!” I laughed brightly. “It’s not the lieutenant. It’s just . . . I’m kind of freelancing a particular aspect of the case. Okay? Just running a hunch about another suspect in the case. You know what a control freak he is: I don’t want him giving me a bunch of grief if I pursue this particular angle and I’m wrong.”

  Mark Terry scratched his chin, eyes narrowed slightly. I could tell he was trying to decide whether he believed me or not. “I don’t know . . .”

  “Plus, look, suppose I’m wrong. I’d rather not get the lieutenant’s butt in a crack over my mistake.”

  Mark Terry picked up the vial, held it up to the light. “What the hell is this anyway?”

  “Tobacco juice. The guy chews a plug.”

  Terry made face of distaste, then slapped a small white label on the vial. “That’s it, then. John Doe, blind DNA screen.”

  “Thanks,” I said, standing. “I won’t forget this.”

  “A drink, huh?” Mark Terry smiled craftily at me. “Hey, maybe a drink wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world either.”

  “Call me.” I reached across the desk, touched him lightly on the arm. “And, baby? Not a word to anybody.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  I’d like to say I spent the rest of the afternoon working the case like a dog. But the truth is, I didn’t. I went home and I sat down on the couch, and the next thing I knew it was dark outside. I looked at the clock. Four in the morning. I’d finally crashed, slept for thirteen solid hours. Didn’t seem much point in getting up, so I turned off the TV, got in bed, and slept until the alarm went off at six.

  I woke feeling wonderful. I put on some old Al Green and juked around the apartment while I was dressing. I was dancing and smiling at myself in the mirror when the phone rang, still dancing and smiling when I heard the voice I had now come to recognize as Chief Biggs’s hatchet man, Captain Goodwin: “Hold for Chief Biggs.”

  I held for while. Now I wasn’t smiling or dancing anymore. The line was silent for a while, then Chief Biggs’s voice came on. “Detective?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Get your silly lying black ass down to my office right this minute.”

  “Um, sir, what’s the, ah—” But I was wasting my breath on a dead line.

  When the gorgeous Captain Goodwin led me into the Chief’s office, Diggs was not wearing his customary smile. He glared at me. “Sit down,” he snapped.

  I sat. I could see there was no percentage in being chatty, so I kept my mouth shut.

  Diggs’s assistant left, closing the double doors behind him. The massive desk was empty, as usual, except for three pieces of paper, all of them lined up in a row so perfect it looked like it had been squared off with a ruler. Diggs’s skin is light enough that there was no mistaking his face was flushed with anger. He stared at me for while.

  “You sat right there in that seat, girl,” he said finally, “and you damn well lied to me.”

  “Sir?”

  His voice rose and he slammed his hand down on the table. “Don’t you dare play little innocent-ass girl to me. Don’t you dare.”

  Obviously he’d found something out. The question, I supposed, was how much.

  “You a very attractive girl,” he said. “I mean, is that it? Am I thinking with my dick? What? How come I’m being so indulgent with you?”

  I just sat there with my knees clamped together.

  “You go out there to Cobb County smoking crack, I help you.”

  “Uh, not crack sir. Methamphetamines.”

  Now I got the smile. “Oh! Oh! Excuse me! Crystal meth. Okay, so instead of getting hopped up and breaking the law and dishonoring your badge on some niggery-ass drug like crack, you going for the drug of choice among America’s great population of shiftless, worthless, no-teeth, dumbass white trash. I stand corrected. Thank you for that clarification. Thank you so very much.” The smile was gleaming suddenly. “Anything else you’d like to straighten out for me?”

  I decided not to repeat my mistake and kept my mouth shut.

  “No, seriously, young woman. I’m asking you right this minute what else you’d like to straighten me out on.”

  I looked at the floor.

  “See, reason I bring this up is that where you’re at right this minute, is you’ve reached that speak-now-or-forever-hold-your-piece type of arena. You with me? I asked you to keep me apprised. And you lied to my face.”

  I nodded.

  His eyes widened. “Do you honestly think you’re the only person in this department that I’ve asked to keep me apprised of little bits and pieces of information? Huh? You think you’re the only person in this city? This state? Girl, my gracious sakes alive! I got people everywhere!”

  “Sir, why don’t you just tell me what you found out?”

  He laughed. Now that he was feeling in control, the old genial Chief Diggs was coming back. “Nah, see
it don’t work that way. How it works is, you tell me everything you know, and maybe if I’m feeling relaxed and at peace with my soul, I don’t make that phone call to the Cobb County DA, the one where I recommend they drag out that indictment they got hid in the desk drawer, and send your pretty ass to the penitentiary.”

  “I’m not sure where to start.”

  “Start, how about, with why you just asked a CID special agent to run a DNA test on the rape-kit evidence found on Lt. Hank Gooch’s murdered daughter.”

  My heart sank. If he knew that, God only knew what else he’d found out. So that was where I started. I told him about all those murdered kids. I told him about the calluses and the bone decalcification. I told him about the DNA test that the Army was running, about the test I was running on Gooch’s saliva. I told him about the one child who still sitting somewhere in a box waiting to die. I told him that there was a connection between Gooch and this case that he should have revealed but never did. I told him that I didn’t know for sure, so I went ahead and ran the DNA just in case.

  When I was done, I felt wrung out as an old dishrag. The Chief beamed paternally at me. He’d been nodding the whole time, like nothing I’d told him was news. I must admit I was surprised at how little shock he displayed at the fact that we’d been secretly freelancing a fifteen-year-old serial killer investigation.

  “See?” he said. “How easy that is? Don’t it make you feel all warm and gushy inside? Maybe if this law enforcement thing don’t work out, I’ll go into the priesthood. I seem to have what your Catholics would call a confessional manner.”

  “Sir, what are you going to do?”

  But of course the Chief wouldn’t be rushed. He leaned back in the chair and smiled. “Nothing makes me feel better than helping out a young person such as yourself. Lot of folks think that the fun of police work is putting bad guys in jail. Hey, that has its appeal. But what I really enjoy, what plays the deep and resonant chords of my soul, is giving back, reaching down, extending a helping hand to a troubled young individual.”