The Body Box

by Lynn Abercrombie

  “Yessir.”

  Big smile. “Don’t feel obliged to patronize me,” the chief said. “I enjoy this whether you kiss my ass or not.”

  I slumped back into my seat and just hoped this would be over soon.

  “I’m on the board of directors of Big Brothers/Big Sisters, did you know that? Oh, yeah. Go around the state giving speeches, raising hopes, extending a hand, etc. etc. Very rewarding work. Especially being able to show the young black folks that being a successful black man is not synonymous with basketball or drug dealing. You know what I mean?” He leaned forward. “That, girl, is the fundament, the mudsill, the very basis of my success. Reach down and help out. Then when necessary, maybe I ask for a favor in return. That’s all.”

  “Look, I don’t want to go to the penitentiary,” I said.

  “What I’m trying to tell you, is that you ain’t the first person in this department to mess up. Human nature being what it is, we got flawed human beings all through the ranks. And a lot of them owe their livelihoods and their reputations to me. Strictly to me. So here it is, your big opportunity.” He took one of the pieces of paper off his desk and handed it to me.

  “What’s this, sir?”

  “See, once word got back to me that you been running DNA tests down at Fort Benning, I started putting things together. While you were sleeping off whatever it was you’d just put up your nose yesterday, I was spending time on the phone, expediting things.”

  “I didn’t put anything up my nose. I had a little caffeine, that’s all.”

  “Not interested, Mechelle. Bottom line, that’s an arrest warrant for soon-to-be-ex Lieutenant Hank Gooch.”

  I stared at it. “And those other two pieces of paper?”

  “What I’m saying, I expedited those two DNA tests—the one you did over at the GBI, and the one from Fort Benning. Had the results forwarded directly to my desk.”

  “You’re saying the DNA matched?”

  “You goddamn right, the DNA matched. Your boss raped and killed his own little girl. Cut off her head with a sword. No doubt he did the same thing to all those other innocent little kids. So what you gonna do right now, you gonna head off to Hank Gooch’s shitass little apartment along with a troop of big crazy SWAT team members, and you gonna place him under arrest.”

  “Yessir.”

  “And, Detective Deakes?”

  “Yessir?”

  “Pencil in an hour at about four o’clock. I got a press conference, then I’m gonna give you a citation for bravery or deductive brilliance, steadfastness, some bullshit, and promote you to head of the Cold Case Unit. How’s that sound?”

  I stared at him.

  “The two words you’re looking for, Detective,” he said. “Are thank and you.”

  “Thank you. Thank you, sir.”

  “Why it’s my pleasure. Yes, indeed. The pleasure’s entirely mine.” He stood and pointed at the door. “Now go arrest that pederast monster before he kills another kid.”

  FORTY

  I briefed the SWAT boys in the Cold Case Unit office, while the SWAT team stood around glowering and flexing their muscles.

  After I was done briefing the SWAT team on the kind of man they were dealing with, the SWAT lieutenant said, “Where you want to take him down?”

  “Let’s play it by ear,” I said. Then I put in a call to Lt. Gooch’s pager. He called me back within two minutes.

  “I thought you were playing sick,” he said.

  Hearing his voice, a creepy sensation ran through my fingers, like bacon was sizzling beneath my skin. But I knew I had to make this good, not let the nervousness make me blow this. “I’m much better now. But thanks for asking. And the lovely flowers? The card? That was so sweet.”

  “You finished cracking yourself up?”

  “Look, I’m at the office. Must have been a twenty-four-hour bug. Just wanted to let you know I’m hale and hearty, at your disposal, whatever.”

  “Well, I found out some very interesting things while you were playing hooky. You know where my place is at, how about coming over here, lemme show you what I got.”

  I felt a jab of anxiety. How did he know that I knew where his apartment was? Somehow he must have figured out that I had walked into his place the other night. But how? “Your place? Your house, you mean? No, I’ve never been there.”

  There was a brief pause. “I was under the firm impression you had.” His voice was as uninflected as ever. “Well, don’t matter. I’m heading home. Meet me over there.” He gave me directions, then rang off.

  “This is something you can’t do at the office?”

  There was a long pause. “I wouldn’t tell you to come there if it wasn’t.”

  The phone went dead. I looked at the SWAT lieutenant. He had been monitoring the call on a pair of headphones.

  “What?” the SWAT lieutenant said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “There’s something in his voice. I think he suspects something.”

  “Y’all hear that?” he called to his squad.

  “Yessir!” The whole squad in unison, like a bunch of gung-ho jarheads.

  “This man’s not just a cop, not just a Special Forces type trained in hand-to-hand combat and all that shit—he’s a crazy ass, cold-blooded killer. Armed and dangerous ain’t getting us halfway there. Officer safety, boys. That’s the top priority here. Y’all understand what that means?”

  One of the SWAT guys, a tall white boy with huge arms and a shaved head, gave me a feral grin. “Lock and load,” he said.

  “Goddamn right,” the lieutenant said. “Now remember: the subject is on duty, so assume he’s wearing Kevlar. If deadly force is required, make it a head shot.”

  “Yessir!”

  The lieutenant looked slowly around the room at his men. “I’m serious as a heart attack. If he twitches, don’t hesitate. Head shots. Put him down.”

  There are times where you need to be thoughtful and ask questions, and there are times where you just act. This was one of those times where you just had to act. Me, I’m most comfortable when I’m doing rather than sitting around thinking. But I have to say, as we rolled up Ponce de Leon toward Lt. Gooch’s house, a tickle of thought ran across my mind. We had a DNA match, yes, but it was for a case outside our jurisdiction. And there was no bright line between the murders in our jurisdiction and Lieutenant Hank Gooch. If I’d been the DA who wrote up the warrant, I might have asked for a couple more shreds of evidence. If I’d been the judge who’d signed the warrant, I might have wanted something more, too. But I supposed that whoever the Assistant DA and the state court judge were, they were as beholden to Chief Diggs as I was.

  As we rolled up Ponce, these thoughts crossed my mind, but only momentarily. Like I say, action comes easier to me than cogitation.

  The unmarked SWAT van slowed at the curb. Gooch’s cruiser was parked in the space below his apartment. I looked around for his personal car, a Ford sedan, but didn’t see it anywhere. My heart was pounding, and my hands were wet with sweat. It was just like the good old days back in Narcotics, the old pure and natural adrenaline high, better than crank any day of the week.

  “Go!” the SWAT lieutenant said.

  And then the troops were charging up the stairs toward apartment D2 in a cloud of black Kevlar and MP5 submachine guns. I took the rear position, then followed them up the stairs at a trot, my Glock held in ready position, both hands on the grip, finger resting on the trigger guard, live round in the chamber.

  “Atlanta police! Search warrant!” the SWAT officer on point screamed, then the six-foot-five monster next to him swung the hundred-pound door buster like it weighed about as much as a toothbrush. The lock splintered, and the stout wooden door swung inward. The point man tossed a flash-bang grenade into the room.

  It detonated with an earsplitting crash, and a brief blaze of light lit up the curtains of the apartment. The SWAT team poured through the door. I had forgotten to stick my fingers in my ears before the flash-bang went o
ff, so I had gone a little deaf.

  Still, I could hear them screaming: “Down on the ground! Down on the ground! Search warrant! Search warrant!”

  And then, distantly, like a voice from some far planet, one word: “Gun!”

  With my ears ringing from the flash-bang, the sound of gunfire didn’t seem quite so loud. Louder than popcorn, but not quite as loud as hail on a tin roof. SWAT guys are trained to fire in bursts of three. Fire a burst and take a bead, fire a burst and take a bead. I must have heard six or eight bursts, so much gunfire at once that I couldn’t distinguish the individual shots.

  Then, silence.

  “Clear!” a distant voice yelled.

  “Clear!”

  “Clear!”

  “Somebody radio a Code 21. Subject is down.”

  Code 21 was an ambulance.

  I felt a peculiar sinking feeling in my stomach, the feeling you get when the roller coaster crests the hill and starts heading down. I walked slowly into the room, my ears ringing, walked slowly through the empty living room, into the spare bedroom, the one with the walls covered with swords. There was something about the deafness that made the whole thing feel kind of dreamlike.

  The swords were speckled with blood. The SWAT team had done just like they were trained. Head shots. As best I can reconstruct what happened, Lt. Gooch had been in the back of the bedroom, had heard the noise of the flash-bang. Flash-bangs are supposed to stun you, but because he’d been in the bedroom, it hadn’t affected him. Apparently he’d heard the noise, stood, and come toward the door with a gun in his hand.

  The whole SWAT team, six men with submachine guns, had been facing him dead on. And they had done as instructed, taking him down with nothing but head shots.

  The corpse—and there was no doubt that this was no longer a living man—lay sprawled on its side in the middle of the room full of swords, a snub-nosed revolver six inches from its hand. The autopsy and the forensic investigation later revealed he’d been hit seventeen times in the head before he ever hit the ground. It had all been over in less than two seconds, seventeen shots out of eighteen fired, right on target. Those SWAT boys, you may not want to take them home to Mama—but, baby, they know how to shoot. There was hardly enough left of Lt. Gooch’s head to make a decent sausage.

  “That is Gooch, right?” the SWAT lieutenant said.

  Battered cowboy boots, blue jeans with a round Skoal can impression worn into the back pocket, a white shirt open at the neck. I nodded.

  “Where is she, you son of a bitch?” I yelled at the dead man on the floor. “Where’s Jenny Dial?”

  Then the sensation in my stomach cut in again, the roller coaster heading for the ground, and then I was falling. I don’t mean that I was falling in some figurative sense, I mean my body was folding up and heading for the ground. I fell and fell and fell, and eventually the world went dark.

  FORTY-ONE

  After I fainted, the SWAT lieutenant kept saying that I should take a ride to the hospital, but I told him it was nothing, just a lack of sleep catching up with me.

  I felt shaky the rest of the day. Theoretically I was lead investigator, but on Chief Diggs’s direct instructions they sent over a couple of homicide investigators to actually process the scene. I protested to Chief Diggs’s representative at the scene, the beautiful Captain Goodwin, who came over and strutted around the scene making peremptory remarks to the homicide detectives (who seemed to view him with amused condescension), but Captain Pretty-Boy said to me, “This is not a whodunnit, Detective. In terms of the crime scene, this is a clerical matter. These ladies and gentlemen in Homicide know best how to do the paperwork so that nobody gets bitten in the tuchis by any unwarranted-use-of-force issues.”

  “Tuchis?” I said.

  Captain Goodwin, who evidently was not a humorous brother, explained to me in pedantic detail what tuchis meant in Yiddish. He also, helpfully, explained to me what Yiddish was.

  “I earnestly thank you for that excellent lesson, brother,” I said. “You must have gone to a four-year college.”

  He eyed me coolly. “As long as I’m wearing this, Detective,” he said, fingering the gold braid on his sleeve, “you will refer to me as Captain.”

  “Oh, absolutely, yes, sir, Captain, sir.”

  He glared at me briefly, then whirled and marched back to his gleaming white Ford, where he spent the rest of the afternoon talking on his cell phone and doing a very good impression of a real policeman.

  At four o’clock on the nose, the public affairs officer stood in front of the podium at the front of the press room at City Hall East. The last time I’d been in here had been somewhat startling. But this was genuinely nuts. The story was going to go national, Chief Diggs had crowed to me before the press conference, and so everybody was there: CNN, the three national networks, CNBC, lots of local stations, local stringers for every major daily paper in the country, even some foreign reporters. The public affairs officer was a statuesque black woman of about forty named Capt. Gwen Byerly-Johnson. She was redbone complected, with a hairdo that would put you in mind of a soft-serve ice cream cone. Like all of Diggs’s flunkies, she wore more gold braid than Muammar Khadaffi. She stroked the press people for a while, got them all whipped up about how the chief had a major announcement and so on; then, finally, Chief Diggs stood up.

  “Today,” he said, “after an extensive undercover internal examination, the Atlanta Police Department came to a shocking conclusion, one that every police department dreads. We found, in our midst, a criminal. A heinous and terrible criminal: a predator upon children. A murderer. A serial killer. That killer has been identified as Lt. Hank Gooch, formerly of the department’s Cold Case Unit. Today, during an attempt by the Atlanta Police Special Weapons and Tactics Unit to serve Mr. Gooch with a warrant of arrest, Mr. Gooch attempted to fire on officers of the Atlanta Police Department. Our officers responded appropriately with deadly force. Mr. Gooch was pronounced dead at the scene.”

  There was a clamor of voices as people shouted questions. “Folks, hold on. At this point in time, we have not determined the total number of homicides committed by this man. It approaches as many as five murders, however. At this time investigation into those homicides remains ongoing. Names of victims will be released presently.”

  Then he told the media a bunch of baloney about how I was his personal representative on an undercover operation to smoke out Lt. Gooch, how Gooch had been moved to an administrative position so as to keep him away from active cases, how the Cold Case Unit was actually just a front for the department’s investigation of Lt. Gooch’s case.

  Then he talked about me, about my personal courage, my undying devotion to justice and a lot of other crap, then he gave me a medal and a commendation for my work.

  After that the press got testy, asking Chief Diggs how a serial killer had managed to remain on the force undetected for all these years, and so on.

  The Chief nodded gravely. “These are all very legitimate and serious questions. Every officer in this department is screened for psychological fitness. Every officer in this department receives frequent evaluations. We test and we measure and we observe. But this was a very cunning individual, a highly intelligent and organized predator. At this time I’d like to announce that the department will be assembling a blue-ribbon panel to evaluate and, if necessary, upgrade our human resources policies. More details on that will follow.”

  I had been waiting for the Chief to mention Jenny Dial, but he kept not breathing a word about her.

  The public affairs shill stood up and said, “Folks, I believe that’s about all the Chief has time for.”

  After it was over, I followed Chief Diggs and his entourage out into the corridor. They all began walking away from me. “Sir? Sir? Chief?” I called. Diggs turned around, looked at me questioningly. “Why didn’t you mention Jenny Dial?”

  “Who?”

  I stared at him. “What do you mean, who? Sir, we both know she’s his last snatch
.”

  He shook his head sadly. “I know how much this case means to you. But let’s be adults about this. It’s almost certain that poor little Jenny is long since deceased. One day her body will turn up. But right now—hey, what can we do?”

  I stared at him. “Nah, nah, nah, Chief. It’s almost certain, based on his MO, that she is alive. She’s out there somewhere in a goddamn box.”

  I got the big smile for that one. “Are you taking a tone with me, young lady?”

  “Don’t you ‘young lady’ me! Jenny Dial is out there in a four-foot-square box. And every minute we sit around out here with our thumbs up our asses is one minute closer to her dying. Somebody out there must know something. We need to have her picture on every TV screen in America. We need—”

  Diggs jabbed me in the sternum with his index finger. “I determine what we need. Your job, Detective, is to do what I tell you.”

  “But—”

  “Handle this,” he snapped to Captain Goodwin. Then he turned and started walking away.

  I tried to follow him, but Captain Pretty-Boy grabbed me, yanked me off my feet. One of his hands had grabbed me by my left breast. It could have been an accident or not. He whispered softly in my ear, “You think you Little Miss Something. Be careful, you gonna find out you ain’t.” His Urbane Brother accent had gone all street on me, and his hand tightened on my breast, squeezing harder and harder till my eyes started to water. “Hm?” he said. “Hm?” After a final hard squeeze, he let go.

  I whispered back to him as he released me. “Brother, next time you go grabbing my tit, you best be wearing Kevlar.”

  FORTY-TWO

  Avoiding the elevators—they were liable to be full of reporters—I took the stairs back down to my office. Sitting in my box was a memo on heavy bond paper with the department seal embossed on the top.

  To:

  Capt. Gwen Byerly-Johnson, Human Resources Division