The Body Box

by Lynn Abercrombie

  Lt. George Gordon, Payroll Deptartment

  Willie Treadaway, Physical Plant

  From:

  Chief Eustace V. Diggs, Jr.

  Re:

  Cold Case Unit

  Effective immediately the Cold Case Unit shall be terminated, deauthorized, and defunded. All Unit personnel are herewith subject to reassignment. In the short run, Unit personnel shall be placed in the Zone Two detective pool, and paid from the Zone Two general payroll budget. No additional expense vouchers, office supplies, or equipment expenditures shall be authorized or funded for the Unit. Det. M. Deakes, commander of the Unit, shall be given two days to attend to administrative details relating to the termination of the Unit. Please give her any assistance she shall require in shutting down the Unit’s office.

  cc: Det. Mechelle Deakes

  Scrawled at the bottom with a fountain pen was this note: “Det. Deakes, you have until Friday to shut down the office and return all files to the appropriate detective bureaus and/ or to the Records Department. Contact Capt. Byerly-Johnson and/or Lt. Gordon regarding details of payroll, etc. Return your keys to Physical Plant. Report to Zone Two for detective duty on Friday. I’ll find something better suited to your talents shortly.” It was initialed “EVD” in grandiose swirly letters.

  Two days. I had two days free. Two days to find Jenny Dial.

  I went outside immediately, got in my car, and drove over to Lt. Gooch’s apartment. The TV trucks had all disappeared, but a cordon of uniformed police still stood around the building just inside the yellow crime-scene tape. I parked, walked up to the cordon, and badged the uniformed officer, a short white boy who was struggling to grow himself a mustache.

  “Sorry, but I’m not authorized to let you in, ma’am,” he said.

  I gave him the high eyebrows. “Excuse me? This is my crime scene.” This was stretching it—but only a little.

  One of the homicide detectives, Lt. Garner, was standing at the top of the apartment stairs. He saw me and hustled down the stairs, a funny look on his face.

  “What?” I said to him.

  He put his hand gently on my arm. “Look, we got it,” he said in a rumbling bass voice. “Everything’s cool here.”

  “This isn’t about the homicide,” I said. “I need to have a look around Gooch’s apartment to try and find out where he stashed the girl.”

  “I said, we got it.” Garner was a big, dark-skinned brother with a shaved head who seemed to have practiced getting the most out of his intimidating stature.

  But I wasn’t having any of it. “You got a hearing problem, Lieutenant? There’s a little girl out there who’s going to die. I need to be inside that crime scene.”

  Lt. Garner glowered at me for a minute, then scowled and looked away. “I’m sorry,” he said “But I got very, very specific instructions not to let you into this crime scene.”

  “From who?”

  “I think you know who.”

  “The Chief? The Chief said I can’t enter my own crime scene?”

  Garner sighed loudly, then turned to the uniformed officer. “Hey, son, was you talking about getting some cold drinks a couple minutes ago?”

  “Well, uh—”

  “This July heat gets me parched. I’ll keep an eye on the perimeter here till you get back.” He took a large, shiny wallet out of the breast pocket of his coat, fished out a twenty, and held it in the white boy’s direction. “Get me a Diet Dr. Pepper, how about?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And whatever you want for yourself. Sandwich, co-cola, anything.”

  We stood silently until the uniform drove away. “Look, Detective,” Garner said. “I don’t like this any more than you do. But I got instructions. I’ll give you five minutes to get whatever you need. But when that white boy gets back, you better be gone. He’s the Chief’s eyeballs at this crime scene.”

  “Thanks,” I said, heading for the stairs.

  “And don’t you dare mess up my crime scene!” Garner called.

  I charged into the apartment and headed for the back bedroom—not the room where Gooch had been killed, but the one where he slept, where all his files were kept. I pulled on a pair of surgical gloves, then yanked open the top drawer of his filing cabinet.

  What I was looking for was some kind of clue as to where Gooch had kept the children. A rental agreement or a deed for some property out in the country, a mortgage note on a house, a receipt for a U-Store-It warehouse, anything.

  I quickly found a drawer devoted exclusively to bills. He had power bills, gas bills, rental payment receipts for his apartment, car notes, and tax filings going back more than ten years. But nothing to indicate that he owned or rented a single square foot of property other than the apartment I was standing in. I looked at my watch. Five minutes had already gone by.

  I opened the other filing cabinet drawers. There was a fat file on each of the dead children. I pulled one out at random, Marquavious Roberts, leafed quickly through it. There was a copy of Lt. Bevis’s Atlanta PD investigative file, some press clippings, a couple of faded school pictures of the boy. Trophies? Something to read so he could gloat over what he’d done? Or maybe he had tracked the cases in order to do whatever was necessary to cover his own tracks.

  Whatever the case, there was nothing especially new or revelatory in the file, nothing I hadn’t seen before. I put it back, opened another drawer. More files on the children.

  I went to the next drawer. The tab on the first file said AM-MERMAN. The next file read BRUNSON. Most of the files were old and worn. But one of them in the back caught my eye. MECHELLE DEAKES. It took me a moment; then I realized what this was. These were files on every law enforcement officer who’d ever investigated any of the cases. He must have been playing some kind of sick cat-and-mouse game with us all this time.

  I scanned the files to see if there were any names I didn’t recognize. There weren’t. He’d sure been thorough, though. Not only was every police officer involved listed, so was every civilian involved. There was a file on Vale Pleassance, files on several of the techs at the GBI crime lab including Mark Terry, a file on the old guy who’d been driving bodies to the morgue for the Department for about a million years. There was even a file on Chief Diggs, though it was labelled DEPUTY CHIEF DIGGS—which I guess he had been back when Gooch had started keeping these files.

  I shoved the file back in the drawer, looked at my watch. Six minutes.

  I opened the last drawer in the cabinet. There were only two files, both of them fairly thick. The label on one folder read DNA. The other said ANALYSIS OF METHOD.

  “Deakes?” It was Garner calling to me. “Yo, Deakes, time’s up.”

  “Two more minutes,” I called.

  “Now.”

  I grabbed both files and tried shoving them into the waistband of my skirt, but they were too thick. Which one would be most important? I had no idea, so I randomly chose the one that said ANALYSIS OF METHOD, stuffed into my skirt, then put the DNA folder back. On a whim, I opened the drawer above, yanked out the much thinner Bevis file, and shoved it into my skirt too.

  As I stood, Lt. Garner appeared in the doorway, snapping his fingers. “Let’s go, let’s go. That white boy’s gonna be back any time. Like I say, I know for a fact he’s one of the Chief’s little spies.”

  I nodded. “Okay. I appreciate the help.”

  Garner squired me to the door.

  “Hey, you know,” he said, “maybe you and me ought to get together for a drink sometime. Talk a little shop.” His voice had a sleepy, Barry White quality to it. I knew shop talk was a long way from his mind.

  “And what’s this?” I said, grabbing his ring finger. He was wearing a thick gold wedding ring.

  “Oh, that old thing?” he said, showing me a row of large white teeth. “Shoot, baby. That ain’t nothing.”

  “Maybe not to you.”

  FORTY-THREE

  I drove home and sat down in my living room to read the files I’d purl
oined. Purloin. Isn’t that a great word? Kind of softens things a little. As opposed to steal, for instance. But I wasn’t going to apologize for what I’d done. When a little girl is locked up in a box somewhere, and the highest law enforcement officer in the jurisdiction plain out says, “Let her die”—hey, the hell with that, I’m going to do what it takes.

  I sat down and cracked open the folder that said ANALYSIS OF METHOD on the tab. Inside were sheets of white ruled paper torn from legal pads, each one filled with Lt. Gooch’s neat, penciled handwriting. Each page was dated in the top left corner. The ones on top were relatively new, but the ones on the bottom were old, brittle, yellowing with age. I decided to start with the oldest material and work my way forward.

  The oldest page was dated September 10, 1990. Three years after Gooch had—presumably—murdered his daughter. At the top of the page, written in bold and underlined twice, was this header:

  HOW TO BE A SERIAL MURDERER AND GET AWAY WITH IT

  I started to read. Given Gooch’s ungrammatical speech and cracker drawl, I was surprised by the formality of the writing. There was also a coolness, a clinical detachment that gave me the creeps. Here’s what the first page said:

  For the sake of argument, posit a subject. This subject wants to kill children. Because he enjoys doing so, and enjoys his liberty, he wishes to remain forever undetected. In his shoes, who wouldn’t?

  Let us also posit that our subject is no fool. Let us further posit that he is not crazy in the conventional sense of the term. Not disorganized, not delusional, not impulsive, not self-destructive.

  Finally, let us posit that he is not of a self-revealing nature, that he is capable of hiding his natural capabilities and predilections behind a facade. The facade might be built on a mask of incompetence, geniality, religiosity, gregariousness, or any of a number of other characteristics that serve to deflect others’ abilities to see him as he really is. He is, in effect, an actor.

  Given these premises, it is logical to assume that our subject will attempt to disguise his crimes.

  The question at hand is, given the nature of his first crime or crimes (ones which in all likelihood were not carefully planned), what method would be most productive for camouflaging his crimes.

  The following methods would naturally be used by such a subject:

  1. Kill each victim using a different method. The simplest way of identifying the victims of serial killing is to isolate and draw together crimes committed using the same MO. Without a common MO, the crimes will not draw attention to themselves as part of a pattern.

  2. Draw the victims from different geographical areas.

  3. Draw the victims from different law-enforcement jurisdictions.

  4. Draw the victims from poor socio-economic backgrounds and disorganized family groups. Such victims are likely to receive less intensive victim advocacy, and therefore law enforcement is less likely to pursue the cases with vigor.

  5. Create plausible suspects. An additional advantage to #4 is that by harvesting victims from disorganized, disfunctional families, plausible suspects will spring immediately to hand in the form of family members with criminal backgrounds, DFACS histories, manifestly violent tendencies, etc.

  6. Leave false clues. A highly organized, intelligent, and careful subject might go so far as to gather materials of potential forensic value in order to shift the blame to plausible suspects. Hair, fiber, blood, semen, etc., might all be obtained and placed on the victim, at the crime scene, pointing the blame toward suspects as per #5 above.

  7. Disguise. When making initial contacts with victims, searching for victims, or actually snatching them, the subject may employ disguise, misleading accents, etc. to alter not just his appearance, but his apparent socio-economic background, his employment, possibly even his race.

  Underneath the pencilled notes, written in the same hand, but looser, more emphatically, in red pen was one more sentence: “Is it possible to pull this off? Or am I dreaming?”

  I don’t know what bugged me more, that this plan had been coolly executed for over a decade, or that Gooch had fooled me so profoundly. Let us posit that he is not of a self-revealing nature, that he is capable of hiding his natural abilities and predilections. Could Gooch have more accurately described himself?

  I went through the following pages. For the next few years most of the notes were taken from forensic and psychological textbooks dealing with the motivations and methods of serial killers. What was he trying to do here? Was this some kind of twisted attempt at self-analysis? Or was he, in effect, trying to size up the competition, trying to anticipate the roadblocks that law enforcement might set up in front of him so as to better evade them?

  The thing that spooked me the most was the almost total lack of any moral tone to the writing. It was as though conscience was an alien thing to Gooch. I found myself shivering.

  There were also scattered analyses of individual crimes. Some of them were murders that were among the seventeen on my list, but some weren’t.

  Then I came to one, a four-year-old boy who apparently died of exposure in a state park near Commerce, Georgia. There was the usual cool analysis of the available forensic evidence including the autopsy and the family.

  But then, at the bottom of the page, was a line that gave me pause: Did the Subject do this or not?

  What the hell did that mean? Gooch was the “subject,” so obviously he knew whether or not he had killed the child. Was Gooch trying to look at the crime from the perspective of a hypothetical law-enforcement officer who’d cottoned on to the pattern? Or what? Was this some kind of suggestion that Gooch was suffering from multiple personality disorder, that one half of his mind was a serial murderer and the other half was . . . well, something different? It just didn’t quite add up.

  By the time I reached 1994, I was starting to feel an uncomfortable tickle in the back of my mind. Unless this was some kind of bizarre ruse, it was becoming increasingly clear from the tone of the writing that Gooch was puzzled by these crimes, that he was not planning something, but working backward from the evidence toward a solution. He was, in short, doing detective work.

  I wanted to believe that Gooch was the killer, that all that remained to be done on this case was to find Jenny Dial before she starved to death. But the more I read, the less it seemed to add up that way.

  I read for another half hour. And the more I read, the more I felt the itch, the more I felt like I wasn’t reading the plans or confessions of a killer, but the investigation of a man obsessed with catching a killer, a man so obsessed, maybe, that he couldn’t let emotion into the equation, that he had to keep the reins tight or he might just fall apart completely.

  Or maybe not.

  The whole thing just flat-out didn’t make sense.

  Then, in the middle of a page entitled “Why Doesn’t the Blood Evidence Add Up?” I read a line that said: “See new folder (DNA).” On this page Gooch appeared to be addressing the thorniest issue we’d faced in trying to make a case that all of these murders were related and were not just the random collection of puzzlingly similar—yet ultimately unrelated—child slayings that they appeared on the surface to be.

  I flipped through the next six or eight entries. Each one kept referring to the DNA folder. The very folder I had been forced to leave at the scene of the Gooch’s death. The more I read, the more it seemed like Gooch’s conclusions about the murders were based on his analysis of DNA evidence.

  The final page had just one line. It said, “Hunger!” The word was underlined twice.

  In for a penny, in for a pound, right? I went out to my car, checked in the back, found that the pry bar I used to open the drawer of Gooch’s desk was still there.

  I slammed the trunk, hopped in, and started driving.

  I’d gotten halfway through Decatur when I noticed that the same set of headlights had been following me all the way from my apartment over off Memorial Boulevard. I figured I was being paranoid, but then I thought, Wel
l, let’s just see.

  I turned right on Clairmont. The headlights followed me. I turned left on Scott Boulevard. The headlights followed me. So far, no big deal. It was a natural route from Decatur in toward the city. I turned left on a little road that hooked off Scott to Ponce de Leon, stopped at the light. The only reason a car would go this way was if they were turning around and heading back to Decatur. The headlights eased past me, continued on down Ponce toward Atlanta. I couldn’t make out the model as it flashed in the rearview, and I didn’t want to turn around.

  The light changed and I turned left on Ponce. In my rearview I saw a car—was it the same car or not?—creeping along down Ponce. Just as it was about to disappear from my view, I saw the car hang a U and come after me. Son of a bitch. A white Crown Victoria. A cop car.

  I drove slowly up the road until I reached a gas station, turned in, and started filling up the tank. The white Crown Vic sped by the station and around the corner. But not quickly enough that I didn’t make out the even features of the man inside. It was Captain Goodwin, Chief Diggs’s assistant. Wearing sunglasses at 9:00 at night.

  I jumped back in the car and tore out of the parking lot, heading back up Ponce toward the city. Yet again.

  This time the headlights didn’t follow. This time he knew he couldn’t follow me without my seeing him. I’d shaken my tail.

  The parking lot of Lt. Gooch’s apartment was deserted. No cruisers, no uniformed officers. I ran quickly up the stairs, looking around. No residents hanging out. There was yellow tape across the door, along with a notice signed by the DA threatening all kinds of nastiness to crime-scene interlopers. I popped the thin edge of the pry bar into the doorjamb just above the lock, leaned hard. The doorjamb made a crunching noise. I pressed on the door with my shoulder, and it swung open. A smell of spoiled meat surrounded me as I walked inside and closed the door behind me.