The Body Box

by Lynn Abercrombie

  I pulled out my trusty Maglight, put on my surgical gloves, went into the back bedroom, and yanked open the bottom drawer of the gray filing cabinet.

  It was empty. Thinking I’d forgotten which drawer Gooch’s DNA file had been in, I pulled open the next drawer. Also empty.

  I cursed softly. Then I checked every filing cabinet drawer in the room, but they were all empty. Not a file, not a folder, not a piece of paper left in the room. I checked quickly around the apartment just in case someone had piled them in a box. But my survey of the sparsely furnished rooms didn’t take long: there were no files left in the room.

  I pulled my cell phone out of my purse and called the evidence lockup. Because of the occasional need for evidence at odd hours, it was staffed 24-7.

  “Ehdense, Off Jessssss, speen.” They generally put the A-team in places like Evidence.

  “Officer, how you doing?” I gave the officer a little nudge with my tone of voice, letting him know I was important, not to be trifled with. “Detective Deakes here. From the task force on this Gooch thing.”

  “Ummmng.”

  “I take that to mean, ‘Yes, ma’am?’”

  “Yethmam.”

  “Good. Now listen up. Lt. Garner logged in that evidence this afternoon, correct, and I need to lay my hands on certain items. You with me, young man?”

  “Uhhhh.”

  “Certain documents were brought in. I need you to pull up on the computer a list of those documents.”

  “Now?”

  “What! You think I called you in the middle of the night so I could find this out in some other decade? Yes, officer, right now!”

  “Oh. What, uh, what the evidence numbers is?”

  “I don’t know the answer to that.”

  “Then how I’m ’pose to find it?”

  “Young man! Are you taking a tone with me?” Dragging out Chief Diggs’s line from earlier in the day.

  “No, ma’am, ah, naw, but—”

  “Don’t but me! Pull up a list of every item y’all logged in on Gooch, and read them off to me.”

  “Uh, like the whole list?”

  “Yes, the whole list.”

  There was a big sigh, then some desultory clicking on the keys. Finally the young officer began reading off the list of items in a halting voice. He was not a strong testimony to the successfulness of our public schools. Or, for that matter, to the rigorousness of our department’s recruiting standards. It took about ten minutes for this idiot to stumble his way through the list. And when he was done, there was nothing that sounded even vaguely like folders or documents or papers.

  “Where are these items stored, Officer?”

  “Uh, I own know. On the shelfs, I guess.”

  “They would be in a group together, I take it?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Good. Well, go find this evidence. All of it. Search through every single item on that list. At some point you will find a large number of file folders. You know what a file folder is, do you not?”

  “Like one of them vanilla things?”

  “The word is manila. Pronounced like the capital of the Philippines. But, of course, that means nothing to you, because you’ve never looked at a map or read a book or even watched the Travel Channel.”

  Silence.

  “Go! Go! Find me the manila folders. There should be boxes and boxes of them. When you find them, call me back.”

  I sat there in the stifling apartment on one of Gooch’s folding chairs, the smell of meat all around me. After about twenty minutes, my cell phone rang.

  “You find them?” I said.

  “Ma’am? I done looked. I done looked and everything, but it wasn’t no vanilla folders or no papers or none like that.”

  “Nothing?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Look again.”

  “Ma’am. For real, I looked hard. I don’t want y’all yelling at me and everything, but, dawg, I looked good and hard. It ain’t no file folders. Not in no Gooch evidence.”

  “All right then. I appreciate your help.”

  I hung up, looked around the room incredulously. Somebody had stolen every single document in Gooch’s office.

  I called Lt. Garner. He answered with his mouth full. “Lieutenant,” I said, “did you log in any of Gooch’s papers?”

  “Papers? You mean all that stuff in those filing cabinets?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Nah. Didn’t seem germane to our investigation.”

  “You sure?”

  There was a long silence. “Where you calling from, Detective Deakes?”

  “Hey, yo, easy now. I’m sitting at home thinking about some things. When this case settles down, I might want to put my hands on a couple of those files he kept.”

  There was another silence, this one briefer than the one before. “Hey, can you hold on for a second? I got another call.”

  Usually when somebody gets another call, there’s a click, a beep, a break in the sound, something. I hadn’t heard any of that. I didn’t think there was another call. Which meant he wanted to put me on hold and call somebody else.

  “Hey, look,” I said. “It’s nothing. Just curiosity.”

  “Curiosity. I have to tell you there’s a lot of scrutiny of this case. From the top of the department, you know what I’m saying? You do not want to be poking around on this anymore. You understand what I’m saying?”

  “I’m not sure I do.”

  “You know who Captain Goodwin is? The Chief’s hatchet man? He was hanging around a good part of the afternoon. And he gave me real clear instructions with regard to you. I’m telling you this because I like you. Word straight from the Chief: if I find out you’re nosing around in this case, I am to call Captain Goodwin. Pronto. Day or night, night or day, it don’t matter. That’s the word I got. And if Captain Goodwin don’t answer, call the Chief direct.”

  I thought about it for a minute. If Garner didn’t take the files, then who did? “Did Goodwin, by any off chance, get a key to the lock on Gooch’s apartment door?”

  There was a long, long silence. “Mechelle. I like you,” Garner said finally. “But don’t push this thing. If the Chief takes a special interest in this matter, hey, I ain’t standing in his way. Okay?”

  “You’re saying Goodwin had a key.”

  “I’m saying your fine little booty is fixing to get caught in the ringer. Don’t be a fool, girl. Lay off this.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I get the picture. Thanks.”

  I hung up, looked around the bleak little room. Why would Diggs be so interested in this case? Did he send Goodwin over here to take those files? If so, why?

  A couple of things occurred to me. The first thing was that—based on his files—it seemed less and less like Lt. Gooch was the perp here, and more and more like he was on a personal vendetta to find the killer, and that in doing so he’d lost perspective and done some dumb things that had ultimately gotten him killed. I wasn’t sure yet if that was the case, but that’s the way it seemed.

  The second thing that occurred to me was that maybe whoever the real perp was—assuming it wasn’t Gooch—he’d somehow cottoned on to the lieutenant and tried to throw the blame on him. But who would have been in a position to do that?

  Somebody in the department. Somebody who was not naturally self-revealing, an actor, a manipulator of people. Somebody with a special interest in kids. Somebody who was always smiling and cracking jokes. And this actor had to be somebody capable of passing as either black or white. A sudden, horrible thought crossed my mind.

  All this time I’d been assuming we were looking at a white perp. But what if it were a black man, a light-skinned black man, somebody with the self-possession to pass as almost anything: white, black, rich, poor, somebody who could talk white, who could talk street, who could talk educated black man?

  I couldn’t think of anybody that would better fit the description than Chief of Police E
ustace V. Diggs, Jr. The whole give-back-to-the-community thing—it was all about kids. Boys Clubs or Big Brothers, whatever it was. Travelling around the state giving speeches to kids at Boy’s Clubs, community centers, elementary schools. What could put a child molester in a better position to find his victims?

  When I looked at it that way, I could see why Diggs would be so hot to shut down this investigation. And had Gooch suspected him? Maybe so. Maybe that was why he’d been so sparing with the information he gave out, so unwilling to involve other law-enforcement people. I began to feel a cold chill run through me. Maybe Gooch hadn’t even pulled a gun this morning. Maybe one of the Chief’s many stooges in the department was on the SWAT team, sent in with a throw-down pistol, and instructions to shoot on sight. Yell “Gun!” and start blasting. As soon as the shooting stopped, he could have run over to the body and slid the pistol under the dead man’s leg. Easy as pie.

  It all made way too much sense.

  I felt something licking at my neck. The old monkey, licking at me, whispering in my ear how much easier this whole thing would be if I had a taste of crank to pick up the tempo, brighten the music a little. I stifled the urge, looked around the room.

  What now? I wandered around the apartment, avoiding the stain on the carpet where Gooch had fallen. Was there anything else here that would do me any good?

  I walked back into the office. The desk drawers. I hadn’t checked them. The top drawer was full of pencils and pens, paper clips, the usual office supplies. The next drawer contained some plain white envelopes, stamps, rubber bands, more innocuous crap. But the bottom drawer had something I hadn’t even considered: a thin notebook computer.

  Maybe Lt. Gooch had left something in there that would be of value to me.

  I opened the computer, turned it on, let it boot up. I was about to start searching to see if Lt. Gooch had kept any case notes in his computer when something struck me. When I was in purgatory, just back from the Program, I’d been stuck in the Human Resources department. For payroll purposes, HR kept records of everybody’s time cards. That meant you could track when folks were on duty and when they weren’t.

  I had been given a password for the computer, and knowing the slackness of the department’s administrative functions, the likelihood that my password had been purged seemed fairly slim. If Lt. Gooch’s computer had the communications program . . .

  I hunted around, found a terminal emulation program tucked away in an obscure folder. I used it to dial up the department’s computer. Sure enough, my old password got me right into the payroll files. Working from memory, I wrote down the dates and times of all the snatches that I could remember. Which was most of them. Then I typed in a search on all those dates against Lt. Gooch’s pay records. The report came up immediately. I compared the results with the snatch dates and times.

  The pay records on the computer only went back six years. But it didn’t matter. The evidence was plain as day. Lt. Gooch had been working a six-to-six shift on March 29, 1997, the day that Morgan Reeves was stolen from her grandmother’s house outside Savannah. Savannah was a five-hour drive from Atlanta. Lt. Gooch had been working all night when Renda Jones disappeared. And when Taylor Ferris was snatched. And Rusty Bennett. And Jenny Dial. Only three snatches had occurred while Lt. Gooch wasn’t on the clock.

  Maybe he could have snuck out once or twice. But six snatches out of nine, snatches that had occurred all over the state? No way. It was impossible.

  I slumped back in Lt. Gooch’s chair in horror. There was no doubt about it. Gooch had been killed this morning for nothing. Gooch was not the perp. This morning there had been only two people standing between Jenny Dial and death.

  Now there was only one: me.

  I took a couple of deep breaths. I wanted to get up and run around, wanted to do something, bang on doors, badger people for answers. But I knew that before I could do that, there was more digging to be done, more digging to be done right here.

  Everybody organizes their computers differently, so it took a good while for me to find anything. I searched for a bunch of key words: hiding place, box, various other things, but that didn’t get me much of anywhere. I pulled up his Web program, hunted through his old e-mails. Most of the mail that he had saved involved correspondence with law-enforcement people working on missing-child cases. There was nothing especially enlightening about them, except that they confirmed my growing impression that Gooch had genuinely been investigating these deaths, not seeking to cover them up or exploit them in some perverse way. And then suddenly I found something tantalizing, a recent message with a caption that said, HUNGRY KIDS. What was that about?

  I opened the message. It read:

  Dear New Subsciber:

  Welcome to Hunger Club, the number one stop for fanciers of famished youngsters! Your password is A1bzz5lr. Don’t forget this is a case sensitive password. Your screen name is OXFORD. If you wish to use another name, go to our utilities page and you can change it. Never give your password away. I need not caution you that our “unique tastes” can get us in a world of hurt. So be careful.

  And have yourself a lip-smacking good time!

  Cheers, Captain Hunger.

  (www.captainhunger.com)

  Captain Hunger? What was that all about? I hit the print button, then looked around the desk. It reminded me of the last word Gooch had scrawled in the file I’d been reading earlier that night. Hunger!

  A telephone cord was looped over the back of the desk. I plugged it into the jack in the back of the computer, logged on to Lt. Gooch’s Internet service, fired up the Web browser, and typed in the address for the Captain Hunger site.

  The next thing I knew a screen popped up that said “Tri-City B-to-B Office Supply.” The logo was a cartoon of a bunch of smiling pencils in a coffee mug. Down the left side of the page was a menu that listed a bunch of categories of office supplies: paper, computer supplies, phones, things like that. I was afraid maybe I’d typed in the wrong address or something, so I tried the address again. The Tri-City Office Supply page came up again.

  I clicked on a couple of menu items, but nothing happened. After a moment a mechanical-sounding voice said, “We at Tri-City are experiencing temporary difficulties with our server. Please try again later.”

  I stared at the screen, clicked on a few other buttons, but nothing else happened. The only thing left was a small box that said SEARCH OUR PRODUCT DATABASE next to it. I typed in “pencils” and hit the search button. I got the “temporary server difficulties” message again. I backed up, cursored to the search box, then typed in “A1bzz51lr,” and hit the search button a second time. The Tri-City Office Supply page immediately disappeared, and a picture of a gaunt child wearing rags popped up. Ethopia, Somalia, someplace like that.

  Captain Hunger welcomes you! read the banner at the top of the screen.

  Underneath that was a pious-sounding paragraph about the plight of starving children in various parts of the world. From the sound of it, the site was related to a charity aimed at ending world hunger. But something about it didn’t ring true. There was a log-in box at the bottom of the page. I entered the name OXFORD and the password, A1bzz5l1r.

  The screen changed. At the top, several images of starving children. Below that: CHAT, IMAGES, NEW STUFF, FANTASY, STARVATION LIVE.

  I clicked on images. The next page to pop up was full of thumbnail photographs of starving kids, most of them naked. If you’d seen any one of the photos in the middle of an essay about world hunger or something, it would have seemed perfectly innocuous. But when you put them all together this way—well, it was clear enough. This was pornography. Some bunch of sick geeks were sitting around getting their rocks off looking at starving children.

  I felt a horrible numbness soaking up through my body, an uncomfortable fascination, not with the images, but with a sort of perverse curiosity to know how far these sickos would take this fetish.

  Was this Lt. Gooch’s fantasy? Or the most recent fruits of
his investigation?

  I went back to the main page, clicked on the chat room. It was full of conversations between people with screen names like GAUNTLVR and HUNGRKID, conversations about the enjoyment they found in seeing starving children. This made me even more nauseated than the images themselves.

  Back to the main page again. I stared at the screen for a while. I wanted to flee, to leave this place forever, to never even have to think about it again, but I knew that I was suddenly and finally on the road to an answer. I clicked on button that said STARVATION LIVE.

  The computer came back with a message saying: “You are not authorized to enter this area. Would you like to register for starvation live?”

  I hit the “Yes” button.

  For a while nothing happened. A minute went by, then two, then five. I was just getting ready to turn off the machine when a small chat box popped up. A message appeared.

  CAPTHUNGER: WHO ARE YOU?

  I typed in the screen name from the e-mail message. OXFORD.

  CAPTHUNGER: DON’T PLAY WITH ME.

  OXFORD: I’M NOT.

  CAPTHUNGER: THEN TELL ME WHO YOU ARE.

  OXFORD: I THOUGHT THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE ANONYMOUS.

  CAPTHUNGER: KEEP DREAMING, DIPSHIT. WHO ARE YOU?

  OXFORD: MY NAME IS HANK GOOCH. I LIVE IN ATLANTA.

  CAPTHUNGER: WHAT’S YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER?

  OXFORD: ARE YOU CRAZY?

  CAPTHUNGER: DO YOU WANT STARVATION LIVE OR NOT?

  I waited, made it like I was thinking. Finally I just typed in a bunch of random numbers.

  OXFORD: OKAY, OKAY. 236-00-4457.

  There was a long pause. It struck me that what he was doing was verifying the number on a credit bureau or some other online source. I started rummaging furiously around in the drawers of the desk until I found a pay stub from the department. Lt. Gooch’s Social Security number was right there in the corner. I typed in another line.