“Talk to me, Tanisha. Rachel’s your girl, your partner in crime. She told you something. Where did she go?”
“Don’t know...no... oh, Jesus...”
Using his fist like a mallet, he pummeled her kidney again.
“Don’t hold out on me,” he said. “It’s a simple matter of respect, sweetheart.”
She choked on her wails. Sobbed incoherently for Jesus.
Delivering sharp kidney blows reminded him of how he’d sometimes punished his wife. A punch to the kidney caused the kind of sickening, blood-in-the-urine agony that stayed with you long afterward. Members of his team had used it to force confessions from hardheaded suspects before they lawyered-up, and he’d brought the tactic home, unleashing it on his wife whenever she delivered his dinner lukewarm, neglected to launder and press his clothes just right, or pissed him off in general.
Good times, back then.
He raised his fist high and brought it down hard on her kidney once more.
She gagged, convulsed, and suddenly, vomited.
“Oh...God...oh Jesus . . . oh please . . .”
“Okay, maybe you don’t know where she went,” he said. “But you know where she and her husband live. I want the address.”
Breathing loudly and wetly, she pointed across the office with a trembling hand.
He got off her and went to the desk she indicated. A black, leather-bound organizer lay beside the telephone.
He thumbed to the address section. Underneath the “M”s he found a hand-written listing for Rachel and Joshua Moore, in Fairburn.
He read the address aloud to Tanisha. “Is this current?”
Weeping. “Yes...”
He tore the page out of the book and folded it into his pocket.
Tanisha turned her head to regard him. Her face was smeared with blood, snot, and vomit. She looked to be in so much agony that she would consider death a blessing.
He picked up a fluffy throw pillow from a nearby overstuffed chair and brought it toward her.
She shrieked, flailed her arms and kicked, but weakly. He smashed the pillow onto her face. He pressed down with his full weight behind his arms.
“Crime doesn’t pay, sweetheart,” he said. “Not when you fuck with someone like me.”
Her muffled screams soon ended, and so did her struggles.
He unlatched the ring of keys that dangled from a loop of her belt. In a supply closet, he found spray bottles of pine-scented disinfectant, and cotton towels. On the desk, he located a sheet of paper, tape, and a black Sharpie marker.
Working methodically, he sprayed and wiped down everything he had touched in the shop, even though he’d been wearing latex gloves this time. Old habit.
He cut off the lights, taped a hand-made sign in the front window that stated, “Closed Until Further Notice,” and left the salon through the back service door, locking up behind him.
Back in the Chevy, he entered his wife’s home address in the StreetPilot.
It was only fifteen minutes away.
40
A second can of Red Bull at his elbow, Joshua surfed to Google and entered search phrases that included the name “Dexter Bates,” and the word, “murder.”
Since the man had been convicted of a felony, he reasoned there should have been a document stored somewhere online—perhaps an archived news story—that included more information about the crime. Although it had taken place four years ago, the thing about the Web was that most of the data never disappeared. When he’d searched on his own name recently he’d found a description of a Photoshop project he’d completed in art school, almost ten years ago.
Google returned, surprisingly, about four hundred results. He clicked on the first link and was taken to a news page dated six years ago.
Dexter Bates, a detective in the Narcotics Division with the Chicago Police Department, stated that the suspect, Manuel Ortiz, 29, was sought for murder and drug trafficking charges.
He sat rod-straight in the chair. Was Dexter a cop, for God’s sake?
Rachel was from Chicago—that was what she’d claimed, anyway. But Chicago was a huge city. The Dexter Bates quoted in the article might have been a different guy than the one who had attacked her.
He returned to the search page and refined the search by adding the phrase, “attempted murder.” The engine gave back a hundred and sixty results, which still seemed like too many. He selected the first one, another news article.
According to Dexter Bates, a narcotics detective with the Chicago Police Department, the charging of the suspect, Tremaine Dixon, 24, with attempted murder is based on the evidence . . .
He went back to Google and narrowed his search further, including the words “attack,” and “knife.”
Google spat out seventeen results, and all of them appeared to reference the same incident.
He clicked the first link. It was a story from the Chicago Sun-Times published four years ago.
Chicago Narcotics Detective Faces Attempted Murder Charge in Attack of Wife
Dexter Bates, a ten-year veteran of the Chicago Police Department accused of attacking his wife with a knife, will face attempted murder charges, a Cook County prosecutor said Tuesday.
“We’re doing everything we can to mete out the appropriate punishment,”
said Greg Young, first assistant state’s attorney. “The fact that Mr. Bates is a police officer who took a vow to secure the safety of the public makes this case especially troubling.”
Dexter Bates, 34, was charged Tuesday with aggravated battery and assault with a deadly weapon in a Sunday evening attack that left his wife of three years, Joy Bates, 26, hospitalized with serious injuries. She has since been treated and released.
Prosecutors stated that the victim admitted she had been subjected to domestic abuse throughout her marriage to Bates, but that she had been afraid to report the abuse because of her husband’s respected standing in the Chicago Police Department.
“She feared that her cries for help would be ignored,” Young said. “Her husband is a decorated narcotics detective, and she worried that the ‘police brotherhood’ would close ranks to protect him from prosecution.”
During a court hearing on Tuesday, prosecutors and police said the victim fled her home on Sunday evening and sought shelter at a neighbor’s residence, pursued by Bates, who proceeded to attack her with a switchblade knife in the presence of several witnesses.
“She was very fortunate to survive the attack,” Young said. “We intend to prosecute this case to the fullest extent of the law. Domestic violence will not be tolerated, and being a cop doesn’t grant you immunity from the laws the rest of us must abide by.”
Bates is currently being held without bond at Cook County Jail.
By the time he reached the end of the story, Joshua’s brain had sputtered to a halt like an engine overloaded with electrical current. He sat for a long, breathless moment, staring at the screen with glazed eyes.
Then he exhaled, violently, and his mind started racing.
Rachel’s real name was Joy? She’d been married to this cop Dexter?
Married?
Back when he was attending art school, he’d been in a car accident. It had been a rainy afternoon, with poor traffic conditions on the highway, and a pickup truck on his left had slewed into his lane, smashing against his SUV. Joshua’s vehicle spun off the road and flipped over three times, and as the SUV tumbled over the earth, end over end, his life had quite literally flashed before his eyes. Miraculously, he’d sustained only minor injuries.
Just like back then, images of his life whirled before his eyes—the life he had created with Rachel.
Bumping into her while perusing an art exhibit at a local museum. Going out on their first date, coffee at a local cafe. Tentatively holding her hand. Kissing her, for the first time. The incredible anticipation, and eventual excitement, of making love to her. Declaring their love for each other. Purchasing the engagement ring. Proposing on bended knee
. Getting married at his family church, and the hotel reception. Buying a house together, moving in, intermingling their lives, nurturing their love.
So, have you ever been married? he’d asked her on their first date.
She’d dipped her gaze into her coffee for a beat, and then met his eyes.
Never been married. How about you?
He pushed away from the table, knocking over the chair in his haste. Lying near his feet, Coco squeaked with surprise.
He charged back and forth from the kitchen to the family room. Hands balled into tight fists. Heart beating so hard it felt as though it were going to rupture.
Why the hell had she lied to him? Why?
Only two turns away from his wife’s house, Dexter was about to hang a right when he saw the familiar signs of a police checkpoint set up farther down the road he was planning to travel: four police vehicles with flashing blue beacons, cops on foot in reflective orange vests, and a queue of civilian vehicles being stopped and checked.
Shit.
Without slowing, he passed through the intersection.
Although he had a full set of clean ID and didn’t think the law had yet tracked him to Georgia, he could not take the risk. Police technology had advanced since his prison stint, with more interconnected databases and surveillance cameras than ever, and someone might have glimpsed his face, somewhere, and made the connection.
Or the checkpoint might have been set up solely to nab people driving without proper license or insurance. Some police departments had monthly ticketing quotas, and setting up checkpoints in certain parts of town was a sure way to boost the numbers.
At any rate, he’d come too close to finding his wife to risk losing it all. Patience, as ever, was advisable.
Continuing to drive, he flipped out his cell phone. He called Shakira, the saucy sister he’d met at his wife’s former apartment.
“It’s Brian,” he said, easily falling into character. “Want to get together tonight?”
Still reeling, Joshua returned to the computer. He moved the laptop to the counter—he was too jittery to sit in a chair.
Online again, he located a Web site called Net Detective. With records on over two hundred million people, the database offered information on an individual’s criminal, marital, motor vehicle, birth, and legal judgment history—everything that was already in the public domain anyway, but often housed by disparate sources. Net Detective collected all of the data under one virtual umbrella and made it easy to conduct research on almost anyone.
He opened an account and paid via credit card for unlimited database access.
He would investigate both Joy Bates and Rachel Hall. He wanted to know everything.
In hindsight, he realized that he should have done such a background check before he’d married Rachel. He should have paid heed to his intuition that had whispered to him from the very beginning that something wasn’t quite right.
But willful ignorance, while it had lasted, had been bliss.
Later that night, eyes grainy from gazing at the screen, he shuffled to the sofa in the family room. He was exhausted, but didn’t want to sleep on their bed in the master suite. The memory of the love they’d made in that bed, and the tender things they’d said to each other while lying there, would have only upset him all over again.
Instead, he fell asleep on the sofa.
For the second consecutive night, he dreamed about the beach. The glorious sun, the pristine white sand. Rachel’s heart-rending smile. His son perched on his hip, his small finger pointing out to the sea and the ferry that plied the tranquil blue waters. The beach house ahead, and Rachel’s seductive wink as she led the way inside.
For her, hell and the devil were not confined to a beautiful Jamaican resort. Hell and the devil were at home, too.
Every day.
She lived in a state of constant tension. She never knew what might set Dexter off and invite punishment. It could be anything. Too much salt on his eggs. Not enough starch used on his work shirts. An after-work beer delivered too warm for his tastes. Taking too long to answer the phone when he called.
Punishment could be a sharp, back-handed slap, though he tended to avoid touching parts of her body that were outwardly visible. Most routinely, he pinched her nipples hard enough to leave them sore, or pinned her to the floor and tickled her mercilessly and humorlessly, until she cried in agony.
Other times, he mashed a pillow onto her face when she was sleeping, long enough to cause her to asphyxiate and think she was dying. Or forced her head into a kitchen sink filled with ice cold water. Or cuffed her and then locked her in the guest room closet for the entire night, a space so cramped that when he released her in the morning her entire body would be aching.
When he was really angry—a couple of times a month at least—he handcuffed her, sat on her legs, and jabbed her kidneys. She had grown accustomed to the sight of blood in her urine.
And when he was most furious—this had happened twice in their three years of marriage—he threatened her with a knife, though he had yet to actually cut her deeply enough to leave a noticeable scar.
She thought about divorcing him, of course. But it was a fantasy, like a child might dream of walking the moon one day. If she dared to go through with it, he would kill her— after all, he had told her as much.
“You ever think about leaving me, divorcing me, baby, you might as well call the coroner and tell him to get your death certificate ready. You belong to me till the day you die, and you know I don’t sell no wolf tickets.”
She believed him. A man who bragged with his buddies about killing people in the line of duty would have no compunctions about murdering his wife, and with his cop friends backing him, he might even get away with it.
Running—stashing money and clothes, buying an airline ticket to some far off place and leaving—was an equally doubtful proposition. Dexter was a detective. He tracked people down for a living. She didn’t have the resources to run.
There seemed to be no way out. The best she could hope for was that someone would mortally wound him or somehow maim him while he was working. Or gun him down in the line of duty.
Certainly, she’d heard the stories of long-suffering, abused women who snapped one day, and slit their husbands’ throats while they were sleeping, but Dexter slept so lightly she was convinced he would wake up and seize her hand as she was leaning over him, and God help her then.
Every day, she asked herself why she had married him. She’d witnessed his taste for violence from the start, yet some sick part of her had been turned on by it, had swooned over his authority and brute display of might. She wondered if she believed she deserved to be treated like chattel, if growing up in a home without a father figure had ingrained in her some kind of damaged perception of what manhood was really all about, and left her ripe for the picking for a man like Dexter, who recognized in her a woman he could control. A woman he could trap.
That was exactly how she felt. Trapped.
Late one summer night, she lay in bed alone, actually thinking, God forgive her, about how she could kill him and make it look like an accident, when she rose to use the bathroom. They had gotten into a fight last night at dinner—she wanted to visit her aunt that weekend and Dexter didn’t want to allow it—which had resulted in his pummeling her kidney again, and as a usual consequence, she needed to urinate with painful frequency.
She left the lights off as she went to the bathroom. Although Dexter was out, supposedly on police business, he hated for her to turn on the lights when he was sleeping, and she obeyed the house rules he’d decreed whether he was present or not.
She urinated—it was blessedly free of blood this time— flushed the toilet, and was pulling up her pajama bottoms when she heard his unmarked sedan rumble into the driveway.
Immediately, her nerves wound tight as guitar chords. She hurried back to the bedroom and got under the blankets. If he believed she was asleep, maybe he wouldn’t want to have sex
. It worked about half the time.
Oftentimes, though, he would have his way with her anyway. She had awakened on many occasions to find him on top of her, sweating, grunting, and pumping.
Underneath the covers, eyes closed, she waited, and listened.
She heard the back door, in the kitchen, open, and the alarm system disengaged. A minute later, however, she detected an unfamiliar sound.
Something heavy. Sliding across the floor.
What was he doing? Moving furniture?
She slipped out of bed and padded across the bedroom. The door was partly open, and she pulled it open wider on silent hinges—as part of her extensive housekeeping chores, she had to oil the hinges every month.
From the end of the hall, a dim light burned in the kitchen. She heard a sound like stones being stacked.
She tiptoed along the hallway. She peered around the corner.
On the other side of the kitchen, Dexter, dressed in a dark suit, his back to her, was kneeling in the wall slot from which he had pulled out the refrigerator. A dark oil mat lay beside the refrigerator, along with a stack of several travertine tiles, as if he were digging up the floor.
On the kitchen table, there was a black leather briefcase, half open. It bulged with cash.
She placed her hand to her chest, as if to quiet her racing heart.
Grunting, Dexter twisted something in the floor. She caught a metallic gleam of some type of lever. It looked like a safe.
He started to turn. Holding her breath, she backed away from the archway. Soundlessly, she retreated down the hall, into the bedroom, and returned underneath the covers.
There, she exhaled into her pillow.
She knew Dexter was a dirty cop. She overheard his conversations with his buddies of the badge. Although the stories troubled her, she never thought of doing anything about it, like going to tell his superiors. “What you hear and see inside this house stays inside this house,” he had told her when she’d first moved in, and she hadn’t dared to disobey.
Besides, if she did go to his boss, how could she be sure his boss wasn’t complicit in his corruption? How could she be certain that Dexter had not somehow implicated her in his wrongdoing, too, to ensure that if he went down, she went down with him?
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