Collecting the Dead: A Novel

by Spencer Kope

  “I’m good to go,” I announce as I swing the jacket on, then I remember something. “Actually, I need three minutes.” Grabbing my backpack, I scoot to the master bedroom as Jimmy looks with disdain at his watch.

  Digging out the Canon PowerShot S95, I plug it into the computer and quickly download the single image from the disk. Thirty seconds of trimming, sizing, and correcting in Photoshop, and I send it to the printer, which kicks out a beautiful, sharp, yet terrible photo. With scissors in hand, I cut the image from the photo paper, leaving a five-by-seven picture.

  A small shelf is mounted to the wall above the computer, a shelf that holds but two items: one is a photo album in black, the other is an identical album but in white. Retrieving the black album, I flip it open toward the back. I try not to look at the other images as I find the next empty space. A couple strokes of a glue stick and the image is set on the page. I close the album and return it to the shelf.

  I’ll need to buy another black album soon, probably within the next two months. The white album’s probably good for a few more years. I never look at the pictures in the black album, not intentionally. The white album’s different. I like those pictures. They smile back at me; happy, relieved faces. Mother faces, child faces, husband, wife, and sister faces. Sometimes they’re waving, eyes beaming and so alive.

  I don’t look at the black book.

  * * *

  The Gulfstream G100—we call her Betsy—is a dream on wings, and one of the perks of the job that I really enjoy. Forests may make me quiver, but put me in the air and I’m in heaven. Les and Marty, our pilot and copilot, have banned me from the cockpit. Apparently I ask too many questions and touch buttons I’m not supposed to.

  They were nice about it, though, and fortunately the G100 only seats four passengers, so there wasn’t an air marshal on board to tase me. That wouldn’t be fun. I went through training three years ago so I could carry a Taser, thinking it would be cool to have one if I ever needed it. No one told me that to complete the course I had to get shot by a Taser.

  When they asked me if I wanted firearms training I said, “Hell, no!”

  The King County prosecutor has me scheduled for three-thirty—last witness of the day. It should be interesting. I rarely have to go to court, which is good, since I get nervous with the whole process. Not from being in court, in front of people. That’s easy. My testimony is what gives me fits and starts. It’s too close to a lie, not that I’d lie in court, I just don’t tell the whole story … and I have a guilty conscience, which eats at me. The jury hears about shoe size, trekking poles, stride length, shine, toe digs, and directionality.

  But I’m not a man-tracker.

  I don’t need a good trail. I don’t need a fresh trail.

  All I need is essence and texture … which I can’t talk about in court.

  Most suspects fall apart in the early stages of the investigation, usually right after I find the body. They give a full confession long before it ever gets to court; it’s pretty hard not to, when someone can tell you everything you did, where you walked, and what you touched. Most know when they’re caught and are smart enough to work out a plea.

  All but the sociopaths and the psychos … the Jonathan Quillans of the world.

  Eighteen months ago, in a meth-induced journey into paranoia, Quillan killed his doper girlfriend’s eight-month-old baby boy in a butcher-fest that gave me nightmares and day tremors for months. After a nine-day meth binge, his mind had descended into a wicked hell of frightening-awful hallucinations: snakes dripping from trees, spiders nesting in his ears, voices whispering in the walls, bugs under his skin that he had to pick at, and pick at, and pick at, but they’d never go away. There were terrible whispering voices that he wanted to block out but couldn’t because he was afraid of the spiders in his ears.

  The report reads like a modern-day horror story.

  The cops are watching, the voices whispered. There’s a camera in the baby’s belly. He couldn’t see the camera. Squeezing, pinching—the baby screaming—poking. It had to be deep.

  Deep, said the voices.

  When his girlfriend Nancy woke, the sound was no doubt still in her ears, a sound that she couldn’t quite understand or place. The same sound had invaded her sleep and bullied her dreams, forcing itself upon her, screaming at her.

  Screaming.

  Pushing the empty Bacardi bottle off the bed, she stumbled to the bedroom door, holding the wall a moment with her right hand as the world righted itself. I remember staring at her handprint on the wall for the longest time: ivory essence with a sandy texture. When she stumbled into the living room, Quillan was bloody to the elbows, digging, digging, digging.

  He killed her, too; poor, wretched, ignorant girl.

  Like unzipping a zipper, he opened her throat from side to side in the kitchen as she tried to arm herself with a carving knife.

  The voices told him to.

  When they found Quillan the next afternoon, he was sleeping like a baby on the couch. Nancy’s sister pounded on the front door for ten minutes without response, growing ever more frantic as her eyes fixated on the thin trail of blood leading across the porch and down the steps. When the police arrived and booted the door, they detained Quillan and did a cursory examination of the bedrooms, the bathroom, and the kitchen, finding nothing. There was no sign of foul play, only the telltale sliver of red trailing across the porch, but even this disappeared by the bottom step.

  Quillan did his work well.

  But the frantic scrubbing and washing of a tweaker nine days gone is no match for solid forensics … in this case chemiluminescence. That’s the use of chemical agents, usually luminol, to illuminate trace elements of blood. It’s a favorite among crime scene investigators because it reacts with the iron in blood to create a temporary blue glow. You can wash, scrub, and scour to your heart’s content, but it’s nearly impossible to fool the luminol.

  They found a dead pool in the kitchen, a nasty patch of neon-blue where a river of blood had emptied onto the tile, splashing upon the cabinet facings, the fridge, the stainless-steel dishwasher, like so much water over a fall: too much blood to survive the loss. What had been a white and yellow kitchen and dining room now shimmered blue; every swipe of the cleaning rags was revealed, every attempt to destroy blood evidence was placed on display.

  But no bodies.

  That’s where I came in.

  Ivory essence … sandy texture … my special gift.

  I see the hidden; I see the shine, every touch, every footfall, every cheek on a pillow, every hand on a wall. Some might call it an aura, I just call it life energy; either way it leaves its soft glowing trace on everything we come in contact with, radiating even from the blood we leave behind. Sometimes it’s chartreuse with a wispy texture, or muddy mauve, or flaming coral, or a crimson baked-earth. Every shine is different and specific to a person, like fingerprints or eye scans or DNA.

  This time it had an ivory color—what I call essence—and a sandy texture.

  Landing at SeaTac, Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, Jimmy leads the way to a waiting car driven by an FBI staffer from the Seattle office, who takes us directly to the King County Courthouse.

  We’re still early, so we kill some time in the cafeteria. The Quillan case was more than a year ago, so I review my notes for the third time before handing the file back to Jimmy. He stuffs it into his Fossil soft-side portfolio briefcase as I say a prayer that I’ll never have to look at it again.

  * * *

  The courtroom is similar to others I’ve had the ill fortune to attend, though without the individual theaterlike seating found in newer buildings. Instead, family members, observers, and reporters sit upon hard church-type pews, lacking only hymnals and prayer kneelers.

  The jury box sits at the front of the room on the right side: twelve overstuffed chairs, six to a row, with the back row elevated slightly above the front, surrounded by hard oak railings stained in dark cherry. At the front o
f the room, elevated above all others and brooding over the courtroom, stands the judge’s bench. Made ornate with carvings and a marble top, it, too, is dressed out in undergarments of oak with a handsome, silky suit of dark cherry stain draped over the top.

  My place is less ornate …

  … and not so high.

  Taking my seat in the witness box to the judge’s left, I shift on the hard chair and try to find a comfortable position; it’s not to be had. Perhaps it’s just me, but I find witness chairs to be strikingly similar to the medieval Judas Chair, or Chair of Torture, a terrible invention embedded with a thousand or more piercing spikes rising from the seat and the armrests and protruding from the back. Its singular purpose, like the witness chair, is to encourage one’s tongue to flap about in a productive fashion. Though in the Middle Ages the truth was less relevant than the confession.

  I glance at the jurors and envy them their stuffed chairs. They look to be a decent group, with not a mouth-breather or drooler among them. The oddest of the lot is an older woman in a lime-green suit, big-framed glasses, and a 1950s-style beehive hairdo.

  Seriously, I don’t know if she’s going for the retro look or if she just came from a Marge Simpson look-alike contest, but it’s freaking me out.

  Okay, maybe the beehive isn’t that large, but I’d wager if it caught fire it’d take her a few minutes to notice … and several extinguishers to put out … and maybe a ladder truck.

  I glance quickly from face to face, making eye contact with some, even sharing the edge of a smile with Marge Simpson. These will be the men and women who decide Quillan’s fate. I may not be able to tell them everything, I think, but I won’t be false; the world has enough liars.

  “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth…” bla blah, bla blah, bla blah.

  I say, “I do,” while thinking in my head, All except for that “whole truth” part.

  “Good afternoon, Steps,” King County Prosecutor Tully Stevens says as he approaches and shakes my hand. I’ve met Tully twice before. He’s abrupt and, some would say, humorless, but he’s a man of integrity and principle, a scarce combination these days, particularly among attorneys. He’s not a handsome man, but he’s not spare parts, either. At fifty, he still has a full head of salt-and-pepper hair that gives him a distinguished look and earns respect from juries … plus it balances the jut of his oversized ears.

  “Steps, could you please explain to the jury why you were called in to this case and what your role was.” His eyes direct me toward the seven women and five men in the jury box. I give a nod, thinking, Here we go, and dive in.

  “The King County Sheriff’s Office contacted the FBI’s Special Tracking Unit after Ms. Moongood and her infant son went missing and investigation revealed a large amount of blood at the residence that suggested foul play. While the house had been cleaned, deputies found a blood trail on the porch”—I gesture toward a large photo on an easel to my right—“that terminated three feet down the gravel walkway.

  “I picked up the trail where the blood ended. Directionality initially suggested the suspect was heading west, toward a parking lot in front of the apartment complex, but then the trail turned south and led to the trunk of a 1996 Chevrolet Caprice parked on the street about a hundred feet from the victims’ house.”

  “And you checked the trunk?”

  “I did.”

  “What did you find?” Tully asks, knowing full well the answer.

  “Nothing.” One of the jurors lets out the smallest of gasps, unnoticed by all but myself and perhaps Tully. I force myself not to smile. “The trunk was empty, but signs on the ground indicated the suspect then entered the driver’s seat of the vehicle.”

  “Was this the defendant Jonathan Quillan’s car?” My eyes follow his gesture to where Quillan sits smugly in a suit, his head shaved bald and his shirt buttoned to the top, concealing the white supremacist tattoo around the front of his neck. Even if the shirt had been laid open and the tie removed, the jury would see little more than unintelligible lines of no significance. The tattoo, which reads White Power, is written in Elder Futhark, a Norse runic alphabet used by the Vikings between the second and eighth centuries. Viking symbols and motifs are all the rage with neo-Nazis, skinheads, and white power punks these days, punks like Jonathan Quillan.

  “No,” I say. “The car is registered to the defendant’s neighbor, Bakri Saaed, and was parked in front of his apartment.”

  Tully holds up his finger; whether to stop me there or to get the jury’s attention, the result is the same. “And Mr. Saaed has already testified that he does not know Jonathan Quillan,” he says to the jury, “nor did he give him permission to use his vehicle.” Nodding to me, he says, “Continue, please.”

  “The track would have ended there,” I say, “if it wasn’t for Mr. Saaed’s GPS. When we contacted him, he advised that the unit keeps a log of the vehicle’s movements, speeds, and times.”

  Tully stops in front of me, his stone face unreadable. “And you reviewed this log and discovered … what?”

  “The log indicated that the car left its parking spot at one-seventeen A.M. and drove a couple miles to I-5, then south to Highway 90, where it headed east for about thirty minutes before turning off near North Bend. The GPS led us to a spot on Rattlesnake Mountain just west of North Bend, where the vehicle parked.

  “The suspect exited the vehicle and removed Ms. Moongood from the trunk—”

  “How do you know that?” Tully interrupts, cutting off an objection from the defense.

  “There were heel marks where he dragged her off the road, as documented in photos number thirty-two and thirty-three,” I say, indicating the pictures on display to my right. “He likely held her under the arms, faceup. If he held her facedown, her knees likely would have dragged, leaving additional marks. Plus, her toes would have left a wider drag than her heels.”

  Drag marks lined in lavender.

  “And where did those drag marks lead?”

  “To a spot less than thirty feet off the road, where both Ms. Moongood and her baby were found under a blanket covered in leaves and dead brush. That ended my involvement with the case.”

  Except for a single picture I snapped.…

  “Thank you, Steps.” Tully’s voice is monotone, still giving nothing away. Turning to the defense, he says, “Your witness.”

  Defense Attorney Robert Baumgartner glides silently across the floor and hovers in front of me, his used-car-salesman smile firmly in place and his slicked-back politician’s hair glistening. I can tell right away that he and I are not going to see eye to eye.

  “You must be an impressive tracker, Mr. Craig—”

  “Steps,” I say.

  “Right,” he replies with the smile-that-isn’t. “To track a man across concrete and gravel and a dozen other difficult surfaces, why, I’d imagine there can’t be too many trackers in the world capable of such a feat, am I right?”

  “You are.”

  “And most of these supposed signs you followed that day don’t even show up in the evidence photos. Why, I’ve had several professional man-trackers look at the photos, and none of them can see your signs.”

  “Objection,” Tully cries. “Lack of foundation.”

  “Sustained,” the judge replies, giving Baumgartner a withering look.

  “So how is it you can track across surfaces that others can’t?” he shoots at me.

  I shrug slowly—I can’t tell them everything, but I won’t be false. “There are always signs,” I say, “you just have to see them. If I touch the rail here next to my chair”—I place my hand upon the wood to demonstrate—“my fingers disturb any dust present; they leave minute traces of body oil and perspiration behind; they may even leave transfer, if, for example, I have mud or paint or blood on my hands.”

  “Come on, Mr. Craig! On concrete? On gravel? You’re stretching the limits of my very active imagination.”

  “Shoes leave scuff marks,” I say. “The
y displace gravel. They leave dirt and mud behind. Perhaps…” I leave the word hanging and can almost feel the jury leaning forward in their seats. “Perhaps, with the court’s permission, a demonstration is in order.”

  “We’re not taking the jury to the woods so you can point out boot prints in mud,” Baumgartner spits.

  “I didn’t say we have to go to the woods,” I snap back. “I can demonstrate right here, in this courtroom.”

  Baumgartner studies me silently for a moment, eyes searching for a trick, a trap, a hidden clause, and finding only my exaggerated smile hanging below bright, taunting eyes. It’s too much for him. Slowly, a smile seeps out from his tight mouth, spilling to the left cheek, then the right—a genuine smile this time. Like a circling shark, he smells blood in the water; what better way to discredit me than to have me fail in front of the jury?

  “I have no objection, if it pleases the court,” he says in a controlled voice.

  Neither does Tully.

  I take a moment to explain the parameters of the demonstration, and then the bailiff escorts me to the hall and the doors close behind us with a solid thud that echoes through the tiled passageway. Beyond, Baumgartner is laying a trail for me to follow, no doubt trying to be clever and using what little he knows of man-tracking against me, poor fool.

  I’m thinking about sushi.

  Not that I like the stuff, it’s disgusting; my brother Jens eats it by the plate. No, I’m thinking of sushi because it’s tightly bundled with seaweed, and, like sushi, I’m going to wrap this testimony up with seaweed.

  Robert Baumgartner is seaweed … at least his essence and texture are that of seaweed, dark green and slimy-wet, his tracks and touchings not unlike the clawings of some nefarious sea beast risen from surf and slouching ashore for some ill purpose. I find the essence and texture appropriate, since seaweed’s slippery and disgusting and some people actually swallow it, much like Baumgartner’s theories and hypotheses.