Collecting the Dead: A Novel

by Spencer Kope

  I watch each clip carefully, dutifully, before going back to number four—the man in the black sedan. I watch him exit the vehicle and point his arm at the hood; the lights flash briefly as the car locks. Starting at the driver’s door, he walks around the front of the car, down the passenger side, and back to the driver’s door, where he checks the door handle.

  Hello, Leonardo.

  There’s no doubt it’s him. Each time I’ve seen his shine at the mall he does the same thing before leaving his car: he walks in a slow, methodical circle around the entire vehicle.

  Is it a ritual? Some type of protection circle? Is he checking the car; the tires? Or is he just obsessive-compulsive, driven by his own mind to go through strict, repetitive routines before doing anything? Jimmy and I have discussed it a dozen times, but we’re still not any closer to an answer. As for me, I’m betting on the obsessive-compulsive disorder … with a little bit of psycho wack-job thrown in.

  The car is too far away to make out the plate. That’s the joke when it comes to security cameras; in almost every case they’re either too far away or too cheaply built to show any real detail. Casinos and banks invest in better-quality equipment and generally have better placement, but they’re the exception to the rule.

  After transferring the video to my thumb drive, I swap disks and start working on Alison Lister’s kidnapper. The video is bad and I’m not optimistic we’ll be able to identify the make, let alone the model. The truck is just too far away, the resolution is too poor, and the only view is from the side. A portion of the front and rear can be seen at an angle, but few details are revealed. Regardless, I transfer the video.

  Plucking the thumb drive from the USB slot, I pause just long enough to check my voice mail: two messages, Mom reminding me about the family picnic in July and my optometrist telling me I’m overdue for an exam.

  “I’m heading to the S.O.,” I tell Diane as I pause in her doorway. “I need to see if Dex can ID Leonardo’s car, plus I have the video from Redding.”

  “It’s the sheriff’s office, not the S.O.,” Diane replies without looking up. “Just because we work for the government doesn’t mean we have to assign acronyms to everything.”

  “S.O.,” I whisper. “S.O.”

  An eight-by-ten color photo sits on top of a manila folder at the edge of Diane’s desk. I recognize it immediately. I should; I took it two years ago at Washoe Lake. Picking it up, I stare at the pattern fashioned from rocks in the high desert soil. “I see Jimmy already talked to you.”

  Diane nods. “I should have a list for you later this afternoon.”

  I place the photo back on her desk, on top of the manila folder. “We have two. I’m betting we find more, making this guy a serial.”

  “I hope you’re wrong.”

  I tap the photo twice. “He left his calling card; what kind of sick bastard does that? He’s marking his conquests, maybe keeping score.” Diane meets my gaze and I give a curt nod. “He’s a serial; you’ll see.”

  * * *

  Dexter Allen’s office at the Whatcom County Sheriff’s Office is a cluttered hole in the basement of the crumbling county jail. Half-buried in the ground with only a handful of windows that look up at the sidewalk outside, the administrative offices of the sheriff’s office are decrepit and worn. The walls are worn, the structural concrete is worn, the floor tiles are worn—even the air is worn, stagnant from poor circulation.

  The texture of the ceiling tiles is mismatched due to their constant replacement as various liquids leak down from the jail above: gray water from the jail shower, soapy water from the jail kitchen, and questionable water from the jail toilets, which are frequently and intentionally stuffed with jail toilet paper to cause an overflow.

  These internal rainstorms are frequent enough that the shelves in the archives room down the hall are carefully and constantly covered in heavy plastic to protect the original case reports. Sometimes the liquid is clear, other times it’s brown. In one case, brown chunks spilled out onto a desk in the Detectives Division, prompting several detectives to collect the sample for analysis, convinced that the inmates were now defecating on them by proxy.

  Dex pays little mind to the crumbling edifice.

  Surrounded by his monitors, he crunches data, reviews case reports, and sips Diet Pepsi. The only decoration in the bland office consists of several Civil War paintings on the wall and his diplomas from the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, and the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. He laughingly calls himself a relic of the Cold War, but after seventeen years as a Russian linguist, then intelligence analyst, and finally as a project manager for various “operations” at the Office of Naval Intelligence, he somehow landed this unlikely position as a crime analyst with the sheriff’s office.

  He’s on the phone when I walk into his office and plop down in a chair. I only half-listen to the call, something about a wanted burglary suspect hiding out in a house near Maple Falls. No doubt he’s talking to one of the deputies, maybe a detective, but certainly someone keen on getting their hands on the suspect.

  The call ends and Dex shoots me a grin.

  “Diane said you’d be stopping by. So … how’s Heather?”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  He chuckles; I’m glad my misery provides joy for so many people. Handing him the thumb drive, I say, “I need a little FVA.”

  Forensic vehicle analysis, or FVA, is an analytical process developed by Dex over years and made real in the form of a photo database. The idea came to him after too many blurry surveillance images crossed his desk: an armed robbery showing only the vehicle’s taillights, a rape where the only clue was the image of the front corner of a truck as it pulled into a parking space just off-camera, a homicide with only nighttime images of a passing SUV.

  Faced with this onslaught of consistently bad imagery, he did what every good analyst does: He changed the game. Dex doesn’t think outside the box, he redefines it.

  When I first heard about FVA two years ago, I called him an out-of-the-box thinker, meaning it as a compliment. He smiled and shook his head. “There is no box.” When I gave him a questioning look, he said, “The idea of thinking machines was once way outside the box, right? Yet now computers are as mainstream as TV, radio, and the printing press—they’re right in the middle of the box with everything else we take for granted day in and day out; therefore there is no box, just vision and actualization.”

  He tapped the side of his head with his index finger: “Computer visualized”—then he tapped the CPU on the floor next to his desk—“computer actualized.”

  I remember telling him he sounded like a Zen version of Tony Robbins; he just laughed.

  Plugging the thumb drive into the USB port, Dex starts a frame-separation program, then selects the video from Bellis Fair and opens it in the program. “Say when,” he murmurs as he fast-forwards through the video clip.

  “Stop!” I say fifteen seconds later as the black vehicle first rolls on-screen. He tags the first frame and then tags another frame after Leonardo parks. With the parameters for the beginning and end of the frame separation identified, Dex clicks a button and starts the extraction. Within seconds the segment of video is dissected into almost six hundred separate still-frame images showing angles of the front, side, and rear.

  Dex is already lost in the hunt, almost oblivious to my presence. His hands work the keyboard and the mouse at a furious pace as he views one photo after another, enlarging some, sharpening others. He selects a dozen of the best images, including shots of the front, side, and rear of Leonardo’s car, and then opens the forensic vehicle analysis database.

  “See here,” he says, drawing my attention to the rear of the vehicle with his index finger, “the little flash. That’s the third brake light. That’s what I call a ‘window-high’ position because it’s at the inside top edge of the back window. You’ll also notice the license plate is not down on the bumper, but up between the taillights; tha
t’s a ‘center-high’ position. The picture quality is about average for surveillance video—”

  “Which means it sucks,” I say.

  “Which means it sucks,” he replies. “Still, there’s plenty to crunch through the database.” He moves his finger to a dark spot behind the rear door. “There’s some kind of reflection here, looks like a window behind the door—hard to be certain with the car being black. Let’s take a look from another angle.”

  Pulling two side shots and a front angle to the top of the image stack, he immediately taps the screen and with an I-told-you-so tone says, “There it is! See the reflection? There’s definitely a window behind the rear door. That narrows our search considerably.”

  “How so?”

  “It’s just not that common, particularly with the newer cars. Let’s run it and see what we get.” Pulling up a query screen, he selects each of the identified criteria, then adds two more, pointing out that the taillights are configured in a “horizontal sweep” and have “bleed,” a term he uses to identify taillights that extend into the trunk. After checking boxes next to each criterion, he hits the query button and the database instantly returns thirty results with links to photos for each one.

  “Volvos, Audis, Hondas, and Hyundais, but none appear to have what I’m looking for,” Dex hums as he clicks methodically through the pictures. “Oh, wait. Here we go.” Tapping the screen several times, he points at the array of images on display. “That’s it. No doubt whatsoever. It’s a first-generation Saturn L-series sedan, which was manufactured for model years 2000 through 2005 … though it looks like this one is a 2000-through-2002 model.”

  “How can you possibly know that?”

  “Look at the front. The L-series got a face-lift for 2003 that included a much larger grille and a redesigned front fascia. That,” he adds emphatically, “is the pre-face-lift model.”

  “So we’re looking for a black 2000 to 2002 Saturn L-series sedan.” I roll the information around in my head a minute, digesting it, turning it inside out. “Too old to be a rental,” I say to myself; the words come out as a mumble. “That’s good. Good.” I’m pacing now, something I do when I’m thinking. It drives Jimmy up the wall. Sometimes I do it just for fun.

  Dex is at my back when the thought comes to me and I snap around so quickly I trip over my own feet and have to catch myself on the corner of a file cabinet. When my mother called me graceful while growing up, she didn’t mean it as a compliment.

  And tripping over my own feet was the least of my concerns as a teen; the real damage came from walking into walls, poles, mailboxes, and doors, particularly in public, and worse when it happened in front of classmates, which was often.

  For years I blamed it on puberty and its corresponding growth spurts, but I had to give up that excuse in my early twenties and finally admit that I get distracted. Often. Of course, it doesn’t help that layer upon layer of shine covers everything I see. I can turn some of it off for short spurts, but it’s hard to turn it all off without my glasses.

  Righting myself with as much dignity as I can muster, I plant myself in front of Dex’s desk. “You have access to DAPS, don’t you?”

  He just smiles and swivels one of the monitors in my direction. The Washington State Driver and Plate Search database, also known as DAPS, is on the screen. “I pulled up every Saturn in Whatcom County with current registration,” he says. “It should be printing right about now.” As if on cue, the printer hums to life and quickly kicks out several pages of data.

  “I’m also going to print a statewide list,” Dex says, “in case your theory about him being from out-of-county is true.”

  Dex knows the Jess Parker homicide as well as I do, probably better. He wasn’t at the sheriff’s office at the time of the murder, but quickly got up to speed when he was hired a few years after, organizing the vast four-thousand-page case report into a searchable database that scored every single document, tip, or follow-up report by relevance. He did the same for the 137 identified suspects, most of whom have since been eliminated from the list, either because their DNA didn’t match, they had strong, verified alibis, or, in one case, they were dead at the time of the homicide.

  Dead is always a good alibi.

  Dex is as frustrated by the case as I am. And I know he’s suspicious of my claims that Leonardo has been visiting the mall. He’s not a tracker, but I can tell from our conversations that he’s done some research since Leonardo’s first shopping trip a number of years ago. He knows that human tracking doesn’t work on asphalt, or on the frequently polished floors of Bellis Fair Mall. To his credit, he doesn’t ask too many questions.

  Other than my father, Jimmy, and FBI Director Carlson, Diane and Dex are the only ones I’ve considered sharing my secret with. I still might. It depends on Leonardo.

  Collecting the statewide printout of Saturn L-series sedans from the printer, we next tackle the mystery truck from Redding … and immediately derail. “It’s just too far away and too poor-quality,” Dex says. The most he can pull from the image is that the truck is a standard-cab, and there’s a slight reflection on the front fender that might—might—be a badge, but fender badges on trucks are so common that it only narrows the search by half.

  “Here’s one thing,” Dex adds, pointing to an image of the truck as it almost exits the screen. “See that hint of red?” I follow his finger to the upper back edge of the cab, just above the rear window.

  “Third brake light,” I say. “Like on the Saturn.”

  “Exactly, and those weren’t introduced into the U.S. until 1986; that means your suspect truck is ’86 or newer.”

  I give him a defeated smile. “That’s ninety-eight percent of the trucks on the road.”

  “Oh, less than that if you factor in the standard cab and the fender badge,” Dex replies in a chipper voice, “but, yes, you’re still looking at thousands of trucks, perhaps tens of thousands, depending on the location and size of your search area.”

  “Tens of thousands, is that all?” I say sarcastically. “No problem. You’ve been a big help, Dex.”

  He just grins.

  * * *

  Hangar 7 is a regular hive of buzzing activity when I return. Les and Marty are tinkering with Betsy … which is a little disconcerting considering neither of them are mechanics and they have the left engine cover cracked open. Marty’s poking around inside with a screwdriver as Les looks on.

  I try not to look or listen as I pass. The less I know, the better.

  Jimmy’s in the break room plopped down on the couch next to his wife, Jane, looking through some catalogs and magazines. Their son, six-year-old Pete, is by himself at the foosball table on the hangar floor. He’s wearing a blue hoodie with the hood pulled up over his head so far you can barely see his eyes.

  The conversation in the break room smells like a remodel. Jane’s been talking about a makeover on their kitchen for the last year and recently told Jimmy that she’s tired of waiting. Worse, she’s under the impression that I’m going to help—so I make a beeline for the foosball table instead.

  “Hey, Petey,” I say, eyeing the rows of miniature plastic soccer players. “You want to give your Uncle Steps a foosball thrashing?” His face is in shadow, but I see the eager smile. “Hey, what’s with the hood, buddy?” His smile turns instantly to grimace as he hesitates, then walks up close to me. Looking around quickly, he pulls the hood back a few inches, just enough for me to see that his thick curly hair is gone. Not gone as in shortened, but gone as in nearly bald; the kid’s got barely a quarter inch of hair left, just fuzz. My eyes go big and I give him a sympathetic look as he pulls the hood back in place.

  “What happened, big guy? You get some gum in your hair or something?”

  He corkscrews his mouth and says in his husky little voice, “We went to the barber shop and I got to pick which piece I wanted to go on the hair cutter.” He looks up at me with big eyes. “I didn’t know the red one makes you bald.”

  Try
ing not to smile, I tell him, “You look very handsome. A bald head is the sign of a tough man, a strong man, someone not afraid to be who he is.” I poke him softly in the belly. “But not every bald man is tough and handsome.” I study him for a moment. “I’d be careful if I were you, Petey. The girls are gonna want to run their hands all over your head.”

  “Eeewww!”

  “Give it a couple years; you might not mind it so much.”

  We play two rounds of foosball, with Petey winning both rounds. Jimmy doesn’t like it when I let him win. He says that losing is a character-builder and that when Petey finally does win a game, he’ll know it was a real win.

  Ppppfth! Fathers. What do they know?

  Besides, I’m his Uncle Steps—even if we’re not technically related. I’m supposed to spoil him, teach him how to throw knives and juggle kittens, jack him up on sugar, and send him home as a six-year-old nightmare incarnate.

  That’s what uncles do.

  When I poke my head into the break room, Jane is holding up two color samples, one of which Jimmy is less than happy with, comparing it to the inside of a baby’s tainted diaper. Catalogs are spread out over the coffee table: cabinets, countertops, sinks, tile, paint, faucets, appliances, pretty much anything you’d need if you wanted to build a kitchen from scratch.

  Jimmy is holding three separate catalogs uncomfortably, like a new father holding an infant. His shoulders are slumped and he has an exhausted look on his face, but his eyes suddenly light up when he sees me. “Steps!” he says with surprising enthusiasm. “You’re back … finally. Look, honey,” he says to Jane, “Steps is here. Oh, that means we’ve got to get back to work.”

  “Hi, Steps,” Jane says, throwing me a smile and shaking her head patiently as Jimmy dumps the catalogs on the table and makes for the door. “So we’ve settled on a thirteen-by-thirteen porcelain tile called Mountain Slate Iron,” she tells me. “It’s a darker tile with stone texture and coloring; very pretty.”