Collecting the Dead: A Novel

by Spencer Kope

  Without a word, Jimmy photographed the image from multiple angles using different filters. We’ll need those images for court, to prove the case is linked to the Sad Face Killer. Without them, all we have is my word, and I can’t exactly walk into court and say I saw a sad face on the victim’s car, an image that everyone else missed.

  “How’d you see that?” the tech had stammered.

  “Lucky, I guess,” Jimmy replied. “The light was reflecting oddly … just a hunch.”

  After Susanville, we flew to Medford, Oregon, where Dany Grazier was kidnapped eighteen months ago. Finding nothing on her car, we headed south again to Yreka, California, and caught a ride with Special Agent Janet Portenga of the U.S. Forest Service. Fifteen miles into the Klamath National Forest we came upon a patch of dark forest where Dany’s body was found. Sad Face’s shine was all over the place, including a detour through the brush to a pine tree forty feet from the body dump where he had carved a sad face into the trunk.

  Jimmy documented it with his camera, each click of the shutter sounding loud and inappropriate; offensive. It’s one of many sounds left in the wake of a homicide. They grate on you after a while.

  Then it was northwest to Brookings, Oregon, for Erica Overdorff—another of the still-missing. Then to Crescent City for Jennifer Green and south to Eureka for Leah Daniels, which had led us to this miserable patch of fetid-green northeast of Weaverville in the Trinity National Forest on a peak overlooking Trinity Lake.

  The forest here is oppressive.

  The warm June air has spent the afternoon baking last winter’s leaves where they lie, brewing a musty, earthy stench of decay that settles between the trees and presses in from all sides. The heat sucks the moisture from my brow, my neck, my face, leaving my skin feeling slapped and raw.

  Despite this, my mind is not on the forest. Instead, I stare at a lone tree at the edge of a high bluff that drops off steeply to the water below. It’s a tree little different from the others around it, except this one has a special color of shine around its base.

  There was something about Leah that Sad Face liked, I can tell that right away. She’s still dead, of course, but he took extra care choosing a dump site and positioning her body. He could have just dumped her in the woods like the others.

  He didn’t.

  I see where he leaned her up against the tree not far off the well-traveled trail, ensuring she’d be found quickly. He faced her toward the lake, perhaps so her dead eyes would have something pleasant to fix upon.

  He sat next to her for a spell.

  Maybe he leaned against her; maybe he held her.

  The shine isn’t all that clear.

  Hikers found her early one April morning two years ago. Rigor indicated she had been dead less than twelve hours; lividity showed that she’d been killed elsewhere and had spent several hours on her side before being propped upright against the tree. She had on the same clothes she’d been wearing when she went missing eight months earlier, and her unmolested purse was resting in her lap.

  Whatever goodwill she had earned with Sad Face, it only went so far. In the end, he choked the life from her just like the others.

  It’s a quiet flight back to Redding, Jimmy and I each alone with our thoughts. We wear headphones so we can talk back and forth above the rumble of the Cessna’s engine, but few words are exchanged. Jimmy is working something out in a notebook that he’s been scribbling in all day, and I spend most of the flight thinking about Heather and our dinner together just a few nights and so long ago.

  Tomorrow’s schedule should be easier.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  June 27, 7:40 A.M.

  Jimmy’s reading the morning paper and eating scrambled eggs washed down with coffee while I nibble at a sesame seed muffin and sip orange juice. The food is good … for a complimentary hotel breakfast.

  Halfway through my muffin, Marty bounces in, shoots me a big grin, and makes a beeline for the coffee. I pray he goes for decaf, but he plants himself in front of a dispenser of full-strength French ground and tops off his one-liter thermos, followed by a sixteen-ounce paper cup. Stirring cream and sugar into the cup, he plops down in the seat next to me, still grinning.

  “How was San Francisco?” I ask politely.

  Out of the corner of my eye I see Jimmy slump in his seat, burying himself deeper in the newspaper as he slowly lifts the top edge up to obscure his face. Jimmy thinks that Marty is too loquacious. Or, in his words, He doesn’t know when to shut up.

  “Greeaat!” Marty purrs, smiling ridiculously like some kid on a candy binge.

  I hope it was great, I think. We didn’t get our crab till almost eleven last night.

  He starts babbling on about how amazing the aquarium was, which doesn’t surprise me since he’s visited close to fifty in the time I’ve known him. He once told me his goal is to visit every major aquarium in the country. As he rambles on … and on … and on … I realize he’s not talking about the Aquarium of the Bay by Pier 39, he’s talking about the Monterey Bay Aquarium two hours south of San Francisco in Monterey.

  “Whoa. I thought you went to San Francisco.”

  “I did.” He smirks. “But I started in Monterey. I rented a little convertible, visited the aquarium, and cruised Seventeen-Mile Drive with the top down. Then I flew to San Francisco.” He leans toward me. “That way I scored two aquariums in one day—and I still remembered to bring back crab,” he adds with a wink.

  Yeah, at eleven o’clock!

  “The giant Pacific octopus exhibit was awesome,” Marty blathers on. Then I hear all about San Francisco, the aquarium, Pier 39, and his misadventures with the panhandlers. He didn’t make it to Chinatown or Alcatraz, but that doesn’t seem to dampen his enthusiasm.

  Les and Marty are switching places today, so I’m sure Jimmy and I will have plenty of time to hear more about Marty’s trip on the plane. Yay. The Cessna is loud, but it’s equipped with headphones for both the pilot and passengers. I’m not sure if they have a mute button.

  Oroville, 9:23 A.M.

  Burgundy.

  It’s a great color, deep and rich and regal. Not like other shades of red that can be too bright, begging for unnecessary attention like a spoiled toddler throwing a temper tantrum. No, burgundy speaks of the wine for which it’s named, dark and luxurious. It looks great on Lauren Brouwer’s 2004 Chrysler 300, a car that itself is dark and luxurious.

  I always liked the styling of the 300 series. It looks like the offspring of an unnatural pairing between a Bentley and an English bulldog—beefy, yet elegant. An hors d’oeuvre of class and power and style wrapped up nicely in Detroit steel and garnished with leather.

  Lauren loves her car.

  I say loves, because her shine tells me she’s still alive … somewhere. I know she loves her car because she posted more than a dozen pictures of it on Facebook when she bought it six months ago.

  Someone else loves the car.

  Or perhaps it’s just that they love Lauren.

  I know this because the car has been washed recently, and probably often. Where dust from the gravel driveway and the nearby fields has settled on the other cars in the driveway, Lauren’s stands apart, clean and gleaming in the morning sun.

  Loving hands have treated the tires, polished the wheels, and cleaned the windows to a squeaky shine. The pristine gem waits for Lauren’s return; a sad vigil, a hard vigil, a hopeful vigil. A vigil shared by her parents, who wait for us inside the house.

  When Lauren went missing, the Chrysler 300 was found parked at the grocery store where she worked swing shift. Neither Oroville PD nor the Butte County Sheriff’s Office deemed it worthy of impounding because there was no indication it was involved in Lauren’s disappearance.

  A quick walk around without my glasses reveals no sign of Sad Face. No shine on the door, the seat, or the steering wheel; no sad-face image traced out on a window or trunk or bumper; no face print on the back window.

  Sad Face didn’t touch the
car.

  I catch up to Jimmy as he’s ringing the doorbell.

  “Anything?”

  “No,” I say. “It’s clean.”

  Footsteps approach the door and I get the sense that someone’s looking through the peephole. A lock clicks and a grim man pulls the door wide. The lines on his face belong to a man much older and there’s a tic at the corner of his eye that probably wasn’t there two months ago.

  “Good morning, sir,” Jimmy says gently, extending his hand in greeting. “I’m Special Agent James Donovan and this is Operations Specialist Magnus Craig.”

  “Martin Brouwer,” the man says, shaking Jimmy’s hand. As I step forward and extend my hand, our eyes meet and I see that same haunted, sleepless, vacant look that I’ve seen too often.

  Souls bleed.

  They bleed through the eyes, for it’s in the eyes that you see the wound. Small wounds, great wounds, and sometimes terrible wounds that rip the soul asunder, some so awful they change the soul—and the eyes—forever.

  It’s the eyes that bleed out such sorrow; the sorrow of a parent wondering every minute of every day where their daughter is and what’s happening to her—and at the same time not wanting to know, because the thought of it leaves them hollow and broken. It’s the eyes that reveal the rents and gashes in the soul, the cracks along the edge, the empty hole where part of the soul has died and turned to shadow.

  The blood of the soul is the teardrop.

  Aside from tears and hopelessness and grief and desperation, there’s something else in Martin Brouwer’s eyes: gratitude. This, too, I’ve seen before, and it always surprises me that there’s still room for it, that it hasn’t been pushed out and discarded.

  It’s hard to imagine how gratitude could survive within the hostile, acidic environment of angst and sorrow and dread, but there it is. As long as there is hope, there is gratitude. It’s easy to understand such an emotion when we find someone alive, but so many times it’s the other way around. Yet, there’s still gratitude, gratitude that we brought a loved one home, even dead. It’s gratitude for the effort, gratitude that we tried, even if we failed. And in those cases, like Lauren’s, where someone is still missing, and has been for too long, there is gratitude that someone is still looking.

  Hope and Gratitude: the resilient sisters.

  Martin’s fingers twitch ever so slightly as he takes my hand and holds it for a long moment. His eyes. He’s a beaten man, but not yet broken. Not yet.

  Hope and Gratitude; they feed him.

  I want to tell him right then that Lauren is alive, that I see her shine pulsing and vibrating with the rhythm of life. She’s just lost and we’re going to find her. But I can’t give him that hope if there’s any chance that Lauren won’t come home; that would break him by parts and finish him whole. It’s enough to tell him we’re going to pour our hearts and souls into finding his daughter, and that we’re the best at what we do.

  I say the words, but they crumble as they fall from my tongue.

  Martin has heard them before … again and again.

  He just nods. Polite. Grateful.

  Alice Brouwer greets us in the living room, a small mouse of a woman with big frail eyes and brown hair. She has a perspiring ice-cold pitcher of pink lemonade and a small plate of cinnamon rolls sliced in halves that she places on the coffee table before greeting us with a tepid smile and a handshake.

  We talk for a half hour, seated around the coffee table. We have a few questions that Jimmy asks, but mostly we let Martin and Alice tell us about their daughter. Some memories bring smiles and even the occasional laugh, but more often it’s the tears of the soul that pour out with the story.

  Lauren is a gentle spirit, always smiling, a good daughter, never in trouble. She has a fiancé and a December wedding to look forward to, and a love of animals so deep that she had saved nearly $20,000 in the hopes of opening a five-star boarding kennel for dogs. She has the whole thing planned out on a five-year timeline and just finished year two ahead of schedule.

  Her older brother, Larry, who’s studying to be an architect, helped her design the three-thousand-square-foot building, leaving room for growth down the road. It includes an exercise arena, a playroom, and speakers in every room that play soft, soothing music while the dogs sleep in their people-like beds.

  That is Lauren Brouwer—dreams and hope and heart.

  Tears follow smiles follow tears.

  I find myself holding Alice’s hand, patting her arm.

  I think of my own mother, Lovisa. After decades in America, she still speaks with a strong Norwegian accent and gets cross with Jens and me when we mimic her. When we were growing up, she was often stern, demanding, and disciplined. She set the bar high for us and accepted no excuses. But she’s also quick to laugh and to hug, and she leaves no doubt that she loves you with every ounce of her great Norwegian heart.

  That’s my mother …

  … and it tears me up to think of the hell she would go through if Jens or I were missing or dead. I imagine she would be much like Alice Brouwer and too many mothers before her.

  “No one said life is easy—or fair,” she often told us. “Life is life. There’s no scale to weigh out your days and make sure you get your share of the good.” She’s right, of course. We pass our years one yesterday at a time, hoping our days will be many but never knowing. In the end we strive for one thing: to make enough good days to outweigh the bad.

  Alice and Lauren and Martin deserve some good days.

  But life isn’t easy, nor is it fair.

  As we step to the door and say our good-byes, Alice suddenly holds both her hands up. “Can you wait one minute … please?” She turns and hurries down the hall before either of us can reply, and we hear a shuffling noise, drawers opening and closing, and then she’s hurrying back with something in her hand.

  Taking my left hand, she turns it palm up and places a silver heart-shaped locket in the center. Slowly, gently, she closes my fingers around it. “Give this to my Lauren when you find her. We gave it to her when she graduated high school. She wore it constantly, but for some reason she wasn’t wearing it the night … the night…” Her eyes go to water. “I just want to see it around her neck when I hug her and hold her.”

  “I will.” The words lump in my throat and it’s hard to swallow.

  Lauren’s shine glows through the gaps of my fingers.

  Pulsing.

  Pulsing.

  Pulsing.

  * * *

  The rest of the day goes as expected; first to Red Bluff some sixty miles north of Oroville and home to Ashley Sprague. Or at least it was her home, until she went missing more than two years ago and hasn’t been seen since.

  Unlike the others, Ashley was a feral spirit—wild beyond measure—so it wasn’t uncommon for her to drop off the grid for days or weeks at a time. So feral was her spirit that no one bothered reporting her missing for more than a month.

  The report was taken reluctantly.

  Red Bluff PD still hesitates to call her missing, believing instead the rumors that she tripped off to Mexico to bartend with some boyfriend in Cabo. Who can blame them? Ashley was the boy who cried wolf, only substitute girl for boy, and partied hard and disappeared often for cried wolf.

  By the time she was eighteen—old enough to be booked into the county jail—she had been reported as a runaway fifteen times, had been booked into juvenile detention a dozen times, and had been through rehab three times.

  Feral.

  Capital F.

  Her first stint in the county jail, exactly twenty-three days after her eighteenth birthday, was for DUI. It took her a few days to raise bail, which, as it turns out, wasn’t fast enough. Corrections officers found her bleeding and unconscious next to her bed on the second morning. No one was talking, but the word was she mouthed off to the wrong gangster girl and got a broken jaw and a concussion in return.

  After that, Ashley seemed to straighten out. She held a variety of odd jo
bs, tried community college—it didn’t take—then, when she was twenty-one, she took a course in bartending and seemed to find something that suited her.

  She was working her way through the legal maze to get her juvenile record sealed when she disappeared; she thought she’d have a better shot at getting a decent bartending job with better tips in Vegas or Reno if she could leave her juvenile baggage behind.

  Every agency has their share of Ashley Spragues; scores and hundreds and even thousands of them, depending on the size of the agency and its jurisdiction. And every time they’re arrested they talk about how they’re going to change their life, how they have this plan, how they don’t need the drugs or the booze or the destructive boyfriend anymore.

  Almost none succeed.

  Almost none try.

  Ashley Sprague did try—and was succeeding—but her juvenile record was hard to shake. Many of the officers and deputies in the city and county knew her on sight and had too much history with her to believe anything she said, so much so that when her coworker reported her missing they glanced through the missing persons report, saw her name, and then disregarded.

  Never mind.

  It’s just Ashley … again.

  There was no search for Ashley Sprague.

  No forensic examination of her car or her apartment.

  She became one of the invisible missing, landing among the ranks of prostitutes and drug addicts. It wasn’t fair, but life isn’t fair.

  There’s my mother in my head again: No one said life is easy—or fair.

  Sadly, Ashley was reaping what she had for so many years sown … and it was a bitter harvest.

  According to the case report, Ashley’s 1995 Hyundai was parked and locked in her numbered parking spot at Dorchester Apartments, a low-income housing project near the center of town. When she never returned, never paid the meager rent, and never picked up her car, it was towed and later sold at an impound auction for $325.

  I’m not interested in Ashley’s apartment or the dumpy tavern with the gaudy red neon sign where she worked. I just want to see her car. I want to see if Sad Face touched it, sat in it, drove it, used the trunk. I want to see if Ashley’s shine is in the trunk.