That Darkness

by Lisa Black

  Maggie told herself this was exercise, but that was not entirely true. Nor did it stem from a desire for human contact, a desire to interact with the homeless (who had grown accustomed to her and had stopped asking for handouts, signaling her acceptance as a colleague instead of a target), as well as the beautiful people out for a night on the town, the gamblers, or the office workers focused on getting home where they could pull off the ties or the heels.

  Occasionally she encountered a sullen teenager, forced by circumstances to resort to this barbaric and ancient mode of transportation or simply stamping off some of their frustrated energy. They had done the unthinkable and walked away from their laptops and flat screens and stereo systems, paused in the texting for just a moment though the phone would still be with them, somewhere. Maggie made a wide and cautious curve around them as they passed, perhaps recognizing more in them than she cared to see. Sometimes all the distractions in the world still aren’t enough.

  Earlier she had stopped back at the police lab to run the fingerprints, too curious about the dead blond girl or maybe empathetic—though empathy remained an emotion you wanted to keep on a real tight leash in her sort of job. Then she put the tapings under the stereomicroscope while she waited for AFIS, the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, to tell her something. Anything.

  Maggie had just identified a tuft of coarse gray fiber as wool when the toolbar’s magnifying glass icon turned to an arrow, indicating that the search had been completed.

  The system’s first choice had seemed promising at first, the same left-sloping loop shape, but the smaller details had not matched up. The next three weren’t even close. Maggie looked through the top ten, the top fifteen, still hoping, then accepted it. The girl wasn’t in the system.

  This was not surprising given the victim’s age. Either she hadn’t been caught yet or her only crime had been running away.

  Just before leaving the lab she’d called Missing Persons, getting the night shift people. No current reports that fit the girl’s description. Either she had been missing for quite some time and just turned up now, or no one had missed her yet. At least no one who felt strongly enough about it to go to the police department. So Maggie had turned out the lights and locked the lab door behind her. She didn’t know why she had even called Missing Persons—it wasn’t her job to identify this girl. It was Patty Wildwood’s job, the detective assigned to the case. Just as it would be Patty Wildwood’s job to find out who had killed her.

  But, forensic techs were supposed to be curious, right? And Maggie had no need to rush home, like the woman trotting past her toward the glass doors of the Terminal building and her usual rapid transit train. A secretary or accountant, ink stains on her fingertips, a bit of baby spit-up still sploshed onto the sleeve of her Windbreaker, worry lines etched into her forehead. Probably caught between a demanding boss and either a sitter who charged exorbitant rates for staying late or the reproving sighs of a husband who had had to feed the kids on his own.

  Maggie came to a stop in front of the casino entrance. A young cop hovered there, watching over those leaving with their winnings and those who might have arrived with mischief in mind. “How’s it going, Marty?”

  He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, his jacket open almost to his shoulders; the temperature lingered right at that crossroads of too hot with it on, too cold with it off and he ran one fleshy hand through his hair with the frustration of indecision. “Not bad, always kinda boring on a weeknight. What’s new with you?”

  “We found a dead girl today.”

  “Wish that was new.”

  “I’m going past Starbuck’s. You want anything?”

  “Nah, I’m good.” He pulled a small card out of his pocket and held it out to her. “This is my wife’s oral surgeon. I wrote her account and insurance numbers on there too. You sure you don’t mind doing this?”

  “No, not at all. Sometimes I spend a lot of hours sitting next to a phone.”

  “Thanks.” He gave her the hapless sigh of the overwhelmed. “’Cause I can’t get anywhere with these people.”

  “No worries. I had to deal with a lot of doctors’ offices with my parents, so I learned the drill.” She nodded a good night and moved on.

  Maggie waited to cross Ontario as a group of three sullen men next to her griped about the fickle nature of slot machines. The breeze felt cool on her face, the way she liked it, though it wouldn’t matter if it were snowing, raining, or heavy with humidity. She walked in all seasons, all conditions, each ramble getting a few feet longer with every passing night. The stoplight changed and she continued over the asphalt, past the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument (completed in 1894, to commemorate the Civil War), its spire reaching into the night sky.

  If nothing turned up on the dead girl Maggie would have to take the prints and information over for entry into NamUs, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.

  As a child Maggie had been irrationally afraid of winding up like that day’s victim—deceased in some way that would leave her unidentified. What if the school burnt down, leaving a pile of indistinguishable corpses? What if the mall ceiling collapsed? What if the bus carrying them all to a field trip veered off the road and scattered the students through a cornfield?

  She hadn’t been a morbid child, not at all, not overly concerned with safety—back when kids rode bikes without helmets and no one had ever heard of hand sanitizer—but it seemed like a very reasonable concern to her. Too young to obtain the wonderfully informative driver’s license, she had filled out the free information form that came with a new wallet and carried it with her around Cedar Point, just in case the Blue Streak should jump its tracks and drag them all into the rocky shore of Lake Erie. Had DNA sampling of children been common then, Maggie would certainly have bugged her parents to let her do it. Privacy concerns hadn’t worried her then and didn’t now. Maggie had never understood how anyone could believe that anyone else would be interested in spying on them, why they believed themselves to be that intrinsically interesting. She knew she was not. She knew that no one would ever be watching her, incredibly boring, staid Maggie; that was why she had to think of these things for herself. At least she had as a child; as an adult she no longer cared. Her aging parents had died—mercifully together—in a highway pile-up three months after Maggie’s thirty-second birthday, and her cell phone GPS would pinpoint her body so that someone could inform her brother.

  She passed the statue of Moses Cleaveland, who founded the city and somehow lost an a in the process, and said hello to the bundle of shirts, leggings, and sweaters that enveloped a woman named Sadie. Sadie nodded to her from her usual bench but said nothing. Some nights Sadie felt like talking, and some nights she didn’t.

  Maggie debated heading back to the loft, wondered if there might be something on her DVR worth the time spent fast-forwarding through commercials. She had a Sherlock Holmes retrospective, and the classic Death Wish, but still she kept walking.

  She could take another street, wander up West 6th Street if she wanted to, direct her meanderings one street over or down, except that those streets would look exactly like this one and thus it would be pointless. Maggie tried to avoid pointless.

  She passed the Old Stone Church, built in 1834, a graceful, peaceful structure dedicated to only the best principles. For Maggie, however, it brought to mind memories that were not graceful and certainly not peaceful. Five years previously a little boy’s body, abused and beaten, had been left on its steps. The child’s killer had chosen his dumping ground not to show disrespect but because he thought it would somehow comfort the child to be left in a space dedicated to love. Maggie remembered the tiny, cold, battered body, illuminated by the harsh glare of her camera’s flash in the hour before dawn. He had not seemed remotely comforted.

  The child’s killer, a registered sexual predator, had been out of jail for five days. Rehabilitation had not worked for him.

  Maggie wondered about t
he man who had killed the girl from the cemetery. What crimes comprised his history as he ramped up to brutal murder? And why couldn’t they—the cops, the courts, herself—get him off the street in time to save the girl’s life? Why did it seem that no matter how hard they worked, how hard she worked, it was never enough?

  The girl had been the second unidentified homicide victim in the past month, rather a lot for a short period. Cleveland wasn’t that big of a city. The other identified had been a man, three weeks ago. Maggie had also struck out on his fingerprints because somewhere along the line he’d been very hard on his own skin. The surface of his hands was worn smooth in most places, so cracked and dry in others that any patterns were useless mash-ups. She couldn’t locate enough distinct “points” of minutia for a computerized search. It seemed too consistent to be deliberate—usually if criminals used acid or sandpaper to wear down the skin some areas wound up more decimated than others and left scars or cuts, so she believed the guy just had really bad skin. Unlike the girl he had eaten a full meal, something with rice and a lot of curry in it.

  After two weeks as an unknown, however, his mother had come looking for him, armed with photos and dental records. He hadn’t shown up to bring her a new hat for Easter, a tradition he had not missed since his teen years except during periods of incarceration. There had been many, and yet he escaped prosecution more often than not—perhaps because each set of his prints in the database had been equally as poor, a collection of nothing and useless for identification purposes. Marcus Whitman Day’s record could fill a phone book–sized tome with tales of burglary, assault, armed robbery, drug dealing, witness tampering, and at least three murders, only one of which went to trial. He had been a one-man force of destruction, yet his mother had come looking for him.

  But a teenage girl who lacked the strength to harm a kitten remained unsought.

  Maggie reached the light at Superior, and began another circuit.

  Chapter 4

  Tuesday, 8:10 a.m.

  Clutter didn’t seem to bother homicide detective Patty Wildwood; she had file folders, cop equipment catalogs, reports, and scribbled notes on randomly sized sheets of paper in haphazard stacks from one end to the other of the battered metal desk in front of her. As they chatted Maggie found herself tempted to hitch one hip over its corner but resisted; if she caused a shift in any one of the small mountains, catastrophe might occur. “I struck out on the blond girl’s prints. The one from the cemetery?”

  “I haven’t forgotten. I don’t get too many fourteen-year-old girls coming across my desk,” Patty said grimly, and Maggie remembered that the tall blonde had two teenagers of her own at home.

  She went on. “But I spent some time with the tapings, and—”

  “Tapings?”

  “Lifting hairs and fibers and any other debris off the surface of the clothes with transparent tape.”

  “You still do that?”

  “That’s my job, Patty—I look at stuff. You know DNA can’t solve every crime in and of itself.”

  The detective held up both hands for a second before letting them drop to grasp a folder from her blotter. “Okay, sorry—I’m having a hard time keeping up this morning, had to get up early for a guy shot in an alley. We’re about to have a short meeting about that girl—want to sit in?”

  “Sure.” She followed Patty into a bare-bones conference room that seemed to double as a storage closet. Denny could spare her for a few minutes. It wasn’t as if she made a habit of hanging around the detective unit. In truth she rarely breached its doors if she could help it, because—

  Her ex-husband walked in and took a seat across from her.

  Rick’s hair had receded a tiny bit more and his waistband had expanded a tiny bit more, but otherwise seemed no different than he had every day of their four-year marriage.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked. Not hostile, just curious.

  “I ran the dead girl’s prints.” This didn’t make a lot of sense but he wouldn’t be that interested anyway. Instead he chatted about a new car purchase—living at the farthest edge of their credit, always, had been only one of many irritations during their cohabitation. As she listened politely she wondered, as always, why on earth she had married him in the first place and concluded, as always, that it had to be because he seemed to possess the traits she did not: decisiveness, unshakeable self-confidence, and a lack of inhibition.

  Unlike most men, Rick had no difficulty expressing his feelings, often loudly. The problems cropped up as soon as it became clear that all this stemmed from his deep and honest conviction that the world revolved around him. And so one morning, after she listened to a long diatribe in which he explained why his boss, the neighbor’s crying child, his own brother, and every member of every minority group on the planet should be put to death purely to save himself from future annoyances, then followed up by musing out loud whether he should go to the store or just for a drive while she did the housework and the laundry, she looked across the table and answered honestly and without inhibition: She didn’t care where he went, so long as it was away from her.

  Hence, a divorce. Not an easy one—if there is ever such a thing as an easy one—but at least a mercifully brief event that cost Maggie every cent she had and felt cheap at the price.

  So now she murmured some pleasantry about the new car. She didn’t say he looked good, though he did, and didn’t wait for him to say that she looked good because even if it were true, he wouldn’t notice. He had a new girlfriend, which made Maggie happy because it would keep him from ever asking her to take him back. But also because Rick was not a bad person, really.

  Two other detectives came in and sat. Patty pushed aside a carton filled with fresh forms in shrink-wrapped bundles and a few loose pairs of handcuffs and called the very unofficial meeting to order by clearing her throat. “Whatdawe got?”

  “Nothing from CIs,” one said. He had reddish curls and a snub nose.

  “Nothing in NamUs,” said the other, a tall guy with dark hair and a tie tack that looked like a Mustang emblem. He meant that the dead girl did not seem to match any of the missing person profiles entered into the national database, which Maggie already knew. She had checked herself. But the detective went on to say, “I called the dentist or odontologist or whatever, and she said the girl’s teeth were a, bad, and b, probably worked on in a foreign country. Something about the material used for a filling.”

  “That would explain the RN number,” Maggie said.

  The four detectives in the room gazed at her, blankly.

  “Ignore her,” Rick said, dangling a pair of the handcuffs, pendulum-like, from his index finger. “She does that.”

  “She was found wearing nothing but a long T-shirt,” Maggie reminded them. “All garments are supposed to have either the company name or an RN number on the label—the registered identification number assigned through the Federal Trade Commission. The tag in her T-shirt had a number, but it was six digits instead of five. I checked it online anyway, but of course it didn’t come back to a real registration. I assumed it was a knockoff—the garment industry still has a lot of shadowy corners—but maybe it’s foreign. I can call the FTC unit here, maybe they can help.”

  Patty shook her head, graying curls fanning out around a round face. “I should feel bad about you doing a chunk of my job for me. But—well, yeah, I don’t.”

  Patty had five current homicide cases on her desk, and who knew how many lingered from the previous year. She needed help. All of them did. If nothing turned up this meeting might be as far as the investigation into the girl’s murder went, and Maggie had no intention of accepting that without a fight. “Don’t thank me yet. I’m not sure what I’ll be able to find out if it’s from another country.”

  “A country with bad dental care.”

  “Or a country with good dental care, that she just couldn’t afford.”

  Patty raised one eyebrow, a trick Maggie had always envied.

 
Maggie said, “A lot of European countries have excellent dental care. There are actually travel agencies now that specialize in guiding Americans over to Russia or Hungary or places to get dental care because it’s so much cheaper than going to the dentist here.”

  “Tell me about it,” the redheaded detective groaned. “I’ve got two kids in braces. Why do you think I work so much overtime?”

  “But it only seems cheap to us because our hourly wages are so much higher. To the average former-Iron-Curtain resident, it’s still too much for them to pay.”

  Patty raised the other eyebrow.

  Maggie shrugged. “I’ve been helping an acquaintance with his wife’s osteonecrosis—her jawbone is disintegrating, and they were overwhelmed by the medical red tape—so I checked it out.”

  The redheaded detective took that moment to ask Rick about the latest March Madness upset—the Buckeyes were getting close. This wasn’t unusual, nor did it indicate a disinterest in the dead girl’s case. Detectives were all largely ADD-prone by nature.

  Maggie went on. “Plus, the coroner’s office gave me the tapings.”

  “Tapings?” the dark-haired detective asked.

  She defined the word again, then said: “They’re kind of interesting. I still don’t know who she is, but I think I can guess where she was killed.”

  Now he and Patty both raised eyebrows, and the other two stopped talking about basketball.

  “She wasn’t killed where she was found, obviously, because she’d have been covered with mud if she’d been stomped like that in the wet spring grass. Her T-shirt had a number of gray fibers on it; they were large fibers, averaging about forty microns, in a ring-spun yarn. I even found adhesive on some of the ends.” Rick opened his mouth, almost certainly to go back to the ball game topic, so she spoke more quickly: “Carpeting. It’s rare to find pure wool carpeting these days, when synthetics are so much more stain-resistant. You can still buy it, mostly for people with allergies and asthma, but this stuff is old, crumbling. Plus I found a number of dog hairs, pit bull, which someone concerned about allergies or asthma probably wouldn’t have around. Then there were paint flakes, a yellowish shade. I put them on the FTIR and they have point nine percent lead—lead-based paint.”