That Darkness

by Lisa Black

  But then Jack curbed his own internal sarcasm. Even a stupid dog knows how to bite—and Viktor had done his share of biting. Just ask the dead blond girl.

  Besides, his grandfather had warned him to look out for little guys, one of the many pieces of wisdom imparted while they tinkered in the land of Oz that was the old man’s basement—a wonderland of rusting tools, baby food jars full of mismatched screws, and enough sandpaper to refinish the floor in every room in the house. “The little guys always think they have something to prove.”

  Jack hadn’t put it together, not even when the forensic dentist mentioned the odd material used in the minimal dental work the victim had in her mouth. It wasn’t until that girl at the office—woman—had begun to talk about lead paint and vacant buildings and numbers in clothing. Not until then did Jack realize that, distracted with Brian Johnson, he hadn’t reviewed the tapes in a few days. An uncharacteristic slip-up for him.

  Now he watched the displaced Ukrainian dodge a Hyundai to reach the opposite curb. There Viktor turned toward downtown, took a sip of his coffee, and walked, swinging the bag slightly. He did not seem to notice Jack, who followed at a comfortable distance, and Jack would not lose Viktor. He knew where the guy was heading.

  The sun rose in visible increments to his right, turning the sky above the steel mill valley to a riot of pinks and purples and then yellows. A cool mist hung over it all, softening the purely industrial area until it resembled a fairy playground. From the left a robust breeze blew in from the lake and it seemed to make Viktor even more unsteady. Crossing Ontario at the end of the bridge presented another challenge, and the light took so long that Jack had to turn right or he would catch up with Viktor entirely. He didn’t want the guy to get a good look at his face, not that it would make much difference since Viktor wouldn’t know him from Adam.

  Jack turned back as the light changed and made it across just as the Ukrainian disappeared into the quiet alley through the Jacobs Field complex. Correction, the Progressive Field complex, Jack reminded himself. Names of structures, he thought, shouldn’t be allowed to change. Ever. Life seemed transitory enough without the formative constructions of a city having an identity crisis every couple of years.

  From there it took only another two blocks to reach the ratty apartment building off East 16th. A building just as that girl—woman—had described. As Jack had listened to her, every word had made the hairs on his neck stand at attention and caused his breath to lodge in his throat until they threatened to cut off his air. Built in 1975 and neglected almost from the start, used and abused until foreclosed on even before the real estate bubble burst. A new owner had begun renovations—one of the reasons Jack had been able to install the camera. He had pulled on a hard hat, strolled into the building, and had it installed in the third-floor hallway within ten minutes. Jack wasn’t much of a tech whiz, but such items didn’t require much tech. They came ready-touse now.

  He didn’t worry that it would be found. Chronically short on money, the new owner had carried out renovations at a snail’s pace over many years. This unpredictable source of employment did not foster any great feelings of loyalty among the sporadically recruited construction workers and they chose not to notice how the “vacant” building had a few tenants, none of whom paid rent. The enterprising Viktor had the third floor to himself.

  Jack did not follow Viktor inside; that would be too risky. He waited in the shadow of another building until Viktor left, about twenty minutes later. Only then did Jack enter—the lock on the main door rarely latched correctly, and the stairwells had no doors at all—walking quietly and carefully up to where the girls were—313. There he listened to their quiet shuffling and giggles for only a few minutes before moving on. Giggling meant they were all right. So far.

  There were eighteen of them, packed into an efficiency apartment. Eighteen girls with one bathroom and a microwave and windows that didn’t open. Jack knew all their names, which would be fake, and their ages (from eleven to nineteen), which probably weren’t. Just as with the last group, Viktor brought them food twice every day. They did not leave the apartment; Viktor had a large, keyed deadbolt on the door and the fire escape had long since fallen away from the window, but surely eighteen girls could have figured out how to break the window and call for help or take the hinges out of the door, had they wanted to. Obviously they didn’t want to, not yet. Thus Viktor could handle this large group without additional help, without employing a thug to stand guard. Unless the thug never left the apartment, or could do so without showing up on the hallway camera, and Jack didn’t bother to worry about either possibility. No point being paranoid—it would only slow you down.

  Jack hit the street for the four blocks to the police department, putting the final touches on his plan, examining it from all angles.

  The current group had arrived before the blond girl’s body had fully cooled. They had come to this country not in a shipping container or on a leaky shrimp boat, but via coach class on a United 787. The female students would be visiting the country for three weeks, Customs had been informed, as part of a graduation reward program sponsored by the Russian department of education. Viktor had correct-looking paperwork done on official-looking letterhead, all of which had been faked on the Epson printer in his tiny loft. It amazed Jack how much could be accomplished with official-looking paper, but he couldn’t complain. He had gotten a lot done that way himself.

  And the girls had been thoroughly prepped, somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic. They didn’t look like street kids or desperate, illegal immigrants. They had been scrubbed and dressed appropriately, in simple but pleasing fashion. They carried notebooks and purses but no cell phones—and isn’t that a refreshing change from the constantly tweeting US teenagers, the airport officials probably thought. Besides, schoolgirls wouldn’t be able to afford global roaming. They were fresh-faced and quite genuinely excited even while disciplined enough to be quiet and fairly calm and to do nothing that might call attention to themselves. Customs had ushered them right through.

  Jack knew all this because he had watched them arrive yesterday morning at Cleveland-Hopkins.

  Tomorrow, perhaps today, Viktor would begin his deliveries. The girls would be sold, one or two at a time, most to pimps, some to individuals who were lonely or unbalanced and, almost always, brutal. But the younger ones would not know that yet, still believed they would be assigned work as nannies or seamstresses; the older ones, the ones who probably had a good idea what they would be in for, still thought they could handle it. It would all be worth it, eventually, when they found a real job or a sugar daddy or even a wealthy American husband. And they had no money, didn’t speak English, and carried fake passports, so where would they go if they escaped from the apartment? Better to wait, hang in, and hope against hope that it would all turn out all right. Eventually.

  Last week Jack had wondered if they might be right. Whether they were turned out here or in their home countries, would it really make a difference to their quality of life? If he took Viktor out of the picture, another Viktor would promptly fill the void. There would always be more Viktors, more Brian Johnsons, more Marcus Days, more everyone. Jack wasn’t crazy and he didn’t harbor crazy ideas of what one man could accomplish. Should he cut off the conduit for these girls, dash even the faint, unrealistic hope of a better life for which they had the guts to cast themselves into hell?

  But then the dead blond girl had been found.

  When Jack reviewed the hallway tapes, the tapes he had ignored while busy with Brian Johnson, he saw Viktor enter the apartment and leave four hours later. He carried an oversize duffel bag, his thin legs struggling under the burden. Viktor hadn’t had the strength to tote the body more than the six hundred feet or so to the Erie Street cemetery, or perhaps leaving her in a cemetery made sense to him in some superstitious or ironic way. A day later when Jack and Riley had been assigned to back up Patty in the investigation and handed the victim’s photograph, he
recognized her immediately as one of Viktor’s previous arrivals.

  The hallway tapes showed him what had happened, as clearly as if the images came with captions. The girls had been escorted to their new lives in groups of three and four until, according to Jack’s head count, one remained. Either Viktor liked to skim from his shipments, keep one back for himself, or something had gotten out of hand. All those times he’d cowered in the presence of stronger men came back to him and finally he had someone smaller and slighter than himself, someone locked behind a deadbolt to which only Viktor had the key, and the girl would have come to the horrible realization that the apartment was not a safe place at all. Not when alone there with Viktor.

  The girl—Jack could have figured out her name from the student visa record, but that would be largely pointless since the name on her passport would certainly be a false one—had died of “massive internal trauma.” The internal part meant Viktor had been smart enough or lucky enough to keep the bleeding on the inside of her body. It minimized the cleanup. He wouldn’t want pools of blood left in the apartment to tip off the next group.

  Jack’s only consolation, his only apology to the dead girl, was that he had not had any idea of Viktor’s tendencies. He had found the little weasel only by physically following him home after he had made a delivery to one of his clients, a violent predator Jack had been studying after hearing his history from one of Riley’s pals. Viktor seemed a flunky, a cog in a large machine. But now in one fell swoop Viktor had not only turned himself into one of Jack’s clients but had elevated himself to the top of the list—even, temporarily, ahead of Maria Stein. But only temporarily.

  Maria Stein remained Jack’s ultimate goal, as well as the spring from which his need for this vocation had welled. He had traced her through three cities and seven years, all the while honing his skills, his techniques, until he learned to mix a highball, knew where to buy plastic tarps wholesale, and could run a name through both the city and state databases without leaving a digital footprint. He had become a master of his craft, and all because of Maria Stein.

  But for now, focus, he told himself. Back to Viktor.

  Jack could, of course, alert the police. He could tell them what he knew, see Viktor convicted and sent to jail. That would remove him from society, Jack’s good deed for the year. Except that the only real proof Jack had would be the illegally obtained tape from the hallway, easily excluded by any defense attorney capable of breathing. Plus Jack would have to explain who he was and why he had been stalking Viktor, and that would curtail his future endeavors. The court system did what it could as well as any reasonable man might expect, Jack felt, but only when it could hang on to the criminal in the first place. Viktor Boginskaya probably wasn’t Viktor Boginskaya at all, making it too easy for him to disappear into another identity in another place.

  No, better that Jack deal with the problem directly.

  Chapter 7

  Tuesday, 11:05 a.m.

  Though their offices sat a scant three blocks from the Justice Center, only on rare occasions did Maggie have cause to get involved with the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency. Cleveland was not considered a hugely popular international destination so instead of hordes of tourists, its visitors arrived to visit family or for business purposes and did not usually get involved in crimes. Now she shoved her weight against the glass door and nearly fell onto the gleaming linoleum of the Anthony J. Celebrezze Federal Building, clutching her manila file and a twelve-point-six ounce bag of milk chocolate M&Ms. She waited until the receptionist finished a call, then asked for ICE investigator Matthew Freeman.

  The receptionist punched a few numbers with a disinterested air, repeated Maggie’s name into the receiver. Then she looked up. “He wants to know if you brought the standard bribe.”

  Maggie held up the M&Ms.

  “I’d better get a cut,” the receptionist said into the receiver, and not in a kidding way. Then she directed Maggie to the elevator bank.

  Five minutes later Maggie was seated across from Freeman, at a long counter filled with scanners and computer monitors. A line of windows along the wall gave her a terrific view of the lake. Farther up the counter two women sat and chatted about an upcoming wedding shower while clicking command after command with wireless mouses, their eyes never leaving their screens.

  Freeman’s right hand drifted toward his own mouse, but then he called it back and offered Maggie his full attention. Tall, black, and somber, he never seemed to gain an ounce despite passing thirty and refusing to eat anything defined as “good for you.”

  “Maybe you have a tapeworm,” Maggie suggested.

  “I promise I’ll get tested.” The candy disappeared into a desk drawer; no attempt was made to share. Matthew Freeman took the process of interagency bribery seriously. “What’s so pressing you came all the way up the street in person instead of sending an e-mail? I was beginning to think you were only an electronic signature and not a living being.”

  Maggie explained the case of the dead and possibly foreign blond girl. “The T-shirt would indicate she recently came here as a tourist or visitor. If she meant to go to school, she would have had a student visa, right? And if she came as a visitor for less than ninety days, she would have just a passport. The coroner’s office estimated her to be about fourteen—which would make it unlikely that she was coming to school.”

  Freeman agreed. “Who travels from a foreign land just to go to high school in Cleveland? College, yes, but high school? Unless she was some kind of genius—or music prodigy. Maybe you should check with the orchestra, or CIM.”

  “I already did,” Maggie said, referring to the Cleveland Institute of Music. “They aren’t missing anyone. So if we assume she went to the US embassy in her home country to get the visa passport, is there a way to search those prints? Are they stored in a database we can access?”

  “You’re getting a little free with the ‘we’ there, baby doll. But your problem is the victim’s age. You said she’s about fourteen?”

  “That’s the coroner’s estimation. Though there’s a slight possibility she could be in her mid to later teens and yet presents younger due to persistent malnutrition. But it will be a few days before they can make that determination.”

  “Well, whether she had a student visa or just a passport, we generally don’t fingerprint children under sixteen.”

  Maggie was silent for a moment. “That sucks.”

  “Sorry, kiddo. Don’t think you’re getting the M&Ms back, though.”

  “I’m not completely sold on her being a student or visitor anyway. If she came with a student group, why hasn’t anyone missed her for the past two days? I’m thinking she emigrated here, and has been here for a while. She could have run away from home a while ago so that there’s no recent missing person report on her. Or it’s sitting on a desk in some other city.”

  Freeman got up and filled two mugs with coffee from a pot brewing in the corner, letting her reason through the possibilities. Then he slid one across the counter before retaking his seat. The two ladies moved on to plans for the bachelorette party.

  Maggie asked, “What about immigration records? I know there’s no guarantee her prints would even be in there, especially if she’s been in the country for a while. I worked on a case last month for Missing Persons where a twelve-year-old went on walkabout with her twenty-five-year-old boyfriend. I wanted to get her prints put into NamUs, in case she turned up at another crime scene, either as victim or perpetrator, maybe doing burglaries with the boyfriend. But NamUs couldn’t enter her because she wasn’t a suspect in a crime and she wasn’t an unidentified body. Anyway, my point is that whoever took that girl’s prints when she entered the country only rolled her right thumbprint. So unless she left exactly her right thumb at a crime scene, we’d be out of luck anyway.” She sighed. “I had hoped it might save a lot of time if I just assume this victim is an immigrant and come right to the source.”

  “That sourc
e being me.”

  “You are the font of all wisdom, oh great one.”

  “You already gave me chocolate, the flattery isn’t necessary. But you have the same problem. Depending on how little this girl was when she came here, you can’t be positive there will be any prints out there for you to find.”

  “Can we try?”

  He sipped. “Of course we can try. Don’t hold your breath, though.”

  “How about facial-recognition software? Every passport has a photo. You don’t even have to tell me about the super high-tech scanning programs you have, or what the airport cameras are doing while we’re dragging our bags off the carousel. Just take this girl’s picture and do what you can with it.”

  He held out a hand. Maggie passed over the printed five-by-seven the coroner’s office had given her.

  “I’ll give it a shot, but it’s harder when the eyes are closed and the face is slack. Again, holding breath, bad idea.” He studied the picture as if it were the sports page, gazing over the rim of his coffee cup. “Awfully little girl to have no one looking for her.”

  “I’m looking,” Maggie told him.

  It took Maggie’s great good friend AFIS a total of ten minutes to hand her the name of the unidentified black male she had just visited at the coroner’s office. Brian Johnson, B/M, DOB 7-25-92. No known aliases or nicknames, which she found unusual. Out of curiosity she looked him up in the report management system. Last known address on East 115th, a long list of associates (most of whom had Alert! flags, indicating more arrests and warrants), an only slightly shorter list of children he had fathered and still owed support for. One of the baby mamas had obtained a restraining order against him five years previously; she had disappeared shortly afterward. No mention of what had happened to the child. A warrant for assault had been requested in the case of a man with burns. A BOLO had been issued regarding an assault on a woman named Brenda. Brian Johnson, Maggie concluded, would not be sorely missed. There existed a long roster of folks who would have been willing to assist his move on to the next spectral plane.