That Darkness

by Lisa Black

  She snapped the lock as efficiently as his grandfather would have and opened the door without hesitation. Every cop in the room watched. Some from a casual distance, but they watched. Jack stood right behind her shoulder.

  The cabinet space had been packed almost to bursting with what first appeared to be a myriad of colors. Pink, purple, brown, black—only at second glance did it separate into a jumble of clothing, shoes, and other items. Maggie took a quick picture and then began to excavate. One of the first things removed turned out to be a passport with a picture of a small blond girl who looked very similar to their victim from the cemetery.

  “Katya Novikov,” Maggie read. “At least I think that’s what it says.” It had a smear of blood on the corner. She handed it to Patty, then turned back to the cabinet and pulled out sweaters, T-shirts, a gold necklace, two paperbacks printed in a foreign language, a small, cheap photo album, a miniature teddy bear, half its fur worn smooth. Beyond that, more of the same.

  “Must be stuff from past girls,” the Vice cop said. “Not just our one victim.”

  “But why lock it up?” Patty asked. “It’s not like it’s valuable, just personal stuff. He might have been holding it for some of the girls who came through here before, but why wouldn’t they have taken it with them when they left?”

  “Maybe they didn’t leave—any more than Katya did.” Maggie held up a yellow camisole with a red-brown smear along its hem. Then she gestured to the inside of the cabinet door, where the imprint of two bloodied fingers could be clearly seen.

  “That’s all trophies?” Patty asked.

  “Kind of indiscriminate to be trophies,” Maggie said, continuing to excavate, with Jack now kneeling at her elbow. “He could have stuffed it in here simply because he didn’t know what else to do with it.”

  “How many—”

  “It will take me a while to go through all this, see if I can make a guess. Then we can go to ‘touch’ DNA on the clothes and objects, if we can work around the budget. That will give us an idea how many different people we’re talking about here. Might not be worth it, though, if we don’t have any subjects to compare it to. Other than Katya.”

  Her words had been very matter-of-fact but cut off as she pulled out a loose snapshot of three toddlers in snowsuits, grinning at the camera, adorable children standing in a field of pure white. She stared at the print, no doubt wondering which of these beautiful creatures eventually came to be imprisoned in a human stable somewhere in a foreign land. Her fingers trembled slightly.

  Jack put a hand on her shoulder.

  She glanced at him, startled but then averting her eyes with their sudden film of water.

  “Yeah,” he said. “It sucks.”

  This was a gesture he hadn’t intended to make, but told himself it might not be a bad idea to get Maggie Gardiner in his mental corner. He might need her in the future—either in the equation or out of it.

  He removed his hand and she emptied the rest of the cabinet, storing the contents carefully in a paper bag.

  The Vice cop said, “If Viktor was farming these girls out, maybe Johnson was one of his clients.”

  “Maybe,” Patty replied doubtfully. “But Johnson never had girls. He stuck with the trade he knew—the drug and robbery business.”

  “Personal use,” Jack suggested. Perhaps connecting all three people would not be so bad after all. He might be able to work with this.

  “He certainly went through them quickly enough,” Riley said. “And violently. He put two in the hospital that I know of.”

  Patty said, “Johnson’s girlfriends—and I use the term loosely—were all from his neck of the woods, women he knew. Since when is he interested in some skinny import?”

  “He was looking at jail time for Brenda Guerin,” Jack said.

  Riley said, “So he thinks he should start picking girls with no local ties. Ones who were never officially here in the first place, so they can’t go crying to the cops when he beats the shit out of them.”

  Maggie Gardiner, Jack noticed, did not appear convinced. She closed up her paper bag and said, “Then who killed Johnson?”

  “Viktor, maybe,” Patty thought out loud. “Johnson was released from police custody on Monday night. After that, no one admits seeing him—though his friends wouldn’t admit to breathing unless presented with incontrovertible evidence of same.”

  Exactly how Jack had hoped that line of inquiry would go. For once Johnson’s friends were telling the truth, and no one, least of all the cops, felt inclined to believe them.

  “Then who killed Viktor?” Maggie persisted.

  “We may never know,” Jack intoned solemnly, and prayed it would prove true.

  Chapter 12

  Wednesday, 10:55 p.m.

  Dillon Shaw checked his watch. A relatively early hour, yet he felt a nagging sense of urgency. People could no longer smoke in bars but the air still seemed hazy with it, the fumes wafting up from the clothing of the people around him and spilling in from the sidewalk outside every time someone opened the door. He would need a cancer stick himself pretty soon; he’d gotten out of work early and had now spent more time inside than he felt comfortable with. He didn’t like to stay in one place very long.

  The food in the place wasn’t much to speak of and he had a feeling he wouldn’t want to see the kitchen it came from. A CD jukebox threw out some hard-edged tunes from the corner, loud but not loud enough to drown out the various conversations taking place among the dark upholstery. There weren’t even that many—it seemed no one in the place had much to say that hadn’t already been said. Dillon debated whether to head home to the room he rented from a friend—well, acquaintance—and spend some quality time with his PlayStation, but then his gaze would return to the girl at the end of the bar and he would give himself another ten minutes.

  She was not any sort of raving beauty, a scrawny frame and no fashion sense, but with a mop of brown hair that just touched her shoulders and eyes with possibilities. At least he thought there might be possibilities. It was difficult to tell from ten feet away, with human beings and the ghost smoke and the dim lighting in between. This wasn’t the kind of bar that had mirrored paneling behind the bottles, just drywall, so he couldn’t watch her reflection while appearing to gaze straight ahead in a contemplative manner. He didn’t want to stare right at her, didn’t want to give anyone—for instance the bartender—a reason to remember him. Though the bartender looked like a guy who’d be cool, who knew whose side he was on, in whose camp his gender planted him.

  Except when he got tired of Dillon nursing a single beer for over an hour. The bartender now crossed beefy arms and asked, “Another one?” even though four inches of liquid still remained in the glass.

  The girl—woman, she had to be at least thirty—drained her beer. This also wasn’t the kind of bar that served appletinis. She pulled her purse forward and rummaged through its contents.

  “No, man.” Dillon said. He, too, pulled out his wallet and selected enough bills to pay for the drink plus a reasonable tip—not too big, not too small, another reason not to remember his presence that evening. He did this all with a relaxed unhurriedness, every movement as insignificant as the next, all the while staying aware of the girl at the end of the bar.

  As she stood up and shrugged into a sweater he headed for the men’s room at the back, past her. If she were there to pick up men, and there could be no reason for a woman to be in a bar except to pick up men, that sweater did not help her case. Fuzzy and Pepto-Bismol pink, pills of white fluff spotting it like freckles, it looked like something a grandmother would wear. A normal grandmother, that is, not his, who had been a bitch on wheels. And he did not say that with affection.

  For a second he didn’t think she’d look up, so he stepped a little too close in the narrow aisle, stomping one foot nearly on top of hers, so that she gave him a little frown. Stop invading my personal space, asshole. He shifted his weight away and continued past her, watching out of t
he corner of his eye as she relaxed and continued, fastening a button, picking up her purse. Just a glance, but it had been nearly enough. He had to be able to picture their faces. He had to be able to imagine what those faces would look like scrunched up with fear, what they would look like racked with dry sobs, what they would look like begging him not to do what he was about to do.

  He reached the men’s room, pivoted, waited a moment, watching the swatch of pink flash as the outside door closed behind the girl.

  He followed. Slowly, casually, again every movement as insignificant as the next. Push open the door, wind through the unofficial smoking section on the sidewalk outside. Turn right because she had turned right.

  She walked up the street, dodging a homeless guy and a stray but friendly dog. Traffic had become minimal in the late hour, but the streetlamps worked and lights blazed in the windows of the occasional residence and even closed businesses. A normal, calm evening. No reason for her to be nervous.

  He wondered where she was going, how much time he had. She might get on a bus; then he would simply board as well and get off at her stop, start over. He kept a supply of bills and small change in his pocket for just such an event. If she suddenly stopped to unlock a car he would have to say something, try to get her attention, get her back on the sidewalk and near an alley or storefront alcove. If it didn’t work, it didn’t work.

  If she had planned to get a cab she would have called from the bar and had it pick her up there. Besides, ordinary people didn’t take cabs in Cleveland unless you were coming from the airport. No one he knew, anyway.

  He didn’t know where she might be heading because he didn’t know anything about her. Dillon didn’t stalk his victims. He didn’t pick them out beforehand, didn’t follow them around for any length of time, didn’t chat them up in the bar or restaurant or theater because he didn’t want to be noticed by anyone, least of all the victim. He didn’t want witnesses to remember him and the girl talking together on the night in question. He had been blessed with an ordinary face with ordinary features. An artist’s sketch of him could resemble any one of an army of white males from twenty to forty years of age, brown eyes, no facial hair. He made the most of this advantage by dressing, acting, speaking in a way to remain utterly unmemorable.

  He certainly didn’t want to give the women time to notice the mole by his eye or the silver ring on his finger or the Band-Aid on his wrist where he had gotten careless with a soldering iron at work. He had learned this lesson the hard way when one of his first victims had remembered that he had melted slashes on the wristband of his jacket (from a welding torch) and the exact length of his sideburns. That had led to his first incarceration. He had served five years in hell and all because he had chatted the girl up first, talked her into leaving the bar with him. It made things easy at the time but he’d paid—oh, how he’d paid—for it later. So he didn’t try the smooth approach anymore. Now he grabbed them quickly, from behind if possible, and shoved them into someplace dark before they could get a good look at him.

  The girl continued to walk, and he wasn’t crazy about the way she was doing it, swinging her arms. Almost mannish. She seemed steady enough—not drunk, which could be good or bad. A little tipsy made them easier to handle, but he didn’t like it if they were so drunk they didn’t know enough to be afraid. He didn’t like it if they didn’t cry enough. He didn’t like it if they cried too much, because that got boring. He hated having to stand around waiting for someone to get a hold of herself. He liked a good scream but had to be careful about that, too, for obvious reasons.

  As he walked he thought about his last one. She had been fun. That had been nearly two months before, only a week after the second-last. It cracked Dillon up how on shows like Criminal Minds the guys always had some incredibly precise plan or schedule that they had to keep, they had to attack exactly every twenty-two days and sixteen hours or some bullshit like that. Who works like that in the real world? Real men were opportunists. Dillon took a girl when he felt like it, when a likely one appeared, when he was bored, when the streets were quiet and deserted (like tonight) with only one or two cars moving along the entire road. He had to find a victim with a face he could picture in the many contortions he would force it to take on.

  And he couldn’t picture much with this victim.

  He still didn’t like the way she walked. It didn’t do much for him. And her hair was kind of dull.

  By the time she abruptly turned and walked into a building—an office building, perhaps she was meeting a husband or boyfriend or something after work—he had already decided to head home and pull out the PS2 instead. He had just made the seventh level yesterday and had some ideas about how to get to the eighth.

  Dillon walked past the building without even glancing inside to see where the girl had gone.

  He didn’t notice the car rolling slowly up the street behind him, didn’t give a thought to the background noise of the engine’s purr. Why would he? He hunted other people. Other people didn’t hunt him.

  Chapter 13

  Wednesday, 9:30 p.m.

  As Dillon Shaw had entered a bar near Hamilton Avenue, Maggie Gardiner completed another circuit in front of Tower City, the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, and the statue of Moses Cleaveland. The sky had sprinkled earlier and the sidewalks were still damp, the air feeling warmer than its real temperature due to the added humidity. The Old Stone Church sat thoughtful and gracious, unable to do anything about the monster that had left his tiny victim on its steps. That monster had slipped out of town and despite a world-wide BOLO, remained at large, doubtless leaving a trail of small but unconnected bodies somewhere across the country.

  The idea ate at her, but she could, of course, do nothing about it. Maybe Charles Bronson could have, but not Maggie Gardiner. All Maggie could do was think, and she needed to do it logically. Brian Johnson had been involved in criminal enterprises. Viktor—not his real name, but what the group of girls called him—had been a supplier for criminal enterprises. It seemed eminently reasonable that their paths might have crossed at some point, that they might have yet another person engaged in criminal enterprises in common between them. Cleveland wasn’t that big of a city.

  Of course they might also have nothing to do with each other, and the similar methods of murder were a coincidence. After all Johnson had been found in an alley while someone had apparently tried to push Viktor into the river. And Cleveland was a pretty big city.

  But she felt sure they had been, shortly before their deaths, in the same place. Maybe not together or even known to each other, but the same place. And if they could find this place, see who else hung out there, the investigation might take a great leap forward.

  Maggie paused at the casino to give Marty an update on the struggle to get both of his wife’s doctors’ offices talking to each other, but had to break off when he went inside to handle a fight between two senior citizens over a particularly lucky slot machine. Maggie moved on.

  However, this mysterious location still might not have anything to do with their deaths. Men like Johnson died all the time, and surely Viktor’s line of work did not make for longevity. She was trying to reason without sufficient facts.

  She passed the monument, but decided to break with her usual path and stroll up Euclid for a block or two. She passed the Chocolate Bar and glanced inside, wondering how good a chocolate martini would really taste. She adored chocolate, but certain flavors don’t do well translated into different mediums. Case in point: coffee jelly beans.

  Just on the other side of the iron railing sat a gray-haired man in a blazer, speaking to a fresh-faced blond girl with hair to her waist, taking advantage of the prematurely warm spring night to opt for the quieter and less claustrophobic outside tables. The girl seemed oblivious to the waiters and drinkers around her, to the neon sign blaring overhead. Maggie hoped to hell she was the man’s daughter and not his date. The vulnerabilities of the young.

  This made her think abo
ut the girl in the cemetery. Viktor killed her, then someone killed Viktor. Wow. Thanks for the help, dude.

  The idea stopped her in front of the Arcade. Maybe Viktor’s death had been an act of revenge. But the girl died first, then Johnson, then Viktor. Maybe Johnson had killed her with Viktor, and someone took revenge on them both. That made perfect sense. Except that she had no reason to think the girl and Johnson had ever encountered each other, no reason to think that the girl had more than one attacker, and no reason to think that the girl had anyone in the country who felt strongly enough about her death to seek vengeance. She hadn’t been here for very long.

  No, more likely that Viktor and Johnson had both been killed due to some criminal falling out, and Viktor’s murder of Katya remained a separate incident.

  Still, the twin themes of justice and vengeance circled each other in her mind. They were not the same, but had the same basis and, often, the same goals.

  Maggie had turned around at East 9th and now reached 4th. To her right across the street the older man and the girl no longer sat outside the Chocolate Bar. To her left the five-hundred-foot stretch of East 4th blazed with neon, fresh flowers both potted and hanging, and strings of lightbulbs stretched across the brick pavers. Summer had begun in Cleveland, at least so far as the restaurants were concerned. The eateries had some competition from the restaurant row along West 6th, closer to her loft, but East 4th did form a nicer view. The street had been closed to traffic, creating a cozy spot where chefs at House of Blues, La Strada, and Michael Symon’s Lola tried to outdo each other in a frenzy of gourmet competition. Maggie turned up the street, and not because she was hungry.

  House of Blues posted their menu in a window next to the hostess’s booth, where the impossibly skinny girl talked up an upcoming concert to a quartet of boys. Maggie slipped behind her to check the menu. Sweet potato fries, and shrimp but no scallops. She didn’t see any mention of almonds anywhere.