by Tom Bouman
Dizzy cut west on a packed-mud path. We swept aside branches until we came to a dark residential block sandwiched between the train tracks and a supermarket parking lot far below. Two of the houses were boarded up, leaving one abutting the railroad tracks, fenced in. It was the dull green of a lily pad, and looked like you could tear the porch away with your bare hands. Two small Japanese cars were parked in a narrow driveway alongside it. We walked the other way, through a narrow side lawn and into the back, where a garage stood, one lone light burning in a second-floor apartment’s window. From the garage’s open door, heavy metal screamed into the night and a lank, shirtless man sat in contemplation of what looked like a Triumph Roadster from the 1980s. He raised a hand at us. We clumped up the steps of the main house and into a faded floral kitchen.
“Nice place,” I said.
“This? Ain’t mine. No, nothing going on in my place but picking up the mail.” Dizzy opened the refrigerator, leaned in, and, finding nothing he wanted, closed it again. “I’d give you a beer if we had any, but looks like Max cleaned us out. He don’t stop once he starts.”
“Max?”
“He owns this place. His ma, actually. Let me go see if his ass is up right now.” Dizzy disappeared into a dim living room where a television bounced off the walls.
Dizzy, Max, and whoever was in the garage. To get in and out with the girl, safe, it might be three-on-one. I made a quick set of cascading decisions. I’d spirit her away as quietly as I could, then call Binghamton PD. If that didn’t pan out, I’d simply pull my badge and show my weapon and walk out into the night. If they didn’t want to let us do that, I’d put myself in front of the girl.
When Dizzy returned to the kitchen, I looked at him for weapons, but his shirt was too loose. He did have in his hand a small, ornate box. He tapped it on the tabletop as we sat, saying nothing. Max, whoever he was, stayed in the other room.
“So,” he said. “So quarrying pays.”
“Fuckin A.”
“How much does quarrying pay?”
“Got a couple hundred,” I said.
“Show me.”
“Where’s your girl?” I said.
After a silence, he rose from the table. “Come on out back.”
We crossed the backyard. The man in the garage didn’t look up as we passed his door, but reached over and turned his boom box up several notches. I saw no weapons near him other than tools. We took an exterior staircase to the second story. Trees crowded in on all sides, reaching onto the small deck, blotting out the city. The door was padlocked from the outside. Dizzy unlocked it and let us in.
We stood in a narrow room. A kitchenette occupied one corner, and two couches made an L in another. There were two doors side by side, closed, a line of yellow light under one. My eye was drawn to a framed photograph of Pope John Paul II.
“Take a seat,” Dizzy commanded. He tapped on one of the doors and disappeared inside.
The door opened and he reemerged. He sat on the opposite couch, pulled a small pistol from his waistband, and rubbed his eyes with a thumb and forefinger.
“Go on in,” he said. “But if you don’t have two hundred . . .” He glanced down at the pistol where it rested beside him on the arm of the couch. “I hear anything I don’t like in there . . .” Once again, the pistol. “Get to it.”
I crossed the distance to the bedroom door, turned the knob, and went inside. The girl wasn’t Penny. Wasn’t old enough to be, just a kid sitting in her underwear on the edge of an unmade twin bed. Clouded eyes sunk into an acne-scarred face, a nose stud that reminded me of my dead wife, an eyebrow ring that didn’t. She had a hand-knit winter hat perched on the back of her head, a small rainbow in the saddest room I had ever seen.
“Nice beard,” she said. You could still hear the teenager.
“Get dressed,” I said. “Quick as you can.” I showed her my Wild Thyme badge, which she gazed at for some time before pulling a pair of jeans out from under the bed. When she was all but dressed I asked her, “Where are your shoes?” She shrugged, and I shrugged, and I took out the .40. “Stay behind me,” I said.
As I moved through the doorway, pistol hanging out of sight behind my thigh, Dizzy stood. When he saw the girl leave the room, his face grew puzzled, and he said, “Hey.” He went for his pistol but knocked it to the floor. Reaching over the sofa’s arm for the gun, he called out, “Bobby! Bobby!” The girl backed into her room. I leapt forward, put a knee on Dizzy, and pounded at him with the butt of the .40. He took the first few on his arm, but I landed one on his head with a thud that traveled up my wrist. He slumped into the sofa, eyes open but unseeing. Footsteps came up the staircase outside. I took a marble lamp from an end table, ripping the cord from its socket with a blue snap of electricity. As the mechanic came through the door, I laid the lamp across the back of his head. He tumbled over a low wooden coffee table and fell face-first onto the floor, the lower half of his body still on the table. Slowly, his legs followed the rest of him and thudded down. I pocketed Dizzy’s automatic.
I called to the girl, but more people were coming up the stairs. I stepped on the mechanic’s neck where he lay and pointed the .40 at the door.
As the door burst open, I called out, “Police!” and told the man entering to drop his weapon. It was the older bald fellow from the bars, two hands wrapped around an automatic and a badge dangling from a lanyard around his neck.
He also yelled, “Police!”
I must have yelled it back about twenty times as I raised my hands, .40 and all. The Rotarian was followed by a slender black man in baggy street clothes, and the woman from the Georgian who had seemed so interested in me, now oddly sober. After the room had settled, I kept my free hand high and slowly laid the .40 on the table, followed by Dizzy’s weapon.
“My badge is in my left inside pocket,” I said. “There’s at least one other man—”
“We got everyone.”
The black cop reached into my jacket and had a look at the Wild Thyme badge, then handed it to the older white man and holstered his gun. “I’m Detective Oates. You met Detective Larkins at the bar,” he said, gesturing to the woman. “This is Lieutenant Sleight. We don’t know you.” I showed him that my ID matched my badge.
Larkins pushed past us and led the barefoot girl out. I realized then that at the bar, she’d probably felt my weapon through my jacket.
“So you on the job up here?” Oates asked. “Help me understand what you’re doing.”
“Jay,” said the older cop.
“Fine, he’s yours.” Oates went into the girl’s room.
I explained to Sleight that I had spoken to a Binghamton desk sergeant. I also told them in a general way what had led me into town.
Sleight nodded and with a faint smile said, “I know who you are.”
Oates emerged, and said on his way out, “Whatever you think you’re doing, it’s done. Lieutenant, can you escort Officer Farrell downtown for a statement while I handle his mess?”
Sleight stepped toward me and said, “Do you mind?”
My foot was still on the back of the mechanic’s neck. The lieutenant peered down into the man’s slack face. “You don’t know who this is?”
“Should I?”
“Bobby Chase, used to be Endicott Fire Department. Got put on leave last year for using, never went back. Bouncer now, dealer. I expect by now he’s done some things he regrets. Shame. I know his dad.” He gave me a meaningful look. “I’ve met his cousins too.”
I eased off Chase, dumbstruck.
We walked to the door while a patrolman crouched by Dizzy. As we passed the garage, Sleight leaned in and switched off the music. I followed him through the narrow side yard, the sound of sobbing getting louder as we made our way out front. On the porch steps, the man I figured for Max sat with his eyes closed, his head resting against the rotting newel base. He was a big one, wearing urban clothes that increased his size. Beneath the bottoms of his too-long shorts, his fat legs were covered
in bug bites. A hefty older woman sat splayed on the porch floor in a white nightgown. I guessed she was in her seventies, and she was handcuffed. It was she who was crying, and though she said no words, the sound she made had a foreign heaviness to it.
“You should see the package she kept in her pantie drawer,” Sleight said. “Keep this town on the nod for a month.”
We walked around the corner, got into Lieutenant Sleight’s late-model SUV, and pulled away.
“Listen, about tonight,” I said.
“You queered us,” Sleight admitted. “We had plans to work Kostis. He’s weak and it’d be his second time in. More years, more reason to talk. You showed up and it got weird. We wanted to take him away quietly, away from the house. Some rough customers there. The only chance he’d talk is if they didn’t know he’d been brought in. Now the whole city knows.”
“Did you know the girl was in there?”
“No. She was a surprise too.”
We passed through late-night downtown easily and parked in the ground floor of a massive garage. From there, we crossed the street and up a flight of concrete stairs to a broad platform. We entered the municipal building through glass doors and a uniformed policeman waved us past the metal detector. There was a world-weary buzz moving through the Binghamton police headquarters at night, and everywhere we walked smelled like coffee and disinfectant. We ended up in a small office with a window that looked out on the Detective Division. He closed the door.
“So, you’re after the Chase girl,” Sleight said.
“Pellings, yeah.”
“Yeah, Pellings. I’ve been thinking about that.”
“Is that your problem? Aren’t you Vice?”
“No. I loan myself out to Special Investigations every now and then because they think I look like a john. The wife would hate it if she knew. But I’m not special; I’m just an investigator. Homicide and Unsolved Crimes.” Sleight shook his computer mouse back and forth and his screen came to life.
“Unsolved Crimes,” I said.
“You’re there for the families when they call. You keep an eye out, listen for echoes, try to make deals when you can. Open things up wider.”
“Echoes,” said I.
“Yeah, echoes. This thing on the East Side is just like that one North Side case that’s still open. How are they connected? When we found Abby Chase, it wasn’t going to be long before it was in the papers. ‘Dead hooker found by railroad tracks,’ nobody wants that. We had to get down to Pennsylvania to reach the ex-husband so he could tell the girls first. I remember being surprised by the house—seemed like they had a nice life, but. There’s the mother, out there downtown. We get to the ex-husband’s, and I had to pull him aside. It was early morning, though, the kids were there, and they knew. Right away they knew. One of them starts crying, and then we did too, me and, uh, Sergeant McKey it was back then. But the other daughter just . . . froze. Like if she didn’t move, the news wouldn’t get to her. Anyways. I don’t remember which kid was which. I just remember the morning.”
“I got to wonder, how many of these are actually unsolved, and how many are . . . like, you know who did it, you just can’t get there somehow.”
Sleight didn’t answer.
“Can I see where she was found?”
He began to type. “Here’s what you’re going to say, more or less,” he told me. “You were in town tonight on your own time, seeking information on a missing person, when Kostis makes contact with you. How did he . . . ?” I told him about the picture on the phone. “Nice, that’s good for us too. We’ll get that off the phone. Concerned for the young woman’s safety, you bling blang blong, we follow you to the scene, and done.”
That was more or less what happened, and I said so.
“Okay,” said Sleight, “he’s probably going to try to deal, but frankly, as I said, he’s in no position to give up any friends without serious health concerns, so he won’t offer us much. What I’m saying is, depending on what he’s charged with, this may actually go to trial. Can you stick to the story?”
“Yes.”
“Would your testimony give us any trouble whatsoever?”
“Look, I don’t want to screw you. I’d been drinking. I also smoked a little weed.”
“Yeah. If it comes up, just deny it.”
“What’s going to happen to the girl?”
“We’ll try to connect her with some family. Treatment. What else can you tell me about tonight? Anything at all.”
I thought. “Nothing.”
“You’re not a detective or nothing, but you had a plan. Where’d you start out?”
“Penny used to work at a place on the West Side, Stingy Jack’s.”
“Ah, now we’re talking. Blaine’s place. His, and some others’.”
“‘Others’?”
“You talk to anyone?”
“Blaine himself for a minute. Nothing came of it. Except—”
“That’s right. Go on.”
“Nothing. He told me a joke,” I said.
“Okay. Picture yourself back there. Look around the room. Anybody out of place?”
The only thing I could think of was the black guys sitting at the bar, not being served, and Blaine’s Irish music. I told him about it.
Sleight laughed. “Holy shit. He knew you from the moment you walked in there. Goddamn it. Now, I don’t know every black kid in Binghamton, but if I did, I doubt very much if those two were from here. Somewhere in that parking lot, in the trunk of some plain little Honda Accord, was more heroin than you or I ever seen in one place.”
“If you know all this . . .”
“Look, I never talked to you about it. But if Blaine was all we wanted . . .” He raised his palms. “We never talked. And you never talked to Blaine.”
The lieutenant and I exchanged cards, so he’d know where to find me if and when I was needed.
“Lieutenant,” I ventured. “Is, ah, who here is looking for Penny? I only ask—”
“It’d still be at the uniform level this early on. Probably. I can ask, and asking may get some doors knocked on.” He turned to me. “Here’s what you do. She got a cell?” I shrugged. “Get the provider to ping it. That way you know, at least, is the phone moving? Where is it? And so on. Now, I’m not suggesting you come up to Binghamton again. But if curiosity gets the better of you, stay away from Clinton Street, for poor Oates’s sake, at least. We’re out there every night, we’ll keep an eye out for her.”
We returned to Sleight’s truck and he took me back up State Street, but continued north rather than west across the river. We came to an unlit area at the edge of Binghamton’s railyard and parked. Sleight turned off the SUV and the blackness of the place swept in around us.
“We looked at the Canadian Northern guy that found her,” Sleight said. “A utility guy. We took a long look at the ex-husband, but he could account for himself pretty well. We brought in a few sorry hustlers. Just one of those things, one of those deaths that . . . it’s ugly, the way people get disposed of. We tried hard as we could to close that case.”
We left the SUV and slipped down to where the railroad tracks cut a swath through the city. Fifty yards distant, two freight trains tattooed with graffiti sat as if they’d never move again. Sleight led me between the nearest track and the hill we’d just descended, to where the slope got overgrown. Again, fireflies blinked in and out of the dark. We came to a stack of rail ties nearly five feet tall, and the lieutenant pointed between it and where it was snugged up to the hill. I looked in all directions and for the life of me couldn’t see any reason for this to be the place, or why anyone would have bothered to wade far enough into the tall grass to find her.
“Crows,” said Sleight, noticing my puzzlement. “Carrion birds. It’s not as remote as you’d think in the daytime.”
I walked around the pile. My eyes fixed on something in the tall grass. Glowing in the scant light from streetlamps was a ring of white stones half planted in the ground, chu
nks of quartz forming a circle about three feet in diameter.
“You found it,” Sleight said. “This appeared about a year after the body. Not all at once. A few rocks at a time, enough that we had a patrolman out here nights. Of course, it wasn’t the killer doing it.”
“Had to be Penny. Or Rianne.”
“Penny. We were disappointed, but it made sense. A memorial, something like that.”
“Doesn’t look like she’s been here lately.”
Sleight named a motel on Upper Front Street, one in Vestal, and a couple truck stops. “That’s where you’d be looking for a girl in the life.”
“We’re not looking for that,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
SHERIFF DALLY wrote out a complaint and convinced DA Ross to tug on the magistrate’s robe. The magistrate on duty swore out a warrant directing Penny’s cell carrier to ping her phone and, if we found it, to allow us to open it and look at any recent activity. We worried that battery life would be an issue if we didn’t find it soon, that it might already be dead. It turned out the phone was alive, and not thirty feet from the trailer. A PSP forensic tech out of Dunmore traveled north to help us out.
The cell was in the woods between the trailer and Dunleary Road. It didn’t take too long before Deputy Jackson turned it up in the middle of a patch of fiddlehead ferns, with no signs of disturbance or human presence around it. Likely it had been flung from the driveway and had maybe glanced off a tree trunk before landing. The tech, a pudgy thirty-something man who’d given up a perfectly decent career in IT for this, took several photos of the phone where it lay, then with a gloved hand picked it up by its cleanest corner and bagged it. It was a plain flip phone, metallic gray with a smear of blood and bits of dried leaf sticking to it. We took it back to the courthouse.