by J. Thorn
Ravna shut the lid without bothering to power down the computer. His mouth was dry and the rest of his beer did nothing to quench the thirst. He fumbled for the messenger bag and pulled the old book from inside. With trembling fingers, he revisited the pages he had marked with Post-it notes.
Chapter 7
He threw the razor into the sink and reached for a towel on the rack. Drew held the princess wash cloth to his bleeding chin and sneered into the mirror. “Tough shit, sweetie,” he said. “Daddy’s bleeding and your towel was the closest one.”
He managed to wipe the shaving cream from the rest of his face while the bleeding slowed to a trickle. Drew straightened his tie and pushed his hair over each ear. A sallow, empty face looked back. Drew slammed the medicine cabinet shut and marched down the steps on his way to first the garage, and then the office.
***
Brian sat on the corner of Drew’s desk holding a Styrofoam cup of coffee and a wry smile. He slid around to face Drew as he sat in his chair. “You look like shit,” he said.
“Not sleeping much,” replied Drew.
“Why not?”
Drew looked up at Brian and shook his head. “I guess I’m sleeping, but the dreams are what’s leaving me exhausted in the morning.”
“Dreams of wild orgies?”
Drew rubbed his forehead and pushed the power button on his PC. The machine came out of hibernation with the whirring of a fan and a couple of clicks. “My head’s pounding.”
Brian stood and shrugged his shoulders. He walked toward the break room while draining the last drops of his lukewarm, watery office coffee.
Drew watched him go and turned back to the monitor. He started his e-mail program and waited. Sunken, bloodshot eyes stared back at him through the black spot on the monitor. The extension on his desk rang, jarring him from the contemplative moment.
“Yo.”
Nags like the wife, Drew thought. He paused, knowing Brian would continue whether he acted disinterested or not.
“Johnson ain’t here today.”
Drew sat up in his chair and leaned into the cubicle row until he could see the drawn blinds on the supervisor’s office. Only darkness leaked out between the plastic rows. The coiled phone cord pulled taut and Drew sat back up. He glanced toward Vivian’s empty cubicle, and then put his head in his left hand while cradling the phone in his right.
“He’s never missed. Got, like, the company record for attendance or something. I don’t think he’s called off in seven years.”
“That’s what I was trying to tell you when you were acting like a little bitch this morning.”
Drew smiled and rolled his eyes. “Okay. I’m listening. You’re like a girl with a secret that you can’t wait to tell.”
“So here’s what I know,” Brian began. “Folks from upstairs were sniffing around this morning. There was a board meeting and Johnson was a no-show. Not only that, but he didn’t call. Nobody really knows where he is.”
Drew sighed. “And?” he asked Brian.
“And what? You don’t think that’s crazy?”
“Call me when you find the YouTube clip of Johnson in bed with three strippers and a line of cocaine. Until then, I really don’t care if the guy isn’t at work because of his hemorrhoids.”
Drew tossed the receiver into the cradle and went back to his e-mail. The bolded subject lines sat like cattle marching to the killing floor. With every delete, the line disappeared and shifted the others closer to the knife. The bottom right corner of the program read “89 new items,” bringing Drew’s forehead into tightly creased ribbons of skin, the wrinkles looking like windblown dunescapes.
His eye skimmed down the “sender” column, stopping around line forty-six at a message with no sender listed. His arms tightened and his fingers fumbled on the keyboard as if he had spent the last hour in a snowball fight without gloves. Drew scrolled down until the unread subject line without a sender stared back from the middle of the screen.
“you know where he is”
Drew looked at it, a simple sentence without proper capitalization or punctuation, the hallmark of digital communication.
Won’t be long before we go completely phonetic. Fucking idiots. His hand slid the cursor over the subject line and Drew’s pointer finger depressed the left mouse button. The body of the message filled the screen as the attachment crawled from the top of the box toward the bottom. Line by line, pixel by pixel, the image digitally unraveled. Cut the resolution, for fuck’s sake. How long have people been sending digital photos to one another? Ten years, twenty years?
The first few lines of the image rolled down with utter blackness, leaving Drew to wonder if the picture had become corrupted on its travels through the wire, across routers, and finally through the company’s e-mail server. As it continued to load, Drew saw the faint, scraggly lines that transformed into the tops of trees. The dark-brown branches tried hiding in the darkness of the night, their naked, spiny arms twisting toward the sky. Dull flashes of faded color punctured the stark desperation of the image. Shades of blue like the bottom of an abandoned swimming pool clung to the bones of the tree, discarded shopping bags doomed to dance in the branches for all time. Mounds of broken concrete obscured the bottoms of the tree trunks. Jagged lines of piercing, white stone lay toppled on each other. Drew squinted at the monitor as his brain tried to categorize the photo or identify the location of it. The lines of the image picked up speed as it raced toward the bottom with the last of the pixels.
Dump site. One used by demolition companies, or possibly the aftermath of a dead factory brought down by the wrecking ball.
The image finished loading and the number of objects at the bottom of it forced Drew to pause and refocus. Unlike the stark emptiness of the treetops and night sky, the ground lay covered with the bones of dead industry. Wires, steel rebar, cinder blocks, rotted, wooden beams, and plastic casings of all sorts lay jumbled on the ground in heaps. The paltry flash on the camera illuminated the construction refuse, but not the rodents in their nests. Drew stared at the jumble of wire snaking through the image.
He sat back and looked at the ceiling, taking a deep breath and shaking his head, contemplating an instant delete or another look. With Johnson out, Drew could not come up with a reason not to linger on the image for as long as he wanted.
He looked again and immediately found part of the picture that had not revealed itself at first glance. In the bottom, right corner Drew found the soles of two shoes that seemed to be attached to the legs of someone lying on his back. His eyes followed a piece of broken conduit to the right, where they stopped on a rectangular, black object. Drew pulled closer to the monitor and squinted. He moved the cursor to the file menu and clicked until the tiny magnifying glass appeared. He dragged the slider to 250 percent and the gray pixels exploded on the monitor, followed by a readjustment of clarity characteristic of a high-resolution image.
Drew grabbed the horizontal scroll and pushed it to the right until the soles of the shoes nearly filled his monitor. He knocked the zoom back to 200 percent so the rectangular object would fit on the screen. Drew identified the black messenger bag, the nylon type used in cheap promotions, like office apparel. In the middle of the outer flap sat a logo, its intricate design obscured by the low light of the environment, but its shape evident to Drew. The design was his creation, the logo now tattooed throughout the office building on mugs, stationary, messenger bags, and more. It was the design that earned him the promotion, the house in the nice neighborhood, his spin on the “American Dream.” It was the piece of work that earned him accolades in the graphic-design department. It was also the design sewn into the black messenger bags distributed at last year’s holiday party, the one used by only one person in the office.
Johnson.
He deleted the message and emptied the trash of the e-mail program. Drew dug through the folders on his hard drive, deleting any trace of cached e-mail messages. He knew the exercise to be futile from h
is days in IT. Contrary to the traditional warnings about backing up your data, Drew knew of countless criminals convicted by FBI specialists who had retrieved kiddy porn or cooked books from computers dumped in a landfill, thrown into swimming pools, or trampled by a pickup truck.
The morning oozed into afternoon as the rest of the office continued under the guise of business as usual. Johnson’s dark office was anything but usual, and everyone knew it. Drew pushed the volume slider up with his mouse until the audio from the streaming news clip came alive.
“. . . have officially declared the death a homicide. Police have released the victim’s name. She is thirty-four-year-old Vivian Cabmel, from Oak Park.”
Drew’s eyes widened as a photograph of Vivian zoomed out from the screen with precision. The picture was taken at least ten years ago. Drew caught his breath, forgetting how beautiful Vivian had been in her twenties. Time, stress, and conflict had sapped her. Vivian’s dark hair tumbled about her shoulders, fanned out with a thin strap on each side holding her cocktail dress in place. She had a drink in one hand and her eyes glittered with fun, mischief, and sensuality. Drew realized that Vivian was pretty enough to become the new media-darling mystery, and still young enough for them to exploit her vivacious sexuality.
Drew grabbed the slider and pulled it back a few seconds so he could see the photograph again, this time attempting to listen to what the reporter was saying.
“Folks in Oak Park are saddened by the tragic loss of Vivian. We spoke to residents of Oak Park Towers, the apartment complex Vivian called home.”
The screen paused and hiccupped as the video feed tunneled over the cable to Drew’s computer. An elderly woman appeared with a huge microphone in front of her face. Her blue eyes and blue hair appeared washed out under the hot lights of the mobile recording unit set up in the lobby of the apartment building.
“She was so nice. She never bothered anyone. One time, my dog got loose and she helped me hang missing flyers all over the apartment building.”
The video cut to a balding man in his late forties, crumbs from a microwaveable meal clinging to his beard and stains dotting a white, sleeveless T-shirt, the kind of person the police would be considering a suspect in the investigation.
“Viv smiled for everyone. She was polite and courteous, but she kept to herself. She never bothered no one. I hope they catch this son of a—”
The video cut the blooming obscenity and pulled back to the news desk, where the anchor looked at the camera with a tilted head. He shook it from side to side, careful not to disturb the coiffed, thinning hairs that makeup had positioned to cover his widow’s peak.
“Such a shame. We have Sal Surmen with us today. Sal is an expert on serial killers. He’s helped the FBI track and catch several over the past few years, and has published his memoirs, To Catch a Killer: My Time Hunting Crime. Welcome to Channel 7, Sal. That sure is a catchy title, if you don’t mind the pun. Can you tell us how you came up with it and where the idea for the book came from?”
Drew smacked the monitor with his right hand, startling a man in a cubicle on the other side of the row. Opportunistic vultures, he thought. He turned back to the screen and pushed the slider to the right, waiting for the video stream to catch up, and then listened again.
“. . . on March fourth. I’ll be sure to get that on my Kindle,” said the anchor with a wink to the camera. “What can you tell us about the Vivian Cabmel investigation?”
Sal laid his book flat on the news desk and folded his hands together next to the white, ceramic coffee mug facing the camera, the network logo perfectly aligned for maximum visibility.
“We’re looking for a sadistic, ritualistic killer. He’s probably murdered dozens of women. Chances are they were young, vibrant, attractive women in their prime. He binds them somewhere, maybe a basement or storage unit, rapes them repeatedly, and then mutilates their bodies before disposing of them.”
The anchor sat back, putting on his best incredulous look. “Rape, murder, dismemberment. Sounds sick.”
Drew wanted to leap through the screen and knock the surgically enhanced smile off the anchorman’s face.
“It’s what gets some men off. They can’t have consensual sex like normal human beings. They have to take it forcefully, like an animal.”
Drew sat back in his chair as the anchorman and his self-published expert continued talking about the grisly details of rape and murder.
He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples with the index finger on both hands. When he opened them, Brian stood at the edge of his desk.
“How ya doin’, bro?” he asked. Drew shrugged. He clicked the streaming-video window closed, exposing an empty spreadsheet underneath. “Working hard, eh?”
“Are you writing a story? Did you get transferred out of design and into media relations?”
Brian raised both palms to Drew and took a step backwards. “Easy, man. Came over to see how you’ve been doing. Me and some of the ladies noticed you ain’t quite been yourself lately.”
Drew snickered. “You and the Oprah crew? That counts for something.”
Brian pulled a chair from against the wall, spun it around backwards, and sat with his arms on the top of the backrest. Drew waited, knowing the macho move would be followed with ridiculous “bro-worry” conversation. He wrinkled his nose at the cloying aroma of Brian’s aftershave.
“Look. You and I have been friends for a long time. I’m worried about you. We’re all a bit skittish with this shit about Vivian. And having Johnson out today with no explanation doesn’t bode well. Folks are saying he was sticking it to her, using his authority to get some ass. They think she may have threatened him with blackmail, a sex tape or something.”
“Bullshit,” replied Drew.
“Whatever. I know you don’t dig office politics.”
“No, bro,” replied Drew, slathering the term with heavy sarcasm. “What I don’t dig is listening to your insincere bullshit that you hope to weave together into a story that you can use to make the women in the office all wet. I don’t dig you dragging Vivian’s situation into a fictional, sexual affair with that asshole. She’d never touch him.”
“How do you know?” asked Brian.
“I knew Vivian better than anyone here. She would have never touched that prick. Ever.”
“I didn’t come here to slam Viv and piss you off.”
“Well you did. Both.”
Brian stood and swung the chair out. He tossed it against the wall where the top chipped the drywall, sending a puff of white dust into the air.
***
Drew came home to Molly sitting on the couch, watching the same regurgitated footage of Vivian’s body being removed from the crime scene. The murder led every network’s newscast, even though the reporters had no more information than they did the day before. The picture of Vivian holding the drink became her. It hovered on the screen whenever anyone spoke of the crime as if she existed in that single moment, and then as a battered, mutilated corpse tossed in the weeds like roadside garbage.
“Can you turn that the fuck off? The kids are going to hear it.”
Molly grabbed the remote and hit the off button, pitching the invisible infrared waves at the television as if to prove the action required effort on her part, and her frustration at being told what to do. “Do you have to be such a dick about it?”
Drew fell into the couch next to her and shook his head. He heard Billy screech from somewhere upstairs as his little sister’s footsteps raced across the floor. “Work is crazy now. Everyone is shaken, and Johnson didn’t show today.”
“His streak?”
“Yeah, ended.”
Molly let out a long, slow whistle. “That prick’s got nothing else to live for,” she said, smiling at Drew. “But I’ve got something you live for.”
She curled a leg around his and slid her delicate fingers inside the waistband of his underwear. He felt her hand move down and the brush of her breasts beneath the sweatshirt,
unencumbered by a bra.
Drew shot off the couch and grabbed the stack of mail from the end table. “Billy have hockey tonight?” he asked.
Molly pushed a lock of her hair behind one ear and crossed her arms. “No.”
“I’m going to eat and then go to bed. I need the sleep.”
Molly looked at the clock on the table and saw the small hand hanging on the six. She tilted her head to the side and picked up the remote control. “Dinner is on the counter,” she said.
Drew used his right hand on the railing to make it to the second floor. Billy and Sara ran over his feet from one bedroom to the other, involved in a game requiring running and screaming.
“Downstairs!” Drew said.
His voice echoed off the walls of the narrow hallway and Sara jumped as if she had stepped on a bee.
“We’re just playin’—”
“I don’t care what you’re playing. Go downstairs, now. I’m going to bed.”
Sara touched Billy’s arm before exploding into laughter and bounding down the steps and beyond his reach. Billy looked at his dad. He stared into Drew’s eyes for a moment before calling after his sister and jumping down the steps.
Drew went through the motions of his nightly ritual until he found himself in bed. The rest of the family continued on downstairs, lights blazing and nobody mindful of the fact that he wanted to sleep.
It’s like I’m dead, he thought. Worse. It’s like I never existed at all.
He meant to stand up and slam the bedroom door shut. Drew wanted to rattle the windows and move enough air that Molly would come upstairs to make sure he was fine. But he did not have the strength to slam the door or confront his wife. Instead, Drew pulled the comforter to his chin and rolled over to face the window. The moon dispelled some of the midwinter dreariness that arrived with darkness at five in the afternoon. A solid snowpack reflected the moon’s light upward, creating a red-tinged atmosphere. Drew looked at the scene and thought it resembled the Martian landscapes from all of those bad, science-fiction movies. The streetlights added to the red hue. Ice gathered on the window screen, frozen in long strands and reminding Drew of another household task he never completed.