Find You in the Dark

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Find You in the Dark Page 3

by Nathan Ripley


  The Pemberton’s big hook to early drinkers is the steam trays of free food brought down in the early evening, the kind of perk you’re more likely to see in a strip club than a straight drinking establishment. It’s been ages since I’ve been to the strippers on one of the regular weekend expeditions the ReeseTech guys would goad me, the boss, into joining. I recall the shows seeming more like grim anatomy lessons set to music than entertainment. I also remember the food being a good sight better than the sweating microwaved tacos that sat in a sad pyramid on the Pemberton’s bar.

  They keep the beer lines very clean, though, knowing enough to avoid tampering with their moneymaker. The crowd is dense on the frequent rainy nights, businessmen and construction workers bundled in together, waiting out a downpour they know won’t end before they absolutely have to set out for home, but that will encourage them to have another drink.

  Despite the packed booths and maze of occupied barstools in my way, it wasn’t hard to spot Keith. Three hundred pounds of bulk with incongruous Paul Newman eyes embedded near the top. He was leaning back, watching for me, taking sips from his pint and eating a gherkin. “Always face the door,” he’d said solemnly during our first meeting. “Keep an eye on them, because you know they’re going to be keeping an eye on you.” I still wasn’t sure who “they” were, but I was soon entirely certain Keith was a complete idiot whose only worth was in the goods he had to sell me, and the cowardice that would always keep our secret safe.

  “Have a seat, Mart,” Keith said, grandly offering me the damp and torn upholstery of the banquette opposite. As long as one of us was facing the door, we were apparently both okay. “I’ve brought treats and treats for you. How was California?”

  Before I could get an answer out, he was flagging down the waitress and ordering a pair of Dead Guy Ales. Despite our business here, it wasn’t an ironic order. Keith lacked imagination, and Dead Guy tasted good.

  “Haven’t been to California since I retired,” I said, suppressing my shock. “Silicon Valley douches wore me out. Ellen still goes down, though.”

  “It hurts me when you bullshit your friend Keith. I know a direct hit when I get one. The guys were talking about the latest pile of bones before I left, thinking it was maybe an old deposit of that trucker guy’s. Guy who owns the lot came across the hole before you could make your little phone call. Probably just missed you by a couple hours.” Keith waited to see if I would fill in Horace Marks’s name. I filled my mouth with beer instead, and let him try his best grinning stare-down. The fact that I’d just missed being discovered by a couple of hours underlined what I’d been thinking for months: the next dig was going to be the last.

  “Fair enough,” Keith said. “I’ll see if a certain someone has called in a certain find when I go in tomorrow. It’ll be all the answer I need.”

  “What have you got for me, Keith? Anything? I’m pretty tired here.”

  “Husbanding-and-fathering is tough even when you’re retired and filthy rich, right?”

  “Yeah. Right, Keith.” I could see him getting annoyed, and since I wanted to at least see what he was going to offer me, I added a smile. Keith probably liked having a captive audience almost as much as he liked the money I gave him.

  “Why did you retire, anyway, Martin? Your hobby’s not full-time stuff. Don’t you miss being a dot-com superstar?”

  “Your terminology’s a little out of date, Keith, but I get what you mean. When Kylie was about eight, after a couple-month stretch where I’d been working minimum ninety-hour weeks, we took her on a trip to a cottage I used to own in Oregon. Kylie and Ellen and our nanny had been out a couple of times, but me, never. We were dozing on the beach by the lake, the three of us, then Ellen wakes up and starts screaming for Kylie. No one was around, it was a big property, and I started to panic, too, after a minute. Big flat beach, you could see everything for a mile on each side, but no Kylie. Then we heard her calling, and spotted her on this island in the middle of the lake. Must have been three football fields from shore. She’d just started swimming out there and kept going until she arrived, is what she said when we took our boat out and got her back. She just kept going.

  “Anyway, I found out I didn’t know anything about what my daughter could do or what she was like, and I figured I’d made enough money for forever if I sold up ReeseTech. I wanted to make sure her childhood was as little like mine as possible, so I did.”

  Nothing shut Keith up like sincerity. He’d looked progressively more uncomfortable as the story went on, and I could see the moment where he tuned out in order to search for an answer that could fit, either a brash brush-off or some kind of empathetic story of his own that would match. He settled on nodding, then unfolded the newspaper he had in front of him, revealing a USB key. I reached for it slowly, knowing he was going to put his sweaty, gravy-scented paw on top of it before I could get it. The hand came down.

  “Why don’t you just hack in to the database if you want this stuff so badly, Mart?”

  “It wouldn’t all be up there, now would it? That’s why they pay you to scan and archive it.” I had done the kind of hack Keith was talking about, in the late nineties, working from a Portland internet café and sweating as much as I ever had, downloading as much raw data as I dared before my backdoor portal was discovered. Security was laxer back then, and I’d never tried a law enforcement hack since. I preferred this method, anyway. It left less of a trail. Only the scanner and the wreck across from me knew what I’d received on CD-Rs and data keys over the past decade.

  Keith lifted his hand up with a wink. I palmed the USB and put it into my wallet, removing a sheaf of bills I put under the newspaper. Keith would pick them up at the end of our liquid meal. These covert elements of our exchange, closer to corner drug-swaps than backroom espionage, were silly to me, but they let Keith feel important.

  “Guess what’s on there,” he said.

  “This is a funless game, Keith. Narrow it down, at least.”

  “It’s a local. An hour-long interview session. Almost as long as your precious daughter-bonding story.”

  “Kerr? Greg Roberts? Lewis Harper?” I tried.

  “You’re just running down the list,” the big man said, his pissed-off expression changing as the booze arrived. I sipped as he gulped. Keith was proof that many cops are just civil servants, waiting for their paychecks and weekends in the exact same way City Hall receptionists do. He’d been promoted in the earliest days of his career for making a huge cocaine bust; it had happened when he pulled over a scared half-Asian kid who was supposedly just up from Orange County on a pleasure jaunt. My guess was that a mixture of racism and jealousy over the youngster’s late model BMW caused young patrol officer Waring to waylay him for driving twelve miles over the speed limit. The kid was crying by the time Keith reached his window, and the three pounds of coke in the trunk were cause for a few more years of weeping in a federal facility.

  Keith got boosted to narcotics, then passed through the auto theft division and finally vice before everyone accepted that he didn’t have a clue, was unlikely to gain a clue, and would lose the clues for everyone else if he continued to have access to crime scenes. By that time, his never-trim figure had inflated to a size that made him unfit for patrol duty, so he ended up spending most of his career in a box-crammed portable unit off to the side of the main precinct. It looked like the type of building you’d see on the grounds of an underfunded elementary school, but it was where Keith had lived his working life, as part of the two-person team digitally logging old evidence files. For eight hours a day, Keith and his partner digitized audio and video tapes, scanned countless pages of unevenly scrawled and typed material, then put it all in a database that eventually, possibly, someone might give a shit about. These were all closed cases, files that had gone untouched for a decade plus. Even when the department shrank the initiative, shedding his partner and moving Keith back into the precinct, he worked in the policing equivalent of the dead letter office,
and that’s exactly why he was useful to me.

  “One real guess,” he said. “Come on, what’s on the key?”

  “Your baby pictures. I don’t know.”

  “Martin, you’re no fucking fun, especially once your wallet’s closed,” Keith said. “It’s Jason Shurn.”

  I set my beer down too hard and it sloshed onto the newspaper. “Shurn only gave two interviews, both to the cops. And he only talked about the discovered victims.”

  “Sure. But he did talk one last time, on the day he went off to ride the lightning. Or whatever cool term they have for lethal in—”

  “Why hasn’t anyone heard these? Why hasn’t anything come of this?” I had to be careful not to whisper, because quiet voices carry farther than yelling in a room as full and as loud as that one was.

  “Because he riddled his way through the answers like he was fucking Gollum. Wasn’t a scrap of sense to be found in that audio, and anyway, the pressure to look for more possible victims was off. Feels like the whole interview process was more of a favor to his murdering self than anyone else, really.”

  I was quiet, and reached into my breast pocket to check on the USB bump in the joint of my wallet. Keith grinned at me. “You’re all personal about this guy—so sweet. Do you and your wife talk about him at night or something, get you heated up?” He leaned back and swallowed an entire pickle, like a fish deep-throating a hookworm. He disgusted me and pissed me off, all at once.

  “He did take your sister-in-law off the surface of the planet, right? Tinsley Schultz, the missing Shurn victim. Forever chased by the honorable weirdo knight champion who managed to marry her sister. Like that was a coincidence.”

  “Shut up, Keith.”

  “Yeah, yeah, sorry.” Keith sulked with his face in the pint glass, then came up grinning. “Even besides this California find I’m pretty sure you made, you’ve been really active with that lil’ spade of yours in the past few years. Ramping up the pace of your finds and your cute calls. Working up to something, maybe? It’s almost your sis-in-law’s twentieth anniversary of being bye-bye, you know that?”

  “Congratulations on the math,” I said, more than a bit surprised at Keith’s accurate, if nasty, guessing. “Someone helping you with your homework?”

  “You better hope not. I did this all by my lonesome, boss.” Keith’s smile got bigger, and he started fumbling on top of the booth seat next to him. He brought up a sheet of paper.

  He hadn’t brought me anything in print for ages, not since I’d told him I wanted to stick to off-line data. Minimize the physical trail. The paper was, of course, creased and a little damp at the corners, but Keith had probably done his sloppy best to keep it pristine. With a slow sense of ceremony, he passed it directly into my hands. Before I looked at it, I knew what it was going to be.

  “Every file I’ve ever pulled for you, coordinated with the dates and times of the calls the department received about the skeletal remains of various victims being discovered all around Washington State. And outside of it.” Keith leaned back in the booth, crossing his arms, a British television detective addressing the aristocrat he’s just cornered with the murderous truth.

  “Do you know how stupid it was to make this, Keith? Did you pull all the call times yourself or were you dumb enough to ask someone else to get the info?” I stopped talking then, knowing I was on the verge of screaming at him, of throwing my pint glass in his face.

  “Contrary to what you think, tech-genius-millionaire-fuck, not all cops are stupid.” Keith waited for this to land, but I didn’t react, just looked back down at the paper. I didn’t think all cops were stupid. Just him. The rest of them were mostly too tired and underfunded to do all of their jobs completely.

  I scanned the sites and names on the sheet. Spokane, Hoquiam, Lakewood. Belinda Cross, Cara Collingham, Jenna Roth. I saw my shovel poking the earth around Cara’s rib cage in Hoquiam, finding her place in that dense hillside thicket of trees while the smell of the Pacific, sharp and rich, melded with the soft smell of the earth Cara had been buried in for twenty-three years. My heart rate went up so high I thought I was going to pass out when I found her and touched her clavicle with latexed fingers. The excitement on the digs could start to overwhelm the calm, screaming through my lungs and chest and blanking out my mind entirely, until I shut my eyes and pressed fingers into the dirt, coming back to myself, to what I was doing. Cara Collingham’s dad thanked the anonymous discoverer of his daughter’s remains in the Post-Intelligencer: said he could sleep again. I made that happen, with Keith’s files. Me, no one else.

  “I typed it on a typewriter, not a computer,” Keith said. “See? There’s a bunch of old ones at the department, electric, half of them don’t work. I know how picky you are about trails, so I pulled all the data by my lonesome, the times, places, and names, and wrote those on scraps of paper, and when I typed them out I got rid of the scraps. One copy for me, one copy for you.”

  “Why?”

  “To make it clear, Mart, that we’re in this together. And that I think it’s about time I started getting some of the credit. The, uh, accolades.”

  A server walked by, and I found I’d lost my voice for a moment. I hailed him and gestured at our glasses, making a two-more motion. The dumbshow loosened my tongue. The noise of other drinkers behind us had become a looped racket of mocking chatter and laughing.

  “You want to claim credit for all of this? All of these discoveries?”

  “No one at the department wants to take a hard look at who does all of these calls. They piss cops off, Martin, with your shitty tone. But you’re doing something real police don’t have time for. That’s got a value to it. I want a piece of that value, for my career. And I want to be on TV.” Keith’s grin broke into a giggle, a small slight sound coming from his bulk. Our beers arrived and he buried his mouth before the laugh could break through the last defense I had against rage and send me across the table to his throat.

  “How would you explain selling police files to a citizen, without going to jail?”

  “Thought of that,” Keith said. “We say I did all the digs, told you about it recently, and you started to help. I think it makes a lot of sense—I’m a cop without an outlet for my, you know, justice instincts, you’re a citizen with a family and a wife who’s suffered a terrible loss. We could bring it all together for the anniversary. Of Tinsley Schultz going bye-bye.”

  “No.”

  “You know where she is, don’t you, Martin? You know where Shurn put her.”

  If Keith hadn’t started out with a threat, I would have pitied him then. His little Hardy Boys plan of how he could whitewash misusing police files, explain pulling a citizen in for extracurricular cop philanthropy, that anyone would believe he had any concern for families that had lost people they loved, families that just wanted the remains of their daughters, sisters, mothers back. But I didn’t have any pity for him. I saved that for the people in the ground.

  “Remember what you’re paid for. By me and the department both. You’re not a detective, Keith, so you can stow this plan right now. You’re Sergeant Secretary. You have the foresight and planning skills of a sandwich artist. There’s no chance you telling anyone anything lands us anywhere but prison. Both of us. So just stick to this very nice arrangement we have, enjoy the money and think very hard about what you’re going to say to me the next time we talk.” I put money down to cover our drinks and left the paper file on the table.

  “Wait,” Keith said behind me. Then he said it louder, enough that one or two people turned around. In the interest of not being noticed, I walked back a step or two and did what Keith asked: waited.

  “I know you, Martin Reese. You’re a sweet family man, you’re rich from a company brand no one quite remembers, but there’s something rotten under it, and I know about it. You know exactly what I mean. Calls, games in the dirt, it’s not public service. Not just public service, anyway. You do it because of what’s wrong with you. I can prove it. The
names Misty and Darla ring a bell?”

  “So you fished out the breaking-and-entering charge I caught that went nowhere from what, twenty-five years ago? Yeah. I grew up broke and stole a few times to eat and buy smokes, and yeah, I targeted the rich kids I went to school with. Then I stopped. So that’s it? We’re done?” Keith didn’t have anything else rehearsed, so he nodded. I walked out of the Pemberton into the licking, rainy cold and walked toward the Jeep.

  I already had the Shurn dig planned for the coming weekend, as Keith had almost guessed. This lost interview I’d bought was icing, an ideal indicator that fate or time was running in my favor. Even Keith’s nonsense threats couldn’t distract me from that. He was another problem I could solve with the correct combination of dollars, apologies, and faked respect. Gripping the USB in my hand, I focused on the gorgeous luck of what I held, the confirmation it might hold of the contents of the site I was going to dig up. The body I was sure was Ellen’s sister.

  “WE GOT ONE OF YOUR pet phone calls, Sandy,” Detective Chris Gabriel said, talking to Sandra Whittal over the divider between their desks.

  “The name is never going to catch,” Detective Whittal said. “I won’t allow it. Let’s play a game where you make sure you never use it again and I make sure not to shoot you.”

  “Come on. You can give me a nickname if you want.”

  “Dumbass? Shitdick?” Sandra added a few more increasingly brutal ones to the list, bluing in the air the way she’d learned from her siblings and sharpened with satellite radio morning shows. Hitting hard and fast had kept the other animals in her division from going too far since her six-month-old promotion. She was thirty-two and lacked the penis that functioned as a skeleton key to acceptance, but she had the competence and could properly talk shit, which went a long way. Chris held his hands up as though she’d drawn on him.

 

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