Find You in the Dark

by Nathan Ripley

  “Okay, okay. Anyway. Computer-voice caller. Pretty sure it’s a genuine one, checks out with something that just went down in NorCal, a body found by sheer coincidence by a guy who owned the property. It had just been dug up, he says, because he was out there last week and it sure as hell wasn’t lying out in the open then.”

  “Old one?”

  “Yep. They haven’t made a solid ID yet, but according to Mr. Roboto, it’s Winnie Mae Friedkin. Do—”

  “If you say ‘Domo Arigato’ I’m putting a bullet through the carpeted plywood bullshit we talk through and ending this forever.”

  “Fine.” Chris got out from behind his desk and walked around to her desk. He wasn’t fat, yet, and maybe never would be. He had that three-years-after-college-football padded muscle, and was about forty now, so he might keep that look forever. His last name, Gabriel, had been a lot more Italian sounding before his grandfather lopped off the last syllable, but his complexion told you where he was from. He waved a USB key at Sandra.

  “I know you’re technologically retarded, so here’s the call, nice and tidy in one little file for you. I’m going home.”

  Sandra took the key. “Thanks.”

  “Come over in two hours if you want. Probably making something nice tonight.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I’ll make it with seafood instead of beef if that’s a little more than maybe.”

  “It’s more than maybe, but it’s not a for sure.” Sandra wasn’t dating Chris, and probably neither of them would consider anything more than uncomplicated sex with another cop, especially from their own division, but she said yes more often than not to his invitations. Lately he’d started talking quite a bit about his life outside of work. Ex-wife, family, an uptick in mentions of his nine-year-old son, Michael, who stayed with him three nights a week. Normal, good guy stuff. It was throwing Sandra off a little, so she was sure to keep sharp in their verbal exchanges and to withhold most physical contact and affection that wasn’t completely sexual in nature.

  “Probably that shrimp pappardelle thing,” Chris said.

  “Yum. See you, maybe.” Sandra Whittal put the USB into her personal laptop, violating department policy, then untangled her earbuds. She listened to the call through to the end: a precise coordinate, ready to be inserted into a GPS. This was repeated twice, in the computerized voice she had once associated with Stephen Hawking or generic PC voice programs, but that had become something else to her in the past few months, while she should have been focusing on the fresh homicides that had been placed on her desk. She’d solved those anyway, and figured she was owed this time. She clicked the audio file back to the beginning and listened to the voice again.

  That is the exact location of Ms. Winnie Mae Friedkin, lately of San Francisco, victim eight of scumbag Horace Marks, currently resident of San Quentin.

  There was something irritatingly British about the words the caller chose. It was one of many things that pissed Sandra off and skeeved her out, all at the same time. The room around her had almost emptied out. The guys on duty were next door, eating around the big interrogation table that subbed as a dining table on slow nights.

  I found her the way I found the others: by doing your job.

  This was as close as the caller got to a signature—on all of the recorded calls Sandra had excavated, there was some sort of finger-wagging admonishment of the police, of the FBI, of lazy law enforcement who were too busy preventing murders to roam the country looking for corpses. This, also, pissed Sandra off.

  She was in cluster of trees—beech, I believe—about two hundred feet behind what used to be a Dairy Queen in 1976, and is now an out-of-business outdoor equipment shop. Glennis Camping, a victim of the recession. She was only shallowly underground. My metal detector picked up her zipper, her rings, her St. Christopher medal. It was a quick and easy dig. Tell her mother so. What you didn’t do to find her. Tell her mother that she can bury her daughter now, and it’s no thanks to you. Goodbye.

  After the coordinates, the call ended with the rasp of plastic against metal, the sound of the phone against the surface of whatever spoke that voice, the voice orchestrated by the man finding these bodies, bringing them into the air, making a game of it. Saying it was all for the families. Anyone in the media who had picked up on the story over the years believed that, like the guy was some sort of postmortem Batman, setting the world right in a way the cops couldn’t, or weren’t willing to.

  But his combination of showing off and secrecy—Sandra knew what that was. And it wasn’t innocent. This caller hadn’t killed any of the girls he called in, as the DNA and testimony and timings on all of his other finds could attest. Maybe he’d never killed anyone.

  “Maybe,” Sandra said, talking to no one in particular. No one would listen, anyway. She took out the earbuds and thought about what was in her fridge for a minute before walking out to her car and driving to Chris’s apartment for dinner and what came afterward.

  After sex, Sandra sometimes had to watch Chris as he did a set of chin-ups on the bar he had mounted in his bedroom doorway. It was a repeated, unnecessary bid to impress her, especially if his performance had been off in any way. She was glad he skipped his calisthenics tonight, choosing instead to lie half-slumbering in the bed as she pulled an old tablet from her purse and began playing the sound file of the call.

  “Jesus,” Chris said, pulling the covers over his chest. “You’re playing that in my bedroom? At least put some clothes on.”

  “Shut up.”

  “I won’t. It’s weird. What you’re doing is weird.” Chris reached over and flapped the cover back on to the tablet, gently. The digitized voice of the caller continued on for half a second before cutting off in the middle of the word “underground.”

  Trying not to be annoyed, Sandra hooked on her bra and swung her legs out of the bed, rooting around in her purse for the spare pair of socks she usually carried with her in particularly rainy weather. Nothing worse than wet feet. She found them and put them on carefully, dressing more slowly than she usually would, to make sure Chris was aware she was leaving, not storming out.

  “Going?” Chris asked.

  “I want to work this.”

  “The call? You’re not going to get anything out of that tape other than what you hear. A mobile signal, from a prepaid phone, sold at some chain convenience store in downtown Seattle, always just used for the one call. And he’s too smart to drop any useful hints, no matter how many times you listen.”

  “Sure.”

  “Is that why you’re fixated on the guy?” Chris asked while feeling around under the covers for his boxers. “You jealous of his sleuthing skills?”

  “Fuck no,” Sandra said, sitting on the edge of the bed. She handed Chris one of the tees he had lying on the floor, a Hole tour shirt from 1994. The frat boy touches in his decor were annoyingly charming. “I’m worried we probably have a cop or ex-cop or fired cop or failed cop trying to make us look like idiots. You should be worried, too.”

  “Some old man or armchair detective wants to help get bodies respectfully buried at family funerals. That’s really not a problem for me.”

  “You’re regurgitating his own take on what he does. Like he’s the soul of angelic generosity, not a weird ghoul. Come on, Chris. He’s not going around looking for people who died hiking and haven’t been recovered, or even living runaways. We’ve got plenty of both on our books. He’s specifically looking for serial killer victims, all women.”

  “Most serial victims are women, because that’s who sick men want to kill. This guy helps them get proper burials. Get closure for their parents. Who cares if he’s an arrogant dick about it?”

  “That is some naïve shit for a cop to be saying, Chris,” Sandra said, keeping the shake of annoyance out of her voice with some effort. “The caller’s following up on a few guys in particular. Killers, I mean. Collecting their work. Pretending it’s a public service.”

  “It is a public servi
ce, Sandra. I know you don’t want to hear it, but I have a kid, and the idea of first, anything happening to Michael, and second, of never knowing? You have no idea. This guy does.”

  “You’ve seen for yourself that ‘closure’ is pop-psych bullshit. How many parents of vics keep calling you for years, wanting to talk about the case? You get the sense they feel way better after the funeral?”

  “So what’s your working theory? He’s a pervert, getting off on this? The scenes are DNA clean.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning no semen. If it’s a sex thing, he’s keeping it to himself.” Chris pushed the pillows behind him into a support as he sat up, pulling the t-shirt on while keeping as much of his skin hidden as possible. Other than the chin-ups thing, Chris was generally protective of his nudity, especially when they got right into a work discussion after screwing. He was excellent cop material, but he and Sandra were both aware of where the next-level investigative talent in the room rested.

  “I’m not going there yet. I’m not saying he’s a freak,” Sandra said, doing a quick scan of the room to make sure everything she needed in her bag was back in it. “Just that he’s, as you say, arrogant, and knows things he shouldn’t. Like one of these neighborhood watch guys who tunes into the police band and does pathetic fake patrols with a stun gun or sidearm until he gets shot or kills someone. Only this guy sticks to bothering the dead, and us.”

  “I still don’t see what’s so bad about families getting to bury their kids, even if it is a few years late.” Chris found his boxers after reaching around with his toes under the sheets for a few seconds. “Hold on,” he said. “Neither of us have to be in early tomorrow. If you’re going to go all game’s afoot on me, we can at least do it over drinks somewhere.”

  Sandra waited for Chris to get the rest of his clothes on, using the time to transfer the call audio onto her phone. She took the audio from the rest of the calls while she was at it, pooling all of the caller’s taunts, all of his irritating bull’s-eyes, into one cordoned-off collection marked “Creep” in her music folder. If his poking around pisses a cop off this much, Sandra thought, he’s lucky none of the guys who hid the women in the first place are around to take notice.

  JASON SHURN. LIVE FROM WALLA walla state penitentiary. If I’d had the right laptop with me, I would have plugged the USB in right in the car so I could start listening on my ride home. But I was careful when I handled this sort of material; the only device these drives and their data ever came into contact with was my scrapbook. I drove down Broad Street like a power-mad ambulance driver, not caring if I got pulled over. Hopefully the rain, which was picking up, would create enough accidents to keep ticketing cops busy. I’d eaten well at dinner and the beer was sitting fine, but there was a gnawing in my stomach that had everything to do with the data key in my wallet.

  “Slow down,” I told myself, feeling the slickness of the road under the Jeep. I pushed my shoulders back, releasing myself from the car-chase posture that had me hunched over the wheel, relaxing into a normal speed. I kept talking, slowly, convincing my heart rate to ease down and my mind to avoid the fogged doubts at its borders, to focus on the weekend ahead.

  “Keith’s stupid list means nothing. I could call the cops myself tonight, tell them I’d found all those bodies over the years, that I made the calls. They’d pin a goddamn medal on me and I’d get fan emails.”

  I sounded so creepy saying these things to myself that I involuntarily looked out my driver’s side into the streaked window of the Tahoe next to me. It was piloted by a red-haired guy who was also moving his lips, to music probably, progressive rock by the looks of him. He was watching the road the way I needed to be.

  Maybe I would ditch the anonymity with my final call. I’d tell the cops exactly what Keith had done, let them decide whether to jail the man or just to archive his sad career with an early retirement ejection. And I’d stop digging for good. A last find: Tinsley Schultz, closure for Ellen, and then The End.

  I hydroplaned for a scary second when I took my turn homeward too fast, but the expensive tires my mechanic had hard-sold me gripped the asphalt. That cylinder of data I had in my wallet might have the last fragment I needed, the part that would make me utterly sure Tinsley was where I thought she was. My phone buzzed in its dashboard holster, and I flicked the steering wheel button that channeled Kylie’s voice through the speakers.

  “Dad.”

  “Yeah?” I answered. Kylie sounded younger than her fourteen years, half-asleep. It was early for regular teenage bedtime, but she had morning practice, which would get both of us up before the sun tomorrow.

  “I think I made Mom a lot more upset than I meant to.”

  “I think so too. You tell her that?”

  “She’s in the bath. Has been since you left, almost. We started to fight again.”

  I nodded, having half-expected this. “I should have stuck around.” I didn’t have a refereeing role in the house, but sometimes my simple, lumpish presence could extend peace that had already been established. I turned into our street and slowed the car down, wanting to hang up before I hit the driveway.

  “It’s okay, Dad, I just feel like a total dick.”

  “I’ll talk to her for you. Then you guys can talk in the afternoon. It’ll be okay—you’re not hurting her feelings, she’s just worrying about you and making sure you’re worried about yourself.”

  “Thanks. And I need something else, okay?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Take another shower when you get home, that reek was still definitely there.” Kylie pushed out a laugh that was part yawn.

  “You finished picking on me? Go to sleep.”

  The water heater at our house was big enough for a multi-unit apartment building, and I’d put it in because of Ellen’s bath addiction. The bathtub was cavernous, almost like a room itself when you were in it. Ellen used it as an isolation tank, sealing out the job I kept telling her to quit. She didn’t want to leave the credit union, because then she’d be dependent on my money, a situation she refused to be in so vocally it was almost insulting. I bought her gifts like the bathroom reno and tub as a sort of generous revenge, a way of forcing her to feel cared for.

  Ellen was walking around in her robe on the landing when I got in, shuffling through something on her iPad. Work stuff, from the pained look on her face. Her legs were still wet, her face and neck glossy with almond oil, her hair rubbed with coconut oil, some of which clumped whitely together on the dark strands. When she got closer she smelled like a bakery, her elevated body temperature pushing the scents through.

  “All clear?” she asked. I let myself drip rainwater onto the mat. “All clear” was our stock spousal greeting, loaded with meanings as disparate as “How’s it going,” “Are we still fighting,” “Is my fly up” and “Is your period over.” Tonight it just meant hello. A hello I didn’t want to hear, because it meant I wouldn’t be getting the privacy I badly needed.

  “All clear. Keith’s good, other than his cholesterol.” And his fumbling attempt to blackmail me, that too.

  “Tell me the number, it’ll make me feel thin,” Ellen said. She giggled and I made my way toward my desk. I sat down and unlocked the bottom drawer, pulling out my scrapbook. Stamped with the Reese Technologies logo, just like the forty others I’d purchased for my employees at the time, exhorting them to get rid of their old Toshibas so we could have a slick, uniform-looking office. I let some of the anti-Mac programmers hold on to their old units, as long as they kept the PowerBooks propped open on their desks as they did their work on whatever homemade assemblage they were attached to.

  Since my retirement, this digital version of my scrapbook had replaced the hard copy I used in the early years of my hobby. I’d scanned then destroyed the old one with a minimum of ceremony, comfortable with having it preserved in this machine as a permanent piece of data. A record of each of my finds, and a detailed account of how I made each one. Winnie Mae Friedkin’s dea
th and uncovering lived in the two-hundred-plus digital shots made of her skeleton. The rest of her was for her mother and her surviving brother. A grave in a place they could visit, where they could remember whatever happiness Winnie Mae had in life before it was snuffed by a worthless beast in a truck.

  Ellen was coming down the hall now, when I’d been hoping she’d loop over to the kitchen or living room and wait for me to be finished. Usually she didn’t bother me when I was in this unofficial little study space, which had taken over from the more spacious home office I’d kept when I was still working remotely for ReeseTech. I liked doing my scrapbooking up here, in the open. As long as I was reasonably careful about it, doing my work here made it look even less like I had something to hide from Ellen and Kylie. Being expert at concealing all of this from them was a necessary part of what I did on the digs—a part of what I had to do to make my life, and our family, function.

  “You and Kylie okay?” I asked. “She called me on my ride back.”

  “She’s supposed to be asleep,” Ellen said, her hand on my right shoulder. I touched the fingers as I lowered the screen of the scrapbook a bit.

  “Well, she is by now. She’s worried she made you feel awful.”

  “At least our daughter is perceptive after the fact, then, because she sure did.”

  I didn’t answer, because I’d stopped listening. I was minutes away from hearing Jason Shurn’s voice outside of canned courtroom audio. A discovery that couldn’t approach the naked thrill of brushing dirt off a white skull that’s been waiting for years, but, still, a discovery. I inserted the drive into the side of the scrapbook and started to transfer its contents. The USB gave up the last of its files and I turned around to face Ellen. Her hand was no longer on my shoulder and the skin on her face was a more threatening blush than the hot-water glow on the rest of her.

  “Were you just passing along a message in a bottle from Kylie because she’s too cool to talk to me and you’re better at tuning out whatever I say?”