Find You in the Dark

by Nathan Ripley

  “Can you call Coach and tell him I’m sick? Say ‘cramps sick.’ He won’t ask. I want to have breakfast with you and talk without having to rush.” Kylie hefted her schoolbag, thick with textbooks and a jostling water bottle, onto her back.

  “Okay,” I said. We left Ellen sleeping upstairs, to talk about her sister and the man who had murdered her.

  • • •

  “This is where they figure he picked her up.” We were parked in front of El Corazón, on Eastlake. Kylie looked through the back window at the overpass and the dark tunnel behind us. The sun was still low, and there were cigarettes and other drinking-related garbage on the sidewalk between the doors of El Corazón and the Jeep. Kylie’s right hand crept over to the lock, making sure it was engaged. She didn’t want me to see her do it.

  “What was it back then?”

  “Same thing it is now. In the nineties it was called the Off Ramp. Those bands you and your friends don’t care about—Nirvana, Pearl Jam—started out here, or at least played here back then. I don’t think Tinsley liked any of them. Maybe Nirvana. From what your mom says, she was too punk for the rest.”

  “She was here watching a show? When he took her?”

  “Let me tell you in order.” What I left out was going to be as important as what I said. There was movement inside the venue; it probably hadn’t been long since cash-out, if there’d been a show last night. “Last time I was here, maybe 2004, it had a different name. Graceland. There was no seat on the toilet in the men’s room, I remember that.”

  “Gross.”

  “I went to a show alone because your mom refused to come. When I pressed her on it, told her we could easily get a babysitter, it was a Tuesday or whatever—she made it clear how serious she was about never coming anywhere near this place. That’s when I actually put it together that it was here that Tinsley was last seen.

  “Your mom was with her that night. She was younger than Tinsley—they were both too young to get in, but there was a guy who lived near UW who made great IDs, they were easier to fake back then. Don’t even try that, by the way. They’re going to be scan-embedded within a year.”

  “Okay, Dad, okay,” Kylie said. I nodded, then turned the ignition to get heat back into the car. I figured our bodies would have been enough to fight off the gentle early autumn cold, but neither of us seemed to be generating much warmth.

  “Your mom, from what I’ve been able to get her to tell me, and what I found out from talking to the police later, some nice detective named Dave—your mom went to the show because she knew Tinsley would be there that night, and she wanted to convince her to move in with her and stop the runaway thing she was doing before it was too late. When your mom turned up, Tinsley said no. I imagine it got to be a heated conversation.”

  “Like when Mom and I fight.”

  “Probably,” I said. “But Tinsley was older, and less connected to her family than I hope you feel. So a little different.”

  The detective, whose entire name I remembered, of course, Dave Broadwell, had told me he remembered Ellen “screaming to us that she’d told her own sister to fuck off and die if she wanted to, like she’d killed her herself with some magic curse.” But that was too private, too much of Ellen’s own story, to tell Kylie.

  “Mom would definitely yell at me if I—”

  “Do you get why she’s so protective now?”

  “I always did get it, come on.”

  I turned the ignition key the rest of the way and we drove until we found a Starbucks. Kylie went in for an enormous black coffee for me and some sort of chocolate caffeine abomination for herself. I hummed tu-ra-lu-ra-lu-ra when she was in there. Soon I wouldn’t be talking about Tinsley, I’d be finding her. Cars fired in and out of the parking lot around my Jeep like a time-lapse video as I waited for Kylie and the café filled up with students and quick-stopover commuters.

  Holding our drinks, Kylie pushed the Starbucks door open with her right elbow and pivoted counterclockwise to avoid the people coming in, clearing them and the garbage can between her and the car with an athlete’s confident knowledge of space and the exact reach of her limbs. I got the passenger side open for her, even though she could have managed it herself. She pulled the lid off her drink and put it on the dash in front of her right after I did the same with mine, an unconscious imitation that made me feel both proud and old. The sun was up, beams grasping the black paint of the Jeep, warming the outside as our drinks heated us. I got right back into Shurn.

  “Jason Shurn probably was there that night. He was a dealer before he went to jail and after he got out. Cocaine.”

  “You can skip the gateway drug stuff, Dad.”

  “I can’t. And that’s not what I’m saying. If you really want to understand this, we need to go even further back.” I started to lay it all out for her. The Jason Shurn story, soon talking to myself as much as I was talking to my daughter, laying out the historical map that was about to lead me and the tip of a shovel to the ground above Tinsley.

  “Shurn was a lot of things before he came for Tinsley. Most of them bad. But he was a young entrepreneur.”

  “Like you.”

  “Nothing like me,” I said, twitching enough for a lick of coffee to slosh out and run down my thumb. “He was a deviant from the beginning, even if it was partially his messed-up family’s fault. His stepdad forced him to get two paper routes in junior high—one at five a.m., and one just after school. And once, when a homeowner on the route asked to stop delivery for a couple of weeks while they were on holiday, Shurn took the chance to supplement his income by breaking and entering.”

  “So that’s how he started being a criminal.”

  “He kept stealing until he got caught.” I skipped over the facts of young Jason’s first arrest: his thieving skills escalated through the years, but he was eventually caught rifling through Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Trilby’s dresser drawers by the live-in maid who hadn’t been invited to accompany them on their annual trip to Maui. According to Shurn’s juvenile record, the boy was “nude and tumescent when the maid entered the master bedroom, and ejaculated when he turned to face her.” A two-week stay in a youth facility, which came with a package of psychological tests and examinations Shurn managed to outsmart, wasn’t enough to take away the taste of transgression his early thieving had gotten him.

  “He could have chosen to get better at that point, you know. Shurn could have turned his back on acting out that way, done anything to avoid becoming a monster. I had a rotten dad, too, I had phases when I was a kid, but I made sure I became the kind of person who deserved your mother and you.”

  “How do you know this stuff about him?” Kylie asked.

  “It’s all out there. You just have to be patient and get through that internet gossip bullshit you were talking about,” I said. I was lying, of course. Most of what I’d told her, and that bit about the maid I’d skipped over, was still classified. I had all this information from Shurn’s juvie file, another USB handoff from Keith. “This shouldn’t even exist,” Keith had said when he gave it to me. He’d made me eat a Cuban sandwich that time, which was admittedly delicious, but the sight of him chomping and drooling—at one point jetting pork juice over the length of the table to land on the manila folder—quickly slayed my appetite. “It was wiped, supposedly, once he turned eighteen and had a clean bill of mental health.”

  “So where did you find it?” I’d asked, pretending to be interested. Keith’s half of the investigations he felt we shared was completely dull.

  “Exactly where it would be if it hadn’t been ‘wiped,’ bud. Sitting in a big ol’ box. That’s the magic of paper files. Sometimes they just find a way to stick around. More luck for you, huh?”

  “Guess so,” I said, wiping Keith’s pig spray from my new acquisition.

  “You’ll like this one. You’ll like it plenty.”

  I shook the greasy memories of Keith and got back to the story, watching Kylie’s eyes go a darker, cobalt blue
as she pictured what I was telling her. Jason Shurn’s next job also involved delivery: A grown-up, recidivist paper route. On his own at sixteen after he left juvie, he started running cocaine around town by bicycle. Mid-eighties dealers in Seattle had found that teenage cyclists were the safest method of getting their product distributed—the supply was kept mobile, and as the delivery boys stayed clean-cut and worked outside of school hours, they were closer in appearance to background characters in an Archie comic than ex-cons. This career choice didn’t show up on Shurn’s juvie record, because he’d stopped doing it after a couple of close shaves with the cops.

  “If the drug stuff isn’t on his record, or in like the articles, how do you know about it?” Kylie asked. “Is that the recording you were listening to?”

  “No, that was just some YouTube documentary thing about serial killers. The drug thing was in some of the papers, I think.”

  “Oh,” Kylie said. It was the first time I’d lied to her that morning, and she almost caught it. The drugs had come up in a court transcript from Shurn’s trial, when his lawyer pulled an improbably stupid Hail Mary and called the serial murderer to the stand in an effort to show that his client didn’t deserve the death penalty.

  DEFENSE COUNSEL: Did you feel trapped by your new position? Enlisted by a sort of Fagin—

  SHURN: Fagin? What are you trying to say?

  JUDGE MCKENZIE: The next person who laughs during these proceedings will be ejected from the courtroom. Counsel will keep questions and language basic.

  DEFENSE COUNSEL: Yes, your honor. Jason, did you feel as though your life was a trap?

  SHURN: No, those were good times. Good as I’d had, ever. Money all the time, my own place. I skimmed coke to take to bars, met girls.

  DEFENSE COUNSEL: You were telling me, earlier—

  JUDGE MCKENZIE: Avoid references to your attempts to coach your client, Mr. Marlon.

  DEFENSE COUNSEL: Yes. Jason, why did you quit?

  SHURN: Didn’t want jail again. Thought I could make more money another way.

  DEFENSE COUNSEL: By obtaining legitimate employment.

  SHURN: Yeah. I started doing regular delivery work. Was an office courier. Also, my bosses found out I’d been hiding their product in places, graves mostly, building a stash for my own business. They agreed not to kill me if I gave it back and got out of their business.

  DEFENSE COUNSEL: You didn’t say anything like this earlier on.

  SHURN: I guess not.

  JUDGE MCKENZIE: Finished, counselor?

  DEFENSE COUNSEL: Yes.

  A throwaway moment in the court transcripts. Really, all it illustrates is how much the judge disliked Shurn, and how little Shurn cared about saving himself from execution.

  “Could they maybe have fixed him when he was a kid, if he’d had better doctors or if he hadn’t met bad people in jail?” Kylie asked. She was chewing on the rim of her Starbucks cup, leaving little animal bite crescents in the waxed cardboard.

  “No, I don’t think so. Shurn got a fair chance in court when he was a kid and much more fairness than he deserved when he grew up. There was something rotten in him from the start.”

  “Why are you telling me all the drug stuff, then? What does it have to do with Tinsley?”

  “A rush leads to a bigger rush for guys like him, I think. That’s what the books say. And it’s true for people who are sick like him, but not everyone. I smoked pot four times and it was boring every time, and that was it for me.”

  “Dad. Holy shit.”

  “Oh, come on. You—I don’t want you to, and you shouldn’t, and you definitely won’t in high school, but people do stuff like that in college. And that’s that. I didn’t care for it but I understood why other people did. Guys like Jason Shurn, they want to keep pushing. But there’s always a way to stop before people get hurt. That’s where I lose sympathy, where my empathy taps out, and yours should, too. The moment Shurn decided to kill women, and the gap of time between then and before he started killing and decided to keep on killing? Even if he had to kill himself, he could have stopped. But he didn’t, and that’s what makes him evil. Evil, dead, human garbage.”

  I was almost out of breath from giving Kylie this supercharged dose of adulthood and frankness, and I didn’t know when I’d decided to add that made-up part about pot, but I knew it was right. I was giving her something secret of my own to wedge that trust in deep, to make sure she’d never talk to Ellen about any of this.

  “Okay. I think I understand.”

  “I hope you don’t, Kylie. The deeper you get into understanding a person like him—I don’t know. At least it keeps us scared of the people we should be scared of, right?”

  “Right.”

  Shurn was too dumb or too ready to die to play safe in his testimony. But his straight talk about stashing drugs in graves showed that he was capable of being direct when he was bored enough to stop playing around. It also demonstrated that his transgressive instincts had started to lean toward death-territory even during his cocaine days. He was always pushing toward death. First the women’s, then his own. The bigger rush.

  A few of the sleazier contemporary papers, while the killings were happening and then when he mentioned the stashing in court, suggested that Shurn had been a teenage necrophiliac. No one questioned the logistics of hiding contraband in a municipal graveyard—these are spaces that are regularly patrolled, which leaves anyone looking to hide something without much time either to hide or to recover goods. If Shurn was hiding things in a graveyard, it had to be disused, abandoned. There are plenty surrounding Seattle. My job had been to tie Shurn to a particular graveyard. As soon as that idea came to me, I knew there would be a body waiting for me if I could find the right tombstone. If.

  I started the car and Kylie was quiet. “You okay?” I asked. “Gotta get you to class.”

  “I just don’t know if I know anything more now than I did before,” she said, changing her tone while she was still talking, from sulky to thoughtful. She pulled her backpack out of the backseat and shoved her hand around the outer pockets, emerging with a packet of saltines. She started eating them.

  “You don’t know anything concrete,” I said, reversing us out of the parking lot and pushing into the stream of commuter traffic, where we came to an almost immediate standstill. “But know that I’m as confused as you are, and we’re both sure of a couple of things. People do evil, messed-up things to other people who don’t deserve it, and the rest of us stand around not understanding why.”

  “And that’s kind of like what not ever knowing where Tinsley is buried is.”

  “No. That’s not a symbol. It’s just horrible.” Traffic started moving and I accelerated, hearing Kylie’s chewing distinctly until I flicked the radio on to give us some music to not-talk over.

  The information I needed was in Shurn’s juvie file. During a psych analysis, an old-school notepad and couch session when he was only thirteen years old, Shurn made a reference to his alcoholic stepfather being an ardent Irish American flag-waver, a champion of his people’s claim to territorial fame in Washington State. My own dad had the alcoholism and unpleasantness thing down, but I’d never had to deal with him being a patriot of any sort, thankfully. He was either gone all night at the bars or looking for me with a fork he’d heated up on the stove. Shurn’s voice came through differently in that transcript, stripped of the bravado that seeped into it after his killings. The psychiatrist, Dr. Milton Stephens, hadn’t recorded his questions: only Shurn’s answers.

  My stepdad just won’t leave me be until he’s really pass-out, can’t-see-me drunk. I f***ing—sorry. I wait in my room most afternoons right after the paper route, just playing around with whatever I’ve got in there.

  Stuff, you know. I wait ’til I don’t hear him talking anymore, because he always talks when he’s drinking. Worst is when he starts singing.

  No, I like music. Real music, I mean, Stones, Zep. He sings that g****mn reedy pipe Danny Boy s***
he used to put on the stereo until he pawned it. Yeah, Celtic. If he starts up with that he’s liable to pile into my room and drive me to the g****mn cemetery again to visit Dan O’****Reilly, guy he thinks is his great-great uncle.

  Those weeks ago, when I read Shurn’s juvie file in my scrapbook after taking a look at the full court transcript, that cemetery detail jumped out and played tu-ra-lu-ra-lu-ra as soon as I ran across it. That night, I made a seared duck breast with madras curry sauce for Ellen, quietly reveling in finding the link between the drug stash and Shurn’s childhood cemetery visits, running her roughly a billion calories over the limit she was trying to stick to, making her eat the delicious thing because we were celebrating, dammit. Kylie was at a swim meet in Portland, staying in the hotel room directly next to the coach’s, subject to text-message check-ins from mom every two hours.

  “Celebrating what? That you’ll love me fat or thin?” Ellen asked.

  “No. Well, that too. Maybe,” I said. She air-slapped me, her hand passing an inch in front of my nose so I could feel the breeze of it.

  “Some stock deal I made two weeks ago went really, really well. We are slightly richer.” This lie was composed of almost 100 percent truth; I had recently had a better quarter than usual with my modest investments. It’s just that I didn’t really care about the money. Not the way I cared about finding Tinsley.

  • • •

  Back in the Jeep, pulling up in front of the school, I realized it was time for me to put some sort of moral on it for Kylie, who had finished her saltines and was pushing her right thumb into the side of her kneecap, probing and shifting the hub of bone and staring straight ahead.

  “Jason Shurn killed Tinsley because he cared more about what he wanted than he cared about other people being living human beings who aren’t objects. That’s what evil is. Okay, Kylie?” I asked.