Ellen was smart, and more importantly, she was and is watchful. She copped me somehow, noticing an average face that turned up more than an average amount of times. She followed me into the undergrad bar one day, asking me a question about term paper percentages, then another one about my t-shirt.
She was incredibly unafraid, considering what had happened to her sister. Just thought I was a shy guy with a crush, so that’s what I decided to be. And really, she had no reason to be scared of me, I don’t think. Even back then, before I had full control. And certainly not once we had started dating. She stopped having much to do with Jason Shurn, in my mind, no matter what might have happened to Tinsley. I didn’t go back to that dark grouping of trees across from her apartment. I never watched her again, except when she was sitting across from me, or asleep in our bed.
With Shurn on the news and Ellen on the couch, I poured out two cups of Earl Grey and walked back to the living room. She had the TV on again, tuned to a rerun of Cheers. She took the mug in silence and I thought about what the killer had said to the reporters. Torland’s. The gravel plant where Shurn had worked for a few weeks in the summer, before the general dislike the guys on the floor and the management had for him led to his passive firing. There were plenty of shifts, just none for him. But the other thing he’d said. Hiking. There was a thickly treed hill behind Torland’s, a green North Seattle rise that had been an occasional camping spot decades ago, back before the plant had been built. The trails were mostly grown over now, since no one much wanted to hike near a belching plant and an abandoned train station. The way Shurn had put those two things together—hiking, Torland’s—I was sure he was saying something. Something about his last kill.
“I’m going camping this weekend,” I said, turning to Ellen. She’d unraveled a little, laughing at something arrogant Ted Danson said. “Wanna come?”
“It’s raining.”
“Just a little, right now. And it’s supposed to be sunny for the rest of the weekend.”
“It’s still outside, which is a real step down from inside.”
“You’ve got no patience for discomfort.”
“Sure I do. It’s not like I need to be cocooned in down pillows all day,” Ellen said, grabbing at what little hair she had left after the Winona Ryder haircut she’d unwisely requested at the salon. Her hair looked nothing like Tinsley’s anymore, cut or color, which was for the best. “I just don’t see the point in putting up with needless, mindless discomfort. Not warm enough yet to be totally safe, either.” She went on to make the argument more complex, drawing in terms from the philosophy courses she was taking and that I had no interest in.
“Been a lot more dangerous in the bars and along the highways lately,” I pointed out. It was a dumb thing to say, and we were soon well into a fight. Small as the argument was, it was still pretty tense, one of those fights you have in an early twenties relationship that’s passed the half-year mark and doesn’t yet know what it’s going to become. We ended up heading hard into the commitment lane. Part of Ellen’s willingness to say yes to my proposal, which I made in the back of Elliot Bay Books, near the sci-fi, was based on how agreeable I’d become since the weekend I went out for that hike, alone.
In the rain, on the trail behind Torland’s, a couple of hours after my fight with Ellen, I found Jenny Starks (Last Seen May 2 1997 / Please Call Us If You Have Any Information / We Want Our Daughter Back) while scouting for a place where I could stake my tent. On the way up, I’d started to give up on the stupid hint I’d taken from Shurn’s interview, telling myself the trail I was walking would be teeming with cops if Shurn meant what I thought he meant. But I didn’t figure on the more relaxed timetable the police have once a killer is safely nabbed.
I couldn’t hike away my annoyance at Ellen’s tensed-up impatience, how she was impossible to argue with once she arrived at a decision. The way that fight had escalated to the point where she felt cornered and forced to lock into a decision was my fault, though, even though I didn’t know it back then. I retroactively give myself the pass young men have to be given: I didn’t know when to shut up, and that’s okay, because I sure do now. Ellen saw any disagreement after that defined point as an attack. Jenny Starks, in death, played a key role in teaching me how to keep secrets, how to keep my own counsel. A lesson every successfully married person has to learn at some point.
I was about three hundred yards up from the highway, and a little off the main, overgrown trail, when I made my discovery. I was beaming my flashlight around, looking for a relatively bare area where I could set up camp without having to hack a jungle out of the way.
Jenny’s lower half was still shallowly underground, but the ground around her had been messily pawed at. I don’t know exactly what had been at her face. Small creatures of some sort, maybe a coyote. And insects, of course. Shurn’s last kill, and weeks of rain had pounded away at the loose dirt he’d laid over her. Jenny was a big girl, built like a Nordic athlete. She’d disappeared from a small town in the interior of British Columbia, and I’d only seen her “Missing” poster because I’d been visiting Vancouver the week before. Back then, the cops were much, much worse at the cross-border communication that would have led them to look for Jenny down here. Cop talk between Washington and Oregon was so minimal it wasn’t until six months into the killings that someone thought to cross-reference the missing persons lists around the Pacific Northwest. And Canada was a whole other country. Bad luck for Jenny’s parents, and Jenny herself had been beyond luck for a long time.
The hillside was pebbly and mossed around the ruined grave, and there were small objects scattered around the body. A leather wallet, worried into shreds, its plastic guts spread out. Conveniently, the driver’s license was lying face-up, waiting for me. Her. I couldn’t check the picture against the face, but what I did see identified itself as Shurn’s handiwork, despite the careless nature of the body disposal. Her eyes were gone, and so was almost all of the facial skin. That was the animals’ doing. But the deep, etched cut across the bone of what had once been a forehead, passing over the temples that had once bordered a working brain, was Shurn’s work. He was a scalper. Everyone knew that much. It hadn’t been in the news, or in any of the bits of tape we’d heard, but the rumor was strong, and the information that later emerged to those curious enough to seek it confirmed most of the darkest whispers that circulated on campus. Shurn had held on to a couple of the scalps for weeks, leaving them by the side of his bed. Jenny’s hair was red in the wanted poster, but it was gone now. I went to my knees then, but not out of piety or fear: it was awe, it was excitement, it was fulfillment. I was right. I found her, where I thought she would be. The sheer rightness of it overwhelmed me, buried any doubts I had about what I had done.
I thought of picking up Jenny’s ID, of driving it to the police station twenty miles down the highway. But when I looked around me and saw how perfectly enclosed this clearing was, fenced by obscuring trees and foliage, I had a better idea. There was a dense line of spruce blocking the half of the clearing where the body was laying. On the other side of the spruce, there was a flatter stretch of hard-packed earth that would be perfect for camping. I’d go back to town, apologize and beg Ellen to come out for a make-up camping trip on Saturday, and we’d set up our tent twenty-five feet away. I’d make sure Ellen didn’t see the body until the following morning, when we could call it in together.
If I brought the ID in alone and led the police here, I thought I had a shot at being treated as some kind of suspect, even with Shurn in lock-up. He might deny this killing, for whatever reason. It was a risk I wouldn’t have to take if Ellen found the body with me. Staying in that tent for an entire night, sleeping and all the rest, with that body so close. It might even help Ellen to shake her fears, pave over our tiny argument in the most dramatic of ways: she could discover that discomfort and fear could both be coped with, as long as you were in good company. Meaning myself, of course. I knew I wanted to marry her, and th
e thrill of finding Jenny together would be a unique bond, a confrontation with the unhappy world that lay outside our happy union. It might even help her come to terms with Tinsley’s disappearance, somehow. I hiked back down to my car.
When I got back and saw Ellen sleeping in the living room, wearing the enormous Metallica t-shirt she’d asked me about when we first talked, I knew I couldn’t go through with it. I thought of her in her old apartment, wiping down furniture after Maria left for the day, asserting control over her small part of the universe, what she had left after her sister vanished. I wanted to be part of the world she’d had to build again, the reasoned structure she had carefully placed over the chaos that had taken Tinsley away.
“Why you back?” she asked, groggy, her neck cricked from sleeping crammed against the couch arm.
“Because I’m an idiot,” I said. “It’s horrible out there, and I’m horrible for fighting and taking off like that. I’m sorry.” I picked her up and carried her to bed, pretending it wasn’t a strain (she was and is a light package, but I’m not exactly a powerhouse), and we had sex, then slept next to each other.
I couldn’t reason out bringing Ellen up to see the body, not now that I’d seen her. All she’d be able to think of, after the terror, was her sister under that same knife. I knew that. I’d have to go back up and call the body in myself, assuming the cops didn’t find it first.
There was no getting away from Ellen that weekend, so I went back to see Jenny again on Monday, during the hour when I was supposed to be presenting in my Shakespeare class. But she was gone. At the time, I thought some larger equivalent of the scavenging animals that had chewed her up had dragged her away.
When I dug up that Irish cemetery grave twenty years later and found a fresh body, I had my first real physical indication of how wrong I was. It wasn’t a scavenger that had taken Jenny’s body away in the night; it was a hunter. What began when I saw Jenny Starks in the hills started to end when I grabbed that newly dead wrist in the Irish cemetery.
DETECTIVE SANDRA WHITTAL’S IPHONE SPAT its ring, the one she’d selected to cut through deep sleep, loud music, and hangovers. Most of the ambient burbles that the phone came with were more lulling than urgent, and Sandra preferred the violent clang that pulled her off her yoga mat (a gift from her cousin that she used for push-ups and crunches) and into the living room of her little apartment, where she found the phone on top of a stack of Richard Stark novels. She toed the power button on her stereo, silencing the Sabbath record that had been sound-tracking her long day-off workout.
“Yeah,” she said. Chris Gabriel was calling from his cell, not from a department phone. “Sorry I didn’t call last night.”
“I had Mikey, anyway. Last-minute plan change. I thought you’d want to know, and beyond that I also argued that you and I should land this: Bella Greene. They’re pretty sure it’s her.”
“Body?” Sandra walked into the bathroom, ready to jump into the shower as soon as this call was over.
“Yeah. It’s out in Federal Way. Besides Greene—it’s weird. There’s a tie-in with old cases, they think.”
“What? Why?”
“There’s more than one body. They’re buried, and there’s more than one body in the hole. Varying ages.” Chris paused for a moment. “I’m thinking it may be relevant to that Finder guy we talked about last week.”
“Give me a visual here, Gabriel, I have no idea what we’re about to get a look at.”
“Sorry. Bella Greene’s body is in a gravesite in an old cemetery. She’s not the only body in there. They’ve been buried across decades. One’s a skeleton, one’s a more recent skeleton, and then there’s one more, a little more than a week buried. Bella Greene.”
“Was there a call?”
“Literally just came in. Same computer voice, same bullshit.”
Sandra skipped the shower, toweling off her sweat and pulling on her clothes. Chris’s car was idling outside within four minutes of her leaving her apartment.
• • •
“Out there” was an old cemetery, disused for years. After listening to the Finder’s call repeatedly in the car, Sandra had gotten the facts together from Chris on the drive up, taking considered bites at the bear claw he’d brought her and jotting a couple of notes in her pad. She had it braced against her knee, swearing when she wet a few pages with coffee when Chris rolled over a pothole.
“I’m warning you,” Chris said, “forensics moved stuff around. Everything’s photographed, but they got there when it was just FedWay cops, got an okay to start shifting.”
“Ugh.” Sandra hated having a scene touched. Ideally, the last thing that happened at one of her crime scenes was the homicide. “Fine. As long as every last goddamn thing was photographed, fine.”
“Fuckin’ heritage site, or should be,” said one of the uniforms when Sandra and Chris arrived. He was a mid-twenties kid who told them a little about his deep Irish American roots as he walked them to the grave. His slight swagger caused him to slip sideways in the mud a couple times. None of the cop cars had driven all the way up to the site, to keep any traces clear, but it didn’t matter. The earth had turned into a soupy bog. Sandra’s boots kept their seal but a few flecks of wetness licked in at the ankle, just where leather stopped and pants began. She’d forgotten her extra socks, but was too focused to be pissed off.
There was a forensic team doing detail work around the grave, looking hopeless even through their face masks. There were indications that two vehicles had been up there recently, one of which had left in a hurry, one of which had apparently been parked behind a screen of branches and perhaps some canvas covers that had been taken off-site. Four depressions in this area, suggesting that the vehicle had been there for some time. The tread marks, as far as they were visible, were for an extremely common tire. Nothing to go on.
Sandra walked a little closer, threading between collapsed tombstones and a few that had remained upright. The bodies had been taken out of their underground stack and tarped over. One, Dan O’Reilly, was a pile of bones. The other, a small-framed Jane Doe, was mostly intact. Then there was a third.
“Bella Greene,” Sandra said.
“Can’t be sure of that yet.” Chris gestured at the body but didn’t look. Sandra had noticed this on the cases they’d been detailed on together—Chris looked closely at first, memorizing the body and indignities it had suffered pre- and postmortem, but stuck with the charts after that, preferring to avoid even looking at photos. Since this wasn’t even his case, the body didn’t have to be stared at. But Sandra was staring.
“It’s her. Look at the wrist.” She grabbed Chris’s own wrist and pointed, the forensics guys looking too. One, a short Indian guy who was closest to the body, gently picked the forearm up. The silver bracelet slid back, revealing an identically patterned tattoo: black leaves under the metal leaves that had slid up the emaciated flesh to rest in the crook of the body’s elbow. “Greene’s mother didn’t mention the tattoo or bracelet when she filed the missing report, but she told the paper about it when they did that feature on her yesterday. The ‘Vanishing Lives’ thing.”
“Good thing someone still reads newspapers.”
“Stinks here,” Sandra said. “Not corpse-stink.”
“There’s solvent all over the place,” said the tech, laying the dead girl’s wrist down then gracelessly levering himself into the pit the bodies had come from, poking at the dirt walls with a thin steel probe. “Paint thinner, bleach. Whole scene is doused, liberally, muddying up our shot at getting anything useful even worse than the—”
“Mud, right,” Sandra said. She walked off a few paces, holding up her hand to alert Chris that she didn’t want to be followed. She’d transferred the call Chris had played her into the sound bank of her cell, and she wanted to listen to it while she looked at this bizarre carnage. Anyone looking at her may have thought she was listening to her voicemails, but it was the hated voice of a computer program that cut through to her
ears.
I think you’ve almost caught up to me, right? But I never gave you a good reason to take me seriously. There’s one waiting for you, and I’ll leave more soon. I’m tired of other people’s memories. Time to make some of my own. Of our own.
Briefer than the rest. Maybe less elegance to the arrogance. And an odd sense, not quite precise, that he wasn’t just talking to the cops. Addressing the media, too, maybe, encouraging the department to air this call. The digging-and-finding ritual of this creep, this intelligent beast, had escalated. The fun of looking for bones, replaced by the thrill of ending lives.
Sandra sat on a tombstone and looked at her colleagues, milling around the grave, pretending that what they were doing would have an effect on the outcome. But if this site were like the others, there’d be no new DNA, no easy physical shortcuts back to the guy. All she had were his fucking phone calls. This one, and the ones before it.
“Is this what you were saying you didn’t want to think of just yet?” said Chris, seeing that Sandra had put her phone away.
“What?”
“When we were talking about what the caller was going to do next. The Finder. You said you hadn’t let yourself think darker.”
“Yeah.”
“So?”
“So he’s planting corpses of his own because he’s worried he’s going to run out of bodies to find. Not even that. The whole thing was a long-term pattern that was escalating, and that we ignored, because he was doing our cleanup work for us, roving outside of our budget to bring bones home to moms. He was escalating the whole fucking time. That’s why the calls came in more often these past four years. The nasty messages for us weren’t cutting it anymore. He needed more. Bella Greene was more,” Sandra said. She had the nosebleed feeling of tears in her sinuses, and turned away from Chris Gabriel, forensics, and the dumbfuck Irish American flag-waving Federal Way cop to start walking back to the car. She’d taken her hood off while she listened to the call, and the rain had already soaked her hair. The cold dripped down her neck to the base of her spine, but she didn’t allow herself to shiver.
Find You in the Dark Page 10