Find You in the Dark

by Nathan Ripley

  I WAS PARKED OUTSIDE OF Kylie’s school, after a stop at ReeseTech to use the showers by the workout room in the basement. No one had seen me. I hadn’t spoken to anyone, beyond a nod at the lobby secretary. Ellen wasn’t home when I dropped by to pick up my phone. I’d texted Kylie right away, asking her to meet me across the street from her school, if she could get out of the swim meet. She okayed me right away.

  Kylie. That was the thought that exploded in my mind as soon as I touched that skin that shouldn’t have been in the grave, the arm of someone who was living the week before. I knew it wasn’t her, I knew it wasn’t my daughter. But for a moment, it felt like it. That I’d come to find Tinsley and instead found her niece, my daughter. Because I’d been digging where I shouldn’t have.

  I’d expected to see Kylie walking up from the smudged glass doors of the sports complex. When the passenger door opened while I was staring in the opposite direction, I screamed. Kylie yelped herself.

  “Dad. What’s the matter with you?”

  “Where were you? Where have you been?”

  “We only swam in the a.m. heats, it was like a weird not-competition thing. Basically a warm-up for the real thing in a couple of weeks in Spokane. Me and Soph left after and went to that accessory place by Nordstrom. It’s like twenty minutes away. Near the place Mom rented for her store.”

  “She told you about that.”

  “Yeah. I know it was a surprise, she texted me last night that she told you. Were you surprised?”

  “Yeah. Going to be a real pleasure to see Gary more,” I said, not realizing there was no reason for Kylie to see the sarcasm in this.

  “Why did you scream, though? Are you trying new meds or what?”

  “No. Something scary happened to me earlier today. I just wanted to see you so I can get my bearings back.”

  “What happened? And how am I supposed to make you get your ‘bearings back,’ whatever that means?”

  “Because talking to you means I can’t afford to be a wreck.” I could feel some of the tremble leaving my hands; the tremors that had been shooting through my legs since I left the cemetery were gone, as well. That grave had almost shaken me apart, and there was never a moment in my life when I needed to be more intact.

  “You look weird and you’re talking weirder.”

  “I went to some crazy guy’s farm and he pulled a gun on me. Was completely drunk in the middle of the day and had no idea who I was—don’t tell your mother any of this, again, and I know I’ve been saying that a lot lately.”

  I told Kylie the rest of my invented story about the cheese farmer with the shotgun and assured her I’d called the police, gaining more control of myself with every second of the lie, a story I could control entirely, pulling back from details any time I saw the beginnings of skepticism in Kylie’s eyes. She sat in the passenger seat of the Jeep, so recently occupied by my sloppily stowed dig kit, with both solidity and total lightness, a person who was settled and who gave you the impression of being there only because she wanted to be, all at the same time. A person who was herself and alive, and not in the hole I’d just opened in the ground and in our lives.

  “We saw each other a few hours ago, Dad. How close of a watch do I need to keep on you?” Kylie laughed.

  I made her promise to cab home when the swim meet wrapped for real, and apologized for sounding like her mother. Kylie walked back into the school, melding with the crowd before she entered. Untouchable and not afraid.

  Before getting behind the wheel of the Jeep up by the cemetery, I’d opened the passenger door and popped the glove compartment, taking out a cylinder of hand wipes and an old bottle of Ellen’s nail polish remover. I poured the stinking, chemical liquid all over my hands, which still felt infested with the stench of that dead flesh I’d touched, even though I’d grabbed it through gloves. I prayed, to no one in particular, that the increasingly heavy rain would do the scene cleanup I hadn’t been capable of. I’d filled in the grave, heaping dirt on top of what I’d found until it vanished, and I’d gone through some of my normal postdig rituals. Just way too fast. And with some steps missing, I was pretty sure.

  After leaving Kylie, I took the Jeep to a service station and had it washed, eating an incredibly salty sandwich as they did an interior clean. While the guys did their work, I bought a prepaid TracFone with cash and sat on a bench in front of Cherry Street Coffee across the street, drinking a flavorless mint tea and preparing to dial Sergeant Keith Waring.

  Keith’s home phone rang. He had a landline, not a cell—he said it was to save money, but it was equally true there was no one in his life who ever wanted to get ahold of him in a hurry. He picked up on the third ring, his voice moving with his constant breathlessness.

  “Waring.”

  “Keith. It’s Martin, just wanting to check something.”

  “Over the phone?”

  “Yeah. Just a customer-base question.”

  “Okay.”

  “Like we discussed. Many times before. I’m your only client, correct? We’re exclusive.”

  “Hey, you know I wouldn’t cheat on you, buddy,” Keith said.

  “That’s good. Very good to know. Because I assume you know how heavily screwed we would both be if, you know, exposure happened.”

  “I’m not an idiot. Plus, even if I had—which I haven’t—no one could Nancy Drew all that stuff together the way you do, right?”

  “Right,” I said. Waring was flattering me, but I’d had the same thought—the chances of someone aligning all those unlikely details from across the decades of Shurn files to arrive at that lonely Irish grave? Minimal. A professional detective, a cop, maybe, but I didn’t think any amateurs other than me would be likely to find Tinsley’s resting place. Not arrogance, just probability.

  “Why do you ask?” Keith said. There was loneliness in his voice, now, a reluctance to let the conversation end. I wondered what the rest of his day looked like. Better than the morning I’d just had, definitely, but grisly and bleak in its own way.

  “Just having a think, that’s all. No reason. Forget it, I’ll see you soon.”

  The photos would stay, I decided. They belonged in the scrapbook, with the rest, especially now that I’d damaged Jane Doe—Tinsley’s—bones with my panicked scramble.

  “All good?” asked a man wearing a Jesus badge, which I soon realized was his name tag.

  “All good,” I said, tipping him with four five-dollar bills and gesturing toward the other guys on his crew. On my ride home, Keith called the TracFone I’d forgotten to throw out.

  “Why did you do it? What the fuck is wrong with you?” Keith was sputtering, his voice wet with panic. The cheap receiver crackled with his nervousness.

  “What? What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “I got a call from homicide. They want me to come in and pull a bunch of old files, trying to track down any mention of a bunch of bones they just found under a girl who got killed last week. It’s going nuts down there. That body you called in, the new dead body? Bella Greene? What the fuck were you thinking? And what did you do to her, you sick—”

  “I didn’t do anything, Keith. I didn’t call anything in.” I attached the name “Bella Greene” to that slippery wrist and the stench that came with it. I tried to scan my mind for pictures of her from the news. “We can’t talk about this now, Keith. Maybe not ever. Don’t do anything and don’t talk to anybody.”

  “It was one of your calls! The computer voice, everything, it was you.”

  “Do you really think I’d start being a fucking idiot about this at the precise moment something goes wrong, Keith?” He was quiet. “The Pemberton, eleven tonight. Calm down and shut up until then.” I drove through an alley near the yacht club and tossed the phone hard against the open lid of a dumpster, hearing the plastic crack before it landed on the soft waste below.

  CHRIS ASKED SANDRA IF SHE wanted him there while she dealt with the mother. She waved him off, leaving him standing with
the desk sergeant. The two men pretended to be talking as Sandra walked stocky, short-legged Sylvia Greene through the warren of offices and cubicles to a comfort area they had set up in the rear quadrant of the station, furnished to look something like a cross between a waiting room and a living room. The walk was long, as Sylvia Greene kept pausing, doing a fist clench and slight turn of her upper spine, as though she were gearing down from an argument. Rick Garner, one of the officers who’d thrown out her flyer a few days before, walked toward them as they entered the last corridor. Mrs. Greene was staring at the linoleum and didn’t notice him.

  Rick opened his mouth, and Sandra saw he had braces, something that must have made parts of the job hell for him, as far as getting teased went. Probably lied about it and said they were from getting his jaw smashed in a fight. As Garner’s hand was coming up to touch Mrs. Greene on the shoulder, he lost all his courage at once and walked past them instead.

  Once they hit the room, Sandra let the woman collect herself. Sylvia Greene had wear in her face, the lines, puckering, and hollows that came from smokes, a decade or so of bad nutrition somewhere in her past, and probably a couple long tangles with substance abuse. But she was young to have a twenty-three-year-old daughter, maybe about forty. They took up seats in the strange room, sitting on soft, grandma’s-house couches in a building of practical surfaces. Sylvia Greene had done the formal identification on her daughter’s body in the morgue a couple of hours ago. It was late afternoon now, and Sandra wanted the sandwich in her purse. She left it there, let a little silence build, and Sylvia started talking.

  “I asked this when they showed her to me, but I think there’s a better chance you’ll be honest with me.”

  “No one here would lie to you, Mrs. Greene.”

  “Soften things, though. They might do that.” Bella Greene’s mother, tendons rippling on her neck as she shifted the muscles of her face to stave off tears and crackles in her voice, looked hard at Sandra, who tilted her head a little, allowing that this might be true. “I asked them about any sex stuff that had been done to her.”

  “There was none,” Sandra said immediately. “No evidence of anything like that. Or—torture.” She’d been unable to find a softer word.

  “So she was just killed.”

  “Yes. Drugged and then stabbed, just once, directly in the heart. Almost certainly no pain. She probably had no idea.”

  “Isn’t that strange, in something like this?” Sylvia Greene said, pushing her hand deep into an inner pocket of her coat. Sandra decided that if the lady wanted to smoke, she’d let her. They’d take the battery out of the smoke detector if they had to. Sylvia pulled out a pack of gum, popping out two pieces. She didn’t offer one to Sandra, just put both in her mouth and started chewing aggressively.

  “I did think it was unusual, yes,” said Sandra. “It seemed like a murder with purpose, not random or part of the usual kind of pattern behavior. Do you know of anyone who would want to kill her?”

  “Where was she found?” asked Sylvia, going directly to the most important question.

  “A location a little bit outside of town, in strange circumstances,” Sandra said. Not the least of which was that the body had been frozen solid before it was buried, and had defrosted under the earth. That one was new to her.

  “Which you’re not going to tell me. They wouldn’t tell me in the room, either.” “Room” meant morgue. Relatives of the corpses almost always called it “the room” in these interviews.

  “For the sake of catching the guy who did this to her, no, we’re not letting anyone know that yet.”

  “Not even the mother of the dead whore on the slab.” Sylvia looked at the floor as she said this, staring through the linoleum.

  “Look,” Sandra started, stopping when Sylvia put her hand up.

  “I’m just glad you’re handling this, not one of the men. You’ll have a better idea of what I mean when I tell you she wasn’t just street meat, from nowhere. Not that any of the girls you see are, but some of them just never had a chance. Bella had a chance. She fucked up her life, but she had a life to fuck up, you know?” Sylvia rubbed the inside of her left forearm.

  “Yes. I know that.”

  “I don’t care what anyone else thinks, just you. If you’re the one who’s going to be finding the thing who did this to her. And I’m going to be of very little help to you, I’m sorry. I’ve barely talked to Bella or seen her in three years.” Sylvia Greene took out her gum and rolled it up in a receipt. Sandra pushed the paper cup of coffee she’d poured for herself over to Sylvia. It wasn’t that the woman looked thirsty, it was that she looked like she wanted to bury her face for a second, chase back the saltwater pooling in her tear ducts while she pretended to sip. This was how cops tended to cry, at least at the station; at certain bars and in their homes, the flow was a little freer, but by their desks, the face-in-mug method was the way to go. Sylvia came up for air after a second, looking more collected.

  “There’s one guy Bella talked about. We ran into each other, near my office, I think really by accident. It had been so long since we talked that I led by giving her a fifty, wheedled her into getting Starbucks with me. She stayed for twenty minutes, getting twitchier and eyeing the door.”

  “Did she seem scared?”

  “Scared she wasn’t going to get a fix as soon as she wanted one, that’s all. I could see her plowing through the dealer Rolodex in her head while I talked to her. But she did mention one guy. She was wearing this turquoise scarf I’d given her for grad, too. Can’t believe she still had that thing.”

  “Who’s the guy?” Sandra asked, trying to hope her way through all the improbabilities, trying to get this potential suspect to fit the profile she was cobbling together. Maybe the Finder also had grown a fixation with women who worked the streets, living parallels of the skeletons he’d uncovered over the years. Maybe he’d pushed that curiosity into his first kill. Maybe he’d buried that kill with an old kill of his own, of someone he’d known. Maybe. Maybe not.

  “I’m telling you right now it’s not him.” Sylvia pushed a clump of her cheap haircut over her right ear, which had been hidden until now. It was shriveled and wavy at the top, thin and misshapen as a broken potato chip, with the shiny skin of a burn scar. A souvenir from Bella’s father, or some later boyfriend. Sandra read the move as a wordless demonstration that Sylvia knew violence and men, and the places where the two intersected.

  “His name,” Sylvia said, “his dumb name is Keegan Fitzroy. Kinda sounds like a cop name from a cheesy old show, right? He’s not a cop. He’s a real piece of crap who owns a sports collectibles store on Third Avenue. Must have family money, or something, because he lives in that new high-rise near the market. Bella said that a few times. Stressed it.”

  “Did you tell anyone about him when your daughter went missing?”

  “Eight or nine cops,” Sylvia said, staring at Sandra now. “I have the feeling no one followed up on it.”

  “I’m sorry. And how did this Fitzroy know your daughter?” Sandra wished that she had her coffee back, but it was too late. Not knowing what to do with her hands, she opened up her notebook and poked at it with her pen.

  “Bella was never an actual prostitute. She didn’t walk, or advertise, nothing like that.” She hesitated, buried her face again in the cup. “I don’t mean to say that proudly, like that was one way I didn’t fail her, that she didn’t fail herself. I’d rather she was a happy, safe sex worker with an apartment of her own and no track marks and with a pulse. But she didn’t sell it straight up. She had rules, I guess. She only slept with dealers—this I found out when she was still in school—or had ongoing things with mostly old, mostly disgusting men. Men who kept her.”

  “Right.”

  “The few times I saw Bella in the last few years, it was different guys, but this time, in the Starbucks, she tried to sell me Keegan Fitzroy like he was the real thing. Some sort of real thing. So after she scurried off that day, I went
into his store to check him out. Skinny with a Grinch Who Stole Christmas gut. Store’s a bit of a mess, and so is he. A snob, too. I think he keeps the store just so he can show off to the losers who hang out there, scream at the occasional kid who comes in and leans on one of his glass cases.”

  “He doesn’t necessarily sound like a direct hit, suspect-wise, but we’ll check him out, Mrs. Greene.”

  “She was bruised, too. When I saw her. Bruised on her arms, and it didn’t look needle-related. I know what junkie arms look like, by now,” Sylvia said, pulling her upper lip into her mouth and chewing it.

  There had been some light bruising on Bella’s arms, according to the guys downstairs, but it didn’t seem related to the murder itself. Looked like trace markings from a few days before death, not severe enough to be tied to a struggle. But Keegan Fitzroy was a little more interesting if he was into inflicting pain.

  “You think Fitzroy had been abusing her?”

  “Probably not. Jesus, I don’t know. Just—”

  “Don’t worry about it. We’ll talk to him.”

  “Yeah. Could you treat him a bit like shit, please?”

  “Not officially,” Sandra said, maintaining clear, frank eye contact. Sylvia Greene got out a small chuckle. Sandra was going to join in, but the laugh didn’t last long enough.

  Walking Sylvia back to her car in the parking lot, Sandra passed Chris, who was drinking a Coke and sitting on the hood of his car. He liked doing part of his reading and thinking out here, when it wasn’t raining, at least. They didn’t talk, but he looked up from his papers and gave Sandra a nod.