Find You in the Dark

by Nathan Ripley

  “These were destroyed. I had this taken care of.”

  “You don’t have a record anymore, Marty, but that doesn’t mean they carry all the paper out to the parking lot and have a bonfire. It’s buried a little deeper, but I was still able to find it with some searching. I’ve had it for about five years, now, thanks to a little naughty breaking and entering, maybe, or maybe even just a phone call. It’s the stuff that isn’t in there that interests me most. So, you at what, sixteen? You were breaking into the houses of certain young ladies and spending a creepy time pacing the premises. Taking a souvenir or two, probably. That’s not mentioned here.”

  “Shut up.”

  “What I’m wondering is how far you took it before the cops scooped you out of that tree. Had you been strangling their cats or anything like that? Isn’t that what you people do?”

  I looked down at the file. My only encounter with the courtroom part of the legal process, before I sank into my few months at juvie for my nighttime activities at Darla’s and Misty’s houses, had also been my first indication that I wasn’t as dumb as my parents and teachers seemed to think. The judge I’d landed—an older woman named Volquez who my public defender told me had two teenage daughters of her own, in a tone that told me I was fucked—responded well to the few details I gave her about my home life and my concentration on the deluded, romantic fantasy ideals I’d had about Misty and Darla, about their wonderful homes and nice lives. I kept sex out of it entirely and summoned up a few tears, and that’s why I got the light sentence I did.

  I realized I was squeezing nail dents into the file. At the top left of each leaf of paper was a diagonal line, the photocopied impression of a staple.

  “Where’s the original?”

  “Nestled in the part of the records department it always will be. You’re on that line between fanboy investigator and genuine profundo-creep, Martin. These pages prove it. Research is fun, you know. I learned a lot from watching you work.”

  “You didn’t learn discretion, Keith. You didn’t learn to be smart.”

  “So you were stalking girls that are around your daughter’s friends’ age now, huh? She’d probably be pretty grossed out to hear that.”

  “If you ever mention or imply anything about Kylie again I’ll have you killed, or kill you myself. I will.”

  “I’m in a fucking panic, too, Martin, don’t you get it? I should have known, looking at this shit, that you were going to go full-psycho on me soon enough. You were practicing for it in high school. You don’t just, just blow out your knee and decide to quit being a night stalker pervert creep like some guy hanging up his football cleats. You finally killed some stupid bitch and planted her and now you’ve ruined my life, too, and we’re both going to trial and jail and that’s it for me,” Keith said, his voice shaking, a mist starting to surface at the lower rim of each eye.

  “Don’t call the Greene woman a bitch. And of course I didn’t kill her.”

  Keith laughed at this, shocking his teary eyes, releasing about fifty percent of his tension. “Don’t call her a bitch, he says. Sitting down across from the fucking Angel of Death and getting PC language lessons. Fine. If not bitch, junkie. Apparently she wasn’t a full-on whore.”

  “If you were going to blackmail me with this juvie record, Keith, you’re a little too late, and a little too involved.”

  “I’m just letting you know that I know, Martin. I know what you are,” Keith said, nuzzling his pint and taking what I realized was his first sip. I’d never seen him wait so long to drink before.

  “Who did you sell the case files to? Who else other than me?”

  “I’m not ready to talk about that yet,” Keith said. The laugh had restored a little of his fake swagger, and I reminded myself that he was currently the only person with access to any of the information I needed. Him and whoever had filled that grave.

  “What are you willing to talk about?”

  “Well, the girl. Bella Greene,” he said, whispering now. “Nothing—I keep my ears open, the guys talk around me—nothing was done to the body, other than the killing part. Fucking weird.”

  “Yeah,” I said. Very strange. “Not even any pain stuff? Rope ties?”

  “You can say ‘ligature’ around me, Mart, I have a TV too.” Keith snorted some foam off the IPA and onto the table. “No, nothing. One clean stab in the heart, while she was drugged. Stung and done.”

  “So—”

  “So the weirdest part of this whole thing is, she’s in a grave with another vic, one that has something to do with your poking around. She a Shurn girl?” I hesitated, but Keith wasn’t going to go on unless he got an answer. I nodded.

  “Figured,” he said. “You must have been over the moon to get those tapes when you did, right? Any clues you needed on them?”

  “Just confirmation of what I already knew.”

  “You’re such a pathetic show-off,” Keith said, some snarl to it. “I listened to all those calls you made, on the way up here. This detective, Whittal—”

  “Tell me what you know about her. Everything.”

  “In a minute, Martin. I pulled the USB off the detective’s desk to dump the files onto my laptop and give them a listen again. No one noticed.” This I doubted, but I let Keith continue.

  “You know how arrogant it is, thinking you’re smarter than cops? It just hasn’t occurred to you that we’re spending our time trying to prevent guys like you from doing the shit that gets the girls buried, right?”

  “You personally aren’t doing anything other than shuffling through filing cabinets, Keith.” This got to him, even if it wasn’t worse than the other insults I’d pushed his way in the past—maybe because this time, I wouldn’t be following up my jibes with a wad of cash. Keith looked at the surface of the table for a minute, tinged the unclipped fingernails of his right hand against his pint glass, then took my wrist in his left hand and squeezed, hard. So hard my knees moved together and clicked at the caps, so hard I felt my bladder spasm. Keith let me go when he saw the begging in my face.

  “Just being at this table with you, I’m doing you a favor, Martin.” He patted the red part of my forearm with his hand, before I slid it under the table. Keith made a shots gesture toward the bar and said “Jameson,” then held up two fingers. I waited for the drinks to arrive, and sipped mine as he threw his back.

  “A favor, Martin. We’re doing each other a favor, one that keeps us both out of jail, or worse trouble. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “So you’re not going to insult me anymore.”

  “Sure. And you’re going to be straight with me about the files. Because someone else out there has them. Or none of this would be happening.” I drank from my pint and Keith matched me. There was a hole in the carpet near my left foot, some hardwood beneath it begging to be liberated in a reno, one that would probably happen in a few years when the lease here came up. I teased the corners of the hole with my boot while I waited for Keith, who made a show of considering his reply.

  “Some stuff, okay,” he said, relenting. “I have sold some stuff to other collectors, but very little that overlapped with your little field of interest. The particular serials you’re into—they’re footnotes, compared to some of the guys I have sitting in the cabinets back at the station. That’s where I do most of my business. The bigs. But you? Barely anyone is interested in Shurn, Carl Hillstrom, those guys. You and—well, maybe that’s all. Only other guy who asked about those files didn’t even want to see them.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “He didn’t want to see the files themselves,” Keith said. “He wanted to see who was buying them. He wanted my client list. A few notes on who was buying what.”

  I’d given up being startled by Keith’s stupidity, which left me with my own to contemplate. The gulping moron across from me, who even now cared more about provoking me than he seemed to care about the trouble we were in—I’d married myself to his mistakes, just for the chan
ce to look at more files, to find more burials. Keith undid the top button of the blue shirt he was wearing, revealing a black t-shirt underneath. He couldn’t even dress himself like an adult, and I’d trusted him with my freedom and life.

  “You weren’t suspicious of someone asking for details of your illegal activities?”

  “I ran him through every possible system I could, even dug up some buried juvie records on him, which confirmed the story he had. And the money. You think you pay big, goddamn. Guy had me thinking I’d finally be able to afford a boat and a few years of docking fees, business kept going that way.”

  The light racket of young people trying to keep their voices down came to us from the doorway. A few college-age kids, four women and a handsome male mascot, dressed in what a shitty magazine would call hipster style, a useless catchall that infuriated Ellen when she heard it. It covered the way she and Gary dressed, though, fitted and vintage with the occasional odd angle. These kids looked like younger facsimiles of my wife and her new business partner, except for the slave-labor cheapness of their pilling, shiny sweaters. I waited for them to do the inevitable: take in the bar and its customers, and pile out to go to the next place. They did.

  “Keith, we need to get into some actual specifics. Who the hell was this guy, and what story did he give you?”

  “I’m not sure if this is really the best setting for us to get into specifics, buddy. What I will tell you here, though, is that he said he’d been inside with Jason Shurn, as a kid. Wanted to follow up on that.”

  “He was in youth detention with Shurn. Someone approached you saying he was old pals with a known, executed serial killer, and just wanted to check up on who else might be interested in said psychopath.” That shadow I’d pictured next to Jason Shurn out at the Irish grave got a bit sharper as I spoke.

  “You’re making me sound like an idiot again, Martin. And I’m not an idiot, or we’d be in a much bigger mess than we are now.”

  I looked at the Schlitz wall clock behind Keith’s head, not really interested in the time, but intensely interested in not making eye contact with him. It was 11:37. Ellen’s meeting with Gary was probably over, unless it was like the meetings Gary liked to take back in the ReeseTech days, which ended with martini pitchers at one of the hotel bars he cruised for tourists. I’d watched him chat up women countless times, some of the ReeseTech programming geeks looking on in awe as he went from a couple drink orders to a room number written on a napkin. It wasn’t impressive to me. He was just good at choosing someone who might choose him back.

  “If you want to talk about this more—and I think we should—let’s go to my apartment. I kept all the files there, anyway, stuff we might need. I don’t want to be seen with you here,” Keith said. The evasiveness of the way he was talking took me back to the Shurn tapes, Shurn whiling away the last minutes he had before the needle delivered its payload into his arm. The “someone else” Jason Shurn mentioned. This kid he’d been in juvie with. Maybe, more than maybe, the guy who’d added Bella Greene to that burial site before I’d gotten there.

  “I don’t want to be seen with you here either, Keith,” I responded, sighing. “Here or anywhere else.” I unfurled bills and put them on the table. At the very least, I could use this expedition to make concretely sure Keith had no record of me left by the time I exited his home, that I’d burned or wiped any evidence of my name from whatever primitive records of his fuckups he kept. I had a feeling it was going to be limited to a grease-stained notebook, maybe an Excel file. “Write the address down for me and get a head start, I’ll catch up. So it doesn’t look like we’re going together. You’re in what neighborhood?”

  “Ballard.”

  “Fine. Look, this guy you gave the list to—you gave my name to—what did he look like?”

  “I never met him. Just dropped the list at a garbage can near the police museum, pulled an envelope of cash out of another can down the street.”

  “Of course you did.”

  “I mean, I’ve seen his juvenile pictures, the kiddie mug shots.”

  “How can you be sure that’s him?”

  “Well, because he gave me the name, and he seemed to—” Doubt turned up on Keith’s face after a few seconds, a good indication of how far he had to be led toward an obvious answer. “I guess I’m not sure it was him.”

  “Alright. Okay. If you’re not going to give me the name here, at least tell me this. What did the person who called in the Bella Greene grave say? What was the call?”

  Keith smiled and angled his several chins. “You sure it wasn’t you made that call? Real sure?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “He said—” Keith pulled on his coat and made a few other adjustments that allowed for a dramatic pause, then started speaking in what was actually a pretty good impression of the inflections of the computer program I used to make my calls. “ ‘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.’ Then he read out a GPS coordinate, took the cops right to Bella Greene.”

  I watched Keith leave the bar and counted off five minutes on the Schlitz clock. Sent Ellen a text that I’d be going late at the bars, not to wait up. And, before I got up and left, worried for a second that I was going to be on that list of new memories this guy was making. List of new bodies.

  “WOULD BE FUN TO HUMILIATE him in front of his weird sports memorabilia pals,” Chris said. “I always hated those people. Grabbing fouls away from kids in the stands at the Kingdome.”

  “Kingdome?” Sandra was driving this time, managing the thin downtown traffic easily. They’d eaten at a cheapish steakhouse near the precinct, pushing the clock so they could be reasonably sure that Keegan Fitzroy would be home. “Gone almost twenty years ago, Chris. What kind of baseball fan are you?”

  “Yeah, Safeco, whatever. Awful name for a stadium. And I don’t watch sports outside of Michael’s league games, you know that.” Chris might have talked more, but he needed his tongue to poke at a thread of rib-eye gristle embedded in his molars.

  “Maybe you told me once, that doesn’t mean I remember.” They pulled up out front of the high-rise where Fitzroy lived, and Chris got out with his badge to have a word with the concierge, gesturing at their parked car. Sandra got out when it was clear they didn’t have to move it.

  “Gave me a fob of my very own,” said Chris, wiggling the keychain attachment that allowed them access to the elevator. “1014.” The lobby was slick in a boring cloned-condo way, green tile and brushed steel.

  “I’d rather live in a fishing shack than a trap like this,” Sandra said, while they waited a little too long for the elevator.

  “Fishing shack’s very doable, on your salary. This place, not so much. So there’s no way this is our guy?”

  “No. I looked at him this afternoon. Zero record, and he’s too young for the earlier calls we got, I think. They started in ’99, with the scrambled tape-recorder voice, before he started using the computer one. In 1999 Keegan Fitzroy was in high school out in Connecticut.” The elevator came, and Chris checked his hair in the chrome reflection as they rode up, patting down a couple of flyaways with a licked hand.

  “He could still have killed Bella,” Chris said. “Don’t get so attached to your Finder and this killer being the same guy. Not yet.”

  • • •

  “Of course I’m worried,” Fitzroy said, about twelve minutes into the informal interrogation. “Not lawyer-worried, but I just said ‘escalating sex games’ and this guy almost grabbed his cuffs. ‘Games,’ ma’am, is the important part of the sentence.”

  “ ‘Detective’ works better than ‘ma’am,’ but I take your point.” Sandra hated interviewing guys who talked like this, grating sub-Tarantino patter. It would have been worse if she’d come alone. Chris, on the couch doing his bored menace thing, kept proc
eedings unfriendly and gave Fitzroy less freedom to improv his hard-boiled lines. Fitzroy, who mostly fit Sylvia Greene’s description, skinny with a disproportionate and half-spherical potbelly, sank into a teak chair and sighed. His face was older than the rest of him, puffy pebbled leather contradicting his teen stick-limbs. Sandra was the only one standing.

  “You buy all this with baseball cards?” Chris asked.

  “Maybe a little of it. But it’s a combo of family money and flipped houses. The memorabilia store is my retirement project, you know? As long as I don’t lose too much on it too many months in a row, I’ll keep it running. Officer. Sir.”

  Sandra shot Chris a look, brief and hooded, making sure he wasn’t going to disrupt her line of questions with more of his interjections.

  “These sex games. Could you tell us about them?”

  “First thing I can tell you is that nothing I ever did to her would leave so much as a bruise, let alone put her in a grave. Consensual, psychological sex games.” Fitzroy pushed his hair back, trying to look slick and blasé but only revealing the thinness of his carefully layered crop. “I don’t know how specific you want me to be.”

  “Pretty specific,” Sandra said, leaning against the side of the chair next to her. “How about you summarize what you’ve told us so far, then take us right up to the night she disappeared? ‘Games’ included.”

  “She came into the store two days in a row, about five months ago. With the way she looked, both out of my customer demographic and not exactly being the tidiest of young ladies, of course I was afraid she was going to steal something.” Fitzroy shifted and tried to make himself comfortable by crossing and uncrossing his legs. The detectives waited for him to figure out that his posture wasn’t what was making him uncomfortable, and he went on.