I used the ice that was pooling in my gut and behind my eyes to steady my hands as I put on the gloves and picked up the needle. Ellen. Kylie. Ragman watching me from the dark as I dug up Bella’s body. Waiting for Keith and me outside the bar. These things together held more menace than the gun tucked into his pants, a threat that carried past the violent simplicity of a bullet passing into my flesh. At least that was something direct. Something I could easily understand, in a way that I couldn’t conceive of losing reality, losing Kylie, Ellen. The vital parts of my life, the ones outside the breathing and guts and blood a bullet would stop.
I opened Keith’s door with my newly gloved fingertips, the white latex giving me some distance from what I was doing, turning my hands into ghostly appendages attached to my wrists. Keith immediately started sagging out, and I braced his padded thickness with my knee against the door. The Ragman laughed, then rounded the car to help me. I was aware of his gun prodding my own hip bone as he pushed Keith’s head back and exposed the throat and veins. The Ragman took out a cell phone to illuminate the target area of skin.
“That big one right there,” the Ragman said, unbuttoning the top of Keith’s shirt with nimble movements of his right thumb and forefinger. A vein just above the collarbone presented itself to the syringe. Keeping my hand steady by making it distant, using the same control as I had in the last moments of a dig, when the first white bones showed through under my shovel blade, I uncapped the needle and emptied the fluid into Keith. In a few seconds, the snuffling noises and shifting stopped. He was as inert as he had been when I’d first seen him in the car. I pulled it out, carefully, recapping the point and handing it to the man whose gun was pressing into my side.
The Ragman reclined Keith’s seat, which gave way rapidly under his weight. He kicked the passenger door shut and we backed away from the vehicle. In the half-dark, it was just a parked car, not worth approaching or looking into. Keith was invisible.
“Let’s get to that elevator and hope there’s no one in there,” said the Ragman. He piloted, walking slowly, knowing I would follow. The elevator was empty until the Ragman entered it, holding the door for me. It was tight in there with both of us, his breathing thick behind that mask. He pressed 3 and we were slowly winched up, the ancient cable making a thin screech as we passed each floor. The ride was long enough for me to ask one question, and the back part of my brain chose it for me.
“The skeleton in the grave. Who was it?”
“You want me to say Tinsley Schultz?” the Ragman answered. “You’ll find out sometime soon. Probably.” The doors dinged open to an empty hallway.
“Keith’s 307. Just left.” Keys he must have liberated from Keith’s jacket pocket were soon in the lock of that door, and we entered into a narrow hallway lined with dirty shoes and decorated with an Ikea rug I’d seen in a dozen other rooms. I went in first.
“Now what?” I pushed forward into the apartment, keeping my shoes on. The Ragman passed me, pulling out a couple of wooden kitchen chairs. He set them up facing each other, pointing at one. I watched him for a second.
“Martin, don’t start thinking now. You’ll ruin everything and your brain will end up on Keith’s wall in the next ten seconds.” The Ragman pulled the gun out of his pants and I flinched. He set it on the kitchen table, next to a fat manila envelope sitting there, and pointed at the same chair. I sat and he flicked the lights on.
Keith’s apartment wasn’t surprising in any way. A little tidier than expected, maybe. From the way the Ragman moved in here, finding chairs and switches in the dark, I got the impression that his scouting of Keith’s building had involved the interior of this room as well.
The Ragman sat down across from me. I looked into the human eyes, their dead latex surroundings. The mask had no eyebrows. The eyes were plain green, friendly, with a deviant fleck of extra pigment next to the iris of the left one. I was stunned to feel my heart rate slowing, a bit of calm settling in. I could actually see this man now, reassure myself that I didn’t know him from anywhere else in my life. Wide in the chest, a stomach that jutted a little, shoulders with useful bulk. He was wearing black jeans, and the thighs in them looked to have some power in them, too; the whole of him spoke of utility strength, the kind earned in hard labor, not in an executive gym. It was a farm worker’s body, a construction guy’s. Or a prisoner’s.
“What are we doing here?” I asked. “What do you want?”
The Ragman laughed, the movement of his chin making the sealed mouth of the mask ripple unpleasantly. “What I want-ed, past tense, was not to have my private business poked around in. Jason’s, either.”
“Shurn.”
“Yes.”
“You knew him.”
“I just told you that. Look, we’ve barely even gotten started here, so I’m not going to sit around explaining everything to you yet. Sit still for a second.”
The Ragman pulled out his cell phone and started taking photos of me, backing off, getting the posters and furniture in the shots. “Tell the camera where you are, Martin,” he said. I had to guess he’d clicked over to video. He put his other hand, absently, on the gun butt, tapping the barrel against the table. I obeyed, telling the camera I was at Keith Waring’s apartment in Ballard. The Ragman set the phone down after another few moments of placing me in Keith’s apartment, taking in the sparse landmarks of the place alongside of my face on the digital screen he was staring at. He pushed the gun he was holding against an envelope on the table.
“I’m going to be taking this with me, but you should take a look inside, first.”
I pulled the envelope over. Two thick stacks of twenty-dollar bills, and a file folder, about twenty pages in it. The cash looked to be about double the payment I usually gave Keith.
“The file’s for you,” the Ragman said, pushing it over to me. I opened it. It was on Carl Hillstrom, the guy who’d written badly spelled letters to the cops in the late nineties while he vanished hitchhikers around the Pacific Northwest. It wasn’t part of the file on him that I’d previously bought from Keith. This was an interview fragment I hadn’t seen before, and I started scanning it despite myself. The Ragman reached over to me and closed the folder.
“Later, Martin. I gave that cash to Keith a few weeks ago, in exchange for all the hard copies he had of files and information on buyers of these files. I can’t be absolutely sure he was telling the truth, but I’m quite sure. He seemed relieved to get the stuff out of his apartment, really. He never had the stones or stupidity to write about any of this digitally, either. Or friends to tell it to. That I made sure of. Been through all of his devices. Our names aren’t anywhere to be found.
“This,” the Ragman said, tapping the phone, “is the only link remaining between you, Keith, and myself. And it won’t have much to do with me if I end up dropping it in a mailbox for the police. You’ll have to do all the explaining if that happens.”
The Ragman got up and I flinched, squeaking the chair back a half-inch. The apartment was small, that little hallway, living room, and the kitchen I was sitting in. An odor of sleep and sweat came from the open door of the bedroom and adjoining bathroom to my left, the place where Keith slept and shit. There was a Led Zeppelin poster on the wall behind where the Ragman had been sitting, and a Picasso print that looked like it had been moving from place to place with Keith since high school. Each corner was speckled with thumbtack holes.
“So why are we here now?” I asked.
“We’re not here,” the Ragman said, gesturing with the phone. “You’re here. Some anonymous accomplice, too, the man holding the camera, but he might as well be on a grassy knoll for all the reality he’ll have for the cops.” The Ragman picked up the envelope on the table and left Keith’s keys in its place, then started to walk toward the door. “Wait here for a while. And really, don’t worry, I’ve been in and out of this place at least twenty times while Keith was at work. Picked clean. With his phone gone, there’s nothing to tie me to him. Anythi
ng else, witnesses, connections, that’s your problem, though. I only take care of physical evidence.”
“How did you know it was me?” I asked. The Ragman laughed.
“I knew some of the finds you made were impossible without police knowledge. And I can smell cop as well as I can smell someone like you, just from the stories. When I heard about the calls, I knew someone just like you, just like Jason, was out there, using files to sniff around. All I had to do to find you was to find Keith and the smartest guy he sold to. Were you fishing for praise?” He didn’t wait for me to answer, and I didn’t have one for him.
“Take a look at that file and find your way to where it says next Sunday.” The Ragman pointed to the thin folder. I’d never dug up any of Hillstrom’s victims.
“Well, don’t read it in front of me, you’ll make me blush. Come Sunday, I’ll let you know how you can get off the hook for Bella and Keith. You’re going to have to do right by me and Jason.”
“I’m not on the hook for Keith. What hook?”
The Ragman waited for a second by the door, putting the gun back in his pants. He opened the hallway closet and felt around for a box on the crowded top shelf. A pair of never-worn New Balance sneakers tumbled down, and the Ragman pulled out the box they’d been purchased in a second after. He showed me the contents: more cash. A lot more cash.
“Keith liquidated his bank accounts just after the Bella Greene call came through. I was following him when he went into the bank. Knew then, knew for a fact, that neither you nor I could trust him to be quiet.” The Ragman placed the envelope of cash from the kitchen table in the box, then tucked it under his arm. “I’m not the thieving kind, but if all this cash gets left behind, the cops will be even more curious about where Keith might have ended up. You are going to come on Sunday, right? Alone, without having told anyone? I can’t tell you how many checks I have in place, Martin. You don’t turn up, I burn your life down. Your wife dies. Your daughter dies. You tell anyone or come with anyone, same thing. I may even do it all anyway. And no one will find any of you, ever. If you do exactly what I say, you get to keep the life you have.”
“What are you going to do to Keith?”
“Nothing. You’ve already done it. You shot Sergeant Keith Waring up with enough nasty stuff to kill a couple of men, even ones his size, Martin. Welcome to killing.”
SANDRA SAT ON TOP OF her desk in homicide, making a last call before going home. She’d stayed late after coming back from Keegan Fitzroy’s place, checking in with the uniforms and undercovers she had patrolling the usual prostitute strips. Sandra didn’t think the next victim would be taken from one of the typical hunting grounds, but she wasn’t about to leave those girls completely unprotected based on her strong hunch. There’d been nothing on the CC tapes from Fitzroy’s building except footage of Bella Greene walking out, and tapes from surrounding buildings hadn’t been able to zero in on what they wanted to see: the pickup. All they had was Bella leaving the building, Bella walking a strip of sidewalk half a block from the entry. Then she was out of frame, a little before slipping out of the world.
The constantly active station became a little less busy as the night went on. A check-in with forensics had nothing to add on the skeleton they’d found with Bella, beyond the gender and age they’d started with. The boys and girls downstairs were running the info against every bit of genetic and descriptive information they had on early twenties girls who’d vanished in the mid-nineties. A list of names and pathetic yearbook photos, alongside dental and DNA information.
There was an evening of concentrated work on Bella Greene’s case ahead of Sandra, but it was at home after a quick call, not here in the station. In front of screen and notepad, maybe with Chris in the next room to yell ideas at, if he didn’t have work of his own to take home. Sandra didn’t let him sit in her kitchen when she had it set up as a miniaturized investigation ops room; the chaos of files and loose papers had to share space with the grindings of her brain and physical thinking, which often resulted in sheets stapled to the wall in patterns only she could read. When Sandra was unpacking the Murdoch double-murder, the one instrumental in getting her promoted to detective crazy early, she’d even tacked a few photos to the floor, structuring her information as piles of words emerging from those visuals. There was probably a way to do this on a computer, maybe even an easy way, but she was afraid it would change the way she thought.
“This is Whittal. Has anyone else made the same call requests I have?”
“What? Requests?” The voice that came across the line was bored, with a slight accent; Sandra might have been talking to someone in a call center across the world, not Mo from the second floor.
“Requests to pull the calls. The computer ones, about the bodies.”
“Oh. Usual media requested the latest one.”
“No one asked for them as a package, then,” Sandra asked, doing her best impression of patience. “The ones from the past few years.”
“No, not really. Archives came by to ask if I had them quickly at hand, but I just told him to stop by your desk and ask you. Quicker for everyone.” Mo meant it was less trouble for him.
“Archives? What the hell is archives?”
“Who. The big guy, has a desk down by you guys. Keith.”
“Keith Waring?” The man in the corner was what some of the guys had referred to as a “furniture-cop,” and he’d stopped occurring to Sandra as anything other than a direction to nod politely in when she walked past his desk. He never checked her out for over five seconds at a time, which she appreciated, but she couldn’t recall ever having had a conversation with him.
“Yeah, Waring.”
“What was it for?”
“Jesus, we didn’t have a long back-and-forth. It was a ten-second phone call,” Mo said, clearly wishing this call had been that short as well.
“I’ll take it up with him,” Sandra said, not about to do anything of the sort. She stood up at her desk, looking across the room to the little area where Keith sat, unboxing and scanning documents all day, taking the occasional photograph, labeling old files for shredding and disposal. Focusing hard, she pulled up a couple of memories, fleeting ones. He ate pungent hero sandwiches for lunch, wrapped in wax paper he’d furl down in pace with his bites. Once she’d asked him where he got them, and he chewed for a while before saying, “From home.” Never interacted with other cops, and his job didn’t really call for him to. Just moving papers around.
“You ready?” Chris asked, standing in front of his own desk and doing a back bend, confusing his bunched vertebrae with the elongated and weirdly graceful motion, which looked all wrong in this room. His lack of mustache and fat made him stand out from the other detectives on the squad, and he caught a fair amount of shit for it. Sandra didn’t think any of their wives would complain about their husbands looking more like Chris.
“Ready for what? Assuming, are we?” She meant this playfully, but with her mind still processing Keith Waring’s interest in the calls, she forgot to make her tone friendly, to swing up on the last syllable.
“All I meant was ‘are you ready to head home for the day.’ Individually, in your own car, as the strong independent person you are, etcetera.” Chris tugged on the lanyard of keys he wore on his gym days. Sandra took in the rest of his workout gear, proof he had no intention of trying to take her home.
“Sorry,” Sandra said. “I’m still fantasizing about beating knobs into Keegan Fitzroy’s head with his autographed Roger Maris bat.”
“We’ll stop by Ski Mask Emporium on the way over,” Chris said, walking over and leaning against the wall of her abbreviated cubicle, extending a hand and putting it on her knee. She let him do it, because there was no one immediately around and because she had snapped at him. Plus, it felt alright.
“I wish it was as easy as caving in that loser’s skull. Won’t help anyone, though.”
“We just have to find the right skull, Sandra. It’s not Keegan Fitzroy�
��s. I’ve been beating the bushes since we left his place, cruising Bella’s associates, short list that it is. Not solid citizens, but decent people, mostly. Users and small-time pushers. If this was a straight impatient passion-kill, maybe I could see a suspect there, but this kind of ritual, this clean of a cover-up on the physical evidence? The call wasn’t just made to throw us, that’s clear.”
“Don’t do this much without checking in with me and keeping me updated, Chris. It pisses me off.”
“Just grunt work. And please remember, we’re partners, and I wouldn’t talk to you that way.” Chris smiled afterward, the way he did when he was properly angry. Sandra put her hands up and bowed her head, accepting the charge of being shitty.
“Sorry. Come here, one sec.” Sandra got up and motioned to Chris to follow her, and they walked over to the corner desk she’d just been talking about on the phone with Mo. Waring’s desk, the surface of it, was bare, but it was bounded by short pillars of bankers boxes, each stuffed full of file folders commemorating investigations of larceny, forgery, death. Sandra poked at one with her foot.
“This guy,” she said. “You know him?”
“Officer Inertia. Sure.”
“He requested all the calls. Mo just told me. He wanted all the computer calls.”
“Yeah. He got them off your desk in that memory stick, just after lunch. While you were wrapped up with Sylvia Greene, just before I saw you out—”
“You let a third party—you, don’t tell me you gave him permission—you let someone who had nothing to do with this investigation take relevant data off my fucking workstation and make off with it?”
“Only after checking to see the calls were the only thing on the stick. I watched him dump them into a folder and then took it right back. Figured you wouldn’t have left anything out in the open if it was, you know, delicate.”
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