Find You in the Dark

by Nathan Ripley

  “Jesus, Chris—” Sandra took down the volume when she heard a door across the room drift open on keening hinges. “This is a police station. I don’t feel the necessity to squirrel away anything pertinent when I leave my desk for a few minutes.”

  “Exactly. It’s a police station, and he’s police, working on archival material. Most of those calls are years, months old. It made enough sense he’d want to have them gathered together.”

  “Why? Why does that make sense? This is an element of an active investigation.”

  “A historical element, and that’s what he deals with,” said Chris. “It didn’t even occur to me that Keith asked on his own initiative. The lieutenant probably told him to throw together a Shurn file with any possible related materials, based on what we found today.”

  “Daley wouldn’t dream of making calls in my investigation without making them clear to me first, or at least notifying me immediately afterward. So no, that isn’t what happened.”

  Chris sighed instead of sending back another volley. “I fucked up, then. In an extremely minor way, though, I hope you’ll agree.”

  “You understand, don’t you, that this guy has access to literally everything he’d need to find these bodies?”

  “No, he doesn’t,” Chris said. “He doesn’t have the brains to find his nose when he’s blowing it, as you may have noticed from the snot traces in his stubble, and there’s also no way he’d keep his mouth shut about having done something right as a cop.”

  Chris tapped on the desk, picked up the one framed picture on its surface: Keith himself, getting a handshake and his sergeant stripes. A long time ago.

  “He’s an accidental burden of promotion and union politics. There’s a reason a sharp detective like you has never taken notice of him, Sandra. He’s not equipped for the job, let alone this covert shit. Have a little respect for my judgment.” Chris’s tone was sharp, but there was something pleading in his eyes that asked Sandra to confirm he was right, or at least that he wasn’t absolutely wrong. With what could have been mercy, or just extreme tiredness—Sandra was too tired to parse it—she nodded.

  “We’ll see. Whatever. I’ll get on his ass about it tomorrow.” Sandra pushed papers off her desk in a canvas shopping bag, and left with a quick goodbye to Chris, leaving any friendly backspin out of her voice. On purpose, this time.

  IT HAD FELT ODD, IN Keith waring’s apartment, for the Ragman to call himself the Ragman, but he’d gotten used to it, the way he’d gotten used to talking to Martin in the same fake-folksy tone he used on customers at his store. Since starting up again with killing, he’d begun thinking of himself as the Ragman, often, the syllables in his head bringing Jason Shurn’s presence back into the spaces where the Ragman lived and worked. Shurn’s hot breath, his capacity for absolute focus. The mistakes he’d make, the admiration he’d look at the Ragman with when the mistakes were resolved. Jason’s hand on a blade, listening to the Ragman’s instructions. The blade touching flesh at the juncture of forehead and hairline, a drugged woman stirring under it, her turning head beginning the incision by its own light force.

  The only important discussions he had these days were with himself, so a self-referent was necessary. Martin probably had that same problem, if it could be called a problem: having no one to share the most satisfying part of his life with. A state that forced a turn inward, caused you to look back to the past, to have conversations with versions of yourself, with your memories.

  The Ragman had outgrown his birth name years ago. Thumbing through the xeroxed documents in the file folder pulled from one of Keith Waring’s pathetic hiding stashes (this one below the vegetable crisper in his fridge), he found this name, the one on the business cards from Acme Urban Surveillance. The name of the store had been Jason Shurn’s idea, one he’d come up with before the killings, the arrest. They’d pooled their cash to order stock for the store, had planned to run it together. It was a miracle and Jason’s insistence on always using cash had prevented the police from tying the two of them together. The Ragman knew Jason never would have talked, even if they hadn’t killed him.

  After watching Martin Reese slowly drive away from Keith’s building, the Ragman had chauffeured the body to North Seattle, to his own home. He lived on the linked grounds of the three homes on the single lot he’d slowly taken over as his neighbors had moved away over the years. The neighbors he never spoke to thought he was being smart: becoming a slumlord himself. Really, he just wanted space, peace, storage. Keith’s car was parked in one of the garages of these houses, a corrosive solution eating at the paint and metal of the car. When the body was unrecognizable, the Ragman would drive it to the bottle factory that had been slated for demolition by a now bankrupt developer, adding the vehicle to the growing piles of industrial garbage that had been unofficially dumped on the grounds over the past five years.

  There’d be almost nothing left of Keith’s body, if the chemicals worked the way they had in the Ragman’s animal experiments. It was currently in three barrels, next to the dissolving car. The tarp the Ragman had lain out to section Keith on was also being eaten away by the solution in the barrel, which would liquefy the cop within three or four days. The man’s body didn’t deserve preservation, to become hidden and monumental; he’d been a functional kill, a prelude, the before-beginning of the Ragman’s entanglement with Martin Reese. Not like the women the Ragman and Jason had put away, had buried with a care and ritual he could remember in detail.

  The geography of this part of the world, a territory dictated not by state borders but by the reach of the Ragman’s old career in ending lives, was landmarked for him and him alone by the graves that marked his accomplishments. Had been since Jason died. And someone, for years, had been hauling up these anchors in his life. The graves had been found much faster than they ever would have if the world had been carrying on its prying and revealing activities at a regular pace, reaching into the Ragman’s stored memories with rooting dog snouts, clumsy hiking boots, urban development, and metal detectors. The solidity of what he’d done, of what he could assure himself was permanently there, had vanished, and it was all thanks to one of those men on the list he’d purchased from dissolving Keith. Martin Reese. Martin, who didn’t have the integrity to do what he’d always wanted to do, who instead had to intrude on the works of stronger men.

  The Ragman carried a box of Keith’s papers toward the barrel that stood in the middle of the untended lawn between the three homes he owned, two of which would certainly have been condemned if a city official ever made his way out here. He poured a half-quart of gasoline into its ringing metal interior, then threw the box in and followed that up with a book of lit matches. The flames erupted upward in a column, straight for a moment and then weakening into a wind-bent, flickering menace of heat that consumed another trace of the Ragman’s identity, along with some worthless, polybagged comic books and a set of inexplicably recent love letters Keith had been hiding in that box. These letters were printouts of emails, smudged and folded so often they’d gone cloth-soft at the creases. The Ragman had read two of them, out of curiosity: they were from a woman in Winnipeg, Canada, apparently, one enthralled by Keith’s invented stories of cop prowess and danger.

  Breathing the smoke of vanishing evidence, the Ragman thought of curious, digging Reese, who was trying to peel the Ragman out of his place in the earth. He was confident Martin would find his way to the right place in the forest on Sunday. If not, he could always just pick him up at home. Visit Ellen first. There had to be punishments if Martin couldn’t hold up his end. The Ragman took out his phone and wiped the photos and videos he’d taken of Martin, that extra leverage that had put such selfish fear in the man’s eyes. This wasn’t a game the Ragman intended to play with digital evidence—it would all be quite real.

  The light in the garage where Keith’s car was parked was still on, the Ragman noted. Would have to be switched off after these papers were burned. The Ragman paid his power bills pr
omptly and regularly checked the wiring in all of his homes, even the two he barely entered, giving the city no reason to check on him. This was an example of the caution that a man like the Ragman insisted upon, and knew to be necessary if he was going to continue doing what he needed to do.

  Jason Shurn had been attracted to that caution, but had at first been inclined to take it too far. “I don’t think we should, just yet,” had been his consistent refrain on the first few nights they’d taken the dark sedan out into the strip of prostitutes along the Pacific Coast Highway that they had initially planned to start culling. Night after night they drove the thirteen-block strip, alternating positions behind the wheel, until their caution became dangerous; the Ragman noticed women were beginning to retreat from the curb when they saw the sedan. They thought it was a patrol car, perhaps. The next day, the women began to curse them, throwing pebbles and pennies at their car, telling them to pay for something or get the fuck out. Jason and the Ragman had become recognizable, which was fatal to their intentions.

  Jason had broken out of his tendency toward overcautiousness by doing something the Ragman would never have allowed himself. He made a random kill. The Ragman had been awakened by a quiet but relentless knocking at the door of the apartment he’d occupied in the university district at the time. Jason stood outside, shaking. He was clean, but may as well have been soaked in blood for the look of guilt and panic on his face.

  “The one I’ve been following. I did it.”

  “Need help?” asked the Ragman, knowing what the answer would be. When he received a nod, he gestured Shurn over to the couch and asked for details on what had happened.

  He’d cried then, which the Ragman always remembered when he saw or heard footage of the persona Jason had adopted after the successful kills. They’d performed all of them together, all except that first one. It wasn’t just Jason Shurn’s loyalty to the Ragman that had kept him from reporting his partner to the police after his arrest; it was vanity. He was proud of something for the first time in his life, and wanted to keep the sense of accomplishment to himself.

  The Ragman had cleaned and hidden that first kill of Jason’s, the last “crime of passion” the Ragman allowed him once he took over managing his career. As with most passion-kills, the bagged corpse the Ragman stowed in a Tacoma pond, weighted down with cement parking blocks, was a victim who was too close to the perpetrator. Melanie Jones was a young woman who worked in the dispatch office at Jason’s delivery job. She was a twenty-three-year-old brunette with an upper back that was slightly curved from too many hours of word processing, but with a pair of excellent muscular legs that set a physical template for all of Jason’s later targets. Luckily, Melanie had a busy romantic life, so after a few weeks of her being disappeared, pressure had come down on the three lovers she’d had at the time. A mentally ill budding poet had been pegged as the murderer, but lack of evidence and a body had kept him out of jail. The crisis had been enough to ruin his life, however, which ended in suicide six months after Jason strangled Melanie in the alley behind Rick’s City Couriers.

  The case was never officially closed, but as the records the Ragman had attained from Waring showed, the investigation was barely touched after that poet hanged himself. A few cursory search parties looked for the body at common dumping grounds in the city limits, and a couple of areas near the shore were dredged, but no one ever got close to Melanie, who was presumably still resting in her thick, anchored cocoon of plastic.

  Jason had been easy to groom once the Melanie Jones debt had been established and his appetites had stopped being repressible. Even if his subsequent kills were not crimes of passion in the traditional sense, Jason certainly went about his work with appetite, with many of the thesaurus companions of passion, so why not call the later kills passionate?

  The Ragman had seen seeds of elevated deviance in the boy when they’d shared a few months of juvenile incarceration in the mid-eighties. The young Jason Shurn was a slender, unhealthy looking boy, always covered in a light sweat, like the dope-sick kids in the detox ward that branched off juvie. Shurn never touched the stuff. He just exuded bad health. There was also something else, the something else that led the Ragman to seek him out in the exercise facility all the boys referred to as “The Yard,” anticipating the outdoor iron-pumping courts featured in the adult facilities most of them would one day occupy.

  “Want to spot me?” the seventeen-year-old Ragman asked Shurn, who at that time had the habit of lounging against one of the walls, shuffling and sending covert messages from his dead eyes, like a juvenile hustler waiting for a pedophile to cruise by in a rusty Cadillac.

  “Wanna fuck off?” the boy asked. “You got, what, 180 on, plus the bar? That’s pretty much two of me. Ask one of the black guys or something.”

  The Ragman vaguely approved of the boy’s avoidance of ugly racial slurs, which only served to spur pointless fights that got all the boys into lockdown for the night, and potentially for a few more days.

  “I prefer to avoid talking to more people than necessary,” the Ragman told Shurn. “Don’t really need the spot that badly.”

  “On account of liking your attitude, I’ll at least stand near you so I can yell for help if you drop that fucking thing on your neck.” The Ragman could repair the way the kid talked, given time.

  “Thanks.” The Ragman lay down on the bench and did a few quick sets. The boy looked off to the side while the Ragman soundlessly pumped the weight, but the Ragman could feel the boy’s left eye flicking toward the bulk on the bench with admiration and hopeless envy.

  “What’s your name?” the Ragman asked, rising to a sitting position, careful to avoid sounding out of breath.

  “Jason,” said the boy. There was a moment where the thrum and clank of equipment and profane conversation around the two young men seemed to fade, to become as unreal as the world outside the prison felt after a couple of months on the inside. It was oddly like a moment of love at first sight, a moment Shurn and the Ragman had seen simulated countless times in the movies. This close approximation of that feeling was enough to form the foundational relationship of their adult lives.

  “Jason Shurn, if you need to know,” the boy finished, spoiling the moment with his fake hood sneer. He looked a bit ashamed afterward, but a not-quite-seventeen-year-old-boy can’t be expected to bask in a glow of tender feeling for long.

  The Ragman stood up, his massive height and overdeveloped muscles establishing a superiority that would rule the bond between the two inside and outside of the jail. As soon as his shadow fell across Jason and he saw the look of awe in the kid’s face, he knew he was on his way to deposing all of the authority figures Jason had ever struggled against: the juvie psychiatrist, the guards, any old bosses the kid might have had, maybe even Dad. Jason started calling him “Ragman” because of the meticulous way he wiped down the exercise gear before and after lifting, ignoring the impatient inmates around him. The name stuck inside the walls, and started to have another meaning when he and Jason started their work. Not all that different of a meaning, though—it was still all about keeping things clean, about leaving nothing behind.

  Those days of devotion to the gym were long behind the Ragman now. He picked up a piece of rebar and stirred the flaming contents of the barrel in front of him, freeing any papers that might have sheltered themselves. His arms were still hard, as iron-hard as the bar he was wielding, but there was now a soft coating of banal American fat over the muscles that had once made his chest project ominously and his torso narrow into a threatening triangle above his crotch. A hunk of ashing paper drifted past the Ragman’s ear, and he swatted it out of the sky and back into the barrel. The only muscle he exercised regularly was his memory, that storehouse of everything he had accomplished. The accomplishments that had started with Jason Shurn.

  In the months following their release from the juvenile facility, the Ragman continued to think of Jason Shurn as his orphan, his adopted boy. The trick had been
to make his own authority something Jason would come to love, to accept unresistingly, to give in to as easily as the weights the Ragman tested his muscles against every day. It had worked.

  The Ragman stayed straight for years after doing that stretch in juvie for his first and last assault on his mother, who was now too terrified to contact him ever again, a handy solution to the problem of her consistent nagging. He had gone to her house just once after his release, to ask for some start-up money for his new life. She had stood on the front steps of her half of the pathetic duplex she shared with a series of identically useless boyfriends, staring at the utter foreignness in front of her, the boy who had once been her son. She smashed a mosquito on the doorsill before it could fly into the house, and the vigorous motion made her breasts shake under the paisley housedress she was wearing, the one she referred to as her “barefoot-and-pregnant lounger.” The Ragman felt a lick of hate in the ticklish part of his throat where it always started, an irritation similar to the effect of inhaling burnt chili pepper smoke.

  “Prison wasn’t so bad,” the Ragman added. “Going back wouldn’t be so bad, I don’t think.” He kept his language terse, trimmed, close to the tough-guy talk that was everywhere within the walls of the prison. Speaking in his usual voice would scare her, but it couldn’t do any harm to make her think he’d changed for the worse behind bars.

  His mother went inside for the money she kept stuffed in one of the cookbooks on the lightly populated shelf in the living room. She put it in the Ragman’s hand. He got back into the car that was waiting for him, with Jason behind the wheel.

  The flames from Keith Waring’s burning papers were subsiding. The Ragman sent a long arc of urine onto the dying fire, his penis shriveling slightly in the cold air as the departing piss shot for the stars and landed on smoldering evidence. He walked back up to the central house after turning off the lights in the garage that housed Keith Waring’s dissolving car and body, moving his thoughts on from Shurn to Carl Hillstrom, the man he’d worked with a few times after Jason. Hillstrom hadn’t been as trustworthy, since he was never as much the Ragman’s creation as Shurn. But the Ragman wasn’t ready to stop after Shurn was arrested. He’d piloted the dumb drifter through his brief series of murders, forced to take on an increasingly active role when he realized how stupid Hillstrom was. In a certain way, it made the control he had over the man that much more tactile, that much more real. Carl Hillstrom had to be instructed every step of the way, especially with the Jenkins girl. The kill no one had ever found, or traced back to Hillstrom. They’d done that one expertly, creating an atmosphere of such incredible fear from the beginning that the girl was too scared to panic.