Find You in the Dark

by Nathan Ripley

  The Ragman was in the backseat of Hillstrom’s four-door Buick Skylark, which they had modified to fold down. It was a cramped and rushed way to do things, but the Ragman could crawl into the trunk in the time between Hillstrom spotting a prospect and her getting into the car. On that day, a summer one when the air itself seemed to be sweating, they had seen the girl hitchhiking when they crested an incline on the highway. Her distant frame was the exact shape and size of those girls Hillstrom liked, and her limbs were naked, the clothing she was wearing a short swath of darker color on a pink torso. The Ragman had lowered the seat and issued his first instruction before closing himself into the darkness of the trunk.

  “If she tries to get in back, tell her you’re not a damn chauffeur and to come on up front. Use that same voice I just used and remember to smile when you do it, or she’ll just go.”

  “Alright, alright,” said Hillstrom. The Ragman noticed a pimple surrounded by a whorl of coarse hairs on the man’s neck before he popped the seat back into place. Jason had been much handsomer, a better lure in these situations.

  The car was already slowing and a pair of clacking shoes could be heard approaching. It was possible the girl was wearing a pair of short high heels; ridiculous footwear for a hitchhiker, but Hillstrom would like that. As the Ragman had expected, the girl tugged on the back handle. Hillstrom barked out the dialogue he had been assigned, no doubt punctuating his delivery with a smile that would have made Lon Chaney uncomfortable. The Ragman heard the silence, sensed the hesitation outside of the car. Then the sound of the passenger seat handle being pulled came, and the girl settled into the front seat. This gap between this correct instinct and the socialized reluctance to cause a scene consistently gave rise to the sweetest suspense the Ragman knew; he’d sensed it on all of his hunts with Jason, and the Hillstrom kills were no different. They knew they shouldn’t, but they always, always came.

  “Why you wearing a toque?” was Hillstrom’s first salvo from the front seat, which was actually pretty good small talk for him. He still had a gruff and nervous voice, as though he were asking a man at the neighboring urinal for a certain type of favor.

  “I guess it is kind of warm for it, but I just like having one on,” said the girl, with a certain kind of lowing accent that the Ragman couldn’t quite place until he realized it reminded him of Carl’s voice. A Canadian.

  “You said ‘toque,’ ” the girl went on. “Thought Americans didn’t say that.”

  “I don’t know,” said Carl. “I’m from Edmonton, kinda north of it, anyways, so I guess I just—”

  “I’m from Calgary! Like, outside of it, too, closer to Canmore, but basically we’re neighbors.” She laughed, sounding less nervous and plainly homesick. The Ragman regularly scanned the Missing posters tacked outside of the grocery store he frequented; he thought he recognized Cindy Jenkins from the darkness of the trunk even before she announced her name.

  “Cindy,” she said, after Hillstrom had offered the stupid fake name he insisted on using, just in case the girl he was speaking to was to escape. He asked if she was hungry and the Ragman heard the crinkling of plastic as a bag of beef jerky was pulled from the recessed gap beneath the driver’s seat. An early suggestion of Hillstrom’s had been to drug the food they gave the girls, but the Ragman had explained that Hillstrom wouldn’t enjoy the later activities if the girls were inert. Carl Hillstrom preferred the girls to be active, which eliminated one of the primary complications of hunting with Jason Shurn. Necrophilia had been Jason’s downfall; if he hadn’t continued to go back to those burial sites and tamper with them, to take souvenirs and stash them around his house, dull-witted Hillstrom would never have entered the picture, because the Ragman and Jason would still be together.

  Hillstrom grunted when he handed Cindy the bag of dried beef. He grunted a lot, really, it being his major mode of expression when the Ragman had first come across him at the adult video store where Hillstrom worked the counter between midnight and eight a.m. The Ragman often came into that place at around six in the morning, before he started his own workday, curious to see who would come in to pluck worn VHS tapes of women and men bent into sweating, unreal, utterly unsexual positions, plunging into orifice after orifice. He was a casual renter, himself, seeing if the choreographed struggles on-screen could stimulate him in the way Jason Shurn’s masterful handling of their victims had. It was never the case, unfortunately. But watching the men in the store could be wonderful. So many of them looked like pornography aficionados: wearing heavy coats in the summer, bristled with exactly three days of stubble, and with the half-closed eyelids of perpetual masturbators. The Ragman often shouldered these men roughly when he passed them in the narrow aisles of the video store, forcing the smaller men to be aware of his bulk, of the space he filled. The Ragman realized how directionless he was without Jason when his regular visits to the video store accelerated to the point where even the dull and silent clerk noticed him.

  “Aren’t you gonna rent anything?” were Carl Hillstrom’s first words to the Ragman. The Ragman had felt sharp heat all over his body, prickles that went beyond goose bumps, a projection of pure rage both below and above his skin. This was what he had been waiting for. An invitation to the dance. This was the same feeling he’d gotten before he’d broken his mother’s arm, the incident that had sent him to juvie and to Jason Shurn. He couldn’t even remember what she had said to anger him, now; she’d always been too stupid to be the mother of someone like him, and she was angry about it all the time, picking at him as petty revenge. The hot rage blanked out the moments before and after the moment he grabbed her arm and twisted; all the Ragman remembered was turning to her, watching her mouth as it screamed, and the hot coating of thickening liquid on his hands as he stared down at the white splinters of bone sticking through the ruined flesh on his mother’s upper arm. Two years wasn’t such a bad sentence for what he had done.

  This time, listening to the words uttered to him from behind the counter at the video store, the Ragman let the rage linger for longer, let it stay with him so he wouldn’t make a mistake. He’d learned how to do this in juvie, learned how to control himself entirely. He turned to the man at the counter, who grunted.

  “You don’t have anything that interests me,” the Ragman said.

  “Then why you keep coming here? Looking for new tapes? We don’t get new stock except on Tuesdays, and not even every Tuesday.” The Ragman felt his anger leak away at this. The grunting man was only curious, in the way dull minds can be when they are prodded into thought by a repeated happening they can’t explain.

  “That’s useful, thanks,” he told the man behind the counter. “Maybe I do come in too much.”

  “Doesn’t bother me. You’re looking for something special, maybe I can help. The fag stuff is in that room behind the curtain.”

  The Ragman laughed. “Thanks, but no.”

  “Doesn’t bother me.”

  “Me neither, but no, that’s not for me.”

  The man gave the Ragman a look that, for the first time, spoke of some deeper consciousness, something below the dullness of his intellectual capacities. It wasn’t intelligence, but it was depth of a sort. Perhaps the same depth he’d spotted in Jason Shurn.

  “Then what is for you? What do you like?”

  “What do you have?” the Ragman asked. Hillstrom lifted the flap on the counter and came to the other side in a slow, unthreatening set of movements, like an old woman doing a three-point turn at the end of her own cul-de-sac. He locked the door of the video store without flipping the BACK-IN-FIVE sign into its active position.

  “Anyone makes a noise up front and I’ll hear it back there.” Hillstrom gestured at the red curtained room. The Ragman turned his head.

  “Not the gay stuff,” Hillstrom explained. “I keep some stuff of mine back there.”

  It was in this back room, which was really a closet behind the deadstock boxes at the back of those columns of sweaty men pistoning in c
ongress, that the Ragman found Jason Shurn’s successor.

  “You can’t actually rent any of this, but I can maybe lend some to you. Or we can watch it together. At my place. Really tough to get hold of. These five are from Holland, and the rest is all Mexican.”

  “Let’s go to your place. When’s your shift over?”

  The VHS cases weren’t decorated with gaudy photographs. They were black, which was an accurate representation of the scenes they contained. As the dawn came and Hillstrom’s daytime replacement came in, the Ragman followed Hillstrom to a tiny room in Capitol Hill, and they watched all of the tapes. Each film was brief. Most of them were shot dimly, almost in total darkness, and all of them ended in death. In addition to the six tapes Hillstrom had first taken out, there was one that was neither Dutch nor Mexican. Hillstrom extracted it from under a loose board beneath the mop bucket in his closet. The video was Canadian, and starred the man sitting next to the Ragman on the basement couch in front of the television, in an apartment nearly as bare as a monastery cell.

  “She screamed a lot, and it was real loud,” said Hillstrom. “I forgot to press the right buttons to turn on the stupid microphone. But it was real loud.”

  “At least you have the video,” the Ragman said.

  “Yeah. You see why I keep this one hidden though, right?”

  “Souvenirs are a bad idea, no matter how careful you are, Carl.”

  “But I have to remember. Look back and know I did it.”

  “I understand. But I have a question for you.” The Ragman shifted over on the couch, accidentally putting his elbow onto the arm in a damp stain of beer and semen.

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t you want to do it again?”

  • • •

  The jostling of a dirt road alerted the Ragman to the fact that Hillstrom had taken the necessary turn off the highway. He and Cindy were chatting away like friends at a high school reunion when the Ragman pulled the release panel on the inside of the trunk and sent the seat panel folding forward. He rolled out and took in Cindy’s face, which was already contorted by fear. He remembered what it looked like in repose from the Missing poster at the grocery store, and it was almost nothing like this scream-mask, which soon came complete with audio. Hillstrom punched her once, hard, in the side of the head, but even when the other side of her head came bouncing off the window, she came back at Hillstrom with nails and fists. The Ragman didn’t do anything but watch, though, holding on to the back of the passenger seat as Hillstrom pushed down on her windpipe with an overhand grip of his right hand while he continued to steer with his left. The Ragman watched, and watched more, watching until the end, at which point he started giving the instructions the boy still needed to hear every time they did this.

  When the cops had combed Hillstrom’s Skylark for fiber and fluids, they had surely come up with some of the Ragman’s. Maybe they had even tested them, thought the Ragman, opening a can of Diet Coke and lying on his bed. There was nothing to test against, though, because the Ragman had no liquids or swabbings on file at any agency. This DNA stuff was such a pain, now, and he was glad to be almost finished with everything. Killing Bella Greene had been quite enough to show him that he had no natural taste for doing it on his own. The real thrill had been going back to those burial sites, putting those memories he’d filed away back into use, even doing some detective work to track down the burial sites he’d let Shurn pick out on his own.

  “And finding Martin Reese, that’s been the real pleasure,” he said, spilling a bit of the Diet Coke on his shirt as he tried to drink it from a lying-down position. He’d become such a slob in the past few years. In the unimportant ways, that is. When it came to the things that mattered, he was as careful as always. “As careful as Martin tries to be,” the Ragman said, spilling more as he laughed and the can balanced in his loose grip shifted on his belly.

  There was no denying it. He was bored. Enough following, enough waiting. He wanted to do it all again. Jason. Carl. Martin. He could make this work.

  SANDRA WHITTAL CLICKED ON THE BELLA GREENE file again, starting the audio. The sun had been down for a long time, but she only noticed how dark her kitchen had become, how hard it was to make out her notes, when the voice spoke out.

  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.

  “It’s different,” Sandra said, tilting her chair right to get within swatting reach of the wall switch. In the new halogen brightness, she stared at a picture of Bella Greene, alive, young, before the junk in her veins, before the shot of poison that killed her, before the dirt and skeletons were heaped on top of her. Sandra had propped the vic photo up on a bag of Intelligentsia coffee on the kitchen counter. She looped the MP3 of the call and paced, talking to the photo, talking to herself.

  “That last part. The ‘Of our own.’ That’s new. As new as him killing someone. Up until now, he’s just been talking to us, fucking with the cops, telling us how we flopped on our jobs, failed you.” Sandra’s you was Bella, and all the victims before her, the ones he’d dug up.

  “So who’s the caller’s ‘our,’ his ‘us’? Not victims. Not cops. Who?” There was still no ID on the other body in the grave, the skeleton buried just above Bella. A lot of potentials had been eliminated already, but there was no ID. A girl, early twenties or late teens, cause of death as yet undetermined, buried sometime in the early nineties. Naked up top, a pair of dissolved blue jeans down below. Levi’s, as generic as could be. Pockets empty, some teeth hammered out of the skull (hopefully postmortem) and nowhere to be found, so dental records were proving tough.

  The voice kept looping, and Sandra kept talking. She moved the photo of Bella aside and opened the bag of coffee, absently carrying a scoop over to her stovetop maker and starting a brew. “So, Finder, you’re sick of just looking? Tired of the cops not taking an interest in you, not chanting praise for your godlike insight to the papers and TV?”

  For some reason, she couldn’t stop thinking of that dead man in the care home, Rudy Clive Fox. And Emily James, the nurse who’d gotten so tired of caring for him that she’d performed the opposite of her role. Fox couldn’t defeat his nature, but that nurse, that woman, she could change her actions in a way that didn’t defy her nature: she could allow Fox, this poisonous element in her life and in the life of everyone else in that home, to die, and still think of herself as herself, of her nature as unchanged. And it wouldn’t happen again.

  That’s why I let her go, Sandra thought. But just what the fuck does that have to do with Bella Greene and this monster?

  Sandra stopped just before pushing the button on the coffeemaker, realizing she didn’t want any, and realizing something else. “Every other call, you show off a little then talk public service. This one, you confess a killing and dare us to catch you. No heroic lining. No avenging the injustices of the past and comforting parents.” She pushed the on button anyway and the water started to burble. This call represented a total shift in how this man thought of himself, a shift she couldn’t quite believe—he could make the trip from digger to killer, that she believed, but he couldn’t just leap from thinking of himself as an instrument of justice to an instrument of the selfish, gleeful killing work he’d been telling the police for decades he was out to undo.

  “People just don’t stop lying to themselves that quickly. And if they do they don’t blab it into the nearest disposable phone.”

  Sandra had asked Lieutenant Daley to confirm a guess for her earlier that day: the department had minimized mentioning the connected calls to the press and asked them to cooperate in keeping the calls unlinked for years, not wanting to encourage scavenger-hunting serial killer obsessives. Daley had a shaved head and eyebrows almost as thick as his mustache, gray hair on a gray face, smoke rust in his throat despite quitting six years back,
and a strong liking for the way Sandra Whittal conducted herself in the field and in not taking any shit from his detectives. She didn’t want him to find out about her and Chris.

  “These freaks,” Daley said, just after Bella Greene’s mother had left and Sandra checked in to update the lieutenant on the lack of facts so far. “There’s a spectrum of them. Our digging guy, the one who’s making the calls, he’s near the top end, still a few steps below actual killers.”

  “He was until this. Bella.”

  “Yeah. Well, below him are a whole bunch of other obsessives, guys who order paintings from Gacy and Charles Manson CDs, then below that are the ones who write porno-detailed true crime books, then the ones who hack out less fucked-up books, write for less fucked-up websites, all the way down to your mom and dad, watching CSI reruns five nights a week.” Sandra’s parents were hard-core Jehovah’s Witnesses, something she hadn’t told anyone but Chris, and they were about as into television as they were into Christmas presents. She wasn’t about to interrupt the lieutenant’s roll by explaining this to him.