Find You in the Dark

by Nathan Ripley

  “So you didn’t want to put any blood in the water,” Sandra said.

  “It wasn’t my call, I didn’t have the stripes yet, but yeah, no one wanted a bunch of upper-spectrum murderhounds boy-scouting around the woods and parking lots with shovels and pickaxes, looking for dead bodies. One’s enough. One’s even kind of useful. Made a few families feel a little better, burying their girls properly. A few reports have gotten out there, the calls we’ve gotten, but nothing that put the whole story together.”

  “To hear most of those guys out there in the division, this guy’s a real citizen, helping us out,” Sandra said.

  “Sure. He’s something we don’t want more than one of at a time, anyway,” said the lieutenant. “Especially now.”

  “I want to keep a couple of patrol units and two plainclothes monitoring every patch working girls are using. Focusing between Seattle Center and Westlake, okay?”

  “That’s a lot of bodies, Sandra.”

  “Spare some live ones to prevent a dead one. It’s good press, Lieutenant. We’ll let the papers know.”

  “You’d let them know if I didn’t give you the manpower, too, I’m sure.” Daley didn’t smile, but he did that mustache-ripple that almost meant the same thing. Sandra had left his office and headed for home not long after that. The units were commissioned, but there were ten times as many vulnerable women waiting to be collected from the internet, from phone numbers on escort cards left in little piles in motel lobbies, from bus stops.

  Ignoring a text, Sandra propped up a different picture of Bella Greene as she drank the coffee. The body in the grave, the skeleton above her. Two bodies. On the wall above the counter were other prints, thumbtacked in a circle, a whiteboard in the middle. It was still blank. Each photo was a different site the guy, the Finder, had called in over the past fifteen-odd years, across the death zone of the Pacific Northwest.

  “They’re tidy, though,” Sandra said, poking the various sites with an eraser. The most recent one, just before Bella—the girl in Northern California, Winnie Mae Friedkin, behind the disused Dairy Queen—even before forensics had set up tenting, it looked like a film set. Thinking back to the six or seven bodies he’d called in before that, and the one back in the nineties Sandra had just looked up at the station that day—they all had that careful arrangement, that just-so dangle of bone, neatly cleared space around the burial sites. Not just to clear footprints, but to set the scene.

  “You take photos, I bet,” Sandra said. There was just enough of each skeleton revealed for some artful shots. Souvenirs. The initial state they’d found the Bella Greene grave in, though—no. Forensics had done most of the uncovering. The skeleton had been exposed a little, including some recent damage to the tibia that was probably the digger’s fault, but Bella’s skin had barely been visible. And looking at the photos, Sandra was increasingly sure the rain wouldn’t have been enough to shift dirt like this. The result was certainly not a souvenir-caliber photo pose. And that broken bone, for such a typically careful digger? A little less certainly, but maybe—

  “You were surprised to find Bella Greene there. Or, what, you wanted it to look like you were surprised? And then you douse the scene, clean it up professional-style, and call to tell us exactly where the bodies are.”

  Sandra’s apartment buzzer went off. The TV in the living room was on, tuned to the CC cam at her apartment’s front door, and she saw Chris’s postgym outfitted body (loose jeans, ancient Everlast shirt) shifting from foot to foot by the front door. The apology shuffle. There was a paper bag in his right hand that Sandra’s stomach responded to, and she buzzed him in.

  “Just wanted to—” he said when Sandra opened the door. She took the bag from him and got her teeth deep into a chicken leg, then nodded toward the kitchen.

  “Look,” she said, “we’ll talk to Keith Waring tomorrow about the audio files, find out what he wanted them for.”

  “You’re not—you don’t suspect him of doing any of this, do you? The guy’s—”

  “He’s not a match for any of the wetwork or the investigative work involved in what went on with these dead women, no,” said Sandra. “But I want every piece of stray possibility nailed down and explained. There’s no real need for him to take those calls, and he’s never shown interest in any other investigation, so why now?”

  “I’m surprised you’re not making calls right now if you think Keith Waring’s a part of this.”

  Sandra eyed Chris, decided to trust him not to get annoyed.

  “As soon as I left you at the station house I called Zadie and got her to do a sort of unofficial check on Keith Waring’s vacation and sick days ranging back about ten years. He barely takes any, and when he has, they don’t sync up anywhere close to when Finder calls have been made or digs done, the ones in Oregon or California. So he can’t be our guy, but he could still be connected.”

  “I guess you didn’t trust my instincts all the way.”

  “I don’t even trust my instincts all the way,” Sandra lied. “For now, look at this.”

  “What?”

  “This.” Sandra pointed at the photo, and Chris came closer. He was a professional when it came to studying footage of scenes, precisely because he preferred working from pictures to working from the reality of the scene. “Bella Greene and the Jane Doe skeleton.”

  “So what?” asked Chris. He opened one of the containers from the paper bag and started eating coleslaw with his bare hands, wincing when vinegar got into a cut on one of his fingers.

  Sandra traced the area around the grave. “It’s sloppy. As well as the scene was cleaned up chemically, it looks—I mean to the eye, aesthetically—it looks like shit.”

  “It’s two dead girls and one dead ancient Irish pile of bones in a hole of dirt, Sandra, it’s not going to look pretty.”

  “You’re thinking like you, and that’s not very helpful, is it? This guy”—Sandra indicated the years of past sites, the called-in corpses from the past decade—“this guy leaves us the sites looking right, to him, looking tidy. Photo-ready, is what I’m saying. I’m sure he takes photos of the sites before he calls them in. Doesn’t take any souvenirs from the body, that much we know for sure, and a guy like him I know, I absolutely know, has to keep some record of what he’s done. So it’s photos. And this, Bella and the Doe, this is not album-worthy. This isn’t one for the trophy case. It’s sloppy. It’s not his style at all. He even broke one of the bones, Chris. That’s not his style.”

  “Killing wasn’t his style until now,” Chris said, getting cutlery and plates from the cupboard, clearing some files to lay a civilized table among the charnel house photos and gruesome text. “Murdering someone for the first time is much more of a stylistic riff than leaving a cluttered grave behind. You’re piling a stretch on another stretch.”

  “Not according to this guy’s pattern, to what he wants to get out of this. Working up to killing makes perfect sense,” Sandra said, wiping chicken grease on her thigh, wincing when she saw the dark streak of oil on what was actually a pretty good pair of jeans. She picked up Bella Greene’s picture. “He was going to start killing at some point, start slotting bodies into graves of his own, taking photos for his sick-fuck files, and keep on leaving us messages. But Bella’s pose—with the site so clean of forensic anything, of anything to directly incriminate him—we know the guy wasn’t panicking. We know he gave himself time to coolly erase himself from the scene. So there’s no explanation for why the grave looks. Like. This.” Sandra thumped the grave photo with finality.

  “Sure there is,” Chris said, pushing a laden plate of fried chicken, biscuits, and too many sides over to Sandra.

  “What?” Sandra asked.

  “Beats me, it’s your case. But there must be an explanation, because that’s what the grave ended up looking like. Someone did that.”

  “Yeah. Someone did,” Sandra said.

  “What’s that tone supposed to mean?”

  “Maybe the guy who’
s been calling isn’t the same guy who did this. I just don’t see why a guy who’s been so careful covering his tracks when he didn’t actually kill anyone would be both sloppy and brazenly provocative when he actually does kill someone. And it’s a clear indication that whoever is involved in this isn’t a cop, another strike against even a cop as deskbound as Keith Waring being our target.”

  “Yeah,” said Chris. “A cop wants to murder a girl? We all know a million ways to get away with that, starting with picking a stranger, staying away from kids with rich parents, picking prostitutes or runaways. Girls just like Bella. All you have to do is not give anyone a phone call about it, bury the body deep, and never tell anyone, and you’re free and clear.”

  Sandra stared at him, a drumstick halfway to her mouth.

  “I don’t write the rules of society, that’s just how it works, sorry as we might be about it. If it is another guy who killed Bella, no cop smart enough to cover his physical tracks like that would be dumb enough to invite capture by tying himself in with some white-whale creep who’s been on the department radar for years.”

  “That’s where the message comes in,” Sandra said. “The last one. ‘Time to make some of my own. Of our own,’ he ends with. The caller used to just taunt us, the cops. That taunt—that’s not for the cops, and it’s barely a taunt. It’s, what—”

  “An invitation?”

  “Yeah. That call wasn’t just for us, it was for the Finder, the guy who’s been looking for the bodies all these years. He didn’t kill Bella Greene, maybe, but he’s tied up in this deep.”

  “So our Finder guy didn’t make the call, you’re saying? That’s a deep stretch, Whittal. You just said he’s been warming up to kill someone all these years he’s been digging.”

  “He has, but this isn’t a stretch if you actually look and listen. The call’s different. The crime’s different, too. The site, the ritual, everything is different, and that just doesn’t make sense: if this was what he’s been building up to all these years, the Finder would make this his most perfect take on a dig, not this sloppy, show-offy, dangerous mess. And the call was just wrong. Against his nature, Chris. I can’t buy him thinking of himself as a completely different person, as a murderer who’s only out to kill and taunt.”

  “Alright,” Chris said, trying to keep the skepticism out of his voice, respecting Sandra’s hard stare at the picture behind him, the workings of that great cop brain in her skull. “So who would want to summon him up? Barely anyone knows that these calls exist, that this guy exists.”

  “The Finder, by calling in those bodies, he pissed somebody off. Digging up those girls all these years pissed somebody off.”

  “Get to it.”

  “The person most likely to be angry about an old body being dug up is the person who put it there in the first place,” Sandra said. She gestured at the photos of the old burial sites with the stripped chicken bone in her hand, using it like a conductor’s baton.

  “All of the bodies at sites that were called in have been tied to existing serials. Jailed or dead ones.”

  “Except the latest one, Chris. That skeleton with Bella. We don’t know who put that there, and we don’t know how anyone would know to look for it there. And who knows if we were right about the perps on the other murders? Half the accused are dead by now. We can’t exactly ask them.”

  “So you’re supposing that there’s someone who killed the other dead girl in the Bella Greene grave, back in the nineties, along with some other women—and he’s pissed at this Finder guy for digging up his handiwork, even though there’s no DNA ties to anyone on the bodies.”

  “Correct. Nice summation, Gabriel.”

  “Another thing. How would this second guy of yours, the one who made the call about Bella, figure that our Finder was going to hear the 911 call? Anyone who’s watched more than four cop movies would know we’d be locking that material away from the press until we had this thing solved.”

  “Well, that,” said Sandra, lying down on the couch and wiping her fingers on her sweater, “is exactly what we’re going to ask Keith Waring in the morning. Why exactly he wanted all those calls, and who else he might have played them for.”

  I WOKE UP ON THE couch, where I’d slept for a couple of reasons. The one I’d give Ellen was that I came in late and didn’t want to wake her or Kylie. The real one was that I hadn’t wanted her to know exactly how late I’d come in, after my painstaking deep-clean of any evidence that might have been in Keith Waring’s apartment. And the other real one was that I couldn’t stand to be near her living body so soon after pushing the plunger on that needle, ending Keith’s life.

  “He could have been lying,” I muttered, my mouth thick with morning scum, the sunrise light from the bay window pushing into my slitted eyes. There were glasses on the coffee table in front of me, two, melted ice and bourbon in them. Ellen’s lipstick around the rim of one, Gary’s dry and tidy lip prints all over the other, probably. I tipped that one off the table with an extended toe, and it shattered on the flagstones in front of our fireplace.

  I knew intuitively that the Ragman wasn’t a man who would lie to me. Not about murder. I’d killed Keith by filling his vein with that poison: he was dead, and I was a murderer. Both facts, both forever. I walked through a miniature courtroom scenario, ignoring all the other circumstances, picturing sympathetic nods from a jury when I told them that I just didn’t know, that there was no way I could have known, that I was coerced. And having no good answer to the next question, whether I was glad Keith was dead. If it made my life easier.

  Because Keith’s absence was a relief, even if I never wanted a role in getting him gone. If the Ragman could go away, too, if he could just evaporate, all of this would be solved, expunged and gone forever. No more fresh bodies in graves.

  “You see the news?” Ellen asked. There was a shake in her voice, and I propped myself up to see her standing on the bottom stair, iPad in hand.

  “I just woke up. Hungover. Kylie up?”

  “No. Did you check the news this morning?” Her voice was flat, zombied. I got up and took the iPad from her hand. A little capsule article, zoomed large. Bodies found. Federal Way. Police source suggests Jason Shurn.

  “Tinsley,” Ellen said. She wasn’t the fainting kind, but she sat down heavily on the step behind her.

  “No,” I said. “No way to know that. They would have called you if they knew.”

  “They wouldn’t, Martin. No cop has had my phone number for years. They had Mom and Dad’s, anyway. By the time I was moved out they’d stopped looking for her. And why shouldn’t they?” Her voice got flatter with every word, and her head started to droop. I gently pushed her over a little and sat on the step next to her.

  “I can take care of this,” is what I came up with. “I’ll talk to the police.”

  “Yeah,” she said, dully. “Can you call Keith? I mean, can you call him now?” The name stung me coming out of Ellen’s mouth; I wanted to ask her never to say “Keith” again, but I wouldn’t be able to tell her the reason.

  “No,” I said. “He won’t be any use on this. It’s just a stupid story in the paper, probably thirty percent accurate at best. Someone maybe found some bones somewhere. There’s no reason to tie your sister into this. None at all.”

  “There is, Martin.” Ellen sagged into my shoulder. She surprised me by making a honking sound, an almost inhuman cry that announced tears coming out of her in a shaking, wet revelation of rage and powerless hurt. I wrapped her up, felt the shoulder of my sweat-stained shirt, the same garment I’d been wearing when I killed Keith, soak through with tears until all I could feel was Ellen on my skin.

  “Mommy?” I turned up to the head of the stairs and Kylie was watching us, looking about eight years old, that almost-adult assurance evaporated by seeing her mother in a state she’d never seen her in before. I felt Ellen brace up in my arms, draw some sort of stiffening energy from deep inside herself, all while I was making reassurin
g eye contact with Kylie, nodding.

  “It’s okay,” Ellen said, her voice normalizing by halfway through the phrase as she peeled off my arm. “Here, come here,” she went on, and I relayed off the step to hand my position over to Kylie, who took over the tight clench Ellen needed. I watched Ellen’s spine lengthen as she pulled into the hug, her shoulder blades flattening under the thin cotton of the sleeveless gray shirt she’d slept in. Committing to reassuring Kylie meant making herself herself again: just like I couldn’t be terrified around our daughter, Ellen couldn’t be shattered.

  “It’s your aunt, again,” Ellen said.

  “You don’t need to be apologetic, Mom, what is it?”

  “There were some remains found up in the woods somewhere, kid,” I said. “Tiny chance it might be Tinsley.”

  “It’s—we were just talking about this, Dad. This is crazy,” Kylie said, still holding Ellen. “At the dinner table, I mean,” she added, flicking her eyes over at me and then back to her mother.

  “That happens sometimes in life. Stuff piles up.”

  “That’s great, Dad, really wise. ‘Stuff piles up.’ ” Miraculously, this pulled laughter out of Ellen, and the women broke their hug a little to laugh at me.

  “If there’s a shred of a chance it’s Tinsley, they’ll know. I’m going to go find out right from the cops, okay? Ellen, you’ve got to ignore this until then. Concentrate on store stuff.”

  “I should have given the place a different name if I was going to use it as a distraction,” Ellen said, almost wry. She got off the step and stretched, facing away from me. “Sorry, kid.”

  “You wouldn’t make me say sorry for crying, Mom.”

  “Give us a second, okay?” I said to Kylie. She nodded and left.

  “Do some work today, Ellen. Just something to get this slightly away from the middle of your brain.”

  “Yeah,” Ellen said, her eyes telling me that wasn’t possible, that she would be thinking about Tinsley all day. “I’ll go down to the store after I eat and shower.”