“Take Kylie, maybe. You talk to her and you won’t be able to go too nuts over this.”
“She has schoolwork.”
“Take her anyway. This is more important than algebra. And don’t walk near the fireplace, I broke a glass there in the dark coming home. Sorry.”
“Never mind. And I won’t go nuts, I have Gary. He’s too shallow for me to be upset around,” Ellen said, trying a smile. I tried harder back and didn’t succeed. Going to the couch, I slipped the file folder the Ragman had given me out from under the cushion, tucking it under my shirt while Ellen went to the kitchen. I picked up her iPad and flicked the screen past the grave article, onto the arts section, giving Ellen that much more of a chance to avoid dwelling. Wouldn’t work, of course, but I did it anyway.
I heaped my clothes and the file on the bathroom floor while I showered off last night’s accumulated fumes, the beer from the Pemberton, the mothballs and sweat of Keith’s apartment. The needle slipping into his neck, my finger pressing down. I reenacted the motion in the steaming air of the bathroom, watching my thumb slide toward my index finger, the lightness of the motion required to end a life. It hadn’t been satisfying, in any way, I knew that. And I certainly hadn’t felt any sort of control. Kylie rapped at the door once but I yelled “Use downstairs” and spent another five minutes under the stream.
I was going to tell Ellen she should sack out for a nap before going to the store, take a pill if need be, but she was gone by the time I exited the bathroom. She’d sent a text:
With gary at store til 4, later, good luck.
Good luck with the cops, that was. I dialed the station, talking through the various recorded and human barriers put up against the idly curious, weirdos, and nuts, finally getting to a sergeant who took me seriously about Tinsley. Kylie came down halfway through one of the calls, dressed in a purple sweater and black skirt, at least one of which she’d stolen from her mother. She was eating a banana and cereal in the kitchen, and I could feel her listening to every word.
Walking to my desk, I spent the time on hold scanning the Carl Hillstrom file the Ragman had given me onto a USB, then dumping the images into my scrapbook. I hand-shredded the sheets of paper and the file folder into a plastic bag while I talked to Sergeant Robert Peake, who gave me what facts he knew about the case and told me to come to the station in two hours.
“Ask for Detective Whittal,” Peake said. “Sandra Whittal.” He had a deep, TV-cop voice, maybe an imitation he’d started doing on patrol that he’d stuck with ever since. “It’s not normal procedure, since she’s in charge of the whole shebang, but apparently she wants to speak directly to anyone who might have anything to do with any of the deceased.”
“You can’t tell me anything?” I asked. Whittal was the name Keith had used, the one who’d been stuck on my calls long before Bella turned up. I walked to the bathroom with my little bag of shredded paper and ran it under the tap in the sink, mixing it into a rich mash I separated into chunks and flushed down the toilet.
“All I know, personally, is what was in the paper. And that’s probably mostly bullshit, sir. But I’m not at that precinct. Whittal will sort this all out for you, I’m sure. She has a great reputation already.”
“Already?” I walked into the kitchen, where Kylie was sitting at the kitchen table, scrolling through her phone and pretending not to listen.
“Fairly new promotion to Homicide. But lots of closed cases.” Peake was being a gossip, but for good reason; my name wasn’t well known outside of tech circles, but I had donated quite a bit to civic and police organizations over the years, in addition to my private donations to Keith Waring. Front-facing public relations police officers like Peake kept up with donor lists. Shame he had no information that was of any value to me.
“Sandra Whittal,” I said. Keith hadn’t said much about her investigative abilities, but he’d been plenty scared, which meant more than any stupid comment he’d made about her looks and youth. Being dead didn’t make the dumb shit he said when he was alive any more profound.
“Yes, sir. I hope you find out what you need to in short order.”
“Thanks, Sergeant.”
I talked to Kylie after I hung up.
“You heard some of that, I imagine.”
“Yep,” she said, getting up and stretching, doing a toe-touching stretch that made me feel queasy, old, and fat at the same time.
“Don’t do that right after you eat, you’re going to throw up.”
“Yeah, yeah. Should I come to the station with you, for moral support?”
“This isn’t going to be pleasant or cool or interesting, kid.”
“Okay,” Kylie said, after a teetering second where it looked like she was going to argue.
“And thanks for being amazing with your mom,” I added, hugging her hard, tears spiking the edges of my eyes. “I’m jealous you can make her feel that much better just by being in the room, you know? I can’t do that.”
“Shut up,” Kylie said, but quietly, in a tone that didn’t suit the words.
Before I headed out, a last piece of business: the device under my car, the Ragman’s leash. I opened the door to the garage and hit the lights, then stood staring at the cement next to my vehicle for a solid forty seconds. The stain I’d noticed by my back tire the other day. Dark, almost black, evenly round on one side, a ridged, spreading cylinder on the other end. It was probably oil but I couldn’t help picturing the Ragman in this garage. Upending a can, a jar, a something full of Bella Greene’s blood, letting it seep into the cement my wife and I stood on when we got into our cars. I walked closer and stared into it, looking for red edges outside of the dark center. I shuddered back and sat down hard, as though a spider had landed on my hand. While I was down there, I lay on my back and wormed under the car, looking for the other thing the Ragman had told me about.
The tracking device was a long rectangular box, with a broken red LED light protruding from one corner. The Ragman, mask off, his features dark under my car at night. In this garage, while I slept. He’d shattered the tiny light with a sharp tap of something or other. He wouldn’t want to give any indication anything was here, while he followed me around.
I detached the magnetic box with a screwdriver, and wasn’t too surprised to find a note lodged between it and the undercarriage. I unfolded it. Laser-printed, Times New Roman italics. Unsigned. Not that it needed a signature.
Martin, you’re clever, but a little less smart than me. So you reading this means we’ve already met. Just wanted to say it’s been fun so far, and I’ll see you soon. Don’t bother looking around for other bugs or cameras or anything—that part of our relationship is over. We both know exactly what the other is capable of, right? And we’re in too deep for me to spy on you. That would be a real violation of what we’re doing here.
I put the note under the machine, and left both on a shelf behind my digging gear. He—the Ragman—knew, whether he was watching me or not, that I wasn’t going to act against him before Sunday. I was too scared. I couldn’t go against him. Not yet. I didn’t have a single option that didn’t end with me in jail, with Ellen and Kylie dead, with the end of everything I loved.
“See you Sunday,” I said, climbing into the Jeep and easing down the driveway, going slower than I normally would. I didn’t want to get to the police station too quickly. In my head I heard Dr. Ted Lennox’s voice, the one I’d heard on tapes I’d bought from Keith or streamed on the internet and even in the odd true crime special. I flicked on the turn signal and the question came to me again, in Lennox’s voice:
“Why weren’t you satisfied by killing the police officer?”
“I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to kill him.”
I heard myself through tape hiss and echo, the sound of my imaginary answer slipping into the smug tones of Jason Shurn’s recording, punctuated by the light rain tapping on my windshield.
“You wanted to kill someone, though. You always wanted to.”
I plugged my phone into the stereo and flipped to a movie podcast, wanting jokes about Stallone’s Judge Dredd to silence the doctor’s voice and my answers. The next answer, the one I was afraid of, came anyway. In my voice or Jason Shurn’s, it didn’t matter.
I’ve only ever wanted to kill someone I needed to kill, Doctor. That I wanted to kill so badly nothing else would do but to have them dead in my hands. I wanted to know I was killing them, and I wanted them to know it, too. I didn’t want it to be an accident, or someone else’s trick. That’s why killing Keith meant less than nothing to me.
CHRIS GABRIEL, TOTING THE BANKERS box full of crumpled papers that served as his desk-side recycling bin, stopped by Sandra’s desk. She was staring deep into her screensaver, her fingers tapping the desk near the keyboard, but not touching it. Chris paused, partly not to interrupt her, partly trying to come up with a good joke to use when he snapped her back into the room. He gave up.
“When the desk buzzes, you gotta answer, Sandra. Martin Reese is here to see you.”
“What?” Sandra had heard Chris, but asked anyway while she pulled herself out of the grave scene she was staring at in her mind. The unposed bodies.
“Martin Reese. Dot-com jackass, married to the sister of an almost-definite but never-found Jason Shurn victim. Tiffany, Tina, something weird. More of an Asian girl name than a white one. Saw the story on the burial site in the paper this morning.”
“Tinsley is the name. Tinsley Schultz. We screened the remains against her file yesterday. Great. Always a delight to deal with wealthy citizens who think they’ve got a piece of a murder.” Sandra got up and cat-stretched, catching a few necks swivel her way before she put her arms down.
“You wanted to talk to everyone potentially relevant, so it’s your fault. He wants to know—”
“I know what he wants to know. Whether his sister-in-law is our Jane Doe.” Sandra dialed the desk sergeant and started clicking around in the Bella Greene file she’d built, forgetting Chris was there until he wasn’t. The sparse data they had on the other bones in the grave popped up, along with a couple of JPEGs of the jumble at the gravesite. Either Martin Reese was a quick walker, or the desk sergeant had waved him in before Sandra confirmed; he was standing in the place Chris had occupied moments earlier when Sandra turned around.
She had a chance to take him in while he stared at the pictures on her monitor. About six feet tall, maybe a little shorter without the Blundstones he was wearing below his expensive, but old, jeans. Good looking in that black Irish way she’d never been a sucker for, but most of her friends had; blue eyes that could likely do Santa Claus–kind when they needed to, but right now were in an attitude of cold focus, a shoot-out stare-down that had probably served him well in business meetings. Mid, maybe late forties. If you didn’t think he was cute, he’d be nondescript, another half-fit Pacific Northwest guy in a jacket too nice to be properly waterproof. Sandra clicked the two photos closed on the desktop.
“Sorry,” Reese said, as though he’d been caught in an accidental glimpse of her through a half-open door.
“Not at all, the apologies are mine. I didn’t realize you’d get back here so quickly.”
“I walk quick when I’m nervous.” Reese gave her a lopsided grin, Han-Solo-meets-Tom-Cruise. “I feel like I’m not even supposed to be here. Are basic citizens allowed back here?”
“You’re here and there’s no problem, sir. I’m Detective Whittal. So you saw the papers this morning.”
“My wife saw them first. She’d be down here herself, but, you know. It’s a little much for her, even still.”
“Of course.” Sandra pointed over Reese’s shoulder, indicating one of the empty interrogation rooms. “Let’s get in there and lay this out,” she said, grabbing her laptop from her purse and pulling up the same files she had on the desktop as they walked. She didn’t want to have this little conference with the rest of the homicide department looking on.
Reese obediently followed her pointing finger, walking the few feet down to the corridor and entering while Sandra held the door open. Before she walked in behind him, she called out to Gutierrez, one of the few other detectives in the room whom she genuinely liked.
“Miguel, has Keith Waring been in yet?”
“Not that I’ve seen, but I’ve been out in the world most of the morning,” Gutierrez said. He was carrying his blazer over his right arm, picking at his teeth with a dime. There was a large green stain on the jacket. “Fucking kid paintballed me when I was coming back from—”
“I got a thing, Miguel, give me a minute.” Sandra dodged into the room and let the door glide shut, leaving Gutierrez’s profanity and what was probably an excellent story on the other side. She gripped her laptop a little tighter when she saw the expression on Martin Reese’s face. Stricken.
“You alright?”
“Just dwelling, sorry. Cell buzzed, probably Ellen calling me. Our daughter’s really upset by all this, too, she can’t help but pick up the tension in the house.”
“Of course. How old?”
“Fourteen,” Reese said, that stricken look fading out and some animation coming back. “You have one at home?”
“Definitely not,” Sandra answered reflectively, then chased her repulsion with a smile. “Sorry, that sounded hostile—I don’t have a child yet, no. Tough with the job.”
“And what you see every day, bringing it home to a baby.”
“Sure,” Sandra said, aware that Reese was either going to ask for a story or get back to the point very quickly.
“Can you tell me, just, can you tell me now if that’s Tinsley in the grave?”
“I can tell you definitively it isn’t,” Sandra said. She saw a little wave of disappointment on Reese’s face. The eyes went blank and he let his mouth open for a second, then snapped it shut while he processed. This matched up well with the typical reactions from relatives of long-vanished people: they want the knowledge, eventually, the certain word that she’s not just lost, she’s gone.
“But I was so sure,” Reese said, quietly. Sandra let him have a second, not for his own comfort, but to see what he would say next.
“How do you know?” Reese asked. He leaned toward the table, and Sandra reflexively twitched backward; usually, she’d sit in the chair at the side of the room when having a noninterrogatory discussion in here, but this time she’d unthinkingly sat across from her guest.
“We know because of height and dental. The bones of the girl, the woman in the grave who wasn’t Bella Greene—they match up, time-wise, with the disappearance of Tinsley Schultz and about four other unsolveds, but none of them are a match. Running those numbers was the first thing we did after the discovery. Height rules most of them out. Our Jane Doe was tall, almost six feet.”
“Yeah,” Reese nodded. “Okay. Tinsley wasn’t. Not even as tall as Ellen.” He pushed back from the table, squeaking the chair, then took a post in the corner of the room. “What else can you tell me? My wife is going to grill me, you understand. My daughter, too.”
“I know. It’s not easy to get over a vanishing.” Sandra was still deeply annoyed at whichever forensics geek or Federal Way cop leaked the details of the body find to the papers. For a second, as she began to recite the facts to Reese, she was sure the media’s source was the tough-talking douche uniform who’d walked Chris and her to the scene. “I can’t tell you too much, of course. Beyond what’s in the papers. We received a call that there was a site of interest in a disused cemetery in Federal Way. Upon investigation, we found a partially dug-up site, containing one set of very old bones that were supposed to be there, the skeleton that we’re talking about, and the remains of the recently vanished Bella Greene.”
“Are these sex murders?”
“That, I can’t tell you, Mr. Reese. I’m sorry. But, since it’s not Tinsley down there, you don’t especially need to worry about that.”
“I’m not only concerned because it’s my—because maybe it was h
er. I live here, you know. Our daughter lives here.”
There, Sandra thought. The wealthy entitlement machine lurches into gear.
“I’m sure she wouldn’t fit the victim profile here, Mr. Reese.”
“You can’t be sure of that. And how many killings are we talking? It’s beyond the Greene girl and that skeleton?”
“We’re not even sure the same person killed both, sir.”
“Someone’s just doing you a favor, digging up bodies and telling you where they are?”
“If someone was doing that, it seems odd he’d plant a fresh body before making the call.”
“It does. Doesn’t seem like something a reasonable person would do, at all,” Reese said. He’d taken out his wallet, started playing with the cards in it. “But the guy’s clearly a stone psycho, right?”
“Something like that. You can tell your wife it’s not her sister. You can tell her and your daughter they don’t have to worry about whoever is out there, doing this. He’s targeting vulnerable women, ones who spend most of their time on the street.”
“I wonder about that,” Reese said. “Why they only stick to the one kind of girl? And how exactly you can be sure this one will?”
“Compulsion, sometimes. Other times, this one included, probably, convenience. He wants easy victims. Again, this is speculation on my part, but I can say with some confidence that your wife wouldn’t have anything to worry about from this guy.”
“Okay,” Reese said, stowing his wallet. “Again, sorry to ask.” He moved toward the door, and was about to start on his goodbyes when Sandra asked him a question.
“Did you know Tinsley Schultz?”
“Of course not,” he replied, almost wincing afterward. “I mean, Tinsley disappeared when Ellen was so young. I guess we met right afterwards, but no, I never met Tinsley.”
“You knew about the disappearance before you met her?”
“Everyone knew.”
“Is it something that—do you mind if I ask how long Tinsley had been vanished before you met Ellen?”
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