“Less than two years. We met at college.”
“While Jason Shurn was still free, probably,” Sandra said. She’d learned early on, while she was still on patrol, dealing with domestics and trying to get the truth out of terrified wives, that there was another shade of hunch, of instinct, in the field. It had to do with questioning—when to pressure someone, and with what kind of inquiries, even when you had no idea exactly why you were doing it. She couldn’t say exactly why she was curious about Martin Reese, but she was. It had something to do with the particular tone he’d been talking to her in, the questions she could tell he wanted to ask, but didn’t.
“Shurn was caught while we were dating. I did this same thing back then, came down to the station to talk to the cops, in her place. They were a little less nice than you are being, since we weren’t married, yet.” Martin turned the doorknob, facing away from Sandra, with hesitance, as though he suspected it might be locked. The door popped open and Sandra followed him out.
“What came first, Mr. Reese? Your taking notice of the Tinsley Schultz disappearance, or your relationship with your wife?” Martin still had his back to her, but he turned at this.
“Are you—what are you implying, here?”
“Nothing. It’s just that women who are associated with crimes, especially the kind that affected Tinsley, with a lunatic like Shurn in the wings . . . they achieve a weird kind of celebrity. I was wondering if you’d heard about who your wife was before you met her.”
“Like I said, everybody knew,” Reese said. “Everyone knew about the disgusting tragedy she was living with. I’m not sure what else you need from me, and I’m very grateful for the first half of this conversation, but I think I’m going to get on with my day now.”
Sandra leaned against the edge of her cubicle as she watched Reese walk away. He paused, once, stooping down as though he was tying his shoe. He was down there for a few seconds, and Sandra couldn’t pinpoint what he might be doing. The boots he was wearing didn’t have any laces. He got up and left without turning back to face her. Sandra walked a few steps closer, to where Reese had stopped. Sandra looked at the sole photo on top of Keith’s desk: Sergeant Waring getting those stripes he soon proved he didn’t deserve.
I FUMBLED WITH A NONEXISTENT scuff on my boots for a few agonizing seconds, having followed a dumb instinct to check out the underside of Keith’s desk when I walked past it, spotting that grinning photo of him in the clutter up top. Beneath a desk was just the place where a tech-phobic, not very bright guy like Keith would hide secondary records. They could be taped to the bottom of one of the drawers, but I couldn’t very well start yanking those out with that cop’s eyes boring into my spine.
All I clocked beneath Keith’s desk with the darting right-eye glance I managed was a liberal studding of old gum. No paper. Nothing. I started to feel a little more sure even he hadn’t been dull enough to hide records of illegal evidence sales in the police station itself. I saw the ass-dent in his chair as I stood up and strode out of the room. Keith would never be back to refresh it. I waved at the desk sergeant and got to my Jeep in guest parking, pulling out of the lot before I allowed myself to start thinking about the unexpected grilling I’d gotten from Sandra Whittal.
“Hundreds of idiot police in this country, and I can’t get one,” I said. I almost wished the Ragman had left a bug in here, something I could talk to other than myself. The fact that the detective had asked me anything, anything at all, was bad. Very bad. And why was a real cop curious about why Keith Waring was late to work? Also bad.
The buzz of a text from Ellen—Come to store with a downtown address—brought me back to Tinsley, the fact that it wasn’t her in the grave. Someone else, some other victim. An undocumented Shurn kill.
“Or yours, Ragman. Maybe they’re both yours,” I said, lingering at a stoplight as it started to rain and my windshield teared up in front of me. A honk or eleven from behind roused me, propelled me back into the flow of traffic. It took me about twenty minutes to make it the few blocks from the police station to Ellen’s store, because I’d forgotten the construction on Stewart Street. Maybe the cop had seen my reaction to Keith’s name. Maybe she was looking into that right now. I had to tell Ellen not to let anyone know about my friendship with the dead sergeant, before anyone found out he was dead. For the first time I could remember, I was going to have to ask her to lie for me.
“Should have made her go down herself,” I said, parallel parking ten storefronts ahead of the address Ellen had given me. But I’d wanted to go to the station, I knew that. I wanted to look the investigator in the face, even if I couldn’t talk to her and tell her about the Ragman, about what he’d made me do. I wanted to know who I was up against, other than Ragman.
The address was halfway down the 1600 block of Sixth, near the old location of a record store I used to go to in college. When I came up to the window, I had a second of disconnect. Ellen was in there, behind the counter, but I seemed to have stepped a few weeks forward in time, seeing the store in the future, somehow. It was too complete, too decorated and stocked. In the foreground, blocking Ellen from sight as he moved on to the next letter, a window sign guy was carefully laying down the last decal that made up the name of Ellen’s store: with the “Y,” tinsley was basically complete, inside and out.
Gary Leung appeared just behind the window guy, saying something I couldn’t hear—knowing Gary, it was probably something unnecessary about what kind of job the guy was doing. Encouraging and condescending the whole time. He saw me and smiled, but instead of waving me in, came outside to meet me.
“Surprise surprise, boss.”
“How did you guys get set up this fast?”
“It was a slow grind, Mart. Not fast at all. Ellen just kept it to herself, and I—well, I didn’t do most of the work, but a lot of the scouting and ordering, yes. Hard not to break it to you when you came to the office the other day, but I figured it was up to Ellen, of course. Your investment was for the last polish. What do you think?” Gary took me by the elbow and I jerked my arm away, realizing a second too late how aggressive it was.
“Sorry, Gary. Packed morning, I’m jumpy. Surprise after surprise.”
“I know. I saw the news thing, about the girl. Ellen didn’t mention it, but I could tell something was up.” He gestured toward the door, offering the entrance to me gracefully, without any of his usual joking or schtick.
“Yeah. Well, it wasn’t her,” I said, then walked into a part of my wife’s life she had barely told me about.
The phone went a little loose in Ellen’s hand when she turned and saw me, her business mask slipping off a little. She’d been denying loans and applying polite pressure in the credit union for years, staring into desperate begging eyes, so she had a certain confirmed coldness. But it cracked for a moment, and I let it stay that way, maybe a little sadistically, before repeating what I’d just said to Gary. “It’s not her.” I mouthed it first, then said it out loud. She kept on going with her conversation, something about insuring a shipment from France. While I waited for her to finish, I watched Gary walk around the store in a proprietary way, the same way he’d walked around ReeseTech. Like he owned the fucking place. Which I guess he partially did, in this case.
Watching his back, the flex in his shoulder blades as he peacocked around, I couldn’t see the partnership lasting with someone as strong and decisive as Ellen. There were talons in Gary’s sense of competition, and the one look I’d gotten at his real face, below the usual set of expressions he deployed in the office, had stayed with me. “They don’t want you as acting CEO, and I’m not going to insist,” was the sentence that unveiled him, a day or so before I pulled the trigger on the final sale of ReeseTech. A second of pure rage between his aging hipster haircut and the crisp blue plaid of the shirt he was wearing, in the ReeseTech elevator. The buyers had passed on having Gary at the helm because of a secret meeting he’d booked with them, a gambit in which he bad-mouthed everythin
g I’d done in my last couple years running the company, told them about ideas that he’d proposed and that I’d passed on. Rick Patel, the head of the conglomerate of smaller companies buying ReeseTech out as a unifying brand, had come to me right away. Out of pity, and because I knew Gary would hear that it was me who had saved him, and he would hate it, I’d asked Rick to keep Gary on. He stayed with the company in a reduced position, heading a small team of old-timers, not leaving despite the massive bonus and crate of stock options he’d received. “I just like coding,” he’d said then. He’d ridden along with the company through the recession and now into the new tech boom, his bitter stubbornness paying off, if my ballooning stocks were any indication of how well the company was doing.
Tinsley the store was an oblong box, the same shape as the record shop I used to frequent on the block, but without rows of music-filled bins consuming the space. It was spare, like a gallery, the cement floor painted white and headless mannequins wearing various Blade Runner outfits people would hopefully be willing to pay three months’ rent for. Gary tucked a price tag into a slim-fit wool hoodie (cowled sweater, it was probably called in lookbook-language) and pretended he wasn’t about to eavesdrop on Ellen and me. She tapped my shoulder.
“It wasn’t her,” I said again. “They don’t know who it was, but not her.” Ellen looked different than she had before I’d walked into the shower that morning. Clothes from the tinsley stock she’d ordered in. Vividly red lipstick, not the peach shade she’d had on when her mouth was trembling with the worries she couldn’t voice.
“Poor girl,” Ellen said. She sighed. “I would still like—I really want to know who it was, just so I can be sure—”
“Really, Ellen.” I spoke quietly, and pushed her a little toward the back of the store, the unpopulated racks and shelves away from Gary’s probing ears. “The heights are completely different. Everything. Physically, it’s impossible that it’s Tinsley. The detective—she’s a woman—was very compassionate, professional, on-it. It’s not her.” I’d improvised the compassionate bit, but the professional and on-it part was unfortunately true.
Ellen sighed out the rest of her tension, except the part that would never leave her.
“Good,” she said. “I don’t know how I could have handled opening this place with that—with knowing that. It would be like a curse.” She gathered a few hangers from the floor in front of her and started putting them on the rack. “Switching gears totally. What do you think of the store?”
I looked around again, even though I’d already taken the room in.
“I’m a little surprised, really. Kinda pissed off, but it’s beautiful, and you should be proud.”
“Pissed off?” Ellen said.
“Yeah, well. I don’t want to be petty about it, Ellen, but—”
“Then don’t start using my name in that scolding tone, Martin. I wanted to do this by myself. I’m embarrassed about having asked you for that money, even, but I had to. I wanted something of my own, like I told you. Kylie and me thought you’d be kind of thrilled, you know, seeing it all alive like this.”
“Yes, but did you have to go behind my back? This must have taken so much time, concentration, effort—I know what setting up a business is like. This was in the works for longer than you said. Also not the classiest move to make Kylie lie to me.”
“Go behind your back? Lie to you? Do you have any idea when you last asked me a question about my life? You have no fucking interest in what I do with my days, Martin. I dropped a thousand hints, I even had piles of dresses and sweaters shipped to the house. I left papers lying around. I gave you every opportunity to notice and ask me what was going on, and nothing. On anything that isn’t about our Kylie, you’ve been miles away for months. For years.”
I looked over my shoulder. Gary and the guy putting up the sign were staring at us, peripherally, and hastily started to talk when they caught my look.
“So you’ve been confiding in this lunkhead instead? Gary’s the guy you choose to let in on your life?” I caught myself, for two reasons: Ellen had bunched up her fists and rippled her eyebrows in a way that I don’t think I’d seen in twenty years of fights. The other reason was Bella Greene in the grave. Keith in the car. This Whittal cop. The notion of picking a fight with Ellen was hilarious, suddenly—a smile almost ambushed me, but I caught it.
“Wait,” I said, holding my hands up. Her forehead loosened a little, the wrinkles smoothing out. “That’s not fair to you. Not even fair to Gary.”
“No, you’re right. It’s very unfair.”
“I’m upset, is all. Stressful morning for the both of us. I’m just—you’re right. I have been so tuned out of what you’ve been doing, and there’s no excuse. I’m sorry. I’m grateful you let me invest, and it really does look fucking amazing in here. Don’t let anything I said dampen that. I’m an idiot.”
“You’re really not leaving me with anything to yell at you about.” Ellen pointed toward the curtained off back of the shop, and we walked past the two narrow changing rooms to sit in the small stockroom, which was full of Rubbermaid containers and fastidiously flattened and bound cardboard boxes. It hadn’t been repainted in here. Bright pastels, like a juice stand in the mall. Ellen shut the door. I pushed down lightly on a stack of beige sweaters.
“What is this, cotton?”
“Wool,” Ellen said. She came close and kissed me, and at the same time, flicked me sharply once on the tip of my dick. I flinched back.
“You’re a sweet man, Martin, and I knew I was signing up for your head in the clouds bullshit on a here-and-there basis from when we first started dating. You’re absent, a lot, whether it’s in the house and you’re staring a million miles away while I’m talking to you, or on yet another camping expedition.” She was still close to me, her chest pressing into mine. Probably not the best time to tell her I was leaving again this coming Sunday.
“Whatever it is that goes on in that brain of yours, Mart, whatever you need to keep happy, that’s fine. You’ve been an amazing earner and we’ve got a great kid and we all love each other very much: that’s how it looks outside, and most of the time, that’s actually how I feel. Just don’t start thinking you have too big a claim on what I think and what I do, all of sudden. Okay?” We sat down on top of a couple of the containers, stayed quiet like that for a couple of minutes while I tried to figure out how to shift gears into asking Ellen for a favor.
“Okay,” I said. “Speaking of what goes on with me, there is something a little off. Keith. Our meeting last night was—weird.”
“Weird?”
“I think he’s into something. Drugs. Might have even stolen some dope from the evidence room.”
“Martin.”
“He didn’t come out and say it, but he did hint. I’m starting to regret ever having known the guy at all.” I leaned against the wall, toeing a stack of deep indigo jeans while I tried to look troubled and faraway, and a little noble. “It’s just that I thought I could help him be less troubled. I don’t know. To keep this all as out-of-our-lives as can be, just don’t tell anyone I had a cop friend named Keith Waring, if they ask. Just say you don’t know, that I’ve never mentioned it, you don’t know all of my friends. Be vague. Being vague isn’t lying.”
“Who would ask?”
“The police. If they find my contact on him. Just tell them to ask me, that you don’t know who I hang out with, but don’t see why I’d be palling around with a cop. Say so and stick to it. There’s no reason for anyone to disbelieve you.”
“You’re not going to turn him in?”
“I’m not even sure if he’s done anything. I’ll sound crazy and be letting down a friend, all at once. Not going to do that.”
“Just stop spending time with him, at least.”
“I promise I’ll never see him again, okay?”
“This is really the last thing I need, Martin. More to worry about. You know that soft open’s really soon, right? I invited anyone I thou
ght might buy something or tell people.”
“Forget this Keith thing, it’s nothing. Literally all you have to do is forget him.”
“I can do that. Gary’s been bothering press and the blogs for the last couple weeks about the opening. It’s really going to work, I think.” Ellen’s own ability to switch modes, something we had in common, came into play when she talked business. I’d only ever known her worries about Kylie, or Tinsley, to break her capacity for focus.
“No problem. I mean, that’s amazing. I thought soft open meant a bunch of boxes and empty space and friends and family. Kylie gets to come, right?”
“Of course.”
I left, hugging Ellen goodbye and sparing a friendly wave for Gary as I walked out. It was time to get back home, to my scrapbook, to my scans of the Carl Hillstrom file the Ragman had left me.
I pushed through the shoppers on the street outside, garnering a “Jesus, buddy” as I shove-walked my way to the curb. The Jeep was waiting where I’d parked it. The sun found a slit in the huge cloud bank on the horizon, and sent a beam straight into my eyes when I sat in the driver’s seat. I lowered the sun visor, and felt the thing behind it as I pulled the visor down. Felt it before it dropped.
It was a feather earring, old, once turquoise and now mostly the color of dried blood. There were a few red hairs tied around it, stuck fast with the blood and time. Hairs from Jenny Starks’s missing scalp, the scalp that had been found by the Shurn case investigators. The earring fell onto my lap, like an exotic butterfly that had been poisoned in a killing jar. I’d seen it in on Jenny Starks’s Missing posters, one of which I’d found a digital scan of to include in my scrapbook.
For a moment, I even thought I remembered seeing the earring on the ground next to Jenny, up in the woods where I had found her, twenty years earlier. I contemplated it before folding it into a day-old Seattle Times I had sitting on the passenger seat, wrapping the whole package into a loose roll. I looked at the visor again. Something had been written on it, in ballpoint pen. “See you Sunday, killer.” I didn’t know if the Ragman had left the earring here while I’d been in the Pemberton with Keith, or if he’d been following me around today. He was probably capable of doing that, tracking device or no. I hoped he had been following me—at least I would have given him a nervous few minutes while he waited to see if I’d come out of the police station, or if I’d confessed everything. Everything I knew, that is, which seemed like less with each passing minute.
Find You in the Dark Page 20