Find You in the Dark

by Nathan Ripley

  “He didn’t mention Waring until his wife told him to, and even then, he seemed to only be giving up some of what he knew.”

  “He must be some sort of conspiracy vampire pervert, too, then, right?”

  “That’s not what I’m saying. Maybe the guy who took Kylie—Keith or not—got a message to him. Reese said he’d ‘failed her’ up there, could have meant that specifically, like he saw her being taken and didn’t get to her in time. Reese could have been contacted and told explicitly that anything he passed on to the cops gets his daughter’s throat slit.”

  “Injected,” Chris said, turning into the parking lot of the coffee place he favored in this part of town, not so close to the university that the students bled over en masse with their laptops.

  “Injected?”

  “If it’s the same guy who got Bella Greene, he’s a needle guy, not a throat-slitter. Right?”

  “Right. Which is why we’re going to knock on Keith Waring’s door. Or knock it down. I’ll get someone from forensics to meet with us out there.”

  Sandra pressed dial, and within a minute, was screaming at whoever wasn’t getting her what she needed in the time she needed it. Later, she was sitting at the kitchen table in Keith Waring’s sad bachelor apartment, a place that was remarkable in only one aspect: how clean it was. Not necessarily tidy, but clean. Especially the living room, hallway, and kitchen. The small, recessed bedroom was a maelstrom of tissues, potato chip bags, bank statements, and gun magazines. It smelled in there, too, a more concentrated version of what wafted by her desk at work when Keith passed her to go to the bathroom.

  Al Mingus, Sandra’s preferred forensic tech, had come once she’d gotten a warrant. The pressure of the potential Kylie Reese connection made it an easy sell.

  No one had reported Keith missing, but when Sandra filed the report and urged a press announcement that afternoon, she was able to convince the lieutenant that there was no one to report him missing. Whatever kind of cop he was—deskbound, maybe corrupt—he was still police, and it was up to his workplace to report him missing, and to do the necessary investigating.

  “It’s more than just clean here,” Mingus said, doing another sweep with the black light. He was tall, and this kind of work had him bending and stooping frequently, his joints making snaps to soundtrack the job. “Looking at the state of that bedroom, and having sat across from Keith at the burrito place a few times, no way should every surface look like this out here. Still a bit of solvent stink coming from the laminate out here and the linoleum in the kitchen, too.”

  “This isn’t just you feeding on my paranoia, as the guys at the station are guaranteed going to say?” Sandra asked.

  “Nope. Doesn’t really prove anything, but this looks like a place that was cleaned up by someone who knows what he’s doing, either from experience or from deep research. There’s barely evidence of Keith Waring himself in this room, let alone anyone else who might have been here with him.”

  “Then Waring did it, the clean. He’s a cop, he has the expertise.”

  “Did you ever talk to the guy?” asked Chris, from his slight leaning perch by the kitchen table. “I can buy him being a pervert and a stalker, but not a brilliant murder-and-cleanup genius. Even with the cop knowledge that a dolt like him could be expected to pick up, he just isn’t up to it. Keith isn’t our guy.”

  “Shut up.”

  “A pro did clean this place out though,” said Mingus. “I’d bet on that. Reason to suspect foul play, especially if we combo it with him not turning up to work. Tracked his phone?”

  “We’re on it,” Sandra said, knowing, though, that it wouldn’t be of much use. If a creep could clean this place up, he could get rid of a phone. “Chris, can you get back to the station and toss his desk again? I already did it lightly, but look for any files, any data, any mention at all of Jason Shurn, Horace Marks, any of the killers our guy has called in bodies of. And of Tinsley Schultz, anyone Reese-related, obviously.”

  “Yeah. Anything else I should have an eye out for? Besides, you know, the completely obvious things you just spelled out for me?”

  “Look for anything that will help us find where he took Ellen Reese’s daughter,” Sandra said. That shut Chris up, and he left.

  An hour later, Sandra dropped Mingus off and went for lunch, eating a bowl of ramen as she processed, checking in with the plainclothes detail she’d set up to make sure no street girls had been assaulted or gone missing. If Kylie Reese, an upper-class teenager on the state swim team, was this psycho’s follow-up to Bella Greene, a destitute addict, there was perhaps little point in keeping an eye on any one group. Sandra hadn’t found a pattern, if there was one. And if there was no pattern, no one was safe.

  BY SUNDAY I’D THOUGHT OF a hundred reasons to turn up early for my appointment with the Ragman, but I hadn’t done it. Hadn’t made the drive, because of what disobedience could mean for Kylie.

  Keith Waring’s picture had hit the news and the papers on Saturday, as a “Person of Interest,” related to Kylie’s disappearance. The reports made it clear that he should be considered not as the suspect, but as someone connected to the case who needed to be spoken to.

  Ellen concentrated on postering and news campaigns for Kylie. We paid off the nurse when it was clear Ellen wasn’t going to be doing the bedridden panic zombie role that was assigned to her by the movies.

  “Every second we’re not out looking for her is a second we’re giving up on her, you get it? Nobody knows what the fuck they’re doing here, the cops, you, nobody, or Kylie would be back right now,” she said to me when I’d asked her to take a nap between interviews, or to listen to what the cops were advising her to say or not say.

  Gary was running the store entirely, which I’d had to thank him for, as much as it pained me. Reporters and tourists were turning up with cameras and questions, and I’d personally seen him scream them out of the store.

  The phantom sensation of pushing that needle plunger down and pulling the life out of Keith’s body hadn’t completely left my fingertips, even when I was dreaming. I thought of a different needle with a different dose of the same drug in Kylie’s neck, at least twice a minute. The Ragman’s hands on her arm, pulling her into his world. Breaking any of his rules seemed impossible at this point. So I checked and double-checked my calculations from the Hillstrom file all Saturday, like a good boy, doing the homework I’d gotten so good at. I knew, knew with the old certainty I’d had on my best digs, where that body was. And Sunday finally came.

  Carl Hillstrom hadn’t hidden this girl in the deep forest, which was a relief, especially since I knew who I’d be meeting at the site. I didn’t feel comfortable in the depths of the wild, and neither did any of the guys I’d followed over the years. They had to be close enough to their cars, close enough to the city they hunted in. Far enough into the trees to feel like no one is around, but near enough to everyone to remember there was still a world around that had been changed by the removal of a life.

  I went into our bedroom, which had become Ellen’s miniature control center over the past two days, the TV blaring and two laptops open. She was between phone calls, staring at the wall above the headboard, standing in her housecoat with dried spit at the corner of her mouth, chewing a pen.

  “Ellen.”

  “I’ve got searchers out, Martin. Volunteers. The cops told me not to but I think it’s going to help, just a couple of groups of six canvassing downtown with her picture. It’s still so close to when she vanished. People remember when it’s been so little time, you know?”

  “I know.”

  “We didn’t look for Tinsley quickly enough. Not that it would have made a difference.” Ellen giggled at this, and for the first time, I thought she genuinely might break before I had a chance to get our daughter back.

  “Ellen. This isn’t Tinsley.”

  “You should leave the house for a bit, Martin. You’re not helping and I feel like you’re not properly here, even.
Look for your friend Keith, why don’t you?”

  “If I don’t look like I’m crumbling into a panic it’s because I’m doing what you’re doing, Ellen. Pretending I’m not going crazy over her being gone, every second.” I gripped Ellen’s arms in both my hands, and she let me hold on to her, but wouldn’t look me in the face. Her arms hung there, the muscles slack, the bones inside them still as slats of scrap wood.

  “You’re really good at staying calm, Martin,” she said. “You can make it seem like you don’t care at all.”

  “I can’t fix this with us right now, Ellen. But don’t ever say I don’t care about her. Don’t say something I’ll never be able to forget. I’m trying to get Kylie back my own way.”

  “And what way is that?” Ellen asked, pulling back from me and sitting on the bed again, checking her phone for updates. For a furious second, I was at the edge of telling her exactly what happened, and how deviating from the Ragman’s orders by a single syllable or move would land our daughter in a grave. But I was too scared for Kylie to tell my wife what she deserved to know. And too scared for myself.

  “I’m going to look for Keith, okay? Like you said. Checking out some old hangouts he had, things he mentioned. But the cops can’t know. Any detail makes it onto a police scanner, and he’ll hear it. I’ll text you where I’ll be staying if I don’t come back tonight.” Ellen stared at me for a few cynical seconds.

  “You talk like this is some tree house game for boys,” she said. Her phone rang and she spoke into it, dismissing me.

  Before getting in the Jeep, I texted Ellen the address of the motel I was going to use as my base camp, with a few quick words—

  Keith mentioned a place he liked to stay near this place. Going to see. Love you.

  I left my iPhone on the kitchen counter, following old procedure. Didn’t want another portable GPS beacon on me, especially with Sandra Whittal and the rest of the SPD gang poking around my family. The tent and outdoor stuff were stowed in the back of my vehicle, the digging and forensic gear below it. I wished for a gun. The eyes I felt on me every moment I wasn’t in the house, cop eyes and Ragman eyes—they kept me away from gun stores, or from a sketchy back-alley arms deal I’d have no idea how to enter into anyhow. There was a hunting knife in a sheath on my calf, pressing uncomfortably into the elastic of my socks.

  The cop car parked across from our house was empty, but I still waved as I passed by in the Jeep, senselessly. I hoped Kylie had eaten lunch, that there were blankets where she was. It was getting chilly. I took the long way, checking my mirror a few times, before getting onto the highway.

  In the forest, with Hillstrom’s woman, I could become myself again. I had a duty, the same duty I’d taken on years ago: to uncover what was hidden, to bring up what was put away. I could make the Ragman understand that, maybe. Or just, somehow, make him leave me alone and give us our daughter back.

  Hillstrom’s last, publicly unknown victim. I was pretty sure I knew who she was, and I was about to find out. One thing about hidden corpses: after the rotting’s finished, they’ll keep forever. I still have a tendency to rush as soon as I zone-in on these trips, and this time I told myself to be careful, to fix my awareness on the drive, with a stop at the Marpole Motel on my way to the Hillstrom site.

  I checked into the motel, a little fleabag minus the fleas that was crowded in the peak of summer and desperately cheap in the fall and winter, in a quick five-minute transaction where I warned them that I’d probably be staying overnight, but that I’d be back by checkout time. The place seemed to be run by just one Hispanic man, who was pulling up the flooring around the front desk when I came in. I gave him a cash deposit before he could ask for a credit card.

  “My accounts got hacked on Friday,” I said. “On the road, it’s been a pain to get the bank to actually take care of anything. They don’t care about anything until it’s their own money, right?”

  The man, sawdust dusting the black hairs on his narrow arms, flicked through the bills in the envelope I’d handed him and nodded. “No problem,” he said, then checked me in.

  I took a look at the room itself. One bed, with an uncomfortable autumn-looking bedspread. An apology on the wall for the lack of Wi-Fi. Instead of a mint on the pillow, salmon candy. I dropped a sweater on the bed and mussed the sheets a little bit, then got back on the road.

  On the Mount Rainier trails, my pack, heavy with the tools I’d be needing, nestled close to my body, keeping me standing up straight as I carried its weight through the woods. The parking lot had been close to empty, with just a couple of Park Service cars and four or five pickup trucks keeping my vehicle company. The rain that had started pounding down made me feel safe, extra assured there would be few people out in the forest with me that day. It would be closer to dry under the canopy, once I’d left the trail at the correct point. I had forty minutes of daylight left, and a bit of dusk after that.

  Around me was the kind of forest that could be interchangeably used in helicopter footage for Enjoy British Columbia or Beautiful Oregon commercials. Tourists don’t care about the niceties of arboreal differentiation, except for the nature weirdos or birders. What I always noticed most was the air, not for its cold freshness, but its clarity: it added to the vividness of a dig, being distant from the smoke and breath of a city, with the trees exhaling oxygen into my natural, hunter’s high.

  A pine branch slapped into my face while I was preoccupied and I realized I’d lost track of how long I’d gone from the third trail marker, the one Hillstrom used as a landmark. I cursed, and went back, flicking on the Stanley Distance Measurer I’d brought, and starting to gauge the distances I’d be walking. I kept going, fifty meters, trusting the odd precision of Carl Hillstrom in his previous jailhouse confessions. Forty meters through the brush on my left would be a clearing. In that clearing would be Carl Hillstrom’s victim. A bit of extra research had led me to believe she was another missing Canadian girl: Cindy Jenkins. The date of her vanishing and the hitchhiking path her family and the cops had put together after a few months of her being gone put her squarely within Hillstrom’s hunting grounds and active months. And the Ragman was out at the site already, maybe. Our appointment was for seven p.m.: two hours away.

  Maybe he’d even brought Kylie, scared, blindfolded, silent. Safe.

  Before entering the thick of the brush, I adjusted my gloves and pulled on the vinyl boot covers I’d brought with me. These flattened my print pattern into nothingness, at the expense of any sense of grip on the forest floor. They slid on comfortably, security blankets for my feet. I adjusted my pack and pushed branches aside with my flashlight before plunging in.

  The dark came. I hadn’t counted on the storm clouds piggybacking the canopy cover, blocking out this much light. The gaps between the pines were comfortable enough to navigate, but I didn’t want to risk a branch directly to the eye, so I kept my right forearm in front of my face, advancing in this ridiculous Dracula pose while clocking my paces. I almost flicked on the flashlight, but was resistant to using anything that might catch a stray ranger’s eye. Hillstrom hadn’t needed to use any lights, and he was never an outdoorsman.

  Research told me that Hillstrom had a habit of wearing overalls when he came out to the woods. Usually it was the same unwashed set, with no shirt or underwear underneath. It was sweaty work, hauling those bodies around, and he found that having a coat on was both too hot and too cumbersome when he set the girls down to do what he had come to do. He hid the overalls in the same under-the-boards cubbyhole in his apartment where the snuff video was found. There was a sorority house’s worth of blood samples in the fabric, according to a true crime book from 2001. All bullshit, possibly. I couldn’t see the Ragman letting Carl Hillstrom reuse a killing suit, instead of disposing of it right away.

  “Fuck!” I yelled when I stumbled over a rock and came down hard on my extended forearm and elbow. The word echoed for a moment, but the forest seemed even quieter when the sound died away. I had an
impression that a sound in the deep background, which had been with me as I walked, stopped when I paused. I stayed still for a moment more but heard nothing. The wind picked up just as the rain stopped, moving the clouds and letting moonlight leak in.

  The ground was slippery under my vinyl treads, but the heaviness of the pack kept me steady. Darkness had eliminated the shades of green and brown I’d seen underfoot on the trail—it was all black below me, black mud, black leaves. Thirty-seven meters in by the Stanley, I pushed past a thick-branched bush and reached the clearing.

  It was a beautiful spot. Not just its isolation, which seemed complete, but its plain natural beauty. The moonlight was bright enough in the high, smogless air to illuminate every raindrop. The clearing looked like it was being scattered with unstrung, white Christmas lights. I opened my pack and started laying down the plates from my stepping kit, which would give me a clear plastic path to and from the burial site. Reduced the chances of my spilling any stray DNA, which was always a possibility, no matter how well your body was condomed up. I was laying out the last plate when I saw something ahead of me in the darkness.

  Someone lying on the ground, in a slight depression.

  I froze up, my body colder than the frigid air around me, before calling out softly, “hey.” It was too small to be the Ragman. It wasn’t the Jenkins skeleton. It still had flesh.

  “No. No. Kylie. Kylie. No.” I started talking, chanting almost, while I left the stepping-plate path and walked over to the unmoving shape on the ground. I kept my pace slow, steady, locking the absolute impossibility that my daughter was dead into reality with each firm step.

  It was a girl’s body. The legs came into sight first, and they could have been Kylie’s. They were bare, and the torso was covered by a long, dark, man’s sweater. I couldn’t tell what color the hair was. Her face was down, pressing into the dirt.

  No.

  I walked a few steps farther, risked putting my fingers on the skin of her right arm. It was cool, but not yet cold. I turned the body over and almost screamed with relief. It wasn’t Kylie.