Find You in the Dark

by Nathan Ripley

  The front of the dead woman’s sweater was torn, showing a tattoo of an eagle just below and between her breasts. It took me almost a minute to finish dragging my eyes up past her smooth neck—there’d be a pinprick on the vein if I could look closely enough, the sting that brought her to this—to see her face. The receptionist. ReeseTech. I’d only seen her the one time, right after digging up Bella Greene. I wouldn’t have recognized her if the Ragman hadn’t clipped her ReeseTech ID tag to her bangs.

  Then came the full version of the vague sound I’d sensed behind me in the forest. Booted footsteps on twigs. The hard, running stomps reached my plastic track, and I looked up at a form that was taller than I remembered as he smashed his flashlight into the side of my head. I tumbled forward a few feet, and wasn’t out by the time I hit the ground.

  My face was inches away from the dead woman’s wrist, as I felt the knee in my spine and the needle in my neck. The way Keith had felt it, the way this girl had, too. The way Kylie had. I couldn’t think of the receptionist’s name, even though I’d just seen it on the tag. I should at least know her name. Then the needle slipped out of my neck and I wasn’t seeing anything anymore.

  REACHING THE BOTTOM OF THE bowl in the Ramen place near the station, chasing the last few noodles, Sandra Whittal indulged the powerful pang of doubt she’d ignored as she was inhaling the meal. You could be wrong about everything was her constant credo when it came to investigation, especially when she started to find the path she thought was the right one.

  Kylie Reese’s picture was on the news constantly now—a rotating selection of nine or ten pictures, actually, ranging from her posed school shot to casual snaps of her sitting with friends on couches or outside sports complexes, the faces of everyone else in the shots digitally blurred out. They get to be blurred, while Kylie gets to vanish altogether, Sandra thought.

  People were talking about this disappearance, too, acting as though Martin Reese was tech royalty, that Kylie Reese was Princess Microsoft, not just a scared girl like the ones who vanished and were ignored every month. If you can fill a woman’s absence with money, her disappearance gets more real to the public, Lieutenant Daley had explained to a bunch of drunk, celebrating homicide cops after Maloney closed a teen-on-teen private school murder last year. They’d laughed and toasted like Daley had made an out-of-place, smoking-jacket-witty comment, but Daley hadn’t smiled. He’d just had another drink. Sandra got to the last noodle and scrap of pork by tipping the bowl up to her face.

  Sandra pushed her chair in and left money on the table, ignoring the buzz of her cell. Another FBI ring, almost definitely. They’d stuck to phone calls, so far, a field agent named Alter announcing their arrival was imminent. The missed call was indeed from him. Sandra needed this to be wrapped before anyone else could arrive. With Kylie alive. With Keith Waring cuffed or with a bullet in him. While she was stowing the phone, she got a text from Chris telling her to get back to the station, double-quick.

  He was lounging at the coffee machine when she entered, talking to Gutierrez.

  “G. just closed that bathtub drowning,” Chris said, poking him in the arm as Sandra approached. She tipped an imaginary hat at him, remembering for a millisecond what it had been like to wear one of the stupid things on patrol, how it had been one minor element among the major ones that had her ambition fixed on getting into plainclothes, getting to be a detective.

  “Great. And how are we doing?”

  Chris hesitated, drawing out a small silence Gutierrez almost spoke into, wanting to retell the story of his collar. Sandra cut off that possibility with a quick, cold look, and Chris continued. “Don’t get too excited. Two things. One, Martin Reese has a juvenile record. Backtracking over every call and email Waring has sent for the past couple of years, we found a call he made to have the record dug out of sealed materials a few months back.”

  “What’s the record? What did he do?” Sandra asked.

  “Tell you in a minute.”

  “Shit on your suspense, Chris, tell me now.” Chris held up his right hand, impassive, and went on.

  “First, we’ve got a missing person report. Less than twenty-four hours, but the woman who reported it was insistent enough on the absence being atypical that it got booted up to our ears. Happened, looks like, about three hours after Kylie Reese was taken off the street.”

  “Who is it?”

  Chris grimaced.

  “You’re going to be way too happy about this.”

  WHEN I OPENED MY EYES, the dead girl was nowhere to be seen. I hadn’t been knocked out since junior high football, but I remembered the cloudy ache of waking, the way it was different from coming out of sleep—you felt like no time had passed at all. But time, and space, had shifted around me while I was out in the forest.

  I wasn’t in the center of the clearing anymore. It was extremely dark, so much so that I could only make out the huge trunks that surrounded me, denser pillars of blackness in the air around me. Distant sounds came from what had to be the direction of the clearing, but I wasn’t able to move. My legs were freezing, because the Ragman had taken off my pants and used them to tie my arms to the tree I’d been propped against. My boxers were stuffed into my mouth, held there by a strong tape that pulled on the bristles of the two-day growth on my cheeks. My cock was in full retreat, trying to curl up into my body, away from the cold and fear. I was just as scared as it was.

  The noises from the clearing were of digging, dragging, scraping. At one point I heard a repeated plastic clatter, and realized that he was stacking the plates from my stepping kit. Sounds of ruffling fabric told me he was replacing them in my backpack. Then he started walking toward me.

  I could taste the sweat from my hour-long hike in the fabric of the boxers, which was soaked with spit. I must have been hypersalivating after I passed out. The booted footsteps were slow, irregular, as if the walker was avoiding fallen logs and branches on his way. When the Ragman finally appeared, he was still easier to hear than to see.

  “Hello, Martin.”

  I started to choke on my disgusting gag. The saliva was too much for the fabric to absorb by now, and was frothing around noxiously in my mouth. I was choking in earnest when the Ragman leaned in quickly, like someone had axed him at the knees, and pulled the tape off. I spat out the boxers and half a cup of drool and panted for a while, wondering how I could feel relief when I was still in so much trouble.

  The Ragman laughed, then cut it off quickly. He wouldn’t have brought me up here just to kill me, I thought. I thought it as hard as I could.

  “I won’t scream,” I said, in my best hostage negotiator voice. Absurdly, I thought of the approach I usually took to calming down Ellen when I’d messed up—that same tone of voice, the repeated apologies, and finally the offer of some form of restitution. The tall man hadn’t moved for a few seconds, and I could sense that he was thinking. I wanted to stop those thoughts.

  “You can if you want to,” he said. “Makes no difference to me.”

  “Just kill me,” I said. “Can’t you do that?”

  “What?”

  “Kill me and let her go. Let Kylie go, just please god let her be safe. I understand that you’ve beaten me and that I could never—I can’t be what you are. I just want my daughter to be alive and I want to be dead. Please.”

  “That’s just not right, Martin. More importantly, begging’s not fun. You’re the one who started this game, so don’t make it my job to finish it properly.”

  The Ragman moved toward me and circled the tree, pausing behind it. I felt him stoop. A shape appeared in my peripheral vision on the right, then edged in front of my eyes. It was the butt of a huge knife, a hunting blade with finger holes in the handle, some Frankenstein-mix of a street fighter’s blade and a deer-skinning knife. The Ragman remained silent as he cut the pair of jeans that bound me to the trunk with the blade in his left hand.

  I was being marched into the clearing. The Ragman steered from behind with the
butt end of the knife handle, prodding me this way and that to keep me from plowing into a tree. The air was freezing on my naked legs, numbing them to the nicks and flicks of the branches we were brushing past.

  The clearing was about five hundred paces from where I’d been tied up. The moonlight was back on us, without any canopy to pierce. I paused, and the Ragman flipped the knife around and prodded me forward, poking a tiny, shallow hole in the skin above the middle of my spine. In the middle of the field I could see my bag, neatly repacked, and the body of the woman from ReeseTech. I couldn’t see her face anymore. The Ragman had put her sweater over it.

  When we got closer, I could see the name tag lying on the ground next to her right hand. The Ragman kicked me in the back of the knees, pushed my head toward the laminated panel, until the picture and the name filled my eye. Rochelle Stokes. The name attached another level of reality to what had happened, especially next to the logo I’d designed and tweaked as I built my company and bank account. The corpse of someone real. Closer to alive than she was to the bones, or to the body of Bella Greene. And closer to my life than anyone I’d ever taken out of the ground.

  I moaned. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t get any other sound out, and I couldn’t be silent, as the Ragman pulled me along and set me on my knees in front of the grave he’d been digging.

  Another body. In that open pit, four feet down, was the one I’d come for. The Canadian runaway Hillstrom had killed.

  “Know who that is?” the Ragman asked.

  “Cindy Jenkins.”

  “Good boy. Very good research boy, Martin.”

  Even her skeleton looked Canadian, I thought, feeling mercifully out of touch with my immediate reality as I took her in for the first time. For a moment, I almost forgot Kylie, forgot the Ragman behind me. It almost felt like another dig, where I could vanish into the intense thrill of discovery. The bones were minor, humble, sweet. There was a huge gouge in the right temple, which was odd for one of Carl’s victims. He had always been a strangler. Cindy had put up more fight than the other girls.

  “She’s the only one I had to help out with. Started running when we opened the car door, after playing unconscious. Very clever, a real survivor. Absolutely paper-thin skull, though.”

  The Ragman rammed his knee into the base of my spine, half a foot below the small cut he’d made. I fell, screaming, just short of tumbling into the grave. I turned to face him and saw that he was wearing a blue balaclava. He pinched my nose, kneeled on my gut, and put something in my mouth. A pill. I swallowed out of fear, out of an instinct to obey. He got off me and I lay there, waiting for whatever was going to happen to happen. Waiting to die. The Ragman pointed at the fresher of the two corpses. I walked over to it, and he nodded, so I stooped and gathered her into my arms. I looked back again, and when he nodded, I dropped Rochelle into the hole, the icy weight of her striking the bones and shreds of cloth that lay in the grave she was going to share. The Ragman had used my shovel to dig, and she fell on that, too. It must have gone deep into the cold flesh of her back, because blood began to well out, dark, glowing black in the light of the moon.

  We both looked into the hole and waited for him to speak, until I realized that he didn’t know what to say.

  “Why didn’t you make me kill her?” I was saying and asking at the same time, less afraid when I reached the end of the question mark than I was when I started. I stared into Rochelle’s dead eyes, still not sure enough to turn and face the Ragman. He stayed quiet and I kept talking.

  “You meant to make me kill her, didn’t you? Something went wrong.”

  “I meant to do exactly what’s happening right now,” said the voice behind me, but it wasn’t quite the Ragman’s. It had a shake in it. A small, slight shake.

  “I had a three-point plan for taking care of Kylie first, then you and the wife in your own garage. I was all ready to deploy if you didn’t turn up in another forty-five,” the Ragman went on, sounding more like himself. “But you made it after all.” I turned around then. He’d peeled up the underside of his balaclava a little, and I felt the vulnerability of my nakedness, beyond just the cold.

  “You gave her the dose you meant to give me. You fucked up the needles,” I said. The drugs in me made me move my lips. The drugs and the rush of feeling some of the fear leave me. “Didn’t notice in time to bring her back with adrenaline, either.”

  The Ragman took up a position across the grave from me and squatted, watching. He peeled the rest of his balaclava off and laid it down on the ground beside me. Showing me his face in cold blue light from the moon. I stood there with my dick out, the grave between us, feeling my heart rate speed up, feeling warm. I looked back into the hole. Rochelle’s eyes looked back at mine, with nothing in the gaze but old data, an unreadable record of her finished life.

  “I never made doses for Jason, or for Carl, when they were doing their kills,” the Ragman said. “I just had to plan, watch, and then make sure everything was cleaned up nicely. For you, I was making it a little easier. I didn’t ‘fuck up’ the needles. I made a concession to how weak you are.”

  I moved my hands to cover up my nakedness. The Ragman laughed.

  “Let me get dressed.”

  “No. And look me in the face. Look at me.” I did. He had a shaved head, the pale skin on top sweating, beads he wiped up with a pass of his right glove. The face was as featureless as could be, the oval template of a police composite sketch before a description had been given to fill it in. Average nose, thin lips, green eyes with no glasses. The eyebrows, maybe sandy brown, but the moonlight didn’t illuminate so much as push light near his face, barely letting me see what I hadn’t wanted to look at to begin with.

  “You can’t do anything about it, Martin. What you see, what I tell you. Anything you tell the cops is going to lead to a few bad chats for me, maybe a quick suicide. And definitely, most definitely, your sweet daughter in the worst way you can imagine.

  “I think you’ll believe me when I tell you I don’t care about what happens to me, Martin. But you care. And you’re so sweet about Kylie it makes me blush, absolutely.” The Ragman poked a pebble out of the tread of his boot and threw it at me. It bounced off my forehead.

  I knew what he was about to do, but I couldn’t think of how I could stop him.

  “My name’s Frank Connell. I own Acme Urban Surveillance, just off Garden Avenue. Bought it with my savings and bricks of cocaine cash Jason Shurn had hidden at my house. We were going to buy it together, until he went rogue and started keeping souvenirs.”

  “Ruined all your work of hiding the bodies.”

  “He got too excited.” The Ragman pointed down into the grave. “Rochelle parks just beside the ReeseTech lot, in the plaza with the coffee shop you all go to. I parked next to her car and punched her once in the side of the head from my rear passenger window when she went to open up her car door. I was a little tired from picking up Kylie from your wife’s little party earlier in the evening, you know. So there was a small error.”

  “No. You were the excited one this time,” I said. “Not Jason. You.” In that moment, I forgot to be scared. I looked at him and saw the same shiver, the same weakness, that had landed Jason Shurn and Carl Hillstrom in prison.

  The Ragman reached across the grave, moving quicker than seemed possible to my drug-blurred brain, and all of the fear came right back. I screamed as he pulled me forward and I fell into the grave, my naked chest landing full force on Rochelle’s, one of Cindy Jenkins’s bones breaking off under my wrist and giving me a deep cut. I started to stand but the Ragman put a boot on my shoulder and pushed me back down. I could feel my skin warming up Rochelle Stokes’s dead flesh. I shut my eyes.

  “You feel how skinny she is,” the Ragman said. “Under a hundred pounds, probably. Anything can kill someone that small. Say, how much does your daughter weigh? Because I’ve been giving her shots, too. Don’t tell me when I make mistakes, Martin, or I’ll correct them all at once. Startin
g with Kylie, then you, then Ellen. Then I’ll go back and sit behind the counter at Acme for another twenty years, and pretend you never existed. And it’s too late to be selfless now and tell the cops all about me, you know that. The instant I hear a whisper of cop, I make sure Kylie dies. You believe me, don’t you?”

  The Ragman reached into the grave and hauled me up by the back of my neck, dangling me as I gurgled. He pulled his knife back out and made a long, ragged cut along my chest, below my nipples, around where Rochelle had her tattoo. Hot blood, my blood, dripped out and down, pouring down my stomach, legs, neck, dripping over both bodies below me.

  “Give them both a good coating, Martin.” The blood was coming thickly out of me. I was on the verge of fainting when he lowered me into the grave, almost gently, and the cold touch of Rochelle’s flesh underfoot forced me awake. The Ragman—it felt ridiculous to think of him as Frank—pushed a bundle of canvas to the lip of the pit. A duffel bag, an enormous one.

  “Put both of them in here.” Struggling, trying to remember that Rochelle only weighed a hundred pounds as I levered her up, rubbing even more of my blood against her shoulder blades, crying out once when I caught her open right eye seeming to look right at me, I got her over the edge. Into the bag. Then I pulled up the bones of Cindy Jenkins, the intact ones and the broken, in a task that seemed to take hours. I filled the bag.

  “I have a new deal for you,” said the Ragman, grabbing the bag as soon as he saw I was attempting to zip it shut. “I’ll trade you this bag and your living daughter for a fresh body. Your own kill. By yourself. I’ll be in touch.” He walked away, striding quickly, the steps soon inaudible as the cold and blood loss took me into the dark.

  SANDRA WHITTAL KNOCKED AT THE door of the Reese house, alone. Chris Gabriel was down at ReeseTech, doing interviews. Stuff she trusted him to take care of. This one she had to handle herself. Asking a woman exactly how fucked up her husband is is a delicate matter.