“Are you finished? Are you going to arrest me now?”
“I brought you down here to tell you I know the pig you are and to give you a chance to let your wife, to let Ellen, hold on to some of her dignity and distance herself from you before there’s no chance. Tell me what you’ve been doing, Martin. Tell me who he is, and where I can find him. So I can bring your daughter back.”
I stared at Whittal and remembered to keep shaking my head, but I was thinking. Frank Connell. I could say that name and keep myself alive, keep Ellen safe, take away any power Gary thought he had over me. Frank Connell. Whittal would call upstairs and they’d have an address. That big cop, Gabriel, he’d whip in behind us in traffic, we’d speed toward the Connell house, or apartment, or compound, wherever a thing like him lived. I’d be in back of Whittal’s car, lifting my shirt and peeling back the tape while I told her about what he’d done to me after he’d killed Rochelle Stokes, how he’d forced me to handle her tiny cold hours-away-from-being-alive body, how different it was from what I’d done before with the skeletons, how it wasn’t exciting at all. That I was sad for Rochelle Stokes. That I hated what Frank Connell had done to her. That I knew her death was partially down to me, but no one can be blamed for a murder that they didn’t commit, that they just partially motivated. I was just part of the chain of causality.
But I knew that if I uttered his name in this room, Kylie was a dead girl. The only way out of this was the way in. Secretly, in the dark. In the woods, in the ground.
I stopped shaking my head and looked at Detective Whittal squarely.
“Officer. Lady. You’re fucking crazy and really pushing the limits of legality. I’m not a cop or a lawyer, but just because this isn’t on tape doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. I won’t be accused of vile—”
“Is that what you have to say?” Whittal asked me. She asked the question more deeply with her stare, a cold, drilling, disgusted one that tried to pin me to the wall.
“That’s all I can say.”
“Let me offer a full apology, and please do have a good day. We’ll check back in with you if there’s anything else, sir. If I am right, which we both know that I am, however, I should say this. It’s a shame you’re such an awful person, because you must be an excellent detective for us both to have ended up here. I’m going to keep looking for your daughter without your help.” Whittal was up and out of the room before I could reply, leaving the door swinging behind her.
Whittal was another problem to solve on my way to getting Kylie back. She wasn’t an escape from the work ahead of me. Just another task. I got up and walked up the stairs and out of the station, stopping by the desk sergeant. I figured I might as well get this step accomplished while I was here instead of calling from home.
“Excuse me. The detective—Whittal—I’d like to talk to her commanding officer. Her lieutenant, whatever it is. I’d like to speak to him or her right now, if that’s possible. My name’s Martin Reese, and I need to make a complaint.”
SANDRA TOOK OUT HER ANGER against Martin Reese on the accelerator pedal, flooring it as she drove to ReeseTech to meet with Chris. “Cuban Missile Crisis,” she muttered. It was what had come to mind when she was laying into Reese in the tiny room, during that completely off-limits interrogation she’d been hoping to convert into a real confession in the properly miked and filmed room upstairs after she’d cracked him. Instead, she’d gotten that look.
Sandra engaged the siren so she could justify her speed, and started threading through traffic aggressively. Looking into Reese’s handsome face, hoping it would get more confused and emotional, she’d only seen strategy and, finally, blankness. Sandra had flashed back to Mr. Potts’s senior history class in high school, hearing him say something that had always stuck with her: “But Khrushchev had vastly underestimated John F. Kennedy.” Vastly underestimated. Reese was as smooth and maybe as smart a bastard as the dead president, but she hadn’t seen the steel in him until she started presenting him with her case, her guesses, her knowledge.
“Even knowing how much I knew,” Whittal said to Chris, who was sitting on the hood of his ride just in front of ReeseTech, watching the recently interviewed staff stream out to their cars to return to their families with tasty stories about Mommy’s or Daddy’s huge role in the ongoing investigation. “Even seeing how right I was, he wasn’t fazed. He just took it in, Chris.”
“He was confused. Really seems like a pusscake to me, Sandra. Jumpy as hell when I had him in the car. Scared about his daughter, scared of us being suspicious.”
“He’s one of those, you know, grace under pressure dudes. A fumbler until he has something to focus on. I didn’t think it. I thought he’d crumble once I brought up his wife, the nightmare he’s about to put her through.”
“Nightmare,” Chris said. The last of the ReeseTech employees had streamed out, a few of them nodding at the two cops, Bob Suchana even half-finishing a salute before he thought better of it and turned the motion into a sleeve-mop of the impressive amounts of sweat dumping out of his scalp. “A nightmare, yeah. We’ve pulled video from every camera in the radius, Sandra, and it looks like the grab took place in a video dead zone. There’s a couple-hundred square foot area that isn’t covered by any lens around here, and that’s where Rochelle Stokes parked every day. Like Kylie’s grab, this was something that was scouted out, researched.”
“We’ll find him. Reese will give him to us by tonight.”
“Get in the car, Sandra. Detective Whittal.” Chris walked around to the driver’s side, and Sandra, hesitating for a moment because she normally would have withered at least one of his ears off for speaking to her in that tone, got into the passenger seat. Chris started the car and punched the gas.
“Chris, I don’t know if I locked my ride.”
“No one’s going to steal it. And forensics are still in the lot. Not, as you and I both know, that they’re going to find anything.”
“Yeah.”
Chris stared straight ahead. What neighborhood he was aiming for wasn’t yet clear, but he didn’t look like he wanted his thoughts or steering interrupted. Sandra’s phone wormed around in her pocket and she took it out. The lieutenant. She thought about picking it up, but took a sneak look at Chris’s eyes in the mirror and decided that she’d wait to get whatever it was between them over with before she took on Daley.
“That’s the lieutenant. Gonna ask him about putting a tail on Reese, tie it to gathering information about his kid.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Excuse me?” Sandra said, just as Chris pulled off the road and into a Shell parking lot. He got out without speaking to her, boosting Sandra’s annoyance into near fury. When he came back with a pack of cigarettes and rolled the window down, lighting one after a couple of out-of-practice flicks, she grabbed it from his fingers, considered grinding it out on his shirt, then flicked it past him out the open window.
“You think this is lover’s quarrel time, Chris? Playtime? Would you tease out an argument this long with Gutierrez or any of the other schlubs out of the station?”
“Shut up. And do not make this man-woman shit. It isn’t. It never has been with us, except when we’re actually fucking. I’ve never looked down on you, joked about you, gave you shit I wouldn’t give any other guy. This is about your. Pure. Fucking. Arrogance. And that dead girl.” Chris wasn’t talking to her in his suspect-intimidating voice; she’d never heard this one before. It was cold. Two high school girls a little older than Kylie Reese walked past the parked car on their way in. Probably trying to score a pack of cigarettes of their own. They paused for a second and the lead girl, all legs in a skirt too short for the season and an open duffel coat, gave Sandra a coded look through the windshield, an are-you-okay widening of the eyes that Sandra found both humiliating and touching. To reassure the kids outside, and herself, she grabbed Chris’s chin between her thumb and forefinger and turned his big cop’s head toward her.
“In any contex
t, you never speak to me like that. Understood? Just so we’re extraclear that this is a professional discussion—”
“It is.”
“Shut up. Just so we’re absolutely clear on how seriously I take this case, our after-hours relationship is officially terminated, over, done.”
“Fine by me,” Chris said, and he looked like he meant it. He didn’t blink. In her peripherals, Sandra watched the girls walk by and enter the gas station store, turning on the flirt jets with the clerk, whose face she couldn’t see.
“Then say your fucking piece, Detective. With the respect due to an officer of equal rank.”
“I’m mad because you’re smarter than me, Sandra. You should have been way ahead of this whole case, way ahead of me, for sure, but instead you’ve poured your whole brain into nailing a guy you’ve even agreed isn’t the guy. He’s not the killer, Martin Reese, if he is anything at all. And the killer is what matters. All this Sherlock Jr. bullshit, these links you’ve pulled out of the ether—”
“Out of the facts, Chris. It still counts as police work even if you’re not kicking in an informant’s knees.”
“I have zero excessive force charges in my file.”
“You’re smart enough to pick the right knees to flamingo. But not smart enough to keep up with my closure rate, so if you’re going to criticize my methods, let’s hear some specifics.”
“Specifically, we have a vanished girl with a clear connection to another vanished girl, and you did absolutely no practical on-scene work to help find her. You’re the best extractor of information from witness interviews in our division, and you spent the day talking to an IT jagoff and his wife. A guy who is alibied for the day and night in question.”
“He left his phone at home so we wouldn’t be able to back-trace him if we wanted to. He was up to something, Chris. Gave me some bullshit about using the time to hunt for Keith Waring’s secret hideout.”
“I don’t give a shit about Martin Reese’s phone or weekend drives. I give a shit about the habits, patterns, and whereabouts of the man who took, and potentially murdered, Rochelle Stokes. Who took and potentially murdered Kylie Reese. Who definitely killed Bella Greene. Who was smart enough and knows surveillance well enough to avoid turning up on a single screen or piece of digital recording. That’s what I care about.”
“Martin Reese is our connection to that killer.”
“You have to explain yourself to Rochelle Stokes. Her family. Because the time you poured into taking down this big, glamour target, this completely unlikely nerd? We could have spent that looking for the man who kills. The man who matters. The perp. Not his cleanup crew.”
“Reese has got you snowed, Chris, the way he’s had his wife and everyone around him snowed for years. His juvie record screams creep, and the way he handled me at the precinct—that fucking calm curtain that came down when he started deciding how he was going to take me on—he’s pure, complete psycho.”
“He’s a millionaire businessman, of course he’s a psycho. Just not one who’s of primary interest to us. Investigate the actual crime, not a target you’ve made your hobby.”
Sandra’s phone started buzzing again, but with a text, not a call. More for a break in the argument than out of any concern for what was on the screen, she took a look.
“Holy shit,” she said.
“What?”
“It’s the lieutenant.”
“Lieutenant doesn’t text,” Chris said, craning to take a look at the screen.
“He does today. And you’re going to love what he said.” She showed him.
fuck off Martin Reese’s back ASAP and call NOW
“Goes well with what I have to tell you, then,” Chris said.
“You didn’t bring me out strictly for the lecture?” Sandra felt around at her feet for her bag, before realizing she’d left it in her car. Never something she’d normally do. Chris was right about at least one thing: she was stretched thin, her brain working in directions that may not have been the most directly relevant or useful. But she was not going to let him criticize her police work.
“While you were interrogating Reese, I heard back from a detective I’d been trying to get through to. Rick Campion in Eugene, Oregon. He worked a case I thought might be relevant.”
“What case?”
“Sarah Weaver. She was nineteen years old and five nine when she vanished in 1995. I’ve been going through every single possible in the files for five states and three provinces around to put a name to the bones buried with Bella Greene. The kind of thing you would have been doing if you hadn’t gotten so fixated on Martin Reese. I kept going on it, and I found who the bones in that Irish cemetery belong to. Sarah Weaver. The gravesite was chosen by Jason Shurn, and he put her there, with someone helping him to do it. The same someone Shurn hunted and killed other women with, including, we’ve got to assume, Tinsley Schultz. I know who that someone is, now. And he’s still out there, and he’s taken Tinsley’s niece away from her family. Her family, who we’re supposed to be helping.”
“Out there meaning where?”
“North end,” Chris said, starting the car. “Fifteen minutes away.”
ONCE KYLIE REESE WAS STOWED, the Ragman started the big clean. The erasure of his life and every death he’d been involved with, starting with the electronics. First by wiping the drives, then by using a forensic program to perform a deeper wipe, then dumping new, pointless, random data from the internet onto all of his computers, phones, and auxiliary hard drives. He did this in the wire-and-screen-infested surveillance room in his house, the place where he’d sat as he monitored Martin Reese and Keith Waring, and where he’d tapped into the security cameras around tinsley and ReeseTech, measuring for blind spots, scouting for a place to grab Kylie, for the parking space where he’d waited for Rochelle Stokes. It had been her bad luck, her bad decision, to consistently park in that dead zone. Maybe she enjoyed a slightly longer walk to her vehicle from the office door. More likely, she didn’t want to get entangled in any after-work conversations with the squatting tech creeps she worked with. Parking where she did had probably allowed her to dodge all sorts of casual-desperate invitations for drinks.
Stage two of the electronics wipe was the physical part. The Ragman slept, first, on a cot in the surveillance room, everything unplugged around him. For two hours of dreamless black, he shut off, opening his eyes to the early dark of autumn, and a deep chill from the windows he’d left open. He took armloads worth thousands of dollars out to the yard. In two large steel barrels, he mixed violent solvents, inhaling and coughing the smoke that emerged when he dumped the equipment in. He’d let it all marinate for a couple of hours.
The nap he’d taken had partially been a mistake. He needed the rest, but the aches of his labors over the past twenty-four hours had manifested all over his body. The knees, especially, which didn’t used to creak even when he was doing squats in the prison yard, or manually loaded shipments into the back of his store. Now they made crackling sounds, like dead leaves being crushed, and a powerful line of agony ran the lower length of his spine. The dent Kylie Reese had made in his throat had added a feeling of congestion to his physical woes as well. The girl had some legs.
“Expiring,” he said, smiling to the empty yard around him. He coughed again when a breeze pushed more of the noxious stink of the dissolving electronics into his nostrils. He walked into the garage and took out a steel barracks box he’d bought at the army surplus, checking on its contents. Forty-eight never-used, superabsorbent shammies. Pulling the locker over to the old Buick he kept in here, fueled up, always intending to drive it again, the Ragman unscrewed the gas cap and started siphoning fuel into the locker, saturating the cloths. He’d never drive this vehicle again, but didn’t feel compelled to run a nostalgic hand over the blue paint job, or to look around the garage at any of the other tools or equipment that were soon to be out of his life.
“Martin,” he muttered. Jason, Carl, Martin. Two dead, one so
on to be dead. He didn’t feel angry at Martin Reese for digging out his memories, anymore, for laying the bones in the air for anyone to see. Because that shovel of his, with its probing, intelligent dives into the earth, had dug into Frank Connell as well, cutting through the aging, sagging flesh of the form that had grown around the Ragman, the polite small-business owner with a strange past that had been his self for years.
The Ragman needed his memories active, something he’d learned in this game with Martin. A game he’d lost the talent, but not the taste, for. Martin had filled a need he’d felt for years without even knowing it. He’d killed Frank Connell and resurrected the Ragman, and now the Ragman could kill Martin, as soon as he finished Frank off himself, with this box of soaked cloths.
The fuses were already set, trailing through the yard, leading into key rooms of each house. He started his rounds, laying down accelerant-drenched rags in the rooms where he’d slept, studied, hunted, stared.
I CAME HOME TO SUITCASES. Three of them, packed in Ellen’s efficient style, every gap filled by balled socks or stockings, every pant and shirt folded to emerge without a wrinkle when she reached her destination. I could hear her in the bedroom. I set down the satchel I’d been carrying with me since leaving ReeseTech. Shutting my eyes and leaning against the door behind me, I waited for Ellen to come downstairs.
What you can control is what you focus on. Everything in front and ahead of you. Rule all of that and you’ll be able to control how people react to you. That’s how it should work, anyway, how it had always worked for me in business, and before that. But there’s always information out there, people out there, that you can’t control. The trick is not to let those uncontrollables overwhelm you and distract you from doing exactly what you have to do. From looking straight ahead and taking care of the problem presented to you.
Find You in the Dark Page 29