“You were in jail,” Ellen said. She’d appeared at the top of the staircase, wearing a green skirt and stockings, a black sweater, and with her hair piled up in an elegant arrangement that must have taken some time. Time she’d spent staring in the mirror and coming to various conclusions, making various decisions.
“No, but I was just at the police station. Talking to that same charming pig who came and visited you at the store. I can’t tell you how sorry I am about that,” I said.
“You’re sorry about that? About her visiting me? How about lying to me for twenty years, from the time we first met? Where the fuck is our daughter, Martin?”
“What could they have possibly told you that would make you believe I have anything to do with Kylie being gone? Can you hear yourself? Come down here so we can actually talk like people about this.”
“No!” Ellen screamed. “You stay the fuck away from me. She’d still be here. Kylie would still be here if you—you’re a fucking liar, Martin. You did this to us.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said, stabbed by the fact that it was true. Ellen didn’t have to be scared of me, but if she knew everything I’d been up to for years, and knew what I’d brought into our lives in the form of the Ragman, she would be scared, yes she would. And I hadn’t kept Kylie safe.
“Do you know what the first thing that flashed into my mind was when that detective woman told me what it is you’d done? Jason Shurn. You were a fucking peeping tom, Martin? A creep who followed girls around and stole from them?”
“No. And if she said that, Whittal’s a liar as well as the string-pulling psycho she’s already proven herself to be. Got that, Ellen? You’re going to let some woman you don’t know tell you what your husband is actually like? Or are you going to listen to him?”
“I know who my husband can pretend to be, but I don’t know what kind of thing you really are, Martin.” This winded me, and I think it showed on my face. Even if Ellen had been rehearsing the line in front of the mirror while she made up that elaborate Medusa bundle on top of her scalp, it cut. It worked. And I think whatever twinge she saw in my face satisfied something in her, some need to hurt me back. She kept going.
“I think you’ve been dealing me a PR package of an adequate husband for two decades, and if I’d been paying proper attention, if I was willing to admit what I was overlooking just so I wouldn’t have to derail my entire fucking life, I would have known what you were like a long time before anyone came along and told me.” Despite herself, Ellen had been moving down the stairs during this argument, pointing and approaching for emphasis, driving her words home with the increase in proximity. I was relieved. It meant that ultimately, she wasn’t scared of me, not really. Anger I knew what to do with. Fear, no.
“I didn’t PR being a dad, Ellen. You know Kylie. You know us. You know me. I love both of you more than anything and yes I do feel like this is my fault, her being gone. But do you believe even for a second that I haven’t been working, in my way, doing every fucking thing I can, to get her back?” I stared at Ellen, coming closer to her, not menacing, just bringing as much of myself as I could into my eyes and pressing it into her.
“I think you are trying,” Ellen conceded.
“And the record shit? I was ashamed, Ellen. Don’t you get that? I was beyond shy as a kid, way beyond shy, and I just didn’t know how to talk to anyone, guy or girl. I had no friends. My parents were interested in everything except me—they paid for my food and some clothes, but that was basically it. So I got a little obsessive and weird, but I never, ever crossed a line into violence. It wasn’t even sexual, it was just weird. I mean, you’ve been with me—we’ve been having sex for years. I’m not weird in bed, or out of bed. Why anything about me, no matter what’s said, should remind you of Jason fucking Shurn is absolutely beyond me.”
Ellen had approached a little more, and she kicked the suitcase lids shut as she walked right up to me and planted a finger on my chest. My impulse was to bat it away, but I tamped that feeling down and let her push. She’d made a lucky choice, forcing her nail into the place where the Ragman’s knife had cut me the most deeply. The duct tape pulled on the uncut skin while Ellen’s finger reopened the cut, and I felt blood start to well out again. Not enough to show through my sweater, as long as I could wrap this conversation up quickly enough.
“The way we met, Martin,” Ellen said. “You think I didn’t notice you following me around campus? Daring yourself to get as close as you could? I’d been on high alert every day since Tinsley vanished, and you spiked my radar. I even thought about going to campus security. Not just thought about it, I was going to, that day I decided to talk to you, instead.”
“And that was the right decision.”
“Shut up. I went to you instead because I figured that if I kept on going to other people, to other men who would barely believe me and stare at my chest while they pretended to listen to me or take a statement or whatever, that I’d keep on being as scared as I’d been since they took my sister away. So I went up to you. And when we started talking, I laughed at myself, and figured that hey, I’d been wrong. That the campus cops and my friends would have been right to laugh it off, that you were just a harmless, sweet, shy boy working up the courage to ask me out.
“So I need to apologize to my past self, because I was right about you. A peeping tom creep, probably panty thief. Lowest kind of sicko.”
“I didn’t do any of that, Ellen,” I said, stepping back from her finger and the flame of pain it was spreading through the Ragman’s cut. My spine bumped into the knob of the front door. “I broke in and took little things. Little things, pencil cases, barrettes, not underwear. It was dorky and misplaced-romantic.”
“It’s fucked-up, antisocial—”
“It’s twenty-five years ago.”
“How do I know? How do I know what else you’ve been poking into for these past years? And how do I know you weren’t just interested in me because of Tinsley, anyway? Because I reminded you of something you really wanted to do to a woman?”
“Is that what this is about?”
“Don’t belittle me. Don’t confuse what I’m saying to you with petty, stupid jealousy,” Ellen said, lowering the volume and upping the rage.
“People around you are messing with your head, Ellen. That doesn’t include me, unless I’ve been doing it accidentally. This cop. Gary, even.”
“Oh, so it’s Gary you’re going to pick on now,” Ellen said, sitting down on one of her closed suitcases. It was packed so tightly that its cloth lid barely dented under her weight.
“I made a mistake trusting him at ReeseTech. I’ve allowed you to make the same mistake, because I thought he’d grown up. I didn’t warn you about what I thought he was like. What I know he’s like. Gary’s been planning to con you into some sort of compromising position, insinuate himself between you and me, and then blackmail me that he’s not going to leave us alone until I pay him off to scram.”
“You think I’m that dumb?”
“I know you’re not. He thinks you’re that dumb. And don’t tell me you haven’t noticed him upping the attention and concern, that he’s especially ready to snap to attention when you have something bad or doubtful to say about me. He’s trying to get into your head. Just like that cop tried to get in your head, except he’s been taking his time. He’s fucking scum, Ellen.”
“I don’t know if I can trust your value judgments of other people, Martin.”
“I’ve been the same guy for you since we met, Ellen. Absent-minded, too focused on work sometimes, I get fat twice a year and then thin again, I don’t listen to you enough, I go camping instead of taking you to resorts, but we built this house together and we have a perfect daughter and I love you and I’m not a scumbag or a monster. I would do anything for you and for Kylie. And I tell you the truth. What I’m telling you now is that Kylie is alive and I’m going to do everything I can to get her back.” I took a breath and watched her think. Watched her
turn over the last few weeks with Gary, the conversation with Detective Sandra Whittal. The couple of decades we’d had. Kylie. Tinsley.
“I’m going to go to a hotel for a few days. I need full concentration on getting Kylie back and getting the right press and people on it. I don’t have time or emotional room to deal with this,” she said.
I knew I’d won something major. The three suitcases she had, whether she was going to end up taking them just to preserve appearances or not, were not what you took to a hotel for a few days. Those were moving-to-a-sublet suitcases, separating and divorce-prep suitcases. Hotel for a few days, we could come back from. It was perfect, actually, to allow me to do what I had to do before I could focus on getting Ellen back entirely.
“I’m going to respect that space. And I’m going to get Kylie back.”
“That would help,” Ellen said, almost smiling through the delirious, unreal strain of it all. Four pairs of Kylie’s sneakers were piled in a corner next to the door, and we both looked at them at the same time.
“Why is that police officer so convinced something’s wrong here, Mart?”
“She has a hard-on for me, Ellen. A nonsexual abuse-of-power cop hard-on, where she’s going to use any little fact or coincidence she can find to support her weird imagined scenario where I’m wrapped up in acts too disgusting for either of us to be thinking about. Okay? So just stick to not telling her shit, because there’s nothing to say. I used to have coffee and beer with a depressed cop out of pity. It was a mistake and I sure regret it now, but it had nothing to do with murder or stalking or anything like that, and I don’t want it to be the foundation of a charge that would land us both in the newspapers for months.” If Whittal had already thought to use the potential wreck of Ellen’s reputation against me, Ellen had already factored it into her thinking about this whole thing. Didn’t hurt to remind her.
“I told her you were with me all Friday night,” Ellen said, standing up and beginning to zip all the suitcases.
“I was, Ellen.”
“I know. That’s how I know you didn’t do this. That you didn’t take that girl Rochelle away from her life. Don’t you understand how awful that is, Mart? That the only way I can be absolutely, dead sure you had nothing to do with what happened to that girl is that I know you have an alibi?”
She stood the suitcases up while I thought about what to say, then told me she had to take a nap in the living room before she left. I stopped her for a moment, holding her face gently, but not risking an attempt at a kiss.
“I mean it, Ellen. I’m going to get Kylie back. You’ll see. You’ll know the kind of person I am, the way you’ve always known.”
She didn’t answer.
“WON’T BE THIS WARM OUTSIDE for quite a few months,” Chris said. “Enjoy it. October and it’s t-shirt weather,” he went on, taking off his blazer and unbuttoning his shirt to prove it. His shoulder holster and undershirt visible, he leaned back against the car and watched Sandra frantically dialing her phone. The flames from Frank Connell’s house—the houses on his property, if they were indeed all his—fought with the sunset for lighting rights of the darkening sky, orange and white taking on the familiar pinks and purples over North Seattle.
“Shut up, Chris,” Sandra said, giving up on dialing the lieutenant. The fire department was already here, in deep force, three trucks hosing the structures down, no firemen inside any of the buildings. A couple of squad cars had shown up and Sandra had immediately sent them knocking on doors, to ask if anyone had seen Frank Connell, occupant of this soon-to-be-carbonized evidence treasure trove. Half the houses on this street were sitting empty, and the drive up had been a study in bleakness.
They’d taken the ride to Frank Connell’s in silence, and by the time the sirens had started sounding behind them and the smoke became their beacon, they were deep in a neighborhood Sandra had barely ever been to. A few motels were clues to how close they really were to downtown, but they were the beaten-down highway ones that charge patrons by the month and occasionally book an unsuspecting family for a weekend, during which the kids learn all about bedbugs and the quotidian lives of prostitutes. A lit-up sign, the brightness of its surviving bulbs competing with the setting sun, indicated that a place called the Sunflower Motel was a left turn and a half-block away from Connell’s houses. The fire trucks had taken a different route, and the structures were being doused by the time Sandra and Chris showed up.
“Was I right or was I right?” Chris said, without any triumph in his voice. “We can effectively call this proof of suspicious behavior.”
Sandra turned to him, slowly, and he shut his mouth. He looked to be reaching for his gun, but he was starting to do up the buttons of his dress shirt. The flames created the illusion of heat, but it was still cool outside, and waiting to get colder when the sun disappeared. The flames were too hot, inferno hot, to risk setting foot into any of the buildings.
“Can I remind you there’s every chance that, if you’re right about this Connell guy, Kylie Reese is trapped in one of those flaming houses? Chris. Detective Gabriel. If you think this represents a victory over me, an investigative edge—it doesn’t. If you look at it as a failing that you didn’t share this information, this alternate path you’d taken on my fucking cue, as you’ll recall—then you’d be right. I was focusing on Martin Reese because he was our bird in hand. The Shurn angle turned out to be a good one, too, obviously.”
“Putting the link between that weird graveyard and Shurn was easy enough, with the bodies and the timing already there for me,” Chris said. “I called everyone who worked on him in juvie, finally got the shrink who did his interviews. Some prompting was all it took to make him remember that Shurn’s stepdad was obsessed with the place. Shrink, twitchy, lonely retired guy out in Spokane, now, he remembers those interviews well, thanks to the murders that came afterward. And yeah, you did do the groundwork on it, and got me gunning towards this guy, with the Tinsley Schultz link, with Waring’s files, all this digging,” Chris said.
“She’s not in there,” Sandra said. “I know Kylie’s not in there.”
“She can’t be,” Chris agreed. They didn’t look at each other. Two more patrol units had showed up, and Sandra gave them orders to drive the perimeter, to look out for a guy matching Frank Connell’s description. For the description itself, she turned to Chris.
“Connell’s a big guy,” he said. “We have no recent pictures, but he’s six three, used to have a bunch of jail-yard muscle, but that was decades ago. About fifty years old, probably scary looking, white. Look for that paired with weird behavior, but I’m seriously guessing he’s far away from here, boys.” Chris shrugged and the patrol units took off to their cars.
“When we’re investigating together, Chris, you talk to me. You’re working a different angle, you tell me, keep me up to date. This helps no one. Don’t try to teach me a lesson with dead bodies. Don’t fucking scold me.” Sandra didn’t let Chris off the staring hook while she told him off, even as he started looking down, preparing to apologize. “What’s the Shurn link?”
“There’s nothing in the Shurn file on him, but the prison shrink remembered them hanging out, a mention or two Shurn made of his ‘friend’ that didn’t make it onto tape. And Shurn, the one year he lived with his mother in early high school, it was in Eugene, Oregon. Same class as Sarah Weaver. My guess is that Shurn and Connell used to talk about girls in juvie, and they decided on going for Sarah together.”
“I’m impressed you sewed this all up.”
“I found Connell because I checked on any other juvie records Keith Waring requested. He asked for Connell’s a few months ago.”
“Goddammit.” Sandra spat the word out and pounded the hood of the car with her fist. It was definitely a mistake on her part not to have done that. A true fuckup. Here and only here, Chris was right. She’d been too focused on the link between Keith Waring and Martin Reese to ask the next few obvious questions.
“Jason S
hurn and Frank Connell. He drew both files at the same time, which is weird, because there’s a copy of Shurn’s juvie record in the main file. I guess he was too lazy to pick it out himself. There’s a note in the Connell file that he and Shurn were pally in the yard. Connell’s never been in trouble after the first conviction—he beat the shit out of his mother—and he runs a surveillance, spy store downtown. He’s been invisible to cops for decades. Keeping clean. But I think you’re right about the partner-killers thing, Sandra. This has to prove it,” Chris said, gesturing at the flames.
“Shurn and Frank Connell met in prison and worked together killing women after they got out,” Sandra said. “Shurn never ratted out his pal, so there’d always be a living piece of what they’d done together, outside the walls of the prison. And Connell was kept from killing because he had a dead record of what he and Shurn had done. The buried girls. The ones Martin Reese couldn’t help himself from digging up, with Keith Waring’s files and help.”
“If it was Reese.”
“Who the fuck else could it have been, Chris, with Kylie and a ReeseTech employee missing and this connect back to Keith Waring? Get in the car.”
“To go where?”
“Reese’s house.”
“Lieutenant told us to lay off him.”
“We’re not going there to arrest him. We’re going there to protect him from Frank Connell.”
WITH ELLEN SLEEPING ON THE couch, I Couldn’t do the work at my desk. So I took the bag down to the basement and set it on the never-used workshop surface down there, a picnic-table length of wood. Getting a tarp out, along with some gloves, I went upstairs for my scrapbook, along with a notebook I’d filled with the details of the procedure I was about to get into. Ellen was snoring lightly, which meant she’d probably had a couple glasses of wine today. She never snored during sober sleep.
In the basement, I put a skullcap on and a shower cap over it. I gloved up, even put on a makeshift paper mask. I set the scrapbook down on the clean surface, next to my satchel, and got to work. Getting this right, and doing it clean, meant everything, because I could be sure that the wrong eyes were on me, waiting for my mistake.
Find You in the Dark Page 30