“Call it in. Don’t let them tow it or touch anything unless I’m there,” Whittal said, eyeing me. “Now let’s get more units out and check out your little spot at Torland’s, Mr. Reese.”
“You’re going to take him?” Ellen said. “We just got our daughter back, and you’re taking him back out to god knows where.” She looked at me, half-fear and half-hardness, knowing that she had to let what I’d done, whatever it was, come to an end. Kylie knew, too.
“It’s okay, Dad, go.” I’d talked to her in the truck when we drove down, speeding through the dark streets, away from the carnage I’d left in the hills. “I never saw his face, Dad. I love that I never saw his face,” she’d said, and then somehow fell asleep. The way she was looking at me now, just before walking into tinsley with her mother, I wondered if Kylie had heard something when we were up on the hill. If she had figured too much of this out.
We left Kylie and Ellen behind and went up to the hill behind Torland’s, squad cars and forensics flanking us. It was the parade I’d wanted to lead twenty years ago, when I found Jenny Starks. And there was the scene, laid out as I’d told them, with Frank and Gary in the grave, a generous sloshing of bleach around. I’d filled in that part of the story on the way up, how Gary had been telling me they were going to make the site spick-and-span after I was dead and buried, how he’d taken the bleach out just before the big man had seized and pushed him, that I’d heard a scream from the guy before I got in the truck, which must have been Gary trying to fight him off by throwing the bleach at him. Whittal never believed me, but she started to look just suspicious, instead of absolutely sure.
SANDRA WHITTAL WALKED INTO TINSLEY a week after it reopened, in early December. She saw Martin Reese going into the back, but not because he’d noticed her. He was carrying a stack of gray coats and muttering something. His wife was at the till, ringing up a purchase for two college boys with extremely frustrating haircuts. They paid—Sandra heard the number and wondered who paid that credit card bill—and were gone by the time Sandra got to the counter. Ellen’s smile dented a bit at the right corner, but didn’t entirely vanish.
“Hello again,” Sandra said. “Business good?”
“It has been. Probably thanks to some of that other kind of press, but money’s money, Detective.”
“Not detective,” Sandra said. “Not for a little while, anyway. I got a pretty hard time for harassing your husband—and no, I know that wasn’t either of your doing—but it was more the way I snapped back that got me a temp suspension. I snapped back at that, too, so the force and I have both decided it’s best that I take some time off.”
“I am sorry to hear that,” Ellen said. “You’re clearly passionate about the work. And I know—I of all people know—that it’s easy to get fooled by people, to focus on the wrong thing.”
“What?”
“With Gary. Gary fooled me.”
“Oh,” Sandra said. “I’m sorry about your front door, too. I appreciate you not making a deal about that. I still wish you’d let me pay to replace the glass.” She was eyeing the door to the stockroom.
“Do you want to talk to Martin?” Ellen said.
“Was hoping. I want to apologize, you know.”
Reese was sitting on the pile of coats Sandra had seen him carrying, scrolling through his iPhone. He got up immediately when she entered.
“Sorry,” he said, like a kid who’d been caught slacking behind the counter at McDonald’s.
“I’m not your boss, she is,” Sandra said, pointing back at Ellen before gently shutting the door. “And I won’t tell.”
“What brings you here?”
“I was just telling your wife that I came here to apologize.”
“No need,” Reese said, pocketing the phone and waving an open hand.
“I was lying to her. I came to tell you to never do anything like this ever again.”
“Like what?”
“You know what I mean,” Sandra said. “You know.”
Reese stared at her for quite a few seconds. Looking for words that would do exactly what he needed them to do, without doing anything he didn’t want them to do. She’d seen dumber people do the same thing before, but she had a feeling Reese was going to succeed. He did.
“You don’t have to worry about me, Detective Whittal.”
Sandra left the stockroom, with the door open, and said goodbye to Ellen. Because the store was still empty, she added, sincerely, “I’m so sorry about your sister. I hope you get resolution on it one day. This is a beautiful thing you’ve done for her.” For good measure, and with a thrill of adrenaline that compared with entering a building with gun drawn, Whittal bought an incredibly expensive scarf. She wore it out of the place, and got into Chris Gabriel’s waiting car.
“What did you say?” Chris asked when she sat down. “And why did we come here, again?”
“Told her I left the force, told him to be a good boy. And I came up here because the last thing I picked up on my work voicemail was a four-minute weeping message from Bella Greene’s mother, thanking me for making things right for her daughter, for getting her killers what they deserved.”
“Did you pass the message on to Martin?” Chris asked.
“I didn’t. I had to take a look at him again, see how he’d come out of his game. If he looked any weaker, different. See if he thinks about those victims for even a minute a day.”
“You able to pick any of that up from looking at him?”
“I got nothing from him, just like before,” Sandra said. “Can we go to your place? Mine’s a mess.” Chris obediently did an illegal u-turn.
“You aren’t really, really leaving, are you?”
“I’ll stick to the temporary leave, probably. Gives us a chance to date without the department scolding, or you pathetically trying to one-up me in the field.”
“I’m sorry about that. I said I’m sorry.”
“I have to come back at some point, if they’ll let me. What the hell else am I going to do, hang out with your kid?” Sandra smiled at Chris, and he laughed, then stopped laughing.
“You want to meet Mike?”
“It’s not that I want to, it’s that it’s getting weird that I haven’t yet. And I know it will make you happy, which has the bonus of also shutting you up.”
Chris started making enthusiastic plans out loud as he drove, forgetting what they’d just been talking about. Forgetting that he was about to ask Sandra if she was going to quit watching Martin. Which was good, because Sandra didn’t want to lie. She wanted to find Rochelle Stokes’s body, to find out who exactly killed her. As long as that body was out there, hidden, she wouldn’t be sure if she was right or wrong about Martin Reese.
Sandra didn’t think she was wrong.
IT WAS THE SCRAPBOOK THAT clinched my story about Gary, once they opened it up.
Bob Suchana at ReeseTech told the cops that Gary was meticulous about his desk, particularly the row of old laptops he had arranged like books on a shelf above his workspace. Including the PowerBook they’d found in his car, the one I’d taken off the shelf when I went to ReeseTech after our talk at the motel.
“No one was allowed to touch them,” Bob had said, repeating the words in an interview with KOMO-TV. “He was more than protective of them. They were—like, forbidden territory. Maybe especially that one.”
The hardware and software transfer I’d done in my basement between my scrapbook and Gary’s old laptop had been difficult. Precision work. Altering dates on files, blanking out data. I’d anonymized all the information on my scrapbook from the beginning, so there was no chance of any file carrying my name. Swapping hardware into the shell of Gary’s laptop was where I was most careful, because our desks had been next to each other—hey, I even recall using Gary’s computer a few times in 2005, I could say, we all swapped or just used the nearest terminal in late-night programming sessions—but it had to be mostly his matter or none in that machine, especially with Whittal leaning on
forensics to tie it to me.
But they didn’t. All the photos of my digs, which I’d been careful to leave any of my limbs out of, and trace of my identity or possessions—they were in Gary’s computer. No one could pinpoint where he was on the days any of the calls had been made, thanks to ReeseTech’s slack record-keeping when it came to workplace attendance, and Gary’s genuinely depressing lack of a social life outside of casual sex dates.
So Gary was the “Finder,” which is apparently what a couple of the cops had been calling me. Forensics dug around a little more up there, too, and yes—they found Jenny Starks. The Ragman hadn’t moved her far at all, back when I came to look for her again and found her vanished. He’d just put her underground. I’m taking a partial credit for that find, even if Seattle PD publicly claims it.
I’ve always been comfortable not getting notice for my accomplishments, and I still am. I made the papers as the unlucky tech guy who’d ended the Ragman’s killing spree, saved his daughter, and been witness to the bizarre ending of the Finder’s bizarre career. If I’d been at all famous, instead of just middling rich, it might have been in the news for more than a couple of days. But the story vanished, quick.
After I was sure that Ellen believed me, that she was at least able to believe in order to keep her life, her past and present, the way it was, I swore to never mention any of this again. Whenever we talk about the store, about tinsley, I do think about our real Tinsley, her bones lying in a grave I can’t go looking for. And I think I can let them lie there.
Kylie and I don’t talk much about those few days. We got her a therapist, of course, one who even had her go out to the burned-out hulk of the Ragman’s properties, so she could see where she’d been kept, what she’d escaped. She digested the trauma, somehow, came through it with knowledge, a little more fear, and more courage. That’s a nice gloss; something has still been taken from Kylie that I can’t put back, that the doctor can’t help her with. And that’s my fault.
On her fifteenth birthday, after Ellen had gone to bed and I’d let Kylie have a glass of wine for a toast, she did ask me one question about it. I didn’t have to lie.
“Dad.”
“Yeah.”
“Did you do anything wrong? That night up there when you brought me back. Did you do anything wrong?”
“I did exactly what I had to do to bring you back, kid. How could it have been wrong?”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THANKS TO RUDRAPRIYA RATHORE, WHO made this book possible. Thanks also to my family: Kay, Sam, Mandy, Paul, Rouba, Seamus, Samson.
To my agents Samantha Haywood and Stephanie Sinclair, and everyone at Transatlantic. To Rakesh Satyal, Laurie Grassi, and everyone at Atria, Simon & Schuster Canada, and Text Publishing.
For reading drafts of this over the years: Andrew Sullivan, David Bertrand, Graeme Desrosiers, Kris Bertin, Julie Chapple. Thanks to Simon McNabb for telling me the idea was worth following through.
And: Emily Keeler, Sarah Weinman, Saelan Twerdy, Rob Inch, Bess Lovejoy, Kirby Kim, Craig Davidson, Andrew Pyper, Troy Fullerton, Sam Wiebe, Michael Haldane, Chris Ferguson, Marlaina Mah, Christian Cantamessa, Jeff Lee Petry, Buddy, Jack Illingworth, The Writer’s Trust and the Journey Prize team.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© IAN PATTERSON
NATHAN RIPLEY is the pseudonym of Journey Prize–winner Naben Ruthnum. Ruthnum lives in the Parkdale neighborhood of Toronto. Visit him at www.nathanripley.com and Twitter @NabenRuthnum.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cover Design by Elizabeth Whitehead
Author Photo by Ian Patterson
Cover Photograph © Stocksy / Alberto Bogo
Ripley, Nathan, author.
Find you in the dark / by Nathan Ripley.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
I. Title.
PS8635.I65F56 2018 C813'.6 C2017-904187-8
C2017-904188-6
ISBN 978-1-5011-7903-7
ISBN 978-1-5011-7907-5 (ebook)
Find You in the Dark Page 33