Personal Effects

by J. C. Hutchins

  Seconds later, there she was: Sophronia Poole. Age 47, lived on Central Park West. There was a photo of the woman here, probably culled from her DMV record. She was black and beautiful; her eyes twinkled behind tiny, trendy glasses. High cheekbones, full lips.

  My eyes ticked down the report. Poole had been a psychiatrist. As with the other deaths, the only M.O. commonality was Martin Grace himself: Suspect was a former patient of victim, the investigation paper said. Victim’s files reviewed. Victim believed suspect suffered from paranoid delusions; suspect felt “followed and hunted.” No clear motive from victim’s files.

  Sophronia Poole died on August 18th, two years ago. I asked Rachael to scroll down the screen.

  “Oh my,” I whispered. “Oh my God.”

  On August 19th, Sophronia’s downstairs neighbor had called 911. Jacob Kellerman hadn’t heard anything unusual the day before. He’d called because blood had seeped through the upstairs floor and left Rorschach stains on his ceiling.

  Sophronia Poole was found on the living room floor of her condo, gagged. Her heart had been removed.

  I closed my eyes. My father knew her, wanted to avenge her. “It’s no wonder,” I whispered. “No wonder.”

  Lucas bounded into the living room, armed with a flathead screwdriver. One of our cats, Bliss, pranced behind him. Lucas proudly pointed to his leg. Dangling from the carpenter’s loop on his jeans was our five-dollar claw hammer.

  “I missed my calling,” he said, jabbing the tip of the screwdriver at the hinged lock on the box. He tugged the hammer from its loop. “Part-time carpenter, part-time locksmith.”

  THWACK!

  The lockbox’s lid shot up like a jack-in-the-box, making a tinny exclamation as its top smacked against the trunk. Pop went the weasel—and pop went Bliss, a foot into the air. She was gone in a furry blur.

  The three of us leaned forward simultaneously; I’m certain we were all aware of this, how silly it must’ve appeared … how very theatrical, how very Pandora ... but we were drawn to the mystery inside.

  Resting atop a stack of documents was a creased envelope. It was sealed.

  I scooped up the screwdriver and used it as a makeshift letter opener, tearing the paper.

  My fingers found a small stack of photos inside.

  I pulled them free.

  We gasped at the monster staring back at us.

  It had been a person once, a woman captured on faded Kodak photo paper. She was young, about my age. A desert sunset glowed from somewhere behind the photographer, soaking the woman in hues of amber and tangerine. Her blonde, feathered hair and bell-bottoms told me this was the 1970s.

  But she wasn’t a person anymore. She was a ghoul. A furious tangle of black lines covered her eyes and mouth, unholy and in-human—worse than a scream, worse than wide-eyed terror. She was howling.

  The ballpoint pen ink was scratched deep into the photo, torn well past its emulsion. I flipped to the next photo. Two more ghouls—once children, now small, feral things with swirling holes for eyes—glared back from a wooden seesaw. Along the edge of the photo was written, At the tot lot, 1982. Jenny, 5. Danny, 7.

  “What in the hell is this?” Rachael said.

  “His past,” I said, shuddering. “Back to haunt us.”

  “Bad juju,” Lucas whispered. His face was pale. “Uckin’-fay ooky-spay.”

  I reached back inside the lockbox and removed several yellowed documents and an envelope. At the bottom of the box were a pair of military dog tags and a bronze disc, slightly larger than a fifty-cent piece. Rachael held this to the light. In its center was a starburst; above that, an eagle’s head.

  “‘Central Intelligence Agency,’” she read. “‘For Valor.’”

  I looked at Lucas. “Not ooky-spay. Ook-spay. Jesus, who is this guy?”

  My eye returned to the photos in my hand. I flipped through the rest. They were all defaced. Entire heads were covered in black permanent marker in some; others simply had slivers of black tape covering the subjects’ eyes. A much younger Martin Grace was in one of these photos. He stood before the Grand Canyon with the ghoul-woman and the tot lot ghoul-children. I couldn’t tell if they’d been smiling when the picture was taken. They were wailing now.

  “‘Dear Rick,’” Rachael recited, holding a creased sheet of paper in her hand. “‘It’s been two weeks since you called. Danny, Jenny and I pray you that you’re safe, sleeping soundly at night, dreaming of us.’” Rachael’s eyes flitted to the end. “‘Keep fighting the good fight. We love you.’ It’s signed ‘Lucy,’ dated March 10th, ten years ago.”

  “Here’s something from the CIA,” Lucas said, tapping a sheet. “It’s for that medal. For, uh, ‘acts of extraordinary heroism involving the acceptance of existing dangers with conspicuous fortitude and exemplary courage.’”

  “Name,” I said.

  “Distinguished Intelligence Cross,” he said.

  “Not the medal, doofus. His name. There’s gotta be a name.”

  “Oh. Richard Drake.”

  Richard Drake.

  “Hot damn,” I said.

  My mind did the math, concocted a question. Was Martin Grace really a man named Richard Drake? I thought back to my research session with Rachael after Gram’s memorial service, and what she’d said then: Martin Grace is incorporeal, Z. He’s a hoax. I flipped the Grand Canyon photo and read the names on its back. Lucy, Daniel, Jenny … and Rick. Yes.

  “So we’ve got a name, and we’ve got a family,” I said. I picked up the medal. “And we’ve got a job, I think. Don’t know what he did, exactly, but we know he was good enough to get this thing.”

  Eager now, Lucas and I examined the other documents. There was a letter from the CIA, also dated ten years ago. LETTER TO: Richard K. Drake, it read. SUBJECT: Discharge from the Agency. I read the two-paragraph note. According to this, the CIA would formally process Drake’s discharge upon his “return to the United States,” and per procedure for “compromised agents of your expertise,” appropriate steps would be taken to ensure a “safe, expedient transition” into civilian life. The letter promised the same assistance for Drake’s family. It was CC’d to a woman named Amelia Ramoo, Director of Operations.

  “This shit’s right out of a Le Carré novel,” I said. “Instant, government-approved history. They gave Grace—er, Drake—a fresh slate ten years ago.”

  “The same year the murders began,” Rachael said.

  Lucas gave a low whistle. Another sheet was in his hand now.

  “Your bad boy just got worse,” he said. “Skipping the commercials, getting to the good stuff. Letterhead: ‘Smith, Whitmore & Gifford: Albany, New York.’ Says here, ‘ …if they could find a body, they would extradite and press charges.’ Ten years ago.”

  He tapped the paper. “Oh, and the ‘they’ are the Russian authorities.”

  Now Rachael gave me a nudge. The dog tags swung from her fingers, clinking on their chain. “This isn’t English, Z. Cyrillic, I think.”

  I gazed at them. Russian authorities, Russian dog tags.

  “Don’t you have a Russian buddy at the paper?” I asked her. “Tech reporter. Nicky-something?”

  “Nicolina,” she said, frowning. “She’s Bulgarian, but she’s old enough to speak the language.”

  I nodded. “That’s fine. Keep holding them, just like that.” I fished my cell phone out of my pocket and navigated to the camera. I snapped a closeup of the dog tags and asked Rachael for Nicolina’s cell phone number. I attached the photo to a text message asking for help, and sent it.

  “We’ll get the name of our unknown soldier soon enough,” I said. “Could be that body Lucas just read about.”

  Rachael shook her head. “This doesn’t make sense. You’re the CIA. You’ve got a badass spy guy who’s clocked in enough time to get a new identity … but then he starts killing people when he goes back to civilian life. Would you allow that? I mean, if these guys are like they are in the movies—”

  “—then
you whack the loose cannon,” Lucas said. “Totally. Convention of the ‘rogue agent’ genre.” He tore open another sealed envelope at the bottom of the stack.

  “Maybe it’s not like the movies,” Rachael said.

  I nodded. “Or maybe they knew he wasn’t the killer.”

  “Huh,” Lucas said. He passed me one of three forms from the envelope. This was paper-clipped to a second sheet of paper. “Birth certificate,” he said.

  “And death certificate,” I replied, gazing at the second page. “Oh man, this is weird. The birth certificate is for a ‘Lucinda,’ but death certificate says, ‘Veronica Grace.’”

  Rachael peered over my shoulder. “The whole family got instant histories. The pink slip said so.”

  She began to type on her laptop. “Screw this. I’m Googling this guy.”

  I nodded. “Name change, right. Wife was in a car accident, on … shit. Lucas, what’s that discharge letter say? What date?”

  “October 7,” he replied.

  “About a month after Drake came back to the States,” Rachael affirmed. The computer screen glimmered in her spectacles. “Poor bastard. At least he was there to take care of the kids.”

  “Kid, singular,” Lucas said, reviewing another sheet. “The ‘daughter-formerly-known-as Jennifer Drake’ died in that accident, too. ‘Crushed cranial …’ ah, gross-o. Wormy-squirmy. I does not want.”

  He tossed the papers onto the trunk, his expression sour.

  “Drake killed ’em. Must’ve,” he said. He pointed to the photo booklet. “That’s why he scratched out their faces. It’s a hit list.”

  I leaned back into the couch. “No. When Grace—shit, when Drake—could still see, he believed that if he looked at you, you’d be marked for death. He was protecting them.”

  Lucas shook his shaggy head. “Then why scratch out their faces at all, if they were already dead?” he asked.

  Protection in the afterlife? I wondered, but didn’t say it.

  Rachael glanced up. “Okay. Zero hits for ‘Richard K. Drake’ and ‘Central Intelligence Agency,’” she said. “Same goes for Times and newswire archives. Your patient’s true identity has been scrubbed … at least in the databases I have access to.”

  I nodded. “But we’ve got a hint at what he did back then. Probably stationed in Russia—”

  “Soviet Union,” Rachael corrected.

  “—okay, the Soviet Union, and he probably killed someone,” I said.”We’ve got a medal. We’ve got a wife and kids, but they’re all dead. What else …”

  “The boy’s not dead, bro,” Lucas said. He stood up and paced, restless. “Well, he’s not a boy anymore, but he’s still alive. Birth cert was in the envelope, but nothing about his death.”

  I leaned forward, groaned again, examined the document.

  “Daniel Drake,” I said. “Aw hell, but his name’s changed now. Rache, is there … ?”

  “I’m on it,” she said. “Pass that over here. I’ll need his DOB, middle name, social.”

  I leaned over, kissed her neck, told her to work her sorcery.

  Daniel Drake. The key to a lock. The only living connection to a blind man’s past.

  As Rachael pried her way into Daniel Drake’s life, Lucas and I sipped Dogfish Head beers and viewed the footage he’d recorded at the blind man’s apartment that afternoon.

  I was amazed by the images on the screen. Even there, in the darkness of Grace/Drake’s spartan living room, Lucas had artfully composed each shot: rule of thirds, depth of field (as much as the Handycam could accommodate, anyway), the proper balance inside the frame that coaxed the eye, unconsciously, to focus on specific objects. Without words, he’d masterfully told a story, and evoked a mood so spooky, I felt myself transported back there, breathing the place’s stale air, praying for light.

  The kid had it. He really did. But he’d make a lousy documentary filmmaker. The things I’d wanted him to record—the names of the CDs on the bookshelves—had been all but obfuscated in the name of artful angles and evocative cinema.

  Lucas didn’t seem to notice this as he watched. I didn’t have the heart to mention it.

  The movie concluded, we learned what Rachael had found so far. Remarkably, public records indicated my patient’s son had changed his name back to Daniel Drake less than a year after his father had returned to the United States.

  Rachael had scored Daniel Drake’s address and a New York driver’s license number minutes after she’d queried his name in her online resources … but she had pressed on, conducting an impromptu background check, cross-reffing with criminal records.

  As she did this, the cell phone in my pocket vibrated and played skeleton song. Text message. I flipped the phone open and read the message from Nicolina, Rachael’s friend.

  DOG TAG NAME READS, “PIOTYR I. ALEXANDROV,” Nicolina’s message said. RANK: LT. COLONEL. HOPE THIS HELPS, SEND <3 TO RACHE.

  I scribbled the name “Alexandrov” in the open notepad on our steamer trunk, and shared the news.

  “We’ll follow up on that later, babe,” Rachael said, peering over the screen of her laptop. “I’m busy … and so are you. Get crackin’ on Drake’s other stuff.”

  Right. Papa Drake’s effects from The Brink. Lucas and I exchanged a quick grin—we motherless Taylor boys knew who ran this operation—and began to examine them.

  People my father’s age think that I’m a tech-head because I can work a computer and cell phone and appear to know what I’m doing. It’s bogus. I’m an analog man. I appreciate the tangibility of doing things without a mouse: the dusky smell of pencil shavings, the splash of paint on a canvas. I dig phone calls more than Facebook messages, prefer week-old postcards to eye-blink emails.

  So I gravitated to the wallet while my brother gleefully poked through the menus on Drake’s cell phone. It was an expensive thing, brimming with programs for the visually impaired. In addition to the standard calendar and address book, it featured a GPS receiver and map software, both of which were voice-enabled and did text-to-speech.

  “Cracked case, off-brand,” Lucas observed as he eyed the phone. “The guy’s got some archived voice mail, but we need a password to get to it.”

  He sat in the corner comfy chair, his face glowing ghost-white from the phone’s large LCD. The screen sputtered, and my brother frowned. “Bad battery?” he said, looking at me. He knocked it against the armrest and the screen flicked on again, feebly.

  “Jeez, careful with that,” I said. “It’s been banged around enough already today, riding shotgun during your fire-escape stunt work. You’re the one who probably busted it.”

  “I accept no responsibility,” Lucas sniffed, tapping the screen. It glowed bright again, like before. “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”

  “Just tell us what’s inside before the thing croaks.”

  He nodded and began tapping the phone’s buttons again. “Lots of numbers in the addy book—whoa—including Dad’s friend, Sophronia Poole. And hey! Tetris!”

  Tinny eight-bit music streamed from the phone’s speaker now, a goofy beep-boop-bleep version of the game’s anthem, “Korobeiniki.” I snickered. An old Russian folk song about peddlers, now forever associated with falling bricks.

  “Love that game,” Rachael murmured from beside me. She hummed along as she dug into New York State’s criminal database.

  Music.

  I sucked in a quick breath. The tune was reminding me of something. Something familiar, important. What was it? A ubiquitous song, yes. Something you’ve heard before, but couldn’t quite—

  “Lucas, I need that film geek brain of yours,” I said. I pointed to our entertainment system. “Grab that stereo cable over there, the one we use for the iPod.”

  I glanced at Rachael’s laptop. “That thing takes memory cards, right?”

  Click. Double-click. “Mmm-hmm.”

  I rummaged in my satchel, finding the memory card I’d used to record Drake’s Casio jam session. I pressed i
t into the appropriate slot of the computer. Rachael gave me a cool look over her specs: Watch it, bud. I’m driving here.

  Lucas triumphantly slapped the cable into her palm. Bliss, who’d taken residence on the couch arm near Rachael, batted at it. Well ahead of me, Rachael plugged the cord into the PC’s “line out” port. She opened the card’s audio file and launched a program to play it.

  “Name this tune, Lucas,” I announced. “I know it sounds familiar, from a movie, but I don’t—”

  The disorganized notes I’d played to bait Grace yesterday thundered from the speakers. We winced. Dali and Bliss hit warp speed, scrambling from the room.

  “Uh, ‘The Kittyfright Concerto,’” Lucas said.

  I gave him the middle finger. He stuck out his tongue, then turned down the volume.

  And now, Drake’s song was playing, that whirlwind stream of high notes … followed by booming low ones. Lucas’ head began to bob along. He snapped his fingers. The bob became an enthusiastic nod. Rachael hit the “stop” button on her program.

  “Natural twenty, baby,” he said. “It’s from Fantasia, the Disney film. We watched it for my History of Animation class last month.”

  “That movie’s effed up,” Rachael said. “If there were ever a movie to see stoned …”

  “That and The Wall, yep,” Lucas agreed. “Anyways, the song’s called ‘Night on Bald Mountain.’ Chart-topping classic, nineteenth century. There’s a monster in it, he drags souls to Hell. Heh! And guess where the composer’s from?”

  “The Soviet Union,” I said.

  “Russia,” Lucas and Rachael corrected. I sighed.

  “So what does that mean?” I asked. “The song. You’ve got a Russian connection, and the Dark Man, maybe? Dragging people to Hell? Babe, can you … ?”

  “Uh-uh. Baby steps, snookums. Working on Daniel Drake here.”

  Right. I gazed down at Drake’s personal effects scattered on the steamer trunk. We’d examined everything: the letters, the photos, the dog tags. They told a story that ended a decade ago. I wanted something more current, to fill in the gaps. The cell phone was a good lead, but …