A Map of the Dark

by Karen Ellis

  Keep your eyes open, Carrie instructs. Whatever you do, don’t fall back asleep. Without awareness there can be no action. Pay attention. Think. Study.

  The answer to your question, says Velma, is lysosome.

  The fourth organelle. Aha! Nucleus, mitochondrion, endoplasmic reticulum, lysosome, Golgi body.

  18

  A familiar face stares at Elsa from Lex’s monitor. Around them, the detectives’ unit sizzles with the heady waft of takeout bacon and coffee and commingled voices as the early shift gets its footing on the day. Raw sunlight arcs up the dirty windows, projecting silvery rectangles onto the scuffed walls. She moves her chair to the right, creating a shadow, blocking the glare on the screen, so she can see the face better.

  The face that belongs to a man named Sammy Nelson, whose DNA was found on the cardboard cup that Ishmael Locke tossed into the trash at Greenberg’s lumberyard.

  Without the aviator sunglasses, the face is easy to recognize. Sammy Nelson. She wonders how many aliases he has; usually, where there’s one, there are many.

  She leans close to the screen, examines the bend in his nose, the backward sweep of brown hair, and remembers him. The much-read book, lavender bows in his daughter’s hair.

  “He was helping at the Haverstocks’ house yesterday,” she tells Lex, her voice quavering. “I talked to him. His name tag said Teddy.”

  Panic branches across her skin.

  How did she fail to recognize him when they were face to face?

  But how could she have known it was him?

  “Teddy’s short for Edward.” Lex grinds his teeth, muscles lumping along his jaw. “Ishmael Edward Locke.”

  Sammy Nelson’s screen face is hard, the way he looks right into the camera, and suddenly she’s back to yesterday, standing at the volunteer table, the messy scratch of his handwriting when he wrote down her name and how he knew her title meant FBI. The close attention he seemed to pay to her and Mel as they walked across the lawn. The pleasure he must have taken in their encounter, knowing that in looking for Ruby, they were also looking for him. The clarity of hindsight; yesterday suddenly in focus.

  Elsa reaches under the desk for her striped bag; her hand searches the bottom, where all the small things fall and gather. And finds it. Round, smooth, a little prick where the pin nestles in its hook. She drops the bag back onto the floor, her stuff clunking around inside, and hopes the laptop didn’t suffer.

  She hands Lex the button. “He gave me this. He pinned it right onto my shirt without even asking. The guy was really weird.”

  He examines the button, front and back, running a finger around the smooth round edge of the laminated metal.

  “He said it was his daughter.”

  Lex exhales. “No shit.”

  “I thought he was one of those nuts who—”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean. I saw him too—one of those helpers who come equipped and never stop talking. Kept my distance.” He looks at Elsa. “But you didn’t.”

  “I should have.” Knowing, as she says it, that it’s just the opposite: she should have stayed longer, drawn him out more, grown suspicious, done something other than walk away.

  Lex closes his fingers around the button; the girl’s face vanishes under his fingers. “What else did he tell you?”

  “He has sisters.” She closes her eyes, thinks back. “He knew I was FBI. I could tell something was wrong, but I…” She reaches under a sleeve and digs in her fingernails, hard.

  A look so warm it could be misread as pity radiates from Lex’s face. He shifts toward her and says, softly, “Been there, Elsa. Done that. Everyone has. This one time, in Vice, I spent a whole night with a kid I thought was a runner for the local dealer before I realized he was the head of the operation. Well, not a kid—he was twenty-five.”

  “I could have had him,” Elsa says. “Right there. I should have known.”

  “You know why kids think Santa Claus is real, until they don’t? Because it’s what they want to think. It’s how our minds work.”

  “Not mine.”

  “Last time I checked, you were human too.”

  “Thanks, I guess.”

  “It’s just a fact. Elsa, no one’s as good at this job as you are. That’s your reputation and now I see why. It’s because you let it get to you. Because you’re willing to admit mistakes. Because you suffer.”

  “So now I’m a martyr too?” Using her grin to break through his compassion, to stop this misguided attempt at…what? Understanding her? Forgiving her? Giving her permission to forgive herself? He has no idea how deep her guilt goes, or exactly why.

  “I wouldn’t go that far.” He puts the button down on his desk, a clack of metal on wood.

  Gathering herself, pulling her hand out of her sleeve, scooting closer to Lex’s screen, she stares at the face. Teddy. Ishmael Locke. Sammy Nelson.

  “I wonder if she’s really his daughter,” Elsa says.

  “Good question.”

  “So, who is this guy?” she asks. “Who is he really?”

  “Nelson was a suspect in a missing-kid case seven years ago in Indiana. Sixteen-year-old girl. They couldn’t prove anything so they let him go. Look at this fucking guy’s rap sheet.” The monitor shows the long, detailed list of crimes Nelson has been accused of over the years.

  “He was at Queens Beans,” she tells him.

  “What?”

  “I was just with Charlie Hendryk. He went to see Ruby on Friday night, right before she disappeared. He’d been feeding her his Adderalls until she moved on, starting buying them from Paul. Charlie deals his meds, but also drugs. And he wants Ruby back, but she’s blocked his number, so he shows up at her work and tries to talk to her, and she scares him off with the fake gun. But before he leaves, he watches a white van drive up, park, a tall guy with brown hair get out.”

  “He saw this freak and he didn’t say anything?”

  “Nelson has Ruby’s credit card, Lex. He was with her.” She feels an acid burn in her chest. Forces in a deep breath, allows it out slowly, eyes landing on the button, that little smiling girl. She picks it up and returns it to her bag, not wanting to lose it.

  “What the fuck was he doing at the Haverstocks’ yesterday?” Lex asked.

  “They do that sometimes, turn up to witness the havoc they’ve caused. Gives them some kind of twisted, voyeuristic enjoyment. He might have even used her credit card for attention—to taunt us. They do that sometimes too.”

  The look on Lex’s face as he absorbs what she’s just said, the implication of them, that Sammy Nelson, aka Ishmael ‘Teddy’ Locke, is operating off a different set of instructions. That bending their minds around his intentions will be difficult, and it will hurt.

  “I can’t understand it.” Lex leans forward, presses his thumbs to his temples. “I talked to Charlie twice. He seemed credible. I didn’t get a single vibe that he was lying or holding anything back, and I’m usually good at reading signals—how did I miss this?”

  “Santa Claus,” she reminds him. “You’re human too.”

  “I never believed in Santa Claus, that’s the thing.”

  “Neither did I.” A tremor slips into her voice. “Lex, what if he’s still there? It’s unlikely. But.”

  He makes the call, phone pressed to his ear, asks the question, his eyes locked with hers as together they wait for an answer.

  “Thank you,” he says, and ends the call. He tells Elsa, “No one’s seen him at the Haverstocks’ since yesterday afternoon.”

  “Where did he go?” And then her thoughts veer upstate, to Locke’s cabin. Nelson’s cabin. Teddy’s breadbox full of snacks. A prickling along her skin. “Call Sang McCracken. Tell him everything we know and ask him to go back to the cabin. Then ask your sergeant to pull together a task force—we need help.”

  “Good idea.” Lex reaches for his phone.

  “I’m calling Greenberg—there’s something I’ve got to find out. Remember how that cabin floor creaked, esp
ecially in one spot?”

  She dials, and as she waits for Greenberg to pick up, the ringing phone is swallowed by the recollection of walking across Locke’s floor. Nelson’s floor. It’s all Elsa can hear now above the workaday din of Lex’s colleagues, the creak, creak, creak of those rough-hewn boards, echoes from a hollow space they’d been unable to find. While the phone rings in her ear, she notices a greasy film on the surface of her untouched coffee, a purple reflection from the overhead fluorescents that someone has turned on unnecessarily. The room fills with too much light, skewing everything.

  “Yello!” Greenberg answers.

  She explains what she wants, and he puts her on hold. Minutes later he returns to the line and rattles off items and their costs in a blur of Ishmael Locke’s prosaic home-improvement projects going back six years. One jumps out.

  “Stop,” Elsa tells him. “Repeat that last one.”

  “August seventh, 2009.” Greenberg’s tone deep and quick, eager to help. “Six planks of two-by-ten raw pine. Fuckin’ A, I remember that sale. Pardon my French.”

  “What do you remember?”

  “He brought in an old plank, actually pried up an existing one from his cabin floor. Had to have an exact match. I mean, two-by-ten pine is some of the cheapest wood you can buy—no one brings in a sample.”

  “You ask him why he did?”

  “I figured he was one of those prissy summer people, wanting every nail in their precious houses just so. Vintage. Know what I mean? A couple of local guys have made a killing selling yesterday’s junk to the second-home people.”

  “Did he strike you as someone with a second home?”

  “If you’d seen the people coming in here dressed like bums and driving away in Maseratis, you’d know why I don’t judge anymore.”

  But if he’d ever visited Nelson’s bare-bones cabin, he’d know what she knows: This is not a man who cares about his home, let alone home decor. If he wanted to match floorboards, it was for a very practical reason.

  “Do me a favor,” she tells him, “and send me a copy of that purchase record.”

  Next, she calls Detective McCracken, who answers with “Elsa. We’re here. What do you have?”

  “Take up the floor.”

  “All of it?”

  “All of it. And careful not to damage anything—we might need to trace wood lots.”

  “On it.”

  She ends the call, looks up, and discovers that Lex disappeared while she was speaking with Greenberg. On his desk, a note: Task force assembling in conference room 2.

  19

  The narrow room with two utility tables pushed together between half a dozen mismatched folding chairs is not the nicest task-force home Elsa has ever seen, but it’s a private space to work in and it’ll do. Along one wall, a large old-fashioned chalkboard is covered with a haze left behind by the erasure of someone else’s notes, the ghost of another case.

  A steel-haired man and a pregnant woman sit facing each other.

  Lex does the introductions. “Special Agent Elsa Myers, FBI Child Abduction Rapid Deployment division. Detective Owen Tate, State Bureau of Criminal Investigations. Detective Rosie Santiago, Queens Special Victims Bureau.”

  Tate half rises to offer his hand, and when Elsa shakes it, he looks right into her eyes. His are surrounded by thick folds of skin networked with deep lines. She knows from experience that the BCI has some good people on its team, and she hopes he’s one of them.

  Elsa says, “Thanks for being here, Detective Tate.”

  “Owen.” The raspy voice of a smoker.

  She walks around the table to greet Santiago, saying, “Don’t get up,” her pregnancy ballooning under a denim skirt and a tight-fitting floral T-shirt. A gold band pinches the detective’s swollen ring finger, and Elsa fleetingly wonders why she doesn’t just take it off for the duration. But people get attached to their things, tokens of deeper meaning, like Elsa with her Swiss Army knife. Without it close at hand, she panics. Just the passing thought of it now sends a call across her skin, an appetite for the touch of cold steel.

  Santiago pushes herself up to standing, maybe to prove that she can despite her girth. Elsa gets it, and they share a quick smile. “Lex filled us in. It’s a doozy.”

  “If you’re lucky”—Elsa shakes the detective’s hand—“maybe you’ll have the baby soon and get a pass out of this one.”

  “Not due for another coupla months. Anyway, this shit doesn’t get to me anymore. I mean, sometimes it does, but not really.”

  “Glad you could join us, Detective Santiago.”

  “Rosie.”

  “Elsa.” She drops her bag on the table and takes a seat. “So here’s where we are right now. I’ve got Detective McCracken upstate taking up Nelson’s floor, and Dr. Bailey, the BAU analyst, is on her way here to work with us on-site. Meanwhile, I’m hoping we can shed some light on this.” She fishes the girl-button out of her bag and slides it across the table like a hockey puck.

  Rosie stops the button with a slap of her hand. Looks at it. “Cute kid. Who is it?” She passes it to Owen Tate.

  Elsa says, “He said it’s his daughter, that he wants to keep her safe.”

  Rosie’s lips gather into something that isn’t a kiss.

  Lex adds, “We’re also waiting on Charlie Hendryk. We’re going to show him an array, but he’s underage, so we’ve got to call in one of his parents too.”

  “We shouldn’t waste any more time on that kid today,” Elsa says. Angry that his delay in speaking up lost them time on Ruby. If he’d told Lex about the van when he was first questioned three days ago, they might have found her already—they’d have known, at least, to look for the van.

  Lex argues, “I know, but we have to get it done,” and he’s right even though she hates it. A positive eyewitness account of Sammy Nelson showing up at Queens Beans moments before Ruby’s disappearance will give them greater resources to work with in the hours ahead. Later, in a court of law, it could be the detail that shifts a jury against him.

  They get to work on Nelson, who he is, where he’s been, what he’s done, charting what came before so they can map, with as much accuracy as possible, what might come next.

  Sometime during the blur of a quickly passing hour, Tara’s ringtone rattles for Elsa’s attention: a happy marimba beat that tends to lift her spirits. But not today. She ignores the call and then, as it slides to voice mail, thinks better of it. Maybe something is happening with their father. Turning away from the group, she holds the phone to her ear and listens.

  Tara’s message-voice is controlled at first and then spirals into agitation: “Sorry about before, on the phone. Dad’s hanging in there for now; he woke up and he actually ate something. And Mellie, well, I ignored your advice and called her in the middle of the night. She got on the first bus up so she’s here now—but I really screwed up and I have to talk to you. I lost control and I hit her and now I feel like shit. Call me.”

  The silence after the click is followed closely by a wave of dark blue misery, a powerful revulsion. Elsa stares at the wall, a fissure racing across her skin, blood memory, opening her. Tara has struck her child and she feels like shit? The hot sting of Tara’s hand on Mel crawls all over Elsa. She scratches, once, hard, sits on her hand, and faces the group.

  Dr. Joan Gottesman Bailey hurries in. “Got here as fast as I could from DC.”

  The behavioral psychologist appears to be about Elsa’s age, pretty, with a bodacious Afro. She wears brown slacks and a short-sleeved yellow blouse that shows off her sculpted arms, igniting a prick of jealousy that Elsa swallows. She hasn’t worn short sleeves in public since she was a kid.

  “Thanks for coming, Dr. Bailey,” Elsa says.

  “Joan, please.” She sits down, unbuckles her leather bag, pulls out a laptop. She unfolds a tiny pair of reading glasses and puts them on. “I worked on the flight so I’m ready to go. You guys want to kick off, set me up with some more context?”

  Lex s
tands, goes to the board, and takes up the first piece of white chalk he finds. He jots notes as he speaks.

  “Sammy Nelson, aka Ishmael ‘Teddy’ Locke, is thirty-six years old, born in Utah, youngest of four children. His three older sisters bullied him—so badly it shows up in school records all the way through middle school.”

  My sisters told me always to bring a book, you know, in case things got boring, Teddy had told Elsa, friendly under the tent. Boring. Not a chance, not if they were punching away at his existence. How did he hide from the assaults? She thinks of the book he had with him that day, The Invisible Man, how worn it was, and wonders now if it’s some kind of emblem for him. A way to talk back to his sisters, to decipher them and make a statement that they didn’t succeed in erasing him.

  She thinks of her own sister, the cruelties that lie between them, but also the love.

  “All of his sisters bullied him?” Joan asks. “That’s unusual.”

  Lex raises an eyebrow, nods. “Yup. When he was five, the family moved to Washington State. They belonged to the Christian Identity church—white supremacists, basically. Later, he dropped out. When he was twelve, his grandfather gave him a gun as a birthday present, and apparently he really took to hunting.”

  “Nice gift,” Elsa mumbles. She feels reassured by the weight of her Glock, a necessary evil, heavy on her ankle, but in fact she hates guns for what they can do and have done to the wrong people at the wrong times.

  “As soon as he could,” Lex says, “he joined the army, spent time at Fort Lewis, Fort Hood, and a few months stationed in Egypt. After the army he landed in Alaska, worked as a handyman, carpenter, contractor. As we know, he’s on record in Indiana as a suspect in the disappearance seven years ago of a sixteen-year-old girl, Gerri Wagoner, but nothing came of that. Eventually he found himself in Oregon, which is his current address. Visits the Northeast once or twice a year. When he’s here, he goes by Ishmael Locke—uses a New York State driver’s license and credit card under that alias.”