by Karen Ellis
What does it mean?
She grabs the clip and, sitting back up, drops it into her bag as her gaze counts all the investigators in the room who failed to notice loose ammo lying around the unit. Eight, and not everyone appears busy.
The things we don’t see that we don’t want to see.
The things we do see that aren’t there.
The things we miss simply because we aren’t looking.
She stands and picks up the tray. If she takes too long getting it to the conference room, her colleagues will wonder where she is, and she isn’t keen on letting anyone know she mislaid her spare clip.
She crosses back through the room, afternoon sucking at the windows.
And it hits her: Memories. Nelson is collecting memories. Souvenirs, mementos, proof that he has allies in the world when it appears he’s utterly alone. Maybe the book reminds him of his sisters, who were cruel to him when he didn’t deserve it. Maybe the button reminds him of a child he abandoned for her own good. And the bloody tools—proof that he connected with other people? Is he building a story that works better for him than the one everyone else sees? Adding emotional inflections to inexplicable actions so he doesn’t have to identify himself as a monster?
She picks up her pace, eager to share her theory with the others.
The door to the detectives’ unit slaps shut behind her and she almost doesn’t hear her phone but catches it on the fourth ring before it goes to voice mail. An Albany area code—another presumption, but she’d bet anything it’s the lab.
“Myers here, what do you have for me?”
“You Myers?” An older man’s voice, a little too loud.
“I just said I am. Who is this?”
“Upstate Forensics. This is the lab calling to tell you we’ve got some information for you, if this is Agent Myers.”
Elsa stops walking and takes a breath. She makes it a policy not to show her impatience with older folks who are hard of hearing, and she won’t do it now. “Yes, this is Special Agent Elsa Myers. I’ve been waiting to hear from you about some blood samples—what do you have for me?”
“Blood and hair, both. You want me to read it to you, or should I e-mail it?”
“E-mail, please. Right away.”
Elsa bursts into the conference room. Conversation stops abruptly; eyes turn to her. She announces, “It’s in—the lab’s e-mailing me right now.”
She puts the tray on the table and hurries around to her laptop. E-mails stream in but not the one she wants. “Fuck. Where is it?”
“I can’t just sit here.” Joan pushes up from the table, goes around to the tray, and removes the various-size paper cups with methodical patience. Lex sits there, thinking or maybe not thinking at all, while Elsa stares blankly at her screen. Rosie bites the inside of her cheek. Owen leans back and yawns enormously, willing equanimity. Everyone finding his or her own way to wait without waiting for the information they’ve been waiting hours for.
Joan hands Lex a tall cardboard cup and sets down an identical one beside Elsa. Takes a tiny paper vessel of espresso and slides it across the table to Owen. Walks around the table to give Rosie her chamomile tea.
“Okay,” Elsa announces, seeing the e-mail, “here we go. I’m forwarding it to everyone so we can read it together.”
All at once they lean into their screens, tap open their mail, read through the report as quickly as they can take in the information. Elsa forces her mind to slow down so she won’t miss a single detail.
A variety of different hairs were combed out of the van.
And the blood of six people was found on the tools, three in each box.
Elsa tries to take that in, six people, but the words, the concept, the reality of it slips off her brain, just won’t go in. Six. Six.
“All right, here’s what we’ll do.” Elsa’s hands lift off her keyboard; she faces the group, somber eyes looking up from their screens. “We’ll run every sample through CODIS and NDIS. Then we’ll call NMPDD and see what they can give us by way of matches.”
If the hair from the van or blood from the tools sparks a match in the National Missing Person DNA Database, they’ll have something to work with. Until then, all they can do is ask Sammy Nelson about it—if and when they catch up with him. So far, like the Amber Alert for Ruby, the APB for Nelson has yielded nothing but hot air from enthusiastic callers—the kind of rubberneckers Elsa mistook Teddy for at the Haverstocks’ yesterday. The force of her voice pushes against a rising feeling: her failure to recognize him and now this curdling in her stomach and oozing into her heart, into her brain, where it stews with reminders of her innate ineptitude. How can someone so damaged expect to think clearly, ever?
Lex asks, “How long does that usually take?” pulling Elsa out of her inner detour, wanting facts.
“Five minutes to three weeks.” She clears her throat, rights her mind. “In my experience.”
“We don’t have three weeks.”
“Lex, no one whose blood is on those tools is still alive.”
“What if one of them is Ruby?”
“Every indication is that both toolboxes were buried a long time ago,” Rosie says. “According to the report, all the blood is old.”
“She’s right.” Elsa pops open her latte long enough for a puff of steam to escape, realizes she doesn’t want it, and recaps it for later.
The calls are made and then the minutes tick forward. A quarter hour. Twenty minutes. Twenty-five.
At last, a flash of red on the screen announces a message from the NMPDD.
Elsa clicks it open and announces, “We’ve got a hit on one of the samples: Tiffany Shamouz, Nevada, eighteen-year-old college student, went missing in April 2008. Never found.”
The air seems to drain from the room; in its place, a heavy silence.
Elsa recognizes the numb anguish of where this is going. Knows how much she doesn’t want to go there. Knows they have no choice.
Soon, her screen flashes red, red, red; more samples sparking results.
“Kelli Jefferson, sixteen, vanished in July 2012 in eastern Pennsylvania. Gerri Wagoner, sixteen, went missing in April 2008.”
Owen says, “That’s the Indiana case they almost had him on.”
“Yup.” Elsa’s voice catches when she reads the next one. “Maisie Campbell, seventeen, Oregon, also April 2008.”
“Fuck.” Rosie leans back and folds her hands protectively over the planet of her unborn child.
Elsa steels herself and reads the next two. “Angela Diaz, Pennsylvania, July 2012. Fannie Mann—”
Lex cuts her off. “Also taken from Pennsylvania? July 2012?”
“Maryland,” Elsa corrects him.
“Right next to Pennsylvania.”
“That’s correct.” Elsa checks the victims found in the nearby states against the samples found in both toolboxes. “The 2008 girls’ blood are on the set of tools from the older toolbox. The 2012 one, the newer box. None of them were ever seen again.”
“I have to pee.” Rosie’s voice small, vaporous, as she pushes herself up out of her chair, knocks the door open hard. Her quick footsteps resonate unsteadily down the hall.
Joan’s concerned gaze rests on the door until it clicks shut. She gets up. “Think I’ll go too.”
Watching the flight of women from the room, Elsa realizes that she also needs to relieve herself, but she can’t return to the bathroom, not yet. She hopes she buried the bloody paper towels deep enough in the trash can. At the sound of someone coming, she’d jammed the knife into her pants pocket, where it now presses against her leg, a tempting and chastening reminder.
“You okay, Elsa?” Lex’s voice brings her back to the moment.
“Hunky-dory. You?”
“Fan-tastic.” But he’s frowning, and she can hardly breathe.
Owen stands at the chalkboard with printouts of Sammy Nelson’s and Ishmael Locke’s credit card and cell phone records and cash withdrawals going back years. Elsa watche
s as he gathers facts in two columns, one for Nelson, another for Locke. Plucking details off the lists, he makes notations beneath their names. Under Nelson, calls and charges in Oregon, Nevada, and Indiana during the month of April 2008. For Locke, activity in Pennsylvania and Maryland in July 2012.
Rosie and Joan slip back into the room, a serene quiet between them. Elsa guesses that the good doctor administered some flash therapy in the ladies’. A glance at the soft slope of Joan’s face, her calm eyes, makes Elsa wish she’d joined them after all.
“So that’s it.” Owen stands back to look at the board. “Nelson’s movements connect to all six of the cold cases, 2008 acting as himself in the Midwest, in 2012 as Ishmael Locke in the Northeast. He’d drop into town. The girls would vanish. Within a week or so, he’d be gone. Interesting note: He has the same issue credit card from the same bank as Ruby’s, Chase, which probably accounts for his smooth move charging that lumber to her card. There are no credit or debit card records from 2012 or 2008 or before of his purchasing the first two toolboxes or any of the tools inside. Best guess, if he was smart about it, he bought them in cash, in different places, over time—with one exception. Five weeks ago he places an order from eBay for a twenty-inch flattop toolbox made by Homak, red. The particular model was discontinued a few years back for a defect in the way the shelf fit into the top. They reissued it as a new model, but apparently Nelson wanted the old one. Had to have it. Shipped to his address in Oregon.”
Rosie scoots heavily forward on her chair. “Anyone from the local PD out at his Oregon place yet?”
“Yup.” Lex. “They’ll ping us if they find anything, otherwise we’ll see a report later.”
“So,” Joan says, “he keeps the toolboxes as souvenirs and buries them so he can visit them whenever he wants. And it was important to him to build an identical murder kit for both clusters of killings. Why?”
“That last part’s an assumption,” Owen argues. “Yes, he built matching kits. But the cases are open; we don’t know what happened to those girls.”
“Shit, Owen.” As soon as she says it, Elsa regrets the edge in her tone, but only because it’s unproductive. To her, the idea that any of the six girls are still alive seems ludicrous. Nelson was a stranger; he didn’t know them and didn’t love them. Why would he have spared their lives? She places her elbows on the table, leans in. “The souvenirs—I think it might be more than keeping reminders of the crimes. It’s hard to describe, but I think he might be trying to define himself, to himself, as better than he really is. He doesn’t hold on to blood just as a memento of something he did. It shows him something about himself that he needs to remember—or believe.”
Joan nods. “And he wears that button of his kid.”
“Right. And the book,” Elsa adds, “The Invisible Man, it reminds him of something his sisters urged him to do to improve himself.”
“So what?” Owen’s tone a little sharp.
“Yeah,” she says, “you’re right, I get it. It doesn’t really matter—I mean, who gives a crap how this guy feels? But then again, maybe it does matter. Have any of you ever worked a repeater before?”
“Unfortunately, yes,” Joan answers. “In some ways they’re all the same, and in other ways each is unique. The key is to focus in on how.”
Rosie says, “Me, never.”
Elsa looks at Lex, who shakes his head, then at Owen, who answers, “Once. Guy hated immigrants. Killed four people over two days, but he was stupid and we caught him pretty fast.”
Those are the good cases, Elsa thinks, when the surprise of what’s happening merges with an adrenaline rush like no other, and you forge ahead with blinders on, eyes fixed on the empowering righteousness of your goal. And you save the kid, and you nail the fucker, fast. Those are the best ones, the best of the worst, because all of them are bad by nature. But in cases like this—the ones that limp forward, tripping over minutes and hours and days, allowing in variations of light that trick the eye elsewhere—doubt infects purpose and you can’t be sure that anything you think or say or do is leading you where you need to go.
“I’ve worked a few of these before,” Elsa says, “and they’re always ugly. Believe it or not, on some level you’ll get used to it, though it will never not hurt. You know that thick skin they probably told you about at cop school—”
Lex rips a page out of his notebook, balls it up, and aims it at the nearest trash can. Scores. “I’m up to this, Elsa. I don’t want you to think I’m not.”
“Yeah”—Rosie, vanquishing any trace of hesitation from her voice—“me too.”
Owen lowers his chin in a formal, stoic nod of agreement.
Elsa says, “I know you are.” But she knows they aren’t, because no one ever is. “And we’re going to find Ruby. We will. He takes them in clusters of three. If he’s following the same pattern now, he’ll want two more girls. We’ll start by looking at all the teenage girls who vanished on the East Coast during the past week.”
The immediate list is long, over a hundred girls reported missing since the previous Tuesday. The four investigators divvy up all the East Coast states, with Joan consulting as they pare down the lists.
The list shrinks and shrinks by the dozen until finally they pare it down to just under thirty girls spread across a triangle reaching from Ohio to Maine to Delaware. Girls who failed to come home after school, work, church, the park, a friend’s house. By eliminating every girl with a plausible reason for her no-show—an inappropriate boyfriend, history of drug use, mental illness, repeat disappearances ending in return—they cut the list to twenty.
Minutes tick through an hour, two.
The list shrinks to ten. Any one of these missing children could be somewhere with Ruby right now, but to join each of those investigations to theirs would be to squander their resources. They have to look harder, to be sure.
Elsa reaches for her cold coffee, foamed milk crusted on the top, and drinks. Everyone else has his or her head buried in a laptop or notes. She takes another long sip, feeling her own concentration evaporate like hot mist in cold air. Evaporate like girls everywhere. Like she did as a girl in her closet.
Exhaustion sinks through her, heavy as a stone. She finishes her coffee, but it doesn’t help.
Her thoughts drift to her father, the creeping shadow of his inevitable death. And then she thinks of her mother, how suddenly she was gone and how helpless Elsa felt after. Horrified, afraid, and now she’d never find out if Deb actually had loved her, if she’d just plain hated her, or something in between.
To this day, Elsa can still feel the smack of her mother’s hand all over her body, yet she can also feel the gentle caress of the same hand during the last minutes before sleep. She can smell the fresh tang of blood inside her closet, and she can smell the sweet cocoa brewed for a pair of frozen-fingered sisters on winter afternoons. She can hear her mother’s thundering approach, and she can hear the same woman’s soft footsteps recede after a tender good night.
How can you make sense of a person who confuses suffering and love, with such devastating results?
No one can.
And yet, somehow, Elsa does.
She sees it. Feels it. Remembers it.
Power is bartered for survival. Survival traded for love. And despite the costs, after each beating, the conversation between you goes forward as if you might still find your way to a truce. But regardless of what is said—before, during, or after—the real currency of the negotiation between violence and its cessation is dread, the knowledge that it will inevitably happen again. That’s the trap. You can’t talk your way out of it, or wish your way out of it, or forgive your way out of it, though you can try and try and try. And through it all, you crazily hope that there is still a sun up there capable of casting warmth, even on you, if you could just get to a clearing where it could find you. Which it never does. Or hasn’t yet. And you are always, always cold. And the scars don’t go away. And despite your best intentions, you will appa
rently never stop replicating the unfathomable punishments of your childhood.
Elsa knew without knowing as a child that her mother’s love for her fed on a cycle of violence and guilt. Her whole life, torn and bruised as she fled past the husks of memory, she pecked at any sweet kernel that tumbled out. (That is her corn maze. How did Lex read her so well?)
With each blow comes the abnegation of another chunk of your self.
Your weakness is her strength.
His strength.
His power.
A spark ignites and Elsa sees it: Sammy Nelson’s drive to vanquish girls in groups of three sets off fireworks in her mind, a flaring symmetry that reveals the contours of his childhood. Why, she wonders, didn’t he learn to resist it? To hurt himself instead of others?
23
The kitchen wallpaper is decorated with vertical rows of yellow teapots tilting right and left, alternating like leaves up a vine. Deb stands at the stove in her apron, stirring something in a big pot. Soup, or stew; she is an excellent cook. You sit at the table, doing homework, on the verge of solving a vexing math problem. Tara sits cross-legged under the table with her Barbies, which have decided to throw a party and use your feet as furniture.
“Get off.” You kick the dolls away.
Tara wails, “Mom. Elsa kicked me.”
“No, I kicked your stupid Barbie.”
“Mommy…” Tara whines.
“I’m trying to do homework,” you protest. “She should take her dolls somewhere else.”
Deb looks over her shoulder, annoyance glowering. “Can’t you just move your work over?”
“Why should I? I was here first.”
“Because you’re the oldest, and you’re supposed to be the mature one.”