The Devil She Knows

by Bill Loehfelm

  “Can you guys do the math,” Waters said, “or should I spell it out for you?”

  Maureen felt a flush in her cheeks, a thin sweat emerging along her hairline as if she’d broken out in a fever. So what was happening to her wasn’t an aberration after all. It was, in fact, part of a pattern. A simple two-step sequence: use people up and then kill them. “So Dennis wasn’t Sebastian’s first victim.”

  Waters took a long time to deliver what Maureen thought was an obvious answer. “No. No he wasn’t.” There was a catch in his voice. He sat silent for a while, staring at the backs of his big hands. “Sebastian takes an interest in whoever looks useful to him. He probably never cared about Valario’s senate seat until he saw a chance to take it from him. He’s a predator. Like most predators, he prefers easier prey. Valario, his mistress, Dennis, all compromised or weakened in some way. Places like the Garter, even the Narrows, they’re target-rich. You guys know this. They’re filled with people who need things: money, protection, drugs. That need is like blood in the water.”

  “I see where you’re going with this,” John said. “But it’s weak. No matter what the rumors are about what happens at the Garter, you can’t hurt him with that place, even if you tie him to it. He was providing security, checking up on his men. A referral he got from Vic. That security business, it’s like a free fucking pass, an excuse to be anywhere, the worse the environment, the better. If anything, that place plays as inspiration for his decision to run for office.”

  “It’s perfect,” Maureen said, “is what it is.” She turned to Waters. “You stake the place out and grab him next time he shows up. No, no, even better. The night he shows up, you raid the place. Catch him with one of his ‘special interests’ and bust him with his pants around his ankles.”

  Waters shook his head. “He’s smarter than that. He does his dirty work somewhere else. I promise you he doesn’t even buy them drinks and hold their hand at the Garter.”

  “Somebody knows where he takes them,” Maureen said, pushing up from the table. “I guarantee it. We just have to find the right person to ask. Or we stake out the Garter and follow him.”

  Maureen knew it was bullshit as she said it. Sebastian would never be that sloppy. He didn’t leave witnesses. Except for her.

  Waters raised his hand. “Enough with the we talk. There is no we when it comes to this.” He checked his watch, his mouth in a tight frown. “However…” He let the space linger, raising Maureen’s hopes. “Maureen, I do need your help with something.” He opened his pad again, reached down with a groan, and picked up his pen off the floor. “Do you know anything about Tanya’s family? We need a positive ID so we can be sure. Right now, she’s just a Jane Doe.”

  “Leave Maureen out of this,” Molly said. “It’s not her job. It’s yours. It’s bad enough you use my house as an interrogation room.”

  “You know how to reach Vic?” Waters asked Maureen, ignoring Molly. “All Clarence had was a phone number, but there’s no answer. There’s no answer at the Narrows, either, the phone or the door.”

  “I got nothing,” Maureen said. This time she wasn’t playing dumb. “Vic lives on the North Shore, I think. But I couldn’t tell you what street or even what neighborhood.” She took a deep breath. “I’ll do it. I’ll do the ID.”

  Waters didn’t say no.

  “Oh, Maureen,” Molly said. “Maybe that’s a bad idea.”

  “No. I’ll do it.”

  She pictured Tanya, naked under a sheet, alone in the cold dark vault at the morgue. No matter what underhanded shit she had tried, Tanya didn’t deserve to be abandoned. Not like that. Not like trash washing up against the rocks. No one did. Tanya had been intimidated, taken advantage of. Had someone, anyone, Maureen included, really looked out for her, Tanya’s life might have been different. It might not be over. But no one had protected her. Everyone had assumed that because of her beauty Tanya belonged to someone somewhere. Nobody left diamonds and gold and hundred-dollar bills and beautiful women lying around unclaimed. Except that they did. And then Sebastian had come along and snatched her off the street like a stray.

  “Right now,” Maureen said. “Take me to her right now.”

  “Don’t do it, Nat,” John said. “Do the job yourself and find her family.”

  “We’ve been looking,” Waters said, “and we’ve gotten nowhere. If we’re going to use her—” He stopped, raising his hand. “If Tanya’s death, if it is her, is going to be part of a case against Sebastian, we need to keep moving. We only have so much time.” He rose to his feet. “I’m only going to ask you once more, Maureen. Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” Maureen said. “I’m positive. Take me to her right now.”

  “At least let John and me go with you,” Molly said.

  “No,” Maureen said. “You’ve got lives of your own. You’re already gonna be late for work.”

  “This is a bad idea,” John said.

  “It’s not,” Maureen said. She pointed at John. “You go back to bed. Molly, you go to work. I’ll be fine.” She tried to smile at Waters. “It’s not like I’ll be alone.”

  “You will be after,” John said.

  “I’ll look out for her,” Waters said.

  “John, she’s a grown woman,” Molly said. She let out a long breath. “Maureen can make her own decisions, whether we like them or not. Let it be.”

  John turned to Waters. “She comes right back here.”

  Maureen knocked on the table. “She’ll do whatever she thinks is best. Can we go, Detective? I’d like to get this done.”

  “Lock up behind us.” Waters gathered up his notebook and headed out of the room, down the hall, and into the front yard.

  “At least let me make you a bagel,” Molly said. “To take with you.”

  “Thanks, but no,” Maureen said. “I might be best on an empty stomach.”

  Pulling on her coat, Maureen felt John and Molly watching her. Out in the yard, Waters walked to the fence, hand on his gun inside his coat, and checked the block. He turned back to the house and waved her out. She didn’t move. He wasn’t like this, Maureen thought, when he had first come to her apartment. From inside his coat, Waters retrieved his cell phone. Calling the morgue. Telling them to prepare the body. Maureen chewed her bottom lip, steeling herself for what lay ahead at the morgue and beyond. Molly came up beside her, pressed spare house keys into her hand.

  “When you get back,” Molly said, “make yourself at home. Whatever you need. I’ll be home by four. John’ll be napping before work. Don’t worry about waking him up.”

  Maureen wrapped Molly in a hug. “Thanks so much. For everything.” Her knees went weak as Molly’s palm rubbed warm circles on her back.

  “No problem,” Molly said. “This will all be over soon.”

  The last thing Maureen wanted to do was leave that embrace and that house. But Waters waited outside. And Tanya waited, too, not at a friend’s house and not in someone’s arms but alone. Maureen slipped out of Molly’s embrace and headed out the door. Waters stood at the end of the walk, holding open the gate. Maureen couldn’t read his face.

  As Waters pulled the Crown Vic away from the curb, Maureen reached into her coat pocket for the ladybug night-light. She came up empty. She’d left it on the couch at Molly’s. Now she had nothing. She wanted Waters to take her back to Molly’s house but couldn’t bring herself to ask. He’d want to know why. I gotta stop running around with a detective, Maureen thought. He asks too many questions. She’d tell him nothing about her trip to the gym, she decided, not a word. The encounter had revealed nothing about Tanya, nothing that Waters would find useful, and he would stroke out in fury if he knew Maureen had put herself within arms’ reach of Sebastian, no matter who had been holding the knife.

  She made a fist in her pocket. Get a grip on yourself. That bug is a cheap piece of plastic. It’s nothing. You lived without it for years. She took out her cigarettes. She lit up without asking permission.

  “I�
�m not doing this for you,” Maureen said, the car settling to a stop at a red light. The traffic signal rocked side-to-side in the winter wind. “I’m doing it for Tanya.”

  Waters’s eyes flicked across the car and then settled back on the intersection. “I appreciate it all the same.”

  Maureen studied her face in the side-view mirror. She looked thinner in the cheeks, hollowed out. She looked like her mother. She took a long drag of her smoke. She couldn’t remember her childhood room without the rose-colored glow of that night-light. She’d never slept without it, even as a teenager, not until she’d moved out and left it behind, until she had started her life of not sleeping until sunrise. And now here I am, she thought, older, wiser, and more afraid of the dark than ever. Stop thinking about it. It’s a plastic bug. She was a big girl now, a grown woman.

  “It wasn’t fair,” Maureen said, “the way you ambushed me at Molly’s with all those questions. Like I was a criminal or something.”

  “You’ve held out on me before,” Waters said. “About Tanya, especially.” He glanced at her across the car. “You’re holding out on me now. About what, I don’t know, but you’re sitting on something.”

  Maureen felt Waters’s lie about the Black Garter land on the tip of her tongue. But considering the fact that she was indeed hiding something he’d want to know about, she decided to swallow her accusation and her hypocrisy. Disappointment bloomed in her chest, thick and heavy. She hated feeling that large and obvious lies had emerged between them like weeds creeping up through a crack in the sidewalk. She was at a loss for what to do, an increasingly familiar feeling these days. “I still say it wasn’t fair.”

  She watched Waters fight a grin. A silent chuckle rippled his belly. His lips twitched but didn’t curl. He couldn’t keep the light out of his eyes. “What could possibly be funny right now?” Maureen asked.

  “You’re young,” Waters said, “but you’re not naïve.” He raised his fist to his mouth to cover a yawn. “So stop acting like it.”

  He looked at her across the car. The humor in his eyes flared and then died, like a flawed match where the flame ignites but doesn’t take. Why did that seem to keep happening? Why did the life leave his eyes when he turned them on her? Like she was a reminder of something sad he was trying to forget. Maureen felt her throat go dry.

  “Don’t even pretend,” Waters said, “that fair has anything to do with our situation. What we’re going to see at the morgue isn’t fair, no matter who it is we pulled out of the water or how she got there. Just go ahead and cut fair out of your vocabulary.”

  Maureen said nothing, turning away from Waters. She dropped her smoke out the window and watched it bounce off the pavement, tumbling across the white lines rolling out behind her. She watched the dead vegetation lining the road rush by, its ugly dandruff of branch-caught trash exposed in the morning light. She thought of Sebastian. Inches. She’d been only inches from him. Close enough to smell his sweat. She thought again of her lost night-light. At least now she had good reason to fear the dark. Now her monsters were real.

  20

  Riding in the elevator down to the morgue, Maureen felt haunted by the Narrows, by the long nights she had spent there that she had wasted underground. And by how Tanya’s short life had led from one vault to another with scant daylight in between. Maureen pressed her back harder against the metal of the elevator wall. She crossed her arms, chewed a fingernail. Between Waters’s bulk and the orderly next to them, precious little room remained for her and even less air.

  The orderly, hook-nosed and pale, his long brown hair tied back in a ponytail, bobbed his head to a pulsing heavy metal song leaking from his iPod earbuds. At his waist, he carried a metal bin covered with a towel. The bin’s possible contents fascinated and repulsed Maureen. Something inside her desperately wanted to peek under the towel, but she was afraid to get too close. Asking would be too weird. The orderly held the bin as if it contained nothing more than cold lasagna.

  It’s funny, Maureen thought, the difference distance makes. A swirling, crashing orgy of sound played in the orderly’s head and he obviously dug it. To Maureen’s ears, though, his music was tinny static, an unpleasant distraction. He had to know where she was headed. Waters, as if his appearance didn’t scream cop loud enough, wore his gold detective’s shield on a chain around his neck. That meant Maureen was making an ID. So that someone, maybe this guy even, had a name to write on the toe tag. Had the orderly seen Tanya? How many beautiful girls had he seen on a slab? Did they stand out among the other dead? Did the living? The expression on the orderly’s face gave nothing away; he could’ve been waiting for a bus or on line at the bank. What kind of distance did this guy get from death? Or was it life to which he grew numb while working in a morgue? Was her life, Maureen wondered, or Tanya’s life, or the stories in the paper about the girl from Prince’s Bay, were they all just tinny static to him?

  The elevator settled to a stop with the ding of an invisible bell and the orderly looked over at her. He smiled, winked, raised the bin a few inches. “A foot,” he said.

  The doors opened and he walked out, turning right down the hall. The explosion started deep in her belly. Maureen covered her mouth with both hands. It was no use. Loud snorts of laughter burst through her fingers. She couldn’t stop them. Tears filled her eyes. She coughed. She worried for a fleeting moment that she might be sick. The orderly glanced back once at her over his shoulder. Maureen could’ve sworn she saw a smirk on his face. She couldn’t stop coughing, painful bursts from deep in her lungs. Her nose was running; she wiped it on her sleeve. Dennis had been taken to the morgue in bits and pieces. He’d probably been loaded out of the body bag and into cold metal bins like the one the orderly carried. Christ, what was wrong with her? She blinked away the water in her eyes, tried to bring her brain back to the task at hand. She felt a thousand pounds lighter than she had getting on the elevator, either from relief, she figured, or severe oxygen deprivation.

  Waters waited in the hall, his huge arm holding back the elevator doors. His face was the picture of patience. Was there anything, any reaction to death, or to the pressure of being alive and near it that he hadn’t seen a thousand times? She knew he’d never ask what she’d found so hilarious.

  “It’s not too late,” Waters said. “We can go back upstairs and I’ll take you right back to Molly’s.”

  “Sorry. I don’t know what happened.” Maureen peeled her back off the wall. “I’m good; just let’s not linger.”

  Waters led her down the long, narrow hall, his shoes clicking on the tile. The fluorescents reflecting off the institutional-green wall tiles cast everything—the floor, the air, her hands—in an olive glow. Maureen wiped at her eyes with the backs of her wrists, sniffling as she walked. The hall smelled like a restaurant walk-in: cool recycled air gone stale from never-changing temperature, a trace of bleach from a recent mopping. No windows, Maureen noticed. Of course, she thought, they were underground. No windows at the Narrows, either. Who wanted a view of the dirt and rock that buried them?

  They stopped at an unoccupied desk where Waters, after checking his watch, signed his name on a clipboard. He handed it to Maureen. She looked up and down the hall. Where was everybody? Well, the dead, at least their bodies, weren’t real needy, were they? The doctors down here didn’t worry about their patients sneaking out for beer and a cigarette. Nobody was gonna bail without paying the tab; paying it once and for all had put them here. She signed her name under Waters’s, leaving her one name removed and a few inky inches short of the Jane Doe scribbled in sloppy doctors’ scrawl.

  With a big hand Waters waved her across the hall, where he stood at a metal door with a small window of thick plastic. Follow Waters’s lead, she thought. Do everything he says and you’ll get through this.

  Maureen walked up to him, standing close, her eyes locked on his face. A sickly pallor had settled into his skin. Unshaven, his stubble was white. Waters looked like an ill old man who needed a s
hower, a salad, and a week’s worth of sleep. Is that what I look like? Maureen wondered. Like I’m sick? Like I’m wasting away? Like I belong down here in the dirt and the dark?

  “You’re doing great,” Waters said, putting his hands on her shoulders. “It’s already almost over. The hardest part is getting here. This’ll take less than ten minutes. We’re going into a viewing room. It’ll be the one body we’re here to look at, and she’ll be covered. Only the face will be showing.”

  Maureen nodded.

  “Okay then,” Waters said. “She wasn’t in the water that long, so she’ll look”—he paused, struggling for words—“mostly normal. You should know right away if you recognize her.”

  “So she drowned.”

  “It looks that way,” Waters said, “but she’ll go through the same procedure as Dennis and then we’ll know for sure—that she drowned, at least—if not how she got in the water. You ready?”

  “No.” How did someone get ready for this? “But I’ll do it anyway.”

  Waters rang a doorbell and an unseen attendant buzzed them through. They entered an anteroom. A couple of cheap plastic chairs and what looked like an old school desk, it even had names scratched in it, sat against the wall. On the desk a pitcher of water, a stack of paper cups, and a mostly empty box of tissues. Beside the opposite door in the far wall was a viewing window. Waters walked to the window. He turned back to Maureen. “We can do it from here, if that’s easier.”

  “I want to go in.” She did; she wanted to rush in and grab up that girl, whoever she was, and carry her out of this horrible place, out into the natural light and the real air. She wanted to hold her hand and brush her hair from her face, promise her she wasn’t alone.

  Waters rapped his thick knuckle on the glass and the door opened. The white-coated attendant stepped back to let them in and then stood, silent and motionless, beside the gurney holding the sheet-shrouded form. He watched Waters. Waters watched Maureen. Maureen stared back at him, blinking away the spots before her eyes. Unlike the anteroom or the hall, the viewing room glowed bright as a makeup mirror. Maureen narrowed one eye. She shook off a chill, shook it off harder when it regrouped at the base of her spine and sprang up her back again. Somewhere nearby, very close, maybe just the other side of the metal door across the room, lay many more of the dead. Through the soles of her boots, running up the bones of her legs, Maureen felt the vibrations of the massive cooling unit keeping all the corpses chilled.