The Thief of All Light

by Bernard Schaffer

  Several joggers were in the area. She’d seen them running along the track when she pulled in, heads lowered, sports headphones tucked into their ears, blocking out the rest of the world as their legs pumped.

  The man waved, realizing he’d scared her, then turned away. In the sunlight, she saw a deep bruise across the side of his face that he’d attempted to cover with makeup. He cupped his hands around his knees as he sat. Molly checked to see where Nubs was. She’d gone back to the sliding board again. He isn’t bad looking, Molly thought. He looks okay. Kind of boring. God knows I could do with boring for once.

  “Hi there,” she said, walking toward the benches.

  “Hello,” he said. “I’m sorry I startled you. I’m supposed to meet someone here, and I was looking to see if you were her.”

  “Nah,” she said. “I wasn’t startled.”

  “Oh, I’m glad.”

  He turned at the sound of a car coming into the lot, looking at it expectantly. It was just an older couple. They got out of the car and headed down the trail, his eyes following until they vanished from view. “Isn’t that beautiful to see?” he said.

  Molly prided herself at being able to read people. She took the time to read him then. His jeans were dark and stylish, and his suede boots were new and unscuffed. He wore a button-down shirt that had been pressed and creased along the sleeves. His hair was thin, despite his age, which she placed at early thirties. Just a few years older than she was. Gentle looking. Vulnerable. With large eyes and soft brown hair that made him look like a mouse. Molly found herself wondering where he’d gotten his bruise.

  “So, what’s her name?” Molly said.

  “Sorry?”

  “Her name. The one you’re waiting for.”

  “We haven’t actually met yet,” he said. “It’s an online dating thing. I guess that sounds pretty weird to someone like you.”

  “What does that mean?” She laughed, knowing what he meant.

  “You know. Someone so pretty. You must think people who have to meet online are freaks or something.”

  “I’ve dated guys online before. Plenty of times. But you have to be careful. A lot of people are just completely crazy.”

  “I bet,” he said. He looked back at the parking lot. “I guess she isn’t coming. I can’t blame her. It was a dumb idea to tell her to meet me at the park anyway.”

  “I don’t think so. I think it was kind of sweet.” She leaned forward to look at his bruise and said, “What happened? Were you in a car accident or something?”

  “A drunk driver hit me Saturday night. It looked a lot worse when I was in the hospital, believe me.”

  “I believe you,” Molly said. “That sounds awful. So did you really like this girl, or what?”

  “I honestly don’t even know what she looks like in person. It’s just so complicated nowadays with all this modern technology.”

  “I hear you,” Molly said. “It’s not like the old days when you grew up in a small town and married your best-looking cousin.”

  He laughed. “No, it certainly isn’t.”

  “I’m Molly,” she said, extending her hand. She pointed at the swing set and said, “That little monster is Nubs.”

  He took her hand and squeezed it lightly. His skin was soft and warm, and he leaned closer to her and said, “My name is Robert Rhoades.”

  9

  THE VIEIRA COUNTY CORONER’S OFFICE WAS CONVERTED FROM A 1940s schoolhouse. It was made from fine, redbrick walls that someone had covered over with snot-yellow polyurethane siding. The paneling was cracked and rotted around the front door, revealing hints of the true exterior beneath, and Carrie found herself wanting to stick her fingers into the crumbling slots and tear them away.

  Bill Waylon held the door open for her, and she thanked him and stepped into the front lobby, overwhelmed by the stench. The air was putrid, made worse by the scent of dozens of sickly sweet plug-in air fresheners. Powerful floor-unit fans were stationed in the hallway, the industrial strength ones used by fire departments to suck smoke out of homes, aimed at them both.

  “What the hell, Chief?” Carrie gagged, pressing the fabric of her shirt against her mouth.

  “It’s a morgue, kiddo. What did you expect?”

  “Nice combo of air freshener and rotting meat. It smells like somebody took a dump under a Christmas tree.”

  Waylon’s nose twitched with disgust, but he was too proud to show it. “You’ll get used to it.”

  The walls were painted faded lime, still decorated with large pushpin boards. Long ago, the boards had been filled with drawings by the kids in class. Sketches lovingly done in crayon for their teachers, rewarded with glittering stars and encouraging notes.

  The corridors were now representative of all life, Carrie thought. You keep walking down the same hallway long enough and all the things that remind you of your childhood and innocence empty out and fill with the stink of decay.

  She watched the chief turn into the next classroom, and she followed him in. Nothing was changed about the room from when it had been filled with third graders. A line of cubbyholes still waited for their books and lunchboxes. The walls were lined with cabinets, where the teacher had kept her supplies. The windows were hand-cranked. Even the chalkboard at the front of the class remained. The only difference was that the desks and chairs had been removed, and in their place were three metal gurneys.

  “Is this where they do the autopsies?” Carrie said, looking around.

  “No, they do them in the cafeteria. The old walk-in freezer is where they store the bodies.”

  “Trippy,” Carrie said. “That would probably explain most of the school lunches I ate as a kid. So where’s the coroner?”

  “He better be here. We had a meeting scheduled.”

  A voice from the back of the room called out, “Coroner’s not gonna make it. Something about an old lady doing the ol’ coronary face-plant into her beef stew at the old folks’ home.” Eddie Schikel leaned against the doorway, holding a thick file under his arm. “Apparently, it caused quite a scene. They thought all the other old fogies were gonna start dropping on the spot.”

  Carrie laughed, and Waylon shot a look at her, one of his eyebrows cocked. “My mom’s in one of those places,” he said.

  “Sorry, Chief,” she said.

  Waylon leaned back against the antiquated metal air-conditioning unit that ran the length of the room and folded his arms. “I’d have thought my homicide a little more important than a routine medical call. Why does everybody in this county have to be a clown?”

  “Come on, Bill,” Schikel said, making his way in. “This guy’s not even a doctor. He’s a funeral director who contributed enough money to the right people to get elected. Why do we need him here? He’d just get in the way.”

  Waylon moved toward the middle table as Schikel opened his file and flipped through the pages. “First things first. I called in a favor, and Philly’s crime lab did a quick check of our blood samples from inside the van.”

  “Tell me there’s good news.”

  “Well, if by good news you mean did we get a DNA profile for the suspect, the answer is categorically ‘no.’ We didn’t get shit.”

  Waylon muttered a curse and lowered his head.

  “How’s that possible?” Carrie said. “There was blood everywhere. Some of it had to be his. In the academy they told us that most people using a knife tend to cut themselves in the process.”

  “That is an excellent observation, young lady,” Schikel said. “Unfortunately, the suspect contaminated it.”

  “Contaminated it? With what?”

  “Bleach. He saturated the entire scene with enough bleach to ruin our chances of getting a decent profile on him.”

  “Goddamn it,” Waylon snapped.

  Carrie’s eyes lit up. “Wait. Can you tell what kind of bleach he’s using? What brand, I mean?”

  Schikel stared at her in mystification. “Sorry?”

  “Acme, Super Fr
esh, Giant . . . don’t they all have their own brands of bleach or something?” Carrie said. “Can’t crime labs identify exactly what brand of bleach he’s using? Then, maybe we can get the store to provide us with some kind of customer profile, right? All the stores track their customers’ purchases. That’s how all these big companies know exactly what coupons to send us. I think we might be onto something here. We narrow it down to one local store, run a behavioral profile on the customer list. Boom! One in custody. News at eleven!”

  “Do me a favor,” Waylon said. “Stop talking.”

  Schikel removed a plastic bag from the file and held it up, showing them several long strands of hair. “We found these stuck to the victim’s hands. He must have ripped them out of the doer’s wig at some point. You know what that means.”

  Waylon rolled his eyes. “It means some lucky S.O.B. gets to go hang out at Club Transmission and talk to everyone wearing a blond wig, which is most likely going to be a bunch of dudes. And given my options as far as reliable investigators, that lucky S.O.B. is me.”

  Schikel laughed and clapped him on the arm. “Look on the bright side, Chief. You might find out something new about yourself. Open up a whole world of possibilities.”

  “Go f—forget yourself, Eddie.”

  Carrie laughed aloud, and Schikel looked at them both in confusion. “What the hell does that mean?”

  * * *

  “This isn’t like TV, Carrie,” Waylon explained as they drove back to the station. “There’s no magical database in any supermarket that’s going to help us. I’ve seen thousands of surveillance photos from supermarkets over the years, and you know how many were ever solved off the picture? Zero. You know why? Because supermarkets don’t give a damn about customers ripping them off. They just jack up the price of milk and potatoes for the week and pass along the cost to you and me.”

  He turned to look at her, concerned he was hurting her feelings. Instead, Carrie was tapping her fingers rhythmically on the windowsill. “I got it, Chief. Makes sense now that you say it. It’s just TV these days, they make it all seem so simple.”

  “It messed us up when those shows started getting popular. Juries couldn’t understand why we all didn’t have laptops that scanned DNA databases and magically produced suspects’ driver’s licenses. The worst thing about those shows is they taught the average person about forensics. Now we’ve got maniacs spraying bleach all over the place to defeat us.”

  Carrie pursed her lips and said, “This is cool.”

  Waylon looked sideways at her. “ What exactly is so cool about it?”

  “The whole thing. Being part of it. Finally getting the chance to do something real. I mean, thank you so much for keeping me in the loop on this. I always wanted to work these kinds of cases. Give me all the crimes scenes and dead bodies you can handle. You want to hear something crazy? I don’t mind it. I want to be up to my knees in blood and guts, getting the evidence we need to put this bastard away forever. I hope he does it again tonight!”

  Waylon’s foot slammed on the brake, sending the car fishtailing to the right. The sound of screeching tires and smoked rubber filled the woods around them as the car bounced to a stop. The chief’s face puffed wide as he spat, “What in the fuck are you talking about?”

  Carrie had never heard him curse before. Not seriously curse. She pushed back in her seat, looking at his large, outstretched finger as he shouted, “You hope he does it again? You think this is some kind of game, young lady? I worked fifteen years in this shit, up to my ass in bugs and worms crawling out of the eye sockets of dead fucking children, okay? Fifteen years of my life that are the biggest nightmare you can imagine, and the reason I came up here was to get away from all that!”

  “I’m—I’m sorry, Chief. I didn’t mean anything by it. I was just talking.”

  He ran his hand through his hair, his bulk settling into the seat. “Listen, I get it. I was young once too. But when you get to be my age, you reach the point you just don’t want to see this kind of thing again. I’ve had enough of it for one lifetime.”

  “I understand,” she said. “So let me take care of all that. You tell me what to do and I’ll go do it. The interviews, the follow-ups, anything else. I’ll do a good job, I swear it.”

  “I know you will, kiddo,” he said. “But at the end of the day, it’s my responsibility, and I can’t just pass that off on you.” He concentrated on the road, then squinted and said, “But I will let you help. Maybe you can go talk to the ladies, or whatever they are, at that nightclub and find out who was wearing a blond wig.”

  Carrie pumped her fist and said, “Yes!” The chief’s stare made her clear her throat and add, “I mean, sounds like a plan. No problem.”

  Carrie folded her hands, trying to keep from showing how excited she was. It was a forty-five-minute ride back to the station. She was determined to do her best to stay quiet and enjoy the thick, green foliage stretching along the road. She felt her phone vibrate, and she slid it out of her pocket. A text message from Molly read Image: Received.

  She opened the message and waited for the picture to download, watching the bars on her antenna flicker as they wound through the hills of the county’s backwater. The image clarified, leaving Carrie’s face contorted in disgust. “What the hell is she doing now?”

  Molly was in a plain black dress and black heels that Carrie had never seen before, and both of her hands were raised defensively, as if she was backing away from the camera. She was posed with her right foot turned to show off the length of her leg and the shoe’s heel. Her hair was pulled back, so it looked like it had been cut short, and her face was twisted in mock terror. Even more strange, the picture was set on a wooden farming platform, with crisscross beams and open slats that revealed the bright blue sky and open green hills behind her. It was a place Carrie had never seen. Since when did Molly start doing macabre photo shoots at places they never went to? And who the hell had taken it anyway?

  She looked at Molly’s swollen cheeks and knew what happened after the picture was taken. Both she and Nubs must have burst out laughing. It was typical of her, coming up with some new and elaborate way of guilt-tripping her for not spending time with them.

  Carrie rolled her eyes and laughed. Molly was a crazy bitch, but she was Carrie’s crazy bitch, even if she did have a seriously deranged sense of humor. She picked up her phone and typed, Nice picture. You should use that for your online dating profile to warn people what kind of a nutjob you really are. The message swirled, not sending. She decided to try again later, when she had a better signal.

  10

  THE HOUSE WAS DARK, EXCEPT FOR LIGHTS FLICKERING IN ITS FRONT window. From her car, Carrie could see her father stretched out in his recliner, staring at the television. He had a couch but never used it, preferring the deep sink of his chair, lowered so far back he had to spread his hairy feet to see the TV screen.

  In one hand, the remote control, and in the other, his favorite companion—a tall, plastic green cup. Carrie knew what was in the cup. It was the same thing that had been in the cup since her mother left. That was a lie they both agreed to let be true. If it was ever brought up, Rosendo Santero claimed he never touched a drop until the day his wife abandoned him and their little girl, leaving him to face the pressures of raising a daughter all by himself. In reality, Carrie knew, he’d always been a drunk.

  In grade school she’d drawn a picture of her family. She drew a colorful sky and bright, smiling sun. In the picture, her mother was sitting in the car, waving to them, and Carrie was standing next to her father holding his hand. Her teacher picked up the picture and saw Rosendo’s other hand was holding a beer.

  Her mother did not leave for another two years, but somehow Carrie had known it was coming. The blond-haired, blue-eyed beauty named Beth Anne Richards was a free thing. Beth Anne had never even taken her husband’s name. She never wore a wedding ring. Or a bra, for that matter. She’d talked so often about touring with the Grateful Dead
before she met Rosendo, Carrie thought she’d been part of the band. When she left, Carrie made up her mind that her mother was simply back out on tour and would return once it was over.

  Rosendo was not a mean drunk. Never abusive. When he drank it was the only time he seemed happy. One night when she mentioned Beth Anne being on tour, her father sat next to her and put his arm around her, hugging her close. “My sweet little angel, your mama was never part of any band. She was what you call a groupie. A fan. She followed them around and lived in a tent, or slept in strange cars, waiting for them to play their music. I only tell you this because I don’t want you to think she is going to come home. She isn’t. From here on out, it is just you and me. The two amigos.” Rosendo had bent over and kissed her on top of the head, expecting her to cry. She didn’t.

  Carrie had absorbed the information like a heavyweight boxer takes an uppercut to the rib cage. It hurt like hell, but years of training taught you how to take the hit. You just brushed it off and kept going. After that night, Beth Anne never appeared in any of Carrie’s drawings again. Luckily, the year her mother moved out was the same year a foul-mouthed, short-haired blond girl wearing ripped jeans and Converse All-Stars moved into town. She and Molly became instant friends, and for all the trouble they got into together, it was Molly’s mother, Penny, who took her to get her hair done and instructed her father what kind of tampons to buy.

  Sometimes, Molly and Carrie would stay up late, plotting ways to get Rosendo and Penny together. Rosendo wasn’t a bad-looking man. The alcohol had given him a pronounced stomach, but he still had a strong, firm chin and smooth olive skin. Women always commented how much they loved his accent, still bearing the slightest touch of his Cuban youth. Penny had even seemed interested for a while, until it became clear that Rosendo had simply given up on that aspect of life. He’d cut it out of his being and thrown it away.

  Looking back, Carrie knew that Rosendo had not said his wife was never coming back for his daughter’s benefit. He was saying it to force himself to believe it, but they both knew he didn’t, and never would.