The Thief of All Light

by Bernard Schaffer

  “Yes, sir,” Carrie said, not moving.

  “Good,” Rein said, disengaging from her. “Now get back in the car and go home. Turn your case over to somebody who knows what they’re doing before you make a mess of it.”

  Carrie was too angry to speak as he walked away, but she closed her eyes and thought of Nubs and Molly, forcing herself to swallow her pride. “Wait,” she called out. “Listen, you’re right. I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing. I’ve never done anything like this before, and to be totally honest with you, there isn’t anybody else I can turn it over to.”

  Rein did not stop walking. “That’s not my problem.”

  “I get it. But the little girl and her mother who are missing? They’re like family to me. I just need you to tell me if they’re in trouble or not. Please. I’m not going to ask you for anything else. If it was just my friend that would be one thing, but her daughter is the sweetest, most perfect little kid you could ever meet.”

  Rein stopped, his back still turned to her. “How old?”

  “Six. Her name’s Natalie. We call her Nubs. Molly took her to the playground yesterday, and they haven’t been heard from since. The thing is, she sent me this weird photo later on, and Bill said it looked familiar but he can’t place it. Can you take a look at it?”

  Rein held out his hand for her to hand over her phone. He raised it and turned away from the sun, using his body to shade the screen as he maneuvered it around, trying to get a better view.

  “Is it a joke?” Carrie said. “Tell me it’s a joke. She’s done this kind of thing before, and I keep thinking she’s pulling some crazy prank on me for not spending more time with her. If that’s the case, I’m going to kill her for wasting your time, I promise.”

  From across the parking lot, a soft breeze blew clouds of dust and dirt across the tops of his shoes, creating a low, soft whisper in Rein’s ears as he stared at the screen. The girl was talking to him, babbling about something, but he could not hear her. He looked up from the phone. “How long after she went missing did you get this?”

  “Why? Do you see something? What did she send it to me for?”

  “When did you get it, I said.”

  “Yesterday. In the early evening. She took Nubs to the park earlier in the day. What is going on, Rein?”

  He looked back down at the picture, examining it, seeing it was still daylight in the photograph, searching for any tiny details he could make out. The sun was hidden, but he could tell from the shadows that it was taken in the late afternoon.

  “Oh my God, it’s no joke, is it?” Carrie gasped.

  Bits of dust blew into his eyes and he blinked them away, wiping his sweaty hair out of his face. “How many are missing altogether?”

  Carrie forced herself to focus, despite the rising panic in her chest. “Another young woman, about the same age,” she said. “Denise Lawson. Now Molly and Nubs. And we had a guy get killed in the parking lot at a gay club, and it was really, really bad, I mean, forget that part. It probably doesn’t have anything to do with it. Right?” She stopped herself. “Look, I’m sorry we just showed up like this, but I’m desperate!”

  Rein watched her. “What makes you think the parking lot murder isn’t involved with the others?”

  “I don’t know! Christ, I don’t know anything. Listen, Molly likes to pull pranks, okay? She likes to do things like this to screw with me, but she’s never dragged Nubs into it before and it’s never felt like this. I need help. Can you help me?”

  He dropped the phone in her hand, and Carrie wiped her face on her sleeve. She looked up to see Rein heading back toward Waylon’s car and he said, “Let’s talk.”

  * * *

  Rein leaned back against Waylon’s police car while Carrie showed her chief how to connect to the Internet. He scratched at his beard, picking clumps of dried dirt from its tangles and flicking them into the dusty driveway. The wind was rising, sending large plumes of earth off the tops of the trucks inside the parking lot. Carrie paced back and forth, holding her phone in her hand with the photograph of Molly on the screen as they waited for the computer to connect.

  Waylon glanced at Rein. “I like the new look. They say beards are in these days.”

  “They’re damn itchy, I can tell you that much. I see your mustache came in,” Rein said. “I guess rubbing all that Rogaine on your lip worked. Sam Elliott would be proud.”

  “All right, it’s connected,” Waylon said, laughing. “What was that name you told me to look up, again?”

  “Regina Kay Walters,” Rein said. “Do an image search.”

  Waylon typed the name into the search bar. Carrie came around the car and stood behind him, gripping the phone as Waylon started the search. Rein moved away from the car, knowing what they were about to see. He heard Waylon’s breath catch and Carrie’s muted cry of disbelief.

  A teenage girl stared back at them from the computer screen, both of her hands raised in the air defensively, dressed in a black dress and tall black heels. Carrie held the photograph of Molly next to the computer screen, seeing that they were both standing in the exact same pose on an old wooden platform, surrounded by open farmland.

  The plastic casing around Carrie’s phone cracked as she squeezed it, her hands shaking with rage as her eyes darted from the computer to the image on her phone, two women, posed and dressed the same, two beautiful faces spoiled by the unmistakable mark of terror.

  Rein looked down at his hands, seeing that the lines of his skin were crusted deep with dirt. His fingernails were black. He was scraped and raw from working with crude machines all day, earning his twenty dollars. “Bill, can I talk to you privately?”

  Waylon followed him, but Carrie’s voice called out, “I want to hear it.”

  “Just give me a minute, kiddo.”

  Hell was in her eyes when she looked at the men. Red hell, dragged up from the lowest depths of her being. “I want to hear it.”

  Dust blew across the driveway, collecting clumps of grass from the truck tires and lawn mower blades, scattering them across places where the grass would not grow. Small specks pelted Rein on the cheeks and in his eyes, but he would not raise his hand to shield them. “In 1990, Regina Kay Walters was kidnapped by a trucker named Robert Ben Rhoades. He made her put on that black dress and those heels, then he made her pose for that photograph you see there. She was fourteen years old.”

  “And then what happened?” Carrie said.

  Rein looked at her with heavy, sad eyes. “He tortured her. Then he killed her.”

  15

  WAYLON SLOWED THE CAR AS HE FOLLOWED REIN’S DIRECTIONS, going through a neighborhood two miles from his work. The sidewalks were littered with trash cans, most of them overflowing so much with debris that there were more discarded beer bottles and trash lying around them than inside them. Cats patrolled the piles of garbage, searching for hungry rodents to kill.

  The stretch of row homes on both sides of the street was a mile long, with power cables dangling in unsecured loops from the roofs. At least twenty people hung out in each front yard, many of them wearing work clothes similar to Rein’s. Waylon knew what he was looking at. Slum housing for undocumented workers. Homes that were designed to hold a family of four, converted into makeshift hostels.

  Waylon had been in homes like that, where the owners had filled every room with mattresses and charged people fifty bucks a week to sleep there. They were crammed into the basement, the attic, the bathroom, the kitchen, some even paid to sleep on the steps. They were packed in like cattle. Normally, the slumlord wanted nothing to do with the property, so he picked one of the tenants to be the superintendent, letting him stay there for free as long as he collected the money from the others on time.

  Rein tapped on the rear window of Waylon’s car and said, “You can let me off here.”

  Waylon turned around in his seat. “You want to go grab a bite to eat first? Maybe get caught up?”

  Rein grabbed the door handle and then
let himself out. He stood beside the car as he looked up the street at the homes and the people he lived with. He walked around to the driver’s side and leaned down as Waylon lowered the window. “What’s your next step on this case?”

  Waylon and Carrie looked at each other. Carrie leaned close to the window and said, “I was thinking we should go talk to the mother of the first missing girl. See if she can give us anything.”

  “Good,” Rein said. “What then?”

  “I have no idea, to be honest,” she said.

  “What about that murder?” Rein asked. “The one from the club.”

  Waylon stopped him. “There’s no connection. Male victim, gay club, doesn’t fit this at all. Just a coincidence.”

  “All those years working cases and you know what I learned about coincidences?” Rein asked. “There aren’t any.”

  “All right,” Waylon said. “We’ll go to the club. You want to come with us and help with the interviews?”

  “Not particularly.”

  Waylon extended his hand, not wanting to push the issue. “Partner, it was good to see you back in action, even just for a minute.”

  Rein took his hand and squeezed, his grip strong and rough. “It was good to see you too, Bill.”

  Waylon did not let go. “I don’t want to wait another five years, man. I miss you. That’s just me being for real with you. We don’t have to talk about work at all. I just want to stay in touch.”

  Rein patted him on the shoulder and said, “I know.” He stepped back from the car, giving in just a little bit, and said, “So, here or work is where I’m at. If you run into another roadblock on the case, come find me.”

  “You mean that?” Waylon said.

  “Yeah. Not like you were ever any good at this kind of thing.”

  Waylon laughed as he shifted. “Yeah, right. Your back probably still hurts from carrying me all those years, I bet.”

  “Little bit,” Rein said, touching his side. “Right here. But only when it rains.”

  * * *

  It was dark by the time they arrived back at the station. Waylon had to nudge Carrie to open her eyes. “We’re here,” he said.

  She sat up, rubbing her eyes with her palms. “Okay. What now?”

  “Now we go home. Get some sleep.”

  “I can’t,” she said, grabbing for the case file. She searched through it, making sure all the papers were there. “We need to go interview Mrs. Lawson about her daughter. See if there’s any way to connect her to the other jobs.”

  “Carrie,” Waylon said, “we’ve been at this all day. I’m tired. I still have a police department to run, and I have an eight a.m. meeting with the traffic signal repair company. Let’s call it a night.”

  “I can’t call it a night! I don’t give a shit about your meetings, there is a little girl missing and some maniac has her! What the hell happened to you? You used to be a county detective, Bill Waylon. Did you and Rein worry about traffic signals when you were chasing down Old Man Krissing?”

  “No.” Waylon leaned his head back against the seat. “We most certainly did not.”

  “Exactly. So let’s go,” she said, waving her hand for him to get going. “I’ll get you the address in a second.”

  He watched her going through the files, then looked out the window at the station’s dark parking lot. Only one police car was parked outside the front door, which meant one officer was on patrol and the other was sitting inside watching television. They never ran more than two cars. Never needed to. The parking lot’s only source of light was a POLICE sign mounted above the front door. The sign was cracked and chipped, faded and old, but it was still lit, he thought, like it wasn’t smart enough to give up just yet. “Listen, I’m not going out tonight. In fact, maybe this was a mistake anyway. Tomorrow I’m going to get ahold of the County detectives,” he said. “They’re equipped to deal with this kind of thing. Harv Bender can work the case, and who knows, maybe he’ll come up with something.”

  “Oh bullshit,” Carrie said, clapping the folder shut. “That’s a cop-out and you know it. Bender won’t do a goddamn thing about this.”

  “It’s too much for us.”

  “Only because you won’t show me how to do this!”

  “Because I don’t know how! Okay? I don’t know how to just manufacture something out of nothing. How to think like these monsters. Jacob wasn’t kidding, Carrie. I never was worth a squirt of piss at this kind of case.”

  “You were a County detective, Bill.”

  “Jesus Christ!” He laughed. “So what? My old man was a big contributor to the Republican party and his friends got me into that job so I didn’t have to write parking tickets for the rest of my career. I’d never been a criminal investigator. I was a street cop my whole career up ’til then. So there I am, a political hack surrounded by a bunch of other political hacks, and I realized none of us knew what the hell we were doing. You know how I got by? I took loser cases. Dead-end investigations nobody else wanted to touch because there wasn’t a chance in hell of making an arrest, and I phoned it in. I did that for two years. And you know something? I would have been perfectly content to keep on doing that, until that pain in the you-know-what showed up. We all pretty much kept our heads down back in those days. Collecting our paychecks and going through the motions. Guys like me, Bender, and all the rest. And then this young guy shows up out of nowhere, and he’s got way, way different ideas about police work. This dude is taking the whole thing too seriously, and it’s making the rest of us look bad. Bender leads the charge to try to get him fired, and everybody pretty much goes along with it, including me. You know what changed my mind?”

  Carrie told him that she didn’t.

  “The first time I saw a little girl with her hands tied behind her back and blood smeared down the front of her summer dress. This beautiful, perfect little angel, and some sick bastard kidnapped her and killed her. Now, nobody wants to touch this case with a ten-foot pole, nobody in their right mind would take responsibility for an unsolvable child murder, but here comes new guy, volunteering. He starts working the case as if he has a chance at figuring out who did it. I laughed at him, telling him he was nuts, just like everyone else, but secretly I was waking up in a cold sweat every night. I’d sit crying in my daughter’s room when I put her to bed, thinking about that little girl. Then one Saturday I can’t take it anymore and I drive to the office and I find him there, and you know what I said?”

  Waylon put his hands down on top of Rein’s desk and said, “Everybody wants to see you fired because you’re an arrogant son of a bitch who’s trying to make the rest of us look bad.”

  Rein looked up from the folder spread open on his desk, surprised to see anyone else in the office on a Saturday. “I already know this.”

  “I’m one of the ones who said he hopes you get fired, Rein.”

  Waylon was soaking wet. Rein turned and looked out the window, realizing it was pouring rain outside. The sky was still dark and it would be noon in a few hours. Waylon’s shoes were still leaking water, and his wet hair was dripping down onto his face, but he did not seem to care. Rein folded his hands across his stomach and said, “I know that, too. Is there something I can help you with, Bill, or did you have nothing better to do on your weekend than come bother me?”

  Waylon looked down at the photograph on Rein’s desk, seeing the smiling little girl in her school uniform. “She’s the same age as my little one. It’s not . . . it’s not right what happened to her.”

  “The whole thing is a tragedy. Now, excuse me, but I have to get back to work.”

  “I know it’s a tragedy,” Waylon said, “that’s not the damned point.”

  “What do you want, Bill? I’m working. If you need to talk to someone, go to a bar, or go to a shrink, but if you don’t mind, I’m trying to find the person who did this.”

  “I want to work it. Goddamn it, I need to.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, but that’s not possible,” Rein said
. “I’m already into it. I can’t just hand it over.”

  “I want to help, okay? You tell me what you need, I’ll get it. No questions asked, as long as we catch this scumbag.”

  Rein looked up at him. “And you expect me to trust a partner who wants to get me fired?”

  “I didn’t say we were partners. I just said I’d work this one with you, your way. After that, it’s back to business as usual.”

  “You’ll do whatever I ask.”

  “If it helps find the murderous son of a bitch, yeah.”

  “I need old cases pulled, evidence reexamined. Grunt work. Things most of you people seem to think is beneath you.”

  “I said I’d do it,” Waylon snapped.

  Rein slid his chair back to make room at his desk and said, “Grab a notepad and pull up a chair.”

  Waylon stroked his mustache, seeing the images of the dead girl in her summer dress in his mind as clearly as the day he’d looked at her small, stiff body. “After that, it was off to the races,” he said. “Rein already had a suspect, it was just a matter of his connecting the dots.”

  “So, is that how you guys became friends, then?” Carrie said.

  “Friends? No. I was still telling all the guys that the second we put handcuffs on the murderer, I was right back on their side. I never got a chance to do that, though. Thank God.”

  “What happened?”

  “Krissing,” he said, uttering the word as if something filthy was in his mouth. “It took us another four years to figure out what was going on, but from the first missing kid, Rein was on it. Sometimes I wonder which one brought the other one in, you know? Maybe kind attracts kind. Then I think that the gods are just cruel and crazy bastards and they put pieces in play that will give off the best show. A whole lot of awful stuff happened in that show, let me tell you. A whole lot. And now it’s happening again and I’m just about as goddamn useless as I always was, except this time there’s nobody to hide behind.”

  Carrie put her hand on his arm. “You’re a good man, Chief. A good man, and a good cop. You aren’t giving yourself enough credit.”