“I only sold pills,” Jonah protested. “Not street stuff.”
“Oh, so you only dealt with a discerning clientele,” Bruce scoffed. “Thing is, you die with a silver spoon up your nose and a stomach full of hydrocodone, you’re just as dead as the poor asshole who could only afford a little cheap smack. I know you managed to convince yourself that you’re not responsible for Marnie Bertram’s death. I thought maybe if you came out here, where a lot of addicts just like her end up before their time, it might bring it home to you.”
“You might think that the addicts who were desperate enough to buy from you weren’t worthy as human beings,” Gin said, trying to take a more empathetic tack in order to get Jonah to see things her way. “But what you may not realize is that virtually anyone can get addicted to opiates. I’ve seen all kinds of people die from abuse of prescription drugs—housewives, ministers, kindergarten teachers.”
“Oh, boo hoo,” Jonah said. But clearly the conversation was taking a toll on him. His shoulders slumped, and he was tugging nervously at the hem of his shirt.
“I’m not naïve enough to think that getting you to stop selling drugs is going to have any effect on the problem of overdose deaths,” Gin said. “Someone else has undoubtedly stepped in to take your place. But you can still help out in another way. I believe you know more about the body you found than you’re letting on. And there’s a disturbing pattern underway.” She couldn’t tell him about the gruesome contents of Brian Dumbauld’s body, but she could at least try to force him to see the victims as human beings. Gin suspected that Jonah was far more sensitive than he’d let on, and that the key to his cooperation was the guilt she felt sure he was carrying below the surface.
“I believe that you really do feel badly about Marnie Bertram, Jonah,” she said gently. “I think you actually feel terrible about it, that it hurts every day to know that you can’t undo what happened. And maybe you think that it doesn’t really matter that Douglas Gluck’s remains were disturbed, since they’ll soon be returned here and given a respectful reburial.
“But here’s what you don’t know, Jonah.” She paused to let the full impact of her words sink in. “There was another murder. When Mr. Gluck’s body was removed from this grave, it was replaced with the body of a homeless man who had the misfortune to cross paths with the killer. He was murdered and tossed in that hole like a piece of trash. And it’s entirely possible that there will be more, if we can’t identify and stop the killer.”
Jonah seemed at the very limit of his composure. His lower lip trembled and he was trying to look anywhere but at the hole.
“But I don’t know for sure,” he mumbled. “I mean, because if it was him, maybe I could have stopped him.”
“Stopped who?” Bruce said. “Gonna need some more details, son.”
“He—he seemed okay at first. He was just someone to talk to while we were waiting for our rides.”
“Logan Ewing?”
Jonah nodded. “We were always the last ones waiting. Dad thought it would force me to talk to the tutor after class, but she was out of here practically before the time was up. And Logan … sometimes his mom never came at all, and we gave him a ride.”
“Your dad didn’t mind?”
Jonah snorted. “Of course he minded. He minds everything that inconveniences him even a little. And he says I’m lazy—he says it’s the reason that my mom left, but I think it’s because of how he treated her. But he couldn’t leave Logan waiting there at ten o’clock at night, and besides, Dad loves to act like he’s some big do-gooder, and this way he could brag to his friends about how he helped this poor kid out.”
“That was it?” Bruce said. “Your whole connection to this kid—a few rides?”
“It would have been,” Jonah said, “except one night I mentioned to him I’d picked up a copy of Dead Lands 2. He told me it was, like, his favorite game. That night he texted me a bunch of links—unlockables, cheats, and hacks. They’re on the internet, the coders wrote them in but they’re not in any of the documentation or anything.”
“I’ve read about those,” Gin said. “Gamers are obsessed with them.”
“Yeah, they’re cool, kind of.” Jonah looked embarrassed. “I mean they’re stupid, they’re not worth anything, but people collect them and then they brag about them so if it’s something you’re into, you can try to get some of the rare ones and then people are like really happy to play you.”
Gin suspected that it went even further than that, that the virtual badges were a form of social capital for awkward kids.
“How many do you have, Jonah?” she asked gently.
“I don’t know, like ten or twelve,” he admitted, not looking at her. “But Logan had, like, forty or fifty. And some of them were really bad. I told him I didn’t believe him about some of them, so he sent me screen shots. He had Stone Face, and Claw Hand, and Triple Saw—that’s super hard to find. But the one … God. The one that I never heard of anyone else finding was Blood of the Enemy. He’s kills his victims by suffocating them and then eviscerates them and pulls all their entrails out and … this is disgusting, but in the game he eats the hearts. Like, raw, with blood dripping everywhere. The most anyone ever got to was four.”
“No shit,” Bruce said, not bothering to keep the excitement out of his voice. Here it was, the first real clue they had connecting Logan to the disturbing contents of Dumbauld’s—a detail that had not been made public. “What does this online character do with the bodies?”
“I don’t know,” Jonah said, looking green around the gills. “I blocked Logan after that. He, uh, scared me. I’ll admit it.”
“So what really happened, at the cabin? How did you find out about the body?” Gin said.
Jonah’s eyes darted back and forth, as if searching for a way out. “He, uh, came to the house one time a few weeks later. He had his mom’s car. It was a Saturday; my dad was playing tennis. I thought it was a package delivery or something, but I opened the door and he was standing there, looking crazy. He was pissed that I’d blocked him, and he said he had something really cool to show me. It was weird, it was like he was going back and forth between mad and trying to be friends … I was kind of thinking he was losing it.”
“But you went with him anyway,” Gin said. “Why would you do that, if you were afraid?”
“Because he—he said he’d post all these things online, about how I was a Castrato. That’s like the worst thing you can be in Dead Lands 2—it’s a troll that’s had his balls cut off because he snitched.”
Bruce laughed. “You were afraid he’d call you that online? That would be like someone posting on Facebook that I’m a Vulcan. Sticks and stones, you know?”
“You don’t get it.”
“I think I might,” Gin said. “You were afraid of what people would think of you for playing the game at all. That he would out you as a social pariah, a geek.”
Jonah lifted his face, affirmation in his expression. “It would be the last straw, okay? I’m already the kid whose dad makes him play in the jazz band. And enter all these speech and essay contests. And I’ve never been allowed to play sports because Dad’s convinced I’ll be a surgeon and he’s worried about my hands. He might as well have put a big sign on me saying KICK ME.” He’d begun to quietly cry. “Do you know how often I got beat up my freshman year? They hate me—all the popular kids. I’ve never been invited to a party. I—I’ve never kissed a girl. And if Logan did what he said he was going to, I never would. So yeah, I went. I figured it was going to be something about the game … but he took me down by the creek and … and, yeah.”
“How did he explain the body being there?”
“He said he just found it. That it just showed up. But I figured he did it—from the start, I knew it was probably him.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“Because Logan said that if I told anyone about it, he’d make it look like I killed the guy. He … he liked having it there. It
was sick. He said he was conducting experiments on it. He said he cut off the hands because they had some sort of deformity that made them look like the Claw Hand character from the game.”
Gin tried to hide her reaction—Jonah could easily be describing the “split hand” effect in some ectodermal dysplasia patients. “But you did take us to it.”
“Don’t you get it? I wanted you to see it. I just didn’t want him to know I was the one who showed you. I thought maybe Jonah would think it was just someone out walking their dog or whatever. I didn’t know it was embalmed, that he just stole the body out of the grave. Honestly, if I had, I probably would have turned him in. Because at least he wouldn’t have killed the guy.” He brushed a tear from his eye impatiently. “I had no idea there was another one. I keep thinking—I keep wishing it was last year. Last summer. Before all of this happened, when I was just thinking I had to get through one more year of high school and then I could leave, I’d be free of this forever.”
He wiped his nose on his sleeve and cleared his throat. “Are we done here?” he said angrily. “Or do you guys want to beat me down or something, make sure I never forget all these important lessons you taught me tonight?”
“We’re just getting started,” Bruce said, taking Jonah’s arm and steering him toward the exit. “You’re going to come down to the station and tell that whole story all over again. Don’t worry, we’ll tell Daddy he’s got to stay in the waiting room.” Jonah tried to jerk his arm away, but Bruce tightened his grip. “I’m going to go pay your pal Logan a little visit. After we make sure that every last thing you said tonight checks out, we’ll put that bad boy away for a long, long time.”
“I know this is hard,” Gin said, shooting Bruce a dirty look as she fell in step with Jonah. “You were brave to tell us everything.”
“Ignore her, son,” Bruce interrupted. “Gin, you need to remember you’re just consulting on this thing. Glad you could come to the party tonight though—you can send my thank you note to the office.”
No one spoke on the drive to the station. As they pulled into the parking lot, Bruce glanced over his shoulder at Jonah. “Tell you what—I might just forget to call your dad for a bit here—given all the excitement. That okay with you?”
“Thanks,” Jonah mumbled. He shot Gin a desolate look as he got out of the car, and then the three of them entered the building.
* * *
Bruce emerged from the interview room an hour later with a smirk on his face, and plopped down on the vinyl sofa in the lobby next to Gin. “He remembered a few more things,” he said. “Wrapped this thing up like a Christmas present.”
“Did they find Logan?”
“Yeah, had to drive around for a bit, but he was out with a few of his skinhead friends, skateboarding. They’ll be here in twenty minutes.”
“And Jonah’s dad?”
“Screaming like a stuck pig—even though his kid’s off the hook. At least we bought Jonah a little time. I’m kind of wondering if we should do him a favor and lock him in the holding cell.”
Gin sighed. It hardly seemed fair for Jonah to have to go back to his unhappy home life after he’d helped crack the case. “I think I’ll head out, then. I’ve worried my folks enough in the last few days.”
“Hey, before you go, I’m curious—are you banging Baxter?”
“I—I’m going to pretend that you didn’t ask that,” Gin stammered.
“Don’t get all offended, it’s just that there’s so many people hooking up at work these days. Liam and Katie, Reggie and Wheeler—”
“Wait,” Gin said. “Reggie Clawitter, in Narcotics? And Captain Wheeler?”
“Well, I don’t have any proof of that one,” Bruce said. “But I saw him let himself into her office last Thursday night when I went back to get some files I forgot. It was almost eight, and it’s no big thing for her to work late, especially with all this political bullshit she’s working, but what reason would Reggie have to stay past his shift?”
“I don’t actually know him that well. I only met him at Douglas Gluck’s autopsy. But Bruce—how would he let himself in?”
“I guess she gave him a key. But that’s another thing—why were he and Serena at the autopsy?”
“Um … because it was a suspected OD? Because it happened at a location they were already watching? Because they’ve become laser-focused on the opioid crisis?”
“Yeah, sure, all true. But there’s something else you don’t know. They’ve been hooking up in records.”
“What?” Gin had seen the records department on a tour of the county offices when she accepted the ongoing consulting role; it was a grim, windowless space in the basement of the county office building, with dingy walls and old metal cabinets literally bursting with files. While much of the building had been updated, the move to a digital filing system was taking longer than expected to complete, which only added to the problem of tracking weapons that had led to the current problem of missing guns. “Why would you think that?”
“Well, obviously they can’t use her office, right? With one whole wall of it being glass? But hardly anyone ever goes down to records, not when they can scan things into the archives. Hell, most of the time it’s locked up since most of the staff is working at the new space. But I come into the building that way sometimes when I ride my bike to work—I don’t like to leave it outside, so I keep it in the boiler room—and I’ve run into Reggie down there in the hall three or four times, and he acted all flustered. I’ll bet you anything he was waiting to give Wheeler the all-clear, so she could come out.”
“But even if you’re right about him having an affair—he could be taking anyone down there. Just because he was in her office a few times, why would you think it’s Wheeler?”
“Because I’ve figured out their code. I can see his desk from where I sit. You know how on the phones, there’s all those keys no one uses anymore because everyone would rather just use their cell?”
“Yes…” There was a phone in Gin’s office that lit up and even rang occasionally, but she’d never used it; none of the consultants did.
“Well, back when we actually used them, you could dial a shortcut to someone’s number by the first letter of their last name. So if you wanted to call me, for instance, you’d hit ‘S’ and then a number—I was two. So my code was S2.”
“And…”
“And Reggie always goes straight for the ‘W’. Get it? And then ten or fifteen minutes later, off he goes—right down to the basement.”
Gin stared at Bruce, a shocking realization dawning. But apparently he mistook her expression for admiration, because he reached across the center console and gave her knee a squeeze.
“Yep, S2 … give it a try sometime. And we don’t even have to go down to the basement—my office doesn’t even have a window.”
“I … will keep that in mind,” Gin said shakily, pressing herself against the passenger window, as far from Bruce as she could get. Not only was Bruce offensive and out of line, but he apparently wasn’t even as smart as she’d given him credit for.
Because Captain Wheeler wasn’t the only person whose last name began with W.
* * *
“Nice night for a booty call,” Tuck said when he opened the door. “Lucky for you, my little princess fell asleep admiring her glitter nails, so the coast is clear.”
Despite the urgency of her visit, Gin smiled. “How was the spa trip?”
“Horrible,” Tuck said, glowering. “Hellish. They brought me tea in this frilly little cup. The place smelled like burning hair and cheap perfume. A woman in a bathrobe old enough to be my mom pretended she couldn’t find the treatment room so she could flash me her boob.” He shuddered. “But Cherie loved it, so…”
“So it was all worth it,” Gin said. “Next time maybe I’ll come with you. We could get side-by-side facials.”
“Are you asking me on a date, Gin Sullivan?”
“No chance,” Gin said. “Is Reggie Clawitter be
hind the gun thefts?”
The shift in Tuck’s expression was comic—and brief. His eyebrows shot up and he looked like someone had sucker punched him for all of two seconds before he composed himself and managed to look bored. “Can’t confirm,” he said. “Can’t deny. I’d be interested in knowing why you ask, though.”
“Because Bruce Stillman is possibly the worst detective I’ve ever met,” Gin said. She described his theories about Reggie and the captain, his frequent visits to the basement. “Will you at least tell me if you think he’s working with someone else?”
“And why would I do that?”
“Because I think I might be able to tell you exactly who it is.”
“This has suddenly gotten a lot more interesting,” Tuck rose and opened a cabinet above the fridge, coming back with a bottle of bourbon and two shot glasses. “I think you need a little more skin in this game. You think you’re onto something—and I think you’re full of shit. What are you willing to wager?”
24
Several days later, an urgent knock at the door woke Gin from a dream. In it, Lily had returned. She was back in the tunnel, still wearing the strange, diaphanous clothing, still beckoning to Gin to come closer.
But something was different this time. Though she was far in the distance, she wasn’t receding any further. In fact, she appeared to be walking slowly toward Gin. Her lips moved and Gin had strained to hear what she was saying, but there was only a gentle rushing of wind … until the knock at her door.
Madeleine entered, dressed for work and carrying her laptop.
“May I sit?” she asked.
“Good morning, Mom,” Gin said with a smile.
“Good morning. Didn’t I say that already? Sorry, I’ve got to be in the city in an hour.” Madeleine was attending a hearing regarding Tuck’s actions since arriving in Trumbull, and while it was mostly a formality given the arrests of Reggie Clawitter and Liam Witt in the IA investigation, Madeleine was a big believer in tying up loose ends. “But I thought you’d want to take a look at this. Your pal Melanie Carter posted it online, so don’t get too upset because it wasn’t big enough news to make the print version.”
In the Darkest Hour Page 23