The Weight of Living

by Michael Daigle

  “A bribe?”

  “I’ll send you the paperwork.” The smirk gone; satisfaction, perhaps, even, boredom.

  “You find all this amusing, don’t you, Tank? Taking, ruining people’s lives.”

  “These are lives that are already ruined, Detective Nagler. Alton Garrett? Calista... that is not her real name but for the life of me I cannot remember what name I gave her...”

  “So she is your daughter?”

  Nagler could see the shrug in his voice. “Daughter. Niece. Wife. The same. She is family, Detective Nagler. Family is flesh, and flesh is a commodity. I create flesh, and I can destroy it.” A pause. “Alton Garrett wants love, so I give him the illusion of love. Calista Knox wants freedom, ah, a truly more dear commodity. She has a heavier price to pay. And you want relief, assurances. They too, come with a high cost.”

  The phone went dead.

  ****

  Nagler stood dripping over the sink in the dark kitchen, watching the last drops of rain fall from the roof like shining beads as they caught the eastern light that cracked the gloom.

  Lauren padded barefoot into the room; she had pulled on a long pajama top.

  “Where have you been?” she asked as she pulled a towel from a drawer and dried Nagler’s wet hair. “I know. Walking.” She folded a corner of the towel and wiped his face. “Why?”

  “Do you know why Calista took you along the other day when she was trying to find the compound?”

  “She asked for help. And I’m trying to help her, Frank.”

  He turned from the window and leaned against the sink.

  “She knew where it was, Lauren. I think she was trying to bring you to Garrettson,” he said softly, as if he was trying not to say those words, but others.

  “No!” Lauren screamed. “No, No.” She threw the towel at Nagler, who reached to her but she spun away. “How could you think that?” she asked, her voice like ice, but her lips quivering and her face soft with fear.

  “Because he called me when I was walking, and basically admitted it,” he said. “He intimated that he had something else in mind, and I said you were off limits.”

  Lauren covered her face, and when she dropped her hands, she was glaring.

  “What’s that chick up to, Frank?”

  “Don’t know. But Garrettson said she wanted her freedom, and it would come at a high cost.”

  “How does he give Calista her freedom?” Lauren asked as she picked up the towel. “He either lets her walk away” — she raised her eyebrows and twisted her head — “which is unlikely, given what she knows about him.” She paused and then glanced at Nagler. “Or he’s going to kill her. That would be freedom with a high cost, right? But how? Why hasn’t he done it already?”

  Nagler kicked off his wet shoes and ran his fingers through his hair.

  “Because he wants it to be a public display, just like Sarah Lawton, a message. An ego-massaging message.” He nodded a few times, then looked at Lauren. “Yeah.” He began to pace. “The short newspaper story about her death quoted a Mister Garrettson who refused to give his first name. Who would that be to Randolph Garrettson? An uncle, father, much older brother. Given the mixed-up lineage of that family, it would be hard to say. But our current Mister Garrettson wants public retribution. That’s why he’s calling me. Telegraphing. But telegraphing what?”

  Lauren hugged herself and squeezed the shiver out of her body. “What year did Sarah die?”

  “Thirty-one, no thirty-two.”

  Lauren sat at the table and found a pencil and an old food receipt.

  “What year did they take the kids?”

  “I don’t know,” Nagler shrugged.

  “Let’s see, Sarah Lawton was fourteen, figure she was three or four when she was adopted, because it seems to me that a grieving mother would want a young child. But maybe they took two, a young one for the mother and an older one to work, help out the father bring in some money. Makes sense?”

  “Sure,” Nagler smiled. Then he remembered that this was Lauren’s field.

  “Nineteen-eighteen.” She frowned. “That doesn’t sound right. Something is off in this timeline, and I think it must be at the early end, with old Remington. Anyone look him up, other than in Mansell’s?”

  “Not that I know,” Nagler said, shaking his head, “I know I didn’t. How are you going to look him up?”

  Lauren pointed at herself. “Um, city planner? Census data. Tax records.”

  She tapped the pencil on the table till the lead broke.

  “Know what I need? Those books. Where are they? I promise I won’t tell.”

  “What do you think is in them?” Nagler smiled.

  “Well, Bruno said there are certain titles that have clues.” She rose and crossed to Nagler. “Besides, if Tank wants them that badly, they must have value, besides the material that Hapworth gave you.”

  He pulled her close. “They are in the very expensive temperature controlled wine cellar at the Catholic Sisters’ Home. Warren Appleton spared no expense.”

  “So I finally get to meet Sister Katherine? Ooh. What stories will she tell me about you, mister?” She glanced up at Nagler with worried eyes. “Find her, Frank, Find Calista. For Leonard’s sake.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Union Iron, Ironton NJ

  “What’s that?” Nagler asked, as he entered Maria Ramirez’s corner of the police garage.

  “This is a wi-fi-enabled hunting camera with motion detection that will send photos or video of your encroaching deer to your laptop or cell phone,” Ramirez recited in a sales voice. “Two hundred bucks at your local outdoor sports outfitter.” She placed the camouflaged camera on a table next to another one. “That’s how they saw you coming, Frank.”

  “Do deer know it’s camouflaged?” Nagler asked as he picked up camera, peered into the lens and studied the controls on the back. “Impressive.”

  A voice came from the back of the room. “The camo is designed to fool people mostly.”

  Ramirez smiled. “Frank, meet my friend, Captain Jim Mangan from Jefferson. He brought in the cameras.”

  The men shook hands, and Nagler said, “Thanks, Captain.”

  “Jim.”

  “Frank. So how did this set-up work, and how did you find them?”

  “Your report matched up with a couple of calls we had about possible shots fired,” Mangan said. “Sound carries off those granite hills,” he said, in answer to Nagler’s puzzled look. “And, well, a pair of hikers heading back to the valley road saw you ducking on the trail from the other side of the clearing and called us.”

  “Didn’t see them.”

  “They said they heard the first shot and backed into the trees for cover. If the shooter was paying attention, he could have seen them as well since they had a placed a camera below the house on the trail — that’s the one that recorded you — and a second one above the clearing.”

  “Sounds like you knew where the shots came from,” Nagler said. “Watching the place?”

  Mangan twisted his mouth and nodded. “Not many homes in that stretch. You saw that. Park land cross the street, steep slopes, river nearby. But we started getting calls from hikers maybe a year ago that someone might be in there, and since it was supposed to be abandoned ... maybe drugs. Sometimes we’d just sent an officer to the door, you know, to warn about black bear sightings, but mostly we’d hike by and take photos.”

  He opened a manila envelope that was on the table and took out a half-inch pile of photos and sorted them.

  Nagler smiled at Ramirez. “So much for using the power company’s drone, huh?”

  Ramirez and Mangan shared a smile.

  “Maria called me and I know a real estate photographer who uses a drone and he agreed to take a few ‘landscape’ shots for us,” Mangan said. “We’ve been experimenting with one for search and rescue.”

  Nagler elbowed Ramirez lightly. “You knew that.” She smiled.

  Mangan continued, “So t
his guy showed up twelve, thirteen months ago. Had sporadic reports he was in the house, but didn’t think anything of it because we saw no drug related activity. We had taken some homeless folks out of there before and took them to a shelter, but this guy seemed to be in and out, you know, like a property owner.”

  He shifted the photo on the table to give Nagler a better view. “We couldn’t find him in the system.”

  Tank.

  “Yeah,” Nagler said. “Until recently the only photo we had of him was about twenty years old. We think his name, based on information we’ve been given, is Randolph Garrettson, and he may be related to the longtime owners of the property. But we also know him as Arthur Harrison from Georgia.”

  “Okay. He was the only person there for most of the past year. We watched the place for deliveries, more trail hikers than usual. It’s the kind of isolated place that would be good for a meth lab. Never saw any of that.”

  He laid out six more photos, three each of Alton Garrett and Jerrod McCann.

  “This pair showed a couple months ago. This guy we know, pointing to Garrett. “Garrett Alton, local kid, is a cop...”

  “Actually, Alton Garrett,” Nagler said. “We were told he changed his name.” Slight shake of his head and shoulder shrug.

  “Need a damn scorecard,” Mangan said.

  “And that’s ‘I’m-the-big-boss,’ Jerrold McCann. Never liked that man,” Ramirez said.

  “Know him?” Mangan asked.

  “Ironton police commissioner,” Ramirez said. “Biggest pain in the butt.”

  “Couple months, you said.” Nagler asked. “What are they doing?”

  Mangan nodded to Ramirez. “I don’t know what McCann is doing, but we know what Garrett is up to. Play the video. We caught this with the drone. We don’t know who the girl is. She’s new.”

  Ramirez fast-forwarded the video for a few seconds, then slowed it as two bodies emerged from the backside of the barn. “Oh shit,” Nagler said as he watched a naked Calista Knox run into the tall grass followed by Garrett. They grabbed each other and fell out of sight as the drone was turned away.

  “Know her?”

  Nagler rolled over a chair and sat down hard, with his eyes closed and his hands arched in front of his mouth. “That’s Calista Knox. She’s the girlfriend of my best friend. And if what we have been told is correct, she and Garrett could be brother and sister.”

  Mangan’s face blanched and his eyes popped wide open. “Know what, I hadn’t connected it until just now... that house, the history...”

  “Yeah,” Nagler said softly. “It’s not something you think about until you’re confronted with it.” Recovering, he asked, “Tell me, at any time did anyone see younger girls there, maybe ten to twelve years old?”

  “No, not that I recall. Why?”

  Nagler sighed. “Given that house and its history...”

  Before Mangan left, he invited Nagler and Ramirez to join his squad on a raid of the Garrettson house. Code and health officials armed with inspection orders and police with a warrant to search the home for weapons, since shots had been reported there, were planning to hit the house soon.

  Ramirez said, “Hey,” and touched Nagler’s shoulder and the stared into his eyes soft with confusion. “Don’t think like that, Frank. Thing I’ve come to accept in this case nothing is what it seems to be. The girl, the old nun, everybody. We don’t know why she was running, and we don’t know why she was naked. And we don’t know why he was running.”

  Nagler leaned one elbow on a table and then rubbed his head. “Tank called me the other night.”

  “Again?”

  “Yeah, in full megalomania. Rambling all over. But then he said that Calista wants her freedom, and it could come at a high cost.”

  “Now that gives me the chills, Frank. Maybe that was why she was running.”

  ****

  The metallic ding-dong of his phone receiving a message jerked Nagler from the state of semi-drowsing he had fallen into after taking a muscle relaxant for his shoulder; his head swirled even while he sat still and straight. He remembered reading the warnings on the bottle: Induces drowsiness. Avoid driving heavy equipment. He looked at his chair and desk. Well, I did my part.

  He opened the phone with a touch and saw the message was from John Guidrey containing three photos of the iron pick that Calista Knox told Guidrey she used to dig out of the Georgia root cellar.

  There was something odd about that scenario, but with a head stuffed with narcotic cotton, Nagler knew he was in no shape to decipher it.

  The photos showed the gray bar lying on a table over a newspaper, being held vertically, and a close-up of the manufacturer’s mark, “UNION IRON IRONTON NJ.”

  Nagler stared at the photos, pieces of Calista’s life rattling in his head. And the image of her sitting in the opposite chair spinning those pieces; the video of her running naked from the busted house; the gentle way she touched Leonard’s chin before running a finger over his eyes and whispering something that brought a smile.

  When do I believe it has a center?

  Squinting against the fog in his head, leaning against the pain in his shoulder and neck, he tapped the “forward” button on his phone and typed in Calista’s number.

  “You used it once,” he typed, having to correct “onct” to “once.” “Use it again.” Then he pressed “send.”

  How about now?

  ****

  The Jefferson team was half-way through the inspection of the wrecked house when Captain Jim Mangan called his name.

  “Detective. Frank. You need to see this.”

  Nagler and Maria Ramirez stepped carefully over the loose boards to find Mangan holding open a door to a clean, well-cared-for bedroom. He handed Nagler and Ramirez plastic gloves before they entered.

  “I’ve seen this room before, Frank,” Ramirez said. In the ‘number six’ photo.”

  “You’re right. Holy shit.”

  Mangan asked, “What’s the number six photo?”

  “We found a young girl in the snow a couple months ago. She’s with the Catholic Sisters now. But in some material we were given that seems to be associated with Garrettson/Harrison, we found a page of posed photos of young girls, all naked, sitting on that bed. Our girl was number six.”

  “It looked like a page in a catalogue or a gallery,” Ramirez said.

  “Like this?”

  The other Jefferson officer had pulled down a bed sheet that had been taped to the wall above a dresser, revealing six pages of similar photos.

  “Jesus,” Mangan said. “Photograph it and then mark them and store them.”

  Mangan’s face was as white as it was in Ironton the other day. “That video the other day was shocking, because you’re right, Frank, you don’t think about it, but this. I don’t know.”

  “This whole case has been like that. One hairpin turn after another,” Nagler said. “The good news is that those turns are getting tighter and there will be no way out.”

  “Well, here’s another turn,” the Jefferson officer said. He had bumped his camera bag into something on the bed, and when he pulled back the comforter, he discovered a shoe box wrapped with five thick rubber bands.

  It had Nagler’s name on it.

  The officer photographed the box as it sat on the bed and then moved it to the center. A single folded piece of paper was stuck under one of the rubber bands. The officer photographed it, then opened it, and photographed that, finally he nodded to Nagler: “It’s for you.”

  “What the hell?” Nagler asked.

  “I used it. C.” The note said.

  Nagler smiled, but understanding the note’s meaning, immediately became concerned.

  “What’s that mean?” Ramirez asked.

  “It’s from Calista Knox, and it means she escaped.”

  As they were wrapping up the shoebox in plastic, another officer yelled from down the hallway.

  “Cap’n, you need to see this.”

 
; He led the group into the field behind the house near the edge of the woods, away from the hiking path to where the rest of the team standing over a hole in the ground.

  “It has to be the mine shaft,” Nagler said.

  “What mine shaft?” Mangan asked.

  “More than a century ago the Garrettsons worked a small iron mine,” Nagler said. “This could be the main shaft. The state has a couple of mine experts who could help ID this.”

  “Want me to take the video camera down?” a patrolman whose nameplate said “Dean” asked.

  Mangan frowned and then threw a flashlight beam down the hole.

  “Yeah, okay, Hank,” he said. “A few yards, just to look. If anything shifts or looks like it’s about to shift, get your ass out of there.”

  “Yes sir,” Hank Dean said with a slight grin.

  He pulled on his helmet and turned on the camera and his flashlight. “You getting this?” Dean asked the officer holding a laptop, who nodded.

  The shaft was roughly six feet tall and angled. The officer cautiously entered the dark hole.

  “Why’s it sloped?” Ramirez asked.

  “This would have been fairly primitive. They had to haul the ore out of the ground with hand carts in the smaller mines,” Nagler said. “In the deeper mines, they would have done it mechanically.”

  “How do you know that?” Ramirez asked, her mouth twisted into the question.

  “My grandfather was a miner. Told me all the stories.”

  “It’s not bad,” Dean called out. The laptop showed him moving carefully in the center of the shaft as he dipped his head under a wooden beam. The flashlight wavered along the dark walls.

  “Hey, what’s this?” he yelled. “A room or something, dug into the wall. There’s a number. A six. What the hell?”

  No, Nagler thought as he and Ramirez exchanged puzzled glances.

  The video grew darker and Mangan called out, “Get out. You’re in too deep.”

  “Just a second, Captain. Shit, there’s like a mattress in there and maybe a shirt. Hang on.” The video showed him moving down the shaft. “I’m at five.”