[Ash Park 01.0] Famished

by Meghan O'Flynn

  “Phone number?”

  He told them.

  Morrison flipped a page in his notebook.

  “Tell me about Meredith. Anything you think might help,” Petrosky said.

  Keil’s eyes were blank, more than marijuana stoned. Pills, downers, maybe. Down the hall, a door slammed and someone cursed. Morrison glanced toward the sound. Keil stared, slack-jawed.

  “Mr. Keil? What can you tell me about Meredith?”

  “Oh uh … she was real pretty. Nice to most people unless they looked at her the wrong way.”

  “Had she mentioned meeting anyone new recently?”

  “I don’t think so.” He paused. “She was kinda bitchy sometimes. You think someone killed her for that?”

  “I doubt it,” Petrosky said. “Did she ever go out to clubs?”

  “Nah, nothing like that. She mostly just hung around here. Do you think it was someone she … like … knew already?”

  “We’re just covering all the bases, sir.”

  “Oh, well, she didn’t know that many people anyway.”

  “Did she have any family? Any friends?”

  “Her mama died when she was little. Never had a daddy.”

  No daddy. Not that a daddy would have been able to save her. Petrosky popped his knuckles against his hip and grimaced at the empty pocket where he used to carry his cigarettes. “No parents? Was she in foster care in Michigan?”

  “Yeah. I dunno for how long or where, she didn’t talk about it.”

  “How long were you together?”

  Keil looked at the ceiling, thinking. “Maybe four years. Not quite.”

  “And in all that time she never mentioned where she grew up?”

  He scuffed his foot on threadbare carpet. “Once she said she had a foster father who beat her up, and she ran away. That was before she met me.”

  “Brothers, sisters?”

  “Just the kid but she hasn’t seen him since we gave him up.”

  “A kid?” Petrosky’s eyes snapped to Morrison. Morrison shrugged and shook his head. “What kid?”

  “She was pregnant when we met. Had the kid, kept it here for a little, but she wasn’t cut out for that. She took him to the church downtown, I think. The one where they have the orphanage.”

  “What was the child’s name?”

  “She called him Jessie, but I don’t know if it stuck. He was only a few weeks old.”

  Morrison’s pen scratched frantically against the notepad.

  “The date?”

  “No idea. Late August, maybe? September? She talked about needing to get the kid warmer clothes because it was getting cold. But we didn’t, just put him in a blanket with all these little ducks on it and then she took him.” His bottom lip quivered. Either the drugs were wearing off, or the police presence was shocking Keil into sobriety. Or he felt guilty about the kid.

  “Who was the father?”

  Keil swiped at his eyes. “No idea. She didn’t either.”

  “So, a boy. And she took him to the church?”

  “Yeah the big one right down the way. With all those troll things. I think it was the only one she could take him to. Not all of ‘em take kids.” He sagged against the door frame. “She’s really dead?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Like, dead, dead? I just thought she found an overnight. She was happy when she got one of those.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “Aw, shit.” Keil put a hand to his chest.

  “Do you need to sit down?”

  Keil lowered his hand to the doorframe and gripped it until the knuckles turned white, but he shook his head. “No. I’m okay.”

  “We’ll make this as quick as possible, Mr. Keil. We need to know where she was the night before last. Who she was with.”

  “Working.” Keil glanced at the wall and dragged his eyes to the floor, looking everywhere but at them.

  “Mr. Keil, we have no doubt she was working the street. What I need to know from you is where she was standing when someone picked her up and killed her.”

  Keil’s jaw worked, but sluggishly. “I’m not sure. Maybe Ventura? She was usually up there. If she went anywhere else, I dunno.”

  “Tell me about the overnights.”

  “Every now and then someone would pay her for the night, to stay there. Rich assholes with hotel rooms, I think. She always came home not worried about money for a day or so.”

  “Any idea who they were?”

  He shrugged. “No, it was never the same person.”

  “When was the last time that happened?”

  “It’s been months.”

  “She have friends that she hung out with? Anyone you knew?”

  Keil shook his head.

  “How did she not have any friends?” Morrison asked.

  Petrosky cleared his throat and kept his eyes on Keil. “Often in domestic violence situations, women are isolated from their friends and family in order to keep them from revealing the situation.”

  Keil stared at Petrosky, but said nothing. Morrison turned back to his notepad.

  “Anyone she might have seen that night?”

  “I don’t know, man.”

  “Where were you the night before last between the hours of twelve and three a.m.?”

  “Um … I think I was here.”

  “Anyone with you?”

  Keil looked over Petrosky’s shoulder, into the hallway. “Yeah … uh … Darcy.”

  “Last name?”

  “Evans.”

  “Who is she?”

  “A … friend.”

  “Meredith know you had a special friend, Mr. Keil?”

  He stared.

  “Did your girlfriend like poetry?” The bloody poem on the mausoleum wall was a wild card Petrosky didn’t want leaked, but Keil would be too nervous to tell the press … if he even remembered the question later.

  Keil’s eyebrows lifted. “Poetry?” He shoved his hands in his pockets. Keil probably had cigarettes. He’d probably let Petrosky bum one.

  Petrosky narrowed his eyes. “Where does Darcy live?”

  Keil raised an arm, feebly pointing to a door three apartments down from his. “Wait … uh, just wait a little, man. Her husband’s home. Saw his car out the window.”

  “That doesn’t bother me any,” Petrosky said.

  Keil’s jaw dropped. He took the card Petrosky offered, but his eyes darted nervously toward the door across the hall.

  “Sorry for your loss.”

  Keil looked once more down the hall and closed the door. The lock clicked into place.

  “What do you think, Boss?” Morrison asked as they walked toward the other end of the hallway.

  “He’s a dick, but he’s telling the truth. Popping pills and coming off downers will make a person honest, if not a little confused. Good for us. He mentioned her overnights, then freaked out when we asked what she did. And the kid thing … he’ll probably regret sharing that when he sobers up. We’ll find out in a minute if his alibi checks out.”

  “I liked the way you snuck the poem in.” Morrison lifted the knocker and dropped it. In a neighboring unit, a dog barked and someone yelled at it to shut the fuck up.

  The man who answered the door dwarfed them both, his dark shoulders as wide as the doorframe, button-down shirt stretched over biceps that would make Hulk Hogan jealous.

  “Afternoon, sir.” Petrosky flashed his badge. “I’m Detective Petrosky with the Ash Park PD. I’m looking for a Darcy Evans.”

  The man’s brows furrowed but he backed up and waved them in. “Of course, officers. Come in.”

  A black leather sofa sat against one wall beside a gleaming glass table with a Tiffany lamp that looked nice enough to be real.

  “Darcy! Some visitors for you!”

  Petrosky studied a series of black-and-white photographs on the wall that appeared to be the insides of abandoned buildings. Interesting. Perhaps they had some photos of abandoned mausoleums.


  Petrosky turned from the wall as a woman emerged from the back room, her black hair braided in neat rows. Her smile faded when she saw the badge. “Isaiah, what’s going on?”

  Isaiah shrugged his beefy shoulders.

  “We’re looking for information on Meredith Lawrence, your neighbor across the hall,” Petrosky said.

  Evans’s shoulders relaxed. “Oh thank God. I thought someone had died.”

  “She did, ma’am.”

  Evans covered her mouth with her palm.

  Morrison stepped forward, touching Petrosky’s elbow. “Do you think we should do this in private?”

  Her hand dropped to her chest. “Why?”

  “Because it concerns Mr. Keil,” Petrosky said.

  Evans shrugged. “I don’t know what you’re getting at, but there are no secrets between me and my husband.”

  “Then let’s jump right in,” Petrosky said. “Ms. Evans, were you with Mr. Keil the night before last, between the hours of twelve and three?”

  “In a manner of speaking—if you count him lying passed out in the hallway and me trying to wake him every twenty minutes as being together. I finally got Isaiah around three and he helped me get him into the house and onto his own couch. Though I think he slept through that part.”

  “Mr. Keil seemed more than a little concerned about me coming over here today.”

  “I can take this one,” Isaiah said. “The one time we spoke, I told him that he needed to get his shit together and stop worrying my wife before I came after him. I wasn’t … serious. I just hate to see her upset. She’ll sit up all night, thinking he’s going to die of an overdose outside our door.”

  “Did you know Meredith Lawrence?”

  Isaiah shook his head. “Not at all.”

  Darcy sighed. “Not really, just in passing. We talked occasionally in the laundry room, but it was mostly complaining about the laundry machines not working and stuff. She was usually coming in when I was going out to work.”

  “And you work where?”

  “I’m a photographer. I keep weird hours sometimes. Just ask my poor husband. He usually comes home for lunch so we can spend some time together.”

  Isaiah put his hand on the small of her back.

  “What do you do, sir?”

  “Molecular biologist.”

  Petrosky glanced around the apartment.

  “You want to know why we live here? With guys like Keil? Student loans. We’re saving for a house. And Darcy wants to write a book.”

  “Anything else you can tell us about Meredith, Mr. Evans? Mrs. Evans?” Petrosky watched them as the silence stretched, but there were no sudden shifts in movement, no alterations in breathing, no wandering eyes. Only slouched shoulders and furrowed brows—worry, but not defensiveness.

  “The only thing I can think of that was different is that she seemed … sad,” Darcy said finally. “Not a normal life stressor kind of thing, but real, deep sad. Something in her eyes. I take lots of pictures, so I notice that stuff. I just wish I knew why.”

  Isaiah wrapped his arm around her shoulders and pulled her to him.

  Petrosky held out a card. “If you think of anything else-”

  “Thank you. I hope you find who did it,” she said.

  Isaiah opened the door for them.

  “We’ll do our best, ma’am,” Petrosky said.

  Two more hours of door knocking gave them nothing new. Apparently, Meredith Lawrence had been invisible. Hopefully her baby wouldn’t be so elusive. If they could find the baby’s father, all the better, particularly if he felt that Lawrence took his child from him. If Petrosky ever found the person who took his little girl, he’d do worse than slice them open and paint the walls with their blood.

  Morrison clicked his seat belt. “So anyone can just drop off a baby and leave?”

  “Safe Haven laws. You leave a baby in a safe place, like a fire station or a church instead of a dumpster, and you’re not under obligation to answer questions. After a few months your parental rights are terminated and they set the kid up for adoption. Don’t they have those laws in California? You’d think surfers would be first in line to drop off kids so they could get back to playing ukulele or whatever the fuck you people do.”

  “Yeah, they have the laws. But I never played ukulele, so I never paid much attention.”

  Petrosky ignored the smile in Morrison’s voice and watched the sky roll around them, the clouds heavy and dark. He glanced at the temperature gauge on the dash. Forty-two. No snow today. Rain. Tomorrow was supposed to be warm, and when the sun came out, everyone would grin and talk about how glorious the weather was for October, as if this didn’t happen every goddamn year.

  Beside him, Morrison tapped on his phone as the church came into view. Through the windshield, gargoyles reached for the sky on stone spires above church doors that looked too massive for human use. Petrosky wondered if maybe you had to build ‘em big to invite God in, but he wouldn’t know anything about that; God had abandoned him a long time ago.

  Petrosky pulled into the parking lot and took a space in front of the main door. Their footfalls crunched against the grand stone stairs. Above them, stripes of stained glass arched toward the thunderclouds, reflecting muted blues and greens and pinks. Morrison pulled the front door open with a whoosh and Petrosky followed him in.

  The air inside burned with the sickly sweet aroma of incense. Walls and windows repeated their footsteps back to them as they walked between the rows of pews toward the altar.

  A door opened and shut behind the pulpit. A bald, rotund man with white eyebrows approached them, shoving his glasses up his bulbous nose, a white robe and long purple scarf swishing in his wake. “Can I help you gentlemen?” His voice was whisper quiet, perhaps a testament to years of sitting in a confessional.

  Petrosky flipped his badge and stuck it back in his pocket. “I’m Detective Petrosky, and this is Detective Morrison. We’re looking for information on a child that may have been dropped off here three years ago.”

  “Dropped off?”

  “Part of the Safe Haven law.”

  The man pushed his glasses up his nose. “I see. Why don’t you gentlemen follow me to my office and we’ll see if there is any way I can help you.” He turned, and they followed him through a back hallway, past ornate bronze and gold fixtures and oak walls glistening with furniture polish. At the last door, he stopped, unlocked it and waved them in.

  An intricately carved oak desk dominated the red-carpeted room. On the top corner of the desk sat gold-plated wax stamps, blotters and sheets of rolled parchment. Stained glass windows bounced chartreuse light off a gilded Jesus crucified on the back wall, wrists bleeding gold, mouth agape in an eternal scream.

  “Quite the place you have here,” Petrosky said.

  The priest lifted one corner of his mouth and settled behind his desk, pressing his fingertips together. Petrosky and Morrison sat in red wingbacks across from him. The chairs felt like satin. From the roof above, the muted rattle of rain began and intensified until it rang through the room like buckshot on tin.

  “As you surely know, gentlemen, those who leave their children with us are not required to give information, and often don’t.”

  “Understood. We’re just hoping.”

  “For what exactly? Most of these children have gone on to successful placements with adoptive parents, some within this very congregation.”

  “We’re not looking to take the child back,” Petrosky said dryly. “His mother was slit open from end to end and we have reason to suspect that the father may be responsible.”

  The priest’s jaw fell open and his hands dropped into his lap.

  “Your name, sir? For our records,” Petrosky said.

  “Ernest Bannerman the third. Father Bannerman to our parishioners.”

  “Mr. Bannerman, can we get a look at those records?”

  The priest pushed himself to standing and walked to a squat file cabinet in the back corner of the room. He
slid out the bottom drawer, retrieved several thick folders, and returned to the desk where he flipped the top one open.

  “We haven’t had many, that’s for sure. We’ve been lucky, I suppose. Only about twenty since the law came into existence.” He scanned the top sheet, turning it over on the desk. “Do you know if you’re looking for a boy or a girl?”

  “A boy. Jessie. About three years ago, late summer or early fall.”

  “Ah.” Bannerman replaced the page, closed the top folder and slid it and the second folder onto the desk. The bottom folder rasped as he pulled the top cover off. One page turned. Then another.

  “Hmm.”

  “Got something, Mr. Bannerman?”

  “No, no, not yet. We had two girls come in three years ago October. Another in December.” He flipped a page. “I don’t see anything else from that time. No boys, no Jessie. Are you certain of the year?”

  Petrosky looked at Morrison, who nodded.

  “Let’s do a quick check of the other years,” Petrosky said. “Four years up to two years ago.”

  Bannerman paged through another file, opened a third and paged some more. He shook his head. “Most of these are older boys, winter or spring, a couple more girls.”

  Petrosky scowled. “We’ll need a copy of that information for our records.”

  Bannerman’s eyes went steely.

  “I can get a warrant, but taking all that extra time won’t help me find a killer who is still on the loose.”

  “I’ll jot the information down for you.” Bannerman pulled a sheet of stationery from his desktop and a pen that appeared to be made from an animal tusk. All God’s fucking creatures. Apparently that one wasn’t worth saving.

  “Any other places around here that she could have taken him to?” Petrosky asked as Bannerman wrote.

  “Downtown there’s a fire station on Anderson that’s listed as a Safe Haven.” Bannerman made a final note and handed the paper to Petrosky, who folded the page into his pocket and stood.

  “Thank you for your time, sir.”

  “Father.” Bannerman straightened his shoulders.

  “Whatever,” Petrosky said.

  Outside the church, rain sheeted, rattling the glass and making the stark tinny sound Petrosky had heard in Bannerman’s office. He pulled the collar of his jacket tight against the wind and hustled to the car, littering the dash with tiny spots of water from his coat as he climbed in and jabbed at the heat controls.