Death in Dark Places

by Drew Franzen

  Needing no further encouragement, Burke scrambled from the cot. Without thanking Dojcsak for coffee, he made for the bathroom to shower and to shave.

  …

  Dojcsak sat erect, back stiff in the functional but uncomfortable wood chair behind his desk, coffee mug in one large fist, telephone receiver in the other, cigarette burning from tobacco to ash in the ceramic ashtray by his elbow. The ashtray had been a gift from his daughter, Jenny, inscribed with her initials and the greeting, “Merry Christmas Daddy, 1990”, her fourth and perhaps—to the girl—final happy Christmas. Shortly thereafter, Luba had been diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, the parent’s reinforced devotion to the youngest child cheating the eldest of what consideration they had to spare.

  For Edward and Rena Dojcsak, Luba’s illness had devoured Jenny’s brilliance as a black hole might a star.

  Sunlight filtered like yellow ribbon through the smudged glass panel of the six-pane window. Airborne particles of dust and debris wandered restlessly in and out of the shaft, invisible one moment; exposed like guilty schoolchildren the next. The sun glittered from the glazed surface of the colorful ashtray. Intended originally as a candy dish but Dojcsak partial to tobacco rather than to sweets, he ultimately utilized the memento as a receptacle to accommodate his most filthy habit. On her rare and infrequent visits to the station, Jenny said nothing to discourage her father’s ill-considered treatment of the keepsake, but her expression on seeing it for the first time being used this way suggested she thought it lamentable.

  The air was heavy in the small office, musty and close like the smell of old socks; too early in the season yet to open windows and to take advantage of the refreshing and premature spring breeze? With the boiler conspiring mysteriously with an imperfect thermostat to belch out great gusts of converted natural gas, the heat in the second story room was, for Dojcsak, intolerable. He drank water from a cooler, two glasses, hoping to slake his thirst.

  Three minutes after placing his first call of the morning, Dojcsak was connected to District Attorney Jimmy Cromwell, the man ultimately responsible for determining the disposition of the Missy Bitson investigation. He offered his condolences.

  “I know it’s a small town, Ed. You have my sympathies.” Dojcsak thanked him. “You also have my support. There’s no reason for me to believe you won’t do a thorough job or to call in the BCI,” he said, officially handing off the case to Dojcsak rather than the New York State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation.

  Cromwell did offer the services of the State Police to assist in questioning and the Forensics Unit to assess physical evidence; Dojcsak accepted. He asked that Cromwell initiate inquiries into transients, rapists and pedophiles (or otherwise disreputable individuals) recently paroled or released from nearby correctional institutes and assigned to halfway homes and possibly at large or newly arrived to the area.

  “Do you suspect an outsider?” Cromwell asked. Dojcsak did not. “Then don’t waste your time, Ed. Look closer to home.”

  Dojcsak assured Cromwell that he would—without exception—pursue all possibilities.

  The post mortem was scheduled for ten that morning. The District Attorney would have his own people attend, as protocol required someone should.

  “Keep me in the loop, Ed,” he said. It was less a request than a demand. “No surprises.” Dojcsak promised to stay in touch and ten minutes later, he replaced the receiver.

  After speaking with Cromwell, Dojcsak removed an 8 ½ by 11-inch sheet of lined paper from a desk drawer and retrieved a ballpoint pen. In the top margin, from left to right horizontally across the page, he wrote in capital letters:

  MOTIVE/MEANS/OPPORTUNITY

  The argument could be made that anyone might have reason to kill Missy Bitson or, more significantly, have no reason at all. In Dojcsak’s mind it amounted to the same thing. The general lament, Who could do such a thing? works in reverse when applied to the murder of a child. After all, children are natural born victims aren’t they, always at the bottom of the proverbial shit rolls down hill, hill? Kids are the canvass on which big people are capable and often times only too willing to project their anger, frustration, humiliation, impotence, and fear; past and present, perceived and real.

  Ed Dojcsak instinctively understood that anyone and everyone could do such a thing.

  In truth, kids today—girls especially, and especially teenage girls—did little to mitigate the possibility of being victimized, dressing provocatively as they did in tight halters and low-slung jeans, leaving little to the imagination, conveying a message of willingness and availability if not in character, in appearance, sharing much too much of their thoughts and their bodies on social media.

  Dojcsak didn’t advocate the imposition of Burkha-style headwear or gowns, but did lament this creeping abandonment of propriety and shame. What use was saying, No with your words when the rest of you cried out, Yes? (Privately, Dojcsak thanked his good fortune. With his own daughters, at least, he did not have this concern.)

  As to means, the crime scene investigation uncovered no evidence of a weapon; no entry wound from either gunshot or blade: Missy had been manually dispatched. She was a slightly built girl; it followed that even a slightly built person might have committed the crime, female or male.

  Opportunity? Simple. Physics 101: acknowledge the impossibility of a body being in two places at one time and eliminate who it can be from whom it cannot. Dojcsak didn’t feel an obligation to produce an eyewitness, only a reasonable suspect lacking the benefit of an irrefutable alibi and against whom the circumstantial evidence was compelling.

  To Ed Dojcsak, the murder of Missy Bitson appeared to have the elements of an open and shut case.

  “Morning, Ed.” Sara Pridmore arrived unnoticed. Dojcsak neatly folded the paper on which he had been writing, placing it in his shirt pocket. “Grocery list?” Sara asked.

  “Of sorts,” Dojcsak said, lifting his shaggy brows.

  Sara contemplated him from the doorway, coffee mug in one hand, the other resting casually on the butt of her holstered nine-millimeter standard issue automatic. As always, when on duty, Sara dressed in a uniform of standard issue dark blue trousers, white jersey (with an even number of ten brass buttons, Dojcsak noted, six vertically aligned through the center of her torso, two on pockets over each breast, and two more used to fasten the epaulets on Sara’s shoulders), thick-soled, spit-polished black walking shoes and a peaked baseball style cap with the insignia of the Warren County Sheriff’s department sewn over the bill. Her blond hair trailed through an opening at the back of her cap, like a horse’s tail.

  Pridmore jogged daily and exercised religiously. By consuming a diet limited to fruit, vegetables, and protein, (grudgingly relenting to a craving for carbohydrates only one week of each month) she maintained a child-like physique. Less than two years out of NYSU and less than one on the job, Dojcsak also understood, even if Sara hadn’t said, that Church Falls was not her first choice for a career in law enforcement and would not likely remain her final destination. Having been rejected for lack of openings by the State Police, he knew her to be on a short-list there, with an application also pending at the FBI.

  “Coffee’s great.” Sara raised her mug in a mock toast. “Not too strong, not too weak. How are you doing, Ed? Have you slept? Have you had breakfast, or is that it?” She indicated the cigarette smoldering in the ashtray by his side, removing her cap and fastening it through a utility loop in her trousers. Dojcsak braced himself. “You look like shit, Ed, like ca-ca,” Sara said, not entirely without compassion or justification.

  The white of Dojcsak’s eyes ran red with fatigue, as if he wasn’t sleeping or was sleeping too much, his cheeks stained purple-pink with the evidence of excessive drink. In the year since Sara’s arrival, his belly and upper abdomen had thickened noticeably and he was smoking more heavily. She approached the desk, snatched Dojcsak’s cigarette and crushed it in the dish. She paused to sip coffee while a
defiant Dojcsak ignited another.

  “What are you doing to yourself?” she asked rhetorically, sounding too much to Dojcsak like Doctor Henry Bauer. “I’ve watched you carry on this way for a year. Are you going to stop, or will you follow Luba into an early grave?”

  Sara regretted the comment immediately upon making it but the truth of her words prevented a credible retraction.

  Dojcsak said, “You sound like my doctor; or my wife.” (In fact, Rena had stopped asking or caring about his condition. Dojcsak had overheard the conversation the previous day between Rena and Kate.)

  Since joining the police, Sara Pridmore had insinuated herself subtly and uninvited into the private affairs of her superior officer, dropping by to visit unannounced and unasked to inquire on the progress of his youngest child. She had also adopted a protective attitude toward Dojcsak’s eldest, the responsibility that in their preoccupation with the health of Luba, her parents had forsaken.

  Sara first met Jennifer Dojcsak in a back alley, at two in the morning, face buried between the thighs of the black, pierced, and tattooed Jordy Bitson, incoherent with alcohol or worse, possessing no identification and refusing or unable to give her name. It was not until Dojcsak arrived to retrieve his daughter later that evening that Pridmore became aware of the connection.

  Dojcsak imagined Sara wanted to save the world. He appreciated her enthusiasm but wished she’d get on with it and leave him and his family to themselves.

  “Seriously, Ed, you look like shit.”

  “We all have our crosses to bear, Sara.”

  “Should I be worried?”

  “Not yet,” he said, “I’ll let you know.” Then, “Are you finished?”

  “For today. Have you spoken with the victim’s mother?”

  “Only with Eugene.”

  Though Eugene had appeared overwhelmed by the death of his child, suspicion from the community would fall immediately upon him. This is to be expected, Dojcsak explained to Sara. Rather than defend against it, they should move quickly either to prove or to disprove his guilt.

  Burke had finished cleaning himself and joined Sara, sitting opposite Dojcsak. He sat with long legs outstretched, heavy soled “biker” boots laced on his feet, and arms folded across his broad chest, confident in and seemingly content with his casual appearance.

  He observed Pridmore, the fine blonde hair pulled back severely into a tail behind her head, the blue eyes arched over by a fluff of barely visible brows and the small but full mouth. Her commitment to full dress blues did little to enhance a figure that, while slight, Burke knew to be well toned. Many times he’d watched her jog along the river, powerful legs churning like pistons, clad only in short, tight, tights and leaving little to the imagination of a partner who’d already crafted in his mind a well defined image of how she might appear naked.

  Within weeks of her arrival, Burke had made an early advance. She’d cut him off with an abrupt, “You’re not my type, Chris.” He had replied, “Not now maybe, but eventually.” She said, “Not now, not ever,” leaving Burke to wonder over what type of man possibly could be, given that he thought he was all to any woman a man should be.

  Dorothy O’Rielly arrived precisely at eight, disengaged the call forward option on the telephone line and without being prompted began to ready the office for what she correctly perceived would be an escalation of activity from a level of subdued, to frantic.

  “A murder,” she lamented. “Here. Can you imagine if we lived in the city?” she said, unaware that with the killing of Missy Bitson, in Church Falls, the per-one-thousand population rate of murder among children had just exceeded that of New York.

  “The Bitsons are expecting us,” Dojcsak said after Dorothy had left. “I’m not looking forward to it, but it must be done. Sara, you ride shotgun with me. Eugene claims the family spent yesterday afternoon home, together. We’ll corroborate his story with the wife. They have a second daughter as well.”

  “Two,” Sara confirmed.

  “Yes,” Dojcsak agreed.

  “One fifteen, still living at home, the other in her twenties, living in New York,” she added for Christopher’s benefit.

  “How do you know this?” he asked.

  She smiled. “Small town, Chris. People talk. Apparently, she’s the reason Eugene Bitson and Maggie McMaster married in the first place.” Sara retrieved the coffee pot, pouring refills for all three.

  “It was gossip at the time,” Dojcsak recalled as if the memory were recent. “More like scandal. Rich white girl gets pregnant by black boy. Her father disowned her.”

  “Leland McMaster,” said Sara with a sigh and a shake of her head.

  Dojcsak said, “You know him.” It was not a question.

  “Who doesn’t? Bought the Jimmy from his dealership,” Sara replied, referring to the candy-apple Chevy pick-up truck she had purchased in the fall, taking advantage with hundreds of others in an attractive zero percent financing option. “Never again; creepy, as if he were molesting me with his eyes. Thought he’d creamed himself when I leaned over to check under the hood.”

  Dojcsak frowned. “He’s in his seventies, Sara.”

  “He’s a pervert, Ed. It’s not something you grow out of, I don’t think.”

  Dojcsak said, “Sara, you speak with the girl, the sister. I’d do it myself, but these days, with things the way they are, it wouldn’t be appropriate. Contact the child in New York, though she’s not a child anymore. Speak with her by telephone. If you think it’s necessary take a day to interview her face to face. For the time she’s been away, I can’t think she’ll be useful, but you never know.” Dojcsak rubbed his chin energetically. “For now, we concentrate on the victim; who she knew, where she went, what she did.”

  “She wasn’t raped?” Sara asked, seeking confirmation.

  “We won’t know until after the post mortem,” Chris replied. “From the look of her, I’d say not.”

  “She was the daughter of Maggie,” Dojcsak said. “You know what they say. The apple never falls far from the tree.”

  “Meaning what, Ed?” asked Pridmore.

  Dojcsak shrugged. “I’m only saying what we already know, Sara. She lied to her parents, about how she would spend the afternoon. She was well-developed.” Dojcsak recalled how Missy Bitson’s wet tee shirt clung to her breasts. “We should conduct our inquiries with an open mind.”

  “So long as it’s not a dirty one.”

  “You’re right. I apologize. I’m not passing judgment, but she was a pretty girl, provocatively dressed for her age. No bra, her belly showing to here”—he indicated with a gesture of a hand cutting across his upper abdomen—“and her navel pierced. You can’t ignore her behavior simply because you’re uncomfortable with it.”

  “It’s the style, Ed, the way she dressed; not a reflection on her character or her behavior.”

  “Maybe so, Sara,” Dojcsak said, “but it’s indicative of it. Recent studies prove me out.” Dojcsak went on to quote an article he had read recently in the New York Times. It stated young girls who are inclined to pierce their bodies are also predisposed to shoplift, use drugs and engage in pre-marital sex. “It’s a sad fact of the times that you really can judge a book by its cover.”

  “Are we investigating the victim or the perp?”

  “It’s murder, Sara; we investigate both.”

  “We’re not talking about a sex-trade worker, Ed.” Sara checked herself. “And if we were, it wouldn’t matter. Times haven’t changed that much. It’s not common for thirteen-year-olds to be having sex.” Dojcsak and Burke simply stared. For emphasis, Sara added, “Not willingly.”

  “We know she left her cousin early,” Burke offered, “to meet with someone. Maybe she was snatched on her way to, or from, her rendezvous? By a stranger or a transient?”

  “No,” said Dojcsak. “I don’t buy it. That would suggest a spontaneity I’m not willing to accept. She knew her killer.” He repeated
, “I think she knew her killer.”

  “The father,” suggested Burke as if he’d given it some thought, or no thought at all.

  Dojcsak said, “We’ll have a better idea when we interview the family.”

  “Sure,” Burke said, “but can we trust them to tell us the truth?”

  “There are enough hoodlums in this town that could be responsible,” Pridmore suggested, still rankled but willing for now, at least, to concede Dojcsak’s point. “Just ask the shop keepers that have had their stores trashed over the past four weeks. They might even be inclined to put forward a few potential prospects.”

  Teenage vandals—to most townsfolk and even to the local police, this was the presumption—had begun a campaign of random destruction on the south side of town. During the previous month, both public and private property had been vandalized. What had begun as vulgar epithets sprayed with paint on alley walls, had escalated to include rocks through plate glass windows in the retail shops fronting Main Street, the toppling of graveyard headstones at the Episcopal Church, and the overturning of civic monuments throughout the town. The insurrection had culminated two nights ago with a fire deliberately set in a recently vacated downtown tavern. Dojcsak suspected arson, but would await the final determination of the County Fire Marshall prior to issuing an accusation.

  The tenant, a half-breed Seneca Indian by the name of Ire (pronounced eerie) Bomberry had been charged recently with pedaling soft drugs through his children to their high school friends. Bomberry had been recently expelled from the Oneida Indian Reserve. Ire was what one Tribal Elder referred to as a “recidivist”, prone to illegal gaming and bouts of excess drink, which given the state of affairs, generally, on the reserve (with a rate of teen suicide and drug abuse more than twice the national average) was damning testimony indeed.

  The blaze had been stubborn and difficult to contain; undetected, it might have spread to engulf an entire block. Given the sorry condition of the neighborhood this might not have been a bad thing, if not for its potential, also, to take out a few dozen citizens with it.