No Woods So Dark as These

by Randall Silvis

  DeMarco said, “Keep your head down, Sonny. And keep this conversation to yourself. If you make a phone call, we will know. Do you understand?”

  “Yeah yeah.”

  “We’ll be in touch soon.”

  Jakiella walked faster and muttered, “Tell me something I don’t fucking know.”

  Fifty-Five

  “Listen to this,” Jayme said. She was seated beside Flores in a booth in the Water’s Edge restaurant, overlooking the marina on the southwestern shore of Conneaut Lake. DeMarco sat across from them, finishing his omelet. Jayme had ordered a croissant and fresh fruit, and Flores, who had really wanted a couple of bagel egg sliders, had followed Jayme’s lead and now picked at the last chunks of pineapple on her plate and wondered if it would be gauche to soak up the fruit juice with the rest of her croissant.

  Only a few boats remained docked at the marina, mostly pontoon party boats and a couple of sport fishing boats. These too would soon be hauled out and stored in one of the local storage yards or, for those who could pay more, inside a huge steel building. The water was too cold now for swimming and jet skiing but tourists and retirees and those who owned a weekend home along the shores of the lake still wandered around on sunny days, drawn to the glittering water and the memory of more festive times.

  “She posted this one last Saturday night,” Jayme continued. “It’s called ‘Mirror Image.’” And she read from Sivvy en Ruine’s Facebook page:

  These fingers could be my grandmother’s

  the ones I stole from her grave to wear

  and wrap around the bowl of a pipe

  the ones I will leave behind for no one.

  This mouth I stole from my father

  so that he could never curse at me again

  his dirty little whore lips plump with poison

  nobody wants to kiss.

  These eyes I stole from ages past

  blinded to beauty by the film of smoke

  that wreathes my head which is

  also not my own, though whose

  I do not know.

  All this stolen self I take with me

  through the valley of the shadow of death

  where I fear all evil, where

  I walk hand in hand with this ugly stranger

  lost in the evil we both have become.

  Neither Flores nor DeMarco spoke. They shared a look.

  “We need to get this girl some help,” Jayme said.

  * * *

  A phone call to Boyd and a ten-minute wait got them the address for Amber Sullivan’s parents. Another thirty-five minutes passed before the State Police SUV and DeMarco’s black sedan pulled to the curb in front of the Fredonia residence. Only Mrs. Sullivan, a thin, pretty woman with dark half-moons under her eyes, was at home. She stood in the doorway behind the locked screen door and considered the smiling Hispanic woman in the state trooper uniform on her front porch, plus the older man and woman waiting below the steps.

  “What do you want to talk to her for?” Mrs. Sullivan asked. “Did she do something wrong?”

  “We have no reason to believe that,” Flores said. “We just have a couple of questions we would like to ask.”

  “About what?”

  “I can’t discuss that, Ms. Sullivan. I’m sorry. Is Amber at home or not?”

  “She’s not. She got a phone call about an, I don’t know, an hour ago? We were down in the basement doing the laundry together. Next thing I know she’s going up the stairs. Five minutes after that she yelled down that she was going out awhile. Last thing I heard was the front door slamming shut.”

  “Do you have an idea where she might have gone?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “No idea at all? Any friends nearby? Did she leave on foot or did somebody pick her up?”

  Four seconds ticked past before the woman spoke. “Is she in trouble of some kind?”

  Flores knew the meaning of those four seconds. “She might be. We need to find her and find her now. So if you have any idea where she is, it is in her own best interests that you tell us.”

  Three more seconds. Then Mrs. Sullivan pulled a cell phone from her hip pocket. “I texted to ask where she was going.”

  “And did she respond?”

  Amber’s mother held the phone out to her.

  Flores read the text: Going up to the lake awhile ttyl. “Conneaut Lake?” she asked.

  The older woman nodded. “She has a friend up there she visits sometimes. I don’t know anything about him. Not even his name.”

  Flores returned the phone. “Thank you,” she said, and turned away.

  “Can you let me know when you find her? Let me know she’s okay?”

  “Absolutely,” Flores said.

  The three investigators walked quickly to their cars, then paused between them. DeMarco said, “Jakiella called her after we left him. Maybe even drove down and picked her up.”

  “They could be back at his house by now,” Jayme said.

  Flores had her own phone out. “I’ll call Conneaut Lake PD and have them watch the house. Make sure Amber and Jakiella don’t go anywhere.”

  Jayme said, “Better have them go inside. From the sound of that poem, she’s already suicidal. And now, with the cops closing in…”

  To Flores, DeMarco said, “Use your flashers. We’ll be riding your tail.”

  Fifty-Six

  By the time they arrived back at Sonny Jakiella’s house, Amber Sullivan had been taken away in an ambulance. Sonny was handcuffed in the back seat of a police car, sleeping with his head laid back, mouth open.

  Acting on Flores’s phone call, a pair of local officers had knocked on Jakiella’s door but received no response. His vehicle was in the driveway, the hood still warm. All doors on the residence locked, all curtains drawn. The senior officer then kicked open the back door. They found Jakiella on the living room sofa, Amber nonresponsive and curled up on the floor between the coffee table and the sofa, heart rate 26 bpm, respiration negligible. On the coffee table were a half-empty pint of Jack Daniel’s whiskey, a still-burning candle, a plastic straw, and a square of aluminum foil black with burned residue. In a small ziplock bag in Amber Sullivan’s jeans pocket were three tabs of Ativan.

  “We’re monitoring his vitals,” the local officer told them. He and a female EMT stood outside the open end of the remaining ambulance. Inside, a male EMT sat beside Jakiella, who lay strapped onto a gurney, an oxygen mask over his face. “As soon as we get the green light, we’ll take him to Saegertown for booking on the drug charges. You guys are looking at him for that triple homicide in Mercer County?”

  “Both he and Amber Sullivan are persons of interest,” DeMarco said.

  “Well, you know where to find them. If the girl makes it, she’ll go to Saegertown too.”

  Flores said, “Would you mind if we take a look inside the house?”

  “Have at it,” the officer said. “We bagged everything we need.”

  “His vehicle too?”

  “Sure, it’s unlocked. We took a dime bag out of the glove box. Not much else in there but a lot of fast-food wrappers and empty beer cans. Plus about a hundred pictures of his kids. You’ve got to give him points for that.”

  The thirty-minute search of the house produced nothing of relevance but for a computer folder loaded with photos of Amber. In none was she looking into the camera. Jayme said, “My guess is she wasn’t even aware that he was taking them.”

  Flores said, “What do you bet his phone’s loaded up with them too? Pictures of Amber and his kids. Judging from what’s in the house, those are the only kind of pictures he took.”

  “Maybe the only people who mattered to him,” Jayme said.

  “Some of the backgrounds might be inside Reddick’s house,” DeMarco added. “We need to get copies of those.
”

  When they finished, only the patrol car remained parked at the curb. One of the local officers had departed in the ambulance with Jakiella for the Crawford County Correctional Facility in Saegertown, but the other remained to secure the residence. DeMarco asked him, “Any chance your guys could seize that laptop inside for us? It has photos and maybe emails relevant to our investigation.”

  To Flores the officer said, “Shouldn’t be a problem. Have your station commander contact the chief.”

  “Thanks,” Flores said. “We’ll need Amber’s and Jakiella’s cell phones too.”

  Jayme said, “How did the girl look to you when she left here?”

  “Honestly?” the officer said. “Like a ninety-pound corpse.”

  Fifty-Seven

  “Sorry to have used up one of your days off,” DeMarco said. He handed a cardboard cup of coffee to Flores and another to Jayme, then picked the remaining one off the counter.

  “Hey, I’m glad to be here,” Flores answered. “I’d work every day if they’d let me.”

  They crossed to a table at the window. Jayme and Flores again sat side by side; DeMarco set his cup on the table but did not sit. “Anybody want an apple fritter or a muffin? I have a lot of free points on my Sheetz card.”

  “Not for me, thanks,” Jayme said, and Flores added, “Yeah, my stomach’s kind of jittery from all that. I probably shouldn’t even be drinking another coffee.”

  DeMarco nodded, slid a chair away from the table, and sat. Amber Sullivan was in the cardiac/coronary care unit and still too unstable to be questioned; they would try again later before heading home.

  “Good work today,” he said to both Jayme and Flores. “Everything is falling into place finally.”

  “Boyd’s going to be green,” Flores said.

  Jayme smiled. “We’ll let him go through the photos and emails. Make him feel useful. Men need to feel useful sometimes,” she added with a wink to DeMarco.

  He was already ticking off other things to get done after they spoke to Sullivan and Jakiella, if they were permitted to do so. Had all of the tasks been related, he would have been able to file them chronologically in his mind, but several were only tangentially relevant to the investigation, others not at all, so he told himself to simply recognize each one for now so that tonight or better yet in the morning he could make a list and prioritize his obligations: two voicemails from Ben Brinker, probably a status report concerning any news on Khatri’s movements and maybe a reminder about the upcoming sentencing hearing for Connor McBride; a text from Chase Miller, probably an apology or plea to be brought back into the fold; a message from Joe Loughner, most likely a drunken wtf’s going on down there.

  DeMarco also needed to get Hero scheduled for his post-op checkup; needed to contact Laraine and get her to file for divorce; wanted to check in with Rosemary O’Patchen for any word from the editor about Tom’s book of reflections and observations, see how the editor felt about DeMarco’s and Jayme’s selections; get both his and Jayme’s cars scheduled for overdue oil changes or else buy the filters and oil and do it himself; and ask Jayme to call Georgina to find out how she was handling life in the women’s shelter…

  God, there were so many people in his life suddenly. A population explosion. How had this happened?

  “Ground control to Sergeant DeMarco,” Jayme said for a second time.

  He looked up from his coffee cup. Both Jayme and Flores burst out laughing.

  He smiled sheepishly. “Still waters run dry,” he said.

  Jayme said, “Daniella would like to know how we do it.”

  “How we do what?” he asked.

  “This,” Flores said. “What we did today. I mean…I do enjoy my work, I really do. But there’s another part of me that has to wonder. Does it ever get to you? The kind of people we have to deal with? It never changes, does it?”

  “You mean like Sonny Jakiella?” DeMarco asked.

  “Him and everybody like him. I mean, we get one body in this life, right? Yet everybody we deal with seems hell-bent on screwing it up with one kind of poison or another.”

  DeMarco shrugged. “When you’re right, you’re right.”

  Jayme said, “It’s hard, I admit. But every once in a while, you know, there’s somebody like Georgina.”

  “You’ve been thinking about her too?” DeMarco asked.

  “I feel like we’re sort of responsible for her now. Like we sent her away to camp and I need to call her and see how she’s doing.”

  He had to smile. A couple of mother hens, that’s what they were turning into.

  “Can I ask you guys something else?” Flores said. “I’m not even sure how to ask it, but…how did you two find each other? And how do you keep being so good to each other? How do you, I don’t know… How did you get what you have together?”

  DeMarco said, “She chased me until I ran out of breath and passed out. And when I woke up, she had me in handcuffs.”

  Jayme chuckled. “There’s some truth to that.”

  “I wish I had what you have,” Flores said. “I must be doing something wrong.”

  He felt that he had to say something, but what? She was looking for words of advice, an older man’s wisdom. But hell, everything good that had ever come his way had come not because of who he was or what he had done but in spite of it.

  Time to steal from somebody smarter. “There was this ancient Roman philosopher,” he told her. “Also an emperor for almost twenty years. Marcus Aurelius. And he said this: ‘A rock thrown in the air, it loses nothing by coming down, gained nothing by going up.’”

  “Okay,” Flores said. “And what does that mean?”

  “That a rock is always a rock, whether it’s lying on the ground or sailing through the air. And you are always you, whether you’re all jazzed up or feeling low. So just keep being what you are—which in your case is a good, kind person and a damn fine trooper—and everything will work out.”

  She smiled, but weakly. “Do you really believe that?” Then looked at Jayme. “I mean I know what you guys have been through lately. I know it’s been… There have been some painful times recently.”

  Jayme nodded. “And still painful.” She reached across the table, laid her hand atop DeMarco’s. “But we’re still here, right, babe? Up or down, we’re still here.”

  DeMarco smiled. Then shared the smile with Flores. Said, “There’s your answer, I guess. Keep on keeping on. That’s all anybody can do.”

  Fifty-Eight

  In the lobby outside the cardiac/coronary care unit, they waited for permission to enter Sully’s room. Flores sat in a dark-green Briar chair across from Jayme and DeMarco on the sofa, but soon wished she hadn’t chosen that seat. Not only were the squarish arms of the chair uncomfortable, but there was no reading material available and she had nowhere to look but at DeMarco and Jayme, their hips touching, or the elderly man who stood in the corner, head down, his lips moving as if he were praying over the cardboard cup of coffee held close to his chest.

  She wondered whom the old man had come to visit. Probably a wife, maybe a dying parent. His clothes looked slept in, wrinkled and baggy on his thin frame. DeMarco had his eyes on the tile floor as Jayme leaned close and spoke too softly for Flores to hear. He answered with a little nod, then touched Jayme’s hand with his fingertips.

  Everybody has somebody, she told herself, and wondered who would visit her if she were dying. Her mother, of course, but who else? Boyd and DeMarco and Jayme, sure, and some of the other guys too, certainly Captain Bowen, but so what? They wouldn’t come out of love for her, not the kind of love she wanted. No, she was more like Sully herself than any of them. More or less on her own. If she were ever shot or in a car accident or dying from some disease, she would be dying more or less alone.

  And then she thought about Georgina too, another lonely girl. Dropped off in a
shelter and left to fend for herself. And what about Suzi and Lady D? If they had been loved by someone, really and truly loved, they would never have ended up as they did. Would not have given in to such evil.

  What was that Bible verse she had learned so long ago? From the book of John, she remembered. We know that we are of God, and the whole world lies under the sway of the evil one. Under the sway. Why would she think of something like that now? At eight or nine years old, however old she was at the time, she had said, after first hearing the quote, “So that means the evil one is stronger than God.” No, she was told. God is stronger than anything. He gives you free will. The right to choose.

  But that didn’t seem right either, not back then and not now. It meant that God didn’t really care. He didn’t care about Sully, didn’t care about Georgina, didn’t care about Lady D or Suzi, didn’t care about her.

  She stood and turned quickly toward the door, said, “Got a bad case of dry mouth. You guys want anything?”

  Jayme and DeMarco answered no, thank you, but she was already moving, blinking hard, telling that first sting of tears don’t you dare, don’t you dare.

  III

  Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast.

  —William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

  Fifty-Nine

  It was nearly 8:00 p.m. before DeMarco, Jayme, and Flores were granted a few minutes in Amber Sullivan’s room in the cardiac/coronary care unit. Amber had been connected to a biventricular pacemaker, a heart monitor, a glucose drip, and an oxygen tube, yet her chances of survival were deemed low owing to the damage done to her heart by ten years of drug use. Amber’s mother had been seated at her daughter’s bedside since early evening, softly weeping, and the attending nurse was reluctant to evict her. DeMarco convinced the nurse that a few minutes with Amber might lead not only to the arrest of the individual or individuals who had supplied her with the drugs but also to those responsible for the brutal murders in Otter Creek Township. The nurse spoke to Amber’s mother, who came briskly out of the room to seize DeMarco by his shirtfront and say, “You get him! You put him in jail and don’t you ever let him out!”