The Body Keeper

by Anne Frasier

  She went through his albums, finally settling on an artist, placing the record on the turntable, adjusting the volume so it was soothing and ambient. “Do you want to try to sleep?”

  “Maybe a little.”

  She turned off the lamp with the red shade. Now the glow from the kitchen was obnoxious. She crossed the room and hit the wall switch. Lights from the city kept the apartment from being truly dark. If she recalled correctly, his bedroom had black drapes. Now she understood why.

  Lying on his side, Uriah scooted back and patted the small space on the couch next to him. The expression on his face was a dare he knew she wouldn’t take. There was an overstuffed chair on the opposite side of the room, but she felt the need to be closer than that. But not smashed up against him. Instead, she sank to the hardwood, her back resting against the couch, Uriah behind her.

  “The floor?”

  “I like floors.”

  Since he seemed to be feeling better, she told him about Alan Reed, about how he thought he might have been Shaun Ford, and how she’d taken a saliva sample from him.

  “That’s extremely interesting,” Uriah said.

  “I know. A man comes to town, says he might be one of the missing kids. Now he’s dead.”

  “Very unfortunate for him, but he could be just what we need to crack this case wide open.”

  She pulled a cracker from the box on the coffee table and took a bite. “I feel bad about it,” she confessed. She didn’t typically share her feelings, but the situation, Uriah’s illness and vulnerability, the night, the room, made it easier. “I don’t think there was anything I could have done, but . . . I don’t know. I didn’t take his theory very seriously. I thought it was a reach.” She finished the cracker and wrapped an arm around her knee. “He told me his girlfriend was pregnant. He had a child on the way.”

  Uriah let out a sigh. “Like I said before, I think your captivity has made you too empathetic for your own good sometimes.”

  Maybe.

  She felt a light touch on her head. Her hair was only a few inches long, but he was rubbing a strand between his fingers in what she suspected was an unconscious gesture.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “My captivity might have enhanced something that was already there. When I was little, maybe seven or eight, I remember going to an event with my grandmother. Maybe a church function, I’m not sure. But one of the big attractions was a raffle for a porcelain doll. There were a lot of women there, admiring it, talking about where they’d put it if they won. They kept entering, some buying twenty tickets or more. My grandmother bought me one ticket, just for fun.”

  She sipped his ginger ale, offered the glass to him. He took it.

  “I won. Instead of being happy, I felt horrible for the women who didn’t get the doll. Every time I held it, I thought of those women and the happiness the doll would have given any of them. I kept thinking about how I wanted one particular woman to have it, someone I didn’t even know, because I felt sure it would make this stranger happy. I don’t think that’s a normal reaction for a child to have. The doll made me feel so bad, I ended up hiding it in the closet, and I don’t remember what ever happened to it.”

  He put the glass back on the table. “And you were a kid. Kids have dolls. That’s some crippling empathy.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Was this before or after your mother was murdered?”

  “After.”

  “It’s typically the opposite. We shut down our emotions, but it’s possible her death woke up an unusually strong sympathetic response in you.”

  That was something to mull over and something she’d never considered.

  “So does that mean I should never buy you a lottery ticket?” His voice was even stronger now. Maybe the diversion had been good for him.

  “That’s a tough one.”

  “Oh, come on. If you won, would you be eaten up by guilt?”

  “I think so.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “I know.”

  They both laughed, then went silent.

  “You’re going to have to tell everybody,” she finally said. “About your health.”

  “I will. I plan to.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow. Today, actually.”

  “In person?”

  “I was thinking about an email.”

  She swung around so she could look him full in the face. From inside her head, it felt like her expression was neutral. No judging, no advice, no reaction.

  He watched her a moment, then revised his answer. “In person.”

  CHAPTER 42

  Uriah called a meeting.

  Jude was relieved to see he looked better than he had when she’d left him to check on Elliot and the boy early that morning. She’d found them sitting at the kitchen counter, eating cereal and talking about a character in a cartoon she was unfamiliar with. Elliot seemed up on it, and he was good at riffing, even with a four-year-old. Especially with a four-year-old. In the brief time she’d been home, she’d called the building caretaker and arranged to borrow a twin bed from an unoccupied furnished apartment. The boy would be leaving soon, but she wanted him to have a real place to sleep, no matter the length of his stay. Elliot would help set it up while she was gone.

  Most of Homicide gathered around Uriah’s desk for the meeting. Chief Ortega was there too, arms crossed, looking a little annoyed to have been summoned from her office. But her expression changed when Uriah shared the news of his bad health.

  “It’s not a big deal,” he assured everyone when murmurs of concern moved around the room, almost as if a silent dread were being passed from person to person. “I might have some days when I’m working from home or when I’m not a hundred percent, but it’ll be temporary.” He glossed over the surgery, telling them it was routine, then they dispersed.

  In the restroom, Jude heard someone crying inside a stall.

  Torn between leaving the person to her privacy and offering help, she knocked lightly. “Everything okay in there?”

  Detective Caroline McIntosh burst from the stall, her nose and eyes red. “Everything’s not okay. Weren’t you out there? He just told us he’s dying.”

  Jude’s stomach crashed at the word dying. “He’s not dying.”

  “You believe that act?” McIntosh turned on water, washed her hands, grabbed a paper towel. “He’s just letting us down easy. That’s all. Letting us get used to the idea. I’ve seen it before. My dad died of cancer.” She pointed in the general direction of their office. “I know that game.”

  Jude frowned. Was it true? She’d believed his reassurances, but now she wondered if McIntosh was right. A few minutes later she connected with Uriah at his desk, but before she could bring up his illness, both of their phones vibrated simultaneously. Like mirror images, they pulled them out and checked the screens. A text from Ingrid Stevenson.

  Do you have a moment to Skype?

  They walked side by side toward a private meeting room that was more conducive to video chatting. Jude sat in front of the monitor, arranging her chair, waiting for the computer to wake up. “Caroline says you’re dying of cancer and just haven’t told us.”

  “I’m not dying. Well, we’re all dying, but I’m not planning on dying anytime soon.”

  “Are you being honest with me?”

  “Two risks.” He sat down beside her. “One, if the chemo doesn’t shrink the tumor and they can’t operate. I doubt that’s an issue because the doctors think the tumor is shrinking already. Why? Because the headaches have stopped, but we’ll know more once I have another MRI. The other is that the surgery is invasive and dangerous. Chances of my dying in the operating room aren’t high, but chances of my coming out with some sort of neurological damage are. I didn’t want to talk about this now, but I’d like you to think about stepping in as head of Homicide if that happens. If I remember right, you were interested in the position at one time.”

  “I don’t care abo
ut it anymore.” He was trying to make light of something terribly serious, and she refused to play along. “It won’t happen. None of it is going to happen.”

  “Okay. Let’s just go with that.”

  Ingrid answered their call from an autopsy suite, where she gave them an update on the John Doe that had finally thawed. No new surprises since carbon monoxide poisoning had already been determined. Cell phone in hand, she moved to Reed, who was lying on a table, still in the preliminary stages, no Y incision made.

  “I don’t understand how you’re able to do the autopsy so soon,” Jude said. “He was frozen like the other bodies, and they took days.”

  “He wasn’t frozen through.”

  “Cause of death?” Jude asked.

  “I’m going to say exposure. We’ve got duct tape residue around his mouth, but I also found some on his wrists and socks. I don’t see any signs of trauma.”

  Jude leaned close as Ingrid aimed her camera at the body. “So someone tied him up and left him outside to die.”

  “That’s my guess.”

  “Then removed the bonds and tried to make it look as if he froze to death,” Uriah said.

  A few hours later, Jude decided to make a surprise visit to the gas station where Alan Reed had stopped. The girl named Jolene was working. Jude displayed her badge and pulled out the only decent photo she had of Reed, one she’d gotten online. “Do you remember this person stopping here a couple of days ago?” she asked.

  “Yep,” the girl said. “Nice guy. Kinda cute. I tend to remember the cute ones.”

  “What time was that?” Jude typically mixed in questions she knew the answer to in order to get a read on the recall and accuracy of the witness.

  The girl had it down.

  “Do you remember what he bought?”

  “Pizza slice and a soft drink.”

  Correct. “Did you engage in any small talk?”

  “We joked about how damn cold it was. He said he was from Oklahoma, and I asked why he didn’t just stay down there, at least till it warmed up. He said he was here to visit his mom. And as soon as he saw her, he was heading back home.”

  “Was he going straight to her place from the gas station?” Jude asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Thank you.”

  CHAPTER 43

  That night while the boy slept in her room in the old but new-to-them twin bed, Jude sat on the couch going through the Shaun Ford case files, opening a manila folder with his photo clipped to the paperwork inside.

  Shaun Ford had been reported missing at ten p.m. on a Wednesday in January twenty years ago. Later, Gail Ford told police he hadn’t come home from school. There were inconsistencies in reports of the clothing he’d been wearing. First, she said he was wearing a blue jacket, jeans, and a blue T-shirt, then she said the shirt was green. Not a huge variation, and not that unusual to get inconsistencies under such emotional trauma. It was one of the unfortunate things that made kidnapping cases hard to track, because the parents were understandably out of their minds.

  Jude opened her laptop and searched YouTube for content. Rather than spending hours researching newspaper archives, YouTube was now her go-to place for video research. And thanks to armchair detectives, it was becoming easier to find pre-YouTube news footage. She wasn’t at all surprised to find pages of videos on the Shaun Ford abduction from various news sites ranging from local to national, but it took one local video to trigger her own recall.

  She remembered it now, the event and the subsequent coverage. Jude had been about sixteen at the time, only five years older than the kidnapped victim himself. Maybe that’s why it had hit her hard. She remembered feeling outraged and helpless and very sad.

  She always figured she’d gone into police work because of her mother, because she’d never believed her death to be an accident. But maybe the abduction of Shaun Ford had also played a part in it. A missing child. Stranger still to think she might be working on the very case that had subconsciously directed her.

  She plugged in earbuds so the audio wouldn’t wake the boy.

  There were interviews with detectives, some now dead, some retired, whom she made a note to try to locate. There were interviews with neighbors. And especially interviews with Gail Ford. Flash-forward to recent news reports, some just days old—renewed interest brought about by the bodies discovered in the lake, with updates on how old the victims would be today. Several sketches of what Shaun Ford might look like now. None bore much similarity to the man who was now lying in the morgue.

  It took two hours for Jude to view all the videos. She sat on the orange couch sipping tea, wrapped in a down blanket, wool socks on her feet, legs crossed under her, Roof Cat sleeping on the back of the couch. Close, but not too close.

  Once she’d gone through them all, she started over with just the Gail Ford interviews, yellow legal tablet braced on one knee, making notes of location and possible time of day, the clothing Gail Ford was wearing, her emotional state, and most of all, the story she kept telling.

  So perfect, down to every single word.

  Memorized, that memorization made obvious by the sheer number of interviews with various people, compiled in one place and easy to view one after the other within a short span of time.

  Ordinarily stories morphed to some degree with each telling. New things were remembered. Some details were omitted because the teller had told them so many times before. Specific plot points dropped into oblivion. The stories were never the same. Never word for word.

  Gail Ford had scripted and memorized these on-camera interviews.

  Why? Maybe because she had something to hide.

  Jude watched the videos again, this time with the sound muted so she could concentrate on Gail Ford’s body language instead of the words. It was interesting how the lack of sound turned off one part of Jude’s brain and dialed up another. The mother broke down in every interview. Almost like a switch had been flipped. She was talking, then she was crying with no warning.

  Sound back on.

  Interesting. The breakdown was always at the same spot. Like many people who cried on camera, she apologized and turned away.

  But there was something in her eyes that Jude had seen before in someone else—the man who’d held her captive. Just before Gail Ford turned from the camera, Jude caught a familiar flicker of pleasure.

  Video could distort and magnify. It could make something more important than it was. But it could also underscore a fleeting emotion that might not be obvious in the actual moment.

  Jude’s heart broke for all those grieving parents who were questioned mercilessly about the disappearance or death of a child, but it had to be done.

  As a professional courtesy and to keep him in the loop in case they found a dot he might be able to connect, she sent an email to Paul Savoy, updating him on the Billy Nelson and John Doe cases and asking him if he knew anything about a woman named Gail Ford. And she moved Gail Ford to the suspect position—as possibly having something to do with the disappearance of her own child. And, if the person in the morgue turned out to be Shaun Ford, possibly having a hand in his death.

  CHAPTER 44

  Ten o’clock in the morning. Ten below zero, brilliant blue sky. Jude could feel the cold of the steering wheel through her thick gloves, and when she turned a corner, the unmarked car creaked and the tires crunched over the snow and ice. Beside her, Uriah gripped his coffee with two gloved hands, holding it close as he tried to hide the shivers going through him. She suspected the chemo was doing a number on his metabolism. It was hard enough to tolerate the cold when you were healthy . . .

  “You should try the hand warmers I left on your desk,” she said. “You just slip them inside your gloves. It helps.”

  “I forgot.” He squinted at the sky. “I think I can feel the sun through the windshield, though. Strange how it can be so cold, yet the sun still feels warm.”

  “Doesn’t seem right, but I’m not going to complain about it
.”

  They were heading to Gail Ford’s house. It was the morning after Jude had viewed the YouTube broadcast footage on the disappearance of Shaun Ford. She’d briefed Uriah and related her suspicion of the mother. It didn’t take any convincing; he seemed to trust Jude more than not when it came to her instincts about people. It hadn’t always been that way.

  She pulled to a stop in front of the house she’d visited not all that long ago to tell Gail Ford the body in the lake wasn’t Shaun. One-and-a-half-story cottage, green vinyl siding with a dormer. The front door had a little rounded roof, making it look cute and inviting. The element of an unannounced visit could work in their favor. She just hoped the woman was home.

  “What do we know about Ford?” Uriah asked, unlatching his seat belt.

  “Single. She was married when her son vanished, but, as often happens, the loss of a child led to a strain on the marriage, followed by divorce. Her ex died not long after. She’s had a lot of jobs, never seems to stay at any very long. Waitress. Bartender. Clerk at Target.”

  She got a text and checked it before getting out of the car. A message from Paul Savoy, thanking her for keeping him in the loop.

  Intriguing. I might have to visit the Twin Cities again soon. No, I don’t know Gail Ford.

  At the house, Uriah knocked and Jude stood back, watching windows for moving curtains or signs of activity. Someone not answering the door or someone slipping out the back. Neither of those happened. The door opened, and Mrs. Ford looked surprised but not alarmed. Understandably worried? Yes.

  Uriah glanced at Jude. His brief faith in her suspicion was fading. He said hello, and Jude explained why they were there. “We’re investigating something that might or might not be connected to your son’s kidnapping case.”

  “Come in quick.” Mrs. Ford motioned with her hand.

  At least one good thing about the cold weather? You got invited in. Nobody was going to stand with a door open, talking to people on a front step. Inside, they removed their boots and left them on the rug near the door. In thick socks, they padded across the living room, tossing hats and gloves on a roughly cut coffee table that looked homemade. Maybe Mrs. Ford was into crafts. Jude and Uriah sat down on the couch, their backs to the large picture window.