by John McMahon
He took it out of his wallet, and I saw how good the fake was. It had a professional laminate like a real driver’s license. That hard coat and thickness. A holograph of the state seal of Georgia in the far background, with a ripe peach in front of it, a miniature image of the kid’s face across the fruit.
We’d just had a new license design come into play in the last year, making the I.D. up to date. Even future-forward.
“Have you been arrested before, Mr. Meyers?” I asked, reading his name off both licenses.
“No,” he said, his voice scratchy. “My parents are gonna kill me.”
“Well, let’s see what we can do then,” I said. “You wanna tell me about the woman back there?”
“My friend Leo gave me her email address. Her name is Maria. You send her a picture, and she makes a perfect . . .” He stopped then, and I nodded.
“If I were to let you go . . .” I said.
“That would be awesome,” the kid answered.
“You don’t want to have this on you, though.” I held up the fake I.D. “I mean, it’s illegal.”
“Keep it.”
I hesitated, mostly to scare him.
“Okay, I’m gonna hold on to this, Dave,” I said, lifting up the I.D. “Problem is—you tell anyone I went easy on you, I gotta come find you. Y’understand?”
The kid nodded, and I told him he was free to go.
Then I turned and drove back to the woman’s address.
When I parked again, I saw Maria Evans locking up her front door and moving over to an attached garage off to the east side of her place. She started sweeping the dust out of the room. Then left and went back into her house, leaving the small door to the garage ajar.
I left my truck and crossed the street.
Entering the apartment complex from the next building over, I moved in between the two structures. Each building looked to contain three apartments, one on the ground floor and two smaller ones on the second level. All around the white stucco edges were blackberry lilies, planted in small boxes. Marvin had these in his yard, and I remember him keeping Jonas away from them. The flowers were pink with spirals of red in the leaves, and they were poisonous.
I came from behind apartment number eight and threaded my way back toward the open garage door.
Inside, a small graphics studio was set up. A Mac hooked to a pile of hard drives. A large industrial Epson. And a laminator, about twenty inches wide.
Along the far wall, blown up poster-size, were images of licenses from Georgia and Alabama.
On the table were three envelopes. Each with a driver’s license in it bearing a birth year of 1998, making each kid magically twenty-one years old this year.
I took a couple pictures of the place and of each I.D. before stepping out and moving around to the front door. Knocking on it.
The same woman opened the front. She’d ditched the robe for cutoffs and a yellow Georgia Tech tee.
“Can I help you?” she said.
“Are you Maria Evans?”
“Yeah.”
I flashed her some tin and introduced myself. Told her I was following up on a previous tenant.
“What’s the tenant’s name?” she asked.
“John Adrian,” I said. “You two both had the same address here. Number one.”
“Yeah.” She nodded. “Adrian managed the place before me. I lived in number three for five years. Then the owner asked me to take over when Adrian left.”
Fidelity, Remy would say. So far this checked out with what I already knew was true.
“What’s the owner’s name?” I asked.
“What’s this about?” she asked back.
I almost smiled. Innocent people, when asked a question by a cop, rarely responded with another question. But the guilty . . .
I turned my head in the direction of the garage. Its door was still open, her illegal I.D.-making lab fifty feet away. She didn’t want me looking over there, and her mouth started moving.
“It’s a management company,” she said. “FJF Investments.”
“And who is John Adrian to you?” I asked. “Did you live together?”
“No.” She smiled. “You got this all wrong. Adrian was the guy who first rented to me when I was in number three. He managed the place until I took over.”
“So you two weren’t a couple?”
“I’m fifty-six, Detective.” She laughed. “Adrian must’ve been twenty-nine back then. Thirty tops.”
Back then, she said.
“So he lived in number one before you?” I asked. “He managed the apartments?”
“If you call it that,” she said. “The place was a mess. No one could even live in number one back then.”
I waited for her to explain.
“There was this whole mold abatement thing going on in number one and number eight. Which are here—and the unit behind me. You couldn’t live in this building at all,” she said. “So when I knew him, Adrian lived in the basement below number four.” She pointed at the structure next door to us.
“What did you think of Adrian?”
“He was a scuzzball. Drank too much. Had a bunch of degenerate Mexican friends.”
I stared at her.
“Hey, I’m Mexican,” she said. “I can say that.”
“You know where Adrian lives now?” I asked.
“Nope.”
“Forwarding address?”
“He’s been gone almost two years, Detective.”
The sound of an airplane was in the sky. Far away, but in our silence, we could hear it.
“Still, I’d like to look around,” I said, knowing this was a trigger for her to talk more.
“Adrian would come home drunk,” she explained. “Gamble with friends from the liquor store he worked at. Make noise. If you complained about it, you’d never get shit fixed in your apartment. I changed that culture.”
“With the ownership?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“Is that Lauten Hartley?” I asked.
She cocked her head then. “Do you want to come inside? I can get the management company on the phone.”
“When’s the last time you saw Adrian?”
“The day he moved out,” she said. “He didn’t tell me shit about how to run this place, and I was pinging him with all sorts of questions. He left me with this leaking septic thing to handle.”
I was still standing out front. “He lived in that building?” I pointed to my right.
“Yeah,” she said. “But there’s nothing to see anymore. There was a septic tank issue. The management company literally filled in the basement, which was part of his apartment. To keep the smell down.”
“With what?”
“Dirt,” she said. “Like I told you, I was transitioning to manager then. So I was just a resident during half this time, but we were all happy about it.”
“Happy about what?” I asked.
“They house-bolted the place. One of those old brick septic tanks got punctured or something while they were under that building.”
“I’m not following you.”
“There was a bad smell,” she said. “Where Adrian lived. Under the house. It got filled in with dirt.”
“A smell like what?” I said. “Feces? Manure?”
“More like rotten eggs,” she said. “There were flies. That’s what I remember most.”
“Show me.”
43
Maria grabbed a set of keys, and we moved across the small apartment complex. As she walked, she pulled her cell phone from her back pocket.
“I’m gonna need to call the management company if I unlock this for you, Detective,” she said. “I’ve seen TV and all. Warrants and such. I think you need a warrant to be looking around here.”
“Traditionally that is what I’d need,” I said. “Are they pretty involved? The management company?”
“Intimately,” she said.
“Mr. Hartley himself?”
“He shows twice a year maybe.”
“So he’d object then?” I said. “To having a manager run—say—an illegal graphic design business in the garage? Making fake I.D.’s for underage kids?”
Maria stopped cold in her tracks, a foot from the door. She cocked her head and her grayish-brown hair clumped to one side.
“What do you want?” she said.
“Your full cooperation.”
She stared at me, at first expressionless. Then a half smile. “Well, lucky for us, I’m in the cooperation business.”
Maria unlocked a side door that led under the building next to hers, and I pointed for her to go in first. She reached a hand inside and flicked on a light.
“Leave your cell phone by the door,” I said, and she did.
The place was a box, maybe twenty by fifteen. It was dry-walled and painted in a butter-yellow color and had wood laminate floors. To my right was an open door with a bathroom and a standing shower. A toilet bowl and a small pedestal sink.
I glanced around the room. A couch was turned up on its side, a space heater beside it. The air smelled stale but clean.
“Adrian lived down here?” I asked.
She nodded. “He had it done up nice, but it was temporary, while the mold got fixed.”
“I thought you said it was all dirt?”
“Next room over,” Maria said, pointing at a single thirty-by-eighty-inch door on the far side of the room. “This structure is built on a hill,” she said. “So that’s the real basement. This is the basement apartment.”
“Open it.”
The door swung toward us, and I pointed my flashlight inside. It was another box of a room, but this one had a concrete floor, and the walls only went up about halfway. Above that, you could see the crawl space under the building. Could stare in at the wooden studs that protruded from the foundation and held up the structure above us.
“Y’ever come down here?” I asked.
“Not much of a reason to,” she said. “But my old place was . . . over there.” She pointed. “Above, I mean. If we could keep walking.”
But we couldn’t keep walking, at least not without ducking our heads, because dirt covered half of the concrete floor and the room itself. At first, on the side by the door, the dirt was an inch high. But as you walked across the giant substructure, the dirt got thicker and you had to scrunch down, so as not to hit your head on the bottom of the building above. Eventually the dirt reached all the way up to the studs.
“Over there was where the smell was.” She pointed at an area piled with three or four feet of dirt.
“So what happened to Adrian when they closed this up?”
“He left.”
“Just like that?”
“He didn’t seem to care.” She shrugged. “Maybe the owner paid him some money. He was packed already.”
I pointed back at the main room. “So John Adrian lived out there—in the finished room?”
“For a few months, yeah.”
“And this dirt area was what?” I asked. “Before it got filled in.”
“Kinda like storage, back then, if you owned or ran the place. Machinery. Plumbing and electrical supplies. I mean, there wasn’t a big-ass pile of dirt here back then.”
“Where do you store those things now?”
“They put one of those Tuff Sheds in when I took over,” she said. “Out by the alley.”
I crouched, close to the ground. There was no smell, except if you counted the musty stink of dirt. “Bring me a couple shovels.”
“Of course.”
I pointed to her cell on the ledge outside. “Don’t go calling anyone.”
She came back about two minutes later, a pair of garden shovels in hand. The kind with a strong neck that you can put your foot into.
“Should we be digging?” she said. “Like—is it safe?”
“Well, if it’s an old septic tank that got filled in with sludge or soft dirt, there’s no issue,” I said.
I made the shape of a box with my hands. “I don’t know what you were told, but a lot of the really old septic tanks are made of brick. Someone hits ’em doing construction and it opens up a hole. The bricks fall in. If that’s what happened and they put dirt or sludge down there, that would seep up any smell pretty quick. But the reality is—most of these tanks are so old that everything in ’em already seeped down into the ground or the soakaway decades ago. The real problem is they’re dangerous because they’re empty holes under the ground.”
I took one of the tools and started digging then, right where she’d pointed. I went for five minutes, moving in a grid pattern and digging holes about three feet down each time. The ground wasn’t like the hard dirt that filled my backyard, but instead loose material. Soft and easily lifted.
“This would go faster with two people,” I said.
She grabbed the other shovel and we both dug, working in silence. After twenty minutes, the dust was so thick in the air that I could hardly see.
It also became clear that there was no concrete subfloor in one area, for a rectangle of about eight feet by ten feet.
Tink.
Maria stopped moving. She stared down at the noise. Which came from her shovel, buried about three feet into the ground.
“Back up,” I said. I took a pair of gloves from my back pocket and got down on my knees, using my hands to push away the dirt that was near the head of her shovel. Then I pulled the tool from the ground and reached in.
My hands grabbed at something hard and oblong, with a bulbous end. I didn’t pull the object out—just followed it—making rough measurements that told me it was about two feet long.
“What is it?” she said.
My hands sifted more dirt, and I felt a curvature. Kept moving south with my hands buried two feet deep until I came to what I was looking for.
And I pulled a human skull from the dirt.
“Oh shit,” she said.
I sat back with my butt against the backs of my shoes. The smell. The flies. The ex-manager who didn’t mind moving out. There was never any septic tank issue down here.
Things lined up in my head. My next move.
“You’re gonna call the coroner’s office,” I said. “I’m gonna give you a direct line to the head dog. So you can talk straight to her.”
“I assume I was down here alone?” the manager speculated. “Needed some dirt for a . . . planter or something.”
“That’s a good story.”
“That you were never here?”
“Right,” I said.
“And the management company?” she asked.
“Let the police call them,” I said. “But even the call to the coroner to get things going. Wait five hours after I leave before you make it.”
“Okay,” she said.
“And, Maria,” I said. “I’m gonna hold on to that I.D. I took from the kid. But let me give you some advice on your business.”
She stared at me.
“You got a big trunk in your car?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Big enough for that Mac and a couple hard drives? ’Cause cops might start looking around after they find a body.”
“Done,” she said.
I held up the skull. Pointed at a hole in it that I could tell was made by a .45. “When you talk to the coroner,” I said, “make sure you tell her that the skull you found—it’s got a bullet hole through it.”
Maria swallowed.
We went upstairs then, and I washed up in her sink.
Maria’s place was cute. Her living room was decorated with pictures of northern G
eorgia that I guessed she took herself. Amicalola Falls from the footbridge. The head of the Appalachian Trail near Ellijay. And downtown Dahlonega around Christmas.
I was exhausted from sleeping in my truck and wanted to get home. Grab a couple hours of rest before the banquet honoring my role in ending the school shooting.
Maria grabbed a bottle of rum and took a shot. “Is that John Adrian’s body down there?” she asked.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“So it’s someone he killed?”
“More likely,” I said. “Do you remember exactly when they filled that in?” I pointed at the building.
“December of that year,” she said, referring to two years ago. “A couple days before Christmas. Maybe the twenty-first or twenty-second.”
Which jibed perfectly with the robbery at the Golden Oaks on December 12. Christian Pelo probably met them out here around the eighteenth. By the twenty-first, the smell might’ve made the place pretty ripe if Pelo hadn’t been buried right.
“Did Lauten Hartley show up for that?” I asked. “When they filled in the dirt?”
“Yeah,” she said. “He was here.”
“With Adrian?”
“No, Adrian had left town a couple days before that. Some family thing. I remember I was officially manager, even though I didn’t know shit yet and wasn’t taking over ’til January.”
“So just Hartley by himself?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No, he came with this other guy. A guy he comes with still once in a while. He’s the one who wheel-barrowed a lot of the dirt down there.”
“Muscle?” I asked, but she stared. Unclear as to what I was saying.
“A bodyguard,” I clarified.
“No,” she said. “I mean, he’s muscular, sure. Blond guy. Younger than Hartley. They work together. You can tell they’re familiar.”
“This guy got a name?” I asked.
Maria shrugged. “He doesn’t talk much, but—I think Hartley calls him Iron or something. They come here together.”
“Iron?”
“It’s not that,” she said. “But I can’t remember what it is. It’s a nickname, not a real name.”
I dried my hands and had her recite what she had to say and do.
