A Long Way Down

by Randall Silvis

  Griffin nodded. “Actually it was the day after the first search. And it was just him that time.”

  Jayme asked, “Sounds to me like he knew we had been here, and that I saw the notebook was gone. How would that have happened?”

  Griffin said nothing. His jaw was set, teeth pressed together, lips slightly puckered as if his mouth held something foul his throat refused to swallow.

  DeMarco said, “You were all staying in touch with each other, right? All four of you?”

  “We were sworn to secrecy about the group. It was like us…I don’t know.”

  “You against the world,” DeMarco said.

  “I guess.”

  Jayme said, “So Gillespie was kept informed as well?”

  “Not by me,” Griffin said. “Kaitlin probably.”

  Jayme asked, “Do you have any idea what kind of information was in the missing pages?”

  Again he shrugged. “She took a lot of notes. Probably everything that had anything to do with the course and, you know, the group. She was really into it all. After Mom died…Sammy needed something, I guess. Dad was a mess, and not even here most of the time. And I was…just a brother. I mean we were close but…I guess that wasn’t enough.”

  “So you joined the group because of her?”

  “She wanted me there. I doubt it was Gillespie’s idea.”

  The grief was tangible on his face now, and in his sagging body—as visible to both DeMarco and Jayme as a darkening of the sky. She said, “So…did your group have a name?”

  “Voluntas. It’s Latin for ‘will,’ as in free will.”

  “And the purpose of the group? Was it just ostension, or something more?”

  “I don’t know that word,” he said.

  “A kind of performance. An acting out of a legend or myth. For its own sake.”

  “Of course we have a purpose,” he said.

  “And what is it exactly?”

  “To exercise free will. To stop being puppets. To wake up to the fact that everybody with any power or authority is trying to keep us asleep.”

  DeMarco said, “And by everybody, you mean…?”

  “The government. Religion. The media. Wall Street, Madison Avenue, you name it. Their goal is to keep us ‘unaware and compliant,’ just like Hillary Clinton said. So that we won’t notice the chem trails, or the black ops, or the UFOs, or how the NSA and Homeland Security are eavesdropping on everything we do, or how Google and Amazon and Facebook have turned us all into data they can sell to the highest bidder.

  “Reality is a lie,” he told her. “And the only way to shatter that lie is to stand up against it.”

  And in so doing, DeMarco thought, you became Gillespie’s puppet. But he kept the thought to himself. He said, “I admire people who think for themselves, Griffin. I admire nonconformists. But if I were in your position, I might ask myself how much of a nonconformist a tenured professor can be, especially when his agenda is to manipulate several young people for his own gratification.”

  Griffin held DeMarco’s gaze for a few seconds, then looked away, first into the sky, and then, again, at the ground. He said, “It’s all just a bullshit matrix of lies and illusions. There can be no freedom until we destroy it.”

  “You keep saying we,” DeMarco told him. “But don’t you think that true nonconformity is an individual job?”

  The boy turned his head, looked DeMarco’s way. “What do you mean?”

  “If you put five, ten, twenty people in a group, what do you have? People who are conforming to each other. Groupthink. Herd mentality.” He put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Think for yourself, Griffin. Follow your own heart. That’s the only group you need.”

  For a while, nobody spoke. DeMarco slid his hand off Griffin’s shoulder, and wondered if his advice sounded as phony to the boy as it did to his own ears. Did he listen to his own heart, or to some less reliable voice?

  He held that question in his mind until he became aware of a bird singing in a nearby bush. Its song consisted of a repetition of two tweets in a row, the second pitched lower than the first, both trembling with vibrato. He looked around until he located the bird. A robin. So common, yet somehow anomalous now.

  “One last question, Griffin,” he finally said. “Do you think Connor would be capable of hurting your sister?”

  The young man was leaning forward, arms clutched around his stomach. The towel had fallen off his chest and lay over his arms, and his eyes were wet with tears. He said, “There’s nothing you could tell me about him that would surprise me.”

  Before leaving, DeMarco asked for and received Griffin’s promise that he would keep their conversation confidential. Then they departed by walking around the side of the house to the circular driveway out front. Along the way, DeMarco slipped the cell phone from his pocket and read the text he had received earlier. It was from Detective Olcott. DeMarco showed the text to Jayme. Dodge Charger registered to Darlene Lubich, it said. Connor’s aunt.

  III

  Come dance with me, the darkness says,

  and we’ll prowl these streets for what we crave,

  that startled gasp, that taste, that scent—

  sweet sustenance for another week,

  another month of dull routine—

  that smothered cry, that strangled scream.

  Come dance with me, the darkness says.

  —from “3 a.m.,” Thomas Huston

  It was raining the night I did Hufford. I first noticed him in line at Subway, but I didn’t pay any attention to him, just wanted to pay and get my sandwich and get back to the car before the rain started. And I made it, just barely. So I’m sitting there eating my sub, I’ve got the engine running to keep the air conditioner going, and the wipers flipping back and forth because the rain’s pouring down in buckets by then. There’s thunder booming and lightning popping all over the sky. It’s cool to watch, and the smell coming through the vents is good too, clean, like the storm is washing away all the dirt and stink of the city. I could have sat there happy all night, just enjoying the storm and my sandwich.

  But pretty soon here comes Hufford out of the store. It’s kind of comical the way he’s hugging his big bag of subs close to his chest and holding the other hand over his head as he goes hotfooting it down the street. But then the voice says, Go get him, and I say What? No. He’s too big. And the voice says, Go! Now!

  So I lay my sub up on the dash and wheel the car around and drive up beside him while he’s jogging the way big guys do, sort of heavy-footed and running on their heels. I put my window down and say over the pounding of the rain, Hey, man, get in. You’re going to drown out there. He stops and bends over and looks in at me, and I point to my sub up on the dash, and then it’s like we’re brothers or something, I guess, because he goes loping around the front and pops open the door and throws his fat wet self into the seat. He starts thanking me and buckling up and telling me where to turn two blocks ahead, but that’s about all he gets to say.

  I had the new place picked out ever since the thing with Venus, when I knew I had to do another one, so that’s where we went. The stunner didn’t work as good on him as it did with Brenner, all that extra cushion to get through, but the storm and the black night worked to my benefit, putting a hush over everything, and later with the cutting as well. Washed us both clean, is the way I like to think of it. Though I didn’t much appreciate him getting my seat all wet. I had those three extra subs of his though, one turkey half sub, one meatball half, one spicy Italian foot-long. Kept me fed for the next couple of days.

  I am Erebus, son of Khaos.

  Seventy-Six

  While waiting for a warrant to impound and search the Dodge Charger, if and when it could be located, personnel from the sheriff’s office determined that the vehicle was not equipped with an optional tracking system. “It’s going to be
close to where he lives,” DeMarco said. “And probably not in a public parking garage. I’m thinking a covered building of some kind. Privately owned. Within a ten-, fifteen-minute walking radius of the apartment.” He didn’t want to question Victoria, Connor, or Darlene Lubich, whose name was on the title, as to the vehicle’s location, because doing so might give Connor a chance to hide the car or clean out its contents.

  A deed search was conducted to determine if any nearby properties were owned by the Lubiches, who lived in a $1200/month town house in a gated community in Vienna Center, approximately fourteen miles north of downtown Youngstown. Their town house came with a two-car garage, which presumably housed their other two vehicles, a Jeep Wrangler and a Nissan Altima. Darlene McBride Lubich’s most recent arrest for solicitation was in 2012; Joe Lubich’s two arrests, one for pimping and pandering, the other for possession of marijuana with intent to sell, were both in that same decade. The deed search came up with zero properties owned by the Lubiches.

  “Word on the street,” Olcott said, “is that Darlene caters to a more discreet clientele these days. She’s forty-two years old but claims to be thirty-three and apparently gets away with it. Joe works at TopNotch Industrial in Warren, general warehouse duties, makes $16 an hour.”

  “So that’s $32,000 a year gross income,” DeMarco said. “A little over $20,000 after taxes. But they own three late-model vehicles and live in a fairly pricey neighborhood. Darlene must be keeping busy.”

  “The drug task force suspects that Joe is still in the weed business. Maybe other drugs too. At what level, they don’t yet know.”

  “So why buy their nephew a vehicle to drive?” Jayme asked. “Unless maybe he’s dealing for Joe?”

  “It’s a good bet,” DeMarco said.

  “You know,” Olcott said, “old man McBride was into a lot of bad stuff back in the day. I wonder…”

  He did another deed search, this one for Bertram McBride, now deceased. And came up with two hits. “A little gas station out on 62,” Olcott informed them, “and a house in McGuffey Heights. Both still in his name.”

  “A lot of abandoned homes in McGuffey Heights,” DeMarco said. “And maybe ten minutes by Uber from Connor’s apartment. About the same by bicycle.”

  Olcott grinned. “I know that gas station. It’s still operational. Always wondered how a little place like that could stay in business. Let me make a quick call to a guy in Drugs, see if they have that place on their radar. Then I’ll grab a deputy and we can go have a look at the house.”

  “Fascetti won’t miss you?” Jayme asked.

  “He’s in court all day. Aggravated murder case in Austintown.”

  DeMarco said, “No luck on Costa’s girlfriend yet?”

  “Not a trace. We have a lifer in OSP, though, who claims to know what happened to her. He’s holding out for a fifty-five-inch flat screen with cable hookup, which isn’t going to happen anytime soon.” Olcott reached for his cell phone. “I’ll send a car out to keep watch over the place in McGuffey Heights while we wait for the warrant. If you guys want to go downstairs for some coffee, or to get a bite to eat…”

  “Coffee sounds good,” DeMarco said. “Call us when you’re ready to roll.”

  Seventy-Seven

  One hour and six minutes later, warrant in hand, Olcott pulled his car to the curb outside an abandoned two-story house in the McGuffey Heights neighborhood. DeMarco parked behind him. The municipal police car that had been parked farther down the street, with two uniformed officers inside, now came forward to park facing Olcott’s vehicle.

  Like other neighborhoods in the city, McGuffey Heights was marked by numerous run-down buildings, razed and overgrown lots, neglected streets and sidewalks. Some of the buildings had fallen in on themselves; others looked as if they had been hit by a bomb. Traffic was sparse, with few people coming or going.

  The entire neighborhood was quiet, but with a different kind of quiet than the late-summer-afternoon quiet when kids are worn out from their boisterous day, and mothers are starting to think about what to make for dinner, and fathers are not yet home from the office. There were as many abandoned homes in this neighborhood as occupied, and those who lived in the occupied buildings did so because they were too old or poor to start over somewhere else, and so they kept to the dimness of their rooms throughout the day, watching pirated cable TV or listening to a radio with the volume turned low, and came outside for the evening’s coolness only when the air was dark and the despair on their faces did not show.

  After releasing her seat belt, Jayme asked DeMarco, “Are we going in armed?”

  “With a one in seventeen chance in this neighborhood of being a victim of crime?” he said, and reached over her knees to pop open the glove compartment. “Damn straight we are.”

  “Do we need to get an okay from Olcott first?”

  “He’ll tell us if he wants to.”

  They stepped outside the car, fitted their pocket holsters and weapons into place. In his left hand DeMarco held a small but powerful flashlight similar to the one Olcott carried. The detective, walking toward them, saw the weapons but made no mention of them. “Officer Blanchard says there’s been nobody in or out.”

  “Every window is boarded shut,” Jayme noted. She studied the driveway. “When was the last time it rained?”

  “Two nights ago,” DeMarco told her. “Started around midnight, drizzled most of the night.”

  “So somebody went into or out of the garage that night. Or else those dirty tread marks would have been washed away.”

  Olcott, accompanied by Blanchard a few steps behind, went onto the front porch. “Careful,” he told the officer. “Some of these floorboards are rotted.” He pounded on the front door while Jayme waited in the yard by the side windows, and DeMarco stood at the rear corner of the house, watching the back door. No sound of any kind came from inside the house. A second officer stood in the driveway.

  DeMarco moved onto the little rear porch, just a stoop with a shingled awning, and tested the rear door. The screen door had been torn off its frame, splintering the wood, but a cheap hollow metal door remained. The door was locked but it hung crookedly from the hinges, and DeMarco could feel the sloppy fit of the latch moving in the strike plate. He gripped the knob with both hands and pulled the door hard to the right while turning the knob, and this time the latch slipped out of the strike plate and the door swung open.

  He went to the side of the building and called, “Back door is open!”

  Olcott came off the porch and crossed around to the rear. To Jayme he said, “Blanchard’s up front. Can you help Officer Simms keep an eye on the back and the garage?”

  “Will do,” she said, and slipped her .380 from the holster.

  At the back, Olcott said to DeMarco, “It wasn’t locked?”

  “It was,” DeMarco said with a sheepish grin, “but it opened anyway.”

  Olcott raised his eyebrows, appraised the door for a moment, then turned on his flashlight, pulled his weapon, and stepped inside. DeMarco followed suit.

  The kitchen was dim and empty and smelled of mold. All appliances, including the sink and most of the cabinets, had long ago been dragged away. The linoleum floor was buckled and scarred and smeared with dried mud.

  They moved into the next room, and the one after that, and the one after that, every room stripped bare and odorous with mold, especially the living room with its dank carpet. Water stains below the windowsills showed where rain had leaked in through the broken windows and past the plywood. Olcott said, “Nobody has lived here in a very long time.”

  They moved up the stairs with Olcott leading the way. Slowly down the hallway, floorboards creaking. DeMarco checked each room on one side of the hallway, Olcott the other side, their flashlight beams swinging back and forth, briefly painting every corner. Empty. Bare. Dark. The air thick and stale and warm.


  “Nothing,” DeMarco told Jayme five minutes later, after he and Olcott had emerged from the building and relocked the rear door. Both men ran a hand over their faces and necks as if they had walked through a curtain of cobwebs, and now turned their attention to the detached garage.

  The only windows on the garage were near the roof, too high to peer inside. The metal side door was windowless and firmly secured with a relatively new lock. The single stall garage door was solidly in place as well.

  DeMarco said, “Let’s pop that side door open and see what we’ve got.”

  Olcott said, “I think you’ve popped enough doors for one day. I’ll call a locksmith.”

  “C’mon, man,” DeMarco said.

  “We break it open, we have to secure it afterward,” the detective said. “Did you happen to bring along a hammer and nail and a couple pieces of lumber? And if there’s nothing inside, who gets the bill for repairs?”

  “Are you always such a killjoy?” DeMarco asked. “I used to think you were the fun guy.”

  “Ha,” Olcott said. “Fascetti wouldn’t have even let you in the house.”

  It took the locksmith a long twenty-five minutes to arrive. During those minutes, Olcott struck up a conversation with the two municipal police officers, Blanchard and Simms. DeMarco and Jayme stood side by side leaning against the side of his car, their feet on the curb.

  “What if the car isn’t there?” she said. “You think they’ll put out a BOLO?”

  “Doubtful,” DeMarco said. “Olcott and the uniforms probably wouldn’t even be here if not for Ben.”

  “He trusts your instincts.”

  “I wish I did.”

  “I trust them too,” she said.

  DeMarco shrugged, shook his head. “All I know is that nobody removes, how many, fourteen sheets of paper out of a girl’s notebook for no reason. We need those pages.”

  “What if he burned them?”

  “Then we’re done. Nowhere to go. Ben can deal with Gillespie however he sees fit, but as for the triple homicide, we’ll be no further ahead than Fascetti is. And if Ben doesn’t pull the plug on us, maybe we should.”