The Darkest Place

by Daniel Judson

  Nothing for a moment, just a still night and dark, empty streets. Then a car appeared on Meeting House Lane, coming from the opposite direction of town, from the east. Miller knew by its headlights that it was Roffman’s unmarked sedan. He watched it roll right through the stop sign and turn onto Lewis. As it passed the hospital parking lot, Miller caught sight of Roffman behind the wheel, or Roffman’s silhouette, anyway. He was sitting up straight, rigidly, his eyes forward. Miller felt a chill. A world full of monsters, he thought then. In one way or another, one shape or another. He remembered what Abby had told him the other night, the talk she’d heard in town, and what that creepy professor, the old German man who was a regular at her deli, had said to her. Dark forces. Maybe he had meant that just to scare Abby, to have perverse fun with her. Maybe it was something more, maybe this old man knew something, or suspected something, maybe he had seen something. Maybe he was just old and knew the world. Whatever the reason, he had spoken aloud what everyone in town knew, consciously or otherwise, but would only whisper. They knew it without being told by those who were paid to protect them, protect their lives and property. This very knowledge, and what it would bring, was exactly what the cops hoped to avoid by covering up, by misdirection. It wasn’t anything new. Miller had seen it, to one degree or another, before. The East End was a getaway for the rich. Years ago it was nothing more than a summer town. But now there was year-round trade. There was even more money to lose. Everything depended on those who came here from elsewhere. Would anyone really rush to this place if the truth of what was really killing young men got out?

  Miller thought about them, about the three dead boys. They were only a few years younger than he. He hadn’t known any of them, had only read their names in the papers and didn’t know anyone who knew them, only people who claimed to know people who knew them. Sooner or later, though, that distance would disappear. Southampton was a small town. Sooner or later one of these boys would belong to someone he knew, or be someone he knew. If he hadn’t done something, done whatever he could, what would he have to say for himself then?

  He wondered then what, if anything, Clay had found in the chapel, if it had been as Colette Auster had said it would be. His mind drifted and he thought about her, the way she had looked at him, her voice, everything she had said. From there he thought of the man he had seen in the van, the man’s ugly face, and the black Jetta that sped away from Miller’s crashed truck. He felt now that he was maybe on the verge of understanding these events and people, on the verge of seeing a connection, any connection. Soon enough, maybe, he’d read through the files and everything would begin to converge.

  Roffman’s sedan had disappeared from sight by the time Miller looked back at the road. He waited with his motor running for Barton to return. He placed his palm on the window beside his head and felt the cold coming off the glass. Someone was out in this same cold, this same darkness, hunting young men, killing them, leaving their bodies to be found. Why? Who? A monster, yes, clearly. But there was good news in that, or a kind of good news, anyway. Miller knew how a monster thought, knew about the dark things that drive us, thirsts that can’t ever be quenched, or that we tell ourselves can’t ever be quenched.

  I can think like you, he thought. I can think like you and understand you and because of this I can stop you. I can do this, do this much.

  Ten minutes later Barton’s Volvo turned from Meeting House Lane onto Lewis Street, then made the right-hand turn into the hospital parking lot and drove straight toward Miller’s beat-to-shit pickup. A minute later both cars were pulling out of the lot, Barton heading toward her apartment, and the man waiting there for her, Miller toward a warm and well-lit place to sit and read the bulky files that lay now on the seat beside him.

  He didn’t want to go back to his house and risk waking Abby, so he drove instead to his shop on Main Street. In the small back room, among the boxes of magazines to be returned the next day to his distributor, Miller turned on the dim desk light and sat down and opened the file. It was at least four inches thick, but he read through everything—the police reports, the coroner’s preliminary and final reports on the first two boys, as well as the preliminary report on the Foster boy. He read, too, all the handwritten notes made in margins by the detectives, and the transcripts of interviews, or what passed as interviews, anyway, that the detectives had conducted in the last forty-eight hours. He read it all carefully but quickly, knew what to look for, what to pay close attention to and what to skim over. He had grown up hearing the jargon and the technical talk, could read a report better than probably half, if not all, the cops on the force. It wasn’t that he was smarter, simply that he had been reading reports since he was a kid, first sneaking into his father’s den and looking through them for the thrill of it, and then later with his father’s approval and guidance, the kind of inevitable passing down of a trade that happens between some fathers and sons. When you do something for a long time, for as long as Miller has been reading reports, then you’re generally better at it than someone who has, relatively speaking, only just begun.

  When he was done reading, Miller leaned back in his chair, touched the bandage on the side of his head with the tips of his fingers, then rubbed his eyes with the heel of his palms. He needed a moment, deep inside he needed it. What he had read was disturbing and chilling. He hadn’t expected it to be otherwise but knew he needed to shake that off before going any further. These files were more than just a collection of facts, some bland, some gruesome. They represented the sudden ending of three lives. More than that, though, more disturbing, they reflected, both subtly and not so subtly, the agenda of those in power, the people for whom, though not officially, the police in this town really worked.

  Except for the occasional squeaking of his chair as he leaned back, Miller’s shop was quiet. Dead quiet. It was as if the world outside had disappeared entirely, swallowed up by the winter darkness. He sat at his desk for a while, thinking, sorting through the facts, considering the conclusions, though of course there weren’t many of those. Miller knew now everything the cops knew, everything that only the cops knew. Unlike them, though, he wasn’t bound by what any higher-up wanted. He didn’t have to take into consideration any bigger picture, didn’t have to keep in mind local economics, wasn’t required to balance anything at all against the lives of three boys. This wasn’t anything new, the law of the land catering to a wealthy few. Miller had seen it before, many times. Gregor had fought it most of his life. But the fact that it was as old as the world itself didn’t make it any less distasteful. Miller’s father had been part of that machine, a facilitator of corruption. He had done what the wealthy had wanted him to. But that was his father. Corruption was what got him killed in the end. Miller loved his father, despite what he did. Loved him then and loved him now. So much had come out, had been written about in the papers, after his death. No one had any idea at all what he was into. But it was who he was, the role he played, the position he filled in a certain time and place in history. The man was not by any means all bad—few people are. But Miller wasn’t his father, didn’t have to care about anything but doing what he could to stop a monster, a shadow casting a darker shadow that was not unlike the one Miller himself had once cast.

  He had promised Clay that he would only do what he was told to do from now on, not show his usual “initiative.” But that all seemed pretty much irrelevant now. This had all but fallen into Miller’s lap, fallen right out of the night sky. He had only gone to Barton to learn what he could about the Water’s Edge in order to better protect himself and Abby, if possible, to see who he had pissed off. Clay could hardly blame him for that. Well, anyone else could hardly blame him for that. Clay would probably find a way. Still, Miller knew he couldn’t keep to himself what he now knew, regardless of how it would look, how Clay and Gregor might perceive it. Miller needed to share this information with them, not to gain favor, but simply because it would be the wrong thing not to do so. And they could just go f
uck themselves if they had a problem with it. He’d do this on his own if he had to. It would go a long way to erasing his karmic debt.

  Miller leaned forward and flipped the pages of the file over so he was looking once again at page one. He figured he’d read over it again, or parts of it, after he made his call and while Clay was on his way over from wherever he was right now. He reached for the phone, dialed Clay’s cell. It rang two times, then Clay’s hefty voice said, “Hello.”

  “It’s me.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “What about?”

  “Can you meet me?”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m at my shop.”

  “What do you need?”

  “I’ll tell you when you get here.”

  “Are you in trouble right now, Tommy?”

  “No.”

  “Then I’m kind of busy.”

  “I’ve got something I think you should see. It’s important.”

  Silence, then: “Meet me by Agawam Lake in five minutes.”

  “Actually, I think you should come here.”

  “You know the deal, Tommy. You’re no good to us if people see us together.”

  “Just meet me here, Reg.”

  “I don’t have time to argue about this.”

  “Neither do I. I’m not dragging what I have all around town. You’ll understand why when you see it.”

  There was another pause, a few crackles of static in the line this time. Then Clay said, “You’re a pain in my ass, you know that, right?”

  “Trust me, the feeling is more than mutual.”

  “I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “You’re in town?”

  “I’m right around the corner.”

  “What are you doing there?”

  Clay hung up. Miller placed the receiver back onto the cradle, walked through his dark shop to the front door. He only had to wait a little over a minute before he spotted Clay hurrying through the cold toward the door. Miller unlocked it, let Clay in, then closed the door again and spun the deadbolt.

  “What’s the big emergency?” Clay said. He brought in a burst of cold air with him. It clung to the fabric of his expensive coat, almost radiated from it.

  “It’s back here,” Miller said. He led Clay to the back room.

  “How’s your head?”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Your shoulder?”

  “It hurts.”

  “I told you I’d call you if I found anything out, Tommy. You were supposed to wait for me to call.”

  “Yeah, well, things don’t always work out the way you want them to, do they?”

  “I don’t have time to play around, Tommy.”

  “Me neither.”

  He led Clay to the desk. They stood side by side. Clay looked at Miller, then down at the open file. He only needed a moment to realize what it was. He stared at it for a time, then looked at Miller.

  “How did you get this?” he said.

  “A friend.”

  “Is it stolen?”

  “Does that matter?”

  “It might.”

  “It’s not stolen, not in any sense that you need to worry about. You’re going to want to read it, Reg. When you do, you’re not going to care how I got it.”

  “We have to do things by the numbers, Tommy. How many times do I have to tell you that?”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t have to do things by the numbers. That’s the beauty of being me. It belongs to the friend who gave it to me. It wasn’t stolen.”

  Clay looked at Miller again, then back down at the file. He stood still for a moment, regarding it, thinking. Finally he took off his coat, tossed it onto a nearby box, and sat down in Miller’s creaky chair. He picked up the first few pages, started reading. Miller walked to a stack of three cardboard boxes on the other side of the small room, sat on top of it. After Clay read through a few pages, he started flipping ahead, looking, Miller assumed, for specific reports, the important ones, the ones that would give Clay what he’d need to accomplish, what he had been hired to do.

  “You’ve read all of this?” Clay said.

  Miller nodded. “Yeah.”

  “And you understand it?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Can you summarize it for me?”

  Miller got up, walked to Clay, stood beside him. He leaned down, was shoulder to shoulder with Clay, like a tutor, went through the pile, locating the pages that mattered, pulling them out and setting them to one side.

  “This is the coroner’s report on the first boy, Jason White,” Miller explained. “Nineteen years old, from Hampton Bays, found in Mecox Bay ten weeks ago. Five foot seven, one hundred and forty-five pounds. Healthy, well-fed male. The report indicates that no marks of any kind were found on the body, and there was nothing unusual in the toxicological screens that would lead the coroner to believe the death was anything other than by accidental drowning. You have to understand, most coroners are very careful about the conclusions they draw. They tend to be conservative. This coroner is clearly no exception. The most obvious answer is usually the correct one for these guys, and since most drowning deaths are accidental anyway, and without any reason to think otherwise, without the investigating officers giving any indications that the death might have been suspicious, the coroner doesn’t bother to look any further than past the obvious cause of death. Also, determining whether someone did or didn’t drown isn’t as easy as you’d think. Usually the conclusion is reached by exclusion.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The circumstances of death are often more important than any physical findings. If a coroner can’t find any signs of trauma or natural disease to explain a death, and the body was found in water, then he’ll probably conclude that the victim drowned. There’s nothing that can be done pathologically that will definitely say one way or the other.”

  “I’m not following, Tommy.”

  “Even the presence of water in the lungs isn’t proof of drowning because lungs will fill with water when someone has a heart attack or overdoses from certain drugs. So someone could die of a drug overdose and his body can get tossed in the water, and though the coroner will find the drug in the tox screen, there’s really no way of determining how exactly the victim died, the drugs or the water. Same thing with a heart attack.”

  “But where does the water in the lungs come from?”

  “We’re made of water, Reg. A failing heart causes increased pressure on the lung vessels, which causes fluid to rise. And to make things worse, if a dead body is submerged long enough, the lungs will passively fill up with water. And to complicate it even more, some drowning cases are what are called ‘dry drownings.’ When someone first starts to breathe in water, their larynx can spasm and close, and the death is actually caused by asphyxiation. Nothing gets into the lungs, not water, not air, and the victim suffocates rather than drowns. The larynx remains closed, and at the autopsy the lungs will appear perfectly dry.”

  “But this boy had water in the lungs, right?”

  “According to the report, yeah.”

  “So I don’t understand. Why wouldn’t they just determine if it was actually water from the bay he had been found in that was in his lungs? I mean, maybe he had been drowned somewhere else and put in the water. You’d think they’d want to rule that out.”

  “There were no markings, no bruising to make the coroner think it was suspicious. Also, it’s not a matter of simply getting a sample of the water out of the victim’s lungs and seeing if it was salty or not. Again, water can enter the lungs passively postmortem. The coroner would have to run what’s called a Gettler chloride test to determine the chloride content in the blood found in either side of the heart. If the blood from the right side of the heart has chloride in it, the victim drowned in freshwater. If the chloride content is higher in the blood from the left, the victim drowned in saltwater. But it’s an expensive
and time-consuming test, and without reason to run it, without the investigating cops asking for it to be run, the coroner just wouldn’t bother.”

  “So Jason White’s death was ruled accidental?”

  Miller nodded. “It was Indian summer. He might have gone for a late night swim, didn’t know how drunk he was.”

  “He had clothes on, though, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Have you ever gone swimming in your clothes? With your wallet and cell phone in your pocket?”

  “No, but his blood-alcohol content was pretty high. I imagine the coroner was thinking that someone that drunk might just do anything. He was last seen leaving a house party in Southampton.”

  “Did he have a car?”

  Miller started flipping through pages, looking for a particular report. “The cops interviewed some of the kids from the party. They said Jason had said he was going to walk home.”

  “To Hampton Bays from Southampton?”

  “Kind of far to walk, huh?”

  “And he ended up out in Mecox Bay, out in Water Mill. That’s a whole other direction.”

  Miller nodded. “Yeah, I know. It’s up to the cops to fill in the blanks. The coroner only has the body and where it was found to work with. Of course, if you read the notes, it doesn’t look like the cops tried all that hard to explain the kid’s travels. Like I said, though, there were no signs of trauma, and the tox screens showed alcohol in his blood. The kids from the party confirmed that he was pretty drunk when he left. They tried to stop him, but I guess he slipped away when no one was looking. He was adamant about leaving, they said.”

  “Maybe he was supposed to meet someone,” Clay offered.

  “Could be. Or else maybe someone picked him up along the way.”

  Clay nodded, thinking about what the bloodhound had told him about the Foster boy’s last walk. After a moment, he said, “How far was the party from the college?”