The Darkest Place

by Daniel Judson

  Agawam Park was a stretch of lawn that ran from Job’s Lane to the edge of Agawam lake, a freshwater lake surrounded on two sides by handsome homes, most built early in the last century. At the far end of the small lake, directly opposite the park, was Gin Lane, a narrow strip of road that separated the lake from the Atlantic Ocean. The Indian summer that had ended with this cold snap had been a long one, so the surface of the lake had only just begun to freeze. Still, partially frozen or not, Miller thought, it was easily the least private place around for someone to dump a body.

  Miller didn’t see Barton. She would have stood out, lost in her slightly oversize parka. Beyond the perimeter of the patrol cars, a hundred yards away, uniformed cops stood next to detectives at the edge of the lake. No sign of the body yet, not that Miller could see. An empty stretcher but no EMT. Maybe the fire department had towed the boy to the shore and the EMT was trying to resuscitate him. They would think that there would be hope of that, of maybe bringing the boy back, what with the water as cold as it was. Miller had read of many cases where victims who had drowned in freezing water and had been dead for up to an hour were brought back to life. But that wasn’t going to happen here, Miller thought. He was certain that the boy had been dead for a long time now, hours probably—drowned elsewhere, in water not nearly this cold, and then tossed into the lake.

  Miller stood in the cold air for a few minutes, thinking he’d have to get warm soon, when he finally spotted Barton. She was walking down the sidewalk on the opposite side of Job’s Lane, had a cardboard box in her hand. Inside it were a dozen Styrofoam cups—coffee, most likely. Steam rose steadily from the lids. He watched as she handed the cardboard box to one of the perimeter cops, took two out for herself, and crossed the barricade, stepping into the parking lot that ran alongside the park. Roffman’s unmarked sedan was there. Miller hadn’t seen it till now. Roffman was standing beside it, talking to two detectives. Miller knew them. Donahue and Ligowski. Both had worked for his father, had been as corrupt as his old man had been. But now, with the new chief, walking the line. Barton handed Roffman one of the two coffees. He didn’t stop talking, didn’t even look at her. They probably didn’t acknowledge each other while on the job, to the point of rudeness, all part of their plan to keep their secret, however much of a secret it actually was these days, from slipping. She turned then and walked past the barricade again, turned right onto Job’s Lane, heading back up the brick sidewalk, walking alone.

  Miller knew then that she had seen him, that this was his chance to talk to her. He left the crowd and walked a parallel course on the other side of the street as Barton. Halfway up the dark block, out of sight of the cops and the crowd, she crossed and met him. They stood in the shadow of the library. She offered him the Styrofoam cup of coffee.

  “It’s yours, isn’t it?” Miller said.

  “I got it for you. On the chief.”

  Miller took the cup, felt the warmth coming from it, held it close to his chest. Every little bit helped. “Thanks,” he said. “And for the call.”

  “I thought I’d better let you know, in case that girlfriend of yours was over and you were too busy to hear it on your scanner.”

  Miller looked at her. “How’d you know about Abby?”

  “It’s a small town, Tommy. I don’t have to tell you that.” Barton looked down the street. “I’ll need to get back in a minute. You never know, they might need some doughnuts to go with the coffee, or someone might want some copying done.”

  Miller hated that, hated that she was treated like that by the men in the department. But that was another conversation.

  “What can you tell me about this kid?” Miller said.

  “He was found twenty minutes ago, floating facedown. His parents didn’t report him missing till last night. The night before that he was supposed to be staying over a friend’s house, but it turns out that was just a setup so his parent wouldn’t know where he really went.”

  “And where was that?”

  “To meet some girl, his friend says. No one seems to know who.”

  “How was his body found? Another call.”

  “No. Somebody walking his dog spotted him in the shallow water.”

  “What was he wearing?”

  “That’s the weird thing. This kid had no shirt on, no coat, nothing. Jeans and sneakers only. All the others were fully dressed, right? And they didn’t have a mark on them, whereas this kid has a cut on his forehead. Not more than a few days old.” She looked at Miller. “This wasn’t some drunk kid out for a late night dip, Tommy. He didn’t get that cut or lose his shirt falling off a bar stool. The story’s going to break. By tomorrow everyone’s going to know what’s been going on here. There’s no way Roffman can call this an accident or suicide. No way.”

  “Is the coroner here?”

  “He’s on his way.”

  Miller nodded, looked down the street. Clay had been on his way to the office of the Southampton Press when Miller had called him, on his way to the “morgue,” as they called it, the basement storage room where copies of all the editions of the paper that had been published were stored in a database. Miller knew that Clay had a reporter friend who worked at the paper, and that she let him in at night whenever he needed to look something up, something that couldn’t wait till morning, or that was best looked up in privacy. Clay had told Miller he was coming back from another look at Colleen Auger’s apartment and would join Miller there as soon as he was done. So, like the coroner, Clay would be arriving on the scene any minute now.

  “What else?” Miller said. “That’s all I know.”

  “How about the kid? What do you know about him?”

  “He’s eighteen. A senior over at the high school. Captain of the swim team, believe it or not. Record holder, even.”

  “Well, that’s the headline then, isn’t it? I take it he had his wallet on him.”

  “Yeah. Which means this wasn’t a robbery that took a wrong turn.”

  “Bad luck for your boyfriend.”

  Barton ignored that. “Donahue just made the call to the kid’s father. Apparently the kid was supposed to be at some friend’s house for a few days, or at least that’s what the parents thought.”

  “What’s the kid’s name?”

  She reached into the pocket of her parka, dug for a notebook. “I have it written down here.”

  While she looked, Miller said, “Any idea what his father does?” He asked it for no particular reason, other than the fact that the more information he could bring to Clay, the better.

  “I overheard some of the uniforms talking about him,” Barton said. “Evidently he’s a bit of a prick. A ‘holy roller,’ the guys called him. He works at the college, is the head of campus security, something like that.” She opened the notebook, found the page. “Here it is.” She had to turn the notebook to catch enough light to read her own writing.

  “The kid’s name is Dolan,” she said. “Kevin Dolan.” She flipped the notebook closed, returned it to her pocket. “That name mean anything to you?”

  Miller shook his head. “No.”

  “Me neither. The kid’s father may be a prick and all, but I wouldn’t wish losing a child on my worst enemy. I don’t think there’s a good way for that to happen, but this way has got to be the worst. It just has to be. Parents want to protect their kids. His will probably spend the rest of their lives wondering what they should have done differently. And that kind of thinking has just got to drive a person to the edge, sooner or later.”

  “Yeah,” Miller said absently. He thought of his own father then, the lengths that the man had gone to keep Miller from paying for the horrible things he’d done, to protect Miller from the consequences of his own actions. Misguided love, certainly, but no one could have told his old man that. He thought then of the lengths to which Gregor had gone to make certain that Miller did in fact pay, that he saw the error of his ways, or was at least given the chance to see that, to change.

  And now, M
iller, out in this cold, doing what he has to do, doing all that is necessary—all to honor both men.

  He looked again toward the haze of blue-white light that hung above the park. As bright as morning—brighter even—though of course it wasn’t morning. False daylight. The intense brightness only made the darkness that surrounded it seem all that more complete. Plenty of places for John the Baptist, or the Professor, or whoever the hell he was, to hide in that blackness, hide while everyone stared dumbly toward that light. Miller glanced at his wristwatch. Fifteen minutes to midnight. Seventy-two hours, more or less, since the Foster kid was found. Seven hours till actual daylight. And then what? How long would this go on? How soon would the next boy be found floating?

  “The Foster kid didn’t kill himself,” Barton said then. Miller turned his head, looked at her. “You can tell your friend Ned that. Not that this won’t be all over the news by morning. Not that the whole cover story won’t come crashing down by lunch, for everyone to see. But he can tell the Foster family, have their lawyer call the coroner in the morning, demand that he change ‘possible suicide’ to ‘homicide.’ This way they can bury their poor kid in peace and maybe get on with their lives. That’s what you guys were hired to do, wasn’t it? Get proof that it wasn’t a suicide.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So then your job is done?”

  Miller nodded, thought about everything she had just said. “There’s going to be trouble for Roffman, isn’t there?”

  “I would think so. He ordered the cover-up. He needs to cover that up now. I don’t think he can, though. I think the best he can pull off is to make it look like all he did was allow the cover-up to continue. Either way, there are going to be a lot of stories in the papers, and probably an investigation. I mean, he was brought in to clean up your father’s dirty department, ended up being just as corrupt himself. He didn’t start out that way, just like your father didn’t start out that way. But people with money want to live above the rules. They expect it, and they can make it hard for a man to keep saying no. That’s the kind of story the papers out here love to print, and that people out here love to read. It’s the kind of story they should read. There are people out here getting away with shit just because they have money. And Roffman’s just a part in that machine. He takes as many orders as he gives.”

  Miller waited a moment, watching her, then said, “Are you in love with him, Kay?”

  She smiled, vaguely. “You and I are family, Tommy, and I’ll do anything I can to help you out, no matter what. But don’t ever ask me that again, okay?”

  “I just don’t want you to get hurt, that’s all. People are going to be digging up stuff on him, anything they can get their hands on. They might find out about the two of you. It could get ugly.”

  She glanced down the street, then looked back at him. “I should get back. Do me a favor, okay? Don’t stay out in this cold for too long.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “How’s your knee?”

  “It hurts a little. Does when it’s cold.”

  “You should get some of those bandages you can put in the microwave and warm up. And maybe stay off it for a while.” She looked up at his face then. He remembered her beside him at his father’s funeral, and then at his mother’s two years later, holding his hand during both, standing at the graveside with him, smiling at him in a way that was meant to comfort him, tell him that everything would be okay. Everything both was and wasn’t okay since his parents had died. But he hadn’t expected anything more than that, anything other than a whole bunch of good rolled in with a whole bunch of bad.

  “We learn what we can from the people in our lives,” Barton said then. “That’s what you and I do. Even the worst people we know can end up teaching us something about ourselves, about the way things really are. You can understand that, right?”

  Miller nodded. “Yeah, I can.”

  “You’re doing what you have to do, Tommy. With your ‘friend’ Ned, you’re doing what you have to. It’s the same for me with Roffman. I can live with what I’m doing because it became clear to me a long time ago that there just wasn’t any other way. It’s the way things are, that’s all there is to it. ’Cause, you know, one of these days I’m going to be the chief of police in this town. And I’m going to know then just what to do—and, maybe more importantly, what not to do. Roffman’s been a good teacher that way. So this’ll all be worth it someday. And they’ll be the ones getting the coffee and making copies. Just wait and see, Tommy.”

  Miller said nothing. What could he say to that, to her? Maybe, he decided then, they were much more than simply ‘family.’ Maybe, with their secret ambitions, the alliances they made with these very ambitions in mind, there was something more that they had in common.

  Maybe they were nothing short of two of a kind.

  Barton smiled, warmly, then said, “I should go. Don’t neglect that girl of yours too much. Redemption is one thing, Tommy. Finding someone to sleep next to you at night is something else.”

  She turned then and left Miller in the long shadow of the library. He watched her cross Job’s Lane, waited till she was far enough ahead of him, then started back down his side of the street, heading for the crowd gathered across from the park, staring with a collective expression of dread at what that false light was finally making visible.

  Clay drove to North Sea, parked his car in the tiny lot behind the deli, climbed the dark stairs to his apartment. It was two in the morning, he was tired, needed more than anything now to get some sleep. The kitchen light was the only light on, the rest of apartment as dark and still as a tomb. He knew this meant that Sophia was asleep in the bedroom. Why wouldn’t she be, at this time of night? Wasn’t everything with a soul asleep now?

  He took off his coat, poured himself a glass of orange juice, tipped a little vodka into it, sat down at the kitchen table. The Foster case was over—at least technically, anyway. They had gathered enough evidence to more than suggest that Larry had been murdered, one in a string of murders that were still ongoing. The dog that had picked up his scent and then lost it in the middle of the road; the police notes detailing their secret investigation, including their nickname for the killer; the coroner’s reports indicating his own growing suspicion that this was more than what it may at first have seemed. And now this fourth dead boy, this Dolan kid, just like the others, identical to them, more or less, only a few minor differences. All this was more than enough to give the Foster family what they so desperately needed. All that was left for Clay to do was to write up the report, documenting his activities on their behalf, his time and expenses, his conclusions, attach the bill, and send it off to the family—not now, but in a few days, maybe even a week; waiting was the decent thing to do.

  Or at least that would be all that was left for him to do were this not such an unusual case. It was, though, clearly had been from the start, for Clay and for Gregor. Not the kind of thing they got involved in.

  Gregor had asked Clay to look into Professor Krause, find out what he could about the man, as soon as possible. This had surprised Clay at first, but then of course he realized it shouldn’t have. The cops wouldn’t find the letter in Colleen Auger’s apartment implicating Krause till sometime the next day, after they found out where she lived. There was always the chance that they could even overlook the letter, miss it entirely or misplace it or even bury it, purposely. Anything could happen. Despite what Barton had told Miller, the cops could still choose to stall, make no comment at all to the press, or claim they couldn’t discuss an ongoing investigation, that doing so would risk tipping off their suspect. They could say a lot of things, anything to keep the truth from coming out. And who knows, maybe they had found something else, stumbled upon something that would lead them to conclude, as someone clearly wanted them to, that Kane was definitely their man. Maybe something Clay and Gregor had been unable to intercept and weed out as false evidence. A letter naming Krause as the Professor certainly would confuse thin
gs, unnecessarily, in the cops’ minds, weaken their case against Kane, and therefore could simply disappear. Hadn’t Clay and Gregor done the same thing with the shirt they had found? Based on what Clay and Miller had seen, the lack of blood in the garbage, and Mercer’s insistence that Kane couldn’t be part of this, that Mercer would get evidence to prove that, they had dismissed the shirt as false evidence and disposed of it. What they had done in the pursuit of justice, the cops could just as easily do to pervert it.

  But regardless of all this, of what the cops might or might not do, regardless of whether the letter was authentic or not, a lot could happen between tonight and tomorrow, and Gregor and Clay had to proceed as though the letter had been written by Colleen Auger. They had no reason to believe otherwise, as they had with the shirt. And it was the only lead they had right now to follow. But it was clear to them both that whoever was behind these murders was escalating, killing boys with increasing frequency now, leaving a shorter and shorter span of time between victims, with each victim that was found. It was safe then to assume—necessary, even, to assume—that there would be another, might already be another somewhere, another boy no one knew, or cared, was missing.

  If they could locate Krause, then Clay could stake out his place tonight, watch his every move between now and morning. Even proving that he had nothing to do with this would be useful. If Clay channeled the information back to the cops through Miller and Barton, it could maybe save some time, avoid confusion. Clay knew that whenever Krause came into town to shop, he came in on the bus. Everybody knew that. So he didn’t have a car. Did that mean anything? Not necessarily. Clay thought that maybe he could find Krause that way. The man stood out, came to town regularly, probably shopped European-style, bought everything he needed the day he needed it. A driver would certainly know him and remember what stop he was picked up at. But the bus company was closed now, and Clay needed to find Krause tonight, needed to stake his place out tonight, not start looking for him in the morning.