The Body Box

by Lynn Abercrombie

  “Do you have a case for me to work on?”

  Lt. Gooch’s pale eyes just kept looking at me.

  “I mean, am I being unreasonable? Asking you a couple things? How I’m supposed to do my job, what I’m—”

  Lt. Gooch shifted the dab of snuff in his lower lip, prodded it pensively with a brown-stained tongue. Then he reached in his pocket, took out a very large set of keys, leaned over, unlocked the bottom drawer, opened it, took out a wretched, vile, dirty Dixie cup that was about half full of a disgusting brown liquid, dribbled some brown spit into it, put the cup back into the drawer, closed it, locked it, put the keys away.

  Finally he spoke. “You got a week. Go to Records, pull some files, find you a case.”

  FIVE

  I went to Records, signed out a bunch of case files, brought them back and set up in the room with them. I tried occasionally to make some chitchat with Lt. Gooch, to bring up something I’d found in a case file, to ask him a question, whatever, but it was a waste of time. He never once spoke to me, just looked at me with the those lynch-mob eyes, then looked back down at whatever he was reading.

  By about noon I was ready to scream. I am not a sit-around-and-read person. I’m a get-out-there-and-mix-it-up person. But I was damned if Gooch was going to get under my skin. So I just sat there and read, dawn till dark, coming in earlier each successive day and leaving later each successive night—though I never seemed to get there as early as Gooch, or leave as late. He remained planted in that chair, motionless as a rock. It was torture.

  And the whole time I kept thinking about that little girl out there. Jenny Dial. I didn’t want to be working these moldy old cases. I wanted to be doing something that had some relevance, that would help somebody in the here-and-now. But what could I do? So I just sat there every day, reading and reading, taking notes, reading, going back to the Records office occasionally to check out more old case files.

  I am not the crying type. But on Thursday I cried all the way home. I cried when I looked around my bare, miserable little apartment. I cried when I looked in the refrigerator and there was nothing inside but some bologna and some two-week-old milk. And when it had built up to the point where the only thing I could think of that would put things on an even keel was a trip down the street to the liquor store, I went into my room and turned on my computer to do some e-mail.

  When I was done going through my messages, I reached out to turn off the computer. But my hand just hung there for a while.

  I had promised myself that I wouldn’t do the thing that I wanted to do next. I kept saying to myself that it was only going to make me feel worse. But finally I gave in and did it anyway. Because the only other thing I could think of involved driving over to the seedy liquor store around the corner. So finally I typed in a Web address that I’d memorized, and after a couple seconds a bunch of pictures came up on the screen.

  At the top of the screen, it said, “Here’s our beautiful new son, Kevin!!!”

  Then the pictures: a little brown-skinned boy with soft curly black hair and full lips that looked a lot like mine. The boy on the screen lay on his stomach, looking up at the camera. Oh, and, yes, sweet Jesus, he was a beautiful boy, with huge brown eyes, almost pretty enough to be a girl.

  Another picture of him sitting on a carpet, an expensive Oriental rug, a litter of toys and dolls lying around him. He was smiling at the camera, toothless still at six months, looking proud as hell of himself for being able to sit up.

  A third picture of the brown-skinned boy, a close-up of his face. He was nestled in a woman’s arms—though you couldn’t see her face, only her hand.

  Which was pale as straw.

  For supper I ate slightly gamey bologna without bread, and warm ice tea. I went to bed as soon as the sun went down, 8:30, so I could get up and go to work early, beat that man in to the office, show him who he was up against. Mechelle Deakes was not some shirker looking for a government paycheck. Whatever my flaws, you bet your ass that wasn’t one of them.

  SIX

  I got in to work at 5:05 AM. Gooch was already there. I couldn’t believe it. He didn’t look up as I entered. “Well?” he said.

  “You ever hear of Evie Marie Prowter?” I said. “Female white, juvenile, body recovered in the woods 4/6/92—”

  “Huh-uh. Don’t talk.” Lt. Hank Gooch shook his head. “Give me the file.”

  I walked across the room, set the case file on his desk. He opened it and began reading, licking his brown-stained thumb every time he flipped over a piece of paper. He read carefully, slowly, so slow it was like he was trying memorize every page. Fifty pages, you’d have thought he could have gotten through them in about five minutes. But no, an hour went by, then another. I just sat there watching him, trying to make sense of this man.

  It was becoming clear to me that he had some kind of a plan, and I believed I had figured it out. What it was, he was in slowdown mode. His plan, I had determined, was that he was trying to do everything so slow that eventually the city would try to fire him. And when they did, he’d sic the union on them, file suit for reverse discrimination or some other BS along those lines, wait around until the lawyers convinced the city that the cheapest way to get rid of him was to offer him a settlement. Then he’d walk away with his crummy little check, go deer hunting or fishing or whittling or whatever it was that shiftless rednecks did when they had nothing honest to keep them occupied.

  Finally, at around 7:00 he closed the folder, looked up at me.

  I didn’t say anything, just waited.

  Finally he spoke. “Nope.” Just that one word.

  I spread my hands. “And? What? What’s wrong with that case?”

  The lynch-mob eyes stared through me. “You tell me.”

  I was at a loss. I’m rarely speechless, but he’d just flat taken the wind out of me.

  “DNA,” he said finally.

  “You’re saying we need a case with DNA.”

  “Take another week,” he said. “Find another case.”

  I decided I was going to have to get a little ethnic on him. “Oh, no you don’t!” I said. “I’ve read two hundred, three hundred cases now. I don’t need a week, a month, a year. I don’t need one more minute of sitting around. You want DNA, I got DNA!”

  Lt. Gooch crossed his arms.

  I walked across the room, pulled out another file.

  “DNA, sir? All right then! Here’s your DNA. Marquavious Roberts, male black, juvenile, seven years old, disappeared 10/12/89—”

  “The file,” he said.

  I laid the file gently in the middle of his desk. Then I stalked out of the room.

  When I came back an hour and a half later, I walked up and stood in front of the desk. The file was closed, sitting right there on the edge of the scarred Formica.

  “Sir?” I said finally.

  Lt. Gooch didn’t look up. He was making tiny little notes in a notebook. “Why you keep looking for my approval? Go find him, get his DNA.”

  “Whose?” I said.

  No answer.

  “Vernell Moncrief’s?” Moncrief was the dead boy’s mother’s boyfriend, the prime suspect in the Marquavious Roberts case.

  “Vernell’s?” Lt. Gooch finally looked up, made a face of pretend surprise. He shifted the dab of snuff in his lower lip, prodded it pensively with a brown-stained tongue. “Of course, Vernell’s! Unless you got a better idea.”

  “So, we’re working the case?” I said.

  “We?”

  Inexplicably, I felt my heart soar.

  SEVEN

  Find Vernell Moncrief, get his DNA. Thank you, Jesus! I was finally working an actual case. I felt like I’d gotten paroled out of hell.

  But then as I walked down the dim, echoing hallway I started thinking about it. Let’s say I found the suspect—which was no sure bet. And let’s say the guy consented to let me take his DNA—which he didn’t have to do. Even so, it would take forever for the case to move. I’d heard that the GBI cr
ime lab’s serology department was so backed up that there was some kind of ridiculous turnaround time on DNA. Months, maybe.

  And so, by the time I reached the elevator, my initial burst of enthusiasm had faded, replaced by gloom. Now that I had a moment to consider the thing, it confirmed my diagnosis of Lt. Gooch. This case was all part of his game to play slowdown until his pension showed up. Once I got some DNA from this guy Moncrief, the case would be tied up for months while we sat around staring at more case files in the dark, silent room. I got the shakes just thinking about it.

  And so, on impulse, instead of heading to the parking lot and off on a fruitless drive to Vernell Moncrief’s last known address, I decided to ride the elevator up to the third floor.

  Sgt. Sheila Fairoaks’s office was down at the end of the hallway. The sign outside her door said, MISSING AND ABUSED CHILDREN COORDINATOR. She was the lead investigator on the Jenny Dial case. I’d known her for a while. She was a nice lady, one of the early women detectives on the force. But honestly? Not the sharpest tool in the drawer.

  I knocked on the door frame, walked in the open door. The walls of her office were lined with pictures of grinning kids. Behind every grin, I knew, there was a sad story.

  “Hey, Mechelle,” she said. “Congratulations on the commendation! That was some heads-up police work.” She was a tall, horse-faced white woman with naturally blond hair pulled back in a bun.

  “Thanks,” I said. We made a little chitchat and then I said, “So, did you get a look at that photograph in the kiddie-porn stash at Delwood Anderson’s house? It looked an awful lot like Jenny Dial.”

  She frowned vaguely, then said, “Yeah, um . . .” She scrabbled around on her desk, came out with the picture I’d found on Delwood Anderson’s bed. She squinted at it. “You really think that’s her?”

  “I don’t know. Have you showed it to the parents?”

  “Uhhh . . .” She kept frowning at the picture. “I guess I should, huh?”

  I raised my eyebrows like an idea had just struck me. “Hey, look, I’d be happy to run up there and talk to the parents. If you want. Save you a trip.”

  Sheila Fairoaks put her face in her hands and looked at me for a minute. “I thought you were assigned to that Cold Case outfit down in the basement.”

  “I’m just settling in. I could make a little time.”

  “Yeah,” she said vaguely. “Yeah, sure. It’s just, seeing that you’ve just got the new job and everything? I better not use you if you haven’t been officially assigned to me. If it got back to—” She pointed her finger at the ceiling, obviously indicating the Chief’s office on the fourth floor. “—you know, you and me both could end up getting taken out to the woodshed.”

  “Hey, I’ll just run it out there,” I said. “See if they think it’s her. If so, you can handle the follow-up, nobody’s the wiser.”

  “Yeah, no, I’m kinda thinking . . .” She trailed off, then shook her head.

  “You sure?” I edged toward the desk where the photo was lying.

  She nodded and hastily closed the folder. “Yeah. You better not.”

  “Okay,” I said. I stood there looking at the folder. “You’re gonna follow up, though, right?”

  Her eyes widened a little. “Hey, Detective, what—are you implying I’m not doing my job?” Suddenly I had gone from being “Mechelle” to “Detective.”

  “Oh, hey, no!” I said. “You know how it is. You find some little piece of evidence and you get all motherly on it.” I grinned.

  She kept looking at me, but she didn’t grin back. “There’s a lot of stuff to sift through here,” she said. “Jenny’s stepfather’s a little sketchy. But at this point I’m still looking at the mother’s ex-husband, Jenny’s biological father. He’s up in Ohio, and at this juncture I’ve been unable to locate him.” Her voice took on a pedantic singsong. “As you know, most child abductions involve a relative.”

  “And the photograph?”

  “I have to prioritize.”

  “So . . .” I said.

  She sat there, her face stiff as wood.

  “ . . . You’re saying the possibility that some asshole may be putting pictures of Jenny Dial on the Internet—that this isn’t a priority to you?”

  She got a slightly hurt look on her face. “Shame on you, Detective. You’re getting real close to calling my integrity into question.”

  I held up my hands in surrender. “Okay, hey, look, forget I asked. I was just trying to help out.”

  “And I appreciate that,” she said. Not meaning it.

  “All right then,” I said. “You take care now.”

  EIGHT

  Back to the Marquavious Roberts case.

  Job one, get Vernell Moncrief’s DNA. Which meant, first, getting Vernell in the flesh. I looked at the map, noticed that his last known address was close to Jenny Dial’s house. Well, not actually. But it wasn’t more than five miles out of the way. Ten, max. And hey, I told myself, Atlanta is home of the world’s longest commute. Statistical fact, you can look it up, Atlantans drive farther every day than anybody else on the planet, Los Angelenos included. A five or ten mile drive—that’s nothing. What could be the harm, right?

  So before going on what I anticipated would be a wild-goose chase to find Vernell Moncrief, I rolled up to the little white frame house where Jenny Dial lived and sat there in the car for a minute, my heart beating fast. This was not the smart play, and I knew it. If word got back to Sgt. Fairoaks in Missing and Abused that I was poaching on her territory, then it would get back to the Chief, and the Chief would rip me a new one.

  I tried to tell myself to let the whole thing go, to just go back to the office and forget about Jenny Dial. But I couldn’t. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t.

  The house was a small wood-frame structure in a mostly Hispanic neighborhood off Buford Highway. Mexicans had been pouring into the area for about five years, and most of the poor whites who used to live there had moved on.

  I knocked on the door. It opened swiftly.

  “No news,” I said quickly, showing my badge. When somebody’s missing, people think the worst every time a cop comes to the door. “Detective Deakes, Atlanta Police. Mind if I ask you a couple questions?”

  “Come on in,” the woman said. “I’m Tracy Dial, Jenny’s mother.” She was small boned and blunt featured, with a blond dye job that showed an inch or two of dull brown root. She wore a Waffle House waitress uniform and had a couple of blurry green jailhouse tattoos on one forearm. But despite the trailer-trash signifiers, there was something about her that seemed strong and solid.

  “I thought Sergeant Fairoaks was working on Jenny’s case,” the woman said.

  “I’m from a different unit,” I said. “Following up a different angle.”

  Tracy Dial studied me for a minute. “What angle would that be?”

  “Probably nothing,” I said.

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “I’m sorry. I was in on the bust of that pedophile ring the other day. We’re trying to see if there are any connections.”

  She narrowed her eyes for a moment, then said, “Wait, I saw you on TV the other night. You’re the one killed that pervert.”

  I nodded.

  “Good for you.”

  “It’s not keeping me up nights,” I said. Not entirely accurately.

  There was a brief pause. Tracy Dial studied me with a pair of intelligent brown eyes. “Detective,” she said finally. “I don’t who you are, what angle you working here. But look.” She held up her arm, showing me the jailhouse tats. “Every cop that comes in here, first thing they do, their eyes go down to my arm. Okay, yeah, I went through a bad stretch once. But it was a long time ago. So I’m goddamn tired of cops coming in here acting like I’m stink on their shoe, acting like I probably done something wrong, acting like this is nothing because my deadbeat ex probably just wandered off with her. Okay? So before I answer any y’all’s questions,
I want to know what the hell y’all gonna do to find my little girl.”

  I thought about it for a while. What was I going to do to find her little girl?

  “That cop in charge of finding Jenny, the one from Missing Children? I don’t believe she’s taking this serious.”

  I wanted to tell her I agreed with her. But you can’t say that to a victim. Instead I said, “Sergeant Fairoaks is a good cop.”

  “You say you’re working an angle. What angle? I asked you once and you dodged my question. Now, what you doing to help me?”

  Again, what was I going to say—that I was off the reservation, running on some kind of impulse, and that even I didn’t know what it was about? “I can’t tell you that,” I said.

  Tracy Dial’s face got hard. “You people make me sick. That’s what that paper pusher Fairoaks keeps telling me. I ask her what progress she’s making, she tells me ‘I can’t tell you that.’ Then she starts in asting questions about my ex. My first husband, Jenny’s biological dad, the minute I told him I was pregnant, he looked like somebody’d kicked him in the nuts. He was so terrified that a baby might interrupt his busy social life, he left me four days later, moved back in with his mother in Ohio. Hell no, he didn’t come back and sneak off with her. Not unless he’s been took over by a space alien. And if it ain’t that, Fairoaks starts in on my husband Larry. ‘Did Larry ever do anything inappropriate with Jenny? Did he ever take long showers with her? Did she wet her bed?’ Hey! Listen up, y’all! It ain’t Larry! I done ast you people for a little help publicizing this here case, help me get Jenny’s pitcher on the TV, help me get her name in the paper. And what happens? Day one it’s on TV for thirty seconds. Day two, it’s a little-bitty old story on page five of the local news section. Day three, it’s like she never existed.” She stared at me. “And you can’t tell what angle you’re working? To hell with you.”

  “Look—”

  “I ast you people to help me put up posters.” She opened a drawer, pulled out a thick stack of crudely photocopied MISSING posters with the girl’s grinning picture printed on them, waved them furiously in my face. The posters were printed on a variety of bright colored papers—blue, yellow, red—that reminded me of elementary school art class. “I ast you people to look at other suspects. I ast you people a dozen different things. And you know what I got? Nothing! Everybody just sits there staring at my tattoo. Sergeant Fairoaks done wrote my little girl off. I can see it in her eyes, she thinks Jenny’s dead or up in Ohio with my idiot ex-husband. So, no thank you, Detective Whatever-Your-Name-Is. Tell me what you know about my daughter, or get the hell out of my house!” She stood there waving her MISSING posters at me, tears streaming down her cheeks.