The Body Box

by Lynn Abercrombie

  “Frankly, Lieutenant Gooch is, ah, somewhat opaque to me also.”

  “Opaque? Nothing opaque about it. He’s a malingering no-account redneck dipshit. That’s clear as glass. But again, that’s not what I’m asking. I want to know what he is actually and physically doing down there.”

  “Reading,” I said finally.

  “Reading.”

  “Case files. He has big piles of them stacked around his desk. And he reads them all day.”

  “Is he working any cases?”

  “He’s, ah, he’s sort of helping me get started on one right now.”

  “Norman Givvens?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Is he working on the Norman Givvens case?”

  “Who’s Norman Givvens?”

  The Chief eyed me over the top of his tortoiseshell reading glasses. “What have we just been speaking about, young lady? Norman Givvens is Mr. Barton Millwood’s brother-in-law.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  The big smile disappeared for a moment, and Chief Diggs eyes briefly grew cool. Then the smile was back, like sun bursting through a cloud. “Keep me in the loop, girl. I want to know what he’s up to.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  The smile went away again. “At a certain point in time, debts will have been paid and obligations met.” Suddenly his accent had gone all street sounding. “And when that time comes, the hammer gonna fall on this bullshit little cold case unit. So you can either be holding the hammer, or standing under it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good girl. Tell your daddy that Brother Diggs says hello.”

  I stood to go. When I had reached all the way to the door at the far end of the vast room, the Chief called out to me. “And Mechelle?”

  “Yes sir?”

  “Your indictment papers are still sitting in a drawer up there in Cobb County.”

  “I realize that, sir.”

  “If I hear that you’ve spent one more instant on little Jenny What’s-her-name, I will personally make sure that you’re sitting in the Cobb County jail by the end of the week.”

  I stared at him. How did he know? And how much did he know?

  He must have heard the questions rattling around in my head. “I know because I know everything, Mechelle,” he said. “I know everything. Interviewing that little girl’s mommy? My God, what were you thinking?”

  I couldn’t imagine how he had found out. “Sir—”

  “Do your job downstairs with Gooch. Forget the girl.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Otherwise your career is over.” And in case I hadn’t paid attention the first time, he repeated himself. “Forget the girl.”

  TEN

  Vernell Moncrief’s address was six years old, taken from his parole sheet stemming from an assault conviction seven years earlier. Guys like Vernell Moncrief—felons, lowlifes, bottom-feeders—rarely stay at the same address for six months, much less six years. So I didn’t expect to find him here. Amazingly, when I knocked on the door of the squalid little house in southeast Atlanta, the man who answered looked just like the man in the mug shot. He was tall, thin, black as creosote, shirtless, and barefoot. A scar ran across his throat, almost from ear to ear.

  “Vernell,” I said, showing him my badge, “come with me.”

  “Whuh?” he said.

  “Now.”

  “I’ma get my shoes,” he said. He closed the door, locked it.

  I strolled around the back of the house, stood behind a scraggly bush with my gun drawn, and waited. About thirty seconds later he climbed out the back window, a pair of Air Jordans hanging by the laces from his teeth.

  “Man!” he said, when I stepped out from behind the bush, pointed the gun at his sternum. “I ain’t did nothin’!”

  Strangely, Vernell Moncrief agreed to giving me a DNA sample without complaint. While we were standing around in the hallway of City Hall East waiting for a crime-scene tech to take a mouth swab, I decided to pump Vernell for information. Not a formal interrogation, just a friendly chat.

  “So how come you ran, Vernell?” I said.

  “I ain’t realize this about Marquavious. I thought y’all was, like, Narcotics or something. Them narcs all the time be hassling me.” He gave me a real serious face that was hard to give much credit to. “Yes, ma’am. Anything I can do to help. ’Cause every time I think about that poor boy, Marquavious, it hurt me right here, you know what I’m saying.” He whacked himself in the middle of his chest with a loosely balled fist.

  “I do know what you’re saying.” Since the mouth swab procedure would only take about five seconds, I had told the crime-scene tech to take her time getting to us. That way I’d have time to talk to Vernell. “So tell me about your relationship to Marquavious,” I said.

  “I ain’t had no relationship! No ma’am! I ain’t like that.”

  I smiled as sincerely as I could. “Nah, nah, I don’t mean that way. I mean like your family situation, that type of relationship.”

  “Oh, yes, ma’am. Yes, ma’am. See, what it was, me and Marquavious’s mama was like married.”

  “Church married?”

  “Well, you know. Common-law type of thing. We was fin to get married, but then Marquavious . . .” He shrugged sadly. “Well, you know. One thing and another. Me and Marquavious’s mama, Loeesha, we had to go our separate ways. It was all this tension and everything, due to Marquavious dying, it done broke us up.”

  “Plus your going to jail for that thing over in Decatur.”

  “Plus that. But I was just in jail, Miz Deakes. Not the penitentiary or nothing.”

  “Right. It was mistaken identity or something probably, right, because you never got convicted.”

  “That’s what I’m saying. Them charges was dropped.”

  “So look, we get this test back, everything works out, you get eliminated as a suspect, this whole dark cloud that’s been hanging over you—it all goes away.”

  Vernell nodded earnestly.

  “You didn’t do it, right?”

  “No, ma’am!”

  “So who you think it was? Had to be somebody, right?”

  Vernell blinked.

  “You understand, Vernell? Most crimes like this, they’re committed by somebody close to the victim. Was there an uncle, a cousin, a minister . . . anybody that was around this boy that didn’t seem right to you?”

  Vernell’s eyes widened, playing it to the hilt, Mr. Innocent, trying to help out. “Mm. Yes, ma’am. Come to think on it a little, you might just be right.”

  The hallway was silent for a moment. The crime-scene tech poked her head around the corner. I shook my head, hoping Vernell wouldn’t notice. The tech got the message, disappeared.

  “Talk to me, Vernell,” I said softly.

  “Bugs.”

  Long silence.

  “Bugs?”

  Another long silence.

  “It was this dude, see?” Vernell made a big show of thinking, big frown, stroking his face. “We was staying over in East Lake. And the home we was staying at, we was renting from this white dude, Mr. Shively. Now Mr. Shively, he use to come around every Friday, get his rent money, sometimes if you come up a little short, whatnot, you tell him like how it was a drain that was clogged up or the roof leaking, something like that. Tell him until he fix it, you ain’t gone pay no rent.”

  “Sure. I know how that is.”

  “Only Mr. Shively, he ain’t never do nothing. He ain’t never fix no leak, ain’t never unclog no drain, nothing. He just say, you don’t pay next week—front rent, back rent both—your black ass out on the street. You know how they play you.”

  “Hey, you got to keep on keeping on.”

  “That’s what I’m saying. But anyway, one time I’m a little short, and so Mr. Shively come around and I’m like, ‘Yo, man, I ain’t paying the rent, we got bugs. We got roaches. We got roaches on the roaches, ticks on the fleas, fleas on the ticks, you know what I’m saying?’ ” But M
r. Shively, he like, ‘That don’t confront me.’ And I’m like, ‘I ain’t paying no rent money till you send the bug man around.’ Right? I’m like, ‘I want some of that Orkin shit, man, or you ain’t seeing no rent money.’ ”

  “Hoo-hoooo!” I said, playing the appreciative audience.

  Vernell smiled slyly. “I ain’t figure Mr. Shively gone actually do nothing. But two, three days later, this truck roll up, big-ass picture of a roach on the side. Bug man. This white dude, the bug man, he pop out the truck, come in, spray all this shit all over the house.”

  “A white man.”

  “Yeah. Jolly-ass dude. Joking around and everything. Talking to Marquavious, see.”

  “But you didn’t like him, did you?”

  Vernell pulled on his lip. “Truthfully? I ain’t think about it. But like a week later, here come the bug man again. He walk around spraying every damn thing in sight. And when he done, man, he play with Marquavious. Give him candy and everything.”

  “Candy, huh?”

  “And so for like a month or two, this white dude coming around all the time. And that’s when I start getting suspicious.” Vernell was putting on a big show now, all indignation and outrage. “I ain’t like the way he look at Marquavious.”

  “See?” I said. “This is exactly what I was hoping to hear from you.” I figured, let him get wound up talking a bunch of baloney, eventually he might say something damaging, something I could use on him later.

  “Next thing I know, Marquavious gone.” A tear slipped out of the corner of Vernell’s eye, a pretty nice touch, I thought, getting so involved in his bullshit story that he’d almost convinced himself it was true.

  “Tell me about the bug man. What he look like?”

  “Medium height. White man. But dark complected. Real dark—for white, I mean. Almost could of been a brother. Like a Jew or a Eye-talian maybe? He run about six foot, maybe a hundred and seventy pounds. You know, normal looking. Brown hair. Always had a big old grin on his face. But it was something about that man I ain’t trust.”

  I nodded earnestly. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. And this bug man, did you ever tell the detectives about him?”

  Vernell scowled. “I done told the po-lices all about that man. But they ain’t listen.”

  “What, they say you made him up?”

  Big nod, big outrage. “That’s right! Them two white po-lices was all like, ‘You telling us a fairy tale, Roscoe.’ Motherfuckers kept calling me Roscoe. Telling me they can’t find no receipt to prove he done sprayed that house! Damn. Telling me Mr. Shively say he ain’t sent no bug man.” Vernell leaned toward me. “But that bug man, he wasn’t no fairy tale. Bug man, he all the time be putting his hands on Marquavious.” He groaned a little for effect, showing me how hard it was for him to even think about this.

  “You remember his name, this bug man?”

  “Never did hear it.”

  “What about the company?”

  Vernell shrugged. “Damn sure wasn’t no Orkin. That’s all I know.”

  “Anything else at all?”

  “I wish I could remember something else. I surely do.”

  I bagged the mouth swab and drove it over to the south side of Decatur, where the Georgia Bureau of Investigation has a big complex. The forensic science center was in the back, a four-story brick building with a glass-fronted atrium.

  I’d dealt with one of the techs there on a regular basis back when I was in Vice. He was a boyish-looking blond guy named Mark Terry, who flirted outrageously with everything that moved.

  “Mechelle Deakes!” he said, making a little frame with his fingers, then looking through it at me like a photographer getting ready to take my picture. “Mm-mmmm! Work it! Yes! You know that’s right!”

  I vamped a little.

  “Saw you on TV the other day,” he said. “You get all famous, can’t come see us little people anymore?”

  “I’m in the Cold Case Unit now.” I decided to skip telling him all about my fall from grace, my year on suspension.

  “Oooo! Big promotion, huh?”

  “Baby,” I said, “if you want to call it a big promotion, you just go head on. Tell me I’m beautiful, too.”

  “You are beautiful,” Mark Terry said. “I’ve always said that.” He gave me a big, leering once-over. “Good to see you put some of that weight back on. You were getting straight-up gaunt for a while there.”

  “Now, don’t you be making me feel bad.”

  “Shoot, girl. I like a woman with curves.”

  “That a fact?”

  “Scout’s honor.” He turned to his keyboard and tapped in some information, then checked the seals on Moncrief’s DNA swab, recorded the number in the computer. “When you need this by?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  He made a big show, laughing and flopping around. “No, seriously,” he said finally.

  “When can you get it done?”

  He peered at the case numbers on the evidence, then at the monitor. “The computer estimates that we’re looking at a two-hundred-and-forty-one day turnaround.”

  “You’re kidding me. That’s almost a year.”

  “We had four techs last year, and we were already running six weeks behind. The state put a hiring freeze on us, and two techs quit the next day. I got eighteen hundred rape kits and another four, five hundred blood and semen samples in the queue. You do the math.”

  “I heard you got new machines, you could do this stuff overnight.”

  “If God himself asked us real nice, we might consider giving him overnight service.”

  I laughed. Terry and I made a little chitchat about the job while he was logging in the evidence. He asked about the Cold Case Unit, and when I mentioned Lt. Gooch, Terry’s grin faded and his eyes went just a little dark.

  “You and Gooch have met, huh?” I said.

  “Yeah, me and the good lieutenant go back a long, long way.” Terry squinted at the information he had just put into the computer. “In fact, I thought he’d already sent this in before.”

  “Sent what in?”

  “DNA. For this case.”

  “I don’t see how he could have. This is my case.”

  Terry shrugged. “I’m probably thinking of something else.”

  That night I went home and fired up the computer, logged on, brought up the screen with the baby pictures on it.

  My son. The boy on the screen was my son.

  I tried not to think of him that way. Before he was born, I’d met the couple who adopted him, David and Nancy No-Last-Name-As-Per-Written-Agreement-With-The-Adoption-Agency, and I’d told them, “You’re his parents now.” I had tried to believe that, to convince myself that I could cauterize that connection, ease the hurt of giving away my own child.

  They seemed like nice people, a little stiff, a little earnest, a little . . . well . . . white. They seemed very David-and-Nancy. But I can read people, and I knew they were good people, that they could love that boy and take care of him in a way that I just wasn’t prepared for, not right then. Not with all my problems.

  The adoption agency required the parents to send periodic letters and pictures to me in care of the agency, letters that would tell how Kevin was doing, pictures that would show him as he grew. In the first letter they sent, Nancy had said they would put up a Web site with pictures and some information about him, that I could check it any time I wanted. She had also said that if I didn’t want the Web site there, that if I didn’t want to be reminded, or that if it would cause too much pain, they’d take the Web site down. I had almost told the agency that I didn’t think the site was a good idea, that I didn’t want that site to become a habit for me. But I didn’t.

  And once I’d gotten a taste of it, I couldn’t let go. I’d go through the day, and by nighttime I’d be jonesing for pictures of my boy. Their boy, I should say.

  But tonight when I got home, the pictures just didn’t satisfy. It gave me a bad feeling, because I knew the pattern: all my life I’d find som
ething, get a taste of it, and then I’d want more. A boy, a job, an experience—it could be anything. Crank just happened to have been the last, worst thing.

  I had minored in computer science during my abortive college career, and I know my way around them. So when I needed another taste of my little boy, I was able to figure out pretty quickly how to go beyond the one page that David and Nancy had provided for me.

  Web addresses, like everything else in computers, are structured like trees, with branches coming off of branches, which eventually work back to a root. It doesn’t take much work to get from an address like http://www.massivenet.com/~an11490/kevin/kevin.html back to the root directory. In this case, they had built some firewalls into the system to make it harder to get back to the root. But I’ve been through two FBI courses on computer crime. This was a piece of cake.

  I managed to find the root directory in about five minutes. I understood why they’d put the firewall in there. After all, it was all part of the adoption arrangements that everything was first-name basis only. Of course, when David and Nancy came to the hospital to get their son, it had only taken a glance at his medical records for them to find out my last name. But their last name had remained behind a cloak. I guess every adoptive parent is afraid of crazy birth mothers, mothers trying to steal their children back, extort money, or God knows what. But still, it bugged me a little that they knew all about me and who I was, while I knew practically nothing about them. Not their last names, not where they lived, what they did for a living, where they went to church, nothing.

  The root directory of my son’s Web page was for a company called MassiveNet.com. The address for the company was in an industrial park in Alpharetta, a rich white suburb north of the city. I pulled up the “Our Management” page, found that the president of the company was named David Drobysch. It kind of pissed me off. How dumb did they think I was? Any fool could have figured this out. I clicked on his bio, and there was my son’s father, a clean-cut man in his early forties with sandy hair and hazel eyes, sitting behind a desk. He wore a gray suit and a red tie with tiny blue spots, and smiled somewhat apprehensively at the camera.