The Body Box

by Lynn Abercrombie

  A man in a red track suit backed through the door to the adjoining room, slammed it shut, locked it, turned around.

  “Aw, man!” he said, seeing us. “Y’all again?” It was Vernell Moncrief. He had one hand under the tail of his track suit. Reaching for a gun? Probably. But I couldn’t tell for sure. A puzzled look ran across his face. Like he was wondering why Cold Case cops were doing a drug bust.

  “Everybody on the floor!” I shouted.

  The two drug dealers complied, but Vernell just kept standing there staring at us, his hand still hidden under his track suit.

  “Get your hand out!” Gooch yelled.

  But Vernell’s hand didn’t move. “What y’all want?” he said.

  Gooch’s voice was quiet now. “Get your hand out of your pants, or I’m shooting you.” Would he? I wasn’t sure. If he popped Vernell and there was no gun under that track suit, it would be bad news for Gooch.

  “Is y’all Narcotics or not?” Vernell said. “I’m confused. I thought y’all was Homicide or something.”

  “Show your hands, Vernell,” I said.

  Vernell’s eyes widened. “This about Marquavious?” he said.

  “The hands. Now.”

  “I ain’t touch that boy! I loved that boy!”

  I could hear the footsteps of the SWAT guys, coming around to the door of the room we were in. They piled in behind me, immediately started shouting at their top of their lungs, “Down on the ground, asshole!” and all the usual stuff.

  “Guys,” I said. “Y’all aren’t helping.”

  They kept yelling, though, until Gooch, without taking his eyes off Vernell, said, “Shut up.”

  I don’t know what it was, but there was command in his voice. It wasn’t loud, but it just made you sit up straight somehow. The SWAT guys all went silent.

  Gooch inched forward. “Vernell, don’t do anything silly.”

  “This about Marquavious?” Vernell said again.

  “Yeah, Vernell,” Gooch said. “It’s about Marquavious.”

  “I gave y’all that DNA!” Vernell said. “Why I’d of give y’all that DNA if I’d kilt that boy?”

  “Vernell—”

  “I ain’t just fell off the turnip truck, man,” Vernell said. “I’d of lawyered up! I’d of made y’all get a warrant!”

  “Vernell. You need to get your hand out of your jacket.” Gooch’s voice was so soft now, it was like he was talking to a woman in bed.

  “Y’all done frame my ass. Because my DNA ain’t on no Marquavious body. Not no way. I loved that boy like he was my own son! Who’d of kilt a boy like that? Done them sick things on him? You know I couldn’t of did that!”

  “Then you’ll prove it to a jury of twelve,” Gooch said. “If it wasn’t you, then you’ll walk. But right now, you need to give me that gun.”

  Vernell stood there for what seemed like a long, long time. I could see the sweat running off his face, running down by his ear, a bead of it tracing the knife scar across his throat.

  “I know I ain’t no good man,” Vernell whispered, pleading. There were tears in his eyes suddenly, mixing with the sweat, running down his nose. “But please! Come on, Mr. Po-lice. That boy, Marquavious, he like my own son.”

  Vernell’s hand underneath his jacket was starting to shake. But he just kept standing there, starting at Gooch.

  And then there were two quick bangs. I saw a flash out of the corner of my eye, then Vernell fell against the door frame. There was another bang, and blood sprayed out of Vernell’s face. He fell forward like a puppet with its strings cut. As he fell, his hand came out from underneath his jacket, a cheap little .25-cal auto slipping from his grasp, clattering to the floor.

  “He moved,” the SWAT guy next to me said, his submachine gun still pointed at Vernell Moncrief. “Y’all saw it! He moved.”

  Gooch turned and looked at the SWAT officer. “Son,” Gooch said, “why you think I brought you people in here? So this wouldn’t happen. If I’d of wanted to execute him, I could of done it myself.”

  “Execute!” the SWAT guy said. “Execute? He was fixing to draw down on you.”

  Gooch looked into the SWAT guy’s eyes until finally the officer couldn’t hold his gaze anymore. The officer turned away, muttering something that I couldn’t make out.

  THIRTEEN

  Instead of doing my paperwork, I drove my eight-year-old-piece-of-crap Chevrolet Lumina up to Alpharetta, sat in the parking lot of a lowrise industrial park, and waited until a man in a golf shirt and pressed chinos came out. It was David Drobysch. The adoptive father of my little boy. He climbed into a BMW 735i and drove off.

  I followed, keeping back a couple of car lengths.

  We crawled through the horrible traffic, driving past strip mall after strip mall—Publix supermarkets, Borders Books, Blockbuster Video, one after another—subdivision after subdivision—Bentwood Terrace, Windward Heights, The Meridian, Country Club of the South, Sheltering Farms—me and my son’s father, and all the other happy and prosperous white folks in their imported cars, windows rolled up, air conditioning blasting. It was five-lane roads mostly, or seven, plus the turn lane in the middle.

  Eventually David Drobysch turned into one of a thousand subdivisions out there, between two giant pretentious stone gates and a huge faux-brass sign that read, ROSEMONT ORCHARDS II, A TENNIS COMMUNITY. We wound down a bunch of identical streets, not a right angle in sight, curving in and out till you lost track of where you were, past one 5,000-square-foot house after another, all built from one of seven plans, all brick, all two stories, all tricked out with the same palate of stale architectural trickery: eyebrow windows, mansard roofs, plantation shutters, copper flashing, copper downspouts, copper gutters.

  Kids played in the streets everywhere. White kids, white kids, white kids, most of them dressed like little gangsters from the ’hood, pants drooping, their small thick-ankled legs sticking out of baggy shorts.

  The BMW pulled into the concrete driveway in front of one the huge brick houses. An eyebrow window in the middle of the sloping roof gave the place a face—the perplexed, vacuous expression of a giant cyclops.

  I drove past the house without stopping, my heart beating way too fast. It took me ten minutes to find my way out of the subdivision.

  When I got home I logged on to the computer to look at my boy. Or I tried to, anyway. But when I hit the button for his Web page, an error message came up. Error 404, page not found.

  Suddenly I was fuming. Had they put some sort of trap on the page so that if I tried to dig past the firewalls, they’d find out and yank the page on me? Did that mean that David and Nancy Drobysch now knew that I knew who they were? Did it mean. . . . There was no telling what it meant. Maybe nothing. Maybe they were updating the page. Maybe their server was down. It could be any of a thousand things. I sat there in a rage, staring at the white, empty screen.

  Finally I cut my Internet connection, started typing up a report for the Marquavious Roberts murder. When I was done, I went in the kitchen and microwaved myself a bowl of Chicken Voila!, then sat on my exercise bike, riding and riding as I ate the bland dinner.

  When I was done, I felt unsatisfied in a thousand tiny ways.

  Marquavious Roberts. I’d solved a case, at least. That was something. Maybe that poor child would rest better now that his killer had gone down.

  But still, something nagged at me. Solving the Marquavious Roberts case had seemed so easy. Maybe too easy. I realized I’d never absorbed the facts of the case, not to the level I had with Evie Marie Prowter’s case, anyway.

  So I went back and sat down with the file, going through it page by page. It was amazing how many things I hadn’t noticed the first time around. Like for instance it was the same detective, Lt. Roy Bevis, that would go on to work Evie Marie’s case four years later. The autopsy had been done by the same person, too, Dr. Vale Pleassance, MD, Assistant Medical Examiner, Fulton County, Diplomate of the American College of Forensic Pathologists.
r />   But when I got to the ME’s report, read it over a second time—and then a third and then a fourth and then a fifth—I started to get a sick feeling. Sick and angry and ashamed all at the same time.

  I picked up the phone, called a number. When the person I was calling picked up, I said, “You knew! How did you know, you son of a bitch?” I said. I could hear breathing, but no answer. “You creepy sick diseased liar.”

  PART TWO

  FOURTEEN

  Jenny had no sense of time, of nights or days. The box was very small, and so it was impossible to stand or move around much. Most of the time, she lay listlessly, hoping to hear a clue as to why she was being punished. Had she done something wrong? Had she broken a rule? Had she been mean to her little brother? She thought it must have been something like that, though she couldn’t identify exactly what it was that she had done to deserve this.

  The box was completely dark. Every now and then a light would come on in the room where the box was kept. She could see the light because there was a slot in the bottom of the box about as wide as her hand, and the light would come up out of it. After the light would come on, she would hear footsteps and then, if she got down on her knees with her face next to the floor, she could see a gloved hand appear. The gloved hand would push a tin pie plate through the slot. In the pie plate there was a gritty, watery substance that had a vaguely chocolatey taste. It reminded her of the stuff her mother drank for breakfast when she was on a diet. Only this was watery and thin.

  Jenny was hungry all the time now. The watery, chocolatey stuff was no substitute for real food. When she wasn’t trying to think why she was being punished, she would think about food. Hot dogs. Gravy. Lime sherbet. And those little chicken strips from Chick-Fil-A that Mommy used to buy after her hairpointment. That was a special treat that she would only think about when she got real, real hungry. They had three different sauces in little plastic packages. Once Jenny woke up licking her finger. She’d been dreaming that she had all three kinds of sauce—honey mustard, barbecue, and the other one that she couldn’t remember the name of—sticking her finger in each one, then licking it off.

  They had been at the house. She’d been playing dolly with her little brother, Benji, making him wear different clothes like he was a dolly. Benji didn’t mind.

  Then the next thing she knew, she was in the box. Why? Maybe it was putting the clothes on Benji. Maybe she shouldn’t have played dolly. Maybe there was something wrong about playing dolly, some special trick to it that nobody had explained to her. Maybe she’d done something else bad that she couldn’t remember.

  Jenny was busy inside her mind, promising Mommy that she wouldn’t play dolly, when the lights came on. She had thought the whole box was made of wood, but now as the blinding lights came on, she saw that one whole side of the box was made of transparent plastic with a bunch of lightbulbs in it, the long tube kind.

  The lights only came on for a couple of seconds. They made a snapping sound. Then they went off.

  But that was long enough. Long enough to see the hole in the ceiling of the box. Long enough to see the eye. The eye looking down.

  FIFTEEN

  Lt. Gooch came in the next morning at his usual time, six-fifteen. There was something about him that seemed different, but I’d be hard pressed to say what it was. Not penitent, exactly. But up to this point I’d seen the man as being like a featureless boulder poking up out of a flat and empty landscape—unreadable, unshakable, but entirely unimportant. But last night I realized that I’d missed something about him. So maybe it wasn’t him at all. Maybe it was me.

  Lt. Gooch came in, set his cheap Samsonite briefcase on his desk, then looked over at me.

  “I hope you weren’t smoking crack last night,” he said. “You sounded a little strung out when you called me.”

  “First off,” I said, holding up one finger. “I have never smoked crack. Let’s get that on the table right off the bat. Second, if I’m mad at you, it must be because I’m smoking something? That’s how it is? Huh? You ever think maybe I’m mad because you’ve been lying to me? Hm? Sir? Ever think it might be you bearing some responsibility here?”

  It had been Gooch that I’d called the night before, calling him a son of a bitch and a lot of other stuff. When I’d finally wound down, he’d said three words: “We’ll talk. Tomorrow.” Then he’d hung up on me.

  “How did you know?” I said. “What I want to know is how you knew I would pick that case. Marquavious Roberts.”

  “You didn’t,” he said. “Not first off.”

  “Okay. But I got it on the second try. You knew. Somehow you knew. I don’t care who you are. I don’t care if you’re my boss or what. I don’t care if I could lose my job if you make a bad fitness report on me. I don’t give a good goddamn anymore. You think you know me. You think you got inside my head. Don’t you? You think you know all about me. Well, I’m here to tell you, you don’t know jack. Hey, go ahead! Call the Chief. Tell him I’m insubordinate. Tell him I’ve been verbally abusing you, undermining your authority, tell him any damn thing you want. But just stop sitting there all smug looking, thinking you know who I am.”

  “You got me mistook for somebody else,” he said. Lt. Gooch seemed vaguely bemused. Which only made me madder.

  “Oh? Tell me it’s not true, what I’m thinking.”

  A half smile on his face, his blue eyes looking at me with this cool, superior light in them. “You talking a lot of riddles. You tell me. Speak the words.”

  “I read the ME’s report on Marquavious Roberts. I read it a little more carefully the second time around. I saw what I’d missed the first time around. You knew it was there all along. If I go over to Records, check the log book, I’m gonna find you checked out the Marquavious Roberts file a long time ago. Aren’t I?”

  He just kept looking at me, not denying it.

  “You think that Vernell Moncrief didn’t kill that boy. That’s why you wanted SWAT—so we’d have a clean bust and Vernell wouldn’t get hurt. You figured it from the autopsy, from the bone decalcification. You knew that somebody had kidnapped Marquavious Roberts and stashed him somewhere for a while and starved him to death.”

  “Almost starved him to death.”

  “See? You’re not even denying it. You been sitting over there all this time, acting like you’re doing nothing, when all this time you been working me. You been playing me. What do you think I am? You think I’m a fool? You think I’m an idiot?”

  Lt. Gooch’s eyes didn’t even blink. “Say it, Detective. You been talking and talking, but you ain’t yet said what you mean to say.”

  “All this time. You’ve been sitting there and sitting there and sitting there, acting like you’re doing nothing at all. But you found a connection between these two cases, didn’t you? You think the same person who killed Marquavious Roberts also killed Evie Marie Prowter. And that the DNA evidence against Vernell is some kind of fluke, right? That’s what you think, isn’t it?”

  Lt Gooch smiled slightly, just a twitch at the corner of his mouth, there and then gone. “See? Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  “So because of you, Vernell Moncrief is dead.”

  “Vernell’s lucky he made it as far as he did. That boy been scheming to get hisself killed for a long, long time.”

  “Who else knows this, Lieutenant?”

  “Nobody.”

  My eyes widened as I digested this. “Are there more?” I said finally.

  Gooch just looked at me.

  My voice got low as a whisper. “Tell me, you son of a bitch. Are there more?”

  Lt. Gooch, unfazed, reached into his cheap briefcase, took out a stack of files, and dropped them one by one across the surface of my desk, each one making a thin slapping sound as it hit. I couldn’t help counting them as they fell.

  When he was done there were seventeen folders lying there.

  I stared. All this time, the son of a bitch had been working a serial killer, not telling a soul.
Seventeen dead children. I couldn’t even fathom it. My stomach went up in my throat.

  “This bastard’s taken seventeen kids?” I said finally. “My God.”

  “Eighteen.”

  I frowned, counted the folders. “Seventeen,” I said. “You only gave me seventeen.”

  “That little girl you been stressing about?” he said.

  I squinted at him.

  “Number eighteen?” he said. “I think it’s Jenny Dial.”

  SIXTEEN

  “Lieutenant, right now all I’ve got in my life is this job,” I said.

  I was still in that room, sitting there in front of Lt. Gooch’s desk, with those seventeen folders scattered across the Masonite desktop.

  “And right now I’m holding on by my fingernails. What you’re asking, you’re asking me to jeopardize my career, you’re asking me to trust a man who’s been stuck down in the umpteenth circle of cop hell, you’re asking me to trust somebody I don’t even know, in the service of heaven only knows what. Now the only way—I’m being straight with you—the only way I’m gonna do that is if you start at the beginning and tell me what the hell’s going on. And don’t ask me to read the files. I’ll be glad to do that later. But first you owe me an explanation. You owe it to me and to Vernell Moncrief, who—as best I can tell—you believed wasn’t guilty before you ever sent those goons from SWAT in there.”

  The mention of Vernell Moncrief’s death elicited the first hint of emotion I’d ever seen on Gooch’s face, a brief cloud that went away in seconds. Lt. Gooch looked at the floor for a moment. He grunted softly, sighed, then opened the drawer to his desk, took out his disgusting Dixie cup, spit out the whole nasty wad of Skoal that had been fermenting in his lip, locked the Dixie cup up in the drawer again.