The Body Box

by Lynn Abercrombie

  A thin, nervous-looking man of about forty-five looked out at us and sighed loudly. Detective Jennings, presumably. He wore the pants but not the jacket from a cheap blue suit, cheap black shoes, a starched white polyester shirt, and a blue tie with tiny gold handcuffs on it. A .38 snubbie was clipped to his belt. “Uh,” the nervous-looking guy said, “y’all, look, I, see, I really can’t, it’s not, you know, it’s not really possible for me to, ah, interface with you. Due to, ah, the instructions I’m under. From the Chief of Police? Chief Brunson?”

  I smiled brightly. “Just a courtesy call,” I said. “We’re going through channels, naturally, put the request in to the chief, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, just thought we’d come by and chew the fat a little, cop to cop, friendly gesture sort of thing. Strictly a courtesy call.”

  The nervous-looking cop kept standing there, his hand gripping the door so hard his knuckles were white. “Uh, the way the Chief left it with me, I was under the impression maybe he was not, you know, inclined . . . to . . .” He seemed excessively nervous about the whole situation. “See, he more or less, what it is, he pretty near instructed me flat out not to even, not to even talk to y’all. Even on the phone. Or whatever.”

  “That is a fact, bud,” Lt. Gooch said. “Your boss made his wishes real clear.”

  The mutt under the tree lifted its head and let out a pitiful sound that might have been a groan or a yawn. Then, worn out by all that effort, he put his head back down on his paws.

  “Like I say,” I repeated, “just a courtesy call.” I reached forward and put out my hand.

  Det. Jennings looked at it for a moment, then finally shook, his grip soft and moist.

  “My partner here,” Lt. Gooch said, “she’s big on soft-soaping people. This ain’t no goddamn courtesy call, Jennings. What’s happening here is a little girl is fixing to die if you don’t stand up and be counted.”

  “Huh?” Jennings said.

  “Open the goddamn door,” Lt. Gooch said. He pushed the door open and walked into the house. It was an excruciatingly neat place, all knotty pine and plaid upholstery, with a large gold-framed picture of a pallid, womanly Jesus on the wall over the brick fireplace.

  “Miz Jennings,” the lieutenant said to Jennings’s squinty wife, “I apologize for barging in. You think you could get us some tea?”

  “Now just, hold on here a doggone—” Jennings’s hands were balled up in impotent fists down around his genitalia.

  “Sit down, please, Detective,” Lt. Gooch said. He took the big plaid chair with the red crocheted blanket on it, then crossed one scuffed boot over his knee. After a moment Jennings sat tentatively on the couch. “I know that horse’s ass bureaucrat told you not to talk to us. But we already got the file. All we need is your general impressions.”

  The detective crossed his arms over his chest, sort of like he was giving himself a reassuring hug. The fingers on his right hand trembled slightly. “My impressions?”

  “Of the Lacy Freemont case. Little girl come up missing November of eighty-nine. Found her body three months later over near West Point Lake. Remember? What we spoke about on the phone?”

  Jennings let out a low groan that reminded me of the noise the dog out front had made. “Look. I got twenty-four years in. One more year, I get the full retirement. I can’t—”

  “You saying that dipshit would fire you for talking to us?”

  Jennings nodded. “Might could do it, yessir.”

  Lt. Gooch looked around the room. “You see him in this room, bud?”

  Jennings blinked.

  “Huh? He got wiretaps in here? Got your wife spying on you?”

  Jennings groaned like his dog again.

  “Then what you worried about, bud? I ain’t asking you to give me no files or nothing. I already got the file.” Lt. Gooch held up the file on the Freemont girl’s homicide.

  “Chief Brunson . . . he—”

  Lt. Gooch narrowed his eyes as though in disbelief. “Why,” he said, “do you keep talking about that man? This is just us, bud. This is just you and me and Detective Deakes. And I guarantee you, me, and Detective Deakes ain’t planning on telling your boss that you been speaking out of school.”

  “Yessir but . . . The Chief doesn’t like people getting all up in his cases that haven’t been solved.”

  “What do you mean his case?” Lt. Gooch said. “This Freemont girl’s got your name on it.”

  Jennings flinched. “Yessir. But, ah, it was really more the Chief’s case. He was . . . Back then he wasn’t the chief. He was the city detective. We only got one detective, see, and he was it.”

  “Then how come your name’s on the file?”

  “Well, he got moved up to chief later that year. And he transferred some of the cases to me.”

  “Wait,” I said. “But it’s your name on the reports. Your signature.”

  Jennings didn’t say anything.

  “You saying you altered the file?” I said.

  The room was silent for a moment, then Jennings’s sad-looking wife scurried in with a tray of iced tea. She had put a wedge of lemon and a sprig of fresh mint in each glass. “Why don’t you just tell them,” she said. “Tell them what that man did.”

  Jennings groaned yet again. “Look,” he said finally. “There was some dispute. As to what his case-closing ratio was. Our old chief died, and Chief Brunson wanted the job. Only the newspaper, the Advocate, they had some kid reporter trying to make a name for hisself. And he was sniffing around, gonna do a story about how Chief Brunson had this terrible case-closing ratio. So he, ah, Chief Brunson, he changed various records. Backdated various reports and files and whatnot. So that all the unsolved cases got put under my name instead of his. And since the old chief wasn’t there to dispute it, he got away with it.”

  “So you’re saying you never worked the Freemont case at all.”

  “Well, shoot, if you put it like that . . .” He ran his finger around the lip of his tea glass until it started making a high, irritating noise. “I mean, I was kind of the unofficial assistant detective. Like a gofer, really. I worked uniform half-time and then helped him on cases half-time, driving things up to the state crime lab, whatnot. So, yeah, I kind of followed him around on that case.”

  Lt. Gooch shook his head. “Falsifying police records. Mm!”

  “Look, please, what do you want to know? I might be able to help you. Somewhat, anyway.”

  “Tell us about the case.”

  Jennings closed his eyes. “Me and my wife was trying to have a baby at the time. We was going up to Atlanta for these infertility treatments. Cost us all kind of money. I owed some money around town. Took out a note on the house. I just couldn’t afford to buck him at that point in time.”

  The house was very silent, a kind of silence that only a home without children in it can take on. I took it the infertility treatments hadn’t been successful.

  Lt. Gooch leaned forward, his sandpapery voice growing soft. “Bud, we ain’t here to judge nobody. Talk to us about Lacy Freemont.”

  Jennings opened his eyes, took a deep breath, and sat up straight. “To hell with Chief Brunson,” he said. Then, looking at me: “Excuse my French, ma’am.”

  I smiled encouragingly at him.

  “She was the prettiest little girl I ever saw. Her mama lived in a trailer park out on Highway 29, just past the chicken factory. She wasn’t exactly a prostitute—the mama, I’m talking about—but she wasn’t exactly not. If you know what I mean. There was a lot of men around.”

  Lt. Gooch nodded. There was the pattern again. Cute kids. Messed-up families. Poor people with no leverage among cops or politicians, people who couldn’t or wouldn’t push for thorough investigations, people who wouldn’t attract TV cameras or newspaper reporters.

  “Chief Brunson, he figured it was one of the boyfriends, probably took her off and killed her. He got it down to two or three of them. But nothing beyond that. One of the fellows we were looking at, he died a coupl
e years later. Cirrhosis of the liver. Another one got convicted of rape in Alabama about six months after Lacy disappeared. Robinson DuPree. Still doing time over there far as I know. The Chief, once he heard that Robinson got arrested, he said to file the case, not bother working it anymore. Figured it had to been him.”

  “Anybody else?”

  “Well, I didn’t do none of the interviews in the case. All the ones with my name on them, they was actually the Chief. Anyway, after the chief told me not to think about it anymore, it got to bothering me. So I went back and I talked to Lacy’s mama. Figured I’d just take one last crack at it.” Jennings got a nervous look on his face, stopped talking.

  “And?”

  “Aw, you know how it is. When you can’t solve a case? Lot of times the victim’s family gets real belligerent. She started spouting off about Chief Brunson, all this stuff about how this whole thing was his fault, and he was responsible for the girl coming up missing and stuff. I mean Lacy’s mama, she’d been drinking a little at the time, so it wasn’t entirely clear what she was getting at. I thought she was just mad because he didn’t apprehend anybody. But later I realized it was more than that.”

  “Meaning what?” Lt. Gooch said.

  But Jennings didn’t say.

  “I asked you a question,” Lt. Gooch said.

  Jennings pinched his lips together, still didn’t speak.

  “Okay, another question then,” I said, not wanting to spoil what little goodwill we had going for us. “Did you get anything off the body? Semen samples, blood samples, anything tangible like that?”

  “I think there was a semen sample, yes. Gathered from the girl’s, ah, anus.”

  “I presume it was never DNA tested?”

  “We weren’t doing DNA back then. Shoot, be honest, down here we still don’t DNA anybody unless we got a likely suspect. Takes a lot of time and money.”

  “That sample could still be tested, you know,” I said. “If it was stored properly.”

  Jennings looked at me then at Lt. Gooch, then back at me. “Wait, hold on,” he said. “You aren’t suggesting I go behind the Chief’s back, dig up that sample out of the evidence lockup?”

  We just looked at him.

  “If the Chief ever found out, he’d kill me!”

  “How come? This case is more than a decade old. Okay, so he made you fudge some reports. Why would he care at this point?”

  Jennings seemed to be debating with himself about something. Finally he said. “Lacy’s mama. She gave me something.”

  I spread my hands. “Okay.”

  Jennings looked up at his wife. “Darling? Could you give us a minute? This is getting down to police talk. Liable to upset you.”

  His wife looked at him for a minute, pulled a wisp of hair back from her forehead, then walked into the kitchen. Jennings watched her go, then stood up and got something out of a knotty pine cabinet against the far wall. A videotape. On the spine, handwritten in faded magic marker, the label read: DATES.

  He turned on the TV, slid the tape into his VCR, hit the play button.

  “Call ’em johns, call ’em dates, call ’em close friends, I don’t know what term you want to use. But what I’m getting at, Lacy’s mama, she was making home movies, you know what I mean?”

  The screen came up full of electronic snow, then abruptly a blurry, dull image came on the screen. It was an overhead shot of a bed in a small room. A counter in the bottom right corner played the date and time. 10:43 PM 10-28-90. After a minute or two of nothing happening there was a sound of unintelligible voices, then a door opened and two people came in the room—a woman in a shortie nightgown, and a man in a suit. The man in the suit sat down on the bed and started pulling off his shoes. The quality of the video was not good, but it was clear enough that when he turned toward the camera you could make out his features. It was a younger version of Chief John Wayne Brunson. The woman started pulling her nightdress off over her shoulders, then the screen went blank.

  “That’s it?” I said.

  Jennings fiddled with the remote control, frowning, but nothing came on the screen. He ejected the tape, peered at it closely, then frowned. “It’s an old tape. Looks like it just broke.”

  “Anything else on there?”

  Jennings shrugged. “Just them going at it.”

  “I’d like to examine that tape,” Lt. Gooch said.

  Jennings glanced at him sourly. “Sir, you got one thing right about Chief Brunson. I been under his thumb a long time. But around here there’s not a lot of jobs that pays half decent and that gives you good benefits and that lets you retire at forty-five years of age. I been sticking it out while a lot of other officers, good officers, have come and gone. I got one year to go, and I’m not doing anything to jeopardize that pension.” He nodded at the kitchen. “Me and my wife, we had plans to have a family. They didn’t come to pass. So we’ve made some more plans. Get a Winnebago, travel, see some places. But won’t none of that come true if I don’t stick out this next year.”

  “I promise you we won’t reveal what’s on that tape,” I said. “Or especially where it came from.”

  Jennings clamped his thin lips together, looked at me with eyes that were half angry, half sad and pitiful. “You know that’s a promise you can’t keep,” he said. “And anyway, that’s not what I’m talking about. This here’s my insurance policy. That bastard, if he should try to get rid of me for one reason or another—like he’s done a lot of good men on this force—well, I’m keeping this in reserve just in case.” He smiled then, a pinched angry smile full of bitter triumph and a certain amount of self-contempt.

  “Were there any other suspects?” Lt. Gooch said.

  Jennings shrugged. “Not really.”

  “Cable guy? Creepy stranger? Strange landlord?”

  “Way she told it, Chief Brunson was the creepy stranger.”

  “You think he did it?”

  The angry little smile came back. “Sometimes I wish it had been him. But I checked on his whereabouts the day Lacy disappeared.” He shook his head. “Wasn’t him. He was up at a seminar in Atlanta at the GBI crime lab.”

  “Is Lacy’s mother still around?”

  Jennings shook his head. “Married some trucker, moved up north. I never heard where to, exactly.”

  We asked a few more questions, but didn’t make any particular headway.

  As we got up to leave, Jennings said, “Earlier? Y’all said a little girl was fixing to die?”

  “Yep,” Lt. Gooch said.

  “What’d you mean by that?”

  “Just what I said.” Gooch got up and walked swiftly to the front door, not looking back.

  TWENTY

  It was getting late by then. Gooch pulled the car into a cracked parking lot just off the interstate and said, “Motel 6 okay with you?”

  “Can’t we do better than that?”

  Lt. Gooch turned toward me. A passing car briefly lit up his cold blue eyes, then his face went dark again. “You want you a mint on your pillow? I could drive down to the Exxon station, get you one.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “Whatever.”

  The next morning we ate biscuits at Hardee’s, then drove up to Macon, where the fourth child, a boy named Junebug Miller, had disappeared.

  After we’d driven for about half an hour, not saying a word during breakfast, not a word on the ride over toward Macon, I said, “Lieutenant, you must be the most phlegmatic guy I’ve ever met in my life.”

  “Phlegmatic.”

  “Reserved. Quiet. Unwilling to talk. Keeping your thoughts bottled up inside. Always sitting there with something going on in your head and everybody around you wanting to know what you’re thinking, but you’re so stubborn that you just—”

  “I know what phlegmatic means.”

  “I’m supposed to be your partner. I’m supposed to be helping you solve this case. And yet you keep shutting me out, acting like this whole thing is some big need-to-know secret. How am I suppo
sed to help, how am I supposed to contribute if you treat me like a four-year-old?”

  “Why should I talk? You do plenty of talking for the both of us.”

  “Dammit, that’s not answering my question.”

  We drove for a while, then Lt. Gooch said, “You want to talk about the case, talk about the case. Tell me your observations, where we’re at.”

  “Okay. In Columbus, we’ve got this house painter who seems to have law-enforcement experience. Then Evie Marie’s mother told us about this guy who’s supposedly her brother’s parole officer, only her brother’s not on parole. Then we’ve got Lacy Freemont’s mother making vague accusations about Chief Brunson.”

  Lt. Gooch took his Dixie cup off the dash, dribbled some brown juice in it. “No.”

  “Whoa, whoa, what you mean, no?”

  “I know what you’re going to say. Maybe we got a law-enforcement connection, and therefore maybe we should take a hard look at Chief Brunson.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And I’m saying, no. I’m saying we’d be wasting our time.”

  “Why?

  Lt. Gooch squinted out the windshield.

  “See!” I said. “There you go again. Either you got a reason, but you’re not telling me, or else you’ve got no reason and you’re not willing to admit it because you’re a mule-headed boot-scooting banjo-playing pea-picking snuff-dipping inbred country-ass redneck cracker fool. Just like everybody around the department says. Which one is it?”

  Lt. Gooch smiled thinly. “Feel better?”

  I blew a bunch of air out through my lips, but didn’t say anything.

  Macon was moderately helpful, but the case there was sketchy for a variety of reasons. Milledgeville was worthless. The detective who had worked the case was retired to Florida, various records had been burned in a courthouse fire, and nobody currently working in the department had been involved in the case. In Walton County, though, we cornered the Sheriff’s detective who’d worked the Becky Lynn Trotter case, enrolling his support with an offer of a free steak dinner at the Western Sizzlin’.