The Body Box

by Lynn Abercrombie

  I have felt low in my life. The day I got busted for buying crank from a Cobb County undercover agent, just to take a f’rinstance. But this probably took the cake. I was so exhausted I could hardly move, but I was also so frightened that every time I stopped, I began to panic. So I kept moving.

  When I reached the fourth side of the big stand of planted pine, I decided the hell with it, I’d just blunder off into the woods. Maybe I’d find a creek or something. If I found a creek, I’d follow the creek, and the creek would lead me somewhere eventually. Troup County is not exactly heavily populated, so “eventually” could be a while. But I figured it would be better than ending up as a wolf treat.

  And it worked.

  Within a few hundred yards, I found a creek. The trees had thinned out a little, so the starlight turned the water into a thready silver path in front of me. I didn’t even need my now-almost-useless flashlight. I just splashed along right down the middle of the creek, counting my steps again, just for something to do.

  I had gone a few hundred paces when suddenly I saw the light—a small, yellow light, almost swallowed up in the darkness. The creek was moving toward it, so I followed the silver thread at my feet. When I’d gotten to what I estimated was a hundred feet or so from the light, it suddenly went out. Around the spot where the light had been, though, I could see a low black shape hunkering against the dark. A house. Somebody must have been inside, and they must have just switched off the light.

  I stopped, listened. Nothing but katydids. I continued down the creek, trying to be quieter. When it became clear that the creek had gotten as close to the dark house as it was going to get, I scrambled up the sandy bank and onto the lip of a small weedy clearing or yard that led up to the house.

  I’d been so fixated on the idea of getting out of the woods that it only occurred to me then that this might be Vale Pleassance’s cabin. I stopped and tried to think. I was trespassing. I had no legal authority in this jurisdiction. If I went up to the house and it turned out there was a child inside, I was liable to torpedo every shred of the case that we had developed up to this time. On the other hand, if Jenny Dial was really in there, saving her life would justify any mistake I might make.

  I turned on my cell phone. For the first time, it indicated there was a signal here. I started to dial Lt. Gooch’s number, but just as I was about to hit the “send” key, I decided, no, he’d hear the panicky note in my voice, and I didn’t want that. I didn’t want him telling me to go back into those woods either, that I was going to mess up our evidence and put myself in harm’s way and whatever else he’d say in his usual condescending tone.

  I clipped the phone back to my belt, decided what I’d do. I’d sneak up, take a peek around the house, see what there was to see—which would probably be nothing—and then I’d follow his driveway back to the road. Nothing to it.

  But just in case . . . I unholstered my Glock.

  When I was a little girl I read that book, The Deerslayer, where Natty Bumpo was always walking through the forest without making any noise. Maybe it’s possible to walk noiselessly through dry leaves, I don’t know, but not when you’re wearing Atlanta PD–issue combat boots. Because as soon as I got the idea I wanted to be quiet, that there might actually be somebody listening for me, it seemed like every time I stepped—no matter how slowly and carefully I did it—I set off this drum solo of rustling grass and popping twigs and shattering leaves. The house was only fifty feet away, but doing my Natty Bumpo routine, it took me forever to get there.

  I reached the wall, found a window, looked in. Except for the red glow of a digital clock, the interior of the house was stone dark. But even with that tiny glow, I could see that I was looking into a living room. Lining the walls were the heads of dead animals–deer mostly, but some of them other animals I couldn’t quite make out, except to see the red glow of their eyes.

  I worked my way around to the front of the house. A big Chevy Suburban was parked on the edge of the gravel road. A sliver of moon had just cleared the trees. It wasn’t much, but it threw off enough light that I could make out a sticker that read FULTON COUNTY MEDICAL EXAMINER on the back window.

  So this was definitely it, Vale Pleassance’s place. A spurt of adrenaline ran through me. I worked my way slowly around the side of the house, stopping every few moments to listen. I wasn’t sure what it was, but I had the creepy feeling I wasn’t the only person out here. A squeak? The creak of a board? A rustle in the grass? It was hard to make anything out against the din of the katydids. And maybe it was just my imagination anyway.

  I reached the back of the house, found another window. The sliver of moon tossed a few stray rays through the glass. It was a small bedroom. Against the far wall was a bed, a small bed. A child’s bed. And in the bed lay the form of a little girl, her long straight blond hair splayed across the pillow.

  I was trying to think what to do next, when a blinding light came down over me and a voice behind me yelled, “Drop the goddamn gun, you son of a bitch!”

  I turned and there was Dr. Vale Pleassance, his right eye trained on me over the barrel of a camouflage-painted shotgun.

  PART THREE

  THIRTY-ONE

  “Now! Drop it!”

  I considered, extremely briefly, the idea of whirling around and firing. But that would have been about eighteen kinds of stupid. So I tried, instead, to be the cool chick. I dropped the gun and gave him what I hoped would be a big, toothy winning smile. “Dr. Pleassance, I presume?”

  Pleassance stared at me for a while over the barrel of his camo-painted shotgun. “Mechelle?” he said. “That’s your name right? The detective?”

  “At your service.”

  He kept staring at me with obvious confusion. Finally he lowered his gun. “Um,” he said. “I don’t know quite how to say this, but you . . . I think you may have wet yourself.”

  I looked down at the stain spreading across the crotch of my jeans. So much for my big Pam Grier cool-chick imitation. I looked up at him angrily. “Who’s the girl in your bedroom?”

  Vale Pleassance was looking extremely puzzled. “That’s my niece. She’s staying with me while my sister and her husband are taking a couple days down in Florida.” He leaned over, picked up my gun, handed it to me. “So, you mind coming inside and explaining to me why you’re skulking around my cabin?”

  I holstered my Glock. “You got a clean pair of pants in there?”

  Ten minutes later, wearing a pair of jeans that fit me more like paint than clothing, I was sitting in Vale Pleassance’s living room, drinking a glass of iced tea. I had left the thumb break on my Glock unsnapped just in case, but there was something about the vibe here, a complete lack of nervousness or furtiveness on the part of Vale Pleassance, that made me feel like maybe I had been barking up the wrong tree. For one thing, while I was supposed to be changing into a pair of Vale’s pants, I had poked my head into the back bedroom and turned the light on briefly, found a little girl sleeping there who didn’t look even vaguely like Jenny Dial. My guess, she was at least three or four years older and her hair, though blond, was darker than Jenny’s. She was smiling in her sleep, the door was unlocked, and there were no restraints visible anywhere. She didn’t look like much of a prisoner.

  “So,” Vale Pleassance said as we faced each other across the crude coffee table in his living room.

  “Well. It’s about a case, actually.”

  Vale Pleassance was looking at me like he didn’t buy it.

  “Yeah, what it was, I was walking up to the house,” I said. “Your cabin? Then I heard this funny noise. I’m not a country girl, you know. So I got spooked and I . . . Well, I pulled out my weapon.”

  “What kind of noise?”

  Good question. “Hooo! Hooo! Like that.”

  “An owl. I didn’t hear an owl. All I heard was you bumbling around in the woods.”

  I tried to look sheepish. “Like I say, I’m no kind of country girl. I got lost. I was kind of creeped out
.”

  “You got lost? There’s a gravel road that runs directly from the road to my house. How did you manage that?”

  I laughed brightly. “If I knew the answer to that, I probably wouldn’t have been out there getting ready to unload a couple nine millimeters into some poor owl, huh?”

  Vale Pleassance still looked skeptical. “Okay. So you came all the way down here on a Friday night to consult about a case. Must be something hot. Let me see the file.”

  I felt my face flush. My story was falling apart right in front of me. “I, ah, I guess I assumed that you kept your case files down here.” Yeah, right.

  “In my hunting cabin?”

  I shrugged.

  Vale Pleassance gave me a brief noise that might have passed for a laugh. “Well, sadly, you were right. I’m such a workaholic that I keep copies of most of my files down here. Saved me a lot of late-night drives up to Atlanta over the years.”

  “Excellent,” I said.

  “So what autopsy did you want to go over with me?”

  I debated what to do next. If he was really the guy, I needed to be careful. If he wasn’t, there was no percentage in alienating him. But I had to broach the subject somehow, see how he handled it.

  “Are your files in a logical order? Something I could make sense out of?”

  He shrugged. “Sure. Filed alphabetically by year.”

  “Mind if I pull a couple of files?”

  “Okay.” He stood. “They’re back here.” I followed him back to another room. It was a roughly furnished office, the walls covered with mounted heads. Deer, wild boar, a bear, a couple of African-looking animals—antelopes I guess—with long, pointy horns. With the lights on, it didn’t look nearly so ominous as it had when I was looking in from outside. The pathologist pointed at a gray filing cabinet on the back wall. “They’re all labeled. Should be easy to figure out.”

  “Go relax,” I said. “It’ll take me a couple of minutes.”

  Vale Pleassance looked at me for a moment as though he still didn’t quite buy my story. But then he just shrugged and walked out of the room.

  It didn’t take five minutes to pull all the files. Like he had said, everything was well organized. He had files going back to 1987, when he was hired as an assistant ME. I took a few more minutes to poke through his desk and to look in some other file folders. No kiddie porn, no pictures of any of the victims, nothing, in short, that looked the least bit suspicious. I even pulled up a corner of the rug. The floor was solid concrete. If there was a secret room in this place, it wasn’t underground: the house was built on a solid slab.

  I came back out with the seventeen files and set them down on the table in front of him. He eyed them curiously.

  “You make a specialty of child autopsies, right?” I said.

  “Sure.”

  “Making you kind of the go-to guy if there’s a puzzling murder.”

  “I’ve done a lot of work on child abuse,” he said. “The GBI tends to call me if they think there might be some kind of parental abuse.”

  “Go through these files for me, would you? I just want your impression. But pay special attention to the details, if you would.”

  “Paying special attention to details is my job,” he said dryly. “Why these files in particular?”

  “Just look.”

  Vale Pleassance squinted skeptically at me; then he took a pair of glasses out of his breast pocket, picked up the first file and started reading. I sat there and watched him read. There was Beethoven on the stereo, one of the piano sonatas.

  Pleassance had gotten to the fifth or sixth file, looking more and more puzzled, when he said, “I just—I don’t know what I’m—”

  “My daddy was always a big Beethoven man,” I said. “I’ll tell you the kind of guy he was. When I was, oh, eight, nine years old, he decided he was gonna learn the Hammerklavier. Came home every day, no matter what time he’d gotten off work, he’d play that damn thing for an hour and a half a day. At the end of the year he called up a bunch of his friends, had them over to our home, and he gave a little recital. And you know what? He never played it again.”

  Vale Pleassance kept looking at me. “You’re not going to tell me what I’m supposed to be looking for.”

  “Nope.”

  He kept reading. It must have been fifteen minutes later that he suddenly got a funny look on his face, sort of taut and nervous. He quickly riffled through the previous file. Then the one before that, then the one before that. His face went pale, and he sat back and stared blankly up at the ceiling.

  “All of them?” he said finally.

  I nodded.

  “How did I miss it? Most of them had significant bone decalcification. Three of them had a strange callus at the top of the shoulder blade. And seven of them had a little round callus on their back right on top of C7, the seventh cervical vertebra.” Suddenly he was weeping. “How did I miss it? How did I miss it?”

  I wanted to believe it was him. It would have been a good thing if we’d found the right man, if we could save that little girl. But this was not acting. There are only a few things I know in life, and one of them is people. If this man was acting, then I’d never trust my judgment of another person again. There’s acting, and there’s acting. This was a man who’d just been deeply shocked.

  “Talk to me,” I said. “You run a youth theater, you seem to have a professional interest in juvenile murder. Why the interest in kids?”

  He sat up slowly, pawed vaguely through the files. “I’ve asked myself that plenty of times. I didn’t have much of a childhood. The usual thing, you know, my daddy was a doctor, his daddy was a doctor, his daddy had been a doctor. They were always pushing me: grades, piano practice, sports, this and that.” He opened one file, looked at it, shook his head slowly, closed it, looked at another one. “When I was about fifteen, I made a vow to myself that I would find a nice wife, you know, get a nice job, not too demanding, have a big passel of kids that I’d love, and that I’d have a good time just being kids and . . .” He laughed sadly. “Look at me. A pitiful workaholic. Too busy doing things to find a wife. Much less raise kids. Too shy, too busy, too something. I don’t know. It’s pathetic.” He looked at the last file, sighed, threw it on the floor, his hand trembling in the air. “How did I miss it? How?”

  “Frankly?” I said. “That’s the question I came here to ask.”

  He smiled at me, sadly, not even mad about it, the tears still wet on his cheeks. “That’s why you had the gun out? I’m a suspect?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “We just—we had some questions, that’s all.”

  Vale Pleassance started laughing loudly, kept laughing for an uncomfortably long time.

  After what seemed forever, a little girl came out of the bedroom and said, “Uncle Vale? What’s wrong?”

  Vale stopped laughing then. The girl came over and he gave her an affectionate squeeze around the shoulder. “The world. That’s what’s wrong. The whole world.”

  The little girl gave him a big hug. And Vale Pleassance started crying again.

  “Don’t cry, Uncle Vale,” the little girl said. “Don’t cry.”

  “Sweetie,” he said, “why don’t you go on to bed?”

  “I want some water.”

  Vale smiled. “Okay, honey.” He stood up and got some water from the kitchenette that was attached to the living room. She drank the water greedily, spilling a trail of it down her nightgown.

  “Nighty-night,” the little girl said, putting the glass on the counter. Then she ran off to the bedroom.

  I said, “Look—”

  “I like kids,” Vale said. “I like way they aren’t swayed by all the crap. Getting a good job, being a perfect worker drone so they can buy a nice house in the suburbs, all that? They don’t care. They know what’s real.”

  “Look—”

  “I do hundreds of autopsies a year. Probably too many. Maybe even way too many. Thousands I’ve done in my life. I can’t
keep them all straight in my mind. I can’t . . . I can’t make connections. I mean . . . I should have seen that pattern. But I didn’t. I missed it. I missed it because I’m my father’s son. I missed it because I’m too damn—”

  “Look—”

  Vale Pleassance stabbed his finger at the pile of autopsy reports. “I do this because I care. And yet I screwed it up. I got distracted because the MOs were all different.”

  “Look, easy, Vale, easy. Okay? We wanted to ask you some questions. That’s different from calling you a suspect. But now that I’m here, I can see it’s not you. I can see that. It’s just not. And these cases, like you say, you’ve done thousands of autopsies by now. A bunch of kids with a funny little callus at C7. Some decalcification here and there . . . This was a really subtle thing. Not something that would jump out at you.”

  Vale Pleassance sighed again. “No. That’s not good enough. I should have seen it. I should have.” He sat down and ran his hands through his hair, looked at the floor for a while. When he looked up again, he seemed halfway restored. “Okay. Okay. Let’s focus here. So y’all found the pattern.”

  “Gooch did.”

  “Okay. So Gooch found the pattern. And after y’all looked at these autopsies, and they all had my name on them, and they all had this one little clue in common, y’all said, ‘How could this guy possibly have missed this thing fifteen times in a row?’”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Okay, seventeen. But that was your line of reasoning, am I right?”

  “There’s more to it than that. We believe our suspect is in law enforcement or a law enforcement–related field. We believe that he is somehow able to make himself into a plausible black or white man. We believe he travels in his job. And obviously he has, shall we say, an interest in children.”

  “What do you mean, he passes as black or white?”

  “In all these cases, there were suspects close to the victim. Family, friend, that sort of the thing. The usual child-abuse suspect. But in almost every case there was also a person—a sort of mysterious-stranger-type guy—who horned in on the victim for a couple of weeks before the snatch. Thing is, this mysterious stranger seemed different in every case. Sometimes white, sometimes black, sometimes blond haired, sometimes brown. But always Mister Friendly, sociable type, fast talker, telling jokes, that kind of thing.”