The Body Box

by Lynn Abercrombie

  “Please,” the Special Agent-in-Charge said, pointing at a chair in front of her desk. We sat.

  “Here’s the tricky thing,” I said, “we’re involved in putting together a case involving a string of homicides. We believe, in fact, that we’re dealing with a serial killer. But I’ll be honest with you; at this point the investigation is fairly preliminary, fairly sketchy.”

  McGahah raised her eyebrows slightly. “Where does the Army come into this?”

  “I’ve been doing a survey of unsolved cases in the state that seem to fit the general pattern we’re looking at. And I’ve found one homicide that occurred here at Fort Benning.”

  “I think you may be mistaken. We haven’t had an on-base homicide in quite some time.”

  “This case is almost fifteen years old.”

  “Wow. You’re saying this guy—I presume it’s a guy? Yes? —this guy has been out there killing people for fifteen years?”

  “Close to it.”

  “So what are you hoping to accomplish by coming here?”

  “I’m here to request that you release your investigative files on this case to the Atlanta Police Department.”

  McGahah nodded. “Yes. Well, as I’m sure you might guess, that will involve some fairly extensive paperwork.”

  “I had a hunch.”

  “What’s the name of the victim in the case?”

  I wrote the child’s name on a piece of paper and pushed it across the desk.

  “Was she a soldier? Civilian employee on base? What?”

  I shook my head. “Six-year-old girl. A military dependent.”

  McGahah looked at me for a while. “My God,” she said, eyes widening. “You’re saying you’ve had a serial killer out there killing kids for fifteen years?”

  “Close to it.”

  “Why doesn’t anybody know about this?” she said sharply.

  “This guy’s smart. The MOs in the cases are different. He disguises them, makes them look like child abuse by family members. The only way we picked up on it was a subtle thing that showed up in the autopsies. Not a contributor to death, though, so initially nobody picked up the pattern.”

  “What kind of thing?”

  “Truthfully, I just can’t tell you everything right now,” I said. McGahah’s face stiffened. “And before you start getting your panties in a wad—which I would, too, if I were you—let me be real clear. This is not some kind of protect-my-turf thing. This is not me wanting to hog the case.”

  “What is it then?” she said coolly.

  “So far—and, Agent McGahah, I’m going to have to ask you to keep this in absolute confidence—it’s looking like our killer is law enforcement.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  I shook my head. “No, ma’am. Straight-up truth.”

  “You have a suspect?”

  “Not, ah, specifically.”

  “Well, what I’ll need you to do is make a written request for the case file. Might speed things up if it came straight from the Chief’s office. Also, we’ve got a form for you to fill out. You’ll need to route that request through the Judge Advocate General. I’ll give you the name of the officer you’ll need to address it to.”

  “How long are we talking?”

  McGahah smiled mirthlessly. “A couple months? Six? A year?” She shrugged. “Army bureaucracy, you know how it is.”

  I shook my head. “We haven’t got a couple months.”

  “Fifteen-year-old case, what’s the big rush?”

  I took a photograph out of my purse, set it on her desk. “Her name is Jenny Dial. We believe our perp snatched her a week and a half ago. Right now, if we can trust our reconstruction of things, she is sitting in a box where she is slowly being starved to death. He will continue to starve her for another month. Then he’ll force-feed her for a week to get her weight back up. Then he’ll kill her.”

  The SAC looked at me for a moment, and then looked away. Her freckles seemed to grow brighter, but I guess it was her face getting paler.

  “Let me see what I can do,” she said finally.

  She stood and left the room for a while. After about twenty minutes she came back with a thick folder in her hands. “I can’t release this to you officially,” she said, “but in the meantime I can let you look at it on a sort of unofficial basis and take notes. Then you can put through your request, and I’ll try to expedite it so you can have an official copy.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Before I hand it over to you, though, let me take a look through it. Every law enforcement organization has its quirks in terms of recordkeeping and whatnot. I might be able to save you some effort, point out what’s important, how to read between the lines.”

  She went through the file carefully, eventually looking up at me.

  “I don’t know how you guys do it,” SAC McGahah said, “but we don’t exactly have a form to fill out that says ‘This person is a suspect’ at the top. But it’s pretty clear our agents investigating this case did, in fact, have a suspect.”

  “Okay.”

  “The agents who investigated the case looked at a number of people. There was a fellow on base who had been a suspect in a child molestation. He’d never been article six-teened, though, because the case was never proven. Looks like he had a pretty solid alibi. There were a couple of other leads. But based on where they put their efforts and the various tests they ran, it’s quite clear who they suspected.”

  “And that was?”

  “Well, let me give you the general outline of the case first. The girl came up missing in April of 1987 and was found in June. She had been more or less beheaded. So the murder weapon looks like it was a machete, or maybe even a sword. The autopsy shows she had been raped, and that she had not actually been killed until about two months after her abduction. So what the investigators deduced is that the killer was somebody on base. This is an enormous place, Fort Benning. Absolutely enormous. And a lot of it is just woods. There are all kinds of little out-of-the-way shacks and buildings that have been thrown up over the years for one purpose or another, to the point that nobody even remembers where they all are. Believe it or not, somebody who goes wandering around out in the woods a lot might know of all kinds of places where a child could be kept prisoner, and no one would even know.”

  “And who might go wandering around in these woods?”

  “Well, this base is probably the premier infantry training base in the United States. You’ve got ranger training, Special Forces, recon, all kinds of guys that go humping around the boonies here.”

  “What’s recon?”

  “Sorry. Everything in the Army has a goofy acronym. In Vietnam they had these guys called ‘Lurps.’ That’s LRRP. LRRP is the acronym for long range reconnaissance patrol. Now it’s called ‘Recon.’ Those are the sort of maniacs who go hiking into the jungle with a knife, a compass, a rifle, and some dried meat; and stay out there for weeks, killing people and blowing up bridges. Crazy types, if you ask me. There’s a recon training course here.”

  “I see.”

  “From the order of the reports, I’d say the investigators decided they had a decent suspect fairly quickly. They ran the rape kit and found that the perp was a secreter. As you know, Detective, that means that the suspect secretes tiny amounts of blood into the seminal fluid, and therefore you can determine the perp’s blood type from the semen sample. The blood type found in the semen matched the suspect’s blood type. So they brought him in.” She paused significantly. “I guess you already know, the suspect was the girl’s father.”

  I nodded.

  She squinted at the page. “Very experienced soldier, gung-ho type, spotless record, nothing but good reports from his superiors over the years. Silver star from Panama, Purple Heart in Grenada. He was a recon trainer here at Benning, spent lots of time alone in the woods.”

  “But y’all never made an arrest.”

  “Nope. This was pre-DNA, of course. The perp was O positive, the s
uspect was O positive. The most common blood type on the planet. The girl’s body was found just off a trail that was used in recon training, a trail that the suspect used frequently. And that’s absolutely all we had on him. No previous record of child abuse. The investigators sweated him for three days, and he didn’t budge one inch.”

  “You mentioned a rape kit,” I said. “What I’d like to do is run a DNA test on the rape kit, see if we can come up with a match on any of the later cases.”

  “Yeah.” McGahah stroked her chin. “Yeah, see, that gets problematic, giving you the rape kit. We’d be talking about an awful lot of red tape.”

  “I don’t have to tell you a girl’s life is riding on this,” I snapped.

  “I know, I know.” The SAC looked thoughtful. “You know what? The Army has one of the best crime labs on the planet. I might be able to get them to run the DNA. Then I could kind of informally pass the test results on to you. Again, pending things getting resolved through channels.”

  “How quick would that happen?”

  “I’ve got a few strings I could pull. Given the nature of the situation, we might be able to turn it around in a day or two.”

  “That would be fantastic.” I felt a rush of excitement. This was better than I’d hoped, probably a good deal faster than routing it through the GBI crime lab.

  “Anything else?” McGahah said.

  I shook my head. “Don’t believe so.”

  The CID officer stood. “You going to catch this bastard?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll have to see what the test results show, won’t we?”

  “Our suspect in this case, is he your suspect, too?”

  “Maybe.”

  McGahah looked down at the file again, read off the name of the suspect. “Staff Sergeant Hank Gooch. You know where he’s located and all?”

  I looked at the CID officer soberly. “Matter of fact, I do.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  So I had a problem. Within forty-eight hours or so, I was going to have DNA results from the semen sample found on the body of Gooch’s murdered daughter. But without anything to compare it to, it didn’t do me any good. I wasn’t in any position to get a court order for a sample of his blood just yet. And even if I did—and Gooch was in fact the killer—then the first thing he was liable to do was to run out and kill Jenny Dial and dispose of her body.

  I drove back from Columbus trying to reason my way out of this box, but my mind was so muddled from lack of sleep that I could hardly think straight. In Macon I stopped at a Quik Trip and gassed up. At the counter they had a display of all kinds of snake-oil herbal supplements: echinacea, gingko biloba, kava kava. Cold pills, think pills, energy pills. I picked up a tiny plastic bag, looked at the ingredients. Caffeine and a bunch of herbs. Well, it was better than nothing.

  “Throw this in, too,” I said, dropping the pills on the counter. “And a Diet Coke.”

  The instructions on the little bag recommended taking two pills. I washed all four down with the Diet Coke, started driving.

  When the pills hit me, I started feeling a slight tingling in my fingers. It wasn’t quite like snorting a line of crank, but the herbs were more potent than I’d expected. I tried to concentrate on the DNA question. There are quite a few ways to get DNA samples. Blood is the best source of DNA, but you can get it from semen, from hair follicles, from saliva, even from sweat. None of which helped me out, really. The problem wasn’t just the source, but the means of getting it. To get the sample, I’d need a warrant. To get a warrant, I’d have to go to the DA. If I went to the DA asking for a sample of any bodily fluid from a cop, the word was liable to get around, which was liable to tip Lt. Gooch off, which was liable to lead us right back to the one place I couldn’t allow us to go—the place where Jenny Dial ended up lying in some ditch.

  My mind started flitting around as I was driving. The caffeine had given me enough energy to stay awake, but not enough to really concentrate. A thought would enter my mind, then it would flit off, then it would come back and recirculate, unaltered, unimproved. I must have been doing eighty-five as I tore through Atlanta. I shot past I-20 without even thinking. Next thing I knew I was on the north side of town, barrelling onto GA 400, the big toll road leading up toward Alpharetta. The same thoughts kept rolling around and around, and eventually I realized I wasn’t thinking about DNA at all.

  I had been seized by panic, and it had nothing to do with the case. I don’t know why—well, okay, I know why—it was paranoia brought on by too many stimulants and not enough sleep, but why I fixated on that little boy, I can’t say, exactly. All I know is that I felt like something terrible was about to happen to the boy who had almost been my son, but who wasn’t anymore.

  I took the Alpharetta exit, headed west, until I had driven past the grandiose sign that said ROSEMONT ORCHARDS II, A TENNIS COMMUNITY. As I pulled up in front of the big house where David and Nancy Drobysch and their son Kevin lived, a shiny gold Acura was backing out. In the front seat was a pleasant-looking woman, blond, blue eyed. The top of a child’s car seat poked up in the back.

  I drove to the end of the cul-de-sac, turned, and followed the Acura down the road. I hung back a couple of hundred yards as Nancy Drobysch merged into the traffic on Old Milton Highway, a large artery with two lanes on each side of a wide turn lane. We drove a mile or so, turned into the parking lot of a bright new strip mall. As Nancy Drobysch slid into a space in front of a Kroger supermarket, I crept around the lot, finally parking in front of a nail salon.

  From where I was parked, I could see Nancy Drobysch’s blond hair disappear into the Kroger. She was pushing a grocery cart with a baby’s car seat in it, but I couldn’t see the baby. I waited a minute, telling myself it was time to fire up the car and get my ass out of there. But I didn’t. I kept thinking something bad’s going to happen, something bad’s going to happen. After a minute, I got out of the car walked into the Kroger, picked up a green basket with the store logo on it, and began wandering through the fruits and vegetables. I couldn’t see Nancy Drobysch anywhere. I strolled around trying to find the weirdest fruits and vegetables. Soon I had a nice little pile in my basket: tomatillos, guava, something called conyaku, a shriveled cassava root. I looked around the store, wondering, how many of these corn-fed suburbanites ate cassava.

  I ambled—as much as it’s possible to amble while flying on caffeine—over to the drink aisle, put a bottle of the most expensive wine I could find into the basket, turned the corner, and banged slap into a cart. Looking up at me from the cart was a tiny brown-skinned boy. He stared at me in surprise; then the corners of his mouth turned down, and he began to wail.

  “Hey, hey, sweetness,” I said. “It’s okay. It’s all right.”

  Then I looked up, and there was Nancy Drobysch, eyes narrow, jaw set. She unbuckled the boy quickly and efficiently from the car seat, picked him up, and cradled him tightly in her arms.

  “What are you doing here, Mechelle?” she said. Her voice was quiet, but her tone was sharp.

  I picked up a handful of the vegetables and fruits from my cart. “Tomatillos,” I said, shrugging. “Cassava root. You know. The selection of cassava in my neighborhood is miserable.”

  She kept looking at me with her cool gray eyes. “David told me,” she said. “He told me you used the Web site to figure out who we are. You promised in the adoption agreement that we wouldn’t have contact. You said that’s what you wanted.”

  I smiled at her, at the boy. “Really,” I said, “I’m just here. I didn’t even know—”

  “Bullshit,” she said.

  I felt a strange sense of dislocation then, a sort of swirling in my chest. I reached toward the boy, to stroke him, maybe, or pat him on the head. My boy. Her boy. He was still sniffling, looking at me like I was some bird of prey ready to come out of the sky at him, swoop him off to be eaten. Nancy Drobysch angled her body away from me.

  “You agreed, Mechelle. You said. No contact.”

  I’m n
ot usually tongue-tied, but I just stood there, this ache in my chest so strong I could hardly breathe.

  “I mean, come on,” Nancy Drobysch pursued. “I don’t know what you’re doing, but you and I both know it’s not healthy. Do you need some kind of help? Counseling? Something? Maybe David and I could help.”

  “I just . . . I just wanted to see him.”

  Nancy Drobysch sighed irritably. “That’s not in the cards. You know this.”

  “I know, I know, I just—”

  “Look, Mechelle, I don’t know how to say this. But after David found out you’d used the Web site to track us down, somebody in the neighborhood said they’d seen somebody that looked like you driving by our house.”

  “Like me? Black, you mean?”

  “It was you, wasn’t it?”

  “No! Of course not!”

  Nancy didn’t believe me, I could see it in her eyes. And there was no reason she should, either. I knew this was bad, but I was just being carried along, unable to stop myself. I reached out my hand again toward the boy.

  “David went to a lawyer,” Nancy said. “I don’t know how to say this, but . . . Look, he’s going to file a restraining order on you. If you come around again . . .” She didn’t finish the sentence, but I knew where it went from there.

  I smiled brightly. “Oh! I see. Okay, I see how this is going. You got the child, it’s all nice and legal, now the gloves come off.”

  “Please! Mechelle. Think! Look at this from our perspective. No, no, actually that’s not right. Look at this from his perspective. Take five minutes and just think. If you just do that, you’ll see what’s right. Okay? Now we’re going.”

  I didn’t move. She tried to back up. I put my hand on her cart, closed my fingers around the steel mesh. There was a brief tugging match, then suddenly a cell phone had materialized in her hand. “Police?” she said. “Hello? Yes, look I need some assistance.”

  “All right, all right, all right, you made your point, girlfriend.” I set the basket of weird fruits and roots and vegetables on the floor, picked up the wine bottle, sprinted for the door.