The Body Box

by Lynn Abercrombie

  “Jenny Dial,” I said. “Where’s Jenny Dial?”

  He didn’t say anything, just kept eyeing me with this queasy expression on his face.

  “Is she in the basement? Huh? You got some kind of little shed out back or something?”

  “All right, all right, just hold on a second,” the Chief said. “I’ll go, ah, I’ll go get her.”

  I was starting to get nervous now. It seemed too easy. Where the hell was Lt. Gooch?

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “Nah, nah. It’s okay. I just got to get the key.” He pointed at an end table next to the couch. Two quick strides, and he was there.

  As he bent over and opened the drawer, I knew in a flash that something was wrong. What it was, I wasn’t sure. But I had a feeling things weren’t working out the way I wanted. He reached down and came out with a Glock, one of the little ones made for concealed-carry. He pointed it at me.

  “Just stay calm,” he said. “I know you been under a lot of strain. A lot going on. I’m willing to take a certain amount of that into consideration. So I don’t want any violence here.” His voice hardened. “But I will do what I have to, to protect my family.”

  Where was Hank? And what was wrong with the Chief? He just wasn’t reacting quite the way I’d expected. It was like he was trying to convince me he was not involved in this thing, acting all goofy and confused.

  “You don’t have to act all innocent,” I said, lifting my shirt and turning around once so he could see there was no transmitter taped to my back. “I told you I’m not wearing a wire.”

  “I’m sure you’re not.” He kept throwing me that big, phony, nervous smile.

  “Besides, like I keep saying, there’s DNA.”

  “Well . . . not exactly,” a voice behind me said. I turned, and there was Mark Terry. He was holding a short-barrelled Mossberg riot gun, department issue, that looked awfully similar to the one Lt. Gooch had carried into the woods. “Actually there’s no DNA at all. I sort of made that up.”

  Mark Terry smiled genially, winked at me. Chief Diggs’s wife was standing in front of him, her face looking drained of blood.

  “Who in the samhill are you?” the Chief said indignantly.

  Mark Terry pointed the gun at the Chief. In a pitch-perfect black accent he said, “Yo, I’m the crazy brother gone blow your gotdamn head off if you don’t put that gun down.”

  “Oh, shit,” I said.

  “Who-whooo!” Mark said, switching back to a white accent, this time sounding like some dumb hillbilly cracker. “Ain’t that the by-God truth, budrow.”

  The room was silent for a moment. The Chief slowly lowered his gun to the floor, still looking dazed by the whole thing.

  “Yeah, I ran into your buddy out there,” Mark said to me. “Lt. Gooch? He was kind of surprised to see me. Kind of surprised when I laid that stick upside his head, too.” Mark laughed again. “Took his very own gun, blew a nice little old hole in his chest.”

  “Gooch?” Chief Diggs said.

  “Lt. Gooch. He’s not dead,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, he is now,” Mark Terry said in the same jokey tone of voice.

  I wanted to do something, but I felt frozen. So I just sat there like a lump.

  “It seems I screwed up,” I said to Chief Diggs. “I thought you were the guy. But I guess I was wrong.”

  “I guess so,” Mark said, laughing.

  “What guy?” Diggs said. “Who is this?”

  “It wasn’t Lt. Gooch that killed those kids, Chief.” I pointed at Mark. “I guess . . . I guess it was him. His name’s Mark Terry.”

  “But you can call me Captain Hunger if you want,” Mark said, still with his jolly smile.

  “He’s a tech at the GBI crime lab. And it wasn’t just five kids like you said in your stupid press conference. It was seventeen.”

  “Twenty-two actually,” Mark said, smiling brightly. “Y’all missed a handful up in Tennessee. Plus Gooch’s kid.”

  Chief Diggs stared. “Look, son,” he said finally. “Let’s, ah, let’s be cool here, let’s be calm, cool, and collected, let’s just work this out before anything rash starts going down.”

  “Have no fear, Chief,” Mark said. “No rashness involved here, none whatsoever. Don’t need any help from you at all.” He grinned. “Though, I must say, it’s mighty white of you to offer.”

  “But—”

  “Nah, nah, Chief. No yammering, no bargaining. This is the part where I kill all y’all and make it look like some type of murder-suicide deal. Like in one of them horror movies where everybody thinks the bad guy’s dead, only he comes back one more time. The crazed Lt. Gooch, everybody thought he’d been whacked by the SWAT boys, only in reality somehow he’s still creeping around, still up to his nefarious deeds and shit.”

  I figured I had to play for time. “Well, look,” I said. “If you’re gonna kill us anyway, at least tell us how you did it. I mean, man—going fifteen plus years without getting caught, passing the blame on a bunch of other people! It may be sick, but it’s pretty impressive.” I smiled. What the hell. I figured if I appealed to his vanity, maybe he’d take some time to explain how he’d faked all the DNA evidence, how he’d abducted the children, how he’d worked this whole thing out. And why, for that matter. He had a long, interesting story that he’d never told anybody. I figured he be eager to tell us, to crow about what clever guy he was.

  I was wrong.

  “What?” Mark laughed. “You think this is a James Bond movie, the crazy villain sits around explaining himself, while 007 works out a plan?” Mark laughed, then pointed the Mossberg at the Chief’s face, pulled the trigger. Inside the house, the gun made an enormously loud noise, and one side of the chief’s face exploded into a red mess. I’d seen the aftermath of people getting hit in the face with shotguns, but never seen it happen. It was about the most horrible thing I’d ever seen.

  Chief Diggs’s wife let out a horrible, screeching howl. Mark planted his shoe in the small of her back, kicked her over on her face. He racked the shotgun, fired into her back, racked it again, fired a second time.

  I jumped up and started toward him. But I really had no chance. He racked and fired, racked and fired. The first shot didn’t feel like much. I think his aim was off a little, and the shot hit me in the left arm. But the second shot caught me dead in the middle of the chest. I can’t begin to describe what it felt like. It wasn’t just the physical pain, the impact of all those bits of metal plowing into my chest; it was the sure knowledge that I’d just received a death sentence. It pretty much took the wind right out of my sails.

  I stood there for a second, and then I just sat down on the floor. A gray darkness started pushing in at the edges of my vision, and there was a terrible pain in my chest.

  Still, I was conscious enough to see a dark shape move into the room, a smooth, graceful shadow with some kind of ragged red thing where a face should have been. There was something long and thin gleaming in his hands. It seemed like all the light in the room, maybe even all the light in the world, had been collected into that curved surface.

  Mark Terry must have heard something, because he whirled to meet the shadow. But he was too late. The bright curved thing flashed.

  Darkness pressing in.

  The curved brightness gleamed and spun through the air.

  A sound like a meat cleaver thunking down through a rack of barbecued ribs.

  Darkness and silence.

  FIFTY-TWO

  I lay in the hospital bed, looking at Lt. Gooch. Hank. He kept telling me to call him Hank. Like that would make up for what he’d done to us.

  “Bird shot,” Hank said. “I’d loaded the Mossberg with bird shot, the little-bitty kind you shoot early-season quail with. That’s why you’re still alive.” The wounds in my chest and in my arm had been nasty, but not life threatening. As had those in Mrs. Diggs’s back, and the ones that hit the Chief in the face. Hank himself, though, looked like he might lose an eye. Hi
s head was all covered with bandages, and the visible half of his face was swollen and purple.

  “You knew, didn’t you?” I said finally. “You knew it wasn’t Chief Diggs.”

  He nodded.

  “How long had you suspected it was Mark Terry?”

  “I didn’t. Not till last night.” He picked up a manila folder. It was the one I’d taken by mistake from his office. “You took this file out of my office. It was sitting by your computer. While I was waiting around for you to wake up, I was leafing through it. You may recall Brunson, the police chief down in Lafayette, was in the CID outfit down there.” He handed me a photograph.

  I took it in my good hand, looked at it carefully. It was a photograph of part of the CID unit down in Fort Benning, everybody dressed in their uniforms. On the front row was a much younger Chief Brunson.

  “So?” I said.

  “Keep looking.”

  I scanned the faces. Then I saw it. On the back row, was a very young, very pleasant-looking soldier. Mark Terry.

  “He was trained as a forensic technician by the Army. Right there in the 86th CID battalion.” Hank raised his eyebrows slightly. “That’s when he snatched my little girl. And that’s when he managed to plant my DNA. I believe it was just like he told you. My wife didn’t like using a diaphragm, and contraceptive pills gave her migraines. So we were using condoms back then. It was probably just like he told you: he rummaged through my garbage, pulled one out, planted my DNA on my own daughter’s body.”

  “Once he had your, ah, seminal fluid, he could keep it in the freezer forever. Plant it wherever he wanted.”

  “Right. And he got blood from other people, hairs, whatever. The whole point was to make the picture as confusing as possible. Even though DNA wasn’t in use then, he knew that eventually it would be a big forensic tool. So he was planning way, way, way down the road from the very beginning. He expected to be at it for a long time.” Hank stood up and looked out the window of the hospital. There was something different about him now, but I’d be hard pressed to say what it was. Like some of the grimness had been squeezed out of him. But he seemed smaller, too. I guess he’d been living with the dream of finding the man who’d killed his daughter for so long, it had taken something out of him to be done with it.

  “So you knew he’d come down there. You set the whole thing up so he’d discover you, take your shotgun away.”

  “Nope. That’s a little too baroque even for me. Nah, it just happened that once I was on the run, that shotgun was the only weapon I had. All the ammo in my car was from quail season last year. I was just making do with what I had.”

  “So you were expecting what?”

  “Figured you’d go in, then Mark would show up, pointing a gun around or whatever. Then I’d come in and take him down. The shotgun was for show. If he got frisky, I had the sword as backup. Only, as it turned out, he was already out there in the woods, staking the place out, waiting for you. I didn’t even see him. He just popped up with a baseball bat in his hand and, boom, I’m lying on the ground. He picks up my shotgun, shoots me in the head. Fortunately, the bird shot didn’t penetrate my hard head. Just kind of stunned me.”

  “Still. You could have told me what you had in mind.”

  He shrugged.

  I gave him an accusatory look. “Just for the record, if you ever use me as a decoy again, so help me God, I will kill you. I’m not joking.”

  Hank turned away without speaking. He stared out the window for a while. “That man took everything from me,” he said. “My child, my marriage, my wife, my military career. The things he took . . . I guess I just never could put anybody else into the picture but me and him.”

  “That’s no goddamn excuse. You put my life in danger, the Chief’s, even his wife’s.”

  Gooch didn’t move, still staring out the window.

  “Was that you I saw before I blacked out? I thought I saw somebody come in with a sword or something.”

  Gooch nodded.

  “Did you kill him with it?”

  He nodded.

  “You feel better now?” I didn’t mean it to come out like that, harsh and condemning sounding. But it did.

  He took a long slow breath. “I don’t feel hardly nothing at all.” There was a long stretch of silence before he finally spoke again. When he did, his voice was so quiet I could hardly hear him. “I’m sorry.”

  “Excuse me?” I said. “Did I actually hear you apologize?”

  He glanced in my direction, not quite meeting my eye. There were tears leaking out of his eye, the one that wasn’t covered with bandages. “I don’t know what the hell’s got into me,” he said gruffly. Then he walked out the room.

  FIFTY-THREE

  The Chief, of course, made a speech before he pinned the medals on me and Lt. Gooch.

  “Under my personal direction,” he said gravely, “Lieutenant Gooch and Detective Deakes engaged in a highly secret undercover operation designed to ferret out the monster who killed those twenty-two children. One might say they acted as double agents. I’m pleased to say that Lieutenant Gooch and Detective Deakes were instrumental in keeping that number from going to twenty-three. Young lady?”

  He leaned down and lifted up a bright-faced little girl. “Folks, this is Jenny Dial, a little girl with the heart of lion. You want to wave at the folks, honey?”

  The little blond girl waved cheerfully. The Chief waited until the clicking of cameras had subsided, then handed her off to her mother, Tracy Dial, who had been tastefully dolled up for the occasion by one of the flunkies in the public affairs department.

  “Now I’d like to say a little about Mark Terry. As you’re all well aware by now, he was killed during apprehension. So we’ll never know his whole story. But apparently he was one of a small number of sick perverts in this country who gain gratification from watching children starve to death. His modus operandi was to starve children almost to the point of death, then to feed them so as to bring them back to health, at which point he killed them and planted evidence on their bodies that would serve to incriminate others. The governor, as y’all know, has let three innocent men free who were serving life sentences as a result of this monster’s frame-up, including one who was scheduled for execution only a month and a half from today.”

  He droned on for a while, called us up and pinned the medals on our tunics, then announced that the Cold Case Unit was going to be fully funded for the next fiscal year, that the mayor had made it clear that the success of the unit had been so striking that its distinguished work must be continued no matter the cost.

  “What a crock of shit,” somebody stage-whispered. Lt. Gooch, who had been sitting with his hand over his mouth, raised his head sharply and looked around with an innocent expression on his face. Everyone laughed but the Chief.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  I took a couple of weeks off, medical leave, started going to meetings every night. For the first time, I was feeling like I’d turned some kind of corner, like I’d faced up to something in myself, something I’d been bullshitting about in the residential program last year, hiding from, not taking seriously. Back in the program I had learned to say all the words—but that’s a far cry from believing them.

  But finally I went back, walked into the Cold Case Unit at a reasonable hour, nine o’clock in the morning. My intention had been to tell Lt. Gooch that I was going to quit the Unit, that I was going to put myself back in the pool and take a street cop assignment again.

  But then I walked into the room, smelled the leaky pipes, and something came out of my mouth other than the thing I’d been working myself up to say. “You ever noticed it stinks in here?” I said.

  Lt. Gooch looked up at me, his pale blue eyes studying me. “Yup,” he said.

  “So what’s next . . . Hank?”

  He kept looking at me. “Take a week. Find a case.”

  I turned to go, thinking maybe I’d amble over to Records to pick up some case files, when he called to me. “
And Mechelle? Just one thing. No DNA, and no children.”

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