A Visible Darkness

by Jonathon King

  “Six hundred-dollar bills. Still crispy,” he said. “The techs are going to run the prints they found inside along with the ones upstairs, but a lot of them looked smeared. We’ll try to match them to prisoner files on the forensics unit first. Maybe we get lucky.”

  No question had been posed, so I shut up. If Richards remembered the hundred-dollar bills, she didn’t say anything. When Hammonds left, both detectives walked over to Diaz’s SUV.

  “Hey, amigo. Thanks for the help, eh?” Diaz said. “We gotta get back to the shop.”

  “Call me when you hear something?” Richards said, and the look was deeply uncertain.

  26

  I was still leaning against my truck, looking up at the high tower of Marshack’s condo building when my cell rang.

  “Freeman,” I answered.

  “Yo, G.”

  I told him I wasn’t with the government.

  “Yeah, you said. You know where D.C. Park at?” said the voice of the leader of the three-man off-limits crew.

  “I’ll find it.”

  “Meet us there, man, we got somethin’ for you.”

  The crime scene techs were still working the Caprice. I asked one of them for directions to the park and left.

  It took me thirty minutes to get back to the zone. I could feel a tingle of adrenaline in my blood. Maybe we get lucky, I thought. The park was a small square of green along Northwest Nineteenth Street. There were a few transplanted palms and willow trees, a multicolored plastic jungle gym and three worn picnic tables. When I pulled up the place was empty except for the table in the far shaded corner. This time there were four of them.

  I kept my hands out of my pockets and crossed the open grass and when I got close enough I recognized the fourth as the Brown Man.

  The crew leader nodded when I stepped up. His two friends stood and took a few steps back. The Brown Man kept his head down, only looking up with his eyes.

  “So, Freeman,” said the leader. He had absorbed my name, filed it. “We did some of our own investigatin’ an’ come up wit some information might be good.” He put an emphasis on the word “might” and cut a look at the Brown Man when he said it.

  “The Brown here works his gig down at the dope hole, but you already know that,” he continued. The dealer hadn’t moved. “He been there forever an’ know everybody, hear everything, ah he say nobody been talkin’ bout killin’ no grands over in the off-limits.”

  The Brown Man shook his head and said, quietly, “Tha’s right.”

  “But he say he got somethin’ on your clean bills but he need to come over here ah see who his information goin’ to an’ not be seen talkin’ to no G by any of his dogs, you know what I mean?”

  I had an idea.

  “I also need somethin’ in return,” the Brown Man said, finally looking up at me.

  All I could do was nod.

  “If you after this motherfucker ah get his ass, he don’t come back on my ass, right?”

  I nodded again, no vocal promises.

  “Cause he one scary motherfucker ah I don’t need his crazy-ass trouble, right? I’m losin’ steady money on this, but I might be losin’ a lot more business, or so say these homies,” he said, looking around.

  “You have a customer who uses new hundred-dollar bills?” I asked.

  He waited. Looked around, avoiding eye contact with the others.

  “Junk man,” he said. “Big scary lookin’ dude always be pushin’ his cart round town. He been buyin’ dope for a long time. Dimes an’ eight-balls and shit. But last year he start buyin’ bundles and payin’ with new Franklins. First time he give me one I had my boys run the bill down at the store see if it any good. After that, they all be clean. Most of them new.”

  I didn’t say anything, picturing the thick figure of the man, draped in his dark winter coat, looking up into my eyes when he’d bent to pick up a can on the street that day. And I remembered the hands, huge and swollen and powerful.

  “Anybody know where this junk man lives?” I asked.

  “Nobody pay no attention to him,” said the crew leader. “Once we start talkin’ about him, everybody seen him around, but nobody know him.

  “Dog here say he thinks he live with his momma somewhere’s over on Washington by the river,” he said, tipping his head to one of his crew. “But he ain’t sure where.”

  The table was silent for a full minute. Nothing more was coming.

  “I appreciate the help,” I finally said. “You’ve got my cell number. If you see this junk man, call me.”

  “No, no, no,” said the Brown Man, turning bold. “I ain’t callin’ nobody down on my own corner. An’ that means you too, truck man. Don’t be parkin’ cross the street messin’ wit my business no more. That’s part of the deal, too.”

  “I’ll call you, G,” said the crew leader, stepping between us. “But you better come quick we find out this junk man been doin’ what you say.”

  I was driving around the zone, aimlessly. If the dark junk man didn’t know anyone was after him, maybe he’d still be on the street, doing whatever he’d been doing during the daytime for who knows how long.

  I was thinking about his eyes, the dark tunnels under the shadows of his brow when he looked up and caught my own. Were they eyes that could hold the kind of remorselessness it would take to steal innocent lives for a few hundred dollars? Eyes that could look away while he crushed an old man’s throat? I’d seen the eyes of killers before.

  “Taking the walk” they called it in Philly, when the arrested or convicted would be walked in their shackles and cuffs from a court hearing back to the jail. They would purposely be taken across an open-air corridor so the press cameras could all get a shot. Some group of cops would always be assigned to do crowd control, holding back the TV guys who wanted to stick a microphone in the guy’s face and asked the inevitable stupid question, “Why’d you do it?”

  I’d been on the detail when they walked Heidnik. When he looked up to see who’d asked the question, he caught my eyes as I held back the line. Just the quick contact made a shiver flutter at the hairline on the back of my neck. Maybe it was the knowledge that investigators had actually talked of Heidnik’s possible cannibalism. Maybe it was just the possibility of pure evil that made you see what couldn’t humanly be there. But neither television nor the movies ever got it right.

  While driving I had unconsciously taken myself back into the alley behind Ms. Thompson’s house when the cell rang.

  “Freeman.”

  “Richards,” she said. “The crime scene guys got a match off some fingerprints from the doc’s car. Some guy named Eddie Baines. He was in Marshack’s forensics unit three years ago for a couple of months on a theft charge. We got an old home address for him, and SWAT is headed out there now. Can you meet us?”

  She sounded in control, but pumped.

  “Give me the address,” I said.

  A cop stopped me at a roadblock three blocks away from the house. I gave the uniformed officer Richards’s name and he called it in over his radio.

  “Somebody will have to take you in,” he said.

  Down the street the road was blocked again by two squad cars parked nose to nose. People who had been evacuated from their houses were milling around, talking to the cops and probably getting little answer for their questions. Another officer jogged up and told me to follow him to the command post. Richards, Diaz and two SWAT officers were working from the side patio of a small stucco house. Richards introduced me around and then filled me in.

  “His place is the beige one across and to the left.” I peeked around the corner. The house had a dilapidated look that followed the neighborhood trend. All the shades were down. The driveway was empty. The roof had a deep sway in the middle as if part of the air had been let out of the place.

  “The phone has been disconnected for years,” she continued. “Neighbors say that Eddie used to live there with his mother, but they hadn’t seen either of them for quite a while
.”

  “How old’s the mother?” I asked.

  “From what we know she’s got to be mid to late sixties. Property records say she’s owned the place for thirty years.”

  “What’s the sheet on our guy?”

  “Thirty-seven years old. Picked up a couple of times for loitering but only the one time for theft, when they say he stole some plants off a woman’s carport. Low IQ. Signs of mental illness. They kept him in the forensics unit for more than thirty days to evaluate him. Nothing in the file to show they had any trouble with him there. Dr. Marshack did a preliminary workup on the guy, but when he’d served out his time they cut him loose to the streets with an appointment for follow-up at the local mental health clinic.”

  “And he never showed up,” I said, knowing the answer. In some things, the world worked the same no matter what city you were in.

  “He have any weapons charges?”

  “Nothing that showed.”

  “So how come SWAT?”

  The two guys in black never flinched.

  “We got a quasi-county employee with half a bottle stuck in his neck. We got some psycho with his prints all over the inside of the victim’s car. Hammonds wants this one tight and by the book,” Diaz said.

  All right, I thought. Show of force. Couldn’t argue with that.

  “They used the bullhorn on the place already. No answer. Now they got guys coming in through the alley and it’s sealed from the front by a sniper,” he said, pointing up to the roof over our heads.

  I looked around the corner again and watched a three-legged dog limping down the middle of the empty street, snuffling the ground and then tilting its muzzle to the air trying to figure out the smell of clean leather and fresh gun oil.

  “All right, detectives, we’re set in the back with the door ram. Let’s get this done before it gets any darker,” said the SWAT lieutenant. Richards nodded her head.

  The lieutenant whispered an order into his radio, and he and his partner stepped around us and out toward the street. We heard the muffled splintering of wood and then a series of shouts from the target house. Everyone seemed to hold their breath, waiting for a crack of gunfire we would all recognize and dread. A few seconds later we heard another whump from inside and then nothing.

  The lieutenant spoke into his radio, and when he raised his hand and motioned us, we moved up behind him.

  “All clear inside,” he said. “Nobody alive.”

  Diaz led the way in. The SWAT team had opened the front door and we could smell the stench spilling out on the porch. An officer coming out shouldered his MP5 machine rifle and offered Richards a tin of jellied Vapo-Rub.

  “Bad in there, ma’am.”

  She dipped a finger and dabbed it up at her nostrils. I took him up on the offer. Diaz declined.

  What furniture there was inside had been shoved up against the walls. It was hot and stale and others on the team were snapping up the window shades and trying to force open the windows. The light that washed in gave the place a gray cast. The lieutenant directed us to a bedroom door just off the kitchen that had been splintered open, but as we approached, another black-suited team member opened the nearby refrigerator door and jumped back.

  “Jesus Christ,” he yelped.

  On a bottom shelf stood a huge glass pickle jar that at first glance seemed to be full of a caramel soda that had been shaken and was fizzing over. On second look, a boil of brown cockroaches was streaming out of the jar in an effort to flee the officer’s flashlight beam.

  “Shut the damn door, Bennett,” the L.T. snapped, and the kid slammed the door and danced into the next room.

  Richards still had her eyes closed when we went into the bedroom.

  “Signal seven in the closet,” said the lieutenant.

  I stepped forward and looked. Folded up in a small linen closet were the remains of a woman. Her gray hair was matted on skin that wasn’t far from the same color. She was curled up in a fetal position and looked too small to be an adult. There was a swatch of silver duct tape wrapped around what was left of her mouth.

  “Been here a while from the looks of that decomp,” said Diaz.

  I turned away and noticed that all the windows had been sealed with the same duct tape. The bed was still made up. But the dresser top had been cleared of anything remotely valuable.

  “Lets get the M.E. out here,” Richards said. “And let’s call Hammonds.”

  27

  Another twilight was spun through with red-and-blue light bars from a line of squad cars. Another visit by the M.E.’s black Suburban. Another body bag.

  I leaned up against the driver’s door of Diaz’s SUV while Richards talked on a cell phone inside, filling her boss in on the details. I was thinking about crisp new hundred-dollar bills, doubting that they were going to find any in this house. The detectives were playing their theme: A former psych patient goes wacko for some reason, tracks down the shrink that treated him in jail and robs and kills him.

  “Uh, yeah. We’ve got a mug shot from the jail and a physical description, sir,” Richards was saying into the phone.

  Diaz had turned on the overhead light in his truck and was looking through the jail and arrest reports on Eddie Baines. He handed a sheet to her.

  “We’ve got a black male, thirty-seven years of age, approximately five-foot-ten and 250 pounds. Brown hair, uh…no eye color here. Some scars on his forearms, possibly knife wounds it says here, sir. No marks or tattoos.

  “Yes, sir. I believe we’ve already got the BOLO out, sir,” she said, passing the sheet back to Diaz.

  I was staring down the darkened street, seeing something big and thick and menacing in the back of my head.

  “Uh, no, sir, I don’t believe so.” She turned to Diaz. “Anything in there about a vehicle?”

  “Uh, nada,” he said, reading through the arrest report. “Looks like he was stopped by patrol on foot while he was pushing some kind of shopping cart. Like a junk man or something.”

  I reached in through Diaz’s window and plucked the sheet out of his hand.

  “Yo, Freeman,” he snapped.

  “What?” Richards said.

  I read the line about the shopping cart, the description.

  “He’s our guy,” I said, as much to myself as to them. “That’s him.”

  The detectives were watching me.

  “Um, yes, sir. Yes, Freeman, sir,” Richards was saying into the phone.

  An hour later we were in Hammonds’s office, on the sixth floor of the sheriff’s administration building. Richards had taken up a spot leaning against a bookshelf. Diaz took the most comfortable chair off to one side, leaving me with the chair directly in front of Hammonds’s desk.

  “All right, Freeman. Let’s get past the fact that you didn’t reveal information that you had. That investigative flaw is not surprising, but bolsters my assessment of your lack of professionalism. So convince me of this theory of yours.”

  He was up tight against his side of the desk, his palms flat together, his tie cinched up and the sleeves of his dress shirt showing an ironed crease.

  I told him of the paper trail on Marshack, the confirmation that the doctor had collected the finder’s fees on the South Florida viatical policies. I told him about McCane and his tailing of Marshack to the northwest side liquor store and the detail about the new hundred-dollar bills, the same kind found in Marshack’s glove box.

  Hammonds peaked his fingers, touching the tips on his chin. Without him asking a question, I elected to go on.

  “I made some contacts in the zone and they picked up the word from one of your local drug dealers that a man fitting the description of Eddie Baines had been paying for heroin with new hundred-dollar bills.”

  “So we’ve got a psychotic with a heroin addiction walking around in Three Zone. He may or may not have been getting money for his habit from his jail psychiatrist. He may or may not have killed that psychiatrist. He also may or may not have killed his mother and lef
t her in her closet to rot,” Hammonds said, turning to Richards. “You have any reason to believe this guy has any connection with the rapes and killings you’re supposed to be working, detective?”

  “Location. Opportunity. Knowledge of the streets. And now, the possible propensity to violence,” she said.

  Hammonds let that sit for a moment.

  “I ask you the same question, Mr. Freeman.”

  “If Marshack was paying this guy with hundred-dollar bills to get high, what was he getting in return for his money?” I said. “And if he was collecting a finder’s fee on viaticals, was he lining up Baines as his hit man?”

  Hammonds shook his head.

  “Those aren’t reasons, Freeman, they’re questions,” he said. “But since you have built these so-called contacts in the zone, it’s my suggestion that you ride with Detective Richards and see if we might be able to find this junk man.

  “And Detective Diaz. I want you to get with a computer tech and go through all the files Marshack may have had over in his office at the jail. Going on the supposition that Marshack’s killer was also looking for something, let’s see if what our burglar was looking for might have been stashed in a place even he couldn’t get into.”

  We stood up and Hammonds reached for the phone and then realized that Richards hadn’t moved.

  “Problem, Detective?”

  “Suggestion, sir. Since I’m a lot better on the computer side and Vince has patrolled that zone before, sir, I think we’d be better served by switching the assignments, sir.”

  Hammonds swept us all with his gaze, as if trying to figure something out.

  “Whatever it takes to get it done,” he said, and dismissed us.

  28

  Richards avoided my eyes when we split up, her to the jail, Vince and I to the parking lot. I watched her disappear down a long hallway.

  “Hey,” Diaz said. “Don’t let it get to you, man. She’s like that all the time with all these cops trying to hit on her. More than two years her husband is dead and she’s still cold, man. It’s nothing personal. Women hold onto their pain.”