Found You

by Mary SanGiovanni

  Sally hit the bottom of the concrete shaft hard enough to loosen her teeth when they smashed together. She didn’t feel that, nor did she feel her hip or elbow shattering against the tile floor, because the impact broke her back first. She didn’t feel her leg twisted up under her like a deer mangled along the side of the highway. She had less than a second’s sense of its wrongness, its bulgy poppingness. She bounced once and then landed hard again. This time she didn’t feel the jagged tile that broke her neck bury itself straight through from the base of her skull to her throat.

  But she thought she heard Dave’s borrowed voice giggling high and strained, before the darkness swallowed her.

  Oak Hill Assisted Living hunkered low on a wildly sloping, lush lawn, its dull grayness a contrast to the vibrancy of the grass that surrounded it. It wasn’t so much that the apartments looked run-down or dirty, per se, but rather that something about the shadowed windows and the unsunned corners gave the viewer the impression of a furtive, almost awkward self-awareness of its own utterly bland appearance. It didn’t have the impressive decay of a Danvers State Hospital or the pain-soaked hardness of an Eastern State Penitentiary, but it made Detective Sergeant Steven Corimar feel nettled in a way he couldn’t quite explain. Like if the building complex were a person, he thought, it would have a drawn, haunted face, eyes flickering with suppressed anger, fists stuffed in baggy pockets, a lanky body clothed not for style but for function, for protection from judgment it felt coming from everywhere.

  Steve had arrived at Oak Hill’s side entrance at 8:13 a.m. A uniformed officer named Frank Kimner met him there. They’d been introduced sometime two weeks earlier during his first few days with the Lakehaven Police Department. The man, short and compact, dark-haired and dark-skinned, exuded warm politeness and a kind of confidence that Steve envied. He gave Steve’s hand a firm shake and looked him square in the eye. Then Kimner led him through the employee complex and down a short hallway to a Plexiglas wall lined with security systems. He watched Kimner punch in a code that opened the door. They passed through another short hallway to an officer on guard by a steel door.

  The officer smiled at him. He looked good, really good. Sunglasses lay folded against the breast pocket. Big, muscular arms lay folded over the broad chest. Buzz-cut dark hair gleamed with gel under the glaring lights. Steve had met this officer early on, too—Ritchie Gurban. Gurban loved being in law enforcement. Most of the men in his family were cops here and in Wexton and had been even out in Thrall before it withered away from the lifeblood of the county. But what made the biggest impression on Steve was the honesty in Ritchie Gurban’s eyes and his warm grin. Ritchie took care to remember names, to remember mundane, pass-the-time conversations, and when he talked to someone, he always made eye contact. Steve liked that. He’d thought about what it would be like to grab a few beers after work at the Olde Mill Tavern with Ritchie, but he’d quickly squashed the notion. It was problematic enough that he even entertained thoughts about Ritchie in the first place. He definitely couldn’t consider acting on them.

  Besides, one afternoon he’d overheard Ritchie in the locker room talking about his girlfriend. He would not have admitted, even to himself, that it was a disappointment to hear, but some of the wind fell out of the day’s sails for him.

  He’d come to the conclusion that it was probably better that way, Ritchie being straight and all. No questions asked by the department, no complications between him and the other guys at the station. Even going out to the bar with them after shifts sometimes made him feel self-conscious, like every mannerism, every inflection of his words, every subtle context of their conversations was being scrutinized. It seemed like they talked about women and sex a lot. Nothing sacred or secret between brothers in blue, apparently. There were times when he heard them talk about the chicks they were banging or the stuff their wives and girlfriends (and sometimes mistresses) wanted them to try out in bed, and his mind raced for something to say, for the limited knowledge of women from his youth he could draw on should he be called to do so. They didn’t ask him too much about his love life (he’d mumbled once that he was happily single and focused on his new job over any new relationships, and they’d left it alone), but Steve couldn’t help but feel that they were waiting for him to contribute, that sooner or later one of them would ask if he ever got laid and what was wrong with him that he wasn’t willing to give them the details?

  Still, Steve couldn’t help but return Ritchie’s smile and the genuine amiability he found there.

  “Hey, Steve. How’s it going?”

  “Not bad,” Steve said. “Hope I didn’t miss anything.”

  Ritchie ran a card key past the sensor, and the steel door opened with a groan. “No way, man. We saved all the good stuff for you, New Guy.” He winked, and for just a moment, Steve felt a rush of warmth in his core…and then it was gone.

  Steve followed Kimner inside. From there they passed into the recreation room and through another key-carded door to the outside. They crossed the quad to a paint-chipped door hanging slightly askew on rusted hinges.

  “They found it open like that,” Kimner told him in a low voice. “They always keep it locked, so it was sort of a heads-up. Her doctor—Italian guy, Fiorello or Fiorelli or something—is downstairs with the building manager, Henry Pollock.”

  Kimner pulled out a map of floor plans for the catacombs, frayed almost clear through where the folds lay. The ink that detailed the rough shapes and chambers was faded in places to an ugly brownish-pink.

  “We’re here,” Kimner said, pointing to a spot on one of the bottom corners of the map. “We need to be here.” He traced a path almost to the other side of the paper.

  “She got pretty far.”

  Kimner nodded. “In the dark, in the damp, no less. Girl got herself all turned around in here.”

  Steve followed Kimner, who fell in line behind a few other officers with flashlights who seemed to know where they were going.

  “Steve?”

  “What?” Steve answered the voice before an eerie recognition sank in. The strange acoustics of the catacombs bounced a voice to him that had sounded an awful lot like his grandfather, rest the man’s soul.

  “‘What’ what?” Kimner called over his shoulder.

  “You call me?”

  “No.”

  They traveled on, falling a little behind the officers they were following. Kimner panted a little. Steve guessed it was the hiking over fallen rocks and debris on the tunnel floor. That, and the weird air down there. The air inside the tunnel was thin and cold enough to make his toes chilly inside his boots, but occasionally a warm gust from origins unknown would blow across his face like a hot, wet breath. Otherwise, there was little circulation. Altogether, Steve found he either couldn’t fill his lungs up, or the air just sat heavy in his chest when he did. Either way, he was looking forward to being in and out and done with this place.

  “Steeeeve…”

  This time, his cousin Charlie’s voice rose from beneath the shrouds of childhood memory. Charlie had been hit by a train when he was nine. He’d been thrown all the way to the trestles behind Steve’s aunt’s house. Some of him, anyway.

  Steve wiped his forehead with his arm and grunted. Very funny acoustics in this place. “You talking to me, Kimner?”

  “What? No.” Kimner had folded the map and tucked it in his back pocket, but he took it out again, along with a flashlight, when he noticed the growing distance between him and the other officers.

  “I heard my name again. I heard it—someone calling me.”

  “Ain’t me. Voices sound funny in here, though. They bounce down corridors, echo, that sort of shit. Maybe someone’s talking about you and it’s just carry ing at all odd angles and shit.”

  “Yeah,” said Steve, not entirely convinced that Kimner wasn’t fucking with the new guy. “Yeah, maybe.”

  The Sussex County CSI team, careful, efficient, and fairly quiet, was nearly done collecting evidence along
the hallways of the catacombs when they reached the site, but Eileen Vernon, the state medical examiner, was nowhere to be found.

  Steve had met Eileen quite literally by accident. She’d bumped his car with her front bumper in the Lakehaven PD parking lot. He’d liked her right away—the way her gray-black hair frizzed out around her temples, the way she’d adjust her bra right in front of him if it so suited her. She had a flat-A Jersey accent that reminded him of a friend’s big Italian uncle, both in cadence and just about in pitch. It made most of what she said sound like she was flipping off the subject as unimportant (“Fuggedaboutit, Steve”). He didn’t think she was Italian, at least not mostly, but he imagined her with a bunch of cats at home and a saint statue in the front hall and something heavy and rich-smelling cooking on the stove on weekends.

  In conversations, she had never asked him straight out about being gay, nor did she ever mention it as a matter of fact, but he thought she knew. Her flirting was, at times, so direct that it might have appeared to border on sexual harassment were they any other two people with any less intuitive an understanding of each other’s motives. But that was just it. He knew women who flirted like they were used to getting what they wanted. And he also knew women who flirted in a fairly harmless way, as if they’d never expect any serious reciprocation, and so felt safe but still giggled and blushed along with the flirting game. Eileen flirted with impunity not only because she didn’t expect him to take her seriously, but because she knew somehow that there was no serious stock to be taken in his flirty responses. He thought it meant she knew. But she didn’t seem to care. And more importantly still, she wouldn’t tell.

  “Where’s Eileen?” Steve asked another detective, a tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed man named Bennie Mendez. Steve had also met Mendez early on; the position he’d taken over at LPD had belonged to Anita DeMarco, Mendez’s girlfriend, before she went on maternity leave. Steve had inherited her desk, files, and all her open cases, as well as a slew of unfiled closed ones.

  Mendez handed him a high-power flashlight and pointed to a collapsed area of the floor, which opened down into a shaft that fell to the subbasement. “She’s down there with the body.”

  Steve gave him a nod of thanks, then walked to the edge of the shaft and peered down, shining the light. At the very bottom, some hundred or so feet, Eileen crouched, taking samples in the bright glow of hanging halogen lamps.

  Steve craned to look around Eileen to the body. One of its legs twisted up under the hip. Blood stained the floor in a pool around it. A fan of blonde hair covered the face. He’d been told her name was Sally Kohlar and that she had been a resident of the assisted living facility who suffered from both auditory and visual hallucinations.

  Steve called out Eileen’s name, and she looked up from a pile of jagged tiles and waved. A flashlight of her own was hooked into the belt of her pants. Her rubber gloves shined in places with blood. “Hey, handsome,” she called up to him as she stood.

  “Hello, beautiful. What do you have for me?”

  “Looks like our little lady banged herself up pretty good in the fall. Time of death, I’d place at three to five a.m. It’s cold down here, though. May be earlier than that. I’ll let you know once I get her back to my place.”

  “So did she fall? Jump?”

  Eileen put one hand on her hip and used the other to shield her eyes from the light. Stepping away from the body, she said, “See, that’s the thing. Like I said, I’ll have more for ya later. But off the bat? I would’ve said suicide, except judging by the impact wounds, I don’t see how the hell she wrote her note.”

  “Note?”

  Eileen took down one of the halogen lamps and held it near a wall, hooking a free thumb at it. Steve looked in the direction of her finger, and what he saw on the wall flash-burned unease in his gut. He never could swallow suicides as easily as hom i cides. Catching a killer felt like standing up to the bully and winning, a public service, a balance of order. But suicides left him feeling like an invader. Who was the killer, the bully, in that scenario? And who was he righting a wrong for? It was the note, he thought, that got him—the ghost of words that meant something once to someone who didn’t care about them anymore, that lasted longer than the person who wrote them. It always got a little under his skin.

  On the wall, in the Kohlar woman’s blood, in big, clear block print, someone had written one word: HOLLOW. Steve glanced back at Mendez, but the other detective looked down and away. Then he turned and walked toward some of the crime scene guys, flipping open his notebook and clicking the tip down on his pen.

  After a moment of looking between the word and the body, Steve looked at Eileen and said, “She couldn’t have written that herself.”

  “Ooh, brains and brawn. You excite me. Take me.” She blew him a kiss, and without missing a beat, continued with, “But yeah, not likely she did it herself.”

  Eileen stripped off her bloody gloves and disposed of them in an envelope. “It would have been a bitch and a half for someone else to get down here, kill her, write on the wall in her blood, and climb up again, unless he or she had help. Just look over by Rubelli at that mess of cords and shit—that’s what they’re supposed to use to get me the hell outta here. And if you wanna know my opinion, any equipment that would get a killing type up and down this shaft would have probably attracted the attention of someone somewhere—ground patrol, security guys, what have you. From what I’ve overheard down here in the hole, no one saw nothing.”

  “Doesn’t even look like there’s much room down there for two and a struggle. Not likely someone was down there when she died, right? Sure she died of impact?”

  “Pretty sure. And yeah, I think she hit bottom alone. No trace of anyone else here, except this note.”

  “Okay, thanks, Eileen. Thanks.”

  She nodded. “No problem, handsome. Stop by later for wine and cheese and lab results. It’ll be a hoot.” She winked at him in the semideflected glow of his flashlight and then added, “Do me a favor, sugar, and tell them to hoist this old whale up, eh?”

  He smiled. “Wonder you can’t float right up on your angel wings, beautiful.”

  She laughed, and he gestured to one of the officers that Eileen was ready. He walked off a ways, checking the route marked off in police tape that the officers thought might have been Sally’s last hundred yards or so.

  “No trace of anyone else here,” Eileen had said. A locked room job…so to speak.

  “But I am here,” voices whispered close to his ear. His aunt, grandfather, Charlie, his old babysitter—a flood of voices that in an instant he both recognized and realized would be impossible. A fast shiver ran across his back. He turned sharply. No one stood close enough behind him to have said it.

  Steve gazed around with deliberate, slow attentiveness, looking for the smirking face, the chuckle stifled behind a hand, and saw nothing.

  “And I still am.” This time, the voices came like a cold breath on his neck. He jumped, turning again. No one was there.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Dave groaned when the phone rang, rolled over, and picked it up. He swore that whatever gods guided the hands of drinkers the night before slept on the job when it came to protecting said drinkers from early morning callers.“Hello?”

  “Hello, this is Detective Steve Corimar. I would like to speak to David Kohlar, please.”

  Dave passed a hand over his face and sighed. Early morning phone calls never meant anything good. And police phone calls usually meant some kind of trouble, either for him or for his sister Sally. “Yeah, this is Dave.”

  “Mr. Kohlar, we need you to come down to the station, please. It’s about your sister.”

  Dave sat up in bed. The latter, then. “What—what about her? Is she missing?”

  “We need you to come down to the station. Please.”

  “Oh God, is she hurt? What happened?”

  “We’re sending a police cruiser to pick you up. It should be there in a few minutes.”r />
  Also not good news. If they sent someone to get you so you wouldn’t have to drive, that was like kicking off a conversation with, “Mr. Kohlar, are you sitting down? You should be sitting down for this.”

  “Yeah, okay. I’ll be ready.” Dave got out of bed, tugging jeans over his boxers as he balanced the phone between his ear and shoulder. He held the phone while he pulled a T-shirt down over his head. “Please, just tell me if she’s okay.”

  The pause on the other end sat pregnant with discomfort. “We’ll see you soon, Mr. Kohlar.”

  The policemen who arrived regarded his questioning expression with somber faces. There were two, an older man and a guy who looked a little younger than Dave. They introduced themselves as Jenkins and Pem-brey. Neither knew anything about Sally, or else just told him that to shut him up. They spent most of the car ride in silence. Dave felt like a total wreck on the way to the police station. His head pounded, his stomach rumbled with acid, and his hands felt cold and slippery as he clenched nervous fists. It was something wrong this time, something really, really wrong. He cursed the cop for not just telling him over the phone, cursed Oak Hill for letting something horrible happen to Sally. He couldn’t bring himself to curse Sally, but he felt angry toward whatever she had done to get herself in whatever trouble she was in.

  And of course he cursed himself. The guilt, an ever-present albatross, never let him forget how pretty much everything to do with Sally was his fault one way or another.

  He dove out of the car the minute the police pulled into a parking space at the Lakehaven police station and half ran into the building, where he pounced with frantic insistence on the officer at the front desk. She was a stout woman with wild puffs of blonde hair; the name on her uniform read Shirley Columsco.