That Darkness

by Lisa Black

  She moved on to Pickwick & Frolic.

  Chapter 14

  Thursday, 7:45 a.m.

  The next morning found Maggie in the police department gym doing her usual push-ups before twenty minutes on the treadmill. Legs ramrod straight and floating above her toes, she lowered herself until her breasts touched the rubber matting, then pushed up on an exhale, irritated that this never seemed to get any easier. Though she had started out at about five at a time and now had increased to thirty, it still felt as if it took all her strength to make those last few. Why, she thought, doesn’t it ever start to feel easy? Not that she felt compelled to increase her reps. She had no interest in body-building, and even less interest in kicking someone’s ass. As long as she fit into a size six and didn’t have osteoporosis, satisfaction reigned. But why didn’t it get easier?

  She lay on the matting for a few minutes before flipping over to do some crunches. Working in a building with a full-size gym—all paid for by seized drug dealer assets—remained one of the major perks of her job. The large room had treadmills, stationary bikes, weights, a full array of Nautilus-type machines and television sets with cable. And, since most cops who used it came there either before or after their shifts and shift change occurred two hours before her starting time, she often had the room to herself.

  Today there were two youngish cops around, spotting each other on weights and talking about the contract negotiations. They said hello to her and promptly forgot her presence, which suited everyone.

  When she had first begun at the police department there had been a lot of male attention, nearly all of it unwanted and unencouraged, but eventually they had become accustomed to her polite refusals to a drink or a dinner or a quick tryst in the locker room and simply gotten used to her being there. Plus by now she had sort of “aged-out” from being of interest to the new recruits, and as long as the more seasoned guys weren’t in the middle of divorce proceedings they pretty much left her alone too. She felt comfortable at the department, as if she belonged without being constrained by that belonging. She could chat with anyone in it but avoided the interpersonal politics that exist in any organization, especially one with more than the baseline amount of testosterone.

  And she overheard some interesting things in the gym, as the guys forgot or ignored her existence. Nothing super-secret, nothing they wouldn’t have told her if she’d simply asked, but sometimes an interesting tidbit in among the sports talk, the gossip about who was having an affair with whose wife, the city not wanting to pay for a line-of-duty car accident the previous month, and, of course, the pension plan. Boys who (Maggie would have bet) had barely passed math somehow maintained a professor’s understanding of quarterly compounding interest, benefit projection formulas, and the advantages of “buy-backs.”

  But as she lay flat on her back after doing more crunches than she really felt like doing—they never seemed to get easy, either—she heard one say to the other, “. . . shot himself with a twenty-two. It went behind the frontal lobe and the back of the eye and got stuck in the skull. So now this guy’s got a bulged-out eye, has a bullet stuck in his head that they can’t get to, and is still alive.”

  “Don’t freakin’ try to kill yourself,” said the other. “The lesson to be learned there.”

  Maggie sat up, coming more or less to eye level with the young cop. He lay on his back on a padded bench, pressing an impossibly large-looking set of weights up from his shoulders. The spotter gave her a wary look, unhappy with a woman intruding into what clearly seemed a man’s world, yet all too aware that she had been in that world longer than he had.

  “Would you say,” she asked of them both, “that a twenty-two is a common murder weapon?”

  “Sure.” The kid, a sunny boy, answered her between grunts of effort. “In self-defense, usually. It’s the kind of thing most people have in their homes, cheap, small, and not the kind of thing that makes your friends worry that you have some kind of Dirty Harry complex. You can shoot rats.”

  “Doesn’t scare the wife,” said the spotter, smiling to show that he meant this in a friendly way. Which he didn’t, really, but neither did she care.

  “What about shots to the back of the head?”

  “Makes it hard to claim self-defense.” Puff. “When the guy’s running away from you.”

  The spotter said, “You seriously want to kill someone, you’ll want to use something bigger. The twenty-two is easy, doesn’t kick much, but it’s a lady’s gun. No offense.”

  “Uh-huh,” Maggie said. “So you don’t see a lot of murders with a twenty-two to the back of the head.”

  “Dunno. Not that common, I guess—but twenty-two’s the cheapest ammo to buy, so got a lot more popular since prices skyrocketed after that last election. So I wouldn’t say it’s unusual, either. Seen a few lately.”

  “That guy in the alley, what, day before yesterday? East Twenty-second.” Puff.

  “I think about a month ago, some guy out around Burke Lakefront,” said the spotter, referring to the small airport on the Erie shore. “And East Cleveland had a Mexican dude dumped in a vacant lot right behind Forest Hills Park, where all the dealers hang out.”

  “When was that?” Maggie asked.

  “Couple months ago.”

  “Really.”

  He glowed under her genuine interest, suddenly the more pleasant version of himself he could be when prompted. “And that guy last month, Marcus Day—he ran a couple corners on Quincy, remember?—they found him in the backseat of his own car. I thought the coroner said that was a twenty-two. I remember being surprised because we figured only his own crew could get to him, and they always made a big deal about carrying those gold-trimmed Taurus forty-fives, like they were some kind of friggin’ trademark or something.”

  “Huh.” Maggie said. “Interesting.”

  “We had just arrested him, too. For about the four billionth time.”

  Puff. “Shoulda stayed in jail.”

  “Maybe somebody on his crew thought he’d made a deal.”

  “Or thought they’d move up on the organizational chart.” Puff.

  Getting bored with either the topic or the reps, the spotter said to Maggie, “Anything else you want to know?”

  She thought. “Where can you get sweet potato fries?”

  Both men snorted. The one standing said, “Fridays. Bonefish Grill. I read they might start having them at McDonald’s. To make the food nazis happy, you know.”

  The kid below him hefted the weights, the cords in his arms bulging out from his skin, his face now a shade of red generally considered unhealthy. “Like anything fried in oil is going to be good for you.”

  “What about scallops with almonds?”

  The kid lowered the weights, rested them on his chest for a moment while his skin went from crimson back to more of a creamy tomato. “Never understood why people think almonds add something to an entrée. My wife’s always putting them on our salad. Thinks it makes it fancy.”

  “Antioxidants,” the spotter said. “Lola has that.”

  Puff. The weights rose again. “Since when do you dine at Lola?”

  “Trying to impress a date. Took her there, problem is she’s trying to impress me—”

  Puff. A breath that somehow managed to imply disbelief without actually forming a word.

  “Not kidding. She lives on the Food Network so she thinks she should order for me, like she can look at me and know what I’ll want to eat. Or maybe she wants to expand my horizons, whatever. She had D cups so I let her do whatever she wants, right? She orders me scallops. They came with almonds on them and I’m allergic. Peanuts, I would have been fine, but almonds—I had to send them back. I could tell right away I wasn’t going to get anywhere near those D cups, but it was that or spend the night in the emergency room. What choice did I have?”

  Puff. “The emergency room. She’d be thinking the whole time that it would make a great first-date story to tell her friends. Those Ds would have been
yours for months, at least.”

  “Yeah, provided I survived the anaphylactic shock.” He looked at Maggie. “Why you asking?”

  She pulled her feet underneath her and stood, lifting her hands. “Just random thoughts. Thanks, though.”

  “No problem.”

  “Dude,” the kid said, arms trembling, his breath coming in short gasps. “Grab this, willya?”

  Denny peered at her over his coffee cup, appearing surprisingly rested. Apparently peace had been temporarily restored to his abode. “Grab yours in a travel mug, because we have a weird one this morning.”

  “I do hate it when you begin conversations that way.”

  “So do I. They’ve got a body at the top of the National City Bank building, or whatever it’s called now.”

  “PNC, I think. It’s on the roof?” Maggie wasn’t afraid of heights, but thirty-five stories up might push her personal envelope.

  “No, in one of the rooms nearly at the top. An office or apartment or something. I think you’d better take a look at it. Josh is at an industrial accident and Amy’s off today. Her sister’s having a tough time with the chemo, I guess.”

  “Okay. But what’s weird about it?”

  Denny seemed to struggle for words, gave up, and said, “You’ll see when you get there.”

  Chapter 15

  Thursday, 8:45 a.m.

  “Five months?” Maggie said when she got there. “How is that possible?”

  “Just a random combination of cold weather in winter and then good air conditioning in spring, prepaid rent, and an incurious building staff. And probably the pH of the paper he’s lying on and the difficulty of ants or flies to climb thirty-five stories in the middle of winter.” The medical examiner’s investigator prodded at the dead man’s arm with a gloved index finger. “The Egyptians couldn’t have done a lot better.”

  “Plus he only disappeared five months ago,” Patty Wildwood pointed out. “That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s been dead that long.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised, though,” the investigator said, scratching one ear with the back of his hand.

  “He disappeared?” Maggie asked. “And no one thought to check his office?”

  Patty gave her a deep glare. Then, enunciating each word: “He didn’t rent this place under his own name. He didn’t rent it under any name connected to him. We’re still trying to backtrack through it all. So no, Missing Persons didn’t check. Persons Crimes didn’t check. His own wife didn’t know.”

  Maggie thought a moment, then asked, “Persons Crimes?”

  Patty’s partner, Tim Phelps, his skin jet black against the collar of his snow-white shirt, nodded at the corpse. “Meet Barry Nickel, the Child Porn King of Cleveland.”

  The dead man, dressed in a shirt and pants still recognizable as an orangey polo and khakis, lay stretched on his back in the center of the room. Legs straight, ankles together, arms at his sides, he would seem at first glance to be resting were it not for the dark stains that had soaked the piles of letter-sized sheets of printed paper beneath his skull and the slightly less dark stains of seeping body fluids that had soaked the back of his clothing. And, of course, the fact that his skin had turned to a hard, yellowish texture that sunk in against him until the outlines of bones could be seen beneath the toughened surface.

  A dead body will do one of two things—decompose or desiccate. Most bodies are surrounded by moisture, in the air, in the soil, and will rot like meat left on a warm counter. But a drying environment can, without any added preparation, turn a body into a modern-day mummy. Hardly common, but Maggie had seen it once or twice before.

  Tim Phelps spoke. “Remember last year when I was in white-collar crimes and I had you make copies of certain JPGs from a couple of disks? I had you put them all on one disk for the state’s attorney?”

  “I do. And I made two copies and told you not to lose them, because I never wanted to look at anything like that, ever again,” Maggie remembered. She had not been remotely joking then, and didn’t now. Kiddie porn did not mean pictures of well-developed middle-schoolers dressed for a music video or cute babies naked in a bathtub. It meant pictures of things being done to those schoolkids and cute babies and were the most disturbing images she had ever seen.

  “His work,” the detective said. “We got an indictment, had a preliminary hearing scheduled when he vanished. We figured he skipped town, hardly surprising since he knew he had no way out of hard time.”

  “He had a good lawyer, I’m sure,” Patty commented.

  The detective scoffed: “F. Lee Bailey couldn’t have gotten him out of this. A good lawyer might knock a few years off your sentence. They might get a few unimportant charges dropped. But even the best ones can’t get people off. Got to be a depressing line of work, frankly,” he added as if the idea had just occurred to him. “They never win.”

  Patty said, “Anyway, his wife reported him missing right away—she thinks he’s pure as the driven snow, of course, and the kiddie porn thing was all a smear campaign by a jealous business rival . . . except this was his business, not commercial real estate like he told her. She’ll probably accuse us of murdering him.”

  The pile of scattered papers underneath the body, forming a sort of unlit pyre, were printed photos—all done in decent quality on glossy photo paper, but obviously from a digital printer instead of film. Maggie glanced at only a few before she’d seen more than enough.

  She averted her eyes to look around the office—for it had to be an office, it had a small bathroom but no kitchen facilities other than a microwave, and no bed or futon to sleep on. Only one oversize armchair with an end table. The rest of the room had been rimmed with cheap folding tables and metal chairs, there to support the five monitors, four printers, seven computers, and the stacks of DVDs, CDs, and printer paper. Nothing had been done for aesthetic effect. It would seem a strictly functional space, perhaps devoted to day trading or data mining, were it not for the body in the center and the photography studio taking up one end.

  No black cloths draped the walls, no cushioned seats or flower arrangements to use as a backdrop. Just a vinyl-covered bench, a plain wooden chair, and a variety of props that made her wonder what they were used for until the possibilities made her feel ill and she stopped wondering. Two very standard-looking slave flashes with umbrellas to soften the light, one hefty tripod with a massive digital SLR mounted on the top, and a video camera that would have looked at home inside a TV studio.

  “I’m going to have to process all this equipment,” Maggie muttered to herself, meaning she would try to lift fingerprints from the cameras, the disks, the photos.

  Patty agreed. “Definitely. I’d love to see who else turns up in connection with this little cottage industry. He had to have a few close colleagues helping him produce the stuff. They’d have been in and out of this place.”

  Maggie looked at the dead man, at the photos he lay on top of. Not in any conceivable universe could she feel a moment’s pity for his fate. “How was he bringing kids here without anyone noticing?” she asked.

  “Good question,” Patty said. “Probably because it’s an office tower so no one’s here at night. Plus maintaining full occupancy has always been a problem for this building—it’s too bloody big, especially in this economy. He was the lone occupant on this floor or the one below; there’s only one occupied place on the floor above and it’s at the other end of the hall. Probably why no one noticed a smell. Again, prepaid rent, no cleaning staff—for obvious reasons—and no one ever saw a reason to enter, until the rent ran out. Then the building manager finally decided that he needed to have a word. Knocked for three days, then used the passkey.”

  “What about his customers? Nickel’s customers, I mean.”

  “Guys buying child porn? They knock, no one answers. They’re going to figure the same as us—Nickel came under heat and prudently decided to relocate. Time to slink quietly back under their rocks; they’re certainly not going to call
the wife, the building manager, or the cops. The one thing these guys never, ever do is make a fuss.”

  “Somebody did,” Maggie said, looking at the body.

  “Though . . .” Tim said. He said nothing more, until Maggie sighed and Patty demanded, “What?”

  “We assume this is him because our subpoena is sitting on the desk over there, and the products underneath him look like his work. And because he’s been missing as long as this guy looks to have been dead. But there’s no ID on him, right?”

  “Nothing in the pockets,” the coroner’s investigator said. He lifted the dead man by the left shoulder, turning the corpse to its side with one hand. The body had the same consistency and nearly the same weight as a plank of wood. Darkness coated the back side of the body; dried, dusty blood and darkened skin with pieces of the paper stuck to it. But the slight depression in the center of the skull clued them in.

  “Gunshot,” Patty pronounced, crouching next to the pyre and prodding the stiffened hair with a gloved finger. “Obviously didn’t exit. Small caliber. Really small, like a twenty-two.”

  “Seems to be a lot of that going around,” Maggie said.

  “Yes, there does.”

  Maggie examined three splotches of blood about a foot and a half from the body, dried to a rust color on the carpeting. They were thick spots, not smears from a hand or foot. “Unless I miss my guess—”

  “Which she never does,” Patty announced to no one in particular.

  “I’d say he was shot in the back of the head and fell on his face, leaving only these few blood drops as he fell. Then the killer threw these photos and disks on the floor next to him, to create this little altar of his sins, and flipped him over on top of it. Blood flowed out from his wound, but not for very long. The heart wasn’t pumping so once the mostly liquid fluids from the head drained, that was it. The rest of his body just dried out.”