Running in the Dark

by Sam Reaves

  “I get that.” Graham looked genuinely afflicted. “I thought he was recovered and back on track. I should have paid closer attention.”

  “I don’t hold you responsible. I just need to know what to do. I don’t need any more drama in my life.”

  “No, I guess not. Well, you did the right thing talking to Spassky, for starters.”

  Abby reached for her laptop and showed him the e-mail Spassky had sent her. “Think that’ll do it? How fast can I get him out of my class if a lecture from the dean doesn’t work?”

  Graham stood. “I don’t know the procedures that well because I’ve never had to use them. But I can promise you I’ll do what I can to expedite matters. You shouldn’t have to be afraid of this kid.”

  Abby watched him go and then turned to her work with a sigh. The message light on her phone was blinking and when she brought up the voice mail it was Ruffner’s number; she just stared at it for a few seconds. Good or bad? She swiped and put the phone to her ear.

  “Ms. Markstein, Detective Ruffner again. Please contact me as soon as possible. We’d like you to come in and try to make an identification in the Lyman murder.”

  Abby was starting to feel at home in the detectives’ office; she went directly to her usual chair and found a cup of vending-machine coffee waiting for her on the corner of the desk. “Thank you,” she said. “But it wouldn’t do good things to my stomach right now.”

  “That’s OK. Somebody will drink it.” Ruffner handed it to a patrolman who gave him a wry look and carried it out of the room. Ruffner sat at the desk, emitting a soft grunt as he settled. He passed a hand over his face, eyes squeezed shut, and Abby realized that the detective was a very tired man. “We have detained a suspect in these killings,” he said.

  “That’s good news. Did you find the missing head?”

  “No sign of it yet. We are hoping to get him to tell us what happened to it.” He sketched a sour little smile. “Though at this point, there can’t be a lot left to find, unless he’s had it on ice or something. Anyway, our investigations led us in the direction of a particular guy, and we went and found him. We can hold him for seventy-two hours before we have to charge him or let him go. So our task now is to make sure we have the right guy and have all the evidence we need to take to the prosecutor’s office. And part of that is for you to take a look at him and tell us if he’s the man you saw at the scene of the Lyman murder.”

  Abby nodded. “OK.”

  “Now, in view of the time that has passed since you saw him, and the need to have an airtight identification that will stand up in court, we have to do a lineup. You’ve probably seen this in the movies. Six guys up against a wall, and the witness points to a guy and says, ‘That’s him.’”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, we do it with photos here. And there are a few wrinkles designed to make it as objective as possible, to avoid false IDs. To begin with, I’m not going to be the one showing you the pictures, because I know which one the suspect is, and I might influence you by body language or whatever. So I’m going to have an officer who was not involved in the arrest come in and show you the pictures. That’s called a ‘double-blind’ setup.”

  “All right, I understand.”

  “You will see them sequentially, one after another, and I’m going to ask you to think carefully, comparing each one to your memory of the man you saw.”

  Got it, thought Abby, I’m not stupid. Aloud she said, “I understand.”

  Ruffner nodded. “Now, I also have to remind you that the guy you saw at the scene might not be here at all. If none of the people you see here looks like the guy you saw, don’t hesitate to say so.”

  “OK, I understand.”

  Ruffner pushed away from the desk and stood up. “OK. I’m going to bring in Officer Keller and he’ll administer the lineup. Just relax and try not to have any particular expectations. Just look at these guys and tell him if you’ve seen any of them before.”

  Officer Keller was the one who had taken the coffee away; he was big, heavy and baby-faced, with a shaved head and a neck that bulged against the collar of his black uniform shirt. He had evidently been instructed to be as robotic as possible; he nodded perfunctorily at Abby but said nothing as he took Ruffner’s seat behind the desk and opened the file folder. “Suspect number one,” he said, and slid an eight-by-eleven sheet of paper with a computer-printed mug shot centered on it across the desk.

  How much of my life am I going to spend looking at these guys? Abby thought. Here was another one, a dead-ender staring into the camera with a glum, defeated look. He had dark hair and eyes and a ragged moustache on a face that showed a lot of wear and tear. Abby gave him five seconds or so and then closed her eyes and summoned the image of the man by the side of the road, smiling at her in the glare from the fire where Rex Lyman was being consumed. “No,” she said. “I don’t think so.”

  “OK.” Keller turned the photo facedown on the desk and pulled the next one out of the folder.

  Abby had seen this one before; it took her a second, but the penny dropped. This was one of the mug shots the state police detective had showed her in her second session. “Um, no. I saw him before. This photo, I mean. He’s not the guy.”

  The third was also one she had seen before: same general type, Hispanic-looking tough guy with dark eyes and moustache, unhappy to be sitting for a police portrait. “No.”

  Number four took her a moment: the face provoked a little twinge of familiarity, but she was fairly sure she had not seen this photo before. She closed her eyes again. The man by the side of the road had longer hair than this, and the moustache crawled down to his chin on either side. But there was a certain similarity in the shape of the head, the general aspect of hard-bitten contrariness. Abby opened her mouth and hesitated and then remembered. “I saw, I think, a different picture of this guy, the last time.” She frowned. “And I said he was a maybe. Just a maybe.”

  Keller reflected her frown and scrawled something at the bottom of the sheet before turning it over on the pile and going to the next one.

  There were six in all. Abby had seen three of the photos before; two were entirely new to her and one was the new photo of the man she had picked out at the last session. Keller thanked her, swept the photos into the folder, and left the room.

  Abby sat pondering until Ruffner came back into the room. “Thank you,” he said, sitting down. “That was helpful.”

  “I still haven’t seen anybody that jumps out at me.”

  Ruffner nodded. “Understood.”

  “The one guy, the guy I picked before. Why is the photo different this time?”

  “Because we took a fresh one when we brought him in yesterday.”

  “So he’s your suspect.”

  “He is.”

  Abby thought for a second. “What about the tattoos? Does he have tattoos?”

  Ruffner smiled and reached for a file folder on the desk. He took a sheet out of the file and pushed it toward Abby. This was a photograph of the same man from the waist up, shirtless, glaring into the lens. His bare torso was covered with tattoos, intricate and detailed, most of them illegible. Over one nipple Abby could make out the words “Vato Loco.” She closed her eyes again, trying to picture the man she had seen. He had also had a scattering of crude blue tattoos across his upper body. Was this the pattern she had seen?

  She opened her eyes. “Have you gone back and looked at the security camera images?”

  “We have. They’re inconclusive, as you saw. The image is too blurry. You saw him close up. You’re the best judge of whether this is the same guy.”

  Abby stared at the picture. “He’s the same type. If you wrote down a description of the two guys, they would read the same. But I’m not looking at him and going, yeah, that’s him. When I picture the other guy, I see the tattoos, for example, but I can’t swear it’s these tattoos.” She looked at the detective. “But that might just be my fallible memory.”

  He nodded
, looking grave. “Let me ask you this. When you look at this guy, do you see anything that rules him out? Do you instantly go, ‘No, it’s not the same guy’?”

  Abby was already questioning her image of the man at the end of the bridge: How much had she seen and how much was after-the-fact construction? “No,” she said. “He could be the guy. But I’m not getting a thrill of recognition here. I’m sorry.”

  “OK,” he said. “That tells us something. Thank you.”

  “So why this guy? I told you I wasn’t sure about him.”

  “I know. But he turned out to be very interesting. This is Mr. Gómez, Alejandro Gómez. We looked at his record, talked to people who knew him, finally tracked him down in Indianapolis. It turns out he was evicted from a property by Jud Frederick last year, and they had a violent confrontation.”

  “Really.”

  “And then we talked to some more people and found out he was a close associate of Pedro Gutiérrez.”

  “I’m sorry, who?”

  “The man who was arrested down in Texas for trading guns to the cartels. Possibly after Rex Lyman informed on him to the FBI. He and Gómez were arrested together on drug charges a few years back. We thought it was enough to go get him and have a serious talk.”

  Abby stared at him, stunned at the thought she might have actually fingered the right man. She drew a deep breath. “I see,” she said. “Well, I hope that’s it, then.”

  “So do I,” said Ruffner. “Believe me.”

  The first thing Abby did when she walked into class was to scan to see if Ben was there. The knot in her stomach eased a little as she saw he wasn’t. The faces turned to her struck her as a little apprehensive today, maybe because of her shaky performance last time out. She had taken an extra minute in her office to put her thoughts in order, get psyched, put on her game face. Now she gave the students a smile and said, “All right. Get ready to rumble. I’ve got some inverse trig functions here that will knock your pretty pink socks off.”

  She was greeted with a groan that told her she had the class back, and she proceeded to nail the presentation. Sitting in the back of the class watching two students work through a problem on the board, she let her mind drift for a moment to thoughts of the man in the mug shot she had seen the night before. He was beginning to resemble more and more the man smiling at her in uncertain light by the side of the road. Shear off the hair and trim the moustache and that nightmare figure would be reduced to Alejandro Gómez, petty criminal and murder suspect with ties to both of the victims. The cops know what they’re doing, Abby told herself. They wouldn’t have arrested him if they didn’t have a good case. “Check that last line,” she said. “Is the exponent right?”

  After class, morale seemed high, hers and the students’. “Thanks, Dr. Markstein,” said Giselle McCullers, ponytailed and beaming. “That all makes sense now. Last night I was like, ‘Just shoot me now.’ I was so confused.”

  “Euthanasia’s a little extreme for homework trouble. See me first.”

  Cole West had hung back, hulking and unshaven in a New Orleans Saints T-shirt stretched tight over his massive shoulders, wearing a faint smirk. Abby had assumed he was waiting for Giselle, but she flounced out without him and he approached the desk as Abby packed up her things. “Hi, Cole. What’s up?”

  “Uh, I just wanted to let you know.” The smirk was gone, and his eyes flitted from the desk to the board and back, avoiding hers.

  “Yeah?”

  Now he looked at her, frowning faintly. “The guy, Ben. The kid that’s been bothering you. He won’t anymore. He got told.”

  Abby stared at him in astonishment for several seconds. “Told? What do you mean? Who told him what?”

  Cole shrugged. “A couple of us. We just told him . . .” He made a brushing-away gesture with his hand. “Don’t bother Dr. Markstein again.” The look he gave Abby was suddenly cold. “I think he got the message.”

  Abby opened her mouth, hesitated, groped wildly for words, and finally nodded. “I see. Um, thank you. I guess. I mean, thank you for being concerned. It’s being handled, actually. The dean knows, he talked with Ben. I don’t anticipate any more problems.”

  “If there are, let me know. OK?” He was serious, apparently.

  She drew a deep breath. “There are procedures. And I think it’s important to follow them, for everybody’s protection. OK? But thank you.”

  Cole West shrugged, and now the little smile was back. “Don’t mention it,” he said. “I really like your class. I’m learning a lot.”

  Me, too, thought Abby, watching his broad back as he left the room.

  Abby was struggling to concentrate on a quiz she was supposed to be composing when her phone started buzzing on the desktop. The number was Lisa Beth’s.

  “You must have been pretty convincing,” said Lisa Beth when Abby put the phone to her ear. “They’ve decided to charge him.”

  It took Abby a moment to catch up. “Who? The Mexican guy?”

  “Your pal, Mr. Gómez. They just released a statement. He has his initial hearing tomorrow.”

  It took Abby a few seconds to find her voice. “So they’re sure it was him.”

  “Evidently. They mentioned an eyewitness identification.”

  “God, I hope they’re not basing this on my identification.”

  “They must have something else. I know they were waiting to hear from the state crime lab in Indianapolis. It must have come just in time. They were coming up to the end of the seventy-two hours and they had to charge him or cut him loose.”

  Abby sat back on her chair. “Oh, God, please, let it be over.”

  “Honey, I think it’s over. I’m not a big Lewisburg PD booster, as you’ve probably noticed, but they got a lot of help from the state police on this. And our local prosecutor’s office is reasonably sound. I don’t think they’d be charging him if they didn’t have a case. I’m jumping the gun a little here. I got a tip at the courthouse. I thought you’d want to know. Now I gotta go write a story. I’ll call you later.”

  She rang off and Abby sat with the phone in her hand, staring at the desktop. Please, she thought. Let it be over.

  The call from Ruffner came a few minutes later. “We’ve decided to charge Alejandro Gómez.”

  “That’s good to hear. You must have found some evidence.”

  “Enough to charge him, we think. We’re still working on it. But we got some testimony and found some things that indicate he’s our guy. We talked to his girlfriend. Former girlfriend at this point, probably. She says he was out all night when both murders occurred and came home with blood on him the night Frederick was killed.”

  “Wow. That sounds pretty conclusive.”

  “Well, we’d prefer to be able to put him at the scene with physical evidence. The state crime lab is still processing material from Frederick’s scene. One of the things we found at Gómez’s house was a knife that had been recently given a good, thorough cleaning. We’re hoping he missed a spot. You don’t need much for a DNA sample.”

  Abby hesitated, then said, “Will I have to testify in court?”

  “If you are confident in your identification, that would help us make the case, yes.”

  Abby let a few seconds go by. “I’m not sure how confident I am. I’m sorry, I tried to make that clear. It could be him. But it’s a maybe. I have to be honest.”

  “OK. As I said, we’ve got other evidence. The case isn’t going to rest entirely on your identification. We think this is the guy.”

  Abby closed her eyes. “Thank you,” said Abby. “Thank you so much.”

  Abby wanted to tell somebody the good news. She went by Graham’s office but he wasn’t in. She made a pass through the student union but saw nobody she knew. She was done for the day and she decided to go home. Ned would be there and she could tell him.

  Driving down Jackson, Abby’s heart sank as she passed the Poza Rica. She had been unable to read the hand-lettered sign in Spanish posted on the doo
r, but the message was clear: the store had been closed for three days. Abby had texted Natalia twice but gotten no answer.

  A knock at Ned’s door brought no response, and a peek through a window in the garage door showed her his car was gone. Abby went down the steps at the side of the house with a new sense of freedom. Her phone went off as she was changing into shorts and a tank top: the number on the screen was Natalia’s. “I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you,” the girl said.

  “That’s OK. I saw the store was closed. How are you doing?”

  “I’m all right. But I had to get out of my house today. Everybody is like going crazy there. With us losing the store and everything, lawyers and cops coming around, it’s nuts. So I left. We could do a lesson today if you want. I brought my books and stuff.”

  “Sure. Let me get a bite to eat first. Say seven?”

  “Yeah, fine. I’m at my friend Leticia’s house. And I don’t have a car. I’m kind of stuck here. Can you come to the trailer park?”

  “The trailer park. Um, sure. Can you give me directions?”

  For Abby the phrase “trailer park” conjured up images of stray dogs, shoeless children and tornado damage, but when she turned up the main street of the park she saw tidy, pastel-painted trailers on permanent foundations, set in neat rows, each with a house number and a mailbox out front. The grass was mowed and the trash bins neatly aligned; it was just a neighborhood where all the houses were long and narrow.

  Abby had to make a turn or two to find the address Natalia had given her. She went slowly, wary of the children playing on the grass between the trailers and sprinting heedless across the street. A lot of them looked Mexican but a lot didn’t, and Abby wondered about the ethnic mix.

  She passed a playground, but there were no children here. The young guys perched idly on the swings and lounging on the merry-go-round with cigarettes in the corners of their mouths were a decade or so too old for it. They were Hoosiers, townies, and not the local bourgeoisie. There were sideburns and mullets and NASCAR caps, sleeveless Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirts. Abby met pale eyes tracking her as she rolled by and she remembered Ruth Herzler’s fear: Look, there goes a Jew.