“People who become law enforcement don’t tend to be the kind who hide their good instincts, is what I’m getting at. Even the worst cop, the kind who’s just logging hours until retirement, wants his good work to be recognized. He understands it as good work, even if he’s not going to be a full-on showoff about it.”
“I’m surprised you’re not using more gender-neutral terms, Detective,” Chris said.
“People don’t hide the good things they do. Especially arrogant people who brag about their goodness and ingenuity right alongside their good deeds, in little anonymous phone calls. The fact that this Finder guy, if that’s what we’re calling him, has been hiding who he is, and why exactly he’s doing this ‘Good Samaritan’ work? It points to something. He’s such a fucking gloating showboat in those calls, telling us what we missed and pointing out how smart he is.”
“Yeah?”
“It means he sees the major part of what he does as something to be hidden away. Something about himself he wants to keep obscure, because it’s closely linked up to a deeply antisocial something-or-other about him. I think he’s more interested in what got these girls dead than he is in getting their corpses back into family hands.”
“Wait,” Chris said. “What if he did call in a body long ago, publicly? Then just started to do it on his own, not wanting to make a big deal out of it.”
“No,” Sandra said. She was fumbling in her purse again, extracting a hardback reporter’s notebook. “In the last twenty years, there have been seventeen accidental or maybe on-purpose discoveries of serial victims by civilians between NorCal and Prince George. All by different people, all of whom I’ve looked into over the past couple of years. No consistency. Nothing about them comes close to fitting a profile, and all their stories of discovery check out as accidents. Usually the bodies were discovered by groups, or couples. Normal people having an unusual day, calling the cops, and going back to being normal.”
Chris reversed and pointed the car toward Fiddler’s Inn, which had what he liked to drink and was close enough to his apartment to cajole Sandra into coming over afterward. “How much time have you been putting into this?” he asked, letting Sandra flip through her notebook a little more. He slowed down early for the roundabout at Thirty-Second and was about to ask again when Sandra finally spoke up.
“A few hours here and there for the past couple years. Nothing significant.”
“Gotta ask again. Why are you doing this?”
“This is a long-term pattern that’s escalating, Chris. That’s why the calls have been coming in more often these past four years. If it’s recognition he wants, he’s going to start wanting it publicly, and I’m not sure what that means. My best hope is that he’s going to drop the anonymity, march into a precinct with a femur and tell us he wants the key to the city and a parade for being a quiet hero for victims all these years.”
“What’s your worst hope?” Chris asked, pushing down on the gas so he could get to the bar and have a drink in hand as soon as possible after Sandra’s answer.
“I haven’t gone there yet,” Sandra said, taking out her phone and pretending to flit through texts. “I just want to make sure we find out who this guy is. Quickly.”
ELLEN SHUDDERED WHEN SHE HAD her orgasm and I shuddered long after mine, as she was falling asleep beside me.
“Tinsley,” I said, so quietly it was barely more than a thought.
“Hm?” Ellen asked, her voice thickening as she passed beyond consciousness. She started snoring, adding volume, and rolled over again, drawing toward the other side of the bed. She generated a huge amount of heat during the night, and couldn’t stand to have any body contact while she slept. This was fine by me. It had been a constant in our marriage, this habit of somehow sleeping separately even when we were in the same bed. Since she didn’t really need her half of the violently expensive Canada goose down comforter I’d ordered online, she used it to delineate a soft border between us. The cloth wall had been there through good times and bad, and had initially consisted of a ratty Pier 1 quilt that had followed me from my student apartment. Ellen had always been willing to roll over the barrier and into my arms; sex was sex and sleeping was sleeping, and fair enough if she liked to do one of those alone.
“Just talking to myself,” I said, quietly enough. She didn’t say anything back. I left the bedroom. It was a little after one. I’d have to be up in four hours again to get Kylie to swim practice, but I could sleep after I got home. The light in Kylie’s room, near the head of the stairs, was off, and we had a “no devices in the bedroom” rule for her, so her phone and laptop were on the little table outside the bathroom.
I still had the trucker speed-drinks and a sex adrenaline boost to go with the thrill of the new audio, and the three of them had me in front of my desk with my earbuds in and the volume jacked to pick up on the audio file where it had been cut off in its silent playback as I talked to Ellen.
The first file was nothing. Just preamble, cops talking and testing out the mike and reel-to-reel.
“Gonna get out of here before I get the reek of him on my clothes,” a Southern-and-cop-accented voice said at one point.
“They wash them good before execution. So you get that nice rotisserie chicken smell when they cook ’em up,” another cop voice answered, this one pure bright-eyed Washington.
“He’s getting the injection, dummy. What fucking state you think we’re in?” Southern answered.
I flicked to another file, this one thirty-two minutes and eleven seconds long.
A coaxing voice sounded after a moment of hiss. I recognized it right away: Ted Lennox, the psychologist who worked the case alongside Seattle PD.
“—the bodies, is all we mean. For the victims’ families. I know you can understand that.”
The hall around me, the wall in front of my desk, the glow from the scrapbook all vanished when the audio started, and I was in a blank metal room with a brilliant naked bulb bouncing harsh light off a steel table with an empty set of cuffs on it.
Silence. Then it came in.
“The souvenirs or the bodies?” said Jason Shurn.
“The bodies, Jason.”
The psychiatrist sounded tired. This must have been a clip from late in the interview. The files were disorganized, as they always were when Keith Waring threw them together. This one also had a minute of clicking silence at the end, one of Keith’s trademark errors. I scavenged, clicking through the other files, looking for Jason Shurn’s answer to the psych’s question. I found it, ten tries in.
“The souvenirs are the bodies, not ‘or’ the bodies.”
“What does that mean, Jason? Come on.”
“It means itself and nothing else. The souvenirs are the bodies.”
“In that case—”
There was a scratching sound, as if someone had accidentally dragged a thumb across the microphone.
“—why have we found more scalps than corpses? There are two in excess, Jason. The, the freezer one—”
“Oh, yes. Young red.”
Jason was saying the words like they were the name of his favorite soda pop. Jenny Starks. My first find. I shook off the memory of that first, almost accidental, dig, and focused on the tape.
“Yes, that one, and then the one we spotted in the overflow pipe.”
“Ash blonde.”
Tinsley Schultz had, of course, been an ash blonde. Ellen had started dying her hair after her sister vanished. Police spotted a scalp where Shurn had disposed of it, but the sanitation crew that forensics had enlisted to grapple it up had triggered a valve and shot the evidence away with thousands of gallons of runoff water. It was never recovered for testing, and never reported to the press. Cops tend to avoid advertising evidence-losing mistakes. I only knew about the lost scalp from a file I’d bought from Keith a few years back.
“Who were the women, Jason? And where are they?”
The psychiatrist—I was sure it was Ted Lennox now, I’d heard his vo
ice on other tapes, and on episodes of A&E’s Biography—became louder, as though he was leaning in. There was a long silence.
“If you want to know where both of them are, you’ll have to ask someone else. I only know where one of them is.”
Another voice broke in. The investigating detective, no doubt.
“The fuck does that mean, Jason?”
“Turaluralura.”
At this, my heart expanded in my chest, my lungs seeming small and flat. I was right about where Tinsley was buried. This was spoken proof, from her killer.
“What?”
There was sharp, quiet violence in the officer’s voice.
“It’s an Irish lullaby.”
“I’m Irish, fucker, and it still sounds like you’re talking utter bullshit.”
It sounds that way, Officer, I thought. If you’re not paying careful attention.
“Detective,” said Dr. Lennox. “Get out.”
That was the place to stop, to get back to proper procedures. I opened my eyes and vanished from the interrogation room, landing back in front of the scrapbook and the USB key that had just confirmed the X my research had marked over Tinsley’s burial place.
I checked that all the rest of the audio files had transferred properly with a brief click and scan-through, then crushed the USB with a pair of needle-nose pliers. In the garage, I took out a small vial with a screw-on top that was tucked in with a few others and a lot of empty mason jars. I put the pieces of the USB in the vial and filled it with a glug of the muriatic acid I’d bought at a chemical supply store. The jar found its destiny in the kitchen garbage, nestled into a fist-sized wad of coffee grounds. I looked back up the stairs as I walked to my desk, thinking of just going to sleep then, dreaming of the luck of what I’d already found. But I wanted to hear more, so I settled back into my chair and put the earbuds back in.
• • •
You can get caught for doing absolutely nothing wrong. Rescuing those bones from an eternity in anonymous dirt, taking them out of a covered hole that couldn’t properly be called a grave, only a hiding place: that’s not wrong. But Ellen could never know.
That’s what getting caught would mean, of course, and that’s what the dream always is: the headlights of her VW illuminating my back on a dig, the glow bouncing off the streaks of black and silver metal still visible on my moving shovel under the patina of dirt and mud. The guilt on my face, the impossibility of explaining, the plain, dumb-sounding phrases pouring out of me. “It’s so her family doesn’t have to be haunted like you are. So there’s no more Ellens waiting to find out where their Tinsleys are. That’s why,” I would say, in each dream, pointing to the small teeth in the small skull near the blade of my shovel.
“That’s not really why.” Ellen had the same single phrase to say in the dream, every time, looking at the anonymous bones in the grave and her husband standing over them, getting into her car just as I woke up. In some of the dreams, I’d put the bones there myself.
When I woke up this time, it was into the reality of a huge mistake. I wasn’t in bed, but at my desk, slumped in my chair, the headphone jack of my scrapbook empty but the earbuds in my ears, the cord dangling free, knocked loose by a nightmare flail of my left hand as I slept. Jason Shurn’s voice spoke at a middling volume into the hallway of my home. Every word sounded enormous, because I wasn’t alone.
“Dad? Is that him? The other guy keeps saying ‘Jason.’ It is him,” Kylie said. She’d convinced herself before I could answer. My lower back was pressed into a hot band of muscle, fat, and spine that I had difficulty straightening as I swiveled the chair to face her.
“Is it who?” I said, trying to buy another second of time, to suppress panic and push off the last dull wisps of sleep and dreams. I should have closed the scrapbook first. “How long you been here, kid?”
Kylie didn’t have a chance to answer. The tape did our talking for us.
“And what about Tinsley Schultz? The ‘ash blonde,’ that’s her, isn’t it?” Ted Lennox asked, his voice coming out clear but low from the scrapbook speakers, into the darkness of the downstairs hallway. Kylie was in her sock feet, even though she was normally a slippers girl, and had on gray leggings and a holey Brian Wilson shirt I’d gotten on a revival tour I went to with Ellen, a show we both cried at.
I slammed the scrapbook shut, immediately worrying I’d damaged it, almost laughing that I could think about hardware damage with Kylie there. Her socks shifted, making a little whiffling sound on the floor.
“Kylie, I get that this seems weird. But I need you to be really straight with me that you’re not going to tell your mom one word of any of this.”
“I don’t think it’s weird, Dad. I think about what happened to Tinsley, too.”
“Yes. So does your mom, we just very consciously don’t talk about it. That’s why it would strike her as weird,” I said, silently thanking Kylie for being more helpful than I could have hoped for. “And with it being twenty years—and talking about Tinsley with you tonight—I just couldn’t sleep. That’s all.”
“I want you to tell me about Jason Shurn,” Kylie said, in that determined voice she used when she was sure she was going to hear a “no” back. A pipe under the kitchen sink that hit a periodic guttural clearing note sounded, rumbling from its position just above the garbage can where the USB Keith had given me was dissolving into atomized gunk.
“What?”
“Shut up, Dad. Jason Shurn. I know that’s him on the tape. The other guy said Tinsley’s name, even! He messed with Mom’s head for life, how could I not want to know everything about him? I’ve tried reading this bullshit on the internet in that slimy way they write about it, like the girls are video game characters that the killer defeats so he can be famous when he, like, decides to get caught. I want you to tell me about him without any of that crap.”
“You know everything you need to already. Shurn was an evil man who’s dead now.”
“I want to know for the same reason that you do, and that Mom should. So I’m less afraid of things like him. So I know he’s a shitty person, not a monster.” Kylie was looking at me instead of her feet now, and I saw what was in her eyes, what I’d seen when she was eight and swam out to that island in the lake without Ellen and me knowing it. When we’d come for Kylie in our boat, she’d watched us with something like curiosity, something like capability, but mostly a capacity that was unknowable and entirely hers. I still wasn’t sure what Kylie was capable of, and even in her sock feet and that big t-shirt with the dumb Smile logo, she was formidable.
“Jason Shurn is both a shitty human being and a monster. Was both.”
“Then tell me about that.”
I thought about the portion of truth I was going to have to offer my daughter, and the promise I was going to need to take from her first. That’s what it was: I would be taking something from her by asking her to enter this lie with me, this part of my life Ellen could never touch or know.
“Okay. We’ll talk about what little I know about this in the morning. But your mother can’t hear any of it, you promise me that.”
“I promise. Why not now?”
“Because we both have to be awake in three hours.” What I really meant is that I had no idea what to tell Kylie about Jason Shurn, Tinsley Schultz, and especially myself. I knew plenty of places to start, but I didn’t know where to end the story once I started talking. Kylie hearing the tape was a mistake I could fix.
I didn’t know yet that I’d made deeper mistakes I wouldn’t ever be able to put all the way right.
I SNAPPED AWAKE AT 4:54, before my phone’s alarm, and swiped the buttons to keep it quiet. If you want to know where both of them are, you’ll have to ask someone else. I only know where one of them is. I got Keith’s point about the riddling nature of the tape, even after a few minutes of listening, but where Keith’s dumbness shone through was his thinking that Shurn was impenetrable. The killer’s way of talking was part of his disguise, just li
ke his good looks were part of the window dressing that hid what he really was.
The Irish thing, Shurn’s tu-ra-lu-ra-lu-ra, I had figured. Shurn knew where he’d put that body. So did I. The only edge he had on me there was that he knew whether the bones I was going to dig up belonged to Tinsley Schultz or not. Then again, Shurn was dead, so I had that on him.
I brushed my teeth and ran the tap, hearing Kylie on the other side of the wall, moving around to pull on her tracksuit.
“Start with the generalities,” I told the mirror, having no one better to ask for parenting advice on what to do when your daughter comes upon you in the dead of night, listening to recordings of the man who murdered her aunt.
But it did seem like a fine place to start. With what kind of man Jason Shurn was, how he was a boring person who was able to exceed the rest of us in two ways only: a narcissism that let him murder others for his satisfaction, and the capacity to murder once and then keep on murdering. A serial killer’s mind isn’t impenetrable, even if those FBI connect-the-dots profiles never seem to nail down the guy’s tics until after he’s been caught or killed. That insane foreignness is just a comforting idea the nonmurdering public would like to nurture. A serial’s thinking is just this side of ours, in the way that a two-year-old’s logic is alien to a teenager. Within a few months of Kylie being verbal, I could tell she meant she wanted a banana and granola when she pointed at the yellow table in our sunroom and screamed “ner.” There’s always sense in it, somewhere, just as there is always sense in the patterns and impulses of the guys whose work I follow. “I only know where one of them is.” That pause in the tape before Shurn coming up with his “Irish lullaby” line was him planting a clue with its own embedded logic. Easier for me to say this, of course, because I’d figured out the answer to the riddle before I’d ever heard the riddle.
I met Kylie in the hallway just in front of the door to the garage. We were always quiet in the early mornings before practice, her alternating bites between a protein and a granola bar, me drinking coffee in the kitchen out of my Sub Pop travel mug. But this time she broke ritual as I was turning the knob, before we’d even looked each other in the eye.
Find You in the Dark Page 6
