“She didn’t ask me to take anything out of the cases—I would have said no—and I noticed that other than the clothes and some patches of skin, she looked pretty good. A little meth hollowness in her cheeks, but even that looked kind of supermodel in the right light. Low light.” Fitzroy grinned, and Sandra wished she could believe he was guilty.
“So when I saw she wasn’t going to steal anything, I started talking to her. Asked her if she collected. She said no, but an ex of hers, blah blah. I asked her out for dinner after close, but I was curious about more than her life story, obviously. I bought condoms before meeting up.”
“Skip ahead,” Sandra said. “The games.”
“First I want to tell you what I did for her. I got her new clothes, I let her stay here some nights. Spending cash, too.”
“Drug money,” said Chris.
“I gave her the money to do whatever she wanted with it. And the sex, that was, I want to make it clear, pretty normal for the most part.” He paused here, and Sandra could see him recasting his sentences. He’d probably told his sordid fuck-stories a dozen times to his friends and the customers at his little store, amping up his performance and using Bella as a plot element.
“Basic role-play,” Keegan Fitzroy said.
“Like Dungeons and Dragons?” Chris asked.
“Detective Gabriel,” Sandra said, not looking at him. Chris shut up.
“One thing was I’d pretend to be a cop,” Fitzroy said, “and that I’d busted Bella for soliciting, or for possession, and she had to get out of it. Mostly it was scenarios like that.”
“Did she enjoy them?” Sandra asked.
“Not sure. Hard to tell. She was a good actor, you know? Or maybe she wasn’t. She looked upset, during, but she was supposed to.” Fitzroy shrugged, his hands pointing to the ceiling. “But there was consent, all over the place, I made sure she said yes to anything before I did it to her.”
“The ‘escalating’ part of the games, Mr. Fitzroy. That’s what I want to know about.”
“It’s something we only did twice. Same fantasy world stuff, but we brought other people in, I guess. A fake pimp/prostitute scenario. Bella had never actually tricked, you know? She’d never done the standing on the corner thing. Always found guys like me instead.” Keegan Fitzroy was starting to look ashamed, finally, but not enough.
“So I wanted her to do it. For me. Not with me watching or anything, but, you know, she had to bring back proof. We only ran it twice. Once the week before I last saw her, and once when I last saw her.”
Sandra finally did sit down. Not to be comfortable, but to be able to look at Fitzroy in the face, to pull his eyes level with hers by staring intensely at his glistening forehead.
“When you last saw her. Which was when?”
“You know,” Fitzroy said.
“Are you telling me, Mr. Fitzroy, that you saw Bella on the night she disappeared? She was over here?”
“Well, even you said you couldn’t pinpoint the night when she went missing. But maybe, yes.”
“You sent her out to act this prostitute fantasy, and she didn’t come back at all that night. You didn’t find that unusual.” Sandra held up her left hand, not for Keegan Fitzroy, but to hold off Chris, whom she could feel heating up behind her, that rage he used so effectively in certain unofficial interrogations building up and vibrating in his big fists. Chris never hit the suspects, but he was extremely good at making them believe he was about to. That’d be no good for Fitzroy, who looked the type to grab onto any lawsuit that presented itself, especially when his personal freedom might be in jeopardy.
“It wasn’t typical of her not to come back when we were supposed to spend the night. She at least would have called me. I bought her a phone, you know.”
“Generous,” Sandra said. She’d closed her notebook. “So you weren’t at all disturbed that she didn’t return?”
“The first time we did the fantasy, I told her to get picked up and insist on doing the guy in his car. I wanted her to come back with the money she’d gotten off him. And the condom.”
“The condom?”
“Not as a fetish thing, just so she had proof she played it safe. I was already taking enough of a risk, what with the needles.”
“You motherfucker,” Chris said.
“Wait in the car,” Sandra told him. “Detective Gabriel, go to the car.” She didn’t turn around, but Chris got up and left after a minute’s charged hesitation.
“The second time I wanted her to get picked up and go to the guy’s place, or a motel. To bring back something from him. A ring, or something from his house. Take something of value, bring it back to me.”
“You wanted to make her into a prostitute and a thief.”
“Just in a game way,” Fitzroy said. The act was crumbling, and she could see a tremble of snot in his right nostril. The tears were about to be born. “I didn’t want her to get hurt. And as far as I know—”
“As far as you know? You do know. She’s dead. Where did you send her to pick up?”
“I wanted her to stay away from the main drags. To pick up a business guy, nearby. I just sent her walking out.”
“That’s not very useful to me.”
“It’s all I’ve got,” Fitzroy said. Sandra wanted to dig the heel of her shoe into the dent just next to his kneecap, to punch the back of his head when he bent from the pain, but she suspected he was the type to have cameras mounted and running around the apartment. For security, and for sex. He started crying anyway, curling away from her stare.
“I didn’t do anything to her. I didn’t kill her, that’s for goddamn sure.”
“You didn’t kill her, no. But you know what you did, right?” Sandra got up then and left, ignoring the questions he was sputtering out behind her, adding only a “Don’t leave town, please. That’s just a request.” When she got to the lobby, she flashed her badge at the concierge again and told him she needed to requisition the security footage hard drive. Anything from the lobby and building exterior. The concierge, a balding, thickly mustached man who smelled of cinnamon, nodded importantly, making the note and telling her that the security company would get it to her the next day.
Sandra checked the placement of the security cams on her walk back to the car, noting that their range would pretty much certainly fall short of showing them anything beyond Bella leaving the building.
Chris was in the passenger seat, reclined about halfway and listening to a Dio song that was mysteriously on the radio.
“Sorry,” he said as she sat down.
“I was halfway kicking you out so I could beat him down without you having to witness it and then lie about it later.”
“I’d love you for that, you know,” Chris said. The way he looked at her for a moment, Sandra worried that he loved her anyway.
“He didn’t kill her. But we know what she was doing getting into the guy’s car, and we know it happened around here somewhere.”
“And that’s it.”
“That’s it.” Sandra turned up the music. The louder it was, the easier she found it to say the next, painful, sentence. “We do know what kind of shithead we’re looking for, though. Like Fitzroy up there, but less crass. Less aware of the kind of pig, or monster, he is. Those dead girls are—they’re like live women are to Fitzroy. Placeholders for fantasy. Things he can fixate on.”
“Yeah,” said Chris. He looked uncomfortable, the way he usually did when Sandra got a certain kind of thoughtful. She made him notice that there were things about her mind that had nothing to do with the way he did police work, or the way he lived.
“We won’t find him like this. Not with forensics, not with witnesses. I know it. We have to look for him on those tapes, Chris. On the tapes, in the pictures of the graves. In his head is where we’ll find the guy, not by talking to shitbags like Fitzroy.”
“And in your head, Sandra. That’s where the finding happens, right?” Sandra didn’t answer, starting the car instead.
I CHECKED MY PHONE ON the way out of the Pemberton: Ellen had texted me a couple times, without urgency.
Bring back 1%. bank transfer Kylie tourney fee, can’t find the org acct number in my email. Going to bed early.
I didn’t know what “org acct” she was talking about, but the dullness of the tasks gave me a rewind second of comfort, put me back into last week, before I’d ever wrapped my hand around Bella’s dead wrist.
I walked out and saw Keith’s car, still parked outside the Pemberton, just across the street. I was angry he hadn’t left yet, but remembered the desk cop’s sausage fist closing around my wrist, so kept it restrained as I walked across the damp, sloped street to ask him why the hell he hadn’t taken off yet. When I got a little closer, I saw Keith sitting in the passenger seat. A couple steps more and I saw the hypodermic needle sticking out of the side of his neck, and the black staring eye of a gun barrel pointing at me from the back window on the driver’s side.
I’d never had a gun pointed at me before, but I’d seen the moment enough in the movies to be surprised by my own reaction, which seemed to take place outside of me. I walked toward the car and the gun it contained at the pace I’d been keeping up until then, somehow knowing that doing anything else would get me dead.
“That’s good. That’s very good, Martin,” I heard from the backseat. I didn’t stoop to see the speaker, but I did see the blue windbreaker sleeve that the gun and the hand holding it were growing out of. Royal blue, the same color jacket one of the guys sitting on stools at the bar had been wearing. Sitting close enough to hear us, probably, but that didn’t explain what was happening.
“You have Officer Keith’s address, correct?” asked the voice in the car. “We have to be quick about this, and the less you think about it, the better. We’re going to go out there, the three of us, you in your car followed by the two of us in this car. I’ll be behind the wheel while Keith finishes his nap. You have two minutes to get to your Jeep, drive back to this street, and start driving to Keith’s palace in Ballard. I know where it is already, but I’d like us to travel nice and close. Park across the street, and I’ll park underground. We’ll meet in the lobby. I’ve checked the building and surrounding streets for CC cameras—not much around. I was even extra-careful and dolloped birdshit on a pole-mounted one at the convenience store you’ll pass at the end of his block. We’ll be fine. Unless, that is. Unless you don’t listen. You call or text anyone, especially any police, I kill Keith and leave a nice note explaining your connection to all of these buried women.”
The voice coming out of the backseat wasn’t as deep as the thickness of visible arm and chest suggested. I leaned down a little, as much as I could without making the move too perceptible, and saw his neck, and above it, the bottom rim of a face mask: latex, the color of pale skin.
“All those women from years ago. Yes. And Bella Greene. This note also explains where and how you killed Bella Greene, and what parts of your garage and home her DNA can be found in. I scattered some around while you were out. The night before you came out for your dig. There are at least seven other compelling bits of evidence in the Reese household. Maybe even a couple at your office. A search warrant would unravel you, friend. To put it simply, the best thing you can do right now is to get in your car and start doing exactly what I say. And give me your phone, actually. Don’t want any last-minute second-guessing from you.”
I handed him the phone. And then found I couldn’t move at all, until the man leaned out of the window and looked at me through his featureless mask, an oval that was blank except for two unevenly cut holes, revealing green eyes and some surrounding, living red flesh. There was another slit just below his nose, revealing nothing, just letting air in and out. He said another two words that pushed me back on the sidewalk and got me walking.
I was already in my car and driving, Keith’s headlights in my rearview, when my conscious mind caught up to what the man had said. “Ellen. Kylie.”
• • •
The drive was an automated haze, a slick and thoughtless highway cruise. I parked across the street from Keith’s apartment building, a slumping three-story. I was lucky that the powerful bulb above the address was functioning, considering how broken down the stucco and other visible outgrowths of the walls were. A length of hose, its presence mysterious after the weeks of steady rain, lay across the brief front lawn that was between the street and the lobby’s front door. I waited a few seconds, and pretty soon Keith’s car pulled up alongside mine. There’d been a little bit of traffic on the way over, a few vehicles getting between us. I’d prayed that the man didn’t think I was trying to lose him. Prayed to what or who, I didn’t know. Maybe to the guy in the driver’s seat of the vehicle that was easing alongside my Jeep.
Keith’s unconscious face was dewed with sweat, a couple of fresh beads trickling past his right eyebrow, telling me he was alive. Beyond the smooth surface of Keith’s flesh was the other man, whom I still couldn’t exactly see. When he spoke, the features on the mask didn’t move, because the mouth hadn’t been properly opened. The lips were joined together by a sliver of white latex.
“Nice going so far, friend,” he said. “Don’t mind the face. I’m sorry I didn’t attach it properly, but it gets really hot if I can’t easily pull it on and off, let some air in. Before we go any further—and we’re going quite a bit further, I promise—let’s correct a little imbalance here. I know your name is Martin, and a whole lot of other things about you.” The man pulled out Keith’s green file folder, my juvie record inside it, and extended his long arm to pass it to me. He had to lean quite a ways, as well, until I could grab the thing with my fingertips and put it in my lap. The man continued his lean, staring at me.
“You know nothing about me, so you should at least get a name.” The eyes behind the latex mask were in shadow, but I noticed them flit to the mirror constantly, looking to see if anyone had pulled into the street behind us.
“I don’t want to know your name. I don’t want to know anything about you. I want to go home and just forget this. Okay?”
“Jason—Jason Shurn, your friend and mine—used to call me ‘the Ragman.’ Stupid nickname at the time, but I sort of grew into it. Started to like it. I haven’t used it in years, but I’d like you to take it up. Now follow me. Awful as this dump is, Keith has underground parking, and there are even extra spaces down there for your tidy urban rover. Fun’s this way.”
“Garages have cameras. CC.”
“I told you, I scoped the place,” the Ragman said. “Just a couple of dummy lenses wired into nothing. Boxes to scare smash-and-grabbers. You’re not the only fan of being prepared. Now shut up and follow.”
The Ragman—thinking the name did make me feel a little more secure, like I’d been given a scrap of knowledge I could use later, if there was a later—pulled away and I followed, swinging behind him into an alley and down the steep drive that led to Keith’s parking. The barred gate rattled up as Keith’s car paused in front of it, and the hand—huge, white, ungloved—of the Ragman pointed to the first visible parking space, which was marked Guest One. I pulled in as Keith’s car vanished around a corner, and the gate lowered behind both of us.
“Now the risky part,” called the Ragman’s voice, bouncing with a plate reverb semi-echo from the dripping cement walls of the garage. “We have to get ourselves into an elevator and down a hallway without alerting a single solitary soul.” I walked toward the voice, and saw the Ragman leaning against the driver’s side of the car. He’d zipped the windbreaker up all the way, obscuring the bottom edge of the mask, and I could see the bulge of the gun butt poking out just above his waistline when he stretched. Spine extended, the man was tall, but not a giant.
“Are we taking him?” I asked. I walked around the car so I was standing next to the passenger seat, looking across the car at the Ragman.
“I don’t know about you, but I’m not ready to quietly lift and carry 340 pounds,” said the Rag
man. He laughed behind the mask, a quick haha that sounded less than genuine. The sort of laugh I’d gotten used to using in business meetings, or sometimes with Ellen, keeping the conversation light when a serious negotiation was underway.
“So we just leave him here?” As if I’d poked him, Keith started to shift in his seat, and I backed away from the car. His head lolled toward the window, the tongue flapping out like a Saint Bernard’s, breath making a reassuring fog.
The Ragman made an arm gesture that invited me to look around. There was barely any lighting in the garage, and around Keith’s parking spot, there was practically none. Behind me was a cement wall, and the spot next to the driver’s side was being used as storage, heaped with bicycles and boxes that sagged with moisture. I could see the Ragman’s chest and torso because of his height, but I had to crane and stare to make out Keith. If the passenger seat were reclined all the way, only an exceptionally curious passerby would be able to see the man.
“We leave him. As long as we’re sure he’s napping.” The Ragman reached into his jacket, too far up to be looking for the gun butt, and pulled out a capped syringe. He pushed it toward me with gloved fingertips. From another pocket, he took out a pair of forensic gloves, still in their package. I stared at both items resting on the roof of the car.
“We’ve got to start getting out of each other’s lives, Martin. Here’s step one. While he sleeps, we go upstairs and clean out any evidence of anything illicit Keith was doing with the police files that were stupidly entrusted to him. You never know who might go poking around up there after us. I don’t trust him to do a proper job himself. Do you?”
“No,” I said. “But we could wake him up the rest of the way, get him to walk up there with us. Show us around.”
“I’m not really asking anymore. If you don’t want to do it this way, then I’m going to shoot Keith and then you. After I clean the apartment, I’ll go for a drive in your Jeep and kill Ellen. She’s meeting with her—with that Gary guy just now, right? Maybe him, too, why not. And if Kylie’s not a sound sleeper, I’ll make sure she becomes one. Just with a bullet or a rope or my hands around her skinny neck, though, don’t worry. I don’t have any of Jason’s rotten little habits. I like things clean and fluid-free.”
Find You in the Dark Page 14
