Find You in the Dark

by Nathan Ripley

  I stared at the handwriting, which was as neat as could be expected from a cheap pen on vinyl. Maybe a handwriting expert would have been able to tell me all sorts of things about the Ragman. His childhood, his taste in magazines, where he liked to spend his summers. How I could get him to leave me alone.

  I pushed the visor up, felt around for my sunglasses, but ended up braving the glare of the drive with only a squint.

  USING A PAIR OF NEEDLE-NOSE pliers that was knocking around in the Jeep’s glove compartment under ballpoint pens and receipts, I picked up the bloody earring when I parked in our garage, and put it into a mason jar. I filled the container with bleach, then put the lid on and wrapped the whole thing in butcher paper. Not that Ellen ever looked in there. The bleach would eat away at any trace biological information left by my hands, my car, the Ragman, or the girl who’d worn this while she died, years ago. I slid the container into the deep freeze with steady ceremony, burying it under six packages of venison.

  At my desk, I slid my scrapbook out of its drawer and plugged my headphones into the appropriate port, in case I needed to cross-reference the Hillstrom interview with audio material. I couldn’t risk Kylie busting in on me listening to tapes, not again.

  I settled into the deepest focus I was capable of and began reading the scanned pages. There was an undiscovered Carl Hillstrom victim, who’d never been found or convincingly tied to the killer. That much was clear immediately. I was insulted by the brevity of the document the Ragman had given me—only three pages of interview, a real zoom-in on exactly what I needed to know to find the site. It was another interview with Ted Lennox on the mike, perhaps interrogating Carl Hillstrom in the same room where’d he’d had that last chat with Jason Shurn, some years before. Even an amateur could have sniffed out the fundamental clue, halfway down the second page.

  TL: Listen to me, Carl. You’ve been good to these families up until now. Two of these girls are buried where they belong, in cemeteries. I believe you when you say that you can’t remember where you put Erin.

  CH: You don’t believe me. You don’t.

  TL: I do, Carl. What I want to know is if there’s anyone else to tell me about. Any other girls. You know you’re in here for good. We both know that. So you can tell me. Is there any other girl?

  CH: No more names. But maybe I can tell you a place to look.

  And Hillstrom starts spilling, in the room. For a moment I wondered whether the Ragman had written this interview himself, because it read like a goddamn treasure map, Hillstrom giving distances and landmarks. How couldn’t the cops have found this girl, with this much to go on? But Lennox’s voice, his exasperation and his weaselly clever patience, was just too nailed for this chat to have been fiction. Unless the Ragman was a Pulitzer-caliber dialogue writer, the transcript was real.

  Hillstrom was long dead, killed on a day when he’d accidentally been issued a yard pass. He hadn’t been able to resist the chance to mix with other humans again. The prisoners had recognized him for the animal he was in seconds, starting to beat on him even before they remembered where they’d seen that face and its blocky Super Mario mustache. They hammered a barbell grip into his brain through the roof of his mouth.

  Two known victims had been discovered in the course of Hillstrom’s interviews when he was first arrested. That had been after a videotape was turned in by his landlord. Because he was impressively behind in rent, and barely turning up at his place anymore, the landlord had evicted him and begun a thorough cleaning of the filthy apartment. A loose floorboard had been discovered during repairs, and under that board was a snuff film. The girl in the video was never concretely identified, but was assumed to be one of the three prostitutes Hillstrom was eventually tied to in court. Apparently her face was already obscured by blood in the first frame of the poorly shot film.

  Hillstrom had been cooperative, telling officers exactly where the two burial sites he could remember were, using landmarks: a certain-shaped boulder, a grouping of trees. They found the women buried deep, in cleverly obscure forested locations around highways leading out of Seattle. In the interrogations, Hillstrom had been spooky-precise in his recall of the burial spots: thirty-five feet from this tree, about seventy feet from the trail, and so on. When the data from the search crews came in, Hillstrom was nearly always spot-on. The “Erin” Ted Lennox mentioned, Erin Muckler, Hillstrom called “the practice one,” and stuck to his story about being too drunk the night he’d gotten rid of her to remember much of anything.

  And here he was, giving another location in the transcript, of someone new.

  CH: Up on Mount Rainier.

  Hillstrom laid out some specifics, which turnoff, which parking lot. Then he dropped the figures.

  CH: You walk down the trail. Third marker. Go about 50 before veering left. Then keep going straight through the brush, about 40. There’ll be a clearing.

  There was a little more of the transcript there, Ted Lennox wheedling to get an identity out of Hillstrom, but there was no more concrete information. My eyes were aching from gazing at the scans on the scrapbook screen. I hadn’t turned on any lights in the house, and now that the sun had properly set, the scrapbook was the only light source on this entire floor of the house, except for the tree-screen leakage of the streetlamps through the big bay window in the living room. I got up to flick on lights and pace, glad Ellen wasn’t home yet to disrupt my thoughts. After about seven minutes of pacing, flicking switches on and off, and rattling every cataloged thought on Carl Hillstrom I had in my brain, I figured out why they hadn’t found the burial site of victim four.

  Hillstrom had been born (yes, of course, to a prostitute and an absent father) in Edmonton, Alberta, and lived there for fifteen years (mutilating animals and being antisocial, yes, continuing to act out a stereotype he wasn’t aware of) before the move to Tacoma. That span in Canada covered most of his schooling, which meant he’d learned his math on the metric system. The numbers he’d dropped in the interview with Lennox—50, 40—weren’t feet. They were meters. Hillstrom had slipped backward, using the metric measures he’d learned in school—by accident, I think, because he wasn’t clever enough to come up with such a precise deception. I took out my phone instead of trying to do the calculation on my own: 3.28 feet in a meter, 50 meters is 164 feet, 40 meters is 131 feet. A long ways off from where the cops had looked when they’d followed up on this interview.

  Hillstrom was too dumb to be manipulative. That had always been clear. He was a smart killer and concealer, but that had never matched up with the way he presented himself in court, or how he came across in non-search-related transcripts. That he’d gotten away with three murders, let alone four, was miraculous.

  “Hillstrom was a junior partner,” I said, just as I heard Ellen pulling into the garage, the wheels of her car rolling up alongside the stain left by Bella Greene’s blood. The Ragman’s touch explained the smart burials of the Hillstrom girls. It explained the murders themselves. A guy dumb enough to leave a snuff movie in an apartment he’s behind in the rent on? Probably not smart enough to get away with murder, alone. But with the Ragman? A Ragman who’d lost his first killing partner, Jason Shurn?

  I caught a shiver in my right hand, the kind of shake an old man gets, or an alcoholic when he’s waking up. It looked a little like it was being jostled by a small, irresistible, and invisible force. I pushed my thumb toward my index finger, imagining the needle there. The needle that had killed Keith. Could be the Ragman tricked Shurn and Hillstrom into their first kills.

  “But you guys didn’t need the encouragement, did you?” I said, then closed my scrapbook.

  ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON, AN HOUR before he was supposed to officially close up shop, the Ragman updated the website for Acme Urban Surveillance with a banner notice: “Away for Two Weeks. Any Order that Has Not Shipped Will Be Delayed—We Value Privacy Over Speed.” For the door, a briefer hand-markered message, which read “Back in Business on the 15th. Sorry.”

 
As he was posting it, Mike Guzman, who ran the convenience store next to Acme, was having a smoke. Guzman watched him tape up the sign from the inside, then walked out to check on it.

  “Going outta town, Frank?” Guzman asked. The Ragman twitched and looked at the ground for a moment.

  “Yeah. Business is always a little soft this month, anyway, picks up again mid-December. Same for you?”

  “With me it’s always bad,” Guzman said, laughing. He was wearing a tight yellow shirt with red stripes, the uniform he always wore to work, even though he owned the store. The Ragman couldn’t understand that; picking an embarrassing outfit for yourself to wear every day, at the place you worked hard to buy. A forty-year-old man choosing to dress as a 1980s McDonald’s employee every day for the rest of his working life.

  “Recession, right?” the Ragman said with a forced wink, then pointed to the stack of boxes just behind the door of Acme. “Got to get those to the post office. Keep an eye on the place for me, will you?”

  “You got it all alarmed up. And more cameras than you need.”

  “Right. Still, extra eyes don’t hurt.” The conversation ended, thankfully, and the Ragman loaded his car, locked up, and drove off. He wasn’t sure if he’d ever be coming back to the store, and was fairly sure he didn’t care.

  In surveillance, it’s the eyes the watched can’t see that matter most, especially when they can feel the gaze when no one’s watching. Martin Reese knew that, now, the Ragman thought.

  The tracker on Martin’s Jeep had been deactivated, and by now he must have found the earring the Ragman had faked up to look like the one that had been lying next to Jenny Starks in the woods, years ago. He’d used blood from a package of short ribs, and aged the feather earring in weak tea and dirt. If Martin had been paying proper attention, he’d have been suspicious of the token appearing at all. The Ragman didn’t hold on to memories; he buried them. Even if Martin did suspect it was a fake, though, it would have done its job: shown him that eyes were always on him.

  “Martin Reese,” the Ragman muttered, and smiled. Martin Reese, Jason Shurn, Carl Hillstrom. The names had a pleasing concordance, and Martin even looked a bit like Jason, if Jason had grown up to be a real man, a worthy partner for this kind of work. If Jason hadn’t failed them both.

  After the post office, the Ragman drove to ReeseTech. The light of the sun, filtered by clouds and his tinted windshield, caught the light pink of the solution in the syringe the Ragman placed on the passenger seat as he parked. Across from the building, in a surveillance camera blind-spot he’d scouted weeks ago, he watched men and women filter out of the place where Martin Reese used to spend his days, when he wasn’t out digging up the Ragman’s past. He waited for the right person to come out.

  COURTESY OF REALITY’S INSANE HUMOR, I was at a Friday night party. Half-hosting the tinsley launch with Ellen, every “I barely knew what was going on until I got here tonight myself!” was greeted with laughter and indulgent eye-rolling from the sixty-odd people who were milling around the space. Doing my best not to answer every “So what have you been up to?” with “Accidentally murdering cops in parking garages.”

  The room was packed, the AC not keeping up with the body heat. If it weren’t for the obvious wealth of everyone there, other than the fashion writers, shoplifting would have been a concern. Gary, in a black-on-black suit that would have made a less skinny man look like a Vegas magician, was greasing his way through the crowd with an indulgent laugh.

  “Martin, did you see that pile of belts in the back, the green ones in the stockroom? Kind of ridged?” Ellen was using her best kindergarten teacher voice on me, and I would have gotten annoyed if she wasn’t both worried and entirely in her glory. The potential belt customer, a woman I’d seen on real estate signs in our neighborhood and several better ones, pretended she wasn’t listening, but emphatically was.

  “Sure. I can find them.”

  “Thanks. Sorry to errand-boy you,” Ellen said. She pushed three fingernails through her hair, a stress gesture that was particular to her business self, coming out only at the credit union, never in our family fights. Seeing her do that in tinsley made me absolutely certain, at that moment, that the store was going to succeed.

  “Let me help, Dad,” Kylie said, speaking from just over my left shoulder. The friend who was supposed to come with her, Lisa or Liza or something, had ditched at the last minute for a date. That had left Kylie wandering the narrow margins of the party, unable to find a corner that wasn’t occupied by a display or an unbearably rich and boring person. Kylie had refused her mother’s offer to wear some of the tinsley stock and was instead in her go-to special occasion dress, a green and black thing without sleeves that made her look a bit older than she was, but not in a way that made me worry.

  “Aren’t you having fun milling?” I asked Kylie, finding my way into my first genuine smile in a long time.

  “I’m the social hit of the season, Dad, just want to help you out.” Ellen had tuned us out and was in deep conference with the real estate lady. Kylie and I made our way through the corridor of bodies to the stock room. The belts were in a pile just to the left of the door, and I grabbed one.

  “Wait,” Kylie said. “Don’t go back out yet. Close the door.” I did.

  “Not that bad out there, come on.”

  “It’s what I expected,” Kylie said, flapping her right hand at me like she was dismissing a servant. “Mom’s doing great. That whole rack of those ugly red shirts is already gone, did you see?”

  “No, but I know the ones you’re talking about.”

  “It’s you, Dad. You’re not okay. You’re not at all okay, and I don’t understand why. That ‘v’ thing between your eyebrows is, like, as deep as an ax wound.”

  “It’s just stress,” I said, disarmed again by how clearly Kylie saw me, even through the noise and flash of a party like this one. “Not used to playing the hapless but supportive hubby at a big event.”

  “Dad. If Mom wasn’t so busy she would have noticed something was really wrong, too. You lucked out having this crisis now. Just please let me help, okay?”

  I don’t think I’d come closer to completely shaking apart and handing over the hell of the last few days as a problem for someone else to solve, as when my fourteen-year-old kid was staring me down in that room full of gourmet cloth. There was something in her determination, her unwillingness to take anything but the real answer in that moment, that made me think maybe she could find a way out I hadn’t thought of. A way for us to put Bella Greene back in that grave, resurrect Keith Waring, to keep the Ragman from ever bothering us again. Then I laughed, without any humor, while Kylie just watched me.

  “I just don’t know what to tell you, Kylie. You’re right, I have a ton of stuff on my mind—nothing to do with your mom or you, everything’s fine—but it’s nothing you can fix. Even talking about it wouldn’t help. But I love you and I love you more for noticing and caring and trying to help. Okay?”

  “Fuck you, Dad,” Kylie said, and left the little stockroom. Stormed out, more accurately. I took one of the belts and followed her, stopping to drop the piece off with Ellen, who took my arm.

  “This is Julie Walker. She just sold the Bezanson house up the way from us, remember? She’s bought and sold half of Eastlake.”

  “The nice half,” Julie Walker said, with a combo Frank Gorshin/ Vivien Leigh laugh.

  “She wants to talk you into getting us a cottage again,” Ellen said.

  “Oh, don’t make me sound like such a snake,” Julie said. “I don’t even have a stake in any of them, I’m strictly urban-property and a little—well, look, tell me how I can buy every one of these belts you have, so no one else in the city has one?”

  “You have no idea how possible that could be,” Ellen said. “The designer died last month and this is the absolute last run of this piece, they say.”

  Ellen had already let go of my arm but Kylie was out of the store already, likely pacing t
he sidewalk across from tinsley, waiting for me to come and find her. Gary waved me over from a small group of middle-aged guys I vaguely recognized, probably from appearances in the same Seattle tech scene stories my picture used to turn up in. I went over to do my night’s job, to talk normally, charmingly, to get people to spend and tell other people to spend.

  When I walked outside of tinsley, not more than fifteen minutes later, I couldn’t see Kylie. I called her name, crossed the street, even checked the alley to see if she’d bummed a cigarette to smoke rebelliously so I could catch her and we could have an honest fight, as she’d done once last summer when she had really wanted to talk to me about quitting swimming. I couldn’t find her. I called her name a couple of times.

  “Kylie. Kylie.” It was on the second “Kylie” that I felt a fear worse than anything I’d felt in the grave where I found Bella Greene, or in the garage when I shot Keith Waring up full of poison. I kept calling until I was screaming her name.

  EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, ELLEN was in our bedroom, with two pills in her and a private nurse outside the door. It didn’t take long for the adrenalized force of her tension to cut through the muffling syrup of the prescription pills, and she pushed past the nurse, who followed her into the living room where I was sitting across from Detective Sandra Whittal. Whittal wouldn’t sit when I first asked her to, but after fifteen minutes of talking, she relented and was sitting on the arm of the couch across from me.