The nurse was a beefy Hispanic kid with a weirdly Canadian accent who went by Tex. Probably he’d used childhood TV to get away from sounding like his parents and had somehow ended up with this. I found myself observing this bullshit and hating myself for it at the same time, then thinking deeper into it, just so I could get a millisecond of mental rest from thinking about Kylie and where she was. Who she was with. And how little I really knew about the Ragman, other than that he’d certainly kill Kylie if I told the cops about his existence.
I gestured the nurse back to his post, getting up to make room for Ellen in the deep leather chair where I’d sunk, trying to look more shocked and more clueless than I was. Ellen’s hair was tied back and her face was pale and streaked with makeup she hadn’t washed off. It looked like scraps of greasepaint on a soldier’s corpse.
It had taken about four seconds of talking to Whittal to remember again why Keith had sounded so shit-scared of her and why I’d felt the same on my visit to the precinct.
“We can’t assume anyone has her, not exactly yet,” Detective Whittal repeated, for Ellen’s benefit.
“Someone does,” Ellen said. “She would never do this. She would have called hours ago, texted, done something. We looked all night. All night.”
“She doesn’t have her phone,” I said. The phone had been deposited in a garbage can two blocks away from tinsley, wrapped in a sandwich bag that reeked vaguely of chorizo sausage. The cops had brought it up to me this morning, asked me if I remembered Kylie having it on her as she left the store last night. I didn’t, but felt sick looking at the touchscreen slicked with grease, glad they hadn’t shown this artifact to Ellen. I could easily picture it in the Ragman’s gloved hands as he ate a sausage on a bun in his van, waiting for Kylie to walk the necessary number of steps away from the store for him to come in with his needles and grasping arm.
“I don’t care that she doesn’t have her phone, Martin, she knows our fucking numbers, she knows 911, she would have called, okay?”
“I’ll be frank,” Whittal said, which made me wonder what she’d been so far. “I do think someone has Kylie. I think it has everything to do with the anniversary of your sister’s vanishing.”
“And with that body you found?”
“Martin,” Ellen said, a lacerating gasp with syllables.
“That’s stretching it, slightly, but maybe. But I don’t think there’s any need to think Kylie’s been harmed,” said Whittal. “I think we would have gotten a call about that, some sort of tease. He’s glommed on to your family because of your sister, Mrs. Reese. That’s what I think. What we’re dealing with, essentially, if I have our guy right, is an obsessive coward who has a fantasy around other people’s murders. Ones he didn’t have the courage to commit himself.”
“Is that so?” I asked, a little annoyed, despite myself. I yanked my ego out of the conversation before it could make me say anything. Kylie was in the Ragman’s world, and I was going to get her out. But if I was going to bring her back to the life she’d been plucked out of, I had to pretend to the police that they could help me, that I was a hapless idiot who needed them. Whittal looked at me with flat eyes, devoid of the compassion that glinted in them when she talked to Ellen. I couldn’t tell which one was the act: the cold investigator or the concerned human being.
“The FBI will probably be in on this soon enough, and I imagine they’ll tell you something similar, Mr. and Mrs. Reese. But I want this solved and Kylie back with you before they even have a chance to run their evaluations and size things up. I’m talking hours here, not days.”
Ellen and Whittal did most of the talking after that, detailing Kylie’s social patterns over the past year, including a boyfriend I didn’t know anything about. I didn’t tell Detective Whittal about the morning drive I’d taken with my daughter just a few days ago, when I’d told her all about Jason Shurn and monsters just like the Ragman.
“I’m sorry,” I said, loud enough for both my wife and the cop to stop talking and turn to me. “I fucking failed, or she’d be here. I’m sorry.”
“Martin, shouldn’t you—” Ellen trailed off. I understood she was going to tell Whittal about Sergeant Keith Waring if I didn’t. So I did. Being slack enough to let Ellen see me with him all those months ago had been one of the bigger mistakes in this disaster.
“I should say, Detective, even if it does seem silly, that I’m friends with a cop. And he’s been acting strangely recently, the last few months. I just don’t think he has anything to do with this, you know?” Whittal’s notepad was out and her lips moving before I finished my last sentence. I’d sparked something I hadn’t expected, and then I understood. Understood what Whittal was thinking, what I had to say now: exactly what the Ragman had set me up to say. Of course. Keith.
“His name’s Keith Waring. We just met in a post office line, around Christmas a few years ago, and he seemed to be an interesting guy with great cop stories. I thought hey, I should make friends out of my normal social circle, being retired and all.”
“Waring. God,” Whittal said, her professionalism fracturing for a second. I think she almost smiled. “Do you have many other friends, Mr. Reese?” she asked. Her hunting instinct made her more impatient and human than her compassion for vanished Kylie had.
“Not a ton of close ones, which could be why I put up with Keith when he started to get weirder. I told him last time we hung out that I didn’t really want to keep going with these meetings, and he got sullen, threatening. This was at a bar, so there were people around, but I still felt a little scared.” I certainly felt scared telling the story to Whittal: while Keith wasn’t around to talk, she’d know what he’d done on the force, might guess why anyone might spend time with him. Access.
“Did Keith Waring tell you what he did for the department, Mr. Reese?”
“He lied, made me think he was still working the streets in Vice, or Homicide. It changed week to week. Eventually he let on that he just did paperwork.” Scrapbook work.
“Why was your last meeting so unpleasant?”
“He kept on mentioning matters from the past. Including Tinsley. Stuff he said he knew and no one else did.”
“Martin,” Ellen said. “You didn’t say anything about this right away?”
“You don’t know Keith,” I said. “He’s too—he’s not strong enough, not smart enough to have anything to do with taking Kylie.”
“Did he know you had a daughter? Had they ever met?” Ellen asked. “Martin, he’s a cop. He probably knows where the security cameras are near the store, or he could find out—that’s how he found that blind spot where he took her.” The police had viewed footage from two businesses near tinsley: Kylie walks by a frozen yogurt place but never makes the walk past the upscale housewares store two storefronts past it. Somewhere in that tiny space of sidewalk, the Ragman had taken away the most important part of my life.
“Ellen, stop. Keith never met Kylie. Maybe he saw her in my car once, but they’d never met.”
“It’s him,” Ellen said. “It’s him, isn’t it?” She was asking Whittal, not me. I felt a cool wash of fear around my lungs and heart, as though the Ragman were in the room with us, instead of manipulating this scene perfectly from afar, from wherever he was with Kylie.
The Ragman had locked in Keith as the suspect no one would ever find. The man he’d made me kill was the one I had to finger if I was going to stay free and get Kylie back. It was a perfect plan, as far as I could see: setting up the police officer they’d never find as the caller and killer in one. Buying the Ragman and me both some time. Time for him to finish with me.
“It’s obviously not him, Ellen,” I said, just as I was supposed to. “He’s at the police station every goddamn day, not out kidnapping girls.”
“I can tell you this much,” Detective Whittal said, answering Ellen and ignoring me. “Sergeant Waring hasn’t been at work. And he worked on archiving cases like your sister’s.”
“He was obsessed
with her, you’re saying? With my sister?”
“I’m not saying that, no. Not yet, not at all.”
“Oh my god,” I said. It seemed like my turn. “So you’re—so Keith talked to me to be close to Ellen, to Tinsley? He’s some sort of ghoul?”
“We’ll need to speak with Sergeant Waring, Mr. Reese. And I have to talk to you in greater detail, once I’ve found him,” Whittal said, flipping her notebook shut and starting to text on her phone. Ellen looked at me with what I hoped was a haze from the pills, but could have been a disappointment so vivid neither of us could confront it. I left the room and walked into the garage, leaning against my Jeep, unfurling the slip of paper I’d found taped under the driver’s side door handle the night before, after I’d finished running around the block, screaming Kylie’s name. The note hadn’t left my pants pocket since. Typed, printed, clipped precisely into a perfect square.
Dear Martin, I’m glad you’re still working away on the Hillstrom papers I gave you. But here’s another ripple! See, a normal someone would have gone to the police right after leaving Keith’s apartment, you know. Jeopardized his own freedom to keep himself and his family safe from the hovering psychotic, right?
But I just wanted to see what YOU would do. And you didn’t call the police in, did you? You never will tell them about US. Our Sunday appointment’s still on (see you soon!!), and I wanted an extra special reminder of the terrible mess you’ve gotten your family in by poking around in other people’s business. If you’re good from now on, Kylie will be fine. I can’t make any promises about you.
R.
I had to believe him. That he wasn’t going to hurt Kylie. And I believed she could survive whatever she was going through, mentally.
I held these things to be true because I had to. Kylie had to be alive. If there was a chance that she was dead, if I admitted that possibility, I knew I was going to start screaming, and that I would never be able to stop.
• • •
Four walls, a ceiling, a floor, a metal toilet built into the wall with the tank cover welded shut, a flush button the only moving part. Opposite from the toilet, a mail slot, built into one of the walls, not the door. Because there was no door. But there was a deep freeze, the kind hunters use, expensive and big enough for the packaged remains of two or three kills. When Kylie Reese opened it, curling her fingers under the top-loading door and pushing up with her arms still weak and absent-feeling from the drug that had coursed through her body, the only thing inside was the cold. There was no plug in the wall, and getting on her hands and knees, Kylie saw a short cord extending into the floor. The light in the room was fluorescent, angry bright, making the white walls glow.
She’d woken up a half hour before, lying still in fear after whipping her head up and finding herself in a room with no door. She touched the invisible spot on her neck where she’d felt a sting after leaving tinsley and walking half the block toward the convenience store on the corner.
The Ragman watched Kylie through one of the four tiny, invisible cameras in the room, checking to make sure she woke up within the window of time the dose he’d shot into her outside of her mother’s shiny new store allowed. He had a needle full of adrenaline loaded and ready to go if she was slow to wake. He wanted her alive for printed stills to be sent to Martin. She wasn’t ready for the freezer yet.
Inside the room, the muscles in Kylie’s thighs and shoulders unkinked as she rotated and stretched next to the freezer, as best she could in her green and black dress. She wouldn’t be taking her clothes off in this place, not with the lights on, not with that slot across from her ready to admit any gaze.
“Are you going to answer if I say anything?” she called, her voice cracking from a dry throat and the fear she was trying to keep down. A second later the mail slot admitted a small, lunchbox-sized box of apple juice, the kind with a straw strapped across like a little bandolier. Kylie walked over and checked the seal, then thought that would be a pretty dumb way to kill her. Her hand shook trying to get the straw out of its wrapping, and she kept trying, pretending to be calm, until its point pierced the plastic.
She walked over to the toilet after a few seconds of poking at the mail slot, seeing if she could get the box back through it. It was strictly one-way. But the tank had something to tell her: there was a note lying on top of it, typed and printed on normal paper, like a school newsletter, but without a masthead and in italics. A personal touch.
I’m not going to hurt you. I’m not going to touch you. As long as your dad plays nice. Or else. You pay his tab.
“My dad will do or pay whatever you want,” Kylie called to the walls, looking into the corners for a camera she could pray to. “He’ll do anything. You don’t understand how scared my mom is going to be, and him. They’ll do anything you want.”
The Ragman, watching the monitor but also able to hear Kylie through the walls, had to keep his laughter down at the “how scared my mom is going to be” part. He let Kylie keep talking, and left to take a nap in the camp bed he had set up in the garage. For the past couple of weeks, he’d been shutting down parts of the home, emptying them of his personal history and loading in newspaper and other easy flammables.
Kylie kept talking to the camera she was sure was up there for a few more minutes. When the words starting coming out automatically, she spent most of the time thinking of what she could do to hurt the man who’d put her in here if he ever opened the hidden door that led into this room. Because she was sure that when he did open up, it would be to come in and kill her.
“KEITH WARING ISN’T THE FINDER, but he’s the guy who killed Bella Greene and made that last call,” Sandra said when Chris pulled up to pick her up. “Hovering about ninety percent sure. We’re going to his house, now.”
“I called in for the address as soon as you texted. Some shithole apartment building in Ballard. You’d think Keith could do better than that, no dependents and a salary all to himself for barely doing anything.” They were already moving east, hooking into a turn at a stop sign and picking up speed as Chris made a bet on what the best route back downtown would be.
“I think he was doing a lot,” Sandra said. “All these years. He’s been getting deeper into these files, reading about our Horace Marks and our Jason Shurns, and he got jealous of our Finder, who had the smarts he doesn’t. Took it one step further and forged a friendship with someone connected to the Tinsley Schultz vanishing, Martin Reese—probably has a bunch more of these connections around. If the digs in the past checked out against Keith’s time off, I’d think he was the Finder. But he’s not. He’s jealous of the Finder and wants to one-up him by killing.” Sandra was riding on a deduction exultance wave, putting the story together as she said it, strongly believing parts of it. She wasn’t sure which parts.
“What if that isn’t it? If Keith’s not our guy?”
“Then we think about it some more, Chris. Right now we’re finding out if Waring is an obsessed weirdo who took Kylie Reese off the street and has her holed up somewhere. What do you know about him, socially? Anything?”
Chris reached down blind, switching lanes, and pulled up a coffee cup. He took a gulp then spat out the piece of discarded gum that had been hiding in the black fluid.
“I think that was mine,” Sandra said.
“Socially I know almost nothing about him. He tries to joke around with us sometimes. The rest of the guys, I mean. He’s clearly terrified of you. But there’s something unnatural about it. Like he’s a step behind, waiting for us to approve of each joke or set him up to tell a story. Socially he’s not all there. Girlfriends, no mention, really. Boyfriends either. He did tell me he wrote back and forth with this one woman in Oregon, maybe Vancouver, trying to pass her off as an ex he was rekindling with. It was clearly an internet thing. I got out of that conversation pretty quick, soon as the coffee was brewed.”
“I thought for a second that he and Reese, the dad, possibly had a thing,” Sandra said. “A sex thing, becaus
e it just seemed so bizarre they’d be friends.”
“Jesus.”
“This makes more sense. Keith glommed on to him because he was connected to Tinsley Schultz. The obsession built and now it’s at the point where Keith Waring takes Kylie Reese. She looks a lot like Tinsley Schultz, you know. He’s got some idea of reenacting what happened twenty years back.” Sandra let the theory out as they sped to Keith’s apartment, not noticing Chris’s growing silence.
“You almost hope you’re right, don’t you?” Chris said.
“What? Of course I do.”
“I mean, what if the kid’s dead, Sandra?”
“She’s not fucking dead and no I do not want to be right that badly. Can’t you stop analyzing me for a minute and just talk about the case? Can I kindly ask you to do that?” A wall of traffic stopped them halfway across the bridge, cutting the momentum of the argument, too.
“I can talk to you about the facts of the case. Remember facts?” Chris said. “There was nothing on the security cam footage we got. Three cameras hit the spot in front of the store, but there are two dark zones where there’s no coverage. Kylie steps into one, holding her phone and texting on it, at nine twenty-seven. Then that’s that. No way is it a coincidence, either—those gaps between camera coverage are just too narrow. Whoever grabbed the Reese girl must have hacked or otherwise gained access to every security feed on the block to determine the ideal place for a grab. No coverage in the area where her phone was dropped, either.”
“Seems impossible. Middle of downtown, not a single street camera?”
“It’s the only block within a square half-mile that has no coverage. Not an accidental dumping ground.”
“Martin Reese looked like he was holding back on something,” Sandra said, and Chris sighed. “What?”
“Nothing, go on.” Traffic started moving again, and Chris relented and hit the siren, starting to weave in and out of lanes.
Find You in the Dark Page 22
