Ellen Reese opened the door quickly, ready to scream at a reporter. The words died in her mouth. Sandra saw the tiredness under the anxiety and rage, the yellow baked-in weariness in Ellen’s eyes, a sure sign she hadn’t slept for more than an hour or two since her daughter had disappeared. Ellen pulled at the collar of her gray sweatshirt and put a bit of it in her mouth, chewing nervously and then waving Sandra inside.
“Mrs. Reese.”
“You have anything for us? I have teams out looking, and I called the swim coach in Oregon that she worked with two summers ago, she spent weeks there. I just want to make sure that everyone possible has Kylie on their radar,” Ellen said. The eyes didn’t change, flat, inexpressive, but the voice was TV-ready. Not manic, but alert.
“That’s good, Ellen. We’re doing the same through other channels. Can you tell me where your husband is?”
“No. He’s out looking for Keith Waring, somewhere.”
“What about last night?”
“Last night? What was that, Saturday?”
“Yes, Saturday.”
“He was here. Being pretty useless. We might have fought, I don’t know. But he was at his desk there, the end of the hall, all night.” Pointing to the desk seemed to trigger more of Ellen Reese’s normal-behavior instincts. “Sit in the living room, okay? You any closer to finding Waring?”
“Closer all the time,” Sandra said, walking toward the gray couch she’d sat on, hours after Kylie first went missing. Martin Reese hadn’t said too much, then. She was realizing how little he said most of the time, unless you asked him a direct question. “So your husband is out looking for Waring, you say?”
“That’s what he said. Something about his old hangout.”
“He should be telling us all of this. We need you both to work with us.”
“Keith Waring is police. My husband is afraid that his information will get back to Keith, and I think he’s right to be. You want coffee? I have instant, and an old pot from this morning.”
“I’ll take a cup from the morning batch,” Sandra said, but Ellen wasn’t listening anymore. She sank into the chair across from where Sandra was sitting, and hours of missed sleep were upon her almost immediately: her eyelids dropped into a blink that lasted too long, a slip into unconsciousness. Sandra got up quietly and walked to the kitchen. Let her sleep for five minutes. She might be a little more useful after she’s startled into waking.
There was an iPhone on the counter, not the latest model. Ellen Reese had been holding hers when Sandra had come in, so this must be Martin Reese’s. Pouring some black sludge from the expensive coffeepot in the enormous Reese kitchen, Sandra quickly went over the dialogue she’d had with Chris just before getting here.
“We have to unsettle her. Get her doubting him. Harmless if there’s nothing going on, incredibly useful if there is something up. Get the wife and we’ll get him,” she’d told Chris, as they walked to their cars in the station parking lot, ignoring a couple of reporters and telling a more persistent third one to fuck off.
“What have we got?” Chris asked. “Really, Sandra. What do we have here?”
“We don’t have Keith Waring. We know Martin Reese has an ancient peeping record, that Waring was probably using it to blackmail Reese, and that Reese, for some reason, hasn’t told us this.”
“He’s scared,” Chris said. They’d reached their cars, and Chris kept his hand on the door handle. Sandra walked around her own driver’s side and continued to talk to him over the roof. “If Waring has his kid, the last thing Reese wants to do is let Keith find out he’s blabbing to the cops. Maybe they’re even communicating, somehow.” It was starting to rain, but they kept talking, both getting into their vehicles and rolling down the windows.
“There’s another possibility. And I’m thinking this because I don’t know if Waring was capable of doing those digs by himself.”
“Guy with his build,” Chris said. “Yeah.”
“Digging is hard work. Subtlety is hard work, too. What if Waring was doing this with a partner? He’s obviously tangled up in this because of those files. But he was never off the job when the digs were happening, when the calls were made—he was at his desk, right behind us. But maybe someone else tapped him as a source of data, bought files off him, and did their own Nancy Drew searches for dead bodies. A person who is fundamentally fucked-up. A serial killer hobbyist. Obsessive. At the point that Bella Greene dies and ends up in that grave, a few things could have happened. Either this other creep decides he wants to kill for real, or Keith Waring decides he wants to escalate their weird partnership.”
“Yeah. And what’s your favorite option? How about some names?” Chris now had a notepad on his steering wheel and was writing, fast, almost as though he were transcribing everything Sandra said. Her brain was the collating and sorting kind, capturing and laying out every relevant detail in order. Chris only understood the full pattern of his cases once he’d actually solved them.
“Wait. Bella Greene’s burial site. It wasn’t staged right. It was forensically clean, but an aesthetic mess. Our Finder, our guy, takes photo souvenirs. Like a real serial, he needs something from the scene, a memento, to make what he does real. And, you know, it’s the digital age. No need to keep scalps around the house anymore. He takes photos. But the Bella Greene site wasn’t like his. It wasn’t Kodak-friendly.”
“You told me this already in your apartment.”
“I wasn’t sure then. I’m sure now. Someone else, someone who hasn’t been doing the digs for the most part, did that one. Killed Bella, and hid her in a place he knew the Finder would look. Maybe that guy, the person who killed Bella Greene, was Keith Waring. And the Finder is Martin Reese.”
Chris let his notepad slide into his lap.
“You didn’t say anything like this yesterday when we talked to Reese.”
“Yesterday I didn’t know about Reese’s juvenile record. Today I think Keith is pissed at Martin Reese and is using Kylie against him.”
“Either that or he’s dead and whoever killed him has Kylie Reese,” said Chris.
“What?”
“Sandra, you do this every time, and usually you’re right. You zero in. But there’s other possibilities out there. I don’t think Keith Waring comes close to the mental level needed to do any of these crimes. Let alone the technical know-how to find a blind spot in CC cameras downtown, and the physical confidence and strength to grab a high school athlete off the street quick enough to not be noticed. So what if you’re right, and someone’s buying files off Keith, and that’s the person who killed him, made him vanish, and did all this other shit?”
“Someone who had something to do with those bodies pulled up over the years, you mean,” Sandra said. “A killer we don’t know about, one Martin Reese pissed off with his finds.”
“Fuck no, Sandra, that is not what I meant. At all. This is insane,” Chris said. “Martin Reese is a tech douche bore, not a fucking serial killer obsessive. No one is more boring and less complex than a guy who works in tech, except maybe a rich guy who’s retired from tech. These guesses are an incredible reach—you can’t build a case on what you don’t know.”
“You can build a suspect on it. And what I do have is a man who married the sister of a likely Jason Shurn victim. Who was ‘friends’ with a vanished records guys from our department. Who had his daughter kidnapped. Who just had a young female employee vanish from his company at a time when a serial is dumping fresh corpses in old graves. He’s the only common link, Chris.”
“The Reese family is being victimized,” Chris said, but sounded less convinced than he had been earlier. Catching a text from his ex-wife, he begged off and left, putting a period on what would have become a circular argument with Sandra. She’d driven up to the Reese house so quickly and with her thoughts so entirely on the case that she seemed to have teleported onto the doorstep when Ellen Reese opened up.
Sandra tried to finish her cup of coffee in the Reese kitch
en, but it wouldn’t go down. She picked a bottle of Woodford Reserve off the counter near the secondary bar sink on that enormous length of marble, sweetening and cooling the aging brew in her cup with the bourbon. She took a sip then made the rest vanish in a deep, eyes-shut gulp before walking into the living room to gently shake Ellen awake. The woman’s eyes flew open, alert, and her arms came halfway to her face in a defensive pose before she registered Sandra standing in front of her.
“Did you just want to get a good stare in, or do you have any questions?” Ellen said. She’d gone paler in sleep, and she rubbed the back of her neck while looking straight ahead, not up at Sandra. A bit of color returned to her face, just above her eyebrows. The cheeks stayed white.
“I’m wondering about your husband, Ellen. Don’t you ever wonder about him?”
“What the fuck does that mean, Detective?”
“Since we’re putting together a timeline that goes back years, I’m trying to get a little background on every person we’ve come into contact with who has anything to do with potential victims over the past twenty years. You know, to see if there’s a tie between your sister and someone who had anything to do with what’s happened with Kylie.”
“It’s Seattle. There are hundreds of people here who knew or worked with or drank with one of the screwed-up murderers in this part of the world.”
“That’s exactly right. It’s very possible that the person we’re looking for—who has something to do with Bella Greene’s murder, with your daughter’s vanishing—was obsessed with your sister.” Sandra never lied, but she sometimes focused on specific areas of potential truth during these informal chats.
Ellen got out of her chair and walked to the mantel, where she moved a small clock aside. She took the pack of Marlboro Reds and the Dunhill lighter she’d revealed and lit up without opening a window, which Sandra was sure hadn’t happened in this room very many times over the past decade.
“I’m not usually this rude,” Ellen said, “but you can’t wear that shirt anymore. The cuffs are frayed and discolored. And the sleeves of your jacket are about an inch too short, so we can see them much too well.” Ellen kept her eyes away from Sandra’s, staring at those cuffs until Sandra lowered her arms to her sides.
“A receptionist from ReeseTech went missing last night,” Sandra said. “Just after work. While your husband was sitting in your hallway, you say. We hit the panic button on it sooner than we usually would for a disappearance, just like we did for your daughter. Circumstances being what they are.”
“Sorry about making fun of your shirt, but it can be a credibility thing. I used to work in a credit union. Things like that make a difference when you’re sussing out a client.”
“Are you listening to me, Mrs. Reese? Two disappearances in two days. Your daughter, and your husband’s receptionist.”
“He hasn’t worked at ReeseTech, properly, for years. You should know that. And just because a psycho—the psycho your department hired, Keith Waring—took an obsessive interest in my family, and is now on some rampage, does not mean that you’re helping matters by implicating my husband in this. He was here last night. He was with me when Kylie was taken. So were dozens of the richest and most credible people in the city, all of whom saw him panicking when he saw his daughter was gone.”
“I’m not here to imply anything, Ellen. Mrs. Reese. I’m here to ask.”
“I don’t know what kind of sick sequence of thought could have brought you anywhere close to asking me these questions. You think my husband is guilty of anything other than the bad judgment of indulging Keith Waring’s friendship? Say so or screw off, Officer.”
“Simply put, your sister disappeared at around the same time as that skeleton we found out in the cemetery was put there. Even though it’s not Tinsley, the timing of the death is the only thing we could have to connect it to what’s been going on. Especially as it involves members of Tinsley Schultz’s family. We’re thinking that maybe it’s someone who had something to do with your sister’s vanishing.”
“So Martin killed my sister and then married me? That’s your theory?”
“No,” Sandra said, with as much sincerity as she could find.
“If you’re so determined to make a link, what about the body that was actually found with the skeleton? Where’s the connection there?”
“No connection, necessarily. A random homicide. Maybe meant to throw off the investigation.”
“The actual recent murder victim is the only dead body with no meaning. Gotcha. God. No wonder you people never found Tinsley. That killing is random, and nothing else is. Just the actual girl who actually just got killed, she’s totally unrelated. Right.”
“Are you aware your husband had a record as a juvenile offender, Ellen?” Sandra had been saving this, and she was rewarded with a tiny fracture in Ellen Reese’s banker’s expression, a little rictus of confusion below the left eye that was quickly smoothed out.
“It’s not a secret-filled marriage. I’m aware kids do stupid things, yes.”
“I’m only trying to fill in a picture of what’s going on in the larger scheme of the case, Ellen. I’m not trying to corner you, or poke at you.”
“If that’s right, can you leave now? I’d like to get back to looking for my daughter.”
“So you’re aware that as a teenager, your husband broke into the homes of girls he went to high school with, who he’d likely been surveilling, and that he stole items from them and took them back to his own home.”
“You finished?” Ellen didn’t wait for an answer, but she’d given one in her widening eyes and concentrated look down at her knees. Sandra saw it.
“You didn’t know. Just tell me, Ellen, it’s fine. You know now. This is important to us looking for Kylie, it’s relevant. And you shouldn’t feel embarrassed about not knowing everything about your partner. Nobody ever does.”
“Embarrassed? You think that’s the operative emotion here, you stupid bitch?” Ellen got off her chair and walked out of the living room, not turning around again, just opening the front door and leaving it that way as she ran up the stairs.
Sandra left, not quite able to figure out if she regretted any of this visit.
THE COLD HAD NUMBED MY cuts. They puckered around the edges, on the wet and dirty skin of my chest. It almost occurred to me to worry about infection, in the few seconds before I was completely conscious again, aware of what I actually had to be concerned about. I looked at the earth walls around me and stood up halfway, leaning back when I got dizzy, shutting my eyes against the flow of blood and returning consciousness. The moon was vivid, turning the field around me gray, trees black, my skin white except for the filth and dark lines left by the Ragman’s knife.
“Frank’s knife,” I thought. He’d armed me with his name, just to show how sure he was that I was bound to him, trapped by him. Just whispering that name to a cop would end Kylie’s life. About ten feet away from the lip of the grave made for the body that the Ragman had taken away with him, my clothes and gear were lying in a tidy pile. The jeans were useless, almost, but still had enough structure and stitch left intact that they could be worn.
My blood moving around made me aware of how cold I was again, the tingling of reawakening flesh blending into the numbness of freezing skin. It was much colder up here in the mountains than it was in the city. If I hadn’t woken up when I had, I might have gone hypothermic, able to forget everything that had happened and would happen as I lay in the dirt and kept sleeping. Instead, I pulled myself the rest of the way out of the ground and walked over to my clothes, stiffly putting them on, being gentle only when it came to drawing my white undershirt over the long, thin cut on my chest. Sticky, dark blood coated my neck and face, behind my ears, the dripping trail of what the Ragman had poured over the girl’s body. Rochelle Stokes, who’d been unlucky enough to get a job at ReeseTech. Gary had probably been on the hiring panel—she was just his type. Small and alt. Now gone, just a body, a life ext
inguished to become a monster’s weapon.
I started to clean the site, then realized I’d need whatever energy I had just to fill the grave in and make it vanish into the surrounding dirt and grass. Picking the shovel out of the hole, I made the first tentative pokes at the pile of earth I needed to get back in there, learning how I could move my arms and body without starting the flow of blood from my cut again. Short, stiff movements. I was working for what seemed like an hour, breathing hard, feeling my body warm and become usable again. All the while I thought of what I’d have to do for the Ragman, what I’d need to dispel him forever. When the digging became hypnotic, repetitive, I unfocused my eyes and saw Jason Shurn pacing back and forth in front of me.
He was handsome, still, kept young and alive by the cooperation of my imagination and hallucination. He was wearing the clothes he’d been arrested in: Lee jeans, a gray Dickies jacket, brown work boots with their tongues flapped out over the laces. His hair was greasy, or wet, which looked about the same in the moonlight.
“There’s no beating Frank,” Shurn said. “And I don’t know why you’d want to, kid. He took you out of the cub scout world and into real combat, you know? He opened the whole fuckin’ world to you.” He walked over and sat, dangling his legs into the hole I was filling. I watched his boots start to submerge as I ladled another load of earth in.
“I haven’t lost enough blood to have this conversation,” I said. The Ragman’s pill had kept my blood flowing, kept me from staying unconscious, but it had done something to my mind.
“I don’t like you thinking of him as a ‘monster,’ Marty. That woman down there, that Rochelle, you put her there just as much as he did. Pretend to feel sorry for Rochelle if you want, but I think you’re just sorry for yourself. You couldn’t give a shit about any of these dead women, except maybe wifey and daughter.”
“You don’t know anything about me. You know nothing.”
Find You in the Dark Page 25
