Find You in the Dark

by Nathan Ripley

  “Just another old fuckup who deserves to be behind bars.” Jail wasn’t for the immoral, for violators: it was for the incompetent. For failures. He’d always thought of Jason, and especially Hillstrom, fond as he could be of them sometimes, as weak. Martin wasn’t like that. He was sick like those other two, but not in a way that made him a weakling. Even in that hole, blood and panic leaking out of him, the drug cocktail and adrenaline fighting it out in his bloodstream, he hadn’t looked tame, beaten, like a victim. He struggled like the women did, the ones Carl and Jason took down. The ones who wanted to live at any cost. Jason and Carl hadn’t minded surrender when it came. They had their run and then it ended.

  “Martin gets one more run and then I kill him. Me. I do it.” Properly. He’d kill Martin right, just after they killed together and the Ragman had control, dominion, again. There were never going to be any police involved in this, not on the Ragman’s part, anyway. Martin could handle the cops who came for him because of the ReeseTech secretary, and if he couldn’t, then he didn’t deserve to kill alongside the Ragman. Rochelle Stokes and the bones of Cindy Jenkins, bagged in the Ragman’s trunk, they’d go the same way as Keith and his car, tonight. The Ragman could still do that. Make dead objects vanish. Go away for good.

  “Mistakes can be erased,” the Ragman said, stopping his tears and clenching the steering wheel tightly. The way he’d squeeze Martin, and Kylie, and Ellen Reese, if Martin didn’t properly respect him when the time came.

  Pulling into his property an hour later, the Ragman checked his video bank, examined the feeds from cameras that would be tripped into life if anyone walked onto his land, investigated the home where he lived and where Kylie Reese was a temporary guest. Nothing. And Kylie was sitting placidly in her cell, on top of the freezer, of all places. She was hugging her knees and staring at the wall, probably doing some sort of mental exercise. The feed was HD from that camera, and the Ragman was able to get in close, to see the flickers of fear in the teenager’s eyes. They calmed him down.

  He walked through the corridors of his home, the carefully arranged stacks of newspapers and open containers of accelerant, and made his way to the slot that opened into Kylie’s cell. He opened it, and waited. Inside, Kylie stirred and walked over, waiting for the food she expected to be pushed through. She waited four minutes, staring at the open slot. It didn’t move, and nothing came through.

  “What do you want?” Kylie asked. Silence. “Have you even talked to my parents yet? My dad? He’ll give you anything, man. Sir. Whatever you want me to call you. I just want to go, okay?”

  Kylie stared through the open slot. She couldn’t see anything around its edges, no fingers, no edge of a tray, but as she got closer, she could see a banister in the background. A dirty red carpet on it, an untidiness of papers and garbage that had a hoarded look to it, opposite to the antiseptic cleanliness of her small prison.

  Kylie came close enough to the slot for her breath to be visible against the pushed-up metal flap. This bothered her, made her feel visible. She stopped breathing. Just waited there, for another full minute. Nothing. So she reached her hand through, slowly, questing with her fingers for a knob, a button, anything.

  Instead, she found hot, living fingers. Four of them, and a thumb, coming together into a fist that gripped her hand and pulled with incredible force, taking her whole arm up to the shoulder into the space on the other side of the door as she screamed and screamed and screamed. The jagged pain of a needle inserted clumsily, hard, at her inner elbow joint, made her scream more.

  “Don’t!” she said, and repeated, louder each time. “Don’t.”

  The door surrounding the slot was pulled open, revealing seams in the wall that Kylie hadn’t been able to see before. And there he was, the man who had her, impossibly tall, a blank mask on his face. She could feel the drug moving through her already, and knew she didn’t have much time. When he bent down, she pushed herself back and delivered. A kick, with her dominant right leg, the one that had always thrown off her movement through the pool until she’d learned control and balance. Kylie didn’t worry about either now as she kicked out, just about hitting what she wanted to: the round bump of flesh in the center of the man’s throat below the bottom rim of the mask.

  The Ragman staggered back, croaking for a few seconds until he could gasp, taking in air. Then, controlling himself, he breathed quietly and deep, and laughed. The girl on the floor, the last of the strength in her legs seeping away under the influence of the chemicals in her blood, cried. He picked up her limp body and walked toward the freezer.

  He made sure Kylie was conscious when he opened the lid of the deep freeze, feeling the cold smoke lick out, and lowered her into it. He shut the lid a second before her eyes, full of panic her tongue could no longer voice, closed.

  BEING BURIED SHOWED ME THE way out. It’s always been like that for me. Pressure. At the company I needed impossible deadlines. With Ellen, the occasional huge fight, the threat of loss. The stakes Kylie brought into our lives. And going through the files, the mass of information, it was only when I had all that competing information in my head at the same time that I could see my way to a grave, to where a killer had left the bones I set out to find. In that motel room, Gary had thrown what he thought was a complication at me. And that was what I had to embrace to save Kylie.

  I was on my way to ReeseTech, after placating Gary in a long chat in the motel room. He was on his way back to tinsley, ready to open up for the day, to repel the reporters who would be even more fervent after Rochelle’s disappearance. The most important thing I’d left Gary with was a promise that Ellen would know nothing about our conversation. “I’ll tell her what she needs to know,” I’d said. By then, he hadn’t cared.

  “I came as soon as I heard,” I said to the windshield wipers, which were batting furiously at the downpour that had been keeping me company on the ride back to ReeseTech. Nothing on the stereo, not music, not news, not Jason Shurn’s voice. My scrapbook was at home in its desk drawer, the voices and images banked there and backed up in my mind. None of it was worth anything to me if I couldn’t get through the next two days.

  “How can I help? What can I do?” Maybe something like that. “Do we know anything yet? Is this the same guy who took Kylie?” No, not that. Mustn’t seem too curious, or assume involvement. Care about the company, be concerned about the girl, but make it clear you never knew her. That you don’t want to take a piece of someone else’s grief. That sadness belongs to her family and friends, and you respect it.

  “I’m just a guy who used to own the company she worked at.” Rolling into the Elliot Bay neighborhood, I breathed deeply a few times, feeling the tape around my chest grabbing at the skin around the cut. My arms and legs were aching from my labors with the shovel, but my head was clear, purged of the drug hangover by adrenaline and chilly planning. And hate. Resenting and disliking Gary had always been something I wasn’t proud of, but I could be, now. I’d been absolutely, instinctually right about what a piece of shit he was.

  I parked the car well in the back of the ReeseTech lot, taking in the outside of the building for the first time, really, noticing the security cameras outside, the ones on the poles that rose out of the rain-spattered asphalt. I looked at the whole setup the way the Ragman would have when he scouted the area before picking Rochelle up, plucking her out of the universe with his hands and a needle.

  Gary’s smugness had been mitigated by awe, back in the motel room. “You really are a genuine over-the-moon sick fuck, boss,” he said. “I knew there was something off about you, but I didn’t think it went—didn’t think it went here. Were you fucking Rochelle? Jumped on your own daughter’s kidnapping to cover up inconvenient business? Wow. You’re not supposed to have an affair with the secretary after you retire, Martin. You fuck her while you’re still working late at the office.” He prodded at what he’d laid out on the tarp for his show-and-tell blackmail act. The shovel and the sloshing bottle of bleach. />
  “I don’t know what half that gear I saw in your Jeep is for, but I know what the package as a whole is, and don’t try to tell me otherwise. They call it a ‘kill kit’ on TV,” Gary said. He backed off from the pile, sat down on the bed. “I made very sure not to touch any of it barehanded, either.” That may have been true, as far as he knew, but I was already leaping ahead of this conversation, knowing what was coming next. Most of it, anyway.

  “You’re not going to say anything, boss?”

  “What do you want, Gary?”

  “I had this slow-burning plan all worked out. You can probably think your way to what that might have been. I’m no more cut out for retail than I am for plugging away at code for a dying company until I’m sixty-five. Not that ReeseTech is going to last that long. That’s why I put my selling bonus into real estate, to get as much money as I could within a couple of years.”

  “Recession fucked you,” I said, paying attention and thinking on several tangents at the same time. Gary’s phone was still on the bathroom counter behind me, which meant he hadn’t taken any photos of my dig kit, hadn’t emailed anything about them to himself or anyone else.

  “Oh, recession and worse. Sketchy condo development—that place near the Marriot, on Waterfront, the one they stopped building about halfway through and then started up again a year and a half later? Well, that year and a half was when my money got eaten up. Panicked and sold up. I don’t know money, Martin. People yes, money no. Most people, that is. I didn’t know you had this in you.” I waited for him to get to the point.

  “All I wanted, the whole time, was exactly what you have. Not the wife and daughter, even though you may not have to worry about the daughter anymore. The forget-about-money money you’ve got. So much of it. Enough that I never have to check my bank balance again, worry about what’s going to come next. I was going to get it from you the old-fashioned way.”

  “And how’s that?” A different emotion was leaking into the constant fear I’d been carrying with me since taking hold of Bella Greene’s wrist in her grave. Rage, a tiny thread of it, like a drop of red dye plinking into a cup of water.

  “Take your wife, take your money. You know how much she complains, either silently or out loud, about you? ‘If it wasn’t for Kylie . . .’ that’s how she says it, trailing off. And shit like this, coming on an errand to find you after you were dumb enough to leave your phone behind—although I guess that was on purpose, since you were being a naughty boy with Rochelle and didn’t want to be interrupted by pesky calls—generally listening to her, and running her goddamn dream business with her. Why did you think I was doing all that? Because I like nice shirts? It’s because I’m edging you out, sweetie. She gets a divorce, enough of your money for her and I to enjoy two years or whatever the minimum decent interval is, and then I take a payoff to get out of her life for good. That was plan A.”

  I walked over to the motel blinds and pulled them up. The rain I’d be driving through in a few minutes had started up, a vicious coastal downpour that looked like bites of the ocean being dropped on the landscape by firefighting planes. Gary kept talking.

  “Ellen ain’t the cheating kind, even for a genuine, sweet, and understanding boy like me. And divorce courts shake a finger at adultery anyway. But love? I could do that, I could make that happen. You’re only invested in Kylie. Anyone can see that. Even now that you’ve fucked up in the worst way.”

  “My wife’s not an idiot. And my daughter’s not dead.”

  “More time I spend with her, more I realize that yeah, Ellen’s not at all an idiot. But you are,” Gary said, in his real voice, with the play sapped out of it. I turned to him. He was standing, now, pointing at me, his face relaxed into cool, real, hate. “You’re the dumbest fucking guy I’ve ever met, for what you’re willing to piss away. Whatever you did with this Rochelle girl, and I have a pretty good idea, probably has more to do with you not having the balls to tell a few people that you’re fucking on the side than it does with you following through on being the dirty bird you so clearly are. You’ve been disappointing your wife in every conceivable way for years.”

  “Get to the point.”

  “Never tell me what to do again. The point, Martin, is that instead of making a full pitch at taking your money and life away from you, I’m going to speed things up by not going to the cops about any of this. For the low, one-time price of three million dollars, paid to me cleverly by some untaxable way you and I think real hard of, together. In return, I ease out of the store bit by bit, and I’m living in Thailand for the rest of my comfortable days by this time next year. Hmm?”

  Cheap, elementary, and effective blackmail. What he’d seen was enough to bury me. With Ellen and the law.

  “Ellen never would have gone for you.”

  “Why not? She settled for you and stuck it out for way too long. She may not be dumb, but she’s capable of fucking up. You’re proof. Probably has a lot to do with that vanishing sis of hers. Vulnerable, and all. Did you do Tinsley, too, all those years back? Now I’m just curious. And did you steal my phone?”

  I waved the iPhone at him, but didn’t give it back yet. I stared at the objects between us on the carpet. The shovel, in particular. It was rimmed with dry blood, a lipstick tracery around the blade that offset the dull dustiness of the rest of the steel. Rochelle Stokes’s blood, a physical testament to her death, the postmortem wound I’d given her when she fell into the grave.

  “I didn’t touch her,” I muttered. “Not when she was alive.”

  “I don’t know what the fuck that means, Martin, and it’s something you should reserve for a trustworthy therapist. I sure don’t want to hear it. Tell the prison shrink next week, if you want. Up to you.”

  “Did you take anything else out of the car, Gary?”

  “Nope. I think my word would be more than enough for Ellen and for the cops to take a harder look at you than you can afford. And I’m not a bit afraid of you, either. You’re too smart to get rid of me right after Rochelle. So let’s chat about the three million.”

  We did talk for a little longer before my drive back. I put on gloves after he left and got to work on the dig kit with the bleach in the motel bathtub. I took special care with the shovel, which I collapsed, before prepping the whole works for selective stop-and-dumps in containers on the way back to town. The cops would have no call to search me, no matter what Sandra Whittal suspected. She had nothing but suspicion and I had to keep it that way, which started by being as forthcoming as possible. I stared at the ReeseTech building for another minute, picking out which cars out front likely belonged to cops. Picking up the leather messenger bag from the seat next to me, I slung it on and opened the driver’s side door.

  I ran through the slackening rain all the way to the lobby, hoping to add breathlessness to my look of concern. I didn’t need to key my way in, though. A big cop with a triangular torso and black hair, a former college jock who’d gotten used to delivering his beatings in the street and precinct instead of on the field, closed a friendly but controlling hand over my shoulder as he opened the lobby door.

  “Detective Chris Gabriel, Mr. Reese. I work with Detective Whittal. Assuming you’ve heard what happened here? My partner’s come and gone, but she really, really wants to talk to you.”

  I’d been braced for an encounter with the woman whose incisive eyes I’d faced down and buckled in front of in the station; this gorilla represented no obstacle. I relaxed and smiled exactly as much as was appropriate.

  “Could you give me ten or twenty minutes to go upstairs and check on my people? Just to show my face. It’s not my company anymore but I want to, you know—”

  “Reassure. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Another twenty minutes on top of the three hours I’ve already been here won’t hurt any.” Gabriel took his phone out of his breast pocket and started toward the front desk, where Rochelle Stokes used to spend eight hours a day. For a moment, as I pressed the up button for the elevator, I thought he wa
s going to examine her drawers, boot up her computer, as other cops had no doubt already done. But no, he just sat in her chair, without adjusting the height, and started clicking out a text message.

  Upstairs was as busy as the lobby was empty. The ReeseTech higher-ups, the ones who were actually in the city and not overseas, had corralled every employee.

  “They only talked to me for five minutes. God, you must be worried sick. Your daughter,” said Bob Suchana, the first familiar face I saw up there. He was tall and shaped liked the ball-chair he used at his desk, the one Gary used to pray would explode someday, sometimes throwing darts from the games room at it while Bob was deep into code. We all watched, but nothing ever happened. Gary got his laugh one day, when Bob turned around suddenly and caught the tip of a dart in the flesh of his thigh. Just now he looked pale, calm, intrigued. He polished his glasses as he spoke to me, placidly mentioning his alibi first: he’d left for his kid’s hockey game right after work on Friday, and had been doing dad duty ever since.

  “I don’t know why they’re going all red alert on this right off the bat.” I waved at a few other people as Bob talked, and slowly walked us to the part of the office where I wanted to be. “Rochelle, I didn’t talk to her much, but she was pretty wild, you know? Not a reliable homebody type. She’s probably off somewhere on her own, forgot her parents were coming to visit this weekend.”

  “What does ‘wild’ mean to you, Bob?”

  “She doesn’t have a boyfriend, and she goes to shows, punk, metal shows, every weekend. Sometimes with friends, but sometimes alone.”

  “Sounds like a lead,” I lied, feeling a little bad for Bob when I imagined how bland his college days and life up through and including marriage had been if he looked at weekend concert-going as evidence of a dissolute, late-eighties Axl Rose life. “But she was still a nine-to-fiver, Bob. Couldn’t be too unhinged.”