Trace Evidence

by Elizabeth Becka

“At least you get a lunch hour,” Evelyn whined back, and closed a door reading Missing Persons on the frosted glass window. “I’m spending mine here.”

  “No you ain’t, either. You go bother some other low-paid civil servant. You know all search requests have to be submitted in writing. No exceptions.”

  “I know, but I’m in a real hurry on this one—”

  “No one jumps the line. First come, first served. All children are equal in the eyes of the Lord.”

  “I understand perfectly. I’m just going to use your computer, really. I’ll be quiet. You won’t even know I’m here.”

  “Huh.” Susannah brushed crumbs off a black spandex top, already pushed to its limit by an oversize bosom. Kind but inaccurate people described her as a large woman when huge was more like it. But most of her hugeness came from muscle, bone lengths in the ninety-ninth percentile, and extra height added by good posture. When in motion she had the bearing of a queen and the attitude to match; the combination left her unmolested by all but the most hardy. Or types like Evelyn, who had figured out her secret.

  Evelyn sat at a computer monitor that appeared to predate Windows and disturbed the blank screen to start up the search feature. The computer worked at its top speed, laboriously grinding gears and sounding like a box of tacks caught in a shredder. Evleyn absently tapped a foot and waited for the question.

  It wasn’t long in coming.

  Evelyn heard the tortured groans of the desk chair wheels as the Missing Persons administrative assistant pushed it back so she could see Evelyn’s computer screen. “What you got?”

  “Just some girls.”

  “What kind o’ girls?”

  “Dead girls.”

  “That ain’t what I call useful information. You come from the ME’s office, all your girls is dead.”

  Evelyn pivoted to face the woman. Susannah worked at four times the speed of the ancient computer system, with greater accuracy. “The girl they pulled out of the river. And the mayor’s daughter. We have all the earmarks of a ritual crime, which means he probably did it before, and if he did it before and we didn’t find any victims, that means they’re still under the water. That means somebody probably reported them missing. Maybe there’s some clue here, something that these two girls and maybe some missing ones all have in common, something that could lead us to him.”

  “I didn’t think missing persons was your job,” Susannah pointed out.

  “It isn’t. Tony would rant if he knew I was here.”

  Another tortured squeak of the wheels, but the woman remained within her battlements.

  “But I have to try to help,” Evelyn added, “before this guy kills again.”

  A sigh heaved from inside the spandex. “What age?”

  “Let’s say between fifteen and thirty.”

  “Color?”

  “All.”

  “Just women?”

  “Yep.”

  Susannah quickly pulled files from the stacks, apparently at random, but Evelyn had no doubt that when she opened each one it would contain information on a missing woman between fifteen and thirty. The castle walls began to sway but didn’t yet fall.

  Evelyn abandoned the computer. “I can’t figure it out, Susannah. Whether you’re just insatiably curious about every last man, woman, and child on this earth or if you’re just anal-retentive, like a crossword puzzle fanatic. You won’t rest until you find a match for each one of these files. You might not want to leave that sandwich unattended, either. I am sorely tempted by an empty stomach and a great love for egg salad.”

  Susannah didn’t even look up from her search. “You won’t eat it, too many calories for a skinny thing like you. I work here because I care about all these lost children of Jesus. Praise the Lord.”

  “He should praise you. But I still think you’re a compulsive puzzler. No one could do this job for purely altruistic reasons. Stuck in this cave, working on hopeless cases—”

  “Oh, yeah? You work with dead people, why you do that?”

  “I’m not saying there aren’t similarities,” Evelyn admitted. “I’m just saying that curiosity is a great motivator.”

  “Curiosity killed the cat, that’s what it did.” Susannah thrust about thirty pounds of paperwork into Evelyn’s midriff. “The copier is over there. And don’t come back here crying about no toner.”

  Chapter 18

  “YOU LOOK LIKE CRAP,” Riley said.

  “Thanks.”

  “I meant that as an insult.”

  “I know,” David said. “But I have an excuse. I spent last night in Records.”

  “With the sexy night clerk?”

  “Without the sexy night clerk.”

  “She’s quite an Indians fan, you know,” Riley added, tightening his tie, an overflow of color in wrinkled silk.

  “I didn’t get a chance to ask. I searched missing persons files for the past year.”

  “Why didn’t you just ask Susannah?”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind. You think we’ve got more bodies sleeping with the fishes?” If impressed with David’s initiative, he did a masterful job of concealing it.

  “There’s three girls that are between the ages of twelve and thirty, two white and one black, two from the near west side and one from Euclid. Actually there’s four more besides them, but two were prostitutes who probably moved on to warmer pastures and two were wives who probably moved on to friendlier pastures. The last two took clothes and personal items with them.”

  “Don’t be too quick to eliminate the hookers. A lot of serial killers start out with hookers—they’re so easy to pick up.”

  “I copied their reports to keep handy, but I thought I’d start with these three.”

  “Start what, exactly? If Missing Persons doesn’t have any leads, what are you going to do? Drag all the rivers?”

  “I’d love to, but convincing the dive team to check all the bridges in Cuyahoga County in the middle of November—”

  Riley nodded, almost with empathy. “Like talking the church choir into providing music for an orgy.”

  “About that, yeah. No, I thought I’d just check their backgrounds, see if they had anything in common with Pierson and Ripetti.”

  “Find anything?”

  “No,” David admitted. “They didn’t live in the same neighborhoods, go to the same schools, the same churches, or the same hairdresser as near as I can tell. The missing girls were a twenty-year-old paralegal, a twenty-five-year-old chef and mother of two, and a nineteen-year-old graphic artist. Thalia Johnson, Christine Sabian, and Blair Danilov, respectively. They were average girls with average living conditions and no police record. They don’t have anything in common with each other, much less our two homicides.”

  Riley had a chance here to say something encouraging, and he let it go by like a bad pitch.

  “You still look like crap,” he said.

  David sat in his car and stared at the house. The neat brick bungalow rose above a manicured lawn scattered with snow, two soccer balls, and a Big Wheel. On the front seat next to him lay a report detailing the skeleton of a human life: husband, Roberto Sabian; wife, Christine Sabian; and two daughters, Kim and Kathy, aged three and eighteen months, respectively. Christine Sabian had disappeared on July 24. Maybe she was at the bottom of the river. Maybe she’d gotten tired of the working-mother treadmill. Maybe David sat here only because he didn’t want to go back to his empty apartment.

  He got out of the car and walked up to the front door; moving around brought the chill in his bones to the surface. The temperature hovered around twenty-eight, damp and cool, but not what a Clevelander would consider cold. Heck, winter hadn’t even really begun yet.

  Roberto Sabian opened the door with a baby on one hip, his Arrow shirt partially untucked, a tuft of black hair gone awry. The interior of the home held a living room ankle-deep in toys, and a table set with three places where there used to be four. The father looked at David with a peculiar m
ix of apprehension and impatience. The little girl looked at David as if he might have a new toy on him.

  “What?” Sabian said.

  David identified himself, but he doubted Sabian heard anything he said after the word police.

  “Is there news? Did they find her?”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Sabian, there isn’t. I don’t have anything new to tell you.” He could see the man’s thoughts as if he had spoken them: Then what the hell are you doing here?

  “Then what the hell are you doing here?” Sabian demanded, making no move to allow David in. “Don’t you guys know what you do to me every time you call or show up? I die a thousand deaths, wondering what you’re going to say. That she’s dead, that you found her body, that she’s got amnesia and has been wandering in Arizona . . .”

  “I can imagine—”

  “No.” Sabian’s voice sounded as bleak and harsh as a desert landscape. “You can’t imagine.” The little girl sensed his pain, and her eyes filled with tears. She huddled against her father, turning her back on the cold air from the open doorway.

  “I’m sorry,” David said again. “I’m investigating some other disappearances, too, and I just wanted to ask you a few questions. I know it’s painful.”

  It seemed for a moment that Sabian might shut the door in his face, might refuse to let yet another stranger poke at his festering wound, but then he stood back to let David enter. “Come on in. I’ll answer a thousand questions, a million, if you can find Christine.”

  David picked his way through the living room, careful not to step on the herd of plastic ponies occupying the carpeted area. Soft lavender paint covered the walls with a floral paper border near the ceiling. White recessed shelves flanked the fireplace on either side, stocked with framed photographs and books that dealt with either food or decorating. The photos were of Sabian and, David assumed, Christine, sometimes with their children and sometimes without, but always together. He picked up a posed portrait of the couple, with the standard cruise-ship tropical background. Christine had straight brown hair hanging to her breasts, a pert nose, and a smile that deepened her dimples.

  “We took that on a cruise.” Sabian set the girl down. She immediately took off for another part of the house.

  David put the picture back and noticed a group shot that featured Christine and her two daughters in matching summer outfits. It had obviously been a hot day, perhaps shortly before she disappeared in June. The woman’s house served as a character witness, testifying that Christine Sabian had been a happy, devoted wife and mother. But pictures, David knew, could lie.

  “What other disappearances?” Sabian asked.

  David turned, and followed the man into the kitchen and took a seat at the table, avoiding several carefully constructed piles of macaroni and cheese scattered along the tabletop. “I have been reexamining some other missing person reports. I’m just shooting in the dark, really, trying to see if there are any connections between the women.”

  “You think you got a Ted Bundy?” Sabian cleared the dishes from the table and scraped them with short, violent strokes, before stacking them in the dishwasher. He did most of this without taking his eyes off David. Obviously Roberto Sabian was not still very often or for very long. “Somebody killing women?”

  He asked it so casually, as if he had considered it as just one more possible explanation instead of a nightmarish scenario that kept him from drawing an easy breath, all day, every day.

  He had to have heard about Destiny Pierson and Lia Ripetti, but did not connect it to his wife, nor did David want him to. So he hedged. “That’s a possibility. I’m just throwing out the standard questions, hoping something will fall into a pattern. Did Christine have any medical problems?”

  “None. Never sick a day in her life.”

  David thought of Nurse Neal and asked on a whim: “Where were your girls born?”

  “Westlake Hospital.”

  His mind changed direction again. “And who would look after them while Christine worked?”

  “Christine’s mother. Sometimes a high school girl from down the street.” Sabian added detergent to the dishwasher. He must have answered all these questions before, but he hadn’t been joking when he said he’d do so again. “Chris worked for a catering service, so most of the time she had to work at night. Usually I could get home before she had to leave, so we didn’t need anyone else.”

  Just themselves, cocooned into a happy web. “That must have been tough, working different shifts.”

  “Like, maybe we were having trouble, so I killed her or she ran away?” Sabian translated without rancor. “It’s okay, that’s been implied by everyone from the first cop that took the report to the checkout girl at the supermarket. I’m immune.” He could take accusations, innuendo, insults. Just get his wife back. “But it isn’t true. Chris didn’t work every day and tried to avoid weekends. We weren’t desperate for money. She worked because she loved it, and because she was good at it.”

  The eighteen-month-old girl must have informed her older sister of this new person in the house, and now they crept down the steps to peer through the banisters, to view this strange animal. David smiled at them.

  “Girls,” Sabian said. “Go upstairs.” When they made no move, he thundered, “Go!” and the tiny feet echoed as they flowed upstairs on a wave of giggles. Sabian looked at David. “They keep asking me where she is, where’s Mommy? God, they must ask five times a day. Five hundred for the first few weeks.”

  Sabian had been a handsome man until tragedy, stress, and worry had taken him directly from his mid-twenties to middle age. He picked up a few pieces of mail from the counter, looked at them without recognition, and tossed them down.

  Maybe the life of a lonely, frustrated bachelor wasn’t so bad, David thought. It had to be better than Roberto Sabian’s unique personal hell. “So she liked her job?”

  “Yeah. She worked for Kopecki’s since before we met. She would develop new dishes for them, oversee the real fancy stuff. People would work there just to learn from her. Chris came up with the honey-mustard-rosemary chicken that you see at every shindig these days. The girls and I are losing weight without her,” he added, a halfhearted attempt at humor.

  “Any problems there? Any conflicts with other people?”

  “Nah.”

  “Any hobbies? Clubs?”

  “Who has time?”

  “Did she like to go dancing?”

  Sabian smiled, amused, then wistful. “Maybe at weddings and stuff. I’ve never been much of a dancer.” He moved to the sliding glass door behind the kitchen table and closed the curtains. David wondered if he ever sat down.

  “And you’re an attorney?”

  “Henderson, Pollack, and Shine. We do mostly contracts, corporate stuff, nothing exciting.”

  “No problems there in the past year?”

  “We’re attorneys—if there isn’t a problem, no one needs us. But were there any large conflicts that someone would kidnap my wife over, no.” He sat, finally, in a hard wooden chair across the table, but then squirmed, shifted, tapped his fingernails, and pulled at his collar so many times that David wished he’d stand up and pace some more.

  Stifled exclamations escaped from the steps.

  “Girls!” he shouted with a voice more like a loud roar than a shout, emphasizing by bass, not treble. Another stampede trampled up the steps.

  “And before you ask, no, Christine did not have any boyfriends, and no, I do not have any girlfriends. Our marriage could not have been more solid. Chris knew that if she got tired of me she could get a head chef job at one of those overpriced places downtown, make a ton of money, and have her own groupies. But she didn’t care about that. Our home, me, and our girls were most important to her.” He looked at David, his righteous indignation foiled by exhaustion. He had probably made that speech more than once and no longer had the energy for it. He wanted her back, and every minute that went by brought him closer to the knowledge that it wasn�
��t going to happen. So he kept moving, trying to make each minute last as long as possible, and the effort was wearing him out.

  “What are these other disappearances that you think might be similar to hers?”

  “Frankly,” David said, not wanting to mention that they were murders, not disappearances, “I wasn’t sure they were similar, and now that I’m here, I don’t see that they are.” Christine Sabian had been only a few years older than Lia Ripetti and Destiny Pierson, but she had already moved into another stage of life, anchored by a career and a family. David couldn’t see a single thing the three girls had in common except that they were young and pretty. “I’m sorry to disturb you again,” he said as he got to his feet.

  “Disturb all you want,” Sabian said. “Just get my wife back.”

  David couldn’t meet his eye. “By the way, have you ever heard of Ashworth Construction?”

  “Yeah, they built the stadium.”

  “I mean, have you ever worked for them, or Christine?”

  “Nah, never. Why?”

  “I’m not even sure myself. Like I said, just shooting in the dark.”

  A brushing sound escaped from the dark staircase behind him.

  “Girls!” Another boom, another pounding retreat. Sabian stared up into the darkness of the upper floor. “I don’t really mind that they keep asking me where she is,” he said, his eyes unfocused, his voice diffused. “What really frightens me is that one day they’ll stop asking.”

  David escaped into the cold air and gunned his car with a little too much verve, gazing through a frosted window at Roberto Sabian’s house. He had hoped for some insight into the guy who had kidnapped Destiny Pierson and Lia Ripetti, and had learned nothing except that people could sink in the pain of uncertainty and drown.

  His watch read seven-ten and he still hadn’t called his father. He put the car into drive and said aloud: “Note to self—next spring, beg, cajole, or force the underwater team into diving at every bridge. Find that woman’s body so this guy can get closure, remarry, and go on before his misery settles into his children like some kind of creeping mold.”