The Ways of the Dead

by Neely Tucker

  “You’ve asked about Michelle ’round here, I take it?”

  “Michelle’s been in this neighborhood all her life. If she was getting high over on Thirteenth Street, somebody would see her. And they’d tell me.”

  “And your family, your ex, her friends, she didn’t touch base with any of them?”

  Williams shook his head. “No boyfriend, either, far as I know. She’d gotten to where she’d go out with a guy, just one night, I suppose, they’d get high or whatever. She used to date a guy Kevin for a while, he ain’t worth shit but he wouldn’t hurt nobody. He works for the city, maintains school buildings. I went to see him, and he was surprised as I was. They hadn’t been seeing each other for two, three years anyhow.”

  “Police didn’t do anything at all?”

  “They checked at the morgue, here, Baltimore, Richmond. They put a note out to those kinds of places if an unidentified body turned up. Said there was no evidence of a crime. They asked me for her dental records.”

  Sully stopped writing and looked at her picture. Williams told him he could have it, that he had plenty. He shuffled in his chair. Sully recognized the interview was over. He looked around the kitchen. It was small and neatly kept. There were no dishes in the sink. The countertops were clean. There was a box of Ritz crackers pushed to the back of the countertop.

  “Did you ever remarry, Mr. Williams?”

  “No.”

  “Anybody—anybody at all—you know of want to do you or Michelle any harm?”

  “Police asked that. No. Michelle and me, we didn’t bother nobody. We went to church every now and then when she was little. She played basketball at Cardozo. Her grades were pretty good. And then she just got to thinking that cocaine was the answer to everything.”

  “Do you mind if I look at her room? Just so I can describe it for the story?”

  Williams finally looked up from the table. “I’d rather you didn’t. I don’t see the purpose. I appreciate your interest in Michelle, I do. But I don’t know how me letting you into her room would help anyone find her.”

  Sully nodded and stood up. He was looking for personal, touching detail, and the man wasn’t buying. “You mind if I ask around the neighborhood about her, show her picture around? I don’t want you to be startled, somebody telling you there’s some guy out there asking after Michelle.”

  Williams shrugged. He checked his watch, walking Sully to the door. The gloom of the house seemed to close in on them in the hallway, and Sully realized only then that the kitchen light over the sink was the only one on in the house. Williams’s voice was low and somber in the dimness.

  “Ask around, suit yourself. I don’t expect anyone to find her anymore. I think she’s dead, myself. But I jump when the phone rings. When I hear a girl laugh on the train. I figure that this is just how it’s going to be.”

  He motioned to the door. Sully turned, opened it, and stepped out. He blinked at the light, sun slotting through the clouds. There was no reason to turn around to say good-bye because the door was already closing behind him.

  twenty-six

  So there were not three young women killed, dead, or missing on the same street in the past eighteen months all within two hundred yards of one another.

  There were five. Five that he knew about.

  There could be more, of course. There was no reason to think he knew about all of them. He had dozens of fliers he hadn’t gone through. Now, there was no way to say they were all homicides—sure, okay, Rebekah Bolin OD’d, maybe. It happened, like John Parker said, and it was just sad, not mysterious.

  But crackheads don’t crawl under floorboards to die. Rebekah and Noel Pittman, dead in the flooring of houses, a block apart? Lana, strangled in the outfield in between? Sarah, her throat slit fifty feet from where Noel’s body was found? Michelle, maybe somewhere near, waiting to be found?

  This could all be a combination of chance and dysfunction, yes—no reason to discount that. But he also let himself say it out loud, walking down the street, because if he couldn’t, then there was no way he could sell it in the newsroom.

  “There is somebody out here,” he said out loud, “killing women.”

  Before him, the old row houses, the brownstones, sat back from the street on their sagging foundations, mute and somehow menacing in their poverty and dilapidated meanness. They were all almost identical to the Williams place. Two stories with attics and little dormer windows, basements, the concrete patio. The city had planted saplings in front of every other house in the narrow strip of ground between the sidewalk and the street. They were supposed to provide shade and greenery, a little makeup on the neighborhood’s aging face. But they were so anemic, so poorly maintained, that they ended up adding to the sense of age, of breakdown.

  He picked a door, went up, and knocked. Somewhere, behind one of these rotting doors, somebody knew more than they were telling.

  • • •

  By five, he had done better than he’d expected. Half a dozen places, people had answered the knock and had memories of Michelle. No one knew Lana, and only one or two recognized Noel.

  Two of the older couples knew Curtis Williams from way back. They talked about seeing Michelle walking by since she was a kid, going to the corner store for a Push-Up in the summer, coming back from the swimming pool at the rec center. Two elderly women who talked to him through the door but gave their names and who remembered Michelle well said they had seen Noel once or twice. One young woman, who answered the door in a long shirt and apparently nothing else, said she had talked to Noel on the street, said hello, had seen her at one club or another. Sully conducted the interview in the doorway, not invited in and not inviting himself.

  He ended two doors from the abandoned house where Noel was found. There was nobody home at 786, the place next door, and he came down the sidewalk and stood in front of 788. It was shabby, long since abandoned. Someone had hammered plywood over all of the downstairs windows and most of the upstairs. The yellow police tape that had surrounded the porch after the discovery of Noel’s body had fallen to the ground.

  You could just step over it. Sully thought about it and looked up and down the street. It was empty. He went fast. A half dozen steps covered the weed-choked walkway and he was up the steps and onto the porch. There was another yellow sticker on the door emblazoned with large letters reading DO NOT ENTER—CRIME SCENE. He tapped on the front door, tried the handle, and pushed.

  It opened.

  A tingle went up his back. His spine straightened and he instinctively spread his feet to the width of his shoulders, balancing himself. He put his hand in his pocket, feeling the weight of the pistol, but did not pull it out.

  Using a knuckle, he pushed the door, hinges creaking, and it went back until it bounced lightly off the interior wall. It was dark inside. He could see the stairwell and peeling wallpaper. When he leaned to the side he could see a tangle of furniture, a couch and some chairs and upended buckets in one of the side rooms.

  He glanced behind him and stepped inside, easing the door shut behind him. “Hello! This is the Metropolitan Police Department! We are securing this property! Come forward now!”

  The words bounced up the stairwell, nothing stirring. Dust motes floated in front of his face. He looked up. The roof had been leaking, the ceiling was pitted and rotting. He waited some more. Outside, he could hear the cars and trucks on Georgia, the hum of passing traffic. He reached in his backpack and found a small vinyl pouch. There was a tiny LED flashlight inside, one of the things that came on a keychain. He clicked it on and took three more steps forward.

  “Hey, asshole, this is MPD! Identify yourself at once! You are trespassing on a police crime scene!”

  Weak light from the end of the day streamed in from upstairs, where there was nothing over several broken windows. Slips of light leaked in from the plywood that had been nailed up over the d
ownstairs windows. He stood perfectly still, scarcely breathing. He counted to twenty. When there was still no sound, no rustle, he let out his breath and moved forward. If there were crack addicts inside, they would have stirred, they would have run for it. The door to the basement was just ahead, in the narrow hallway that ran beside the stairs leading to the second floor. He set his backpack down behind the front door. He didn’t want it slowing him down, giving someone something to grab, if a crack zombie materialized.

  He went up the stairs, intent on making sure no one came down behind him to cut him off from the front door. He put his feet at the far outside of each step, the wood gone dark with rotting and water stains, to prevent them from collapsing under his weight. He made the upstairs landing.

  The bathroom was filthy, rat and pigeon droppings in the tub, the shower rail rusting, the mirror broken and pieces of glass and chipped tile on the floor. The light fixtures had been stripped out long ago, exposed wires dangling from the ceiling. Puddles of water stained the floor. There was a bed frame, with springs but no mattress, in the back bedroom. Roaches scurried in front of him.

  The windows in the front bedroom had sheets of plywood nailed across them. It was dark and dank and the room was empty, save for trash in the corner, beer cans and cigarette butts and empty bags of potato chips and the unmistakable smell of urine and defecation. It was hard to believe that people had lived, slept, dreamed, and made love in this space, that there had been voices spoken and plans made, a sense of the future. There was nothing now, just squalor and decay. He turned and went back down the steps, looking into the kitchen and then pulling open the door to the basement.

  A dank, fetid smell greeted him, earth and rot and a stale exhaust, the breath of a corpse. He coughed. It was black without relent. He shone the light on the landing to the steps downward. There were footprints and long, clean marks, as if something had been dragged, visible in the dust, the detritus of the police and investigators and crime scene techs. He tried to picture the night—he figured it would be night—when someone had carried Noel down into this space.

  The woman he had seen in the photographs, the beautiful skin, the perfect hips, the dangling earrings, the hair spilling to the left—she was racy, she was sexy. She wasn’t some down-market crackhead. Nothing but desperation would lead anyone down these steps, and he’d seen nothing to suggest Noel had been desperate. She wasn’t living when she was brought into the house, he was sure of that now.

  He stepped into the void and put his feet squarely on the landing, squatting down and shining the flashlight to the bottom of the steps.

  The beam sliced a narrow tunnel in the darkness. There was a heap of chairs and trash bags and an old car seat and shoes and a mop and what looked to be mounds of clothes and an ancient television, turned on its side in the corner. He could see the gaping maw of the shattered plywood flooring. He took a deep breath and walked quickly to the bottom of the steps, swinging the flashlight in a ragged circle as he went. His foot caught on something and he staggered forward, catching himself at the bottom, cursing under his breath, sweat puddling in the small of his back now.

  When he stood upright, he swung the light onto the grave, a few feet to his left. The flooring had been linoleum slapped down over plywood planks, as John had said. The planks had been pulled up and stacked against the brick exterior wall, and there were old metal folding chairs and part of a washing machine and ripped-open bags of garbage. Shards of it lay everywhere. Brown dirt was stacked in a heap toward the back of the room, clods of it scattered about. The hole was maybe two feet deep, no doubt dug deeper by the crime techs than the original burial. The smell of wet dirt and rot was choking. Worms moved in the dirt. The hole seemed to waver and move, a thing hungry to regain its decomposing meal of flesh and blood and viscous rot. It was open and raw and as filthy as a mass grave he’d seen once in the Bosnian war, a filled-in ditch that gave up its dead in a watery muck.

  He extended the light over the hole, stepping around it, going to the jumble of material at the wall that had been moved out of the way. The chairs, the washing machine, empty cans of chili, shoes, shirts, pants, women’s blouses, empty containers of canned vegetables, cigarette butts, two, three crumpled packs of Marlboros, like his old man smoked, an old metal rack for bread or something . . . He went back to the grave, following the beam in the pitch-blackness.

  Kneeling down, peering at the dirt, reaching into it, letting his hands get the feel of it. The earth at the bottom was molding, crumbling, soaking.

  “Noel,” he said softly. This is where she had wound up, where someone had placed her. Someone working the dirt in the darkness—did they hurry?

  Upstairs, the front door swung open. Footsteps directly above him. The door slammed shut.

  A sparkle of fear lit at the base of his spine, sending flares up and out and now there was someone above him, someone who had him pinned down here, in the dark, in the muck. He shut off the light and worked the pistol out of the jacket pocket, thumbing the safety off.

  The footsteps moved, heavy, contemplative. They went to the right, then around to the kitchen. Sully looked up the stairwell. He’d left the door to the basement open and the backpack behind the front door.

  Quickly, he inverted the flashlight, pointing it straight down. He put his hand over the glass, flicked it on and let the light bleed down through his fingers, illuminating his feet. Dirt and nothing else. He took one step. No sound. Then another step and two more and he stopped.

  He was beside the grave and out of the line of sight from the landing at the top of the stairs. He turned the light off. The footsteps above him did not go up the stairs to the second floor, but seemed to wander from room to room, back to the front door.

  Then, without warning, they raced down the narrow hallway babababam and stopped, just as suddenly, at the basement door.

  Sully ducked backward, kneeling, almost falling over. He was desperate to get out of the line of sight. All that son of a bitch had to do was lean forward with a flashlight and they’d have him pinned like a bug on an insect board.

  The shadow at the top of the stairs did not step forward onto the landing. It did not move the door backward or forward. It stood there for one minute, two. Sully, his legs starting to cramp, breathed into his hands.

  The door to the basement creaked forward, as if lightly pushed. It bumped against the wall, then swung back, and before it hit the jamb a darker shadow appeared.

  A flash leapt from the end of the shadow, a bullet—phhhffttt—slamming into the dirt beside Sully, stunning him. The second shot shattered a broken piece of wood, Sully staring at it, thinking, Silencer, the person above has a silencer, and there were two more flashes, cracking a slab of marble, ricocheting off the concrete block wall.

  Sully took a step backward and his heel caught on something in the dark. He wobbled too far back, his momentum was carrying him past the point of balance, he couldn’t stop it. Helpless, he raised the pistol and fired as he fell, one two three times, hitting the steps, the landing, blowing a hole in the basement door.

  The blasts covered the noise of his falling in the dirt and whatever he’d tripped over. It felt like an overturned bucket. He rolled to his right and stopped, gun up.

  Two rounds came back at him, one slamming into the dirt, the other shattering a chunk of porcelain. The steps above him retreated toward the front door, Sully tracking the sound with his pistol but not firing.

  The front door open and slammed. Silence fell.

  Sully closed his eyes and opened them, ears ringing from the blasts of his gun, the weapon still up and out, his left hand bracing his right wrist.

  He stood slowly, letting the blood circulate down his stiffening legs. His right knee—God. He swung it back and forth several times. He held his left arm out and shone the flashlight at it. Six twenty-two. He shut the flashlight off and counted. When he got to one hundred and had
heard nothing, he turned the flashlight back on. Six twenty-four.

  The gunman was gone or waiting him out, hiding just inside the front door, the slamming a ruse to draw him out.

  He shone the light over the dirt and carefully walked to the bottom of the steps.

  Once there, he counted again, this time to fifty, scarcely breathing, and then took one step on the stairs, flashlight in his left hand, pistol in the right. Listening, holding his breath. Nothing. Then he rushed up the rest of the steps and yanked open the door. He stopped, just for a half beat, and then flashed a hand out into the first floor. Nothing.

  Whoever it was had gone.

  A breath let out of him, slow, involuntary. He put the pistol back in his jacket. A careful step took him onto the landing, then into the hallway. Nothing was any more amiss than it had been before. He was surprised to see the intruder had not taken his backpack.

  Picking it up, quickening his step, he listened for sirens—had nobody else heard the gunshots?—and trotted back to the kitchen and a door that opened onto the backyard. He peered out the window; nothing but high grass and trash. The dead bolt was still in place. It turned easily. A tug on the handle and the door popped open.

  The fresh air washed over him like an absolution. He breathed it in deeply, looking outside before stepping there, wiping a hand across the sweat on his forehead. He pulled the door closed behind him and walked quickly to the back of the property.

  He vaulted himself over the iron fence with a grunt and a hop on his gimpy leg and found himself in a narrow walkway that ran off the alleyway behind the shops on Georgia. A few steps brought him to the curved part of the alley, his hands trembling, nerves firing. It was rough concrete with bits of gravel. To his right, the dumpster behind Doyle’s sat thirty feet away. He looked to his left and the alleyway curved out of sight. Just around the bend, he knew, would be the dumpsters for the Hunger Stopper and other stores. You couldn’t see them from here. The dumpster where Sarah was killed, or had been dumped, was in a blind spot.