“Hi, pal.”
“Hi.” The boy didn’t seem timid as much as nervous about having cops in his home. Like he’d been in trouble before, or seen it. He had a mop of black hair. Big, dark eyes.
“Hey, so I’m pretty sure you and your friend Cameron called 911, since the incoming number is logged by the system. Okay?”
The boy nodded. He put his finger back in his mouth and nibbled at it.
“Get that out of your mouth,” the woman barked.
Scott pulled his hand away again. Dana looked beyond the boy into the dark.
“This your room?”
“Yeah.”
“You have a phone in there, or you used one somewhere else in the house?”
“In the kitchen,” he said.
“We still have the old landline,” the woman grumbled from behind Dana. “The Verizon hook-up, runs to each trailer, but lotsa people have disconnected by now.”
“I think it’s good to have a backup, right?” She glanced towards where Hamill had faded back into the kitchen and was snooping around. The woman followed her gaze. “Hey!” she called to Hamill. “Excuse me? Detective?”
She hurried off, the floor creaking, leaving Dana alone with the boy.
“Can I see your room?”
Scott shrugged. “Sure.”
The bedroom was gloomy — the lights off, a small flat-screen TV in the corner with a video game paused. The screen cast a bluish light over the mess of rumpled bed covers, clothing strewn about, books, toys, and a portable animal carrier.
Dana pointed at the cage. “You have a cat, a dog?”
Scott shrugged again. “We used to. A cat.”
“Oh yeah? It run off?”
“Think so.”
The room smelled of sweaty socks. There were several posters on the wall, and what looked like some drawings. “So you found something pretty scary today, huh?”
“Not too scary.” The boy took a seat in the beanbag chair in front of a small TV, seeming to relax some.
“No?”
“Nah. I’ve seen worse.”
“Really? You’ve seen a dead body before?”
“On TV. Zombies. You know the show The Walking Dead?”
“I know it, yeah.”
“Yeah, I mean, there’s some pretty scary stuff on there. But it doesn’t bother me.”
Dana nodded, as if this made sense. She didn’t let her daughters watch The Walking Dead, though she and her husband had seen an episode or two.
Dana stepped closer to a drawing on the wall. It depicted a scene full of gore, with what looked like two men on horses riding down and trampling another man on the ground. The other drawings were also violent: F-16s in a dogfight; a space ship blasting off, with a skull and crossbones manifesting in the plumes of exhaust. There was a desk in the corner and more drawings piled there.
“You like to draw, huh?”
“Yeah. My dad was a good drawer.”
“Oh yeah? Where’s your dad?”
The boy seemed embarrassed. “He’s in jail.”
“Oh. Okay.” She forced herself to stop taking inventory of the room for a moment. “So you’ve seen some pretty crazy things already. Like on Walking Dead, and maybe even in your own real life, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“So finding that person today in the river, kind of no big deal.”
Scott looked away, saying, “Well, I mean, I guess it was kind of weird.”
“Kind of weird? Yeah? How come?”
“I mean, you know, me and Cameron like to go to the river after school.”
“Sure. What do you do at the river?”
“Throw rocks and stuff. You know. Just hang out.”
“Cool. And today, boy . . . kind of a surprise, huh?”
“Yeah. A big surprise. Cameron was like, ‘Holy crap!’ And I was like, ‘What?’ And he was like, pointing, and he was like, ‘There’s someone dead in the river!’ And then we walked over and we saw her and we knew she was dead.”
“You knew she was dead.”
“Yeah. We could just tell. Her hands were sort of floating. Like this.” He waved his arms, wiggling the fingers.
“Did you see anyone else?”
Scott shook his head, no.
Dana persisted a little. “No one walking away, in the woods, nothing?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Did you find anything? Maybe a bag? Like, a purse or a backpack? Maybe something else that was there?”
Scott said nothing, and looked at the frozen screen where a video game car was stuck in mid-screech around a hairpin turn. “No,” he said quietly. “Uh-uh. Nothing.”
Dana stood in the center of the room. “Hey, Scott?”
The boy looked up with wary eyes. “Yeah?”
“Mind if I check your animal carrier there? Just have a look? The carpet’s wet. Floor was a little squishy when I walked in. You know?”
The boy’s finger went back to his mouth. He bit at his nail and his eyes drifted to look at the carrier. He shrugged his shoulders.
Dana walked over, pulling a fresh pair of latex gloves from her back pocket. She opened the front door of the animal carrier, reached in and found something soft. It was a backpack, soaked. She lifted it out, water pattering onto the carpet.
“I bet this was hers, huh?” she said to Scott. “What do you think?”
Scott wasn’t looking at Dana. He stared down at the floor, chewing on his finger. He nodded, almost imperceptibly.
“Hey,” Dana said. “It’s okay. I get why you took it, you know? You wanted to find out who she was; the woman in the water.”
Scott looked up and his worry seemed to ease. “Yeah,” he agreed. Whether it was true or not, it didn’t matter. Dana set the backpack in the doorway, so it could be forgotten for a moment. “Anything else you want to tell me?”
Scott shook his head emphatically.
“No? You sure?”
The boy nodded, up and down. Dana believed him.
“Cool,” said Dana. “You did a good thing.” She could hear the murmuring voices of Hamill and the boy’s mother in the other room.
“You just live here with your mom, yeah?”
Scott nodded. “Yeah.”
“Anyone else that comes around?”
He shrugged again.
“Does that mean yes? No?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes, my mom has friends over.”
“Man friends? Woman friends?”
“Both, I guess. Not much. I have a babysitter. But I think I’m too old.”
“Oh yeah? She nice? Or he?”
“Yeah, she’s okay.”
Dana nodded. She looked around one last time. “I like your drawings.”
Suddenly Scott leapt up from the beanbag and dashed over to his desk. “I just did these,” he said with obvious pride. He fanned them out. Some were done on pages from a lined notebook; others were rendered on beige construction paper. Dana gave them each a quick look, turning on a big grin.
“You’re quite an artist, man. Just like your dad, huh?”
“Yeah.” He pushed around the drawings and gazed proudly down at them. Dana was thinking of the backpack and what she might find inside, when one of the drawings caught her eye.
She stepped closer. This one showed a man, perhaps, standing alone on what was maybe a rock. He had the body of a human, but his head was not.
“Is that a bull?”
Scott held up his hands. “I don’t know. Yeah, a bull.”
“Where’d you get the idea for that?” Some of the violence in the other drawings had been mildly disturbing, but not unusual for boys of Scott’s age. This drawing was different. It wasn’t violent, but decidedly mature, unsettling to look at with the androgynous body and grotesque horned head. Dana noticed that a single tear had been drawn beneath the creature’s staring eye.
And then the image disappeared as Scott reshuffled the papers, placing others on top, more of the stick-figure variety, more planes and race ca
rs and tiny army men.
“I just think of them and then I draw them,” Scott said.
Dana bobbed her head. At the door she stopped. “Can I take a photo?”
“Of that one?”
“Yeah. That one.” She pulled on another smile. Her husband once told her she looked benign when she smiled. It was the only way he’d agreed to marry a cop, he’d joked. “I promise I won’t sell it on eBay or anything.”
Scott played coy. “Yeah, sure.”
Dana centered her phone over the picture, and took a shot. She was about to thank him again, when the boy spoke. “I sometimes dream about it,” he said.
“About drawing?”
“Yeah. I dream that I’m drawing.”
“That’s good. Must be meant to be.”
Scott looked over and Dana tipped him a wink. Then she left the room, with the backpack in her grip.
* * *
Back in the car, engine idling, Dana held the backpack on her lap, Hamill sat in the passenger’s seat. Dana looked at Scott’s bedroom window, but the boy was no longer there. Twilight was gathering.
“That mother is something, huh?” complained Hamill. He lit a cigarette and cracked the window.
Dana unzipped the pack. There was no time to waste. She switched on the interior light.
“What do we got?” asked Hamill, dragging on the cigarette.
“Notebooks. Textbooks.” Dana fished around inside the main compartment of the bag and pulled out a three-ring binder. She flipped it around right side up and both detectives looked.
“Aha,” said Hamill. “There we go.”
On the cover of the binder was the logo for nearby Plattsburgh College. Dana handed it to Hamill and then pulled out the notebooks. There were three, each for a single subject.
“Meteorology,” she said, handing it over to Hamill. “Finite Mathematics.” Each notebook was a different color and had the subject written on the cover in marker. “Abnormal Psychology.” They were stacking up on Hamill’s lap. Dana pulled out the textbook last. “Principles of Social Psychology.”
“There a wallet in there? ID?”
“Check the notebooks. I’ll look.” Dana riffled through the smaller compartments. She found two lollipops, assorted hair ties, candy wrappers, a few pens, but no wallet. In the last pocket, her fingers closed around something hard.
Hamill was flipping through the notebooks. “I got a name,” he said.
“I got a phone.”
“Sonia Taylor,” Hamill read. He glanced at the phone Dana had in her gloved hand. “Christmas came early.”
Dana turned the phone over in her hands. “We need a warrant.”
“Bullshit,” said Hamill. “She’s deceased. And that’s a container.”
“It’s not a container. Not anymore. Supreme Court has been all over this — you know it, I know it. She’s dead, but she still has rights.”
Hamill grunted and muttered something. Dana popped the battery out of the phone and held it up. “Anyway, the thing is worthless. Soaked.”
“Alright,” Hamill said. “Let’s head to the college.” He got out of the vehicle. She watched him get into his pickup, a light snow swirling around him in the air. Dana followed her partner out of the trailer park.
CHAPTER THREE / O’Sullivan’s
Plattsburgh was a half an hour away. They dropped Hamill’s truck at his house and proceeded together in the Chevy Corsica, a police-issued vehicle. Hamill insisted on driving, chain-smoking all the way. Dana took the time to place a call. She spoke to the state police captain, who relayed that evidence techs had scoured the woods searching for any signs of struggle or evidence of a perpetrator and had so far come up empty. Several more items were logged, bearing no surprises; a couple of old soda bottles, a beer can, a crushed cigarette pack, a broken piece of blue plastic. The river had yielded nothing further. The CSI team would keep working through the night anyway, but that was probably going to be it. Troopers had been going door-to-door in the surrounding neighborhood, but they had turned up nothing on the decedent. The show belonged to the detectives.
Dana looked out the window as they sped up the interstate. The last light drained into the jagged horizon.
“Christ, I hate this daylight saving bullshit,” Hamill said. “Is it — are we on daylight saving now? Or off it? I can never frigging get it straight.”
“We went off it.”
“All this dark. Jesus. Dark at five o’clock. Next month dark at four thirty. They should just leave it. Who gives a shit if it’s dark in the morning? All you do is take your dump and drink your coffee.” Hamill glanced over. “It must be tough, huh? Shawn and you and all those girls hanging out in the pitch black for six months?”
“I don’t think them being girls has anything to do with it.”
“Well, I’m sorry there, Missus female-sensitivity-training. But, come on, you don’t think women are just taking over the world a little bit?”
Dana scowled and looked out the window. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Come on, you’ve thought about it. You got three daughters, right? And all girls in your own family.”
“Yeah,” Dana said quietly.
There was a heavy pause. Both detectives stared into the night, until Hamill said, “Well, you know? Guy I know in Placid just had a daughter, too. So’d my sister, in St. Paul. Just saying. Might be men are being phased out.” He renewed his grip on the steering wheel and shrugged. “It was a good run.”
Dana looked down at the victim’s cell phone in her lap. Like she’d said to Hamill, people had a right to privacy even after they’d died. She would have needed to get an affidavit to the judge before going through the young woman’s phone, but the thing wasn’t working, anyway. For now, they were going to go to the girl’s college with a name, and hope they could get her address. Hamill’s rant about emasculation would have to keep.
Her partner changed the subject back to the business at hand. “Social psych, abnormal psych, those are fairly advanced classes, right?”
“You tend to take abnormal after general psych. Then there’s developmental, social, and others. She could be a sophomore. Maybe a junior.”
“Plattsburgh turns out a lot of psych majors?”
“You can get a masters there, yeah.”
“So what are we thinking?”
“What are we thinking? Nothing. We’ve got her name. Sonia Taylor. No one by that name lives in Hazleton. She’s a student. We want to find out more, like where she lives. Let’s give them a call.”
“Nothing much they’re going to be able — or willing — to tell us over the phone.” He raised his eyebrows. “What? Miss Polly Procedural. They’re not going to disclose shit to us over the phone; we could say we were the Pope and the Queen of England, they’d keep stuff confidential. That’s our beautiful bureaucracy.”
“That’s not bureaucracy. That’s elected representatives.”
“Supreme Court’s not elected. Appointed.”
“Supreme Court doesn’t rule on college confidentiality.”
“Sure they do. That’s FERPA territory. Supreme Court has ruled on FERPA cases numerous times.”
She smirked. “Alright. Family Educational Rights and Privacy. You win.”
“Anyway, what about the kid?”
“What do you mean?”
“The kid who took the backpack. What do we think about him taking the backpack?”
“He stole it.”
“Well, I know that. Did you check and see if he took anything out?”
“I asked him, and he said no.”
“And you believed him,” Hamill said. He wrinkled his nose at her and winked. “You softie.”
Dana blew air out of her lips, dismissively, ignoring the flirtation that sometimes crept into her partner’s comments. She grew serious. “Kid was interesting, though.”
“How so?”
“Just was.” She paused, and added, “I don’t know, like you said; I
don’t have any boys in my family. Not anymore.”
They rode in silence for a few moments.
Dana glanced at her watch. It was a birthday present from her husband. Almost two and a half hours had passed since the call had come in to 911. She rapped softly on the dashboard. “Come on,” she said, “let’s get there.”
Hamill gave her one more look, lifted an eyebrow, said “You’re the boss,” and stepped on the gas. They did eighty the rest of the way.
* * *
The registrar’s office was closed.
“Shit,” said Hamill, standing in front of the glass doors. He was at the top of a wide set of stairs, the building entryway framed by Corinthian columns.
“Told you we should’ve called.”
Dana glanced at her watch again. Just before five thirty. She watched a pair of male students make their way along the walkway that cut through a central courtyard.
Friday night. Time to kick back and relax. Most of the students would be getting ready to party.
Sonia Taylor, she thought. She pulled out her phone and called the station. She’d previously given one of the troopers the girl’s name and indication that she attended the school. She could refer inquiries like that to BCI in Albany, but she liked using the regional troopers. By now there had to be something.
“Maize,” answered the trooper.
“Trooper Maize. What have we got?”
“I was just going to call you. Sorry for the delay. We had a little bit of an incident down here.” The state trooper barracks was located in Desiree, another small hamlet about forty minutes from Hazleton.
“What do you mean?”
“Ah, we got a call from a man who said there was someone in his backyard, setting off fireworks or something.”
“Fireworks.”
“Yeah, sent a car over. Nothing.”
“Fireworks in November.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Who was the caller?”
“Roy Hayes. In his eighties. Drinks gin all day. Amazing he’s still alive. Anyway, so with everyone out at the river and in the woods, I’ve been at the phones. But I did a search just a few minutes ago. I’ve got Sonia Taylor, her DMV records. Got an address in Schenectady. Maybe her parents. She hasn’t updated her driver’s license since she left home, I guess. No arrests, not even a traffic violation, nothing. I did a Facebook search and wound up with about twenty girls with that name, so I’m going through them.”
DARK KILLS a gripping detective thriller full of suspense Page 2
