Suburban Dicks

by Fabian Nicieza

  She opened the door. Ramon saw her and stood up. They both waved awkwardly to each other from twenty yards away.

  Ruth noticed that, too. “You’re here to see him?” she asked from her third-row seat.

  “Yes,” said Andrea. “Be sure to tell your father later tonight.”

  She cast a fierce glance over her shoulder at her oldest child. Mutual understanding. She opened the minivan’s doors. Ruth, Eli, and Sarah released themselves from their seats and freed Sadie from her restraints.

  Ramon strode toward her. He smiled and removed his sunglasses. He remained gorgeous. He still had that same confident gait. He looked like he hadn’t gained a pound in ten years, while she looked like the Bride of Frankenstein’s head had been placed on top of a poorly dressed beach ball. Out of spite, she wished children on him.

  “Ruth, Eli, take your sisters to the play set,” she said.

  The littlest ones ran. Eli darted off to keep up with them. Ruth left more slowly, warily, eyeing her mother and the bronze Adonis approaching them. She walked past Ramon, who nodded and smiled.

  “Hi,” he said to her.

  Ruth said nothing.

  Ramon reached Andrea at the edge of the entrance to the park. They hesitated a moment, then hugged. Awkwardly. Andrea felt his back muscles, tighter than those knots in her stomach. She hated feeling this way, hadn’t felt this hungry since the affair they had both wanted didn’t happen. Ramon disengaged from the hug first. Andrea saw that Ruth had been watching. Ramon looked at her belly and smiled.

  “Yeah, I wish science could come up with some way to prevent pregnancies, but we’re just not there yet,” she said.

  “I’m in the same boat,” he said with a smile. “Maria’s pregnant. Um . . . Maria’s my wife.”

  “I know,” she replied, feeling that knot draw even tighter. “Congratulations.”

  “I’m terrified,” he said.

  “Good, because it is terrifying.”

  “Honestly, I don’t know how you did it back then.”

  “Ramon, I don’t know how I’m doing it now,” she said. “You just . . . do it, I guess. Figure it out as you go along and then feign shock when they turn out to be serial killers.”

  He laughed.

  “Speaking of which . . .” She segued by clicking the remote to open the Odyssey hatchback.

  “Yeah, I was surprised by your email,” he said. “Why come to the FBI instead of the local police?”

  “I don’t think I can trust the local police,” she said.

  “West Windsor has a good reputation,” he said.

  “Let me rephrase that: I know I can’t trust them.”

  He understood. He still implicitly believed in her.

  She moved a towel in the hatch to reveal a green Hefty garbage bag that had the bones inside it and two mason jars that contained soil samples from the hole.

  “Human torso,” she said, pointing to the larger bag. “Presumed male. Based on decomp, presumed to have been buried at least twenty years, though I’d guess more likely forty to fifty. Soil sample from the burial site.”

  With his hands stretched up to the top of the opened hatch door, which accentuated how absurdly flat his abs still were, he took it all in. “Where was the site?”

  “West Windsor. Just outside the backyard of a house abutting a wood line and a nearby creek,” she said. She leaned over to pick up her iPad, which she had tossed into the hatch next to the bags. She opened a file showing the newspaper clipping. “I suspect someone was murdered a long time ago and the body was dismembered and spread across town. A human femur was found in a working farm in the early seventies. Local papers played it as a dinosaur bone. Police claimed they were going to have the bone analyzed at a Princeton University lab. Police report indicates no lab report was filed. Doesn’t even look like the bone was ever sent and it’s not in the archives, either. From the newspaper picture alone, I could tell it was a left femur.”

  “How did you access the police report?”

  “I’m working with a local reporter,” she said. “We coerced an officer to look in the archives for us.”

  “Coerced?”

  “Here’s where it gets complicated,” she said. “A gas station attendant was killed in West Windsor eight days ago. Police said it was an attempted robbery. I know it wasn’t.”

  “Who did you coerce for that one?”

  Andrea hitched a thumb toward the playground. “I tricked my youngest into having a screaming fit because she had to pee just as I drove by.”

  He smiled. “You saw the crime scene.”

  “Not intentionally,” she replied. “And the victim lived at the house where this torso was found. Vic and family are immigrants from India. House was built long after this body part was buried.”

  “Why does this land on the police? Because if I help you, someone will ask.”

  “I don’t have enough to prove, but I have enough to suspect,” Andrea said. “The victim’s family had a pool permit denied. It is one of a series of permits that have been denied over the last thirty years because they said the houses were too close to groundwater.”

  “And were those houses all close to groundwater?”

  “Yes,” she said. Then, tapping her iPad, “But so was the femur bone found by the farmer in nineteen seventy-two.”

  “They buried a dismembered body on different farms across town,” he said. “They did it near the water because the farming equipment was less likely to go there.”

  “But they never planned for the massive amounts of housing developments that would spring up decades later,” she said.

  “And someone in the police department is covering up for the original murder?”

  She loved being able to talk to someone who thought the same way she did, saw things the same way she did. From the moment she had met Ramon Mercado, the very second, she knew she had met, if not the love of her life, then at least the most simpatico person she had ever known.

  Born and raised in the Bronx, Ramon had attended Columbia as a criminal justice major and graduated from Quantico six months before she’d met him. He had been assigned to the Brooklyn-Queens resident agency and had been invited by her Criminal Evidence and Legal Issues professor to speak before the class. He was twenty-five years old, gorgeous, and incredibly confident. He looked like the love child of Benjamin Bratt and a washboard. She decided to break up with Jeff as soon as her class ended.

  She had caught him off guard during his lecture with her questions. After class, she impressed him with her initial thoughts on a recent spate of murders in the city that she thought were the work of a serial killer.

  “Show me,” he said.

  And Andrea did. And it continued from there until they captured Morana. And they fell in love, but he was engaged and she had a boyfriend. And his love for her led his fiancée to dump him in a spectacularly public fashion. And her fear of losing a safe thing for the right thing prevented her from acting on how she really felt.

  And then she got pregnant.

  And then that was that.

  And then there was now.

  A park in Newark, an open minivan hatch, and the only man she had ever really loved taking her seriously about the only thing she had ever loved. If she hadn’t been terrified of bouncing off him with her fat stomach, she would have straddled him right there.

  “I need you to run the bones for DNA,” she said.

  “I can do that.”

  “Thank you,” she replied.

  “I would like to say one thing for the record, though.”

  “I never should have stopped,” she said. “I know.”

  He nodded.

  She checked on her kids. They were on the play set and interacting with the kids from the Newark camps. Laughing. Scampering around. Having fun.

  But no
t as much fun as she was having.

  27

  HAVING escorted his mom back to her room after brunch, Kenny Lee sat in the residential parking lot behind the Windrows complex. Huiquing had told him Dobeck and his buddies usually went on a shopping excursion on Tuesday afternoons. He wanted to see the animals out in the wild.

  In the three years his mother had lived at Windrows, he had noticed that seniors sometimes played a convenient game of pretending to have bad hearing and exaggerating how physically or mentally challenged they really were. He needed to get a feel for Dobeck and his friends. Could they all still drive a car without incident? Did they know how to get from point A to point B and back again without getting lost?

  After ninety minutes, they came out of the main building through the rear lower level: Bradley Dobeck and Steve Appelhans first, then a new third wheel using a cane. Kenny recognized him as Karl Halloway, who had been a West Windsor Township administrator for more than thirty years.

  Their gaits were serviceable for three men in their late seventies. They argued loudly about where the car was parked, with each claiming it was in a different numbered spot. Kenny had asked Laura Privan a few questions before his stakeout. The car belonged to Appelhans, since neither Dobeck nor Halloway was registered as having a vehicle at the facility.

  As the men continued to argue, Kenny was thankful his windows were closed and his air-conditioning pumping. Appelhans fumbled with his remote, pointing it in various directions, hoping to hear the car chirp. Dobeck identified the sound and pointed behind them. They shuffled toward the car, which Kenny noted was not parked in a spot any of them had vehemently predicted.

  Appelhans had been planning to drive, but Dobeck badgered him to hand over the keys. Dobeck got behind the wheel and they all left. In his head, Kenny kept a running tally of the reasons why Bradley Dobeck couldn’t have murdered Satkunananthan. His list remained blank.

  He followed them down Route 1 South to the nearby malls. They pulled into Nassau Park and parked in front of the Walmart. Kenny navigated to another row before he found an empty space. He casually emerged from his car and strolled toward the store, not concerned overmuch that they would elude his tail.

  He entered the store—struck, as always, by the fact that 95 percent of the people shopping were 200 percent heavier than he was. Yes, he wore his childish arrogance like a bulletproof vest, smug that it made him invulnerable to anything slung at him from the outside. He knew it did nothing to protect him from what went on inside, but there was nothing he could do about that.

  In the Walmart, each of the men had taken a small cart and gone off in a separate direction like a scene out of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, which Kenny’s father had made him watch when he was younger. Kenny followed Bradley toward the frozen food section.

  Bradley stared at the dessert selection. After an absurdly long time, he got ice cream sandwiches. Good call, thought Kenny, though his mother’s chiding voice rang in his ears: “Don’t shop for frozen foods first. They’ll melt before you check out.”

  Clearly, Bradley Dobeck had never listened to Huiquing Lee’s rules for grocery shopping. Or ice hadn’t been invented yet when Bradley’s mother had taught him the rules. Dobeck moved farther down the aisle. He grabbed a handful of frozen dinners. Kenny winced at the thought of being in his seventies and eating TV dinners alone in his studio. Most residents at Windrows had meal plans and ate in the dining halls, but a full monthly plan was a pretty steep dig for anyone on a fixed income. Someone living on a cop’s pension would likely still need to eat in their own room a few times a week.

  Kenny considered what he knew about the Dobecks: Bradley, age eighty, born 1940, son of World War II veteran Bertram and homemaker Carol. Bertram became a county sheriff after the war and was apparently to blame for starting the pattern of assigning the firstborn male a name that started with a B.

  Carol died in 1956 from what was officially ruled a “home shooting accident.” Eventually, after a few years scrabbling for work, Bradley followed the family tradition, deploying to Vietnam in the fall of 1965, leaving behind his wife, who was pregnant with their first child. He didn’t see his son, Bennett, for the first time until he came home in 1967.

  When the West Windsor Police Department was officially incorporated in 1968, Bertram Dobeck was named its first chief of police, at the age of fifty-three. He made his son, Bradley, the department’s first official hire, and Bradley eventually became the second chief of police in 1986.

  Bradley’s son, Bennett, also dutifully followed the family tradition, joining the army at eighteen and serving in Kuwait during the Gulf War. His son, Benjamin, was born in 1991. Bennett became chief of police in West Windsor in 2000 at the young age of thirty-four, when his father was asked to retire by Mayor Wu.

  This wash, rinse, and repeat family service would be considered incredibly noble under all other circumstances, but from small-town scuttlebutt, and often enough from the horses’ mouths, there had been a great price to pay in the Dobeck family for that service and sacrifice. Personal choice had gone out the window from the moment you were a male born into that family. Career choices, religious choices, political choices, social choices, and, Kenny suspected, stupid frat-boy joking aside, in Benjamin’s case, your sexuality had to be sublimated out of respect to the Dobeck legacy.

  Kenny watched Bradley saunter down the Walmart aisles. He ogled the younger women, sneered at an overweight African American man and a Hispanic woman, and pinched his nose twice when he walked past Indian families. He seemed to enjoy just playing the part of the rude, indifferent, slightly addled old man.

  And maybe that’s all he was. Kenny couldn’t be sure.

  There was an edge to the man’s brusqueness that went beyond “get off my lawn.” If he had to play armchair psychologist—and he always thought that was 75 percent of a reporter’s job—Kenny would say that for a man who spent an entire life in service to his fellow man, Bradley Dobeck hated people.

  Kenny could certainly empathize with that philosophy, but his own insecurities meant he didn’t feel he measured up to others, while men like Dobeck thought it meant the rest of the human race didn’t measure up to them. For as much as an eighty-year-old man could come across as terrifying, Bradley Dobeck managed to pull it off. And if that was the case now, what must he have been like in his prime?

  Kenny snapped from his musings to watch the greatest living threat to mankind place a packet of adult diapers into his cart.

  A few minutes later, in a NASA-level feat of spatial coordination, Bradley rendezvoused with Appelhans and Halloway at the same cashier line at the same time.

  They argued as they unloaded their carts. Who had forgotten what, who had doubled up on an item, who had bought the wrong brand. Kenny waited for the inevitable cringe-worthy culmination of the outing: watching them pay the bill.

  It was only after the cashier had finished scanning all their items that they asked for three separate receipts. She politely reminded them she had asked if it would be one bill and they had said it would be. Dobeck snatched the receipt out of her hand, muttering about how their kind were useless. Kenny wasn’t sure if he was insulting the woman’s skin color or Walmart cashiers.

  As they loaded bags into their open trunk, Kenny strolled toward his car. The topic of debate had now shifted to how the men should separate their bags in the trunk so they would remember whose bags belonged to whom. Kenny added getting old to his long list of things to avoid.

  After getting into his car, he was startled when he heard a sharp rapping on his rear driver’s-side window. Dobeck stood outside his car. The old man had a grin plastered on his parched face that looked like it had been carved out of dry-baked dirt.

  Kenny saw his own face reflected in the glass as he lowered the window. It reminded him of Wile E. Coyote right before he dropped off a cliff.

  “Hey, kid,” Dobeck said. “Just
wanted to mention, if you’re going to tail someone, you either disappear completely or you blend in completely.”

  “I was sort of caught halfway in between, wasn’t I?” asked Kenny.

  “I would say you fucking stood out like an erection in a room full of women,” he said. “Except, son, I know you Asians don’t really stand out so much, right?”

  Kenny stared into his cold eyes, and the more he looked, the more he felt he gained a measure of the man. “I find it hard to feel threatened by a man I just watched purchase adult diapers.”

  Dobeck laughed, hearty and loud.

  That scared Kenny all over again.

  Dobeck walked back to his car. Kenny watched him through the rearview as he got in. Appelhans was now driving. The car awkwardly backed out of its spot. It didn’t turn sharply enough, so it had to pull forward and then back up again.

  And again.

  And again.

  As they finally left, he grabbed his phone and texted Andrea: Need to meet at Simpei’s house. Tonight.

  She texted back within seconds: Tonight?

  He texted: Yes.

  He made a call.

  “Jimmy, it’s Ken. I need you again tonight. I know NCIS is on. Yes, I’ll DVR NCIS for you. Seriously, you work for Verizon and you don’t have a DVR box. Okay. I’ll text you the address and the time.”

  Kenny Lee sat in his car on a Tuesday afternoon in a Walmart parking lot knowing in his heart that he’d just had the shit scared out of him by Satkunananthan Sasmal’s killer.

  28

  ANDREA finished putting Sadie and Sarah to bed by eight. She went to Eli’s room to check on him. He was reading one of her ratty paperback Calvin and Hobbes collections. She smiled, proud of his interest in so many of the same quirky things she had loved as a kid. He watched Power Rangers with the volume off and created fake dialogue for the characters just as she had. He read the original Love and Rockets magazines by the Hernandez Brothers that she had won in a bet from her cousin. The latter were totally inappropriate for him, but fuck it. Let him have some modicum of cool as a child, because if Jeff’s genetics were a barometer, his teenage years were going to be hell.