FOURTEEN
Jenny had no sense of time, of nights or days. The box was very small, and so it was impossible to stand or move around much. Most of the time, she lay listlessly, hoping to hear a clue as to why she was being punished. Had she done something wrong? Had she broken a rule? Had she been mean to her little brother? She thought it must have been something like that, though she couldn't identify exactly what it was that she had done to deserve this.
The box was completely dark. Every now and then a light would come on in the room where the box was kept. She could see the light because there was a slot in the bottom of the box about as wide as her hand, and the light would come up out of it. After the light would come on, she would hear footsteps and then, if she got down on her knees with her face next to the floor, she could see a gloved hand appear. The gloved hand would push a tin pie plate through the slot. In the pie plate there was a gritty, watery substance that had a vaguely chocolatey taste. It reminded her of the stuff her mother drank for breakfast when she was on a diet. Only this was watery and thin.
Jenny was hungry all the time now. The watery, chocolatey stuff was no substitute for real food. When she wasn't trying to think why she was being punished, she would think about food. Hot dogs. Gravy. Lime sherbet. And those little chicken strips from Chick-Fil-A that Mommy used to buy after her hairpointment. That was a special treat that she would only think about when she got real, real hungry. They had three different sauces in little plastic packages. Once Jenny woke up licking her finger. She'd been dreaming that she had all three kinds of sauceâhoney mustard, barbecue, and the other one that she couldn't remember the name ofâsticking her finger in each one, then licking it off.
They had been at the house. She'd been playing dolly with her little brother, Benji, making him wear different clothes like he was a dolly. Benji didn't mind.
Then the next thing she knew, she was in the box. Why? Maybe it was putting the clothes on Benji. Maybe she shouldn't have played dolly. Maybe there was something wrong about playing dolly, some special trick to it that nobody had explained to her. Maybe she'd done something else bad that she couldn't remember.
Jenny was busy inside her mind, promising Mommy that she wouldn't play dolly, when the lights came on. She had thought the whole box was made of wood, but now as the blinding lights came on, she saw that one whole side of the box was made of transparent plastic with a bunch of lightbulbs in it, the long tube kind.
The lights only came on for a couple of seconds. They made a snapping sound. Then they went off.
But that was long enough. Long enough to see the hole in the ceiling of the box. Long enough to see the eye. The eye looking down.
FIFTEEN
Lt. Gooch came in the next morning at his usual time, six-fifteen. There was something about him that seemed different, but I'd be hard pressed to say what it was. Not penitent, exactly. But up to this point I'd seen the man as being like a featureless boulder poking up out of a flat and empty landscapeâunreadable, unshakable, but entirely unimportant. But last night I realized that I'd missed something about him. So maybe it wasn't him at all. Maybe it was me.
Lt. Gooch came in, set his cheap Samsonite briefcase on his desk, then looked over at me.
“I hope you weren't smoking crack last night,” he said. “You sounded a little strung out when you called me.”
“First off,” I said, holding up one finger. “I have
never
smoked crack. Let's get that on the table right off the bat. Second, if I'm mad at you, it must be
because
I'm smoking something? That's how it is? Huh? You ever think maybe I'm mad because
you've
been lying to me? Hm? Sir? Ever think it might be you bearing some responsibility here?”
It had been Gooch that I'd called the night before, calling him a son of a bitch and a lot of other stuff. When I'd finally wound down, he'd said three words: “We'll talk. Tomorrow.” Then he'd hung up on me.
“How did you know?” I said. “What I want to know is how you knew I would pick that case. Marquavious Roberts.”
“You didn't,” he said. “Not first off.”
“Okay. But I got it on the second try. You
knew
. Somehow you knew. I don't care who you are. I don't care if you're my boss or what. I don't care if I could lose my job if you make a bad fitness report on me. I don't give a good goddamn anymore. You think you know me. You think you got inside my head. Don't you? You think you know all about me. Well, I'm here to tell you, you don't know jack. Hey, go ahead! Call the Chief. Tell him I'm insubordinate. Tell him I've been verbally abusing you, undermining your authority, tell him any damn thing you want. But just stop sitting there all smug looking, thinking you know who I am.”
“You got me mistook for somebody else,” he said. Lt. Gooch seemed vaguely bemused. Which only made me madder.
“Oh? Tell me it's not true, what I'm thinking.”
A half smile on his face, his blue eyes looking at me with this cool, superior light in them. “You talking a lot of riddles. You tell
me
. Speak the words.”
“I read the ME's report on Marquavious Roberts. I read it a little more carefully the second time around. I saw what I'd missed the first time around. You knew it was there all along. If I go over to Records, check the log book, I'm gonna find you checked out the Marquavious Roberts file a long time ago. Aren't I?”
He just kept looking at me, not denying it.
“You think that Vernell Moncrief didn't kill that boy. That's why you wanted SWATâso we'd have a clean bust and Vernell wouldn't get hurt. You figured it from the autopsy, from the bone decalcification. You knew that somebody had kidnapped Marquavious Roberts and stashed him somewhere for a while and starved him to death.”
“
Almost
starved him to death.”
“See? You're not even denying it. You been sitting over there all this time, acting like you're doing nothing, when all this time you been working me. You been playing me. What do you think I am? You think I'm a fool? You think I'm an idiot?”
Lt. Gooch's eyes didn't even blink. “Say it, Detective. You been talking and talking, but you ain't yet said what you mean to say.”
“All this time. You've been sitting there and sitting there and sitting there, acting like you're doing nothing at all. But you found a connection between these two cases, didn't you? You think the same person who killed Marquavious Roberts also killed Evie Marie Prowter. And that the DNA evidence against Vernell is some kind of fluke, right? That's what you think, isn't it?”
Lt Gooch smiled slightly, just a twitch at the corner of his mouth, there and then gone. “See? Now we're getting somewhere.”
“So because of you, Vernell Moncrief is dead.”
“Vernell's lucky he made it as far as he did. That boy been scheming to get hisself killed for a long, long time.”
“Who else knows this, Lieutenant?”
“Nobody.”
My eyes widened as I digested this. “Are there more?” I said finally.
Gooch just looked at me.
My voice got low as a whisper. “Tell me, you son of a bitch. Are there more?”
Lt. Gooch, unfazed, reached into his cheap briefcase, took out a stack of files, and dropped them one by one across the surface of my desk, each one making a thin slapping sound as it hit. I couldn't help counting them as they fell.
When he was done there were seventeen folders lying there.
I stared. All this time, the son of a bitch had been working a serial killer, not telling a soul. Seventeen dead children. I couldn't even fathom it. My stomach went up in my throat.
“This bastard's taken seventeen kids?” I said finally. “My
God
.”
“Eighteen.”
I frowned, counted the folders. “Seventeen,” I said. “You only gave me seventeen.”
“That little girl you been stressing about?” he said.
I squinted at him.
“Number eighteen?” he said. “I think it's Jenny Dial.”
SIXTEEN
“Lieutenant, right now all I've got in my life is this job,” I said.
I was still in that room, sitting there in front of Lt. Gooch's desk, with those seventeen folders scattered across the Masonite desktop.
“And right now I'm holding on by my fingernails. What you're asking, you're asking me to jeopardize my career, you're asking me to trust a man who's been stuck down in the umpteenth circle of cop hell, you're asking me to trust somebody I don't even know, in the service of heaven only knows what. Now the only wayâI'm being straight with youâthe only way I'm gonna do that is if you start at the beginning and tell me what the hell's going on. And don't ask me to read the files. I'll be glad to do that later. But first you owe me an explanation. You owe it to me and to Vernell Moncrief, whoâas best I can tellâyou believed wasn't guilty before you ever sent those goons from SWAT in there.”
The mention of Vernell Moncrief's death elicited the first hint of emotion I'd ever seen on Gooch's face, a brief cloud that went away in seconds. Lt. Gooch looked at the floor for a moment. He grunted softly, sighed, then opened the drawer to his desk, took out his disgusting Dixie cup, spit out the whole nasty wad of Skoal that had been fermenting in his lip, locked the Dixie cup up in the drawer again.
Then he spoke. “Here it is. I guess the Chief told you why this unit got started. Political thing. Chief intends this unit to fail. They stuck me down here with this bird, Dickie Showalter, who was just looking to ride out a few months to his pension. So I figured until I got somebody I could work with, I'd spend a few months going through every unsolved homicide in the past twenty-five years, work me up a list of priority cases. I try to be thorough, not go off half-cocked. Took longer than I expected. But when I was going through the files, there was some things that popped out at me. That thing with the bonesâthe decalcification of the bonesâit popped up in a bunch of child abductions, not just Evie Marie Prowter's. As you figured out, there was bone decalcification in Marquavious Roberts's autopsy report, too. But that's not all. In several of the autopsies, the victims had unusual calluses on their backs and necks, usually situated above the fifth cervical vertebra, or along the superior posterior aspect of the scapula. And all of these were cases where a brother or a stepfather or a family friend or whatever was suspected but never charged. I looked into the bone thing, figured out it indicated malnutrition. Pattern appeared to be the same in each case. Child was starved for a period of time, then apparently put back on food, then when their weight was restored, they were killed.
“Each case, the MO of the murder itself was different. Sometimes the kid was shot, sometimes stabbed. One was burned. Some the bodies were dumped in plain sight, some of them were hidden. At first I figure the malnutrition is some kind of coincidence. I mean it was only six cases over a period of a decade and a half.”
“Six?” I said.
“Like I say, I wasn't sure at that point. So I decided to widen the universe. Started checking the papers for child disappearances. Thing about child abductions is they happen all the time. And ninety-nine percent of the time, it's a marital breakup situation, custody dispute, one parent stealing a kid from the other. So it took a lot of winnowing to narrow it down to the right cases. Eventually I found seventeen. Marquavious, Evie Marie.” He waved his hands over the files on the desk. “And these.”
“All in Georgia?”
“Mostly. One over in Anderson, South Carolina; one in Bessemer, Alabama.”
“Could there be more?”
Lt. Gooch shrugged slightly. “I looked pretty hard. Tennessee, North Carolina, Florida. Didn't spot anything there. Could of missed a couple, though. And I could be wrong about a couple of these, too.”
“So have you, ah, developed a picture of this guy? A profile, whatever you want to call it?”
“The perp? No. I got a better picture of his victims. Children, age five to nine. Prepubescent, I guess would be the word. Race, no barrier. Sex, no barrier. We got a black boy, we got white girls, we got a Mexican kid. The common thread, they're all poor. Poor, or at least what you might call lower middle class. Working people, mostly the kind of folks you'd find on the rolls for WIC and AFDC, free lunches at school, Section VIII housing, that kind of thing. Mostly broken homes, disorganized family lives, third-rate parents.”
“The kind of people who cops won't take seriously when they say their little girl just disappeared,” I said. I felt the hair come up on the back of my neck as I was saying it. “The kind of people the police are liable to think their real daddy came back from Ohio, took the kid off to some other state, that kind of thing?”
“Yep.”
“So this person, he's organized, chooses his victims very carefully.”
“Yep.”
“What else?”
“Last thing, maybe it's just my judgment, but they're all good-looking kids, big smiles, bright little faces, photogenic. Easy on the eyes.”
I felt something squirm in my stomach. “Any feel for the perp? Other than that he's smart?”
“My guess, he's a traveler. Professionally, I mean. He gets close to people, scopes out the family. Let's assume he's got a job. For him to find a victim, scope them out, then take the time to get close to the family . . . Well, it'd be hard to do that on a weekend-field-trip-type basis.”
“Vernell gave me some big yarn about this bug man.”
Gooch nodded. “It seems like it's part of the pattern. But it's hard to say for sure. About half the files report some kind of mysterious stranger hanging around, somebody that made them nervous. And not one single time did an investigator seem to take those reports seriously. As far as I can tell, nobody ever fingerprinted this alleged stranger, nobody ever photographed him, never put him in a lineup or a photo array.”
“So have you done
any
fieldwork yet?”
“Nope. Just paperwork. Studied the case files. I haven't talked to any of the detectives yet.”
“How come not?”
“I was waiting on you.”
I blinked. “Me, personally? Or just any warm body besides that other detective, the short timer.”
“You. Specifically.”
I studied him dubiously. “I don't believe you.”
The cool blue eyes surveyed me. “Believe it, or don't. Don't make no difference to me.”
“You're full of it. Sir. The first day when I got here, you remember what you said? You said, âWho are you?' You'd never seen me before in your life.”
A ghost of a smile. “That's what those of us in the detective business call dissimulation. You may have heard, it's one of them fancy interrogation techniques they teach at the CIA interrogation workshops and whatnot. I searched through two hundred personnel files, narrowed it down to three people. I talked to a bunch of people who'd worked with you. Then I observed you.”
“You
spied
on me? When?”
“When you were up there pushing paper? Gay Lesbian Whatever-it-was Coordinator?”
“Liaison.”
“Like I say, whatever. Point is, I was keeping an eye on you. Seeing how you interacted with your fellow law-enforcement professionals.”
“I never saw you.”
“You never
noticed
me. Different thing.”
I sat back in my chair. “So? How
did
I get on with my fellow officers?”
“Not well.”
“Why not just . . . Why not just interview me? Like any normal person would.”
“I just didn't.”
“So why me? Why me, specifically?”
“Had to be the right person.”
“Oh, now suddenly we're getting down to flattery.”
“Not flattery. Facts.”
“So, explain it to me. Exactly how you knew I was right.”
“First off, I needed somebody with people skills. You didn't get on well up in Admin because them people are idiots. You're results oriented; they're keeping-their-jobs oriented. Everybody in Narcotics sang your praises up one side and down the other, how you had a special touch with people, getting people to talk, that type of thing. Case you haven't caught on, touchy-feely ain't my strong suit. But I needed more than that. I needed a particular kind of person. Nothing to lose, no husband, no kids, no, uh, entanglements. I don't need nobody down here that wants to spend the weekend fishing or doing yardwork or taking the kids to Chuck E. Cheese. I need somebody who's gonna live this case, somebody who don't have no life.”
Somebody who don't have no life.
I was mad at the manipulative bastard, but at the same time secretly impressed that he seemed to have read me so clearly.
“You knew about my baby, too, didn't you?” I could feel a little tremor in my voice.
Hank Gooch looked away without speaking.
“You thought that would give me, what, some kind of special motivation? Huh? My mind all tuned into the missing children wavelength? Huh? Man, you make me sick.”
“I never claimed to be no nice man.”
I suppose I could have let my anger at the man spoil the moment. But the truth was, I was intrigued. Lt. Gooch had deliberately set me up, sucked me into this thing, opened the door into the dark room, pointed the way. And I couldn't help myself: no matter how mad I was, I was already through the door, already in the room he'd prepared for me, no going back. He had me.
“One thing you haven't mentioned,” I said.
“And that would be . . .”
“DNA. Have you run the DNA on these cases?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“And?”
Gooch looked at something over my shoulder for a while. “Mixed bag,” he said.
“Meaning what?”
“There's lost samples in two cases. The first four murders all match each other, but no match to any perps in the database. A couple of the other murders have common DNA. Then three of the cases are already considered to be solved. Four, if you include Marquavious Roberts. Three men are already serving time in these cases, straight-up DNA matches.”
I wrinkled my forehead. “Hold up. You're saying some of these cases are already solved?”
“In theory, yes. Open-and-shut cases.”
“And you think the people who got convicted didn't do it?”
He nodded. “Yup.”
“That all sounds a little hard to swallow.”
“Does, don't it?”
I took a few long breaths. This all sounded like a fool's errand to me. But what if? Seventeen missing kids. If Gooch was right, this would be the case of a lifetime.
“So what's the first move?” I said.
“Since you already opened the case, let's talk to Tanya Prowter, Evie Marie's mama. After that we gonna start at the beginning, start with Victim One, work our way forward.”