Chapter 6
Chapter Six
________________
ANSON
“I’ve been meaning to ask…” Chaim, my superior officer, wiggles a pen over his desk. The ends hit his blotter, making a rapid tick-tick-ticking , and tiny ink stabs appear. “That psychic chick turn up any new leads?”
He stops, clicks the end, closing the pen, and chucks it into the holder. Then he pushes back in his chair. His ass doesn’t do that balancing act in the seat. There’s not enough room between his desk and the bookshelf cramped behind it to recline. It’s more of a closet than an actual office. A place the powers that be stuck him because his years of service afford Chaim a level of privacy I haven’t reached.
My desk is among the other detectives; homicide, narcotics, and computer crimes. When I have to walk down a hall for a face-to-face with Chaim, I stand the entire time since there’s no room for a second chair in his hidey-hole.
The few of us—Okay, the two of us, Chaim and me—assigned to split Brighton P.D.’s unsolved missing persons and cold cases understand that, like any police department, we’re understaffed and woefully under-funded. I mean, it’s not as if we’ve got cement blocks tied to our legs and are swimming through unsolved murders. But it’s something the Chief of Police claims they’re aiming to change.
The public uproar after the Pruitt case was bad fucking press for the town of Brighton. Proof won out. Except, cameras and conjecture went unchecked. It left a lot of citizens under the impression that inept small-town cops assigned to cases over a decade ago are why those girls weren’t found here sooner.
Not that every officer, in every town, who worked those cases doesn’t have their own regrets. In hindsight, everyone is wondering how the victims remained hidden so close by. What evidence was missed. What anyone could have done better, differently, from the onset.
Reality is, even working with other jurisdictions, there wasn’t the access to forensic experts or the advanced technologies we have today. Time marches on. Technology changes. States are working diligently to get the backlog of offender fingerprints and DNA samples from convicted felons into CODIS. The scope and the backlog of information are immense. But, with any luck, eventually searching those databases should crack remaining cases and stop many from going unsolved in the future.
Until then, we keep at it.
Chaim’s and my time get split. The men and women we investigate ongoing crimes with are dedicated. They take pride each and every time they don’t have to hand files off to us. Can you blame them for wanting to do great police work? I can’t.
Not after Pruitt.
Leaning cross-legged against the doorjamb to his office, I grab my jaw with my thumb and forefinger, moving it back and forth to test how sensitive it is.
While I’ve kept what went down at Sweet Caroline’s quiet, my life since meeting Rae Lee Chatham has been an utter disaster. I’d gone the following morning for a filling only for the dentist to discover the molar needed a root canal and crown. That afternoon, a private investigator in Goldsboro sidetracked me. Try as I may over the weekend, every time I sat on the couch to watch a game, my attention span vanished. All I could think of was the way Rae Lee’s body felt against mine.
I think she put some voodoo hex on me because I lost the TV remote every time I put it down, and my phone and keys magically disappeared more than usual. Not to mention, this morning my laptop bag wasn’t in the spot where I normally leave it in the kitchen. It somehow got tucked in the corner alongside my shoe rack at the door. I never leave my computer by the door. I wound up skidding into the dentist’s parking lot, five minutes late for the root canal.
“Dhere’s a few tings Chadham said that I’m foddowing up on. I need to ged on id.”
I have better things to occupy my time than shooting the shit. Plus, whenever I open my mouth, my fat tongue and puffy lips have me slurring my words. I sound like a bumbling buffoon.
Chaim, who carried most of the conversation, chuckles at my speech. “Hope that novocaine wears off soon, man.”
“Thdanks. Me tdoo.” I turn to go.
“Wife’s out of town. Wanna get dinner tonight? Liquid. If you can manage,” Chaim calls. “Mark-39 introduced a new beer.”
After the day I’ve had, a cold beer with a buddy sounds too good to be true. I also hope to have full use of my lips again by dinnertime and not dribble all over myself when I drink. I’m in.
I nod a hello to the people I pass in the hall, sit down at my desk, and sort through the notes I took from Rae Lee’s reading at the Turners’.
I start where the likelihood of finding something concrete to go on is highest. Using my computer to search local parks, I get ten pages’ worth of hits in Brighton and surrounding jurisdictions. Most of them are within the radius of the Pruitt farmland. I’ll fan out if I need to expand the search as far as the capital.
I switch to satellite view. One by one, I zoom in and drag the screen around the perimeter of each playground to get an idea of the size, checking for the potential of anything hidden that I’d need to go investigate on foot. Then I move to the center of the park, looking for sidewalks or water features similar to what Rae Lee described.
Checking the first page of hits off my list takes me an hour. So far, I have one park where the trees obscured the view and the aspect on the street view hadn’t stretched to show me what I needed to rule it out. I click to page two and continue.
The next park is oblong. It’s within a stone’s throw of an elementary school. Lush green pines circle out, surrounding a soccer field. Directly across the street is a baseball diamond. There’s an entrance for a parking lot. But there’s also a sidewalk that takes anyone there for recreation up to the playground equipment. It looks like there might be a second entrance I can’t see through the foliage.
I drop my virtual self on the striped crosswalk. The avatar’s view faces the baseball diamond. There’s a pole for a solar-powered pedestrian crossing with a bucket of bright orange flags attached.
I click the right arrow on the screen. I see a school zone speed limit sign. There are no stoplights within the horizon. A large city park sign shows the turn into the parking lot. Then the sidewalk on the park side of the street seems closer. Slowly, I scroll farther to the right… And I can’t believe my eyes.
I jump out of my seat so quickly that I bang the front of my thighs against the desk drawer.
Twenty minutes later, I pull my car into the lot. Rushing to the main entrance, incredulous at what I’m seeing. The street sidewalk is from side to side. The painted crosswalk lines merge with a path straight into the park. A few feet beyond where the two intersect is a wishing well that’s about five feet in diameter and three feet tall. It’s surrounded by a circular walkway. The water is shallow and still. A handful of pennies and nickels are scattered on the chipped blue bottom. It wouldn’t surprise me if younger kids fed the well and the older ones took from it.
Does calling life as I see it make me jaded?
Parked off to the side of the walkway is a white two-seater utility vehicle with Town of Brighton Parks and Recreation splashed over the hood. Next to it is a dry-vac style pump with a corrugated tube snaking toward the well and an orange outdoor extension cord running the opposite way.
There’s a tug on the extension cord. Seconds later, an older fellow in tidy coveralls pokes out. The shade doesn’t hide the deep wrinkles on his forehead and around his eyes that he’s earned from laboring in the sun. He has a white goatee and a pot belly concealed by his height and his uniform.
I approach him slowly, indicating I’ve read the name embroidered on his badge. “Morris?” I show him mine. “Detective Ames.” I biff the S. “Sorry, root canal.”
“I hear ya, boy. Had one of them myself. Just talk slow.” He looks to see if anyone is around. “Be like me. Pretend I don’t talk slow.” He winks, tossing his head back with a raspy chuckle.
I’d classify Morris as a bit jaded, but his overall demeanor is jovial.
“I’m investigating a case. Do you mind answering a few questions?”
Carefree, Morris’s pearly whites beam from ear to ear. He grunts his approval, slipping his hands into his pockets, and rocks back on his heels.
I speak slower, like he instructed me to. “You do the maintenance here?”
“I take care of this one and a few others.”
“What can you tell me about the park?”
“Ain’t much different from any other ol’ park. Greenway. Playground. Field. Trees. Houses now all around it. ‘Sides this backbreaker, they’re all pretty much the same.”
“You don’t like wishing wells?”
“They never shoulda put this here. Stupidest place for a water feature ever, if ya ask me. It ain’t even got anything to keep it full or the water circulating. And cleaning it is something awful. Bird poop. Kids leaving stuff in it. Gum. Candy wrappers. Food Wrappers. Sometimes worse.” Morris scrunches his nose. Experience has made him jaded, too. “I don’t know whose bright idea it was. But it wasn’t mine.”
I take Morris to be efficient: a no-nonsense type of guy.
He moves toward the town vehicle, either tired of standing still or of my lackluster questions. Or maybe Morris has a job to do and the longer he flaps his gums, the longer it’ll take to get it done and go home. I can’t blame him for wanting to multitask.
“When did the city install it?” Again, mundane. I can search the town archives.
“I dunno. Fifteen, twenty years ago. Lost track.” He widens his feet, spraying neon orange on the far edge of a slab that’s raised so that no one trips. The opposite edge of the adjacent one has been ground down.
The tip of my shoe toes the wide vee in the middle of the two concert slabs. “What does this?”
“Makes the sidewalk uneven? Overgrown tree roots mostly.” Morris lifts the hand holding the spray can to the leafy canopy. “Sometimes, the ground shifts when we get too much rain. Flooding and all. All the building they been doing means there’s less place for the water to go, so it moves the earth tryina forge a new runoff trail.” He points the nozzle at the wishing well. “Hurricane season is the only time that’s ever full and it’s to overflowing. Glad they’re taking it out. Parents these days, their noses in their phones instead of watching their littluns. It’s not safe. Not safe. Somebody’s baby is going in headfirst and going to drown and somebody else is going to post that whole tragedy on their instacart for the whole world to see.”
Instagram. But he has a point. Bystanders shooting a video first and calling for help second is becoming a frequent problem that puts lives at risk.
“You get a lot of animals around here?”
“Yep. It’s a park. Squirrels. Possums. Raccoons love the trash cans. Deers. Did you know them and those coyotes are getting moved along by all these new houses?”
“What if something decomposed?” I cut Morris off.
“Yeah. It would have to be a big thing to cause a sinkhole. A stump or something or other.” He drops the hose into the well.
“Do you know offhand how long it would take a stump to decay?”
“In this climate, if I were to guess… Three years?” He shrugs.
“How long has the sidewalk been buckling?”
“Pretty much since we put it in.”
“And that was twenty years ago?”
Morris’s face elongates. His head bobs from shoulder to shoulder. “It coulda been more like fifteen.”
Fuck me, there’s a chance Rae Lee Chatham might be on to something.
His finger hovers over the shop-vac, ready to push the on button. “Anything else?”
“That’s it for now. Thank you.”
I head to the parking lot, jumping as the vacuum loudly begins sucking the water out. Biting the inside of my cheek with a crunch, my eyes tear and I hold back the Ow .
“Hey, detective?”
I raise a brow, rubbing my sore face.
“If you’ve gotta camera, I’d be taking some pictures if you need any for your case. The park administrator finally did me a favor. I’m emptying this headache because it’s getting torn out.”