Forty-Four Box Set, Books 1-10 (44) (132 page)

“Yeah. He showed up this morning looking for you. He found the bottle of Vodka in the freezer instead. I’m trying to pry it out of his hands in exchange for a Smith Rock Benny over at McKay Cottage.”

“I’m glad you’re there for him, Kate. He’s pretty broken up about it.”

“That doesn’t even begin to cover it. But I don’t have one thing to do all day, so I told him we could hang out and watch movies. He loves a good rom com, unlike you, so we’ll have a good time. I’m going to make him stay the night too. He shouldn’t be alone.”

It was good David had some company. I didn’t like the idea of him alone in his house with only his turtle there to console him.

CHAPTER 44

Frazier was at my door an hour later with the news.

“It was just a dog, Abby.”

I was quiet for a second.

“A dog?” I said.

“Yes.”

He looked worn out, like a kid who has ridden a rollercoaster a few too many times.

“Have a seat,” I said.

“Thank you.” He let out a sigh. “You prepare yourself for finding the body, do all this self-talking so that you’re ready for when they bring up the corpse of the girl you’ve been looking for all this time, prepare yourself so seeing it won’t knock you to your knees. And then this happens and you’re glad, elated really, she wasn’t there.”

He loosened his tie.

I was also glad that it wasn’t Emily down in the ground, but I was disappointed that they hadn’t found something related to the case.

And again I wondered why I had such a strong feeling that I needed to get to Eugene. Was it just to dig up a dead dog?

I hadn’t contributed anything to the case and now I had even led Frazier and the others on a wild goose chase. I had wasted everyone’s time. I had played with their emotions.

The sunset, the running visions, even seeing Emily’s ghost twice had all added up to a big nothing.

“By the way, we found two homeless men in the woods not far from the grave. They had their camp there. They said they helped dig the hole. The dog belonged to someone they know, another vagrant.” He ran his hand over his face. “Tell me, what led you to that spot?”

I wasn’t sure what the point was now, but I told him about the dream anyway.

“Coconuts, huh? Well, there still might be something to it. Keep the channels open,” he said. “I could really use some coffee. My treat.”

“Sure,” I said as we stood up.

“The weather’s changed. You might want to bring something.”

It was drizzling when we stepped outside. Frazier drove, the wipers moving slowly across the windshield.

After a few miles he turned into a small parking lot. The restaurant looked like it had been in business since the 1950s. It was one of those old-fashioned coffee shops with large windows, vinyl-covered seats, and older waitresses wearing stiff uniforms and nurse shoes.

We took a booth way in the back, although hardly any other customers were there. An old Chicago song played in the background, something about not knowing what time it was. Soon a woman with short gray hair and a pencil sticking out from behind her ear walked up to us with two glasses of water.

“Good afternoon, Detective,” she said, setting them down as Frazier turned over a ceramic cup that was on the table.

“Hello, Ruby,” Frazier said.

“How’s tricks?”

“It seems the trick’s on me today,” he said.

“You know what I always say. Sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug.”

She left and returned with a coffee pot. She filled his cup to the brim and then turned to me and smiled.

“You in, hon?”

I turned over my mug and returned her smile. She tried to give Frazier a menu, but he held up his hand.

“This will do fine.”

“Me too,” I said.

“You two let me know if you change your minds. We’ve got homemade cherry pie and it’s cooling in the back.”

She hobbled away slowly, heading toward the only other customers at the far end of the restaurant.

“Sounds like you’re a regular.”

“I am. Ruby’s one of the first people I met when I moved here. She lends an ear from time to time.”

I poured a little cream into my cup and took a taste. It was the kind of coffee that got the job done. Nothing more.

“The statistics vary, in some studies they’re as high as 90 percent, but what’s clear is that most people are killed by someone they know. And as we always feared, this could have been one of the exceptions. It could have been a stranger abduction. Those are the real tough ones to solve.”

He sighed.

“Sometimes no matter how hard we try, we never find out anything. I’ve had a few cases like that over the years. Or if we do find out what’s happened to them, it’s three or five or ten years later after the perp has been picked up on another charge in another state and decides to talk. I hate to say it, but that’s where this one seems to be heading. At some point soon, the guys upstairs will pull us off and Emily Ross will be a cold case.”

I nodded, the sadness hitting my throat. I thought of her file and picture locked in a steel cabinet in some basement gathering dust.

Forever.

I wanted to say something but couldn’t think of anything. Frazier stared out the window at the sidewalk.

“It’s been unseasonably wet this month, even for Eugene,” he said finally. “You know, summer rain makes me think of home.”

He grabbed a packet of sugar and played with it for a while as if not sure what to do next. He then opened it and dumped it into his mug.

“I’m trying to cut down on the stuff, but it’s a struggle,” he said with a smile as weak as the coffee. “You know, this case reminds me of my very first one in a lot of ways.”

The rain came down harder.

CHAPTER 45

Frazier swallowed slowly and studied the weather a little longer. It was a full on downpour now, the water streaking off the windows.

“I was your age, maybe a year younger, eleven months into the job. No more than a kid really. I was strong and proud back then. I graduated second in my class and had a good arrest record going. I was already eyeing a detective badge, thinking that this was the life for me.”

His eyes drifted down and rested on the coffee.

“I loved it that year. Loved it too much, looking back now. And like most young people in those days, I thought I could make a difference. Hell, Abby. That’s the modesty of a used-up old man coming through. The truth is, I walked out the door each morning feeling like I was God’s gift to law enforcement.”

I wondered if I would ever feel that way about a job, if being a chef would evoke that kind of passion.

“It was the summer of 1969 and we were in the middle of… so many things. A heat wave for one. Things like that mean something in cities like Baltimore. As the temperature rises, so do the problems. Arrests double. People are out on the street, bumping up against one another with no patience. All that and then you mix in the political unrest of the times. Dr. King had been killed the year before, and Bobby Kennedy. The Vietnam War was in full swing.

“The cities were angry places back then. Ready to explode.

“So that summer the powers that be decided that the presence of patrolling squad cars in the neighborhoods was the most important factor in deterring crime. The logic went that the more cars that were out there, the better. We were on our own for the most part and I was fine with that. I
knew
I could handle whatever the streets threw at me.

“And if we got in over our heads, someone would always be close by.

“They stuck the rookies on the graveyard shift, but I didn’t mind. It was almost like a game and I could see it all out there in front of me. Cruising through industrial areas and the impoverished parts of town meant nothing,” he said softly. “Mostly I came across junkies and prostitutes. Nothing I couldn’t handle.

“One night, a few hours after midnight, I came up to this old Dodge moving real slow down a deserted street. He was either high or up to no good. And his taillight was out. I followed him for a few blocks and then hit my lights.

“He pulled over, leaving almost two feet between his car and the curb.

“I got out and walked up, my right hand on my gun. It was just the two of us out there. We might have been the last two people on earth. Except that we weren’t.

“The window went down, making a squeaking noise. Behind the wheel was a man in his mid-twenties with long hair, looking like he had just come from a Grateful Dead concert. My first thought was that he had been tripping on acid and gotten lost. A white boy like him had no business being in that part of town. Not at that hour. Not in those days.

“‘Did I do something wrong, officer?’ he said, looking up at me.”

Frazier stopped and looked down at his hands and sighed, shaking his head. Then his eyes came back up.

“I can’t tell you how often those words have haunted me through the years.”

He cleared his throat.

“I told him about the taillight. He apologized, saying he had meant to get it fixed but that he had been too busy at his construction job all week. He promised he would take care of it in the morning. He was calm, polite even.

“He handed me his license and registration. His hand was steady. But something wasn’t right with him. Something was off. Not because he was a white boy driving around in a black of part town either.

“I could feel something right here.”

Frazier tapped his chest a few times.

“But I couldn’t pin it down. He was coherent. His eyes were clear and I didn’t smell any alcohol on his breath. I went back to the patrol car and called in his plates and ID, but he checked out. Then I heard on the radio about some trouble a few blocks away. Shots had been fired. There were already two units responding, but I wanted to go too.

“I handed back his information and sent him on his way without even so much as a ticket.”

Frazier rubbed his face with both hands and then finished the last of his coffee. He looked out at the rain again, the black hole at his side growing. I stayed quiet, waiting until his eyes met mine again.

“He had taken a little girl from her bedroom just an hour before I stopped him,” he said, his voice low. “Mary Anderson, age 12. He climbed in her window and snatched her as she slept. Of course, we found all this out later. That, and how he raped and tortured her for a week before killing her and dumping her body in a city trash bin. It took us two years to find him again. And two more dead girls.”

I bit my lip.

“You see, Abby, over the years I’ve come to realize that I was as much a part of her murder as he was. There were plenty of mistakes on my end that night. I should have acted on what my gut was telling me. I should have stayed and let those other cops take the call on the radio.”

Frazier paused, his breath shallow, the life gone from his eyes.

“And I should have opened that God damned trunk.”

CHAPTER 46

Ellis Frazier had been his own judge, jury, and executioner. He hadn’t murdered Mary Anderson, but, in a way, he had killed
himself.

That young man brimming with attitude, dreams, and soul was never seen again. In his place, a shell of a man roamed the streets of this or that city down through the years, like a ghost, always trying to set it right. Trying to right a wrong that could never be made right. A wrong he was not responsible for.

Frazier couldn’t have known that Mary Anderson was in that trunk that night. But I knew it was useless to point that out.

So instead I wiped away a tear, blew my nose on a napkin a little too loudly, and said nothing.

“I’ve got to head back,” he said after a while. “How about we start again in the morning?”

“Of course.”

He dropped me off at the motel a few minutes later. It didn’t take long before the walls of the room began closing in. I couldn’t shake the heartbreak of it. I needed to get out.

The rain had let up, the clouds now off on the horizon. I went for a walk.

Frazier was there with me every step of the way. At that moment I felt that his story would always be with me.

He could never be the same. Everything he was had been locked in the back of that car right alongside her and stolen forever.

As I wandered through the university in the fading light, I thought about how he had probably spent his entire life trying to make up for that one mistake. And if he was able to solve a case, to find a missing girl or her killer, it wouldn’t be enough. In his heart, it would never make up for what he had done.

I knew a little bit about evil. Even if you managed to escape from its grasp, you were still tainted. Everything was different, as if your world was a shade off from before, had a different smell, a different feel. Evil, in the end, always had the upper hand that way. Even just brushing up against it briefly would change you forever.

After hearing Frazier’s story, I realized for the first time that it wasn’t just the victims and their families and friends who were affected in these abductions, but also the people searching for them. They were touched by the darkness, too.

Even though I had never met her, at some point in the investigation Emily had become real. I wanted to help her. I wanted to find her.

I now felt the same way about Ellis Frazier. I wanted to help him, too.

When I got back to my room, I lay on the bed with my eyes closed, falling deeper and deeper into a heavy gloom.

And then I reached for the phone.

“I miss you, Ty,” I said. “I just left this morning, but it feels so much longer. It’s like I’ve been in Eugene forever.”

“Are you doing okay?”

 “I’m okay. It’s just been a hard day. You at work?”

“Yeah, but I have a few minutes. I’m in the back ordering supplies. Tell me how the investigation is going.”

I gave him a quick rundown of the events of the day.

“At least they didn’t find her dead, right?”

“Yeah, I was relieved about that. But I wish we had found something. Anything. I mean besides a dead dog. This morning I was so sure I needed to be here.”