The Body Box (22 page)

Authors: Lynn Abercrombie

Tags: #Fiction, #Thriller

BOOK: The Body Box

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THIRTY-FOUR

Just before sunup, I could feel a crash coming on. I'd drunk so much coffee that my hands were trembling, and I felt jumpy, my thoughts running off in disconnected little jerks. All I wanted to do was sleep. I'd reached that point where you either stumbled into bed and lost a whole day, or you just kept plowing ahead. I decided to go for a run in the semidarkness to see if I could revive myself. At first I felt like I'd been beaten by a stick, but by the time I'd gone a few miles, the sun was coming up and my head started to clear. I started trying to make some connections based on the unsettling discovery I'd made during the night. As I was heading back into my house something struck me: all three of the early cases in Atlantaâwhich had run from 1988 through 1992âhad been investigated by the same detective. His name was Lt. Roy Bevis, Jr.

I waited till nine o'clock, then called the Admin office.

“Officer Danley, Administration,” a woman said.

“How you doing, Officer. It's Detective Deakes from the Cold Case Unit. Could you do me a favor, look up the phone number for a retired detective, Roy Bevis, Jr?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

She put me on hold for a while, finally came back on. “Um. Ma'am? He's deceased.”

“I realize that. Does he have a wife? Somebody that gets his pension check?”

“Oh.” She put me on hold for a while, then finally came back with a number. I wrote it down on the palm of my hand, then hung up the phone.

I dialed the number, and a white woman with a county-sounding accent answered. I explained who I was and asked if I could speak to her.

“Right
now
?” she said.

“If it's not inconvenient.”

The woman sighed. “I guess,” she said grudgingly.

Roy Bevis's wife lived in Stone Mountain, in a slightly seedy development called Bonanza in what had certainly been all-white area when it was built back in the sixties, but now most everybody who lived here was black. All the streets were named for characters in the old TV showâHoss Road, Little Joe Drive, Cartwright Circle, like that. Yee-hah.

I knocked on the door, heard three or four latches and locks being unfastened, and then the door finally swung open an inch or two. Two eyes looked at me suspiciously through the gap. “Mrs. Bevis? It's Detective Deakes. I just spoke to you?”

The eyes kept looking for a while, then finally the door swung open.

Mrs. Bevis locked all the locks again after I'd entered, then led me silently into a living room that had the feel of a museum. Everything looked like it had been purchased from the same store about ten minutes after the house was built. Lots of avocado green upholstery, lots of streaky faux antiquing on all the exposed wood. The walls were knotty pine. A picture of a thin-faced, serious-looking young man in a police uniform hung on the wall over the brick fireplace.

“This is just lovely,” I said. “It makes a room feel so homey having all the family pictures.” A bank of gloomy-looking white people stared down at me from the wall, most of them in black-and-white photographs that looked to have been taken a long time ago.

“Thank you.” Mrs. Bevis sat, perching on the edge of her chair. She didn't offer me anything to drink, didn't look like she was in the mood for small talk. “You didn't say on the phone what this was about.”

She was a fat woman of about sixty-five, but not the jolly fat type. She was the sagging, depressive fat type. The fat hung off of her as though her skin had been filled with bird-shot, all the weight of it stretching at her until loose folds of flesh hung from every part of her body, from the sides of her face, her chin, the backs of her arms. A powder blue sweater was draped over her shoulders like a shawl. It was July, but the air conditioning didn't seem to be on, and the air was stifling and still, with an unpleasant odor to it that reminded me of chemical fertilizer.

“I'm not entirely sure where to start,” I said. “I'm with a new outfit in the department called the Cold Case Unit. We're investigating old cases, unsolved cases. Several of your husband's cases have come up.”

Mrs. Bevis looked at me without replying.

“And so . . . I realize that your husband has . . . deceased. But what I was wondering is if you could tell me anything about the cases, anything your husband might have passed on to you, or anything that he might have kept at the house orâ”

Mrs. Bevis pursed her lips. “I expect you'd have to tell me exactly which case you're talking about then.” She had a clipped, schoolmarmish way of talking, each syllable squeezed out very precisely.

“There are three of them, actually. Mindy Reese, D'Juan Farmer, and Marquavious Roberts. Children.”

Mrs. Bevis looked at me silently. Finally she stood up and opened the avocado drapes and stared out the front window. A bunch of kids, all of them black, were playing on their bikes in the street. I wondered how she felt about that, a certain kind of life that she'd grown used to passing away right in front of her eyes. Probably living on her husband's little pension and a tiny Social Security check, feeling trapped here in her own house, a white prisoner in a black world. But then, maybe not: It's hard enough to figure out what's going on in my own head, much less somebody else's.

“Mrs. Bevis?”

Mrs. Bevis reached up and put her hand in front of her mouth, as though she were about to cough, then put it back down. “I've been waiting,” she said finally. When she turned around, there was a sad smile on her face. “I've been waiting for almost ten years, dear, for somebody to come and ask me that question.”

My eyes must have widened a little. “Oh?”

She nodded slightly, and the smile became bitter. “They told me he committed suicide. They told me Roy pulled his car over in a rest stop halfway to Tennessee, took out his revolver, and killed himself.” The smile faded. “Anybody who knew my husband knew that he could never kill himself. Never. And even if he had, he would have had the decency and the respect for others not to have done it such a terrible fashion. Why, doing it like thatâit could have been seen by children!” She said this as though that would have been a worse sin that killing yourself.

“I don't know,” I said. “He's not the first policeman to have trouble handling the stress.”

Mrs. Bevis eyed me coldly, pulled her pale blue sweater around her shoulders as though, despite the closeness and heat of the room, she was about to catch a chill. “Apparently you never knew my husband.”

“No, ma'am, I didn't.”

“In the months prior to my husband's murderâ”

“Murder?” I said.

She pronounced it as though it were two distinct words: “Mur. Der.” She looked at me for a moment, lips pressed together again. “Murder. In the months prior to my husband's murder, his fellow detectives said that he had become âagitated. ' ” She wiggled two fingers on each hand, making quotation marks in the air. “They said that he had become âsecretive.' They said that he had become âdifficult.' They said that he had become âunreasonable.' ” She went back to the couch and sat down. The late afternoon sun was pouring in the window now, doing no kindnesses to her sagging face. “And for these reasons, they said his death was consistent with a suicide.”

I nodded.

“But only I understood what was going on. You see, Mr. Bevis loved his work. He loved being a detective. It meant everything to him. Probably more to him even than I did.” She said this matter-of-factly, with only a hint of bitterness. “In the months prior to his murder, my husband had determined that he had uncovered a serial killer. Was he secretive and unreasonable and difficult and agitated? Well, perhaps he was. But if so, it was because he was excited. Every day in the months before his murder, he got out of bed eager to get to work. I had never seen him so excited by a case as he was by those three cases.”

“I assume that your husband's superiors knew that he believed these to be serial homicides?”

“No. I believe he didn't inform them of his suspicions.”

“After he died, did you bring up that fact to his fellow detectives?”

Mrs. Bevis shook her head. “No.”

“Why not?”

Mrs. Bevis looked at the floor. “I'm not a strong woman,” she said. “My health situation is quite precarious.”

I didn't quite see the relevance of that, but I figured I'd let it pass. “Okay, fair enough. But what I don't understand is this: how is it possible for him to pursue an investigation, presumably over a course of many months, without his superiors or his co-workers knowing what he was doing?”

“How is it possible? Because he didn't tell them.”

“You mean he justâ”

“As you know, unlike in New York City or the various other jurisdictions that one sees so often portrayed in police dramas on the television, Atlanta homicide detectives do not have partners. When you work a case in Atlanta, it's
your
case. You may have other detectives help you on the case, but the assignment is yours and yours alone.”

“That's true,” I said.

“So he played this case close to his vest.”

“Why?”

Mrs. Bevis studied my face. “Did I understand you to say that you're not with the Homicide bureau?”

“That's right. I'm in the Cold Case Unit. It's a new unit, completely separate from Homicide.”

“And is anybody outside of your unit aware of your investigation?”

I felt something prickling on the back of my neck. All of Lt. Gooch's secrecy, and now this. “No,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

“I'd keep it that way.”

I frowned. “Hold on, hold on. You're really saying what I think you're saying? You're saying that your husband believed this case involved a law-enforcement officer.”

“Yes.”

“And whoever it was, they found out he was investigating them? And they killed your husband? That's what you're claiming?”

“Claiming?” Her eyes were cold. “I'm
telling
you.”

“Are we talking about somebody in Homicide?”

“That I don't know.”

“He never told you who he suspected?”

Mrs. Bevis ran her hand slowly across her sagging face. “I don't know that he had a specific suspect. Not until the very end, at least. If he did, he never told me.” She paused. “He must have been close, though.”

I was suddenly conscious of how hot it was in that room, of the sweat that was pouring out of me, sticking my blouse to my back, and I wanted to get out of there. “Did he keep any records here? Anything that wasn't in the files at the station?”

Mrs. Bevis looked around the room with a vague expression on her face. “I'm not in the best of health,” she said. Dodging my question, it sounded like.

“Mrs. Bevis? Did he? Did he keep anything here?”

“No,” she said, after a brief pause. “No, I don't believe he did.”

“Because there's no indication in the file that he was pursuing anything along the lines you're saying. He had to have documented what he was doing, but it's not in the file.”

Mrs. Bevis's lips stiffened slightly, like she'd come to a decision. “Well, I don't know anything about that.”

“You're
sure
.”

Her eyes flashed briefly. I was almost sure she had something, but it seemed clear she wasn't going to give it to me.

“He's still out there,” I said. “There's another little girl out there.”

The fire seemed to go out of the woman, and the evening light caught every fold and swag of skin. “I'm really not well at all,” she said. “I think you'd better go.”

I put my card on the table by her elbow. “I'll see myself out. But if you find something,
please
call me.”

As I opened the door, I took another look at the long row of pictures on the wall. In one of them, Roy Bevis was standing in the middle of a row of four or five men, all of them obviously plainclothes police. Bevis had his arm around another cop. A much younger Lt. Gooch.

Lt. Bevis's widow called out to me. “You be careful, dear. You be very careful who you talk to.”

THIRTY-FIVE

“Cold Case, Gooch speaking.”

“Hey, Lieutenant, it's me.” Silence. “Mechelle.”

The line remained silent.

“Sir? Lieutenant? Sorry I didn't make it in this morning. I don't know what it is, but I'm sick as a dog. Must have eaten something bad last night. I'm hoping it's just food poisoning, but I'm throwing up, I've got diarrhea, I've got all this junk coming up thatâ”

“I don't need a stool sample, Detective. Just get better by tomorrow. We got work to do.” The lieutenant hung up on me.

“Thanks for all your concern and everything,” I said to the dead line.

After that I made a couple more phone calls, then got in my car and started driving.

Fort Benning, down on the Alabama border, is a massive place, bigger than half the counties in Georgia. In fact, it's one of the biggest army bases west of the Mississippi, a major training station for the infantry, with all kinds of schools including ranger and airborne training as well as the infamous (and recently renamed) School of the Americas, which is often accused of training South American right-wing death squads. The Army's Criminal Investigation Division maintains a regional CID headquarters battalion, as well as a unit called the 86
^thMilitary Police Detachment, which has investigative responsibility specifically for Fort Benning.

The country is flat and hot and heavily forested around Columbus. July had been unusually dry this year. There was a big forest fire burning to the west as I drove down the interstate, and for twenty miles before I reached Columbus, I could smell smoke.

The head of the 86
^thMP Detachment at Fort Benning referred to herself as special agent-in-charge, rather than by her military rank. Special Agent-in-Charge Rose Ellen McGahah was a small, solid white woman with hair cut so short it verged on crewcut length. She had a frank manner, a strong Boston accent, and a square face with pale, clear skin and big freckles.

“I wasn't entirely clear from our conversation on the phone what you were looking for, Detective,” she said as she led me back to her cramped, anonymous-looking office. There were no particular decorations in the place other than a couple of plaques on the wall that showed she'd won practical pistol marksmanship awards.

“I was deliberately vague, Agent McGahah,” I said. “I felt this was something that I ought to take up with you in person.”

“Please,” the Special Agent-in-Charge said, pointing at a chair in front of her desk. We sat.

“Here's the tricky thing,” I said, “we're involved in putting together a case involving a string of homicides. We believe, in fact, that we're dealing with a serial killer. But I'll be honest with you; at this point the investigation is fairly preliminary, fairly sketchy.”

McGahah raised her eyebrows slightly. “Where does the Army come into this?”

“I've been doing a survey of unsolved cases in the state that seem to fit the general pattern we're looking at. And I've found one homicide that occurred here at Fort Benning.”

“I think you may be mistaken. We haven't had an on-base homicide in quite some time.”

“This case is almost fifteen years old.”

“Wow. You're saying this guyâI presume it's a guy? Yes? âthis guy has been out there killing people for fifteen years?”

“Close to it.”

“So what are you hoping to accomplish by coming here?”

“I'm here to request that you release your investigative files on this case to the Atlanta Police Department.”

McGahah nodded. “Yes. Well, as I'm sure you might guess, that will involve some fairly extensive paperwork.”

“I had a hunch.”

“What's the name of the victim in the case?”

I wrote the child's name on a piece of paper and pushed it across the desk.

“Was she a soldier? Civilian employee on base? What?”

I shook my head. “Six-year-old girl. A military dependent.”

McGahah looked at me for a while. “My God,” she said, eyes widening. “You're saying you've had a serial killer out there killing kids for fifteen years?”

“Close to it.”

“Why doesn't anybody know about this?” she said sharply.

“This guy's smart. The MOs in the cases are different. He disguises them, makes them look like child abuse by family members. The only way we picked up on it was a subtle thing that showed up in the autopsies. Not a contributor to death, though, so initially nobody picked up the pattern.”

“What kind of thing?”

“Truthfully, I just can't tell you everything right now,” I said. McGahah's face stiffened. “And before you start getting your panties in a wadâwhich I would, too, if I were youâlet me be real clear. This is not some kind of protect-my-turf thing. This is not me wanting to hog the case.”

“What is it then?” she said coolly.

“So farâand, Agent McGahah, I'm going to have to ask you to keep this in absolute confidenceâit's looking like our killer is law enforcement.”

“You're kidding me.”

I shook my head. “No, ma'am. Straight-up truth.”

“You have a suspect?”

“Not, ah, specifically.”

“Well, what I'll need you to do is make a written request for the case file. Might speed things up if it came straight from the Chief's office. Also, we've got a form for you to fill out. You'll need to route that request through the Judge Advocate General. I'll give you the name of the officer you'll need to address it to.”

“How long are we talking?”

McGahah smiled mirthlessly. “A couple months? Six? A year?” She shrugged. “Army bureaucracy, you know how it is.”

I shook my head. “We haven't got a couple months.”

“Fifteen-year-old case, what's the big rush?”

I took a photograph out of my purse, set it on her desk. “Her name is Jenny Dial. We believe our perp snatched her a week and a half ago. Right now, if we can trust our reconstruction of things, she is sitting in a box where she is slowly being starved to death. He will continue to starve her for another month. Then he'll force-feed her for a week to get her weight back up. Then he'll kill her.”

The SAC looked at me for a moment, and then looked away. Her freckles seemed to grow brighter, but I guess it was her face getting paler.

“Let me see what I can do,” she said finally.

She stood and left the room for a while. After about twenty minutes she came back with a thick folder in her hands. “I can't release this to you officially,” she said, “but in the meantime I can let you look at it on a sort of unofficial basis and take notes. Then you can put through your request, and I'll try to expedite it so you can have an official copy.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Before I hand it over to you, though, let me take a look through it. Every law enforcement organization has its quirks in terms of recordkeeping and whatnot. I might be able to save you some effort, point out what's important, how to read between the lines.”

She went through the file carefully, eventually looking up at me.

“I don't know how you guys do it,” SAC McGahah said, “but we don't exactly have a form to fill out that says âThis person is a suspect' at the top. But it's pretty clear our agents investigating this case did, in fact, have a suspect.”

“Okay.”

“The agents who investigated the case looked at a number of people. There was a fellow on base who had been a suspect in a child molestation. He'd never been article six-teened, though, because the case was never proven. Looks like he had a pretty solid alibi. There were a couple of other leads. But based on where they put their efforts and the various tests they ran, it's quite clear who they suspected.”

“And that was?”

“Well, let me give you the general outline of the case first. The girl came up missing in April of 1987 and was found in June. She had been more or less beheaded. So the murder weapon looks like it was a machete, or maybe even a sword. The autopsy shows she had been raped, and that she had not actually been killed until about two months after her abduction. So what the investigators deduced is that the killer was somebody on base. This is an enormous place, Fort Benning. Absolutely enormous. And a lot of it is just woods. There are all kinds of little out-of-the-way shacks and buildings that have been thrown up over the years for one purpose or another, to the point that nobody even remembers where they all are. Believe it or not, somebody who goes wandering around out in the woods a lot might know of all kinds of places where a child could be kept prisoner, and no one would even know.”

“And who might go wandering around in these woods?”

“Well, this base is probably the premier infantry training base in the United States. You've got ranger training, Special Forces, recon, all kinds of guys that go humping around the boonies here.”

“What's recon?”

“Sorry. Everything in the Army has a goofy acronym. In Vietnam they had these guys called âLurps.' That's LRRP. LRRP is the acronym for long range reconnaissance patrol. Now it's called âRecon.' Those are the sort of maniacs who go hiking into the jungle with a knife, a compass, a rifle, and some dried meat; and stay out there for weeks, killing people and blowing up bridges. Crazy types, if you ask me. There's a recon training course here.”

“I see.”

“From the order of the reports, I'd say the investigators decided they had a decent suspect fairly quickly. They ran the rape kit and found that the perp was a secreter. As you know, Detective, that means that the suspect secretes tiny amounts of blood into the seminal fluid, and therefore you can determine the perp's blood type from the semen sample. The blood type found in the semen matched the suspect's blood type. So they brought him in.” She paused significantly. “I guess you already know, the suspect was the girl's father.”

I nodded.

She squinted at the page. “Very experienced soldier, gung-ho type, spotless record, nothing but good reports from his superiors over the years. Silver star from Panama, Purple Heart in Grenada. He was a recon trainer here at Benning, spent lots of time alone in the woods.”

“But y'all never made an arrest.”

“Nope. This was pre-DNA, of course. The perp was O positive, the suspect was O positive. The most common blood type on the planet. The girl's body was found just off a trail that was used in recon training, a trail that the suspect used frequently. And that's absolutely all we had on him. No previous record of child abuse. The investigators sweated him for three days, and he didn't budge one inch.”

“You mentioned a rape kit,” I said. “What I'd like to do is run a DNA test on the rape kit, see if we can come up with a match on any of the later cases.”

“Yeah.” McGahah stroked her chin. “Yeah, see, that gets problematic, giving you the rape kit. We'd be talking about an awful lot of red tape.”

“I don't have to tell you a girl's life is riding on this,” I snapped.

“I know, I know.” The SAC looked thoughtful. “You know what? The Army has one of the best crime labs on the planet. I might be able to get them to run the DNA. Then I could kind of informally pass the test results on to you. Again, pending things getting resolved through channels.”

“How quick would that happen?”

“I've got a few strings I could pull. Given the nature of the situation, we might be able to turn it around in a day or two.”

“That would be fantastic.” I felt a rush of excitement. This was better than I'd hoped, probably a good deal faster than routing it through the GBI crime lab.

“Anything else?” McGahah said.

I shook my head. “Don't believe so.”

The CID officer stood. “You going to catch this bastard?”

“I don't know. We'll have to see what the test results show, won't we?”

“Our suspect in this case, is he your suspect, too?”

“Maybe.”

McGahah looked down at the file again, read off the name of the suspect. “Staff Sergeant Hank Gooch. You know where he's located and all?”

I looked at the CID officer soberly. “Matter of fact, I do.”