The Ragman's Memory (7 page)

There was a long pause before the voice came back. “You have a warrant?”

Ron sighed and visibly relaxed. I resisted telling Mrs. Davis that she’d been watching too much TV, and instead used her own preconceptions against her. “We don’t need a warrant for a conversation. We can get one, though, if we think you’re trying to hide something from us.”

The lock snapped angrily and the door swung back to reveal an angular, bitter, pale woman in her thirties with a dirty face and several missing teeth. She was dressed in a pair of tight blue jeans and a red-and-white wool shirt, pulled out to disguise a malnourished, swollen stomach. The hot smell that swept out to greet us made me realize how lucky we’d been to be chatting through a barrier.

“Fucking cops,” she said and turned her back, vanishing into the gloom.

Ron and I tentatively followed, instinctively moving to opposite sides of the door frame once we’d entered. Both of us had spent too many years exploring similar buildings to feel any safety within them.

I narrowed my eyes to see into the darkness, breathing shallowly until I could get used to the stench. I heard the creak of sofa springs as the woman’s dim shape folded into a dilapidated couch against the far wall. My vision improving, I saw by the live cigarette in the ashtray by her elbow that she’d been sitting there before our arrival, presumably in the dark, doing nothing.

I didn’t bother looking for a seat, not wishing to overexpose myself to my surroundings. “You are Wilma Davis?”

She snorted and then coughed, reaching for the cigarette.

“You don’t even know that much? This is going to be great.”

“And your daughter is Shawna?”

“You already said that.”

“She went to the dentist’s office under a year and a half ago to have a cap put on one of her teeth. Do you remember that?”

“Sure I do. Figured she couldn’t get boyfriends if she didn’t have all her teeth. I told her men don’t give a fuck about a woman’s teeth—not what they look for anyway. Cheaper to have ’em pulled. Cost a god-damn fortune.”

She dragged on her cigarette.

I paused, waiting to see if she’d say more, but she’d apparently run dry. I was struck by her lack of curiosity about why we were here. “Why didn’t she go back to get the job finished?”

“It was finished enough,” she answered disgustedly. “She got the fucking cap. Where did she think the money would come from?”

“You paid for the cap?” I asked.

“Who the hell else was going to? Of course I paid for it.”

I thought for a moment, filtering her words from their meaning.

Despite the overstated anger, she’d acquiesced to her daughter’s desire to get her tooth fixed and had obviously paid for it at great sacrifice. “You knew it was only a temporary repair—that the tooth would rot unless a permanent cap was put in?”

She crushed the cigarette out as if she wished my eye were beneath it. “I’m no fucking moron. That’s what got me so pissed off. I was playing ball with the little jerk. I was going along with the whole deal. I had the goddamn money.”

She finished in a snarl, and hurled the dead butt into the darkness of a far corner.

I took a guess. “But by the time the second appointment came around, Shawna was gone.”

Instead of answering, Wilma Davis merely dug into her breast pocket for another cigarette, which she lit with trembling fingers.

“Why did she leave, Mrs. Davis?” I asked after a few moments.

Her voice had calmed. “Why do they all leave? I did. Everybody leaves, sooner or later.”

“You know where she went?”

“I was the last person she was going to tell. I came home one day, and she was gone. That was it.”

“When was that?”

“Late last April… What’d she do, anyway? Rob a bank?”

Nine months ago, I thought. I ignored her belated question for the time being, sensing she’d been anticipating the worst from the start. “Did she have any friends we could talk to? Someone she might’ve kept in touch with?”

She leaned forward in her seat, stabbing the cigarette in my direction, her question already moot in the misery clouding her mind. “I can sure as hell see you don’t have kids. They don’t
talk
to you; they don’t tell you their friends’ names; they don’t tell you shit. You watch their faces, looking for the child you knew, and all you see is they hate your guts. They bleed you dry, and then they drop you like shit.”

She rose and approached me, still talking as if her rage might stave off the pain we both knew was coming. I heard Ron shift slightly, returning to the defensive. “You want to know who her friends are? Go find them yourself. ’Cause when you do, she’ll probably be there, too, doing drugs and getting fucked by men who won’t look her in the face. That’s what happens to little children, mister. I know. But you can’t do anything about it. You can kick and scream all you want, but the more you do, the more they want to leave. You tell ’em the truth—as plain as the shit on your shoe—and they tell you you’re full of it.”

She had closed the gap between us, her face inches from mine, the cigarette forgotten in her hand. Her breath encircled my head. “You find her, policeman, you tell her I’m dead, just like she is. She won’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, but she’ll find out soon enough.”

In the twilight from the greasy windows, I could see the tears in her eyes—the shiny paths they left on her cheeks. “Will you do that? Will you tell her?”

I did look her in the face and chose not to lie. “We might’ve already found her, Wilma. And if I’m right, maybe you can bury some of your grief along with her. She’s not in pain any longer.”

She stared at me in silence for a moment and then burst out sobbing.

GAIL TOOK A BITE OF PIZZA
and chewed thoughtfully for a minute. We were sitting at either end of the kitchen’s small serving island, late at night, enjoying the novelty of a shared meal, even if it was garnished, I noted wistfully, with vegetables only.

“What did you do then?”

“Asked to see Shawna’s room. There wasn’t anything useful—no letters or diaries—just posters and stuffed animals and what-have-you. But it was so dark and gloomy… And dirty. Tough way to live.”

“I thought maybe Wilma’s phone records might help—give us a clue to who Shawna was calling her last few weeks at home. ’Course, that was wishful thinking—I suppose I should’ve been happy she had a phone at all, much less a filing system. I’ve got Ron pestering the phone company for it instead. We should have something tomorrow. She did have a recent snapshot she let us have.”

I paused to eat a slice myself, watching Gail cross the kitchen to refill her glass with milk. It was during small moments like this that I was happiest we’d moved in together. Despite the crisis that had stimulated the decision, I found myself uncannily comfortable with the end result, wondering why we’d staved it off for so long.

“After that, we went to the local high school,” I continued. “Talked to teachers, advisors, administrators—basically anyone who’d known her—and finally we chased down a couple of her old friends. But we didn’t get much—she was a loner, a dreamer, someone easily influenced by a smile and a good line. Her grades were lousy, she had zero ambition, her social skills were inept. She was plain and insecure and dying to get away. They all said her relationship with her mother was the pits.”

“No ties to Brattleboro?”

I shook my head and spoke with a full mouth. “No ties anywhere except to her hometown. When we first came up with Shawna’s name, we did a complete computer search. Nothing came up. The joke would be if the bones aren’t hers at all.”

“You see today’s paper?” Gail asked after a brief pause. I gave her a dour look, feeling twinges of familiar dread. “No. What did they do?”

“Nothing bad. They screwed up a little on the details, saying the piece of jaw you found was from the mandible instead of the maxilla, and they pumped up what you found a bit, making it sound like you’d sent a small graveyard of bones to Waterbury, but it was basically okay. They toed the line on the possible cause of death, quoting you that there was no sign of foul play so far, and they kept the little girl’s name out of it. Still, it’s causing the expected ripple around town.”

Given her many political contacts in Brattleboro—she’d served on the board of selectmen for years, among other high-visibility organizations—I knew Gail wasn’t referring to local gossip. I also knew she hadn’t brought up the newspaper article to make idle conversation. “Who from?”

She shrugged vaguely. “Some of the church groups, the halfway house, a few mental health people—the last two worried their customers’ll be hassled by the PD for questioning. And the selectmen… I heard the town manager’s phone was ringing off the wall with all the official hand-wringing about more violence in our streets.”

She turned her attention back to her meal, but I’d caught her meaning. Any political heat was troublesome enough, even as a routine part of the process. The fact that it was building so fast, based on the discovery of a few small bone shards, was unusual. It gave me the queasy feeling there might be something stirring I knew nothing about.

· · ·

The follow-up story on the “mystery bones” ran on the front page the next morning. I had called Christine Evans—Norah’s science teacher—the day before as promised, and she’d been more than happy to talk to Katz and his reporters. A photograph of her appeared beneath the headline, and she was heavily quoted throughout the article, expounding on the habits of scavengers and the aging of bones. I appreciated her keeping Norah’s name out of it, but my earlier affection for her was dampened by what I’d since discovered about Shawna Davis. That anyone should benefit from the remains of a girl so neglected in life was an irony I couldn’t appreciate.

Except that we still had only circumstantial evidence linking Shawna to our body—an ambiguity we needed to settle.

J.P. Tyler knocked on my open door as I was finishing the paper. “I got a fax from the lab early this morning and followed it up with a phone call.”

I waved him to the plastic guest chair by my desk.

He sat down gingerly, a sheaf of papers clutched in his hand. J.P. was not a “people person”—an inhibition that only worsened when he was faced with someone superior in rank, regardless of how accommodating they tried to be. Still, it made me extremely grateful that while our budget was as anemic as any other department’s in town, we could still afford to equip, train, and entertain Tyler enough to keep him with us.

“First off,” he began a little ponderously, “most of the bone tissue we sent them was human. What we thought came from animals, did. And the PCR DNA test they ran links the hair to the skull and the teeth. But that’s about as definitive as they want to get so far. They think the person was a young Caucasian female, but they stress that these are statistically-based findings and have a twenty percent or better chance of being wrong. It might’ve been better if we’d had more to give them, but even with the other skull fragments we excavated from under the doghouse, it wasn’t as much as they would’ve liked. They favor long bones and the pelvic girdle—that’s where most of the aging and sex studies they use for base data have concentrated.”

Despite the care and speed the lab had expended on our behalf, I couldn’t help feeling a twinge of irritation. I’d put Shawna Davis’s face on this cast-off corpse hoping the lab would reward my faith. Now I not only didn’t know if I had a bona fide homicide on my hands, I didn’t even have a rock-solid identity for the victim.

“What else?” I asked.

He held out half the papers in his hand, all of them long computer-generated printouts with rows of lie-detector-style spikes on each one, accompanied by near-hieroglyphic annotations lining the margins. “These are toxicological analyses of the hair sample. None of them can tell sex or age either, but hair is a good indicator of other things. It grows at a little over a centimeter per month, and retains many of the chemicals ingested by the host.”

He leaned forward and began spreading out the sheets, pointing at the various spike patterns. “Some of these are legal drugs—like dextromethorphan—that’s found in a cough syrup called Robitussin DM, for example—so we can guess she either had a cold a couple of months before she died, or maybe she took it to get high. Anyhow, there’s also some marijuana—at multiple points—and finally,” he concluded, extracting a sheet from the bottom, “this: phenobarbital.”

“Sleeping pills?”

“Stronger—it’s a barbiturate. The longest-lasting available. The kicker is that it surfaces right at the root of the hair shaft, implying she was on it at the time of her death, although they tell us to allow a week’s margin for error with all this.”

“So she committed suicide?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so. The reading indicates a prolonged exposure—like a week or so. Taking a guess, I’d say she was sedated.”

My earlier irritation began to fade. “Can you tell if the amount was high enough for that? Maybe she just had a bad week getting to sleep.”

Tyler sat back. “I thought of that. Mass spec analyses aren’t as refined as urinalyses when it comes to specific amounts, but I checked the
Physician’s Desk Reference
for dosage recommendations, and it said that 120 milligrams of phenobarbital, three times a day, is the most you’d want to give an adult for sedative purposes. It’s true that different bodies metabolize chemicals at different rates and react to varying quantities, but this reading’s consistent with that dose—and there’re no other indicators along the hair shaft showing prior phenobarbital use. Had there been, it might have explained a growing tolerance for the stuff and a consequent need for more of it. The hair goes back almost twenty months, by the way.”

“But there’s no way to say the phenobarbital killed her?”

Tyler shook his head.

“You said earlier the hair had been dyed. You get anything back on that?”

He showed me another printout. “I gave the information to Sammie earlier. She’s checking on it now. The infrared analysis pegs the dye to only two manufacturers. If we’re lucky, we’ll be able to eliminate the hairdressers that don’t use this color, and maybe a few others that don’t use these brands, and end up with somebody who remembers her.” He glanced hopefully at Shawna’s photograph I had taped to the wall before me. “One thing that might help is that the hair grew one and a half centimeters after the dye was applied, or about six weeks before she died.”