Read The Body Box Online

Authors: Lynn Abercrombie

Tags: #Fiction, #Thriller

The Body Box (12 page)

Jennings groaned yet again. “Look,” he said finally. “There was some dispute. As to what his case-closing ratio was. Our old chief died, and Chief Brunson wanted the job. Only the newspaper, the
Advocate
, they had some kid reporter trying to make a name for hisself. And he was sniffing around, gonna do a story about how Chief Brunson had this terrible case-closing ratio. So he, ah, Chief Brunson, he changed various records. Backdated various reports and files and whatnot. So that all the unsolved cases got put under my name instead of his. And since the old chief wasn't there to dispute it, he got away with it.”
“So you're saying you never worked the Freemont case at all.”
“Well, shoot, if you put it like that . . .” He ran his finger around the lip of his tea glass until it started making a high, irritating noise. “I mean, I was kind of the unofficial assistant detective. Like a gofer, really. I worked uniform half-time and then helped him on cases half-time, driving things up to the state crime lab, whatnot. So, yeah, I kind of followed him around on that case.”
Lt. Gooch shook his head. “Falsifying police records. Mm!”
“Look, please, what do you want to know? I might be able to help you. Somewhat, anyway.”
“Tell us about the case.”
Jennings closed his eyes. “Me and my wife was trying to have a baby at the time. We was going up to Atlanta for these infertility treatments. Cost us all kind of money. I owed some money around town. Took out a note on the house. I just couldn't afford to buck him at that point in time.”
The house was very silent, a kind of silence that only a home without children in it can take on. I took it the infertility treatments hadn't been successful.
Lt. Gooch leaned forward, his sandpapery voice growing soft. “Bud, we ain't here to judge nobody. Talk to us about Lacy Freemont.”
Jennings opened his eyes, took a deep breath, and sat up straight. “To hell with Chief Brunson,” he said. Then, looking at me: “Excuse my French, ma'am.”
I smiled encouragingly at him.
“She was the prettiest little girl I ever saw. Her mama lived in a trailer park out on Highway 29, just past the chicken factory. She wasn't exactly a prostitute—the mama, I'm talking about—but she wasn't exactly
not
. If you know what I mean. There was a lot of men around.”
Lt. Gooch nodded. There was the pattern again. Cute kids. Messed-up families. Poor people with no leverage among cops or politicians, people who couldn't or wouldn't push for thorough investigations, people who wouldn't attract TV cameras or newspaper reporters.
“Chief Brunson, he figured it was one of the boyfriends, probably took her off and killed her. He got it down to two or three of them. But nothing beyond that. One of the fellows we were looking at, he died a couple years later. Cirrhosis of the liver. Another one got convicted of rape in Alabama about six months after Lacy disappeared. Robinson DuPree. Still doing time over there far as I know. The Chief, once he heard that Robinson got arrested, he said to file the case, not bother working it anymore. Figured it had to been him.”
“Anybody else?”
“Well, I didn't do none of the interviews in the case. All the ones with my name on them, they was actually the Chief. Anyway, after the chief told me not to think about it anymore, it got to bothering me. So I went back and I talked to Lacy's mama. Figured I'd just take one last crack at it.” Jennings got a nervous look on his face, stopped talking.
“And?”
“Aw, you know how it is. When you can't solve a case? Lot of times the victim's family gets real belligerent. She started spouting off about Chief Brunson, all this stuff about how this whole thing was his fault, and he was responsible for the girl coming up missing and stuff. I mean Lacy's mama, she'd been drinking a little at the time, so it wasn't entirely clear what she was getting at. I thought she was just mad because he didn't apprehend anybody. But later I realized it was more than that.”
“Meaning what?” Lt. Gooch said.
But Jennings didn't say.
“I asked you a question,” Lt. Gooch said.
Jennings pinched his lips together, still didn't speak.
“Okay, another question then,” I said, not wanting to spoil what little goodwill we had going for us. “Did you get anything off the body? Semen samples, blood samples, anything tangible like that?”
“I think there was a semen sample, yes. Gathered from the girl's, ah, anus.”
“I presume it was never DNA tested?”
“We weren't doing DNA back then. Shoot, be honest, down here we still don't DNA anybody unless we got a likely suspect. Takes a lot of time and money.”
“That sample could still be tested, you know,” I said. “If it was stored properly.”
Jennings looked at me then at Lt. Gooch, then back at me. “Wait, hold on,” he said. “You aren't suggesting I go behind the Chief's back, dig up that sample out of the evidence lockup?”
We just looked at him.
“If the Chief ever found out, he'd kill me!”
“How come? This case is more than a decade old. Okay, so he made you fudge some reports. Why would he care at this point?”
Jennings seemed to be debating with himself about something. Finally he said. “Lacy's mama. She gave me something.”
I spread my hands. “Okay.”
Jennings looked up at his wife. “Darling? Could you give us a minute? This is getting down to police talk. Liable to upset you.”
His wife looked at him for a minute, pulled a wisp of hair back from her forehead, then walked into the kitchen. Jennings watched her go, then stood up and got something out of a knotty pine cabinet against the far wall. A videotape. On the spine, handwritten in faded magic marker, the label read: DATES.
He turned on the TV, slid the tape into his VCR, hit the play button.
“Call 'em johns, call 'em dates, call 'em close friends, I don't know what term you want to use. But what I'm getting at, Lacy's mama, she was making home movies, you know what I mean?”
The screen came up full of electronic snow, then abruptly a blurry, dull image came on the screen. It was an overhead shot of a bed in a small room. A counter in the bottom right corner played the date and time. 10:43 PM 10-28-90. After a minute or two of nothing happening there was a sound of unintelligible voices, then a door opened and two people came in the room—a woman in a shortie nightgown, and a man in a suit. The man in the suit sat down on the bed and started pulling off his shoes. The quality of the video was not good, but it was clear enough that when he turned toward the camera you could make out his features. It was a younger version of Chief John Wayne Brunson. The woman started pulling her nightdress off over her shoulders, then the screen went blank.
“That's it?” I said.
Jennings fiddled with the remote control, frowning, but nothing came on the screen. He ejected the tape, peered at it closely, then frowned. “It's an old tape. Looks like it just broke.”
“Anything else on there?”
Jennings shrugged. “Just them going at it.”
“I'd like to examine that tape,” Lt. Gooch said.
Jennings glanced at him sourly. “Sir, you got one thing right about Chief Brunson. I been under his thumb a long time. But around here there's not a lot of jobs that pays half decent and that gives you good benefits and that lets you retire at forty-five years of age. I been sticking it out while a lot of other officers, good officers, have come and gone. I got one year to go, and I'm not doing anything to jeopardize that pension.” He nodded at the kitchen. “Me and my wife, we had plans to have a family. They didn't come to pass. So we've made some more plans. Get a Winnebago, travel, see some places. But won't none of that come true if I don't stick out this next year.”
“I promise you we won't reveal what's on that tape,” I said. “Or especially where it came from.”
Jennings clamped his thin lips together, looked at me with eyes that were half angry, half sad and pitiful. “You know that's a promise you can't keep,” he said. “And anyway, that's not what I'm talking about. This here's my insurance policy. That bastard, if he should try to get rid of me for one reason or another—like he's done a lot of good men on this force—well, I'm keeping this in reserve just in case.” He smiled then, a pinched angry smile full of bitter triumph and a certain amount of self-contempt.
“Were there any other suspects?” Lt. Gooch said.
Jennings shrugged. “Not really.”
“Cable guy? Creepy stranger? Strange landlord?”
“Way she told it, Chief Brunson
was
the creepy stranger.”
“You think he did it?”
The angry little smile came back. “Sometimes I wish it had been him. But I checked on his whereabouts the day Lacy disappeared.” He shook his head. “Wasn't him. He was up at a seminar in Atlanta at the GBI crime lab.”
“Is Lacy's mother still around?”
Jennings shook his head. “Married some trucker, moved up north. I never heard where to, exactly.”
We asked a few more questions, but didn't make any particular headway.
As we got up to leave, Jennings said, “Earlier? Y'all said a little girl was fixing to die?”
“Yep,” Lt. Gooch said.
“What'd you mean by that?”
“Just what I said.” Gooch got up and walked swiftly to the front door, not looking back.
TWENTY
It was getting late by then. Gooch pulled the car into a cracked parking lot just off the interstate and said, “Motel 6 okay with you?”
“Can't we do better than that?”
Lt. Gooch turned toward me. A passing car briefly lit up his cold blue eyes, then his face went dark again. “You want you a mint on your pillow? I could drive down to the Exxon station, get you one.”
“Whatever,” I said. “Whatever.”
 
 
The next morning we ate biscuits at Hardee's, then drove up to Macon, where the fourth child, a boy named Junebug Miller, had disappeared.
After we'd driven for about half an hour, not saying a word during breakfast, not a word on the ride over toward Macon, I said, “Lieutenant, you must be the most phlegmatic guy I've ever met in my life.”
“Phlegmatic.”
“Reserved. Quiet. Unwilling to talk. Keeping your thoughts bottled up inside. Always sitting there with something going on in your head and everybody around you wanting to know what you're thinking, but you're so stubborn that you just—”
“I know what phlegmatic means.”
“I'm supposed to be your partner. I'm supposed to be helping you solve this case. And yet you keep shutting me out, acting like this whole thing is some big need-to-know secret. How am I supposed to help, how am I supposed to contribute if you treat me like a four-year-old?”
“Why should I talk? You do plenty of talking for the both of us.”
“Dammit, that's not answering my question.”
We drove for a while, then Lt. Gooch said, “You want to talk about the case, talk about the case. Tell me your observations, where we're at.”
“Okay. In Columbus, we've got this house painter who seems to have law-enforcement experience. Then Evie Marie's mother told us about this guy who's supposedly her brother's parole officer, only her brother's not on parole. Then we've got Lacy Freemont's mother making vague accusations about Chief Brunson.”
Lt. Gooch took his Dixie cup off the dash, dribbled some brown juice in it. “No.”
“Whoa, whoa, what you mean,
no
?”
“I know what you're going to say. Maybe we got a law-enforcement connection, and therefore maybe we should take a hard look at Chief Brunson.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And I'm saying, no. I'm saying we'd be wasting our time.”
“Why?
Lt. Gooch squinted out the windshield.
“See!” I said. “There you go again. Either you got a reason, but you're not telling me, or else you've got no reason and you're not willing to admit it because you're a mule-headed boot-scooting banjo-playing pea-picking snuff-dipping inbred country-ass redneck cracker fool. Just like everybody around the department says. Which one is it?”
Lt. Gooch smiled thinly. “Feel better?”
I blew a bunch of air out through my lips, but didn't say anything.
 
 
Macon was moderately helpful, but the case there was sketchy for a variety of reasons. Milledgeville was worthless. The detective who had worked the case was retired to Florida, various records had been burned in a courthouse fire, and nobody currently working in the department had been involved in the case. In Walton County, though, we cornered the Sheriff's detective who'd worked the Becky Lynn Trotter case, enrolling his support with an offer of a free steak dinner at the Western Sizzlin'.
The detective—a short, balding man in his late thirties named Guy Watson—allowed that there had been a man hanging around the family of the victim who had bothered them a little at the beginning of the investigation.
“Yeah, well, what it was,” Detective Watson said, “Becky Lynn's stepdaddy claimed he'd been stopped by a state trooper. Speeding or blowing a stop sign, something like that. Said the state trooper kept looking funny at Becky Lynn. Said he didn't think much about it, only the state trooper came around their house a couple times on some type of pretext. And all the time, he's giving Becky Lynn the eye.”
“So did you pursue that angle?” I said. “There's not much in the file about it.”
“Well, I asked the stepdaddy, Ferlin Joyner was his name, I asked Ferlin to show me the ticket that this alleged trooper had given him. Well, he changes his story: now it's not a ticket, the trooper only gave him a warning. Okay, I can see where this is going.
Do you remember this trooper's name, Mr. Joyner?
Ferlin says, sure. His name's . . . Well, I forget what he told me. I imagine it's in the file. So I called up Post Five, which is the state patrol zone we're in, they never heard of this supposed state trooper.”
“Did you confront him with this?”
“That isn't in the file?”
“What isn't?”
“Well, see, we found the little girl near the trailer park where Ferlin Joyner used to live. I told Ferlin he was lying. He lawyered up. Two days later we go out to his apartment, turns out he's hit the road. Just flat disappeared.”
“There's nothing in the file about how this case was resolved,” I said.
The detective looked uncomfortable for a moment. “That was the same time we had those two big rape cases. That student from University of Georgia? Raped those two ladies over at the Wal-Mart parking lot? Y'all didn't hear about that over in Atlanta?”
I hid a smile. Two rapes in a Wal-Mart parking lot would barely raise a ripple in Atlanta. “No, I believe we missed that one.”
“Point is, it was a whale of a big thing out here, two rapes in two weeks. We got all hot and heavy into working that rape case and . . . Well, since it looked like Ferlin had killed his daughter, we just kind of . . .” He shrugged. “I guess the paperwork got neglected. We put a national want out on him through the FBI, figured he'd turn up somewhere. But he never did.”
“What about forensic tests? The case file said there was possible DNA source, but then there's nothing about any test results.”
Det. Watson squinted at me curiously. “Sure. That's what nailed it. There was blood under the gal's fingernails. We ran the DNA. Of course DNA tests always take a long time. So it didn't get back until after we'd put that rapist in the pokey, that kid from UGA. But it came back a definite match.”
“You're saying it was definitely Ferlin's DNA was under her fingernails? Her stepfather's DNA?”
“Sure.”
“That wasn't in the file.”
Watson frowned. “Hell, it should have been.” Then he smiled ruefully. “I got to admit, paperwork's never been my strong suit.” He poked the basket in the middle of the table with his fork. “Either of y'all want that last biscuit?”
“Hold on, hold on,” I said. “You're saying this guy killed his daughter, and he's still out there somewhere? Are you even looking for him anymore?”
The detective shrugged. “Like I say, I put his information into the system, swore out a warrant, whatnot. I run him through the computer every few months. Don't get the impression I totally let this thing drop. But he's just flat
gone
. If a fellow in America wants to get lost, it ain't that hard to do. He keeps his head low, we probably ain't gonna find him.”
 
 
As we drove back to Atlanta that night, I said, “I don't know, Lieutenant. I'm still just not sure if there's a pattern here. Yeah, Marquavious had that bone decalcification that we found in Evie Marie Prowter. But how do you explain Vernell's being a DNA match to the semen found on Marquavious? This Ferlin Joyner guy was a DNA match to his stepdaughter. There just aren't common perps here.”
“Look in the autopsy. All these kids, they're missing for at least two months, then when they're found, there's significant bone decalcification. That's no accident.”
“Yeah, but maybe there's some explanation for this starvation thing, something that would take away the connection we thought we had.”
“I've searched every bit of the literature, believe me. There's nothing about bone decalcification.”
“But maybe there's not—”
“Then we've got the unexplained calluses on the necks and backs of about half of them.”
“And
not
on the other half.”
“Plus, almost all these cases, we got a suspicious stranger. In the Becky Lynn Trotter case, it's this state trooper.”
“Who apparently didn't exist.” I was feeling exhausted and depressed. We'd been going nonstop for days, and it seemed like we weren't any closer than we'd been last week. I was beginning to feel like that stack of seventeen cases was probably a lot bigger than it should have been. I couldn't help feeling like Jenny Dial was less and less likely to be alive with every minute we threw away on these old cases. “Maybe it's nothing, Lieutenant. Maybe we're wasting our time.”
Lt. Gooch didn't answer.
“And how do you explain the DNA?” I said.
“I don't,” he said. But there was something in his tone of voice, something I can't identify, that made me think he knew more than he was telling me. Yet again.
What are you hiding?
I kept thinking.
 
 
It was almost midnight by the time I got home, but I wasn't sleepy at all. I realized that I'd been feeling a growing sense of anger and resentment the whole time we'd been on the road, a bitter feeling that I was being mistreated, taken for granted, misled, disrespected, and quite possibly still being lied to. Feelings of resentment, that's what they said in the program that you were supposed to especially guard against. But I couldn't help it. The case was turning out to be messy and unsatisfactory—maybe not even a case at all, but just a bunch of unconnected tragedies, not a serial killer but a serial mirage.
And Hank Gooch was making it worse. With his superior attitude, looking at me with those cold blue eyes, snapping at me, withholding information. How much more stuff was he holding back? Was there information that he was still hiding from me for some reason, something that glued this case together more strongly than just the two puzzling details of the decalcification and the calluses, or this mysterious stranger who may or may not have even existed at all? He had specifically told me when I first started looking at cases to find one with DNA evidence. Now here we were with DNA evidence to burn, and none of it added up to squat. I lay down on my bed and tried to go to sleep, but all I could think about was how mad I was at Lt. Hank Gooch.
I got up and turned on the computer, tried to log onto the Web site where my little son's pictures were—but it came up an Error 404 again, address not found. So they'd done it. That smug bastard David Drobysch, up in his pretty house, had decided it was too messy keeping me in the loop. Somehow he'd found out I was poking around in his server, that I'd probably figured out who he was. And now he was cutting me off.
I looked down at my hands. They were shaking with anger. In the program, they said that managing your anger was half the battle. They taught some little techniques—breathe in, breathe out, things like that. I breathed in and out four or five times until finally I felt like I was going to explode.
“Breathe in, breathe out?” I said. “Bull
shit
.”
I lay down in the bed, feeling the anger in my belly like a hot little fire. When in doubt, go to a meeting. That's what they said in the program. I hadn't been to a meeting in months.
Ten minutes later I was down at the Korean grocery on the corner of Memorial Drive. Just a little something to help me sleep, that was all I needed. Not anything hard. Just something to take the edge off. There was a picture of a big blue bull busting through a wall on the cooler behind the counter. Malt liquor, sure. The official beverage of no-account black folks everywhere. That would be just about the right thing.

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