Jayne and Steelie - 01 - Freezing (14 page)

Eric barely registered Steelie's thanks before he signed off with her and began dialing an outside line.

Sitting next to Steelie in the lab, Jayne felt groggy from lack of sleep and the after-effects of stress. Steelie's sofa bed was not the most comfortable and she had been awake too long thinking about the wire in the plant tubs. She tried to re-focus on the conference call she and Steelie had just accepted from Thomas Cullen's parents.

Donald and Patricia were each talking over the other. Patricia's sniffles were audible.

Donald was saying, ‘We've heard from a coroner in Alaska – here dear, take the whole box. And they said that—' He was interrupted by Patricia, who seemed to have regained her composure.

‘They said that information you gave them about Tom was what made the difference and—'

Her husband leapfrogged again. ‘We'd like to thank you, very much.'

‘And we wondered if the doctor told you how Tom died?' Patricia sounded hesitant and hopeful.

‘Wasn't he able to tell you anything?' Steelie had to tread carefully, unsure of how Chuck Talbot would have worded things or if there was any mention of the earlier gunshot wound that left the bullet in their son's head.

‘Well,' Donald began, ‘he said they couldn't tell how he died. Now, we didn't think that was possible, but we get most of our information from TV. Is it possible to just not know?'

Jayne answered, ‘Yes, sometimes it can be difficult to tell how someone died, if the body hasn't retained enough traces. If you're concerned, you can have an investigation done by a private pathologist, although they're expensive and may still not give you any answers.'

‘Yes, well, I don't know if we'll go to those lengths,' he said hurriedly. ‘But we thought that before the funeral, we'd make a decision about any more . . . investigation.'

‘Right now, we're just glad to know where he is and to have him back. Thank you – both of you. We never expected answers so quickly.' Patricia sounded on the verge of tears again.

Jayne sat silently watching Steelie as she hung up the phone and wrote a note about the call to add to the Cullen file. Feeling like a sleepwalker, she followed Steelie to the front of the building where Carol was gathering her things for her usual early departure on Fridays.

Steelie asked, ‘Did you speak with the Cullens before you put their call through?'

‘Yes,' Carol paused in her actions.

‘Thanks. They seemed to be in a good place, despite the fact they've just learned their son's been dead for years.'

‘Well, we talked about moving past things we can't change, whether it's related to anger at the police for not finding him sooner or anger at themselves for not being able to prevent what happened.'

Jayne turned from where she was staring absently out the front window. ‘Did you get a sense of how they're going to cope with not knowing exactly how Thomas died?'

‘I think Patricia is finding it difficult. She told me that she's a statistician and is used to mining information for as long as it takes to turn it into meaningful data but . . .' Carol waggled her hand from side to side. ‘She can't really apply that to this situation. I think it's shaking her entire foundation for life, work, everything.'

As Carol left, Steelie handed all her notes related to the Cullen case to Jayne. Jayne stood at the window a minute longer, listening to Steelie walk away, and then she turned into her office. She filed the notes in the folder labeled ‘CULLEN, Thomas, (Tom)' and then took the whole folder to the cabinet that held closed cases. Opening the drawer reminded her of Gene's visit to the office and how unimpressed he'd been by the Agency's completion numbers.

So far, every missing person who'd been found using an Agency 32/1 profile had been found dead. There was no way of telling how many of the missing people were alive or whose bodies had been hidden by killers in the hope they would never be found. She wondered if the killers realized that they harmed countless others by this practice? That it was a further injury?

As she slotted Thomas Cullen's folder in the drawer, she found herself thinking about the bodies she'd helped to exhume from the mass graves near Srebrenica, the steep slopes of Kigali. She thought about the attempts made by the killers to hide the identities of the dead. How it stunted survivors' attempts to grieve, to move on through the healing rites of washing the deceased's body, a funeral followed by cremation or burial, the therapeutic ritual of visiting their relative's grave for the rest of their lives.

The lack of those rituals tortured survivors; individuals who perhaps never came into contact with their torturers. It was in this way that the killers planted seeds of disruption that would germinate well into the future. And in the meantime, bodies lay in the ground, mingled with friends and strangers, teachers, lovers, the person standing next to them when they were pulled off the bus and shot, the person they fell on to when they were hit across the forehead. Jayne saw them all in her mind's eye, the bodies they'd been unable to identify. She'd never known whether subsequent teams had identified them. Yes, it was torture to not know.

She knew where these thoughts could take her but she was still surprised to hear the sob escape. It came from so low down that she clutched her abdomen, thinking she could stop the next one. But it erupted, always stronger than her will, and caught her breath, forcing tears. She wiped them away impatiently and looked at the open drawer of closed cases. The dark recess of the empty section felt like a reproach. She slammed the drawer closed.

‘Pull yourself together,' she muttered. Then, louder, ‘And stop talking to yourself.'

‘Hey, that's my line.'

Jayne whirled. Steelie was in the doorway. ‘Did you have to creep up on me like that?'

Steelie walked into the room. ‘Oh, please! Most of LA heard that file drawer slam shut. I was just the one who pulled the short straw to go investigate.'

Jayne wiped her face and went to sit at her desk.

Steelie looked down at her. ‘Look . . . we just helped get one person home. Right? Focus on the positive.' Her cell phone rang and she looked at the readout.

Jayne listened to Steelie say, ‘Eric! How ya doin'?' and then decided to follow Steelie's advice. She tapped out a short email to Gene, almost boasting that the Agency had closed another case. She pressed
Send
and looked up to see her friend checking her watch.

‘Yeah. Can we make it Café Tropical on Sunset? Do you know it? 'Kay, see you there.' Steelie hung up and turned off Jayne's desk lamp. ‘Come on, let's get some food in you.'

TWELVE

D
iving along Hyperion towards Sunset Boulevard, Jayne kept checking her rearview mirror. ‘Another dark Chevy or maybe a Lincoln Town car.'

‘You've got to look for a spotlight on the driver's side,' said Steelie, turning around to look out the window behind the truck's bench seat. ‘I think whatever you just saw turned into the parking lot at a bank.'

Jayne glanced at Steelie. ‘You say you're not scared by what happened last night and yet you didn't want to put your car on the road today.' She looked in her rearview mirror before glancing over again. ‘I think maybe you are a little scared.'

Steelie jerked a thumb out her window. ‘You just missed the shortcut to Sunset.'

‘Oh, damn.'

Forty minutes later, they were finished with a dinner consumed under an umbrella on the sidewalk outside Tropical. Inside, the Cuban café was busy, diners crowding around varnished pine tables after moving potted spider plants to windowsills to make more space.

Steelie had just gone inside to order coffee when Jayne saw Scott and Eric drive past, looking for a parking space on the adjacent residential street. She ducked inside the door and told Steelie to increase the coffee order.

The Suburban parked at the end of the block. When Scott and Eric came up the street, Jayne noticed that they were still wearing their office clothes: dark pants and white shirts, the latter now open at the neck. They'd removed their jackets and ties but still didn't quite fit in with the Friday evening crowd at the café with its mix of sandal-wearing academics, kids wearing Che Guevara t-shirts, and people who were either too cool or too broke to go to the Westside for entertainment. As she watched the agents advancing, she realized they'd probably never fit in to a café culture because they were too watchful; they took in rooflines and locations of cars, their posture looked more alert than most, and they walked in step with each other without looking like they meant to do it.

Steelie came out as they arrived. They shook hands. ‘How you guys doing?'

‘Glad it's Friday,' Eric replied, taking a chair.

‘I'll second that,' said Scott, putting his hand out towards Jayne.

She took his hand but was afraid he would be able to tell she'd been crying less than an hour earlier, so she addressed Eric. ‘Long week?'

‘Oh yeah. But next week's going to be a doozy.'

‘Why's that?' asked Steelie.

‘Well, we're going to Arizona and if it wasn't bad enough to lose a day driving there, we're on stake-out for a couple of days.'

‘And nights,' said Scott, waving his finger. ‘Can't forget the nights.'

‘What's in Arizona?' Jayne asked, stealing a look at him over the top of her mug.

‘Ironically, it's where the Georgia license plate takes us.' He settled in his seat and told them about tracking down the van through body shops near the freeway.

Steelie said, ‘OK, so you've got this description of a guy and his van and you know he tried to call someone in Arizona. What does that add up to?'

‘Well, we initiated a search of campgrounds between LA and Tucson, figuring that if he headed out there he had to rest at some point.'

‘And,' interjected Eric, ‘given he's got a freezer in the back, he'd need to stop at a place where he could hook up power or recharge a battery.'

‘We got a hit at a KOA campground nine miles west of Phoenix. The old guy who runs the ground doesn't hold much stock in keeping records of license plates but told us that a van matching our description hooked up there last night for just a couple of hours. Seems this old guy had a nice chat with the driver of the van who mentioned he was heading over to Mesa.'

‘Old guy reckons he can learn more about people from talking to 'em, not taking down their ID,' Eric added.

‘Turns out he might be right,' said Scott. ‘We put out a request for Phoenix PD to look out for the vehicle in Mesa and it seems they've found it parked in a suburban side street. The van's the right make and model, the right color, and has a padlock on the back door handles.'

Steelie and Jayne looked at each other.

‘That sounds like the one, right?' said Jayne, turning to Scott.

‘Maybe,' replied Scott. ‘But it's not wearing a Georgia plate. That may or may not be significant because it's easy to flip a plate. But there's enough to warrant checking it out.'

‘I hope it's the right one,' Jayne said, then had to avert her eyes when she had a sudden vision of the body parts by the freeway. A leg, a midriff, Mrs Patterson's arms. Jayne pictured the van in Arizona leading to the rest of Mrs Patterson.

Steelie pushed her chair back. ‘Anyone for more coffee?'

‘I'll get it,' Eric said, joining her as she turned into the café's side door.

Jayne hoped that by looking upwards, the tears welling up in her eyes would just slide back to where they came from. Music from the café's outdoor speakers was suddenly more audible, a live recording of Ruben Blades'
America
.

‘Hey,' Scott said gently.

Jayne chanced a look at him. The tiny movement gave a waiting teardrop its big break and it scudded down her cheek before she could brush it away. But something in his expression made her feel like she might be able to leave the wet trail, that when it was dry, it would be as though it had never happened.

‘Hey, yourself,' she replied. It was their traditional phone greeting and the fact that he'd used it now comforted her.

‘Thinking about Mrs Patterson?'

Her lips parted in surprise. ‘How did you know?'

‘I was thinking about her myself. Or I should say, talking about this case with you and Steelie always makes me think about the victims, not the perps.'

He put his elbows on the table as he looked toward the traffic stopped at the light on Sunset. ‘Y'know, when I was sent to Kosovo, I was just thinking about killers – people who burned their victims alive after locking them in a house – what their psychology was. But once I'd been in one of those houses, trying to work out if my eyes were tricking me or if the ash on the floor was actually a person reduced to a . . . to a fucking shadow . . .'

Jayne felt her arms come out in goose bumps as she watched him.

He looked back to her. ‘Well, I came out just thinking about bodies. And I'd guess that's how it is for you all the time.'

Jayne was stunned into silence. Any time they'd talked about Kosovo before, he'd never described this; just as she'd never described seeing Benni blown to pieces by a mine when on their way to a gravesite . . . that day in northern Kosovo, that day of blood, and sweat, but no tears. Those came later, when she was home, jumpy and demoralized, not sleeping well, the type of person for whom an empty filing cabinet could now produce an outpouring of pent-up grief; mingled grief about victims and killers, graves and booby traps, life and loss. These were her reasons for omission with Scott, and other people. And now she knew he'd omitted things too.

She examined his face, his features softened in the glow of lights threaded along the café's umbrellas, looking for physical traces that he was like her. But he didn't look like damaged goods. He looked rested, excited, and engaged, his fingers twirling the salt shaker on the table between them. She sensed his anticipation to get to Arizona and now understood this fundamental difference between them, why he seemed so balanced. The same phenomena might demoralize them both but where she got stuck or felt overwhelmed, he pushed through, powered on, and closed the case. Maybe he could be future-oriented because it was his job to catch perpetrators who were still out there, not stop at digging up evidence of their past deeds, as she had done, as she had had to do with the UN.