Unrevealed (5 page)

I started to get a sick feeling right about then. It came on faster than food poisoning from bad tuna. I checked to make sure Christy was still occupied leading the afternoon songfest with her off-key pack of kids. And indeed she was. I opened the door that held the calendar and cutouts and was greeted by a set of steep stairs that led into a basement. The door creaked as I closed it and pulled the cord on the overhead light to illuminate my descent into the musty, dirtfloored habitat. As my feet hit the bottom, I was immediately struck by the dampness of the area. Moist conditions tend to accentuate other odors, such as feces and blood and death.

I turned on another light at the foot of the stairs. The walls were brick with cracked mortar.

And then I felt it.

I saw the desperation in the child's eyes.

I felt the fear spreading across the dank space.

I sensed the suffocating torture of dying slowly at the hands of a crazy woman.

Fletcher told me, “Bulls-eye marks the spot.” I canvassed the small basement and saw a large dartboard hanging on the far wall, near the corner. The center of the dartboard had a red dot…a bulls-eye. I quickly crossed to the spot and removed the dartboard. Behind it, I found a section of bricks about eighteen inches tall and twelve inches wide that had obviously been removed and put back in place. Finding a crowbar nearby, I easily lifted the bricks away from the dirt. The smell of death gave it away long before my fingers touched the fingers of the baby.

 

It's taken me several weeks to process all this. I learned fairly quickly that Christy killed the baby before the two teenage girls went to work for her. I also found out that Social Services hadn't been making regular checks at her home because, after all, she was a multi-award-winning, thoughtful, cheerful, church-going, Christian woman who had been given the moniker of “saint.” Nobody could have guessed that Christy was on high doses of four strong drugs to fight severe bipolar disorder and depression and that she'd stopped taking two of them, which pushed her into a cascading psychotic break. At the moment when her mind splintered, she was holding the baby who wouldn't stop screaming and that's when she probably said, “Time to go to sleep, baby,” and proceeded to suffocate it before burying it half-alive in the wall of her basement. The problem was that Christy was so out of it, she didn't see Fletcher watching the whole thing as he hid in the basement behind the water heater.

I don't question how a woman can do that to a baby. I know that evil lingers in the minds of everyone. It just takes the right fuse to ignite it. I know that people looked at my own father and thought he was a great man. I also know that I didn't have a chance in hell of convincing anyone that he
was a monster and that my brother and I were at his mercy. You can't judge a book by its cover.

And I don't question how a fourteen-year-old boy can emerge from the bowels of hell with only a small part of his brain functioning and be able to speak to me with his mind. I don't question the “coincidence” of being chosen that day to speak at Fletcher's school or the “synchronicity” that he “just happened” to be warehoused in the classroom I was in at that time.

And I
never
question my gut. Because my gut has gotten me where I am today. My gut allowed me to survive my own childhood hell and it's led me to solve homicide case after homicide case for more than seven years.

Writing about this whole ordeal has been cathartic for me. I feel a bit lighter right now. Maybe Sergeant Weyler was onto something when he suggested I do this. It sure as hell beats being psychoanalyzed by a Freud-loving woman with a mauve toilet.

My younger brother, Mike, is engaged to be married. Good for him. But the wedding won't be for an entire
year
. I personally don't understand long engagements. To me, it's either do it or don't do it, but don't keep me in suspense. I have to get him a present, and if he thinks it's not going to work with his fiancée, I'd like him to give me a heads-up so I don't have to keep track of the sales receipt in case I have to return his gift.

To further complicate my brother's whole engagement, he and his fiancée, Lisa, decided that they needed to drag it out by first having a “spiritual blessing” by a “shaman.” Mike, if you're reading this (and I
know
you're reading this), why in the hell did we have to drag our asses across two states and end up in Sedona? If the attraction was the New Agers,
we could have packed a lunch and driven over the hill to the Socialist Republic of Boulder, Colorado. It's infinitely closer than Sedona and I could have escaped the gathering sooner.

I hope Mike doesn't hire this “shaman” to marry him because I don't think that quack has a license to do anything except wave a turkey feather and blow sweetgrass smoke in your face. I keep putting “shaman” in quotes because when I think of a
real
shaman
,
I think of a four-foot, ten-inch, oilyskinned Peruvian male wearing nothing but a loincloth and a piercing stare and carrying a humble walking stick. I
don't
think of a bloated, sixty-year-old Jew who looks like Jack Klugman, wearing a Budweiser T-shirt and a
pressed
pair of dark denim jeans. Seriously. They were ironed. Who irons their jeans? Oh, that's right. Bloated, sixty-year-old Jewish “shamans” who drink Bud.

I know, I know. I come off as an abrasive cynic. But it comes with my job. I don't think anyone else at Mike's spiritual blessing gave this “shaman” a second thought. They just accepted him for whatever he said he was and left it at that. But not me. I looked at the “shaman” and pondered what thought process it took for him to craft this odd little image. I wondered what his distraught Jewish mother must think. “My son, the
SHA
man,” I could hear her crying, with a roll of her eyes. Did he scour the Internet looking for “shaman props” to incorporate into his shtick? How many New Age workshops did he sit through in order to develop this ridiculous persona?

People are always saying I'm judgmental. Screw ‘em. It's not judgmental; it's called
observation
. I suggest you learn it. If more people would take the time to observe other people and not just accept what they see on the surface as fact, they wouldn't have so many damn problems. I'm not saying
they'd be happier; I'm saying their lives wouldn't be so complicated. As a cop, I can't help it. It's in my blood to probe beneath the surface. Once you learn the basics of reading body language, posturing, intonations and all the other subtle diagnostic tools good cops use to discern what's in front of them, you gotta go to the next level, and that next level is unexplainable. It's a
knowing
that grips you and leads you toward the truth.

With me, what you see is what you get. No illusions here. But I'm an odd bird in a flock of fakers. I looked around the crowd in Sedona as our “shaman” floated another cloud of sweetgrass across the air. God, what a motley bunch. Those who weren't standing in bare feet were wearing flip-flops. Who in the hell wears flip-flops to a damn “spiritual blessing”? I even spotted one guy wearing a tenement T-shirt. You know? Those sleeveless numbers that are ribbed and so thin you can see the outline of the guy's nipples if a cold wind blows? I thought this guy was waiting around to load up the folding chairs before we left for the “honoring of the elements” down by the water feature, but apparently he was a cousin of Lisa's. America, say hello to your future: It's wearing a damn tenement tee and flip-flops.

We're standing around this stagnant fountain that supposedly symbolizes “emotional freedom” as Mike and his future bride are repeating their “intentions” to each other and I can't take my eyes off this guy in the tenement tee. Lisa's cousin. I'm starting to wonder if maybe I busted him for doobie years ago. I've got a good memory for faces, and I can remember most of the boneheads I've taken down over the last two decades. But I can't figure this one out. Then he looks over at me and nods his head like he's acknowledging me. Now I'm really confused and I can't focus that much,
especially after Mike and Lisa jump on their road bikes to cruise down the hill to the eco-friendly reception where
all
the food is green…even the cake. (I'm serious. I can't make up this shit.) I start to move toward the crowd and this wingnut in the tenement tee makes a beeline for me.

“Hey, Jane,” he says in a hushed voice, his orange flip-flops collecting another layer of dirt and gravel with each step.

He's looking more familiar at this point, but I still can't place him. I nod to him but keep up the wall around me.

“I guess we're gonna be related by marriage now,” he says with a smile, “me the cousin of the bride, you the sister of the groom.”

God help me
, I'm thinking.

“This'll be a different kind of wedding for you and me, huh?” he says.

I bite. “Different in what way?”

“Well, for one, we'll remember it, and for another, we won't make asses of ourselves.”

And
that
is when I knew where I've seen this guy. He sits across from me on the plaid couch with the bad springs in the basement of the Methodist church where they hold the weekly AA meeting.

For those of you who didn't get the memo, I'm sober. (I'm also back working in Denver Homicide after some “negotiations” with Sergeant Weyler. Now I'm
Sergeant
Detective Jane Perry, for what it's worth.)

I'm still getting used to regarding myself as a
recovering
alcoholic instead of a drunk. There's so much more to explain when you're
recovering
than when you're just another tedious, piss-ass alcoholic. People are more likely to accept you when you say you're a drinker, but when you're
recovering
,
there are the inevitable questions of how long you've been sober, what prompted you to get sober, how does it
feel
to be sober, blah, blah, blah. If I made a habit out of indulging in all that shit, I'd have to get a load on just to suffer through it. I'm a very private person. I don't feel a need to wear my addiction on my sleeve and regurgitate my dramas to everyone in earshot. I prefer to stand outside the group and recover alone. But they say you need to have those fellow recovering drunk shoulders to lean on when you start, so I play the game…to a point. I don't have a sponsor. I just can't bring myself to get cozy with some well-meaning ex-alky who keeps insisting that I meet her for coffee so we can “chat.” For me, it would feel like an Amway sales ambush. “Do you have a few minutes, Jane? I'd like to talk to you about your sobriety!” No thanks.

Am I keeping my sobriety a secret? Well, no, obviously not, since I'm writing about it and you're reading it. Did I keep my drinking a secret? Well, yes, in fact, I sure as hell tried. But I had a little trouble keeping the hangovers under wraps and my frequently bloodshot eyes tended to tip my drunken hat. But even so, there were still a few acquaintances who didn't quite appreciate how far I'd fallen into the bottle. But I'll say it again:
they weren't observant
. Just like Mike's Jewish “shaman,” all I had to do was come up with a good cover story and more than one schmo bought this shiksa's lame excuses.

As they say in AA: “You're only as sick as your secrets.” And let me tell you, there are a
lot
of people out there keeping a whole helluva lot of secrets. Our secrets often stalk us, continually reminding us that we're one revelation away from having our human frailties or youthful transgressions laid bare. Some of our secrets are minor, but other secrets
take on their own identity, framing and defining an individual's cloaked life. For those souls, their secrets haunt them, holding them hostage to the fear that one day they will be discovered. The mere thought of being exposed is enough for a few of them to kill; for others, it's enough to make them take their own lives rather than face disgrace.

As I've commented many times while working in Homicide, people kill for one of three reasons: sex, money or gettin' even. When you think about it, secrets inhabit each of those motives: Sexual secrets, financial secrets and sundry secrets that force a person to seek revenge. I had to keep all of that in mind when I worked a case recently involving Mr. Winston Gambrel.

I was paged at 2:22 a.m. a few weeks ago and summoned to Mr. Gambrel's upscale home after Mr. Gambrel hysterically called 9-1-1 to get help for his wife. She had fallen down their circular staircase and sprawled in her lilac nightgown on the Italian tile near their front door. When the paramedics arrived, 65-year-old Gambrel answered the door nude, hyperventilating and sweating profusely. His 59-year-old wife, Abbey, showed signs of serious trauma on her chest and shoulders. Tossed across the entryway, under an 18thcentury secretary from Britain, Abbey's lacy white underwear lay torn and slightly bloody around the lace edge. Mr. Gambrel had surface cuts on his upper thighs. He told the paramedics he didn't know how he got them but assumed it was from scraping against the bedroom furniture as he sleepily made his way through the darkness after he heard a loud thump outside the upstairs bedroom door.

When his wife was pronounced dead, Mr. Gambrel went into what I would best describe as catatonic shock. A deep and soulful wail that cannot be manufactured by anyone
except those who honestly feel it in their bones followed that. “
She's my world
,” he wept. As I stood there in the entryway, sealing the torn and bloodied lacy white underwear in a plastic Kapak evidence bag, I watched the world he knew crumble around him. Amid his grief, a gallery of suspicious eyes observed his every move. Among the paramedics and the other cops on the scene there was a sense that everything was not what it seemed. Mr. Gambrel's story of what happened also changed.