Condemned: A Thriller Read online

  “Show some respect, for Christ’s sake,” Dray said. He climbed effortlessly up onto the stage while Aragon walked around to the side and ascended stairs buried in plaster dust like drifted snow. He removed a pair of surgical gloves from his jacket, snapped them on, and crouched beside the girl.

  She was sprawled in a way common only to the deceased. Her joints were bent at impossible angles and her face looked blankly back over her shoulder. Her skin was translucent white; the bruises on her back and thighs stood out like the spots on a Dalmatian.

  Dray carefully rolled her onto her back and looked away from her nakedness. He was one of the most chivalrous and compassionate people I’d ever known, which was undoubtedly why Aragon noticed before he did.

  She stood behind Dray and shined the light over his shoulder and onto the woman’s upper chest and neck.

  “What the hell is capable of doing something like that?”

  THREE

  The Crime Scene Response Team and MSP Trooper Evidence Technicians arrived while I was being escorted from the scene. Harper was awash with red and blue lights from the cruisers parked along the curb and around both sides of the Eastown. Neighbors had gathered in front of the vacant strip mall across the street and in the urban prairie to the east to watch the drama unfold from a safe distance. I took pictures of them from beneath the gas bays at the Mobil station, where I found the guy I paid to watch my Blazer staring distractedly toward the theater while a group of kids tried to pop the lock on my driver’s side door with a slim jim they probably made in shop class. The thunk of the doors unlocking by remote sent them running.

  I hopped up on the hood and watched the van from the Wayne County Medical Examiner’s Office slip in the back way off Malvern and judder across the vacant lot behind the Eastown to the asphalt apron where I entered the building. Once the CRST was finished, they’d take the body out the back, away from prying eyes and cameras. A part of me wanted to sneak back there and get some shots of them loading the body bag into the van, despite the deal I made with Dray not to pursue the story further until after they ID’d her and notified her family. In exchange, he promised me an exclusive, which, based on the nature of her wounds, would likely mean a landslide of advertising revenue. I kind of liked all of the cool gizmos and gadgets I received in trade—like the bulletproof vest and the mini stealth light—but I liked cash even more, especially when it came to luxuries like paying my rent and, you know, eating.

  I won’t pretend to be an expert on pathology or the intricacies of tissue wounds, but even a layman like me could tell the girl had been attacked by some kind of animal. Her flesh looked masticated and raw and I could see the tendons and vessels exposed by the torn skin.

  I took a couple more pictures with my cellphone before switching on my remote hotspot and logging onto the Internet. The population of Detroit in 1950 was 1.8 million people, all of them living high on the hog in the post-World War II heyday of American industrialism. During the intervening years it steadily dwindled to a mere seven hundred thousand, forty percent of its former glory, and there was a complete reversal of its racial demographics. Back then the population was 83% white; today the exact opposite is true. While I was reluctant to consider any racial component to the murder, I knew her ethnicity would make it a thousand times easier to identify her. The sad reality was black girls went missing every day, but a missing white girl was a headline event.

  It took me all of two minutes to find what I was looking for. Her name was Lindsay DeWitt and she was reported missing three days ago from the University of Michigan-Dearborn campus, roughly a dozen miles straight down the Edsel Ford Freeway to the southwest. She was a pretty little thing. Hair like spun gold and eyes the color of a tropical sea. She was twenty years old and two years removed from a second runner-up finish in the Miss Michigan Pageant, which awarded her enough money to cover her entire sophomore year at UM-D. According to her bio, her life’s ambition was to “work with underprivileged youth to help steer them toward a better future.”

  She was reported missing by her roommate, Tiffany Lockley, who said Lindsay left at the usual time for her early morning jog on the Rouge River Greenway Trail. Tiffany had an early class and was gone before Lindsay returned. The two usually met back at their apartment for a late lunch. She became suspicious when Lindsay’s sports bra and leggings weren’t hanging over the shower rod, as she always left them, and her backpack was still on the kitchen table. By the time she contacted all of Lindsay’s friends and the campus police, nine hours had passed since the theorized window of her disappearance, although the police didn’t organize a search until a full day later. By then whatever evidence might have existed was long gone. They dredged the river the following morning. Within forty-eight hours, the Michigan State Police, Dearborn PD, and the law firm representing her parents had raised a fifty thousand dollar reward for any information leading to her safe return.

  I pocketed my phone and thought about the possible paths that had led her from jogging on a heavily frequented trail to hanging naked in an abandoned building three days later, looking like she’d been attacked by a wild animal. None of those paths led me anywhere my mind wanted to go.

  The headlights from the ME’s van silhouetted the Eastown before bounding across the weeded lot to the north and speeding away into the night.

  I pictured her parents sitting by the phone, their eyes bloodshot and tempers frayed from lack of sleep, desperately praying for it to ring, only when it finally did, it would bring them news that would irrevocably alter the course of their lives. In a matter of hours they’d be standing over the body of their little girl, her face stark white and her lips starting to blue from the cooler. I imagined the mother sobbing and collapsing to the floor while her father attempted to remain strong and said the words that would haunt him until his dying day: “That’s her. That’s my baby girl.”

  This wasn’t the kind of story I covered. Mine was a site dedicated to drawing attention to the plight of a dying city and improving the quality of life of its forgotten people, those who lacked the communal voice to cry for help from a nation accustomed to looking the other way. And yet here I was, drawn into the middle of the investigation through no fault or desire of my own. The thought of treading on the body of a dead white girl to bring national recognition to the ails of our city made me sick to my stomach, but I had to believe it was no accident that I found myself in this position and needed to take full advantage of it.

  I climbed in my car and sat with the engine running while I contemplated what I should do next.

  Dray’s black Explorer was parked a block to the west on Harper. I debated leaving a note suggesting me meet up for breakfast under his windshield wiper, but I figured he’d take it the wrong way under the circumstances. He bristled around reporters, much like his partner, who jogged out to her unmarked Caprice Classic as I watched. Behind her, uniformed officers fanned out from the Eastown to canvass the neighborhood for anyone who might have seen anything. The crowds dissipated like smoke when they approached. Judging by their body language, the cops knew as well as I did that if anyone saw anything, they weren’t about to say a word.

  Bad things had a way of happening to people who opened their mouths in the Murder Capital of the United States.

  FOUR

  I lease an apartment in the New Lafayette Towers off of Orleans Street. The rent’s a little steep for a studio with barely five hundred square feet, but I have a sixth-floor view of Lafayette Central Park and on a clear day I can see the Windsor skyline across the Detroit River. It doesn’t hurt that I’m within walking distance of Ford Field and situated at a hub of highways from which I can easily get to any part of the city in a hurry. The optimist in me refuses to acknowledge my proximity to the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel, while the pessimist takes comfort from the fact that I’ll be one of the first people out of town if the whole city goes up in flames.

  My computer setup occupied the majority of my living space. It was an older Al
ienware desktop that I’d customized through the years into the kind of machine that a burglar wouldn’t spare a second glance, but could run circles around just about any other computer out there. The bumper sticker on the side had a picture of a camera and read “I Shoot People for a Living.” I housed my own servers and backup storage under my bed, which was supported by concrete blocks. I routinely paid an old college buddy to upgrade my security and firewalls; the first time I got hacked I’d lose what little credibility I’d established in the community and find myself back in the unemployment line with every other journalist I knew.

  I grabbed a Granny Smith from the fridge and plopped down in what I like to think of as my captain’s chair. I’d developed a system of typing with my right hand and eating with my left. When I heard that apples had as much caffeine as coffee without the Beavis-like jitters, I made the transition without a second thought. I didn’t have to waste twenty minutes waiting for a pot to brew, my stomach was no longer a seething pit of acid, and there was zero risk of spilling it all over my livelihood. Plus, when a tip came in, I could just grab one on my way out the door.

  As it turned out, though, there was no truth to the statement whatsoever. The whole caffeine thing was just a rumor, presumably perpetuated by the nefarious apple cartels to hook people like me on their product. However, the high natural sugar content and low glycemic index did have the same stimulating effect on the body, and at a cost of roughly two-fifty for a five pound bag instead of twice as much for a single freaking latte.

  The tweet alerting me to the non-existent scrappers at the Eastown had already been deleted, along with the account from which it originated. While the police could subpoena the identity of the person who opened the account under the name @anachronist, I certainly couldn’t. Besides, if whoever sent the message was responsible for the death of Lindsay DeWitt, I doubted he was so stupid as to set up the dummy account from his home computer. I’d already given the name to Dray, so he probably had half a dozen tech guys chasing down that angle by now.

  I remembered the name specifically because it spoke to me on a personal level; it might as well have been my own screen name for how perfectly it described me. I’d never really thought of myself in those terms, but when it came right down to it, I was a self-professed anachronistic, someone who refused to accept the modes of life characteristic of his time. Perhaps a better definition would be someone who believed the past contained treasures lost to us, but held out hope that they could still be recovered. Regardless of the definition, the irony was not lost on me.

  The pictures from my cellphone uploaded without complication. I perused them while my coffee machine dribbled Folgers into the carbon-scored pot. Nothing struck me as extraordinary about the Eastown from the outside, at least nothing relevant to the death of a young girl. The majority of the people gathered in the glow of the light bars wore hooded sweatshirts or caps pulled down low to hide their eyes. There wasn’t a white face among them and no one stood apart from the crowd. I watched enough TV to know that killers often returned to the scene of the crime or inserted themselves in some way into the investigation; I just hadn’t watched enough to know how to pick them out if they did.

  I saved the images onto my hard drive, backed them up to the server, and sent them to Dray in case he might be able to see something I missed. I also hoped it might prod him into a response I could use to open a dialogue about the case without coming across as a vulture eager to peck at the body.

  While I waited, I Googled Lindsay DeWitt and sifted through the various, largely superficial mentions, most of which were press releases of her top-three finish at the Miss Michigan Pageant. The attached picture featured Lindsay in a powder-blue dress from the breasts up. Her shoulders were turned almost sideways to the camera and her hair had been swept to one side so it cascaded down her chest. She wore dangling earrings that matched her gown and a smile that made her look as though she kept a secret to which only she was privy. It was her eyes that drew my attention most, and I found myself wondering how anyone could have possibly beaten her for the crown.

  She was labeled Miss Ludington Area and as such represented a small collection of communities along the Lake Michigan waterfront, on the opposite side of the state from Detroit and at the opposite end of the societal spectrum.

  When I added “Ludington” to the search, I found dozens more entries. She held the distinction of being named both homecoming queen and valedictorian of her senior class. She made the dean’s list at UM-D her freshman year and was photographed on several occasions with one of the alternate captains of the men’s hockey team. She was the eldest daughter of Barry and Eleanor DeWitt. He served as the district attorney of Mason County and she taught at the elementary school. Lindsay’s younger sister was a junior in high school and already crowned Junior Miss Ludington Area. Outside of her old man’s prosecution of criminals whose affronts were presumably of the misdemeanor variety, I couldn’t see anything in her background that warranted her murder.

  The world was a poorer place without her in it. She wanted to make a difference in the lives of inner city youth and I had no doubt she would have succeeded. Whoever took her from us had done us all an unforgivable disservice. She was the kind of person who not only glowed, but somehow brought others into her light so it could shine upon them, too. I couldn’t see her doing anything to make someone hate her badly enough to kill her. I could, however, see how someone could become fixated upon her to such an extent that she occupied his every waking thought and incited the kind of obsession that led him to fantasize about having her all to himself.

  And then I performed the search I’d been putting off since the moment I saw the damage inflicted upon her body. Dog attacks accounted for roughly twenty-five deaths annually and were generally the result of a combination of fear and aggression. Most victims were children, which an image search bore out. I cringed as I studied faces stitched from the corners of their mouths to their ears and entire scalps torn from their bloodied craniums. I saw arms and legs lacerated as though by a weed tiller and puncture wounds deep enough to see bone. I dropped my apple, half-eaten, into the wastebasket.

  I recalled my memory of Lindsay’s upper chest and neck. The wounds had been of a similar nature, but they were confined to a compact and well-circumscribed area. The images I saw now showed more widespread damage, especially to the face, and defensive wounds to the hands and forearms. Her body had exhibited none of those traits. In fact, other than the bruising to her back and thighs, her entire body had been a uniform porcelain-white. There had been no fixed lividity where the blood had pooled, as you’d expect from a body that had been deceased for at least twenty-four hours—as evidenced by the lack of rigor mortis—and potentially as long as three days, some percentage of which she had spent suspended upside down. Yet her face had been as pale as the rest of her, not suffused with blood. Not even a hint of it. There was only one conclusion I could draw: She’d been drained of her blood before being hanged in the Eastown, and I couldn’t think of a single animal capable of doing that.

  I thought of the blood dripping from her fingertips and alighting on the floor at my feet. Striking my cheek. I closed my eyes and tried to picture where it might have originated from a body I was now convinced had been exsanguinated.

  My phone chirped to announce the arrival of a text message. Dray’s message was brief and told me he’d reached the same conclusion I had.

  Tell me you haven’t showered yet.

  FIVE

  I arrived at the station as the sun broke the eastern horizon. I tried not to interpret the blood-red dawn as a portent.

  My reception wasn’t exactly convivial, but, all things considered, it could have been a lot worse. I’d smeared the blood that dripped onto my face back into my ear and the hair above it. The tech who swabbed it from the conch and sealed it in a sterile tube with my name and the case number clearly labeled made no secret of the fact that she was also collecting samples of my skin for DNA pur
poses. She laughed when I said she couldn’t do that without a subpoena, as though my constitutional rights granted by the Fourth Amendment protecting me from unreasonable search and seizure were a joke to her. At least she was nice enough to confirm they already had my fingerprints on file so I wouldn’t need to have my fingertips digitally scanned as the line resembled the queue at Space Mountain in July. I thanked her out of habit and waited for Dray to see me before washing my hands and face. A change of clothes would have been nice; the ones I was wearing were dirty and smelled of dust, urine, and cigarette butts.

  For a second I thought Dray was going to take me into one of the interrogation rooms, but we passed them and continued down the hall to a conference room with a No Smoking sign beside the door and nicotine-yellow cinderblock walls. He closed the door behind us and gestured for me to have a seat. He plopped down across from me and massaged his temples with his thumb and middle finger.

  I felt badly for him. He looked exhausted and significantly older than when last I saw him. The job was obviously taking its toll on him, as I’d cautioned him from the start. He wasn’t the kind of guy who could switch his job off and on when he punched the clock. He internalized everything, took responsibility for it and made it his own.

  We’d always been alike in that sense. There was a time when we’d both been intent on saving the world. I think that came from watching our fathers suffer as foreign automakers steadily gained a larger percentage of the market and continued advancements in automation led to annual layoffs they stressed right up until the day they miraculously survived the cuts and began preparing for the next year. We watched our mothers struggle to find any sort of jobs to supplement our finances and in the process emasculate our fathers and drive them into the arms of depression. My mother ultimately left when I was ten for reasons she never bothered to share with me, nor did she leave a forwarding address. Dray’s mom served as a surrogate in many ways. She took me in when my old man went on his binges, although my memories of that time are still foggy and I don’t spend a whole lot of time dwelling on them.