Condemned: A Thriller Read online

  The solar-powered lights dimmed while I was studying the statue of former mayor William Cotter Maybury and the bas-relief behind him, which featured a man with a weapon and a woman with a child. The symbology was lost on me.

  The statue of Hazen S. Pingree was better suited for people like me, who needed things spelled out for them. The inscription read: He was a gallant soldier, an enterprising and successful citizen, four times elected mayor and twice governor. He was the first to warn people of the great danger threatened by powerful private corporations and the first to awake to the great inequalities in taxation and initiate steps for reform. He died in 1901 and this statue was unveiled nearly seventy years before the “powerful private corporations” up and abandoned the city to those most burdened by the “great inequalities of taxation.” It seemed a posthumous insult to leave him lording over the nightmare ruins of a future he foresaw but couldn’t prevent.

  According to the last line of the inscription, he was the Idol of the People. Maybe Milton was wrong; perhaps the problem wasn’t our idolatry, but that we were simply worshipping at the wrong altars.

  I wondered if that was why I was drawn here, why my subconscious had led me to this park, and ultimately to this statue. Something was wrong with the way Paradise Lost had been represented in the Metropolitan. It was almost a pastiche in a way, an imitation of his work by someone who may have learned about it from a superficial perspective, not by someone who was intimately acquainted with either Milton’s larger body of work or with him as a person. He was considered a revolutionary in his time, a man who railed against the oppression of the English monarchy and served the commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell. His message was not one of acquiescing to the inevitability of fate, but of rising above it and seizing destiny by the throat.

  The display in the Metropolitan had been created by someone who borrowed his iconography and but a single work from a much broader body, the vast majority of which was political in nature. And that was one of the most notable similarities between Paradise Lost and The Divine Comedy. Both were political statements written in times of great social upheaval and even greater corruption; their descriptions of hell were used as an unveiled form of social commentary. I believed the killer was using these murders for the exact same purpose. He wanted the world to see his vision of hell and to hear his message about what corruption has done to this city, and maybe to him on a personal level. The problem with that theory was so far he’d only shown us Dante’s and Milton’s versions of hell…

  He had yet to show us his own.

  And only when he did would his true message be revealed. But he wasn’t about to do so until he had the full attention of the media and he could do so on the main stage for the whole world to see.

  Which meant there would be more bodies.

  On my way back to my car, I pondered other historical works in a similar vein. The Aeneid by Virgil. Piers Plowman by William Langland. The Place of the Damned by Jonathan Swift. The History of the Caliph Vathek by William Beckford. Which of them spoke to the killer? Which would he usurp and corrupt for his next crime scene?

  Now was not the time to have it out with Dray. We could resolve whatever issues had come between us when this was over. For now, our priority had to be finding this guy before he hurt anyone else. And I had a good idea of where to start.

  I turned my cellphone back on and waited for the screen to wake up. I had fourteen new messages, surprisingly none of them from a number I recognized as Dray’s. In fact, they all originated from different phone numbers and social media accounts. Seven came in through Facebook, four via Twitter, and the remaining three by text.

  The first contained a single word: Write.

  The second read: Isn’t there something you should be doing?

  The third: Get back to work.

  The fourth: If you can’t handle it, you’re no longer of any use to me.

  The messages followed the same general theme of escalation until I came upon one from a cellphone with a 269 area code. The Kalamazoo area. It read: Did you come all the way down here to check out some titties?

  I stopped walking and turned in a circle. The ground tilted beneath me. I was surrounded by trees and hedges and an entire city coming to life. People dotted the sidewalk and cars circled the park. The people mover roared past over Witherell Street.

  He’d been watching me. He’d texted me while I was standing before the fountain, with its Roman goddess towering over me.

  I picked up my pace as I headed toward my car. I glanced at the next message: That mayor isn’t the only one who’s going to be dead around here.

  Jesus. I tried to recall the faces of the joggers, of the others I’d seen in the park, tried to remember any cars that might have slowed or anything else I might have seen. He’d followed me from one statue to the next, and finally to the third, where I must have been when he sent me the final message.

  Turn around.

  I looked back so fast I tripped over my own feet and fell. Bounced right back up, oblivious to the blood on my palms. My pulse throbbed so hard my vision wavered and I could hear nothing else. There were people everywhere. I turned and collided with a jogger. Stepped down into the street and a car horn blared. I ran to my car and climbed inside. Locked the doors with a thuck.

  I couldn’t catch my breath. Couldn’t think straight. I buried my face in my hands and cried for the first time in as long as I could remember. The reality of the situation truly hit me for the first time. Never in my life had I been so scared.

  When I finally opened my eyes and looked up, I found myself staring at the face of Lindsay DeWitt. Someone had pinned a copy of the Detroit Free Press under my windshield wiper. The press photo from the Miss Michigan Pageant dominated the front page beneath the headline: Abandon Hope.

  I flinched when my cellphone chirped. It took every ounce of my strength to hold the phone steady enough to read the message.

  Tick Tock.

  EIGHTEEN

  Dray didn’t answer when I called so I drove straight to the Eastern District Station—which consolidated what was once the Fifth and Ninth Precincts—and waited for him there. The last thing I wanted to do was drive back to my apartment and risk the killer following me. I didn’t care if he followed me here; there was no way he’d even attempt to get at me inside a station filled with officers who, if their communal mood was any indication, had yet to have their first cups of coffee.

  The desk sergeant directed me to take a seat in the lobby, on the opposite side of the bulletproof glass from him, with a woman screaming to be “let at” someone presumably being booked in the back, a rail-thin junkie who didn’t appear to be breathing, and two homeless men settling into the uncomfortable plastic chairs to sleep away the day. He said he’d page Detective Rogers and let him know I was waiting to see him, although I couldn’t help but notice that he didn’t take my name.

  I used the time to think. And to write. I know I promised I wouldn’t write about either of the murders, but the story had already leaked to the freaking Detroit Free Press, so it was out there, whether anyone liked it or not. As were details that had to have been provided by someone who’d physically been at the crime scene, which narrowed the list of culprits to maybe twenty, at the most. At least the majority of the details had been withheld. There was no mention of the bite wounds to the victim’s throat or the fact that she’d been found completely naked and hanging upside down. For that I was grateful; her family didn’t need to come under siege by the media. Not now, while they were still attempting to come to grips with the loss of their cherished daughter in such a terrible way.

  The problem was that word of the quote carved into the wall above the medicine cabinet had leaked, and that was nothing if not the kind of sensationalism editors positively lived for. It captured the imagination and helped strike fear into the hearts of its enrapt readership, the kind of headline that the syndicates picked up.

  This was about to blow up, despite all efforts to
prevent it, so I saw no reason not to add my own voice to the chorus, especially with the added motivation the series of messages provided.

  There was a lot of deliberate hype and disinformation, too. Maybe an element of truth could actually help serve to contain the situation in some small way. Or so I told myself in an effort to feel better about going back on my word.

  I was conscious the entire time I typed of my cowardice. By caving under the pressure of the monster and potentially accelerating his endgame, I was helping him achieve his goals. I could only remind myself that whether by me or someone else, his story would be written. Besides, I’d seen what he did to those girls and I was in no hurry to meet him in the flesh.

  There were any number of ways to justify it to myself, but the fact remained that I was ultimately contributing to the deaths of more young girls like Lindsay and Alex. Unless he was stopped first, which I guess was as good a reason to write about him as any. He communicated with me and me alone. If anyone would be able to help catch him, it was me.

  It’s amazing the lines we can talk ourselves into crossing and the atrocities we can rationalize in the name of self-preservation and under the guise of doing the right thing.

  When I was done, I posted the article to my site and did my best to forget about it. Twenty-six thousand subscribers had just received a copy via my RSS feed and it was only a matter of time before word started to travel through the online grapevine. I had no control over where the chips would fall from there.

  I checked in with the desk sergeant, who assured me he hadn’t forgotten about me and suggested that if I were tired of waiting I could always leave, although in more direct terms. I returned to my seat and tried Dray’s cellphone number again to no avail. Surely he wasn’t dodging my calls. If there was one thing I knew about Dray, it was that he never shied away from a confrontation, especially when he was the one who instigated it. No, there was a reason he wasn’t taking my call and it had nothing to do with what had gone down between us. There were only two reasons I could think of: either he’d caught a break in the case…or he’d found another body.

  I sincerely hoped it was the former.

  I knew what I needed to do. The idea had struck me while I was in the park, right before the messages came through, but I wanted Dray to do this with me, if for no other reason than to prove to him that I was on his side. Then again, maybe a part of me wanted to rub his nose in the fact that I was right and he was wrong.

  If my theory about the victims being chosen because of their last names was right, then it shouldn’t be too hard to determine if he’d already abducted his next victim. The fact that both Lindsay and Alex had been attacked at least a week prior suggested that other victims were likely already out there, waiting to be found. Maybe Dray even believed me and was already running them down. If not, then maybe by aiding the investigation in some way I could cleanse my karma of the stain of writing my article, which I’d titled “The Final Curtain Call” and used as a vehicle to convey the similarities between Lindsay DeWitt and the Eastown Theatre itself, and what I hoped the killer expected to read.

  I figured the best place to start would be here in Michigan, and then expand my search from there if nothing panned out. The Michigan State Police website housed a missing persons database, which featured pictures of more than twenty men, women, and children. The most recent addition had gone missing in 2011, so I assumed it was a listing of cases that had gone cold and were now reliant solely upon luck. The Center for Missing & Exploited Children yielded only a handful of girls over the age of seventeen, none of whom matched my criteria. Archived newscasts provided far more results, so many, in fact, that I was forced to add the year to narrow the field to a more manageable number, and even that was depressing in its scope.

  It made me sick to think how many families were out there right now, praying for the safe return of their children, while desperately fighting the revelation that they would likely never see them again. How many of these young lives had been taken in the darkness and their bodies dumped in unmarked graves that would never be found? How many monsters were using this state as their private hunting grounds? How many had gotten so good at hiding their victims’ remains that we didn’t even know they were out there?

  I saw faces of all ethnicities, all of them beautiful in their own way. They were the pictures chosen by their families, selected because that was how those who knew them best had seen them. Some were breathtaking in their beauty, and my first thought was of the horrible things men were capable of doing and the lengths to which they’d be willing to go to hide their desires.

  The sad reality was that most of these girls would never be found.

  I felt for the families of Erin Delmas, Laurie Goodson, Samantha Kent, Andrea Irving, and Jennifer Melton, who must have seen Lindsay DeWitt’s face in the paper and feared the same thing happened to their daughters, all of whom had similar physical traits. All five had long blond hair, although only four had blue eyes. Laurie Goodson had green eyes and Erin Delmas’s hair was obviously bleached. The remaining three all fit the same physical mold, although only two of them were currently seeking higher education. Jennifer Melton had been reported missing after failing to show up for her graveyard shift at a Diamond Shamrock. A second photo of her showed a much different person, whose gaunt face and prison-green tattoos positively screamed junkie.

  Samantha Kent was a junior at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and was reported missing nine days ago by her parents, whose unreturned calls prompted them to arrive at the campus within twenty-four hours of hearing from her last. Samantha called every day to check on her younger sister Abbie, who suffered brain damage from a car accident, which stunted her mental development. She was the reason Samantha was following a pre-med tract with the intention of becoming a trauma neurosurgeon.

  Andrea Irving was a senior at Michigan State. She’d been homecoming and prom queen at Gross Point South High School outside of Detroit, as well as valedictorian of a class of nearly five hundred. Her car had been found a half-mile from campus near the Gamma Phi Beta sorority house, where she’d been studying with one of her sisters until two in the morning. That same sister reported her missing the following morning after she failed to show up to take the test for which they’d been cramming for more than a week. It was her goal to finish law school and serve as a public defender before eventually trying her hand in politics, where she could make a real difference. At least according to her father, whose name I recognized from my dealings with the Buildings, Safety Engineering and Environmental Department of the city government.

  I searched the origin of their surnames, starting with Samantha Kent’s. And went no further. Kent was a long-established English surname that originated in the county of the same name.

  It meant white.

  I flipped back to the image of Samantha Kent on the Fox17 home page and stared at the face of a girl I feared was somewhere out there at this very moment, either in desperate need of help or already past that point and waiting to be found.

  “What’re you doing here?”

  I glanced up to see Aragon standing over me, her fists on her hips. She looked down at my screen, then back up at me.

  “I was hoping to talk to Dray.”

  “Lucky you. You get me instead.”

  “Where’s Dray?”

  “You his mother now?”

  “I need to talk to him. I think…I think I can help.”

  “I’m his partner. Whatever you got to say to him you can say to me.”

  The truth was I didn’t care who listened to me, as long as someone did. The information would get to him one way or another. I just wished there could have been a less painful way to do it.

  I closed my laptop, waited for the desk sergeant to hit the button to release the magnetic lock, and followed Aragon into the back.

  NINETEEN

  Aragon’s desk was at the back of a long, narrow room with overhead fluorescent tubes that made a crack
ling sound and gave everything a faint bluish tint. Had she not plopped down into the chair behind it, I would never have known it was hers. Maybe subconsciously I’d been expecting to find the whole thing wrapped in barbed wire and a human skull for a pencil holder, or at least the general motif of sharp and jagged. What I found was a neat and orderly workstation without so much as a ring from the bottom of a mug of coffee on the plastic overlay. The computer monitor was old, but not archaic, and the keyboard had seen such heavy use that several of the letters had worn away. I caught just a glimpse of a framed photograph of her with a little girl who couldn’t have been more than three or four and realized how badly I’d misjudged her.

  She leaned back and opened her hands, an expression of impatience on her face.

  I pulled up the most recent string of messages on my phone and slid it across the desk. She picked it up, studied the screen for a moment, then glanced up at me. If she was surprised, it didn’t show. I waited for her to say something. She chewed on the cap of her pen for several interminable seconds before sitting up abruptly and turning her monitor around so I could see it.

  I stared at the words on the screen in utter disbelief. I’d read them all before. In fact, they were the exact same messages I’d just given her to read.

  “You tapped my cellphone?”

  “We subpoenaed your records. Big difference. Especially when it comes to the paperwork involved.”

  “Why didn’t you just ask me?”

  “Would you have given them up willingly, Mr. First Amendment? What about all your confidential sources?”

  She said it in a mocking tone that instinctively made me want to tell her exactly what I thought of her, but I refrained. I realized that despite my reasons for coming here and my intention to help where I could, I’d stepped into a morass I hadn’t seen and even now could feel myself sinking.