The Ways of the Dead Read online

  He unclasped his hands from the back of his head, pulled his gaze down from the ceiling, and leaned forward in his chair, his forearms back on the edge of the desk. “So I’d say probably not. I’d say maybe. You think it’s to the right of that.”

  “How would I check into other girls, women missing up in that area?”

  “Under eighteen, right here, but we can’t tell you shit because they’re underage. Adults, you got to go out to 4-D. But I got to tell you, don’t be looking at the files out there like they’re Scripture.”

  “Because?”

  “Well, one, I refer to my earlier statement, senator. It’s kind of fucked up. Two, adults have the right to disappear. It’s not a crime not to keep a fixed address, and it’s not against the law to move someplace your momma and them can’t find you. And I’m saying ninety-eight, ninety-nine percent of missing adults are the homeless, vagrants, the mentally ill, your hard-core methies and crackheads. They turn back up in a week or two in McPherson Square, Freedom Plaza, or living beneath an overpass in Brooklyn, or five years later in a homeless shelter in Minneapolis, or they turn up as a toe in the morgue. Not more than a handful are quote-unquote actual missing cases—kidnappings, girls who leave for work and never come home.

  “Meanwhile, look at this here. You’re a uniform out there in your district, pulling double shifts, busting your ass? Family calls, brother’s missing, they’re hysterical or they’re pissed or they just feel on obligation. They know he’s fucked up but they call it in because it’s family and what else you gonna do? You catch the case, and this isn’t—you ever see the NCIC form? It’s like thirty fucking pages. Dental records, tattoos, list of surgeries. You wouldn’t believe. So you sit with them, fill out the form, but it’s not even a perp card, right? The guy didn’t do anything. You lose ninety minutes of the only life you’ll ever lead and you send it to us downtown.

  “Now, five days later, the asshole turns up living beneath a tarp on Farragut Square. You find out he’s had a crack problem since high school and the family knew it but didn’t tell you because they knew if we knew then we wouldn’t look. They’d be right but it’s bullshit. So you’re pissed the family hustled you, but you got to stop what you’re doing, go erase him from your system, then call us and say, Hey, erase him, then we’ve got to have somebody actually erase him instead of just thinking about it, and if you forget or we forget then the numbers get off, and you can multiply that process by about a million. That’s the files you’re looking at.”

  “So you’re saying the Old Testament is more reliable?”

  “Don’t get me started on the Bible. Merlie is, what do I want to say, a special friend.”

  twenty-five

  You had to be kidding. People tell you things like this, this is the way it is, and you still just couldn’t believe.

  From a file drawer, the clerk at 4-D had pulled out page after printed page of official police notifications of the missing, the sheets spilling out onto the floor at one point, a sheaf of them. God.

  On each sheet, a picture of the individual was centered below MISSING in bold, black type. Their name, their age, and last known location was listed at the bottom, along with an MPD phone number. There were more than a hundred, could have been two. They were in no particular order, and the database was not much more than a computerized mess. Some of the cases were closed out, with marks for “Reunited” or “Dead.”

  Some listed the precise date they went missing; others just read “Summer 1998.” Some went back to the late 1980s. One—he took this one—had been filed the week before. Others listed an address for the missing, not the place where they were last seen. It had the surreal look and feel of a fever dream, postcards from a nightmare of America gone wrong.

  He stopped at the bulletin board in the front lobby on the way out, another bastion of “Missing” posters, most of these handmade. There were pictures of smiling young women, plump-faced middle-aged men. Nearly all the faces were black, most of the rest Latino, and there were two or three white faces, old, grizzled men who did not look coherent. There were a couple of handbills that he recognized from the files he’d just gone through in the back. He went back to the copies he’d made and turned down an ear of the paper on those, to mark it as someone whose family appeared to be seriously involved.

  Jogging across the street to the McDonald’s, he got a Coke and some French fries, went to a booth, pulled out a flask, topped off the Coke with a lace of bourbon from his flask, and settled in.

  Six or seven cases immediately appeared to be possibilities. Linda Blackwell, Kellie Meikle, Rebekah Bolin, Andrea Thompson—good god, all these in the past three years, all listing a home address within four or five blocks of Princeton Place? Was anybody paying attention?

  He pulled out his cell and started dialing. Blackwell, Meikle, both had answering machines. On Bolin, a woman answered, listened to his spiel, and said abruptly that her daughter was dead.

  “Ma’am? I’m terribly sorry to hear that. I—I am. But it would be helpful to me if you could tell me where she was found. I don’t see her on a list of homicides.”

  “They found ’Bekah beneath a house on Princeton Place, the 600 block,” she said.

  Sully, who had been scribbling notes, stopped.

  “Beneath a house?”

  “The floorboards. The—what do they call it, the crawl space? It was abandoned.”

  “When was this?”

  “January, this year. When they found her. She’d been there awhile.”

  He looked at the poster.

  “It says here—the poster—that she was last seen in June the year before, like seven months prior.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Was it unusual for you not to see her for that long?”

  “I told you she’s dead.”

  “Yes’m, I hear you. I’m sorry. But—it sounds like—maybe—it says here she was twenty-three, that maybe she was out a lot.”

  “’Bekah had been in the wind since she was seventeen.”

  “But—why—why didn’t they call it a homicide? I don’t mean to pry, it’s just—”

  “’Bekah had been on the streets since she dropped out. She weighed ninety-three pounds. She had been arrested I don’t know how many times for drugs. She’d come home and I’d have to put her out, send her to her father’s. She’d steal everything.”

  “There was a community meeting at the rec center last night, and the police, they didn’t even mention her name as—as a case that might be—”

  “They said her death was of ‘undetermined causes.’”

  “But she was found beneath the floorboards of an abandoned house.”

  “They said to me, they said, Look, she’s been doing crack forever, got busted recently for heroin, likely she got a hot dose, you know, and it likely gave her a heart attack—”

  “Likely?”

  “—and she died from that. Yeah, likely. What else? I loved my baby. But I ain’t going to sugarcoat what she was.”

  He waited, trying to think of something kind, something patient, to say. Nothing came to mind. The lady knew what she knew.

  “Okay, like I said, I’m writing about Princeton Place, and some of the things going on up there. Can I get a picture of Rebekah to—?”

  “You can use the one on the flier.”

  “Thank you. May I ask your name? I never—”

  “Pearl. Pearl Bolin.”

  “And, just making sure I heard right, you were her mother?”

  “I still am.”

  He hung up, the whiskey forgotten, his mind tumbling the numbers to a combination lock. Something was off here, something—this many women and he wasn’t even looking hard yet . . . Where was it, where was it? There it was. Williams. The handbill from the police station, Michelle Williams, the dad from the night before.

  He
dialed the number on the flier and held his breath, looking at the picture on the handbill, a smiling young woman, plump, pretty.

  The phone picked up. The baritone he’d heard last night.

  “Hello? Mr. Williams? Sir, my name is Sully Carter, I’m a newspaper reporter, and I’m working on a story about missing persons in the District? Right around Princeton Place, in fact? I was trying to reach the family of Michelle Williams. Someone mentioned her name at a community meeting last night, and I was just following up to see if—”

  “This is Michelle’s father. That was me. Why you calling? Has she been found?”

  “No, not that I know of. I’m a reporter. I’m working on a story about missing young women. Michelle appears to be one of those. That’s why I was calling.”

  Silence. It went on.

  He looked at the phone and said into it, “To find out some more about her. I saw the flier at the police station, saw the report, and heard just a part of your question last night. It looks like she’s been gone about a week.”

  The phone rustled. “Four. It’s been four weeks. They finally just now put out the flier, they got the date wrong to boot. What else is it you need to know, reporter man?” The tone wasn’t hostile. It was resigned, and Sully sensed an opening.

  “Well, actually, a lot, Mr. Williams. The basics—the last time you saw her, places you might think she could have gone—but also something about who she is, what she likes to do, what her plans are.”

  “Were. What her plans were. If my baby’s been gone four weeks without talking to me, she’s dead. But I’m asking, what’s it to you?”

  Sully let out a breath. “It’s . . . it’s partly my job, Mr. Williams. I’m not calling you in my spare time because I have an odd interest in missing young women. I’m at work. I’ve been doing this twenty years and I’m serious about it. There are a couple of other girls who are missing from around this neighborhood and—I’m not going to lie to you—they’ve turned up as homicide victims, or drug cases. I’m writing about them, and that research led me to Michelle’s name. I’d like to come see you, find out some more about your daughter, and, if it’s okay with you, put her picture in the paper.”

  There was another raft of silence.

  “Where are you,” the baritone said, “right now?”

  “The McDonald’s on Georgia, just up from the intersection with Missouri.”

  “You know where Warder is?”

  “I do.”

  “I’m at 3535. I got to be at work at four. You can come now, you hurry.”

  • • •

  The block was mostly row houses and the Williams place was like the rest: two stories with a basement, an awning over a concrete porch (his was painted gunship gray), four steps down to a grassy yard, a brick walkway to the street. A rusting chain-link fence lined the sidewalk. Two green city-issued trash cans sat just inside the fence, their plastic shells mottled and stained. Sully turned to look up the street toward Princeton Place as he opened the gate to walk into the yard. He could make out the stone edifice of Park View Elementary two blocks down. On the far side of that, in the baseball field at Park View Rec Center, was where Lana Escobar had been killed in the outfield grass. Noel Pittman had lived in the first building behind the center field fence. Rebekah Bolin, she’d been found on the east side of the Warder intersection. Michelle Williams could have walked by all of them in less than five minutes.

  When he knocked, the bolt drew on the interior door, and it swung inward to reveal a tall, broad-shouldered man, a paunch beginning to strain the front of the T-shirt that was on under his unbuttoned Amtrak uniform.

  “Sully Carter,” he said, opening the screen door and extending a hand.

  “Curtis Williams,” he said, gripping Sully’s hand, backing up a step to let him inside. It was a narrow fit; Williams was a big man.

  The hallway was dark, as was the front room off to the right. It was quiet save for the tick of a ceiling fan in the living room, its rotation slightly off, clicking on each circuit.

  “The kitchen,” Williams said, gesturing down the hall. Sully went into the room, the yellow tile, dim light overhead. There was a small rectangular wooden table pushed against the wall and two chairs. Sully pulled one out and sat down, putting a card of his on the table as he did.

  “I got maybe twenty minutes before I got to go,” Williams said.

  “Yes, sir, listen—thanks for the time,” Sully said, looking him in the eye. He had maybe sixty seconds to gain his trust. People made their minds up fast, almost on instinct. It was about a feel, a perception, and that was based on physical observations and a sense of comfort. It was about sincerity and it couldn’t be taught or faked.

  “You work at the Amtrak station, Mr. Williams, or you make the runs?”

  “The runs, mostly. I do the ticketing, keep the books en route. Sometimes the café car when they don’t have anyone else.”

  “You don’t sound like the new guy.”

  Williams raised his eyebrows. “Twenty-three years,” sounding out each syllable. His voice was deep, but he spoke so softly Sully had to lean forward to catch it. He took the card Sully extended and looked at it while Sully went back over the story he was writing. Thirty or forty seconds into the explanation, Williams reached over into a stack of papers on the table, and pulled out a picture of Michelle. It was a school photograph. She had her hair pulled back, a bright smile, a deep blue T-shirt, and dangling earrings. Thin eyebrows, indicating they were plucked and managed. She was a little on the heavy side. She was twenty-four, her father said.

  Sully smiled, looking at it.

  “You got kids?” Williams asked.

  Sully shook his head no. “It wasn’t good when I grew up. I got a sister who I haven’t seen in six, seven years. She lives out in Phoenix. Kids appear to be something my family doesn’t do well.”

  Williams nodded. “I hear you. My wife took off when Michelle was three. It was just me and her. I got people, but they’re down in North Carolina. She’d go stay with my mother in the summers. I stopped taking overnights on the train for a long time back when the wife left, just up to New York and back, the same day. Michelle and I did okay. She went to school down there at Cardozo.”

  Sully wrote this in his notebook and nodded. “What’s her birthday?”

  “August 22, 1975.”

  “Could you tell me about the day she disappeared?”

  The man pulled out a chair, far enough from the table that his legs did not fit under it. He sprawled as much as sat. When he went from standing to sitting, his body posture went from dominant to defensive.

  “Not really,” he said. “I was out on an overnight to New York. I had started back on those a few years ago. Last train up, first one back the next morning.” His voice had the same resigned effect that it had over the phone. “Now, see, I didn’t think it was unusual when she wasn’t home when I got back after my run. She liked to stay with one of her friends over the weekend. She was grown. And, ah, she had problems with the drugs, Mr. Carter. She’d be out to all hours. She’d get one job, lose it, and go back to getting high. So it wasn’t all that out of place for her to be gone a few days.”

  “She’d been to rehab?”

  “Several times. We’d fought about it. She’d been raised right. And then—I don’t know. High school, started running with the lowlifes. This neighborhood, I been here since I got out of the service, and that was just before Michelle was born. Older folks been here longer. And it just seems that a lot of our kids, they’re good, but they just wound up without any . . . any ambition.”

  Sully leaned back in his chair, pulling up his pen from the notebook for a moment. “It’s hard, with kids.”

  “It was a joy. For a long time. When she was four, I always said I wanted her to stay that age forever.”

  “What was that date, when you came back fro
m that overnight?”

  “September third. A Friday.”

  “Was she working anywhere when she went missing?”

  “No. She’d worked at the Hunger Stopper up there on Georgia for a hot minute, worked at some place in Dupont Circle, then the drugstore over on Sixteenth. That was all in about two years. She got fired from each one. I don’t think anybody wanted to hire her after that.”

  “So you got back that Saturday, what happened?”

  “I got back about one in the afternoon. She wasn’t around, and like I say, that wasn’t unusual. She didn’t come home that night, and that wasn’t unusual, either. I tried her pager Sunday afternoon.”

  “She didn’t call back?”

  Williams shook his head and let one of his massive hands flutter off the table, a surprisingly delicate gesture. “Never again. I was home then—they let me take a paid week off to look for her, not even making me take vacation—but there was nothing. It was like she walked off the edge of the earth. I went down to the police station Tuesday, I think it was. They looked up her record—she’d been arrested once, for drugs—and I told them she had that problem. They said she hadn’t been picked up, but to try the homeless shelters and then try them back.”

  Sully looked down at the flier he’d taken off the wall at the police station. “Hunh. This wasn’t posted until October 3, a few days ago. It lists September 13 as the date last seen.”

  “I know. The police ain’t no damn good if you haven’t noticed. I went down there the first time, like I said, and they didn’t do nothing. I went down there again a week later, September 13, and that’s when they decided she was officially missing. It took them nearly three weeks to even produce that flier, and then they got the date wrong. That’s why I went to the meeting last night, to give them what for.”