The Weight of Living Read online

  “Yeah,” Nagler said. “I understand. So, what happened to the guy?”

  “Apparently killed in a traffic accident out in Nebraska. Cops out there said it was suicide by semi. Report indicated he drove his truck across the median on I-80 and slammed it into the first big rig he saw. Big fire. Not sure they if ID’d him properly or not because both vehicles and everything inside was pretty well burned up.”

  “Jesus. Send me all that?”

  “You bet,” Guidrey said. “Good luck. Need anything else, call me.”

  “Count on it. Remember his name?”

  “Um, yeah, Garr ... Garrett ... Garrettson. That’s it. Randolph Garrettson. But the cabin was listed under an Arthur Harrison. Never found him.”

  “Wondering. Why do you remember that case? Was a while ago.”

  “It was taught at the state police academy, one of the first cases here to use profiling,” Guidrey said.

  “Recall what they determined?”

  Guidrey laughed. “Yeah, that he was a sick bastard with a fixation on little girls because he lost his daughter. You’ll see in the file. The girls all looked alike.”

  “Hey, thanks,” Nagler said and then hung up.

  Why did that name sound familiar? Probably because an old mayor in Morristown was named Garris. Must be a million of them.

  His phone rang and Nagler nearly spilled his coffee reaching to answer it.

  “Hey Frank, it’s Ramirez. Got something you need to hear.”

  Five minutes later, down in her space carved out of the garage, she handed him a set of headphones.

  “What am I listening to?” he asked.

  “This call has come in four times in the last three days.”

  “What?”

  “Just listen first.”

  Nagler adjusted the headset and nodded. He heard two words. “She’s six.”

  He squinted at the floor as if that would help him hear better; he waited for more.

  Ramirez tapped her ears, telling his to remove the headset.

  “That’s it?” he asked.

  “Yeah, that’s it. Four times.”

  “ ‘She’s six.’ What’s that mean?”

  Ramirez shook her head and shrugged. “Haven’t a clue. Ain’t that girl like twelve?”

  Nagler nodded. “Could we trace the call? It’s not a crank call?”

  “I’d say if it came in a couple of times, yes, but we logged them all. But four times so far, so it’s someone with a message. And there could be more since there are still a few hours of tape left and the hotline is still active. We can’t trace it because it’s not on the 9-1-1 line and it’s way too short. First call came in at nine, next one at noon. Next day, same pattern.”

  “That’s not a crank caller. That’s someone who knows something. She’s six. Does that mean she’s sixth, like after fifth? Sixth on a list, sixth in a row? Is there a seventh?”

  “Dunno.”

  Nagler reset the earphones and nodded at Ramirez to play it again.

  “She’s six.”

  The voice was obscured, muffled. “She’s six.” Male? female? Hard to tell.

  Background noise? Hard to say, the call was so short.

  “She’s six.”

  Again.

  “She’s six.”

  Again.

  “She’s six.”

  ****

  Lauren Fox looked up from her tablet computer and scanned the row of houses passing on her left.

  “That’s it!” she shouted. “The blue one.”

  Frank Nagler slowed the patrol car and angled it into a driveway with a battered, windowless Ford pick-up stacked on blocks at the far end.

  “You sure?”

  Lauren glanced at the screen, and then at the house again. Number one-nineteen.

  “Rafe, one of Rashad Jackson’s kids, told him he had seen some youngish kids living here a while back,” she said. “He didn’t remember seeing any adults, just the kids hanging on the front porch.”

  Nagler cut the engine, rolled his eyes at Lauren and said, “Well, let’s check it out.”

  The last election ousted former police chief Bob McDonald as mayor, replacing him with Rashad Jackson, whose reconstruction of the burned community center swept him to office. Jackson had not made many promises, but he did wrangle a couple of million dollars from the state to remove the flood debris from five years before, piles of which had sprouted grass and small shrubs. Watching the broken boards, twisted metal and crushed cement being hauled away lifted some spirits.

  Jackson had insisted the office of economic development be reinstated, and demanded that Lauren Fox be placed in charge.

  When the city agreed to coordinate the information and search for the girl’s identity or family, Lauren culled from the tax records lists of empty homes, abandoned factories, and vacant lots. She had winnowed the list of three hundred down to about a dozen prime locations where neighbors or kids like Rafe had reported they had seen unsupervised young children.

  The front door was rotted, the wood soggy like wads of tissue paper that gave as Nagler pushed on the doorknob; he was greeted by a wave of air so rancid it could have been comically green. “Watch it,” he yelled over his shoulder to Lauren, still standing next to the car. “You’ll need a mask.”

  Nagler wrapped his nose and mouth in his handkerchief and stepped in. A feral cat hissed at his presence, then hunched low, bolted around the corner and out of the room. The air — thick with the smell of human waste, rotted food, dead animals and feces — stung his eyes, and he backed out to the porch. No one, not even the most desperate, lonely kid, would be living there; the homeless would have kept the place cleaner than the filth he saw, even in his brief inspection.

  “Cross it off the list,” he said as he turned back to the car. Lauren had reentered the vehicle and was sitting with her head in her hands; she raised her head and Nagler could see she had been crying.

  He quickly crossed to the car and opened her door, kneeling in the wet driveway. “Hey, what’s up?” he asked, lifting her chin. “Oh, sweetie.” He leaned in and kissed her eyes. “One too many?”

  Lauren nodded weakly and placed her head on his shoulder. “I guess,” she whispered.

  Nagler stroked her cheek and brushed a few loose hairs from her cheek, then smiled softly. “You don’t have to do this, you know. You don’t have to fix everything.”

  She formed a half smile, closed her eyes, coughed once, and sat up. “I know,” she said, as she touched his cheek, and then kissed him. She shuffled around in the car seat. “Let’s go.”

  It was something else, Nagler thought as he stood up, brushed his wet knees and closed the car door. He had seen Lauren march into some of the dirtiest, cluttered, smelliest homes in Ironton and not flinch; had seen her stare down some of the worst of the city’s landlords to get what she wanted. He turned and stepped into an unseen slushy puddle, the cold water filling his shoe. “Damn it.” He shook his foot to expel some of the water and winced as he felt the squishy sock slide in the shoe as he put weight on that leg as he crossed behind the car to the driver’s door.

  “Saw that,” Lauren giggled softly. “I’m sorry.”

  Nagler laughed. “You’d think that after living in this state for all these years I’d get a pair of L.L. Bean boots and keep my feet dry. But no. I wear dress shoes. I’m an idiot.”

  Lauren brushed his cheek. “Yeah, but you’re my idiot.” She took her computer from the dashboard, closed it and said, “Let’s get out of here.”

  “That wasn’t about the house or the girl, was it?” Nagler asked, as he drove back to City Hall.

  “That obvious? I was thinking about my dad. And well, my mother, living alone in that old neighborhood now that he’s died, in that old house filled with memories, but not much else. It just hit me. She never had any friends there because she worked. And now she’s home and whomever she knew is gone.” She glanced out the side window. “He was her best friend,” she said softly
to the glass, leaving a wisp of breath, a damp spot fading, “Maybe her only friend. I’m a lot like her, Frank. Maybe too much.” She stared out the window, past the decrepit blue house, into the space beyond. “Are you my only friend, Frank?”

  Before Nagler, stunned at the question, could respond, his phone rang. He picked it up and tossed it to Lauren. “It’s Ramirez. Please answer it.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Hi, Maria, it’s Lauren.” Her voice was suddenly bright again. “Yeah, that’s it. We’re on our way back from our motel quickie ... Oh, you bad girl! I’ll make sure he stops by.” She placed the phone back in the console and watched as Nagler, smiling, shook his head. “You should hear us when you’re not around. Anyway, after you drop me off, she needs to see you. Something very interesting.”

  Nagler touched Lauren’s shoulder. “Wanna talk? What’s going on?”

  She smiled weakly and stared at the floor. “Later. You need to talk to Maria.”

  ****

  Ramirez was grinning.

  “I don’t want to hear it,” Nagler said, suppressing a laugh.

  Ramirez patted his cheek twice. “She just makes you happy, Frank. So be happy.”

  He scratched his neck and grinned. “Yeah.”

  “But what?”

  “She’s been up and down lately. And in the car before you called, she was crying. Said it was about her mother?”

  Ramirez frowned “Maybe it is. You don’t need to worry about that girl, Frank. Don’t need to see my favorite couple all moody and stuff.”

  He nodded at the console, and then smiled. “Video?”

  Ramirez, seriously, “Yeah. Unbelievable.”

  She pressed several buttons and the screen came to life. As he watched the gray screen fill with a dark image, Nagler was deeply intrigued. Maria Ramirez rarely used the word “unbelievable.”

  “Wait a minute...” Nagler leaned toward the console. “Is that? ...”

  “Yeah,” Ramirez said coldly. “That’s our girl.”

  “Holy shit!” And a shocked Nagler looked up at Ramirez, who was shaking her head.

  “Can you believe that? They threw her out of that damn car.”

  Ramirez reset the video. A large, dark vehicle, some type of SUV, eased to the right curb and the rear passenger-side door opened. For a second, nothing else happened. Then a body, resisting, was pushed from the vehicle into the street. The person grabbed at the door and an arm emerged and pried their hand from the door jamb, and quickly pulled the door shut. The person tumbled back to the street as the vehicle pulled away, swerving on the slick, snow-covered street and out of range of the camera. The person crawled to their knees, pushed off the sidewalk with their arms, opened their mouth in an apparent scream, said a few words, and then faced the camera.

  “Can you pause it and focus on the face?” Nagler asked.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  And there she was. Tank top, shorts, barefoot. Pushed out of a vehicle onto a snowy street; spun and slipping, grabbed back, missed the door handle. “Keep it running.”

  On the screen, the girl glanced up the street and then down the other direction, took a few steps into the roadway and shielded her eyes, and perhaps sighed, as her shoulders rose slightly before falling. Then she walked out of the camera range.

  “Where?” Nagler asked, his voice like gravel.

  “Blackwell and Prospect. The camera is on the south side of the street by the historical society building. She walked six blocks east to get to the grocery. There’s a traffic cam at Blackwell and Sussex, a couple bank ATMs with cameras, and the pawn shop on the corner of Union has about three security cameras ... We’re looking.”

  “What time?”

  “Time stamp on the video said nine-fifty.”

  Nagler turned away from the monitor and folded his arms over his chest. “Jesus, Maria. Someone tossed her out of a fucking car into the cold.” He turned and slammed his fist into the table. “Frame up that car again.” The screen was filled with the image of a dark, large vehicle, maybe three rows of seating judging by the length of the side windows. “Can we fuss with the light and shadows?”

  She laughed. “Fuss with it?” Ramirez said. “Yeah, to a degree. These are not the newest cameras, and with low light ... we’ll see how much better we can make it.”

  Nagler nodded several times, slowly as if the thought needed to be pulled from different parts of his mind before it was clear.

  He stared at the fuzzy image. “How many vehicles look like that?” he asked himself.

  “Say what?”

  Nagler shook his head and frowned. “Nothing, Maria. Just talking to myself.”

  “Well, talk out loud, buddy. This is something. An incomplete something, but something, which makes it two somethings. A black vehicle in the middle of the night dumping that kid on a snowy street, and the call that repeated, ‘She is six.’”

  Nagler smiled, Maria Ramirez was some cop. Focused. Hard as nails and good. “You need to keep throwing me that life line, Maria.”

  “One step at a time, Frank. Remember what you told me: Put one foot in front of the other.”

  “You’re right.” Nagler stared at the flickering video of the mystery vehicle, then twisted his mouth into a question.

  “Hey Maria. Does that look like something is covering up the license plate?”

  She leaned over the console and pressed a couple of keys and the rear of the vehicle grew larger, but more indistinct on the screen with each enlargement.

  “That’s as good as it will get,” Ramirez said. “But there is something there,

  slipped over the plate between the frame.” She touched the screen at the top of the license. “Can just make out the tops of the numbers and letters. See it? A point, a flat line, a shorter flat line, a couple more points and a nub of something. Maybe we can get something from that?” She printed out a couple copies of the plate. “Who knows to do that? Wanna take a crack?”

  “Someone who knew that there were cameras along Blackwell Street,” Nagler said. “And didn’t want to get caught.”

  In the parking lot on the way to his car, Nagler’s phone rang.

  Oh, man. “Yeah.”

  A breath. “You have something of mine and I want it back.”

  A hang up.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Tank

  “A hundred pounds, Frank,” Leonard said. “One hundred pounds.”

  “That’s really something; good for you, Leonard,” Nagler replied.

  Nagler, Jimmy Dawson, and Lauren Fox sat around a low-slung table in the new coffee shop/book store Leonard had opened. Leonard sat nearby on a tall stool, a symbol of the personal changes he had undergone.

  The entire shop was a symbol, Nagler thought one day, as work crews installed new windows and repointed the brick face, and in the adjoining two storefronts, installed new electric service, flooring, and walls. A symbol of the nascent revival that was blooming in Ironton. The grocery, Leonard’s store, some new shops and restaurants on Blackwell, some of the damaged homes and buildings repaired. Still, Nagler knew, the city recovery was stalling. The state take-over, which lasted two years, produced nothing. The problem, Dawson wrote time after time, was that revitalization plans were easy to plant, but too often died unfunded on the vine. Ironton became another Atlantic City, Dawson wrote, a bauble on the governor’s keychain, a photo-op for a new election campaign, another empty promise.

  But Leonard, with the help of an insurance settlement, a small grant, donations, and community volunteers, acquired the adjacent empty stores. He had expanded his book shop to include a full coffee shop, new reading areas, and added a new business: old and used books.

  The grant required that he offer some job training for youth, and he added Rafe and Dominque from the community center. Leonard’s assistant Bobby Reynolds took on the challenge of the new venture of accepting old books from estate sales and the like. The state college provided an expert, and Bobby handled the paperbacks and other
old books that came by the carload.

  But the most significant change was Leonard himself.

  Three years earlier, when former Ironton cop Tom Miller terrorized the city, burned down the community center, and killed two Ironton College students, Leonard’s store had become the final battleground in that deadly game. Leonard, Lauren, and Bobby had been hostages in the fatal standoff between Nagler and Miller, and the stress of event sent Leonard to the hospital.

  After two months there, Leonard’s doctors finally released him if he had agreed — and Frank Nagler had agreed as Leonard’s guardian — that Leonard would immediately begin a fitness and weight-loss program under their supervision.

  So into Leonard’s life entered Calista Knox, physical therapist, trainer and soon, constant companion.

  “Look at them,” Lauren Fox would nudge Nagler’s elbow as Leonard and Calista huddled in the corner store, holding hands, as she brushed away something from his cheek. “Ah, love.”

  Nagler would nod in agreement, but, silently, he knew it was more than that. For months after that attack, Leonard had laid morosely in the hospital bed, eyes closed, pretending to be asleep, shunning visitors. He rarely spoke, even as the kids from the community center, Delvin Williams, Lauren, Bobby, and Nagler took turns reading him newspapers, books, or just chatting up recent events. Nagler knew he had seen this before, had seen it in his own mirror in the days that followed the death of his wife, Martha: The long slide to self-pity and forced solitude, the construction of the shell designed to block out the world, but instead formed a festering cauldron of anger.

  “You’re doing what I did,” Nagler told Leonard one day.

  Leonard at first just stared at the blank wall, then he sighed and rolled his head to face Nagler; his eyes were liquid and dark, swimming in the loathing Leonard felt for the world and himself.

  “You’re right, Frank,” Leonard had whispered. “And I do appreciate all the care that you and others have shown me, but I feel so useless...fat, blind, I can’t do anything for myself. I wish for once I didn’t need anyone.”

  “Useless, oh Leonard. Don’t forget what you’ve done. The store. You saved that neighborhood even as the city was falling down around it. The friends you’ve made. The inspiration...”