Unrevealed Read online

  By Sunday afternoon, I was obsessed with Ellen’s story. I thought about the tragedy of losing both her sister and brother so close together and I understood why she chose to disappear into a bottle. I wondered, briefly, if the story of the brother and sister’s death might have made it to some news show. I’d seen plenty of post-9/11 human interest stories on TV and in the newspaper — stories that followed victims’ families and revealed everything from suicides to new relationships. Call it curiosity, but I opened my laptop and searched “Frank Challis photography Vermont” based on the limited information Ellen had given me. The very first website was “Frank Challis Photography” and mentioned “In Memoriam” in the brief description. I clicked on the link and read about Frank’s work. There was a beautiful shot of Vermont in the wintertime. I looked closer at the photo and saw the copyright. It was 2007.

  I went through photo after photo and found current dates on most of them. Finally, at the bottom of one page, it read, “To contact Frank directly…” and gave a number. If Frank was dead, he sure as hell took great photos from the grave.

  My eyes drifted to the “In Memoriam” link at the top of one of the pages. I clicked on it. It loaded slowly. First I saw the name “Marge” and then “Challis” appear. The photo took longer to load. But once it did, I stared in stunned silence. It was Ellen.

  Sure, she looked younger and fresher, but it was Ellen. There was the striking brown mole by the right side of her bottom lip and the same haircut, with less gray. Even entertaining the idea that she and her “sister” were Irish twins, the chance of both of them having a large mole in the same location was a billion to one.

  “Fuck,” I said out loud. Not so much angry as confused. I thought back on the conversation I’d had with her. Little by little, the jigsaw puzzle started to make sense. I had wondered why “Ellen” knew so much about Marge’s private thoughts and — how an estranged sister was able to tell me what Marge was going through and how it was affecting her. When she described the phone call that Frank allegedly told her about, she was really telling me what she saw out that window of tower one and what she felt at that critical moment. And when she told me, regretfully, that she shouldn’t have let Marge die, that she “should have helped her more,” believed in her, and filled her with hope instead of making her believe she wasn’t worth saving, the poor woman was actually talking about herself. The addict she used to be. The one Frank tried so desperately to help.

  I think I understand why she killed off Frank in her head. Once she “killed” herself, she had to “kill” him as well to assuage the loneliness. If he weren’t dead in her mind, she might get weak when she was drunk and call him up to hear him tell her that everything was all right and that she wasn’t a bad person. But as each year passed, and Marge Challis remained on the 9/11 victim list, the chance to resurrect her “dead body” and come clean became more unfeasible. Even though that’s what she wanted more than anything. After she got sober and the cobwebs cleared, she came face-to-face with herself. She didn’t want to be “dead” anymore. So she reinvented herself, like we all do when we shake loose the shadows of addiction. She became Ellen Brigham, went to more meetings, and finally got the guts to approach me and partially reveal her stained soul. She was on step nine in AA: making direct amends to people, whenever possible, for past wrongs. The problem was, the “dead” can’t make direct amends.

  I played back the visit to its conclusion, and I remembered the look she gave me right before she left — the look that almost pleaded with me to read her mind. “I just wish,” she stated. It had seemed odd to me then but not now. I was pretty sure that what she wished more than anything was for Frank to know she was okay. Like it was up to me to be a good PI, put the pieces together, maybe contact him, and… what? What in the hell was I supposed to do? I couldn’t call Frank out of the blue and drop that bomb on him. Fuck that shit. It’s called direct amends for a reason, not amends via a third party who also happens to be a drunk. No. I’d talk to her first at the meeting. Somehow, we’d figure out how to make it all right.

  So, right now, I’m sitting in my Mustang sucking down my twenty-second cigarette of the day and I’m about to go inside the Methodist church for the weekly meet-and-greet with the Basement People. I’ve been keeping an eye out for Ellen — I mean, Marge, but I haven’t seen her. The meeting starts in five minutes, and I want to get a good seat close to the bad coffee and bowls of shitty hard candy.

  I walk down into the basement and the mood is grim. There’re a few people crying and shaking their heads. I walk over to Joe, the guy who runs the meeting. He’s not looking great either.

  “What’s going on?” I ask him.

  “Sad news. I got a call yesterday. Ellen B. died.”

  “Fuck,” was all I could muster. “What happened?”

  “Car accident.”

  “What?”

  “She fell asleep at the wheel and ran off the road. Died on impact.”

  I felt the walls start to cave in around me. Marge took the bus to my office. She didn’t own a car. “How did you find out Ellen died?”

  “I got a call from her cousin,” Joe offered. “She said she found my number on the members’ phone list.”

  It suddenly made sense to me. “Right. Her cousin. Marge Challis?”

  Joe nodded.

  And so the cycle of life and death, reinvention and resurrection continue for Marge. I contemplated calling Frank, but I figured I’d need a stiff drink before I did that. To preserve my sobriety, I opted out.

  Like I said, in AA, you have to delve into why you drink and what triggers your need to disappear. Once you stop killing the pain with the bottle, you’re supposed to come alive and find out who you really are and why you choose to exist. But some of us…some of us choose to walk out of a burning building that is twenty-five minutes away from collapsing, and before we get to the end of the street where the debris isn’t so thick and the smoke has cleared, we’ve become someone else. And we believe in our hearts that the long shadows that stand just behind us will magically disappear just like the person we slaughtered. But those damn shadows are as uncompromising as we chose to be when we believed we could kill the past. They grasp us even more relentlessly.

  Somewhere out there right now, Marge Challis thinks she’s again shaken off the darkness. But when she wakes up tomorrow, there will be a little less light to guide her.

  YOU CAN’T JUDGE A BOOK BY ITS COVER

  I want to be up-front with everyone who is reading this. I had to be talked into writing it. You see, I’m a very private person, and I’m not someone who readily opens herself up to others. I’ve always been like that, ever since I was a kid. When somebody showed a passing interest in me or in my life, I’d wonder why he cared and what his true motive was. Chalk it up to having a hardcore cop for a father. I’m suspicious of people in general and more than a little cynical. But I bet any cop would tell you the same thing.

  For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Jane Perry and I’m a homicide detective here in Denver, Colorado. Technically, it’s Sergeant Detective Jane Perry, but most people I know just call me Jane. Being a cop is all I know how to do, and I’m good at it. That’s not arrogance, that’s confidence. I am the job, as they say. If I were flipping burgers, my head would still be programmed as a cop. It’s in my blood. My dad was a homicide cop, and his buddies considered him top-notch. I didn’t follow in his footsteps to be like him. The last thing I want to be is like my father. I’m a homicide cop because I like to wrap my mind around the mysteries of why people kill other people. I like to get into the heads of the killers.

  I like to run around inside the victims’ heads even more. I can walk into a hot crime scene while the blood is still wet and death still hangs heavy in the air and I can hear the walls whisper their secrets. Sometimes I can hear the screams and pleas of the victims before they took their last breath. Not hear it like in my ear. It’s more like hearing it in my gut.

  Go
d, I sound fucking nuts. But that’s the only way I can describe it. It’s not some kind of psychic shit. It’s so much deeper than that. I hear the dead with my gut. Yes. And it consumes me. And, believe me, it’s changed me inside forever.

  My former boss, Sergeant Morgan Weyler, who I now work alongside since my promotion to sergeant, is the one who actually talked me into writing down this particularly strange story. He thought it would be “cathartic” for me, since I refuse to go to therapy and be psychoanalyzed by a woman who keeps a dog-eared, tear-stained, heavily underlined copy of Freud’s biography in her bathroom resting precariously on the back of her mauve toilet.

  The first and only time I met the woman, I was immediately turned off by her sparrow-like features, translucent, veined skin and weak jawbone. She talked so quietly that I had to lean well within her three-foot comfort range just to hear her. When she told me I needed to “explore my boundaries and process my authentic self,” I wanted to cap her with a 9-millimeter plug. She “suggested” that I had “anger issues.” I told her she didn’t need a degree in psychology to figure that out. The guy at my corner coffeehouse who’s twenty and still hasn’t graduated from high school made that brilliant deduction during my first interaction with him. When I left her office, she said I was being too “judgmental” about her. Those types of women love that word, judgmental. What they don’t realize is that when they tell someone that they are being judgmental, that’s a judgment. But they can’t hear that because the irony horn is blaring too loudly.

  I tend to read people fairly quickly. You have to be able to size others up in my line of work — to separate the real victims from the liars. But I’ve been sizing up people’s actions since I was small child. When you’re abused as a kid, you learn that you better assess people and their possible actions quickly because if you don’t, you’re going to be on the receiving end of one helluva punch. So I became what some therapists call hyper-vigilant. Sometimes, I had to judge a violent situation within seconds of its erupting. So I spend a lot of time stepping back and observing people. I’m always on guard; always waiting for the proverbial shoe to drop. That’s probably why I smoke. I think the nicotine takes the edge off but allows me to still focus.

  One way I learned to read people was through their body language and voice tones. People’s mannerisms and subtle voice alterations are massive “tells” in determining whether someone is being truthful with me. My dad, Dale Perry, taught me all about body language, and he was damn good at it. That is about the only good thing I can say about him because he also taught me how to be a great drunk, how to fear, how to hurt, how to hate, how to see life as continual struggle and how to never feel that I’m good enough. Jesus, now I sound like a damn victim and that’s the last thing I want to be. I despise victims. Not victims of crimes…victims of life. People who can’t build a bridge and get over their inner turmoil. I’m actually particularly drawn to people who’ve had to walk the harder path and come out better or worse on the other end. Survivors. Yeah, that’s who I champion. Maybe that’s because I see myself in them. I have great empathy for the survivors of this world because I know what it takes to climb out of severe trauma and reach deep within your heart and soul and resurrect yourself into a new reality.

  My road to resurrection has been a long and strange one. During that trip, I’ve encountered some — how can I say this without sounding crazy? — otherworldly phenomena that I can’t explain but that have operated within my life and the lives of those around me. Mostly, it’s the bizarre synchronicities — coincidences — that defy logic. Sometimes, I’ve experienced prophetic dreams or feelings that have materialized in the waking world. The first few times it happened, it scared the shit out of me. I attributed it to too much booze. While the booze may have loosened me up to make me open to the phenomenon, there was something else operating outside of the bottle. I no longer fight it, because in many ways, I’ve always allowed my intuition to guide me, even on hard-to-solve homicide cases. So these days, when I encounter the odd person or the odder circumstance that borders on the unexplainable, I don’t fight it. I don’t try to explain it, and I try to work with it instead of against it.

  I can give you a great example, one that definitely feeds into what I was mentioning earlier about feeling empathy for the survivors. I drew the short straw at the office (which is Denver Homicide, or simply DH) and was asked by Sergeant Weyler to give a classroom career-day lecture at one of the public middle schools here in Denver. If you knew me, you’d know I am not the person to be sent out to a goddamn school to talk to these annoying midgets about my job. But, like I said, I drew the short straw.

  So I get to the school for my 2:00 p.m. appearance, and I’m greeted by the effusive female principal who chose to wear her red power suit and four-inch black heels that day. And here’s me, in my denim jeans, cowboy boots, light blue poplin shirt and leather jacket. I felt like the dyke who came to dinner standing next to her. After she shook my hand with her firm grip, she leaned forward and sniffed the air around me.

  “You smoke?” she asked me.

  “Yes,” I admitted, “but I won’t pass them out to the kids.”

  She got that deer-in-the-headlights expression on her face, not sure if I was kidding. She suggested that I take off my jacket, hoping that would erase the scent of tobacco, but I assured her that the nicotine was deeply embedded in my cell structure and probably had penetrated my DNA, so it was useless to remove my jacket. I then moved my jacket just far enough to reveal my Glock, which I always keep in my shoulder holster when I’m on duty. I thought she was going to fall backward on her four-inch FMPs when she saw it. She asked me to remove my service weapon, but I was getting pretty pissed by this point and told her that if the Glock left the building, so did I. I was actually hoping she would take me up on that offer because I really didn’t want to sit in front of a bunch of jacked-up munchkins and field questions from them.

  Unfortunately, she asked me to follow her into a sixthgrade classroom, where I was met with thirty pairs of gawking eyes. She introduced me as “a female detective” from the Denver Police Department, which I certainly thought was obvious since I do have shoulder-length brown hair and enough of a chest to not create confusion as to my sexual identity. But this broad seemed to want to make sure the kiddies knew I was a woman who was also a cop. Boggles the mind, eh? I guess that’s because Cagney & Lacey was way before their time.

  I had just been asked to sit on a wooden stool in front of the class and start my talk (which I hadn’t given any thought to) when another teacher entered the classroom accompanied by a kid who looked about fourteen. He was taller than the other dwarfs in the room, and he was dressed like a junior anarchist, complete with black trousers, combat boots, Matrix jacket and T-shirt that sported two words in red block type: Question Everything! A quick glance at the powersuited principal told me that she wasn’t happy to see the kid joining the class. All the pint-size members of the classroom turned around to gawk at the kid, who returned their stares with a crooked smile and a raised eyebrow. Even though he was led to a seat in the rear, I could see that there was something wonky with his left eye. He looked like he’d been bashed around too many times and had suffered some sort of facial trauma.

  Irritation filled the space around the principal, who clicked her heels across the vinyl floor toward me and spoke in a hushed tone she usually reserved for admonishing wayward students.

  “Looks like we’re having an unexpected extra member of the class today,” she whispered as a low murmur rolled across the classroom from the pre-pubescent pack. “His name is Fletcher. He’s…um…how do I say it?” She searched valiantly for the proper PC term but came up short. “Special needs,” she settled on. “He’s been held back a couple years,” she motioned to her own head, rotating her index finger around her temple in the universal hand gesture for “fucking nuts.” “Sometimes we don’t know where to put him. If he starts to get disruptive, we’ll pull him.”

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sp; We’ll pull him? I thought. It sounded like code for “We’ll take him out and ice him. Eighty-six him.” Then I wondered if the poor son-of-a-bitch had any clue how many people looked on him as a pain in the ass.

  I no sooner thought that than Fletcher yelled above the din, “Pain in the ass,” and let out a cheeky chortle.

  The principal shot Fletcher a look that would melt steel while I looked at him in stunned amazement. It was just plain odd. But maybe it was a coincidence. Yeah. Right. How many times had I used that old saw of an excuse to rationalize an occurrence that defied reasonable explanation?

  The kids were told to quiet down, and the floor was turned over to me. Suddenly, I had thirty pairs of tiny eyes staring at me, waiting for wisdom to pour from my mouth. I’m not counting Fletcher in the pack, as he was staring into space at this point with his mouth loosely hanging open, like his jaw had broken hinges, and looking quite lost. It was a tough audience because they seemed at once curious and judgmental of me. I started talking with my usual cadence, which is crusty and forward. I don’t have a “voice” for kids and a “voice” for adults. It’s all the same voice, and I think my tone kind of scared some of the kids in the front row because I saw them leaning back in their little seats. That made me feel uncomfortable, so I attempted to change my voice to make myself sound “safer” but then I started to sound like I was tripping on Halcyon. I was reminded of Sergeant Weyler’s admonishment before I left DH. “Watch your mouth, Jane,” he warned me. I have a tendency to use crude language, which my job tends to perpetuate. Frustration was building by this point and I thought, “Fuck this shit.” It wasn’t a second later that Fletcher jerked his head away from the window and screamed, “Fuck this shit!”