Notes on an Execution, page 11
“Then you can tell your captain we have ID,” the coroner said.
As he detailed the rest of his report, the bones they had uncovered, the many still missing, Saffy tried not to wonder. Which femur belonged to Lila, which incomplete set of ribs. The room was dank and sterile, everything tinted a noxious shade of green. Laid out on the tables, the girls looked more animal than human.
When Kensington finally rushed in, the coroner had already signed the report, tucked safely into Moretti’s briefcase. Kensington panted, breathless, his suit wrinkled, hair greased back with a wet fistful of gel.
“Well,” Moretti said, clapping her hands together decisively as Kensington spluttered. “I think we’re done here. Kensington, you get to notify the families.”
* * *
Back at the station, Saffy let the buzz expand. Until then, her rotation had included robberies and domestic incidents, nothing especially contentious—it was a new exhilaration, the thrill of catching a good case, and as she followed Moretti through the bullpen, even the troopers could not bring her down. She ignored the usual, a whispered joke concealed behind a hand, a laugh so muffled she could not track it to the source. All her life, strangers and teachers and peers and colleagues had made her feel acutely aware of her dark skin. It never seemed to matter that she had grown up here, that she had never been to India, a place she yearned for idly—as a child she had traced the country’s shape, a reverent finger on the map, outlining its careful borders. Next to the hordes of tobacco-chewing boys, muddy boots propped on their desks, Saffy would always feel outcast.
“We’ll set up here,” Moretti directed. The backroom conference table was littered with the half-solved cases still in rotation: the Saranac robbery, a series of Y2K conspiracy threats, a child abduction Kensington had been working for months.
“I’m putting you on the old files,” Moretti said. “Kensington and I remember too much. You’re completely fresh—I want you reading through everything.”
“What exactly am I looking for?”
“Anything that puts us near that forest.”
On the television in the corner of the room, the press conference blared. The captain’s face was somber as he monotoned a careful statement, glancing only sparingly at the audience of reporters. When the camera panned to the photographs, the girls looked younger than ever. Izzy and Angela smiled in front of blue backdrops in staged high school portraits—Angela wore a shirt embroidered with yellow polka dots, and Izzy had a spattering of acne across her cheeks. Lila didn’t have a school photo; her boyfriend had provided that single known photograph, back when she’d gone missing. Lila stood on a sidewalk overgrown with weeds, red backpack flung over her shoulder, head twisted back to smile at the photographer.
“You’ll be okay?” Moretti asked, a half question. Moretti had not forgotten. Lila had been a beacon, that night in Travis’s trailer, guiding Saffy directly here. This very case, pulling her into the light.
The old files appeared then, a distraction and a relief—four dusty boxes, lugged in by a disgruntled trooper, sweat stains blooming in the pits of his uniform.
“I take it these are mine now?” Saffy said.
Moretti winced, apologetic. “I’ll grab us lunch.”
When Moretti had gone, Saffy lined the bulletin board with new photographs from the crime scene. The forensics team had uncovered the girls’ belongings, in various states of decay. Shoes, earrings. Lila’s backpack, Angela’s purse. Izzy’s mother had been the first to notice—a beaded barrette was missing, Izzy’s favorite. Her mother was certain she’d been wearing it that night. Angela’s mother mentioned a pearl bracelet, a family heirloom her daughter never took off. Moretti was convinced the jewelry had gotten lost in the brush, and besides, nothing of Lila’s had been taken. But, Saffy pointed out, Lila didn’t have parents. No one had been watching. Trinkets, Saffy had suggested to a tight-lipped Morettti. Maybe he took souvenirs.
Saffy crouched on the fraying carpet. The first of the four cardboard boxes contained the witness interviews—the base had collapsed, sagging with the sheer number of reports. She would have to track them all down again, take new statements.
At the very bottom of the stack, Saffy found the original print: Lila’s photo. It had been shot on a disposable camera, dusty and faded, Lila’s smile bleached and pallid. Saffy thought of Kristen then—Kristen, with her stable job at the salon, where her clients told her she looked like Jennifer Aniston, how her clothes hung easily on her thin, lithe frame. Kristen, who had always known she was bound for something better, who had worked for stability and then accepted it without question. Saffy studied the photo of Lila, a girl reduced to a discolored snapshot, and wondered if she would always feel like this: a pendulum swinging between the two of them, never sure of what she might have become.
Beneath Lila’s photo, there was a bag. A hunk of dark hair lay limp in the clear plastic, evidence an officer had found at the bottom of the driveway where Izzy disappeared. As Saffy leaned against the backroom wall, Izzy’s hair in her lap, she was transported into a hallucination that had stalked her for years now, a parallel universe that felt sickening, nearly fatal in its limitlessness.
A highway, dusk. A flicker of long black ponytail. Izzy had died at sixteen, but she was older here: nineteen, maybe twenty. Windows open, air whipping hard, an old bluegrass song twanging from the radio. There would have been a boy, sitting in the passenger’s seat—Izzy would not have loved him, not here, maybe not ever, but this wouldn’t have mattered, in the hot flush of youth, his calloused fingers creeping up her thigh, the horizon bleeding behind the Adirondack peaks.
In this almost-world—the substitute reality that lingered like a daydream—Izzy was never a pile of bones on a table. She was bright and golden, a blazing instant of mundane and perfect glory.
* * *
Saffy tracked down a handful of the witnesses from the initial case—Angela’s boss from the diner, the kids from Izzy’s party, the friend Lila had gone out with that night. The locals were confused, wary, oddly giddy to find her waiting on their stoops. As Saffy perched on sinking couches and politely declined tepid cups of tea, Moretti kept the captain at bay, while Kensington handled the never-ending tip line. Most witnesses couldn’t remember much. She had gathered no new information.
Her last witness of the long, parched day was a young woman named Olympia Fitzgerald. Saffy pulled up in front of an unfinished house, a single-story ranch perched on a wide swath of field, pieces of construction equipment scattered across the browning grass. October in the Adirondacks looked like a postcard; Saffy sat in her car, skimming the transcript, the details fading off the page. Olympia had been twenty years old in 1990, and her interview had lasted all of seven minutes before the lead investigator dismissed her. The sun slouched over the horizon, the sky a magnetic blue, and Saffy closed the file, too tired to finish.
A woman in a tattered velvet tracksuit answered the door, her gray hair like a thinning mane. Inside, a grandfather clock spilled its guts onto the living room floor. A younger woman—Olympia, the daughter—had propped her bare feet on the coffee table next to an open bottle of neon orange nail polish.
“What’s up,” Olympia said, disinterested, even as Saffy flashed her badge. Saffy yearned for Moretti’s voice, silky and exacting, so naturally competent.
“Back in 1990, you talked to Sergeant Albright about the disappearances of three local girls.”
Finally, Olympia looked up, shifting as she sat up straight. Her mother loped into the room and stood behind the couch, hands protective on Olympia’s shoulders. They had not invited Saffy to sit. She hovered awkwardly next to a fraying armchair.
“I know,” Olympia said. She used her palms to push back a greasy strand of hair, her fingernails still glistening wet. “I saw the news. You found those bodies.”
“Yes,” Saffy said.
“I told him everything.” Olympia’s voice cracked, a hint of panic. “The detective, back then. I told him everything I know.”
“We’re reopening the investigation, Olympia. I’d like to hear exactly what you remember.”
Mrs. Fitzgerald nodded her daughter forward—Olympia hesitated as her mother’s fingers massaged her neck.
“The summer those girls went missing, I worked at the Dairy Queen off the highway. I had this coworker, this boy. He was a little younger than me, just graduated high school.”
“Go on.”
“I remember the night Izzy Sanchez went missing,” Olympia said. “I remember it really clearly, because it was also the night after he and I—well, we’d been flirting all summer. I went over to his place, in that trailer park by the forest where you found the bodies. One thing led to another, and . . . we tried to, you know. But he couldn’t. So, I left. And the next day at work, he seemed strange, completely off. When I tried to talk to him, he had this look in his eye. Like he wanted to hurt me. It was so many years ago, but I’ll never forget it. I let him close the store alone. That was the same night Izzy disappeared.”
“What was his name?” Saffy asked.
“Ansel,” Olympia said simply. “Ansel Packer.”
That name.
Saffy’s jaw filled with saliva, the sulfuric rush before a spew of vomit.
“Did you notice anything else?” Saffy asked, quaking.
“I’m sorry,” Olympia said. “I don’t remember much, not like that. I spent a long time just trying to forget.”
Memory, Saffy thought, was unreliable. Memory was a thing to be savored or reviled, never to be trusted.
“Did you laugh at him?”
The women gaped. An endless pause.
“Please,” Saffy said. “Do you remember, Olympia? It’s important. It sounds like he felt threatened, embarrassed. Do you remember if you laughed at him?”
Olympia’s expression was a cracked veneer of shame. Saffy had her answer. The room smelled like Christmas candles and smoked meat. A sudden wave of understanding broke over Saffy’s body, the recognition simmering. A patch of orange fur, stuck bloody to Saffy’s palm; Lila’s giant eleven-year-old eyes, a handful of crumbling oatmeal raisin cookies. The way the squirrels laid in death, one, two, three with the fox, arms stretched deliberately above their heads in surrender. Moretti’s finger hooked through the eye socket of that skull. Fur, skin. The way death peeled itself deliberately from a bone.
* * *
The Fitzgeralds’ bathroom was papered in peeling pink. Mrs. Fitzgerald had lined the counter with little figurines—angels and shepherds, porcelain cherubs. A bowl of potpourri sat by the faucet, old and crunchy, a layer of dust gathered on the petals. Saffy ran the water cold, splashed it onto her face.
As the years faded, Saffy remembered less and less about her mother. The tiny things had slipped away without saying goodbye. Her mother’s favorite shoes were red patent leather. Saffy could not recall the shape. She remembered dark lipstick, but not the slope of her mother’s canine teeth. These tiny reckonings seemed unfair, as Saffy leaned both hands against the faux marble counter. In the mirror, she still saw bits of her mother, except her mother had been white, and for that reason, Saffy would always resemble her father to everyone else. When people asked where she was from—no, where she was really from—Saffy would tell them. My father is from India. No, I’ve never been. Yes, I’d like to go someday. And every time, she would feel an exhaustion that reached her very bones.
Saffy wished her mother were here now. She would have words for this change, riling ferocious from Saffy’s gut. A monster, roaring the sound of that name: Ansel Packer.
Saffy still kept the photo frame, with her mother’s handwriting inside. It sat now on her nightstand—the glass polished clean. Felix culpa, her mother had written. The happy fault. The horrible thing that leads to the good. As Saffy fled the Fitzgeralds’ house without goodbye or explanation, she wondered about her father; if he had grown up learning religious phrases similar to those she’d been forced to study in the Bible as a foster child. For God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit evil to exist at all.
* * *
“We have a lead,” Saffy said, breathless.
Moretti looked worn, her hair uncharacteristically mussed as they sat in the late-night hush of the station. The bullpen was blissfully abandoned. Moretti had sent Kensington home, after he’d sulked over and plopped the day’s reports onto the conference room table. The tip lines had exploded since the press conference, and Kensington had spent the day listening to a series of unhinged townie theories. The girls were kidnapped by a serial killer from the seventies, the girls were members of a Satanic cult, the girls had fought, then murdered one another. The tip line was necessary, Moretti had lectured to a cranky Kensington, who’d taken a flask from his jacket and swigged it blatantly. They had to check every box.
But now, Saffy had this. Something real.
Ansel Packer.
Saffy’s clothes still carried the mildew stench of the Fitzgeralds’ house. Beneath the glow of the desk lamp, she detailed Olympia’s statement, explaining what she knew of Ansel Packer as a boy.
“He exhibits all the traits of our perpetrator. Explosive, but not consistently so. Fragile with his masculinity, always trying to prove it. Socially competent enough to avoid calling attention to himself. It makes sense—I’ve seen him before, humiliated. Those animals in the yard, also buried by a creek. He kills in threes, Sergeant.”
Moretti eyed Saffy with a doubt that felt horribly akin to pity.
“So you had personal relationships with them both,” she said slowly. “The victim and the suspect.”
“Yes,” Saffy admitted. There were very few cases in their department that did not carry similar conflicts—the Adirondacks were small.
“There is a difference,” Moretti said gently, “between believing something is true and having the facts to prove that it’s true. It doesn’t matter what you suspect. It doesn’t matter what you think, unless you build a case that can stand up in court.”
Even as the surety rushed through her veins, Saffy could not speak of the fox. She had never told anyone what Ansel had done, how that corpse had globbed onto her bedsheets—it felt too raw, too personal to divulge. The incident lived inside her, a private bubble of shame that she poked on her worst days, just to see if it had changed shape. It never did.
“What about the trailer park?” Saffy asked. “What if he’s still there?”
Olympia had given a detailed description of Ansel’s trailer, inside and out. She’d described his strange behavior, his paranoid ramblings. He was always going on about the universe, Olympia had said. About multiple realities or something.
“Unlikely. Didn’t your witness say he was going to college? She didn’t have any evidence, Singh.”
“What about the trinkets? The jewelry? What if he has them?”
“It’s a stretch.”
The night felt heavy. Out the window, a brisk autumn wind battered the trees, the summer critters retreated and gone. Saffy let the chill creep up her spine.
“Look,” Moretti said, with an unbearable sort of tenderness. “I know what it’s like, to want something to be true. That does not make it so, and you can’t let that cloud your judgment or close your eyes to other leads. Things are different for us here, okay? It’s important that we don’t let our emotions get in the way of our reasoning. Sometimes—sometimes it’s our job not to feel however we do. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
* * *
Kristen’s house looked like a movie set. It was rustic, cabin-pretty, with big windows overlooking the hills and centralized heat. Even from the stoop, it smelled like air freshener and expensive candles. It was a Saturday evening, nearly Halloween, the sun setting over the treetops in ghostly rays. Saffy had done her face up using the makeup samples Kristen had gifted, which the salon received for free—the foundation was always two shades too light for Saffy’s skin, but this was not something she could tell Kristen without embarrassing her.
“Hi, hi, come in,” Kristen said. “I just popped the pizza in the oven. I hope you’re not starving.”
Saffy shed her shoes while Kristen chattered. Kristen’s house had been Jake’s until six months ago, when he’d asked her to move in—already, Saffy could see where her friend had taken over. Little calligraphy signs and pillows with needlepoint catchphrases like Laughter Is the Best Medicine and It’s 5 O’Clock Somewhere! Kristen’s technician’s apron had its own hook in the front hall, glitter smeared across the fabric. Kristen was obsessed with the impending Y2K disaster, and as they crept closer to the New Year, her fixation only grew. She had lined every shelf in the house with stores of canned food and tubs of bottled water.
“Do you mind?” Kristen asked, sheepish, as she pulled half a bottle of chardonnay from the fridge.
Saffy shook her head. Moretti had a set of unbreakable rules—no substances, however casual. By the time Saffy applied to the NYSP, she had gotten entirely clean, with no proof of her past, no arrest records or criminal charges.
“Are you okay?” Saffy asked, as they settled on the couch, Kristen’s fingers fidgeting the stem of her wineglass.
“I’m fine,” Kristen said.
A long quiet.
“Lila,” Saffy said finally.
She and Kristen rarely talked about those years, in which Saffy had drifted through the underbelly of this unforgiving town, mirroring Lila’s downward spiral. Now, Saffy wanted to tell Kristen how the drugs had felt, melting through her veins, how she’d passed entire days lying on a dusty mattress. How she’d known Lila’s life and then grown out of it—how Lila had not gotten the chance to do the same.
“Kristen,” Saffy started. “Do you remember Ansel Packer?”
“Of course,” she said. “That kid was so weird. He was transferred too, when Miss Gemma got sick. Aren’t you working that robbery case?”
“Moretti got me transferred to this one. To Lila’s.”
“God, that woman loves you.”
“I don’t know why she—”
“Oh, shut up,” Kristen said. “You’re the best young investigator they’ve seen in decades. And besides, you make a good story, Saff. Wayward teen turns her life around. You’re like a detective from a TV show, the poor little orphan haunted by her past. Plus, you found that missing boy all on your own—”
