Colin Harrison - The Finder

He sat up some more. His head felt filled with sand.

"Very unfortunate," croaked his father, eyes open.

"What, why?" Ray answered.

"This house has many nice beds upstairs that I worked hard to pay for," his father said. "I wish you'd slept in one."

"I'm fine."

"Well, while you were sleeping I did a great deal of work for you."

"You did?"

"Sure."

"Well?"

"She gets mail at her apartment?"

Ray thought. He remembered locked mailboxes inside the apartment house foyer. "Yes."

"Did she have a regular phone there, a landline, we used to call it?"

"Yes. Mostly for international calls to her mother."

"And a cell phone? She's not calling China on a cell phone."

"Yes."

"Two phone lines," observed his father. "Billing cycles every thirty days. Two bills in thirty days. Cell phone and regular bills tend to be separate, they are for me."

"She's been missing something like five days."

"If the bills were perfectly distributed fifteen days apart, you have about a one-in-three chance that there's a fresh bill sitting in her mailbox showing who she was calling. Might be very useful information. Only other way to get it is with a court subpoena."

"One in three aren't bad odds."

"They could be worse or better."

"Maybe she had her mail forwarded."

"No." His father winced. "People running for their lives don't do that. Plus it generally requires a trip to the local post office. You have to give a new address. She didn't have a new address."

"Maybe she had the post office hold her mail."

"No!"

"I'm just trying to think of-"

"No! She was attacked at night. She fled. The post office doesn't open until eight in the morning. She was long gone by then."

Maybe, thought Ray. But one-in-three odds were pretty good.

"So I get into her building. I've got my old fireman's keys."

"Make sure you break into her mailbox."

"Just break into it."

"Yes," his father said, waving at Gloria now for breakfast. "Hell, man, this girl's life could be on the line here."

"I know, Dad."

He waited for his father to respond. But he didn't, and instead just stared into space, eyes unblinking and mouth tight, like a cop confronting a suspect for the first time, knowing he was guilty.

What is the Marine Park Athletic amp; Social Club of Brooklyn, New York? By law it is a nonprofit organization that happens to own the land and trailer used by Victorious Hauling amp; Sewerage, precursor organization to Victorious Sewerage Services, LLC, precursor to the current and not yet bankrupt company, Victorious Sewerage, LLC, which enjoys a thirty-year lease at $100 a year. Simple enough, it would appear. On a map, the Marine Park Athletic amp; Social Club is an irregularly shaped lot on landfill near the Dead Horse Inlet of Jamaica Bay. Its baseball field, dugouts, and small clubhouse are heavily used by summer-league baseball teams, most of which have an affiliation with local Catholic schools. As a nonprofit organization, it pays only nominal real estate taxes. A good third of the property is devoted to the sewerage company, a muddy lot of trucks, the office trailer, and a huge two-story cement-block warehouse originally built to house the regional inventory of a national paint company. Judged to contain enormous environmental damage from thousands of leaking cans of paint, the entire lot was sold in the 1960s by the company for $1, with the proviso that all future liabilities would pass to the new ownership. The president of the Marine Park Athletic amp; Social Club is also the principal owner of Victorious Sewerage, one Victor Rigetti, Jr. The company has been known to engage in commercial activities far outside the scope of its state license, such as buying untaxed #2 home heating oil from various freelance purveyors, providing parking space for the fuel trucks of those same purveyors, supplying warehouse space for "discount" clothing merchants wishing to store inventory temporarily, and so on. The large warehouse includes a three-bay truck garage, as well as several small windowless areas in back, one that is used to store tools, restricted-use chemicals, harsh solvents, cleansers, and other materials used in the sewage and cesspool business, and one that contains two bunks, a toilet, a sink, a refrigerator, and an illegal unvented stove. Another appears to be used to store tires and engine parts, but if you know where to look, which almost no one does, you may find behind the piles of truck tires a spring-loaded, four-foot-square floor panel that lifts up to reveal a homemade ladder that descends into a deep, small, ill-lit room that has in it a bathtub, a chair, a mouse-gnawed mattress, a pile of chains, and a hose.

You could call this a never-used fallout shelter built in the atomically paranoid 1950s or you could call it an infrequently used dungeon. Take your pick; both are right. Anyone with just a hint of claustrophobia would soon be reduced to frenzied panic in this windowless, underground room once the floor panel was replaced and its true smallness had become evident. The room, however, is wired for light (one bare bulb, with a pull chain) and electricity and has running water. At the center of the room is a floor drain. The drain leads to an illegal septic tank directly beneath the hidden room. This room has been carefully vented not to the storage area above it but through the walls and to the roof directly. Any malodorous effluvia issuing from this room are thus released well above the level of human beings and instantly mix with the diesel exhaust of the large trucks leaving or entering the property.

The bathtub, by the way, is a rather elegant old-fashioned enameled one, enamel being useful for its imperviousness to acid and solvents. Oddly enough, its drain is sealed. Yet there is a small hole drilled near the top lip of the bathtub, with a tube attached to it leading from the outside of the tub, and close inspection reveals that the tube is pure copper, oxidized green now, and leads directly to the drain in the middle of the floor. Further inspection of the room shows that the water pipe entering from the wall is divided into three separate uses: one a common hose bib attached to a hose that is neatly coiled in the corner; the second a smaller-gauge tube that runs directly to the drain in the middle of the room; and third, another small tube of equal diameter that runs directly to the old bathtub, providing it with its only source of water. The stopcocks that connect the main pipe to the smaller tubes are welded to set positions: one can turn on only so much water through the tubes and no more.

Once the tubes leading to both the tub and the floor drain are comprehended, it becomes apparent that the tub is slowly filled from the water tube. The tub's contents drain at an equal rate at the top of the tub through the copper pipe that leads to the floor drain, and these contents are further diluted by the second water tube that leads to the drain.

The tub, it should be noted, is full, and its soupy contents are a dark, reddish brown. The water tube leading into the tub trickles perhaps a gallon an hour, which means a gallon an hour of the soupy brown mixture exits the tub to the drain, there to be diluted by the flow of water from the second tube.

Next to the tub are a dozen-odd canisters of various solvents, acids, and caustic jellies, some empty, a few half full, the rest unopened. Each variety of canister has its own respective implement: a glass measuring cup and a tin scoop for dry powder, a steel ladle for jellied matter. The neatness of the canisters and the careful placement of the implements is suggestive of habit, orderly procedure, and thoughtful intention.

Standing overly close to the tub causes one's eyes to water and soon thereafter one suffers from a raspy cough and light-headedness. The chemical stench is bad enough to prevent anyone from wanting to plunge a rubber-gloved hand into the odorous murk in the tub, but if one did, and stirred around a bit, one would find not only that it was hot, because of the exothermal chemical processes at work, but also two dozen metal grommets, such as are typically found on men's work boots, a pair of mushy Vibram soles, a number of tooth fillings, a piece of a jawbone, some slippery, degraded pieces of skin, perhaps one with a lightning bolt tattooed to it, a handful of vertebrae, their most acute tips and wings blunted by the action of the chemicals, a set of large scapulae, male from the size of them, and a complete pelvis, also originally belonging to a large male, already so eroded by the chemicals in just a few hours as to appear to have been lying on a beach for a decade. Within only a few days, all the bones and the skin will be gone, leaving just the rubber shoe soles, the metal fillings, and perhaps some indistinct sandy granular matter. This residue, it may be assumed, will be wiped up with a paper towel and discarded in the local McDonald's in a McDonald's bag retained for this purpose. Meanwhile, the water will continue to trickle into the tub and drain for hours to come, slowly washing away all traces of the tub's contents. Then three gallons of bleach will be poured into the water and this, too, will be allowed to drain away.