Eulogy

by J.R. Godwin

Disclaimer: "Labyrinth" belongs to Jim Henson & Co. There's no money being made off of this.

Rating: M

VERBAL: Who is Keyser Soze? He is supposed to be Turkish. Some say his father was German. Nobody believed he was real. Nobody ever saw him or knew anybody that ever worked directly for him, but to hear Kobayashi tell it, anybody could have worked for Soze. You never knew. That was his power. The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist. And like that, poof. He's gone.

-The Usual Suspects (1995)

OPERATOR: Turley! Half the goddamn city just called 9-1-1!

-Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995)

3.

Here is the way of our world. Pay attention.

While Ana Maria Ramirez is wheeled away from the alley, while her parents huddle together outside the morgue (praying praying praying it won't be their baby girl but of course it is), while Harry and I question witnesses in a feverish bid for clues - the world has come awake with the dawn and the birds have begun chattering. The news of Ana Maria Ramirez is no sure thing, of course. We haven't officially identified her yet, but that hardly matters. The gossip channels already know.

So the news spreads like birdsong across treetops, through the streets of El Barrio, through the little bodegas, to the front stoops of apartment buildings, across the blacktops of the basketball courts.

¿Esa niña? The one who went missing last week?

Yeah, cops found her in a dumpster.

They sure it's her?

Yeah. I know a guy who works at the restaurant where they found her.

She went to P.S. 83 with my son.

Watch your kids. There's a nut on the loose.

She disappeared from her own bedroom. Man, how can you fight that?

I just ran into the parents. They're going to ID her now.

Señor, ten piedad.

And so it goes.

By lunchtime, Channel 7 reports that the NYPD has discovered the body of a child in East Harlem. By dinnertime, Channels 7 and 11 will confirm what every neighbor north of 110th Street already knows: the body is Ana Maria's.

Even for a place with as rough a history as El Barrio, the news hits like a body blow. Schools bring in counselors. Parents pick their kids up early. On every corner, in the 7-11s and the hairdressers and the laundromats, people mutter about forming neighborhood watches.

Overnight, another story breaks on all the major news outlets: a sex tape has just turned up of a popular millionaire heiress. A jealous ex-boyfriend is accused of leaking it. The heiress goes on Twitter and vehemently denies it all with the sort of colorful language that would've earned me a mouthful of soap as a kid.

The release of an eagerly-anticipated Hollywood movie has just been pushed back for the second time. It's already over budget by hundreds of millions of dollars, an oversight that could very well cost the famous director his career.

A former child star was photographed over the weekend flashing her tits at a strip club and doing a line of cocaine. The paparazzi stake out her family's vacation home in the Hamptons but her daddy, a famous country singer, won't comment. NBC is promising a segment about the strip club incident after lunch.

In this melee of rich white snobs and blonds behaving badly, the tragic story of a little brown girl from East Harlem barely earns any notice. Ana Maria's short life and brutal death get five sentences, buried on page 12 of the New York Daily News that I buy the next morning when I stumble out from the apartment amid Elsie's protests.

Just five. Trust me. I count every line.

The former child star and her tits get the front page.

"Jesus fuck, Williams. You get in an accident on the way in?"

Everyone in the squad room is staring at me like I'm a corpse. Too late, I realize I'm standing stock still in the doorway, dumb, mute, a cigarette dangling from my mouth. Where's the newspaper? I must have dropped it on the sidewalk somewhere. I don't remember. Everything hurts.

My head swims when I shake it. "No. No, I'm good."

Somebody forces me into a chair. Somebody else gets me coffee I won't drink. Hands, a group of them, patting me on the back, the shoulders. Silent affection. Poor guy's still grieving. We got your back, Williams. I can hear it in their touch.

"Okay, everyone," says Captain Mills, "listen up. You all heard the news yesterday. We got a child killer on the loose. We already have one confirmed victim, and this guy will probably target others. Any questions?"

"Somebody said the body was mutilated?"

"Correct. The eyeballs were removed from the sockets."

We're not a bunch of rookies. This room has seen the worst humanity's had to offer. But you can feel the room deflate at this news. "How?"

Captain nods at me and Harry. "You boys wanna answer that?"

Harry sighs. "The coroner says whoever did it had a delicate hand. He removed the eyes with a scalpel without tearing the tissue around the sockets or nicking the bone. We're probably looking at someone with medical training."

"Motive?"

"Not sure. He kept her alive for a week. She was fed and taken care of. No sign of sexual assault. There's just the matter of her eyes missing."

The room comes alive like a bee's nest. People are murmuring. This case has serial killer all over it. It's been a while since Manhattan had one of those. Serial murder is a nasty business. Shooting a cheating spouse in the heat of an argument? Despicable, but we can understand people going crackers under stress. There's something unnatural about humans hunting humans for sport. It makes you question the order of things.

It also brings down the wrath of the entire community on our heads. Why haven't you assholes caught him yet? You gonna let us all die? What do we pay you for?

The psychic scars from a serial killer don't go away, either. Captain Mills was just one week out of the Academy when David Berkowitz started shooting people in '76. He helped make the arrest. At least, that's what people say. He won't talk about it.

"And no clue how she got kidnapped?" someone calls over the buzz of the crowd.

"No," I reply. It's the first time I've spoken up. The room hushes. "No sign of forced entry at her home. No sign of struggle in her bedroom."

"Well, that's bullshit," Captain says. "You can't tell me some creep busts into a kid's room and leaves no trace behind. Can't be done. I want you people going over the evidence again. We got a lot of scared people out there."

Our squad is licking its wounds when we bundle into the squad room after the meeting. Somebody says in a high falsetto: "We got a lot of scared people out there. Jesus, like we don't know that?"

"Lay off, Wagner," Harry gripes. "Captain's right. We're sitting around with our thumbs up our ass."

So we pull out the case files and pass them around for the hundredth time. Everybody carefully inspects the photographs, the witness testimonies, the coroner's report. None of it makes sense, and yet the answer's here somewhere. It's gotta be. It's staring us right in the face and we're just not seeing it.

Cassie told me once that people share brain space. She was on the last leg of a PhD in neuroscience when she died, so she knew about stuff like that. As she'd explained it: "That's the beauty of human relationships, baby. It's too much for one person to remember everything, so your friends and family chip in. One person knows everything about cars, so you go to him to change your tire. Another person, they handle numbers and money. Someone else is good with people, so you go to them for your people problems. That's another reason people fall apart when they get divorced - they don't just lose a wife or a husband, they lose entire chunks of knowledge needed to survive. It's like losing part of your brain. A whole skillset - pfffffff, gone."

Explains why I feel like I'm drugged up lately. When Cassie died, she took half my soul and half my brain. When I try to reread the coroner's report, it might as well be Chinese.

I flip through photos of Ana Maria's bedroom, which looks like a Care Bear shat all over it. Pink everything. Lucia will probably go through this phase.

What am I looking for? What?

Is there something foreboding about the unicorn bedspread?

Did the killer drop a clue next to the undressed Barbies?

Did he hide pornography on the bookshelf?

What do you think, Sarah? Were you good at these sort of puzzles? Would you see something in these photos?

There's nothing. This is bullshit. The bedclothes are hardly rumpled. Ana Maria wasn't grabbed in the dark and pulled, kicking and screaming, from her bed. Her family would have heard, and the bed is undisturbed. The covers are lightly thrown back as if Ana Maria got up in the night for a drink of water.

Pointless. This is pointless.

The detective next to me, Vasquez, throws down a stack of photos and rubs his face. "Hey, who was that wack job who killed people out in California back in the 80s?"

"Which one?" That I even have to ask that question is sad.

"The devil-worshipping guy."

"... which one?"

"The one in L.A. Broke into people's homes and killed them in their beds. Mexican guy."

"Richard Ramirez. The Night Stalker." No relation to Ana Maria and her family.

"Yeah, that's him."

"Different M.O. Ramirez was chaotic. The guy we're looking for is too methodical. An older man, with an older man's patience. Ramirez was a serial rapist and tortured his victims. He hurt whoever was around. Our perp went out of his way to keep Ana Maria fed and reasonably comfortable while he had her. Who does that?" I rub my temple. "This guy's different. He targeted Ana Maria and bided his time."

"You can't prove that," Harry interjects.

"I can't. But do you doubt me?"

Harry doesn't answer. No one at the table does. I've got them by the balls on this one. People don't doubt my intuition on these things. They questioned me in the beginning, until my hunches turned into arrests. Then everybody started whispering about what a goddamn genius I am.

Nothing genius about what I do. Being a detective means working your way backwards to a logical conclusion. Our perp doesn't have the manic glee of a younger killer. This guy's too careful. He didn't take Ana Maria by accident. She was planned. Everything was planned. But what does it all mean?

"Nobody doubts you, Toby," Harry says, "it's just …"

"This case is fuckin' weird." Vasquez says what everyone else is thinking. I see a lot of nodding heads.

Christ, Ellis is about to speak. I can see it in his ferret-like face. He wants to say something funny. Every department has an Ellis. Ellis is one of those assholes that makes you question the Academy's judgment for passing someone so ill-suited to public service. Harry told me that his one wish in life was for Ellis to accidentally shoot himself before he appeared in the seven o'clock news on charges of corruption or police brutality.

Ellis doesn't disappoint. "Hey, there's one suspect we haven't considered yet!"

The room groans. We've come to expect his witty remarks. "Yeah, Ellis? Who?"

"Maybe the boogeyman took her!"

A few people actually chuckle. Harry and I lock eyes and shake our heads in disgust.

"Maybe the boogeyman took her - can you believe that jackass?" Harry offers me a cigarette before I even have to ask, but I shake my head.

"Thanks, I bought smokes this morning."

Harry lights up and takes a drag. The sun outside is bright and cheerful for such an awful day. "You got real quiet all of a sudden."

"What Ellis said back in the squad room … it brought back memories. When I was a kid, I thought the boogeyman took Sarah, too."

"You were a kid. Ellis is supposedly a grown-up."

"Yeah, I guess."

I have a memory of you, but of course it's not real. I mean, you died when I was a baby. Babies don't remember things, right? So of course this is a memory of a dream. Something I made up in my head. Your mind makes things real for you sometimes. You're not sure what's real and what's not. The mind's a jackass like that.

Anyway, the dream: I'm not much older than I was when you disappeared. I'm barely walking. Mom and Dad are fighting a lot. Grandma was still alive then, I guess, a constant presence in our lives. Trying to fill the hole that you left behind.

But she never did, Sarah, did she? Grandma couldn't. You up and left and no one could put the pieces back together.

Did you like our grandmother? She died when I was in 8th grade. She said you were such a good girl, but grandmas are obligated to say that. Grandma also said you were always making up stories. You were very creative. Fanciful. That's what she said.

I could read between the lines. What Grandma meant was you had your head up in the clouds. You were a little girl who didn't want to grow up. A bit of a storyteller and a rebel.

Oh, sorry. I'm rambling again. It's been hard, Sarah. Real hard. God, you have no idea. First I lost you. Then I lost my squad. Then my wife. Then I let a little girl die. It's fucked up. I've lost so many people, my life's looking like Swiss cheese.

So. The dream. I'm, like, two. That's the age when kids start rebelling against everything. I was a little nudist at that age. Mom practically had to staple me into my overalls.

Anyway, Mom's in the kitchen arguing with Dad. Screaming, actually. It's bad. I want to get away from it, want someplace safe.

So I hide. I'm a good climber. I clamber up the stairs and look for a place to hide. What's a good sanctuary?

Oh, I know.

The room at the end of the hall. The forbidden bedroom that Mom and Dad never enter.

But when I open the bedroom door, the desk lamp is on. Which is strange. I mean, no one ever comes in here.

That's what my adult self thinks, while watching the dream unfold. Why is the light on? My toddler self doesn't notice. Young children don't notice abnormalities like that. I'm too busy inspecting the toys in the room: a teddy bear, and a stuffed unicorn, and a scary statue of … what's he supposed to be? Dracula? He looks like a villain. Grandma would've said, That there is a very wicked man.

Suddenly, a voice cries, "Toby!" I know that voice, but I can't place it. I associate that voice with strong arms and anger. Someone who held me and scolded me in equal measure.

I sharply turn my head and see a girl standing next to the mirror. Well, she looks like a woman to my toddler self. To a 2-year old, anyone older than you might as well be a grown-up. But now, as a 38-year old man … I mean, she can't be more than 15.

Of course it's you. You don't sound angry with me this time. Your voice is sincere, like a mother's embrace. A little teary, too. You've obviously been crying.

You look nothing like the ghastly hallucination I saw in Afghanistan. Your flesh is pink, rosy, alive. You look warm. Human.

I grin wide and hold up my arms. Pick me up!

You move as if to grab me. But then you freeze and glance behind you like you've suddenly heard a noise that only you can hear. When you turn back to me, you put up your hands as if to ward off a blow and back away, regretful.

"Not now, Toby." You're crying again. I don't understand. Did you fall down and hurt yourself? Why are you crying? "I'll come back to you. I promise."

Then you step through the mirror. Just like that, as if it's a door. One second you're there, the next you're gone. Erased from existence.

When Mom and Dad find me, yelling, "No, no, no!" and banging on the mirror with my fists, they freak out because I've climbed onto the desk. I could break my neck doing that.

Of course, this is a dream. One I've been having since at least middle school. I don't know what made me think of it. I guess I've been thinking of you more than usual lately.

Three days later, we get the call: another child's been taken. Jennie Ortega. 7-years old. Her mom goes to wake up Jennie and her brother, and that's when she realizes her daughter's missing. Taken, in the middle of the night.

So now we know: New York has a serial killer preying on its children, one who somehow bypasses locked front doors and snatches children from their own beds. Not wanting to waste a good story, the newspapers immediately give our perp a fitting nickname. They call him The Boogeyman.

Harlem panics.