“Didn’t tell that to the DA’s men, huh?”
Goshen gave me the blank gaze of a city bureaucrat, willing to stand there until I figured it out for myself. Or at least until quitting time.
“You have a map of this place?” I said.
Goshen tapped his forehead.
“Right here. But you have to ask the right question. Let’s go.”
The elevator was a birdcage job with one of those old cranks you have to hold down until you get to your floor. Goshen turned it on with a skeleton-looking key, and we started up. The warehouse man kept his eyes fixed on the crank. Not because he didn’t know how to work it, but because his alternative was to look at me. Didn’t exactly make me feel warm inside. Still, we were moving.
“Fifth floor,” Goshen said. “Nineteen ninety through ’99.”
He cracked the elevator door and we walked out. Rows of iron shelving stretched upward and ran off into the darkness. Bits of light from what might have been bulbs filtered down from the rafters. Useless except as a reminder to go back downstairs and get a flashlight. Fortunately, Goshen was ahead of the game. He jumped into a forklift and pulled a flash from his pocket.
“Let’s go,” he said, and powered up the lift. I got in and we drove.
“Kind of a big place, this fifth floor, Ray.”
“Lot of sick fucks, Kelly. Lot of sick fucks. This is it. The late nineties.”
Goshen played a light over lumps of black, coffin boxes of evidence covered in dust. Forgotten by everyone. Cataloged by Ray.
“Here, put these on.”
Goshen handed me a set of latex gloves and a white breather. I started at one end of an aisle. He started at the other. The work was slow, box by box. Pull one off the shelf, open it up, and pick through the pieces of old crimes.
Some of the material was strictly forensic: small plastic bags of hair, blood smears, or nails clipped off a corpse.
Then there was the echo of what was once a life.
In one box, coloring books, the pictures half finished, a child’s name in crayon, smeared with blood.
In another, a CD of Pearl Jam’s Ten, AMANDA scrawled on the cover with a flower. Underneath the CD, a calendar from 1996. Filled with dates that never mattered. People never met. A life never lived and now forgotten.
Two hours into the process, I picked up a small box with 12/24/97 scrawled across the side. My heart tightened for two reasons. That was the day of Elaine Remington’s attack. Even better, the signature on the box belonged to John Gibbons.
Goshen was around the corner working on another aisle. I sliced open the box and found a single manila envelope inside. It appeared to be intact, with Gibbons’ initials and the date written across the red evidence seal. I sliced through the seal and slid out a single item, a green women’s polo gashed in several places and crusted with blood, now the color of rust. I felt a presence at my elbow.
“What you got?” Goshen said.
I showed him the evidence box.
“The date is right and it’s got Gibbons’ name,” I said. “But there’s no case number.”
Goshen picked up the envelope and turned it over. His fingers were thin, nails long and ragged.
“Nothing on the envelope, either.” The warehouse man winked. “Almost like someone wanted it to be lost.”
“I’m thinking this is the shirt my victim was wearing.”
“I’m thinking you might be half-ass right for once. Let’s go back to the office.”
We sat down with two cans of Old Style and the shirt between us. It was almost winter in Chicago but mid-July in Goshen’s cubbyhole. A fan chugged away in one corner. Goshen popped open his beer and pushed half the can past an impossibly large Adam’s apple, never taking his eyes off the shirt. And never touching it.
“Officially,” he said, “this piece of evidence doesn’t really exist. No case number, no log-in report, no other identifying marks.”
Goshen craned his neck, rolled his eyes, and pushed at the shirt with a pencil.
“I got to go out and clean up that fucking mess you made out there. When I come back, I have a lot of work to do. I don’t want you here, and I don’t want any more distractions lying around. You got it?”
I got it.
“You really don’t like the DA, do you?” I said.
Goshen gave me a look of pure nothing and left. Like any good civil servant, he cherished institutional hatred, nurtured the otherwise forgotten slight, and polished a grudge like it was gold. Whatever the DA’s office had done to Goshen, it wasn’t good for them. For me, however, it was a different story entirely. I picked up the shirt carefully, folded it into its envelope, and slipped out of the warehouse. As quickly and as quietly as I could.