The morning after Pete picked me up from my place and I met Detective Wolski for this first time, Ma doled out tasks. Some of our extended family, with a few from my father’s side who didn’t have work or were able to take off, came over and we strategized. The day was sunny, and the walls of the kitchen shone hot yellow; I’d drunk too much of that nasty chartreuse.
Ma assigned us tasks that, if Dee had been labeled critical missing, the police department would have been required to undertake. Because her case hadn’t warranted sufficient suspicion, according to Wolski, we were supposed to exhaust our own investigations. These included, per the Milwaukee Police Department Missing Persons SOP: Conduct a search of the home and grounds from which the person went missing, conduct a search of the last location the missing person was seen and conduct an interview of those who last saw the missing person, fully identify and separately interview anyone at the scene of the disappearance of the missing person and treat the location as a possible crime scene, identify any areas at the incident scene that have been disrupted or may have the potential for the presence of evidence and safeguard those areas, broadcast a description of the missing person and vehicle, and conduct a canvass of the neighborhood. Ma, Pete, and Suze had already exhausted a number of these items by the time they brought me home to help.
Ma asked me to call the Milwaukee Journal; she said we needed an announcement in the paper. I spent the morning listening to a bad recording of Beethoven’s Fifth, and I never got through to a human. I borrowed Suze’s car and drove back downtown. No one profited more from the murders than the newspapers; the week after the serial killer was arrested, circulation and sales hit record highs. Milwaukee, and the rest of the nation, had a dark, insatiable appetite for this story.
The first of the victims to be identified was a twenty-three-year-old man named Oliver Lacy. He was engaged to the mother of his two-year-old son at the time of his death. Lacy’s mother identified her son from a photo of his severed head. Minutes after she’d returned from the Police Administration Building downtown, her house was swarmed with reporters. On the evening news, she sat in her recliner with her granddaughter on her lap and blinked into dozens of flashes. The fuzzy ends of microphones brushed her lips. When one cameraman turned his lens on the scene behind him, we saw reporters standing on her coffee table, framed family photos smashed on the ground, mud and grass from the reporters’ boots on her carpet.
Inside, the Journal offices were packed with people in motion, weaving around desks, typing furiously on massive IBMs, dropping paper, picking up paper, passing out coffee and sandwiches, shouting to one another from across the room or into phones. It sounded like everyone in the room was being paged, but no one seemed to mind the cacophony of fifty pagers going off at once. No one noticed me. I approached the desk closest to the office doors, where a young woman was holding a phone to her ear with her shoulder and writing furiously on a legal pad. I waited, and she flitted her eyes up at me, once and then twice, annoyed. She put the phone down, kept writing, and asked, “Can I help you?”
“I hope so,” I said.
She glared. I supposed if I said the serial killer’s name, they’d roll out the red carpet. Peter said some of his lawyer friends had heard other media outlets, particularly national ones, were giving limousine rides and steak dinners to the killer’s relatives or neighbors, even his prom date from high school, in exchange for exclusives.
“We’re very busy,” the woman said.
“Who can I see about getting a missing-persons announcement and photo in the paper?”
“Is he gay?”
“Excuse me?”
“Is the missing person gay?”
They had yet to identify all the victims.
“It’s my sister,” I croaked, not sure what to say.
“Oh,” the woman said, obviously disappointed. She pointed across the room at a cubicle fitted into a corner. “He might be able to help you.”
I knocked awkwardly on the wall and poked my head into the makeshift office. A young man, a boy, really, whipped around in his swivel chair. His eyes were wide, rimmed red with fatigue and chemical alertness.
The walls of his cubicle were lined with photos. One wall was just children, and they were mostly stiff school photos—cheesy smiles against purple and green backgrounds, pressed collars and combed hair. Others were candid—a girl at her dance recital, another at a picnic; one boy grinned at the bottom of a Christmas tree, the presents like a fort around him. One wall was covered in photos of young men.
“We’re a little behind,” the boy said. I scanned the photos: Milwaukee’s missing. Where were all of these people? “We’ve been flooded with requests, mostly by families of young missing men. Now everyone thinks maybe their son was one of the serial killer’s victims. Can you imagine?”
There was a face I recognized: the jazz prodigy from Chicago whom I’d seen on the news a few weeks back. I stared at this man; I wondered if he was dead.
“Can I help you?” The boy fidgeted. The small, tired look of him made me want to take him into my arms and rock him to sleep.
I nodded. “My sister’s missing. We need an announcement in the paper.”
“Okay,” he said. And it was that simple. He asked for a copy of the missing-persons report, as well as a photo. He ran the report through the copy machine without looking at it.
“Do they always make the family do this?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “Journal and PD relations are at an all-time low, but usually, the detective passes along the information, or whoever filed the report. Who’s your assigned detective?” He flipped to the front of the report he’d just copied. His face reddened.
“What’s wrong with Wolski?” I asked.
The boy was embarrassed, and he hesitated. “He’s not a bad guy,” he offered.
“But . . .” I waited.
“He’s got bad stats,” the kid said.
I wasn’t following. “Meaning?”
“Meaning he doesn’t usually find the people he’s looking for.”
I frowned, and I could tell the kid felt like he’d said too much.
“But that’s not always a reflection of the detective,” he said. “Obviously, some cases are more easily resolved than others,” he added.
“Wolski thinks she ran away with her boyfriend.”
He shrugged. “So you know what I mean.”
The Journal didn’t print the damn thing for a week, and when they did, it was hidden in the lower corner of page eleven: a two-inch-square box below a shrunken, grainy version of Dee’s face. The notice was printed in the same issue that called 1991 Milwaukee’s “deadliest year ever,” citing not only the gruesome murders of that summer (eleven and counting) but also the murder of a nine-year-old boy by a group of teenagers who’d allegedly killed the boy on account of the Chicago Bulls jacket he was wearing.
Leif called that week to tell me Erik had run away again. Leif was out of breath, and his voice was strained, as if he were choking. He said Erik had seen the tiny report about Dee in the newspaper and had spooked. Was he afraid of Frank? I was afraid of Frank. Maybe we were the only ones. Leif said he had no idea where Erik had gone. He had left in the middle of the night with a backpack and fifty-two dollars in cash that he’d stolen from Leif’s wallet. He hadn’t left a note or a forwarding address.
“So he’s not with you?” Leif stammered.
“Why didn’t you call me sooner?”
“I can’t be responsible for everyone, goddammit.”
“I tried to call you,” I repeated. I’d called our apartment and his parents’ house every night to talk to him about Dee’s disappearance, but the phones had rung and rung. Once his mother had picked up their landline and shouted, We’re not interested!
“I bet Erik and Dee are together somewhere,” he said. “They probably decided to take a trip. Get some air, get out of the city.” I thought of all the empty, airy promises I’d made Dee on the night of the third—Canada and Thailand, a house in the woods or the jungle. A place where we’d be safe.
“You’re dumber than Wolski,” I told Leif.
“Fuck you,” he said.
I hung up. I put my head against the wall and rolled my forehead across the stucco. The wall felt almost like a cool ice pack. Pete put his hand on my shoulder and I jumped.
“Any news?” Peter asked me. He wrung his hands.
“Erik’s run away,” I told him, and he threw his hands up, frustrated by any news that didn’t seem Dee related. “Again.”
“Who the hell is that?”
“Leif’s brother,” I said. Pete squinted. I explained, “Dee and Erik were friends. Became friends.”
“I see,” Pete said. “Peg? I need to know from you.” He paused.
Pete and I had never been all that close. I’d always thought he was hard on me, unnecessarily so. I never understood why. “What?” I gulped.
“What do you think is going on here? What’s happened to her? Is she with this kid? Is she . . .” Neither of us wanted him to finish asking that question. I nodded, though.
“She isn’t with him. I don’t know, Pete. It’s bad . . . You know she wouldn’t . . . We don’t go this long. Ever. You know that.”
He clenched his jaw. Rifled around in his pants pocket for his cigarettes. Though Pete had once told me he abhorred the habit of smoking, after Dee went missing, he started smoking almost as heavily as Suze. He plugged a cigarette in his mouth and spoke with it clamped tightly between his teeth. “That’s what I thought. Now you need to start acting accordingly.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked him.
He went toward the door. “You’re taking this all a little lightly, no?”
“And you’re a real asshole, you know that?”
Ma heard us and stormed into the room. “What is this?” she yelled.
Pete hid his cigarette but inched toward the door. “Nothing, Ma, nothing.”
I stared at the carpet.