Untold

By Mitchell Nelson

Nearly a year ago, Caroline Gillespie took on gangsters, a dirty cop, and her own bloodthirsty father, and now all she has to show for it is a recurring nightmare and a mediocre newspaper job. Still, it’s an improvement. And maybe more—maybe it’s the beginning of an ordinary life as an ordinary member of society.

But then her best friend, crime reporter Troy Stanforth, is found brutally murdered, his body abandoned on the side of the road like so much garbage. Caroline believes he was killed to suppress some truth he’d discovered. The police, on the other hand, don’t seem to believe anything. In fact, it almost seems like they don’t care about catching Troy’s killer at all.

Against everyone’s better judgement, Caroline launches an investigation of her own. To find Troy’s killer. To find his untold story. Her obsession will take her into the dark underbelly of her city in search of a powerful and violent enemy. An enemy who likes the darkness just fine, and will stop at nothing to keep Caroline from switching on the light.

The sequel to The Cannibal's Daughter.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mitchell Nelson
• Release date: May 4, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311078162

Mitchell Nelson

Mitchell Nelson lives in Oklahoma. When he's not writing, he spends his days playing music, drinking coffee, and looking for new stories. He does not have any pets.

Book preview

Say you’re a businessman. Say you have a product you have to move from an undisclosed location in Mexico all the way to Dallas. You’ve got to do this without anyone stopping you. The cops, say. Or the border patrol. Because they might want to see what kind of stuff your truck is carrying. They’d want to see your product.

And let’s say, in this scenario, let’s say that kind of thing is just not acceptable.

Maybe, if you’ve been around a while, if you’ve got enough trusted employees, maybe you send one of your own people to do the job. But you’re more the upstart type. The fresh entrepreneur. You don’t have the infrastructure in place.

So what do you do?

In this scenario, maybe you outsource. Maybe you call up the guys at Gorilla Shipping. That’s their current name, but it’s not always the same. More like, not ever the same. That you even know they exist, that’s proof of your determination.

You don’t know the name of the guy who picks up the product. It doesn’t matter, anyway. Gorilla Shipping, think of them like a sort of temp agency. They’ve done the legwork, so you don’t have to. The guy, what you need to know about him is that he’ll get the job done.

The guy, the Mexican, he’s driving a truck with the words GORILLA SHIPPING painted across the side in big black letters. The letters are faded in places, rubbed out in others. But if you look close enough, you notice how the edges of the letters are crisp. Like maybe they were painted there more recently than it first seems. Painted to look worn.

He crosses the border a little after eight in the evening. He’s breathing a lot more easily after he’s actually in the states. Not that this is new for him, he’s a human sized ping-pong ball pinging and ponging across a border-shaped net. But still. How football players get bad knees and coal miners get black lungs, the border is the one great hazard of the Mexican’s career choice.

It’s six and a half hours from Laredo, on the border, to Dallas. 430 miles in basically a straight line on northbound I-35. And your guy, the Mexican, no matter how much his bladder is on fire, he doesn’t stop. Because with your product, stopping isn’t really safe. A lot of potential problems there, in stopping.

But you know all about that. It’s your product.

The Mexican, while he drives, he thinks about his family. His kids, his little girl and his little boy. And he thinks about his wife.

It’s better for him that way. Less stress, if he thinks about the reason for his job instead of the job itself. Because if he thinks too hard about the product strapped down on the floor of the huge trailer behind his truck, the sweat breaks out on his forehead and his chest gets tight. He starts thinking about abandoning ship.

And should he do a thing like that, his boss will kill him. This is not hyperbole. It’s just one of the many reasons you can trust Gorilla Shipping.

What matters is that your product is safe with him. He’s the opposite of a risk-taker. He’s a do-your-job kind of guy. What matters is that this guy is trustworthy. He’s the kind of guy you know is going to make it to Dallas right on time. He’s going to pull up to the loading bay in the back of your location right at the time he said he would, and he’s going to have all of the product with him.

All of it.

Outside, all the ugly light spilling all over the loading bay, it comes from inside. The roll-up door is open, it’s leaking all that light everywhere. The back of the truck meets up with that open mouth into the guts of the building. The driver, he’s precise in his maneuvers. The problem is that the shape of the truck and the shape of the roll-up door are not so precise, so the light keeps leaking out into the loading bay.

He waits a while in the cab after he’s got the trailer in position.

Back there, some guys have already got the truck opened up. These are your guys the same way the Mexican is your guy. You, the hypothetical businessman. They’re on loan, these temps supplied by people more experienced than you. They’re unloading the product into the inside of the location. The dark accents of their voices echo in the loading bay.

The Mexican takes a packet of cigarettes from the passenger seat. He gets out of the cab and takes the lighter out of his back pocket, where it’s been biting his ass since about Waco. The wind comes sweeping out of the north and keeps putting out his lighter flame. Just think, that wind blowing all the way from the Arctic just to annoy him.

Hey, fat boy, are you going to help or not? one of your people says from the exposed inside of the building. Shouting at him with that thick accent they’ve all got.

Not my job, he says.

His job is to move the product with the semi. Not with his hands. That’s the deal, okay? That’s his job.

His bladder is aching.

He gets his cigarette lit. Standing there, his back is to the light coming out of the building. He can hear, still, the sound of product slapping against the floor. These people—your temps—aren’t gentle while they unload.

After his cigarette, they’re still unloading the product.

He thinks maybe he could go up and say, Hey, where’s the toilet? But then he’ll get all kinds of shit from those assholes, all of them laughing at him and mocking him in whatever language they talk in. Instead, he just drops his cigarette and crushes it with his foot and walks over to the edge of the loading bay.

Out there in the night, the shouting workers fade out and the highway grows louder. The concrete loading bay slopes inward towards the big doorway, a concrete valley, and he walks right up to the top of it. Around the edges there, at the peaks of mountains surrounding the valley, there are some trees. Some grass. A chainlink fence. A single tiny red light.

He unzips and takes a piss. The sound of his urine splashing in the dirt is counterpoint to the sound of the highway. He shakes off some droplets and zips up.

He thinks: Light?

The tiny red light.

The one hidden in the darkness of the trees.

Standing there with his feet rooted down, how you’d stand if you were in the woods and you thought there might be a bear somewhere nearby, he tilts his head sideways.

His guts are all tight inside. The needle point of light hangs there just on this side of the chainlink fence. Suspended in the air. Hidden in the shadows, there’s a shape behind the light. If you squint enough, you can see the clean-shaven head. You can see—if you really try—you can see the army-green coat blending into the shadows of the trees.

The Mexican looks over his shoulder, into the loading bay where the white men are working. Where your guys are unloading the product.

They don’t see it. They don’t even think to look. Anyway, why would they?

He takes the cigarettes out his pocket. He lights one. He doesn’t move from where he’s standing, he just smokes his cigarette. The nicotine buzzes in his brain, a million fireflies at once. The Arctic’s windy assault stings his face, but he doesn’t move.

All this time, he’s looking at the little red light over there.

Watching as it blinks.

And blinks again.

And blinks again.

Used to be, you could hear a camera when it snapped a photo. These days, these digital cameras, they capture their images in guerilla-warfare silence. You can’t hear it unless you’re right up next to it.

The guy holding the camera, though, he’s not so quiet. He keeps rustling the leaves. His army-green coat keeps brushing against the chainlink. Against the trees.

Hey, fat boy, calls one of the white guys in the building. You are really just going to stand there?

The voice echoes up the concrete valley. The Mexican smokes his cigarette, exhaling some mix of wet breath and dry smoke into the air.

The red light blinks.

The Mexican traces a line with his eyes. The line begins at the red light blinking, blinking, blinking in the darkness. The line slides straight through the cold air and comes to its logical endpoint at the back of his truck. Where they’re unloading product into the bright inside.

For reasons he’d rather not discuss, he knows some things about cameras. He’s not an expert, but he knows enough. He can make out the long lens attached to the front of the camera. How it’s got to be zoomed in on the bright open door to get a usable photo. How even when he was standing over there at the front of the truck, he wasn’t in the shot. And even if he was? He had the headlights behind him. If he were in the picture, which he isn’t, he would just be a slightly-overweight black blob.

The bald guy over there, he’s just taking pictures of the product. He doesn’t care about some Mexican driver.

So what to do next? Go over there and rough the guy up a little? Right. He’s a truck driver, not a thug. He’s not about to do that kind of favor for someone he’s never even met and doesn’t even work for. Or, what else could he do? Tell the guys inside they’ve got a spy in their midst so they can do the roughing up instead, him just standing there watching the blood splatter all over the pavement? He knows the kind of guys inside that building. They don’t do beatings. They do killings. There will be blood.

No, that doesn’t sound too great to him.

It’s not his job.

Easier just to walk back down to the truck and keep his back to the camera. To lean against the bumper and smoke another cigarette, feel the engine thrum underneath him, think about his wife at home. How she’ll be missing him tonight.

Inside, the white guys unload the product.

At the edge of the loading bay, the red light blinks.

When the white guys are done, they close up the truck. The Mexican gets in and drives away. A lot easier, driving home. Because your product isn’t his responsibility, when he’s driving home.

TWO

The last time I see Troy Stanforth, it’s just another day.

In books, people are always getting bad feelings for no reason. Foreshadowing, it’s called. But me, riding up the elevator in between a man in a suit and a man in janitor clothes, I don’t feel anything. There’s no foreshadowing in my gut or my heart or my head.

There’s just the prickle of renewed circulation in my toes. The February numbness in the tip of my nose.

The elevator lets me off on the fourteenth floor and I walk down the hall without even one premonition. I go to the wide glass door with the Dallas Daily logo painted on it in white.

When I push the door open, the only bad feeling I have is that maybe my shoes are still wet. But I stomp a couple of times on the mat laid out for just that purpose, and after that my bad feeling goes away.

On the other side of the door, the big room is full of people moving in the aisles between their cubicles. They’re talking to each other and making phone calls and typing on computers. One whole wall of the room is just plate glass windows, so you can look out and see how high we are. But all the people walking by, none of them are looking at the window.

These people and me, we are the gears of the media machine. We don’t have time to smell the roses or admire the view. We have a whole newspaper to fill up with information.

Phones are ringing. Keyboards are clattering.

I edge around two men drinking coffee and talking at the mouth of the aisle. They don’t look at me when I go by. When I say, Excuse me, it doesn’t even make a hiccup in their conversation.

My cubicle is at the back end of the aisle. Troy is in his cubicle, across from mine, slouched down in his chair. There’s stubble sprouting on his chin and on his head, maybe two days’ worth. He’s wearing his army-green coat, the one that’s all ripped up and stitched back together, the black threads standing out like sutures on your skin. His eyes are focused on whatever’s on his screen, a deep frown-line between his eyebrows.

Walking over there, I almost say something stupid.

Something like: Hey.

Something like: What’s up.

But instead I dump my messenger bag onto the ground beside my chair. My chair, in the cubicle across from his. I take off my big coat and drape it over the back of my chair. Another thing you see all the time in books is how guys are always watching secretly when girls take off their coats. But Troy keeps frowning at his computer when I take off mine.

I sit down in my chair.

Troy looks up, blinking. He says, Rosie was looking for you a minute ago. He says, How was the thing?

Boring, I say.

He laughs.

What? I say.

That’s gonna be a killer headline.

I shrug, taking my laptop out of my bag and setting it on my desk. The thing was Jefferson Hale, this former football player who’s going around the country giving speeches to convince people to buy his new book. Which is about his experiences with football and Jesus, so far as I could figure out from all his talking.

So are you saved now? Troy says.

I didn’t really listen, I say.

One eyebrow goes up. He says, So how’re you going to write it up?

I’ve got his book?

Really? He sits up a little straighter. You bought his book?

He gave me a copy.

Troy’s chair turns so he’s facing me straight on. Jefferson Hale just handed you a book, and all you’ve got to say about it is ‘boring’?

I shrug. I open my laptop. Not really my thing, I guess.

What I don’t say is that at the bookstore where they had the book signing, listening to this huge white guy answer dumb questions from his fans, I just kept thinking, What a faker. This big guy with his gym-built muscles and his giant paychecks, his only injuries caused by playing games for a living, why does everyone look at him and think he’s so tough? What’s he ever done except run into some other big guys on a field?

I look up at Troy to see if he’s still looking at me. He is. Only, I’m out of things to say. So I say: Football, I mean. I never really got into it.

Troy nods. Only he’s not saying anything still. He picks up his camera off his desk. His fingertips press again the sides of the long lens, the telephoto lens, and twist so the thing comes unscrewed.

Is he cute? he says after a while.

And it’s maybe twenty-five degrees outside our building, but inside of it my face gets hot.

I open my mouth to answer him. Only I don’t say anything, because right then is when the orange dome of Rosie Kitterman’s head comes bobbing along the aisle. Across from me, Troy mouths the words he always says when Rosie comes around: Ginger at twelve.

She appears in front of me, this ghost with white skin and all-white clothes and a shock of flame on the top of her head. She’s this sort of stretched-out person. She’s taller than most guys and thinner than me, and all of her curves are more like angles. And in her arms, she’s carrying a stack of dark green binders, all of them inches thick.

You’re late.

Sorry, I say. It went long.

She looks at me, her eyes saying, Sure, whatever you say, her eyes piercing through me and seeing how I’m telling her lies. But she doesn’t say anything about it. While her feet stay planted on the floor outside the cubicle, she leans into it and drops the binders with a bang on my desk. A reed bent by the wind, she straightens back up.

April of ninety-five to August of ninety-six, she says to me. The usual.

Her eyebrows are up.

Her back is straight.

Rosie, she’s just daring me to argue with her.

Me, I’m just here to please her. In this machine, I am just the part that makes Rosie happy. I say, I still have an article to finish.

Yes, well, I’m sure you’ll have time for both.

It’s almost five.

Welcome to the life of a newspaper reporter, she says. The way you’d talk to a little kid if you happened to hate little kids. She says, Sometimes we have to work long hours. Anyway, you got to see that football player, didn’t you?

You told me to go, I say.

She waves a hand, brushing this stupid comment of mine away without examination. She’s already moving away from my cubicle. Proximity to a lowly writer like me, it could spoil her clean white clothes.

Most girls your age, she tells me, "would just kill to get paid to go see a man like Jefferson Hale. So consider this paying your dues, hmm?"

Across the aisle, Troy is looking at me. His eyebrows are up. His camera is balanced in his hands, pointed at his feet.

And maybe what I should be saying is, This isn’t my job. Or, What do I get out of this? But me, I only exist to make Rosie happy.

I say, All right.

The jagged lines of Rosie’s body reposition themselves to face away from my cubicle. Her legs walk away with her. Her neck doesn’t turn even once so her face can look back at me.

The binders are so thick, the stack of them is as high as my eyes when I’m sitting up straight in my chair. I flip open the one on the top. The first page is covered in print. Paragraphs as big as dreadnoughts. Across the top, there’s a headline and a byline:

ROCK AND ROLL MUSICIAN COMMITS SUICIDE!

by Rosie Kitterman

Thousands and thousands of words. Maybe hundreds of thousands, I don’t know. All of these old articles have been printed out by Rosie and saved on the shelves in her office. In there, she’s got a whole bookshelf full of just these fat green binders. And all of them, they exist only in the form of actual, physical paper. This stuff that’s hard to copy, that can be destroyed in a fire, whatever.

Troy says, You have to type all that up?

Yeah.

I twist a lock of hair around my hooked forefinger and tug until I feel the ache deep underneath my scalp. Doing the math in my head, how long it will take me to finish. Forever, is how long. The girl who has to spin straw into gold from that one fairy tale, that’s who I am. Only I’m spinning paper into digital information.

Bummer, Troy says.

Yeah.

Troy has his camera up in front of his face. He’s looking through the lens at me. He says, I’m telling you, you need to transfer. Crime section doesn’t have so many crazy people.

You have only crazy people.

His camera tilts upwards, towards the ceiling, like he wants to immortalize the water stains up there as digital images. We write about crazy people. You work for one. He says, Go talk to Tommy. Tell him you want to transfer.

Tommy: the editor-in-chief. Who I have only actually spoken to maybe five times. Including the time he hired me.

I shrug.

I say, I wouldn’t want to step on your toes.

You kidding? I couldn’t get through my backlog if there were ten of me, Caroline. His camera tracks downwards again, him looking at me through it. And we need more of you young whippersnappers around to keep things fresh.

Yeah, I say, "because you’re so old."

Under his camera, he smiles at me. I smile back, shaking my head a little. The red light on the camera comes on and then goes off again, maybe the length of time it takes you to wink an eye at someone.

I have seen many, many moons, young one.

Did you just take a picture of me?

Indeed. He lowers the camera, looking at me with an expression so serious you know it can’t really be. He says, For though I have seen many moons, I have only once seen the elusive smile of Caroline Gillespie.

Whatever, I say, rolling my eyes, shaking my head. My face feeling hot again, I say, Don’t you have somewhere to be?

Nah. He tilts back in his chair, putting one hand behind his head like he’s getting comfortable to stay there forever. Only then he looks at his watch and sits up straight. Shit, I’m late for a thing, actually.

A few seconds, I watch him stuffing papers into the pocket on the front of his camera bag. More gingerly, he slides the camera into the compartment padded like the inside of a