The Body Box by Lynn Abercrombie

bottom-feeders—rarely stay at the same address for six months, much less six years. So I didn’t expect to find him here. Amazingly, when I knocked on the door of the squalid little house in southeast Atlanta, the man who answered looked just like the man in the mug shot. He was tall, thin, black as creosote, shirtless, and barefoot. A scar ran across his throat, almost from ear to ear.
    â€œVernell,” I said, showing him my badge, “come with me.”
    â€œWhuh?” he said.
    â€œNow.”
    â€œI’ma get my shoes,” he said. He closed the door, locked it.
    I strolled around the back of the house, stood behind a scraggly bush with my gun drawn, and waited. About thirty seconds later he climbed out the back window, a pair of Air Jordans hanging by the laces from his teeth.
    â€œMan!” he said, when I stepped out from behind the bush, pointed the gun at his sternum. “I ain’t did nothin’!”
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    Strangely, Vernell Moncrief agreed to giving me a DNA sample without complaint. While we were standing around in the hallway of City Hall East waiting for a crime-scene tech to take a mouth swab, I decided to pump Vernell for information. Not a formal interrogation, just a friendly chat.
    â€œSo how come you ran, Vernell?” I said.
    â€œI ain’t realize this about Marquavious. I thought y’all was, like, Narcotics or something. Them narcs all the time be hassling me.” He gave me a real serious face that was hard to give much credit to. “Yes, ma’am. Anything I can do to help. ’Cause every time I think about that poor boy, Marquavious, it hurt me right here, you know what I’m saying.” He whacked himself in the middle of his chest with a loosely balled fist.
    â€œI do know what you’re saying.” Since the mouth swab procedure would only take about five seconds, I had told the crime-scene tech to take her time getting to us. That way I’d have time to talk to Vernell. “So tell me about your relationship to Marquavious,” I said.
    â€œI ain’t had no relationship! No ma’am! I ain’t like that.”
    I smiled as sincerely as I could. “Nah, nah, I don’t mean that way. I mean like your family situation, that type of relationship.”
    â€œOh, yes, ma’am. Yes, ma’am. See, what it was, me and Marquavious’s mama was like married.”
    â€œChurch married?”
    â€œWell, you know. Common-law type of thing. We was fin to get married, but then Marquavious . . .” He shrugged sadly. “Well, you know. One thing and another. Me and Marquavious’s mama, Loeesha, we had to go our separate ways. It was all this tension and everything, due to Marquavious dying, it done broke us up.”
    â€œPlus your going to jail for that thing over in Decatur.”
    â€œPlus that. But I was just in jail , Miz Deakes. Not the penitentiary or nothing.”
    â€œRight. It was mistaken identity or something probably, right, because you never got convicted.”
    â€œThat’s what I’m saying. Them charges was dropped.”
    â€œSo look, we get this test back, everything works out, you get eliminated as a suspect, this whole dark cloud that’s been hanging over you—it all goes away.”
    Vernell nodded earnestly.
    â€œYou didn’t do it, right?”
    â€œNo, ma’am!”
    â€œSo who you think it was? Had to be somebody, right?”
    Vernell blinked.
    â€œYou understand, Vernell? Most crimes like this, they’re committed by somebody close to the victim. Was there an uncle, a cousin, a minister . . . anybody that was around this boy that didn’t seem right to you?”
    Vernell’s eyes widened, playing it to the hilt, Mr. Innocent, trying to help out. “Mm. Yes, ma’am. Come to think on it a little, you might just be right.”
    The hallway was silent for a moment. The crime-scene tech poked her head around