Your Life Is Mine

by Nathan Ripley

  Pargiter closed his notebook and pocketed it.

  “Do you think there’s going to be a Chuck Varner–inspired mass shooting in my city sometime soon, Ms. Potter?” he asked.

  Every sentence he’d spoken to me since he’d confessed his limited culpability in giving Maitland control of my mother’s case had gotten calmer and slower, and because of that, this question sounded absolutely surreal. He could have been asking me whether I liked kale.

  “Chuck Varner sniped a couple from an overpass, waited a few hours, then headed to Harlow Mall to finish it. So here’s what I think is going to happen: the same person who killed Vernon Reilly is going to want to kill a lot more people. He’s going to do it tonight.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  * * *

  THE YOUNG UNIFORM cop, still holding his notebook, came around the corner again. His voice squeaked a little, but the words were insistent.

  “Detective Pargiter, I’m sorry, but we found part of the rifle, we think.”

  Pargiter, still lost in the prospect of an upcoming massacre, took a moment.

  “Who touched it?”

  “What? No one did, sir. It’s up on the hill.”

  “Let’s go.” Pargiter included me in this, and the young cop took to his squad car, putting me in the grilled-off back seat as he and Pargiter rode up front. Jaya, who was sunk into her phone, didn’t see us passing.

  The yellow-grassed incline, just under a billboard advertising Dole juices, was a perfect spot. Chuck would have admired the selection, and so would Crissy. Perhaps she’d even helped this psycho pick it out, someday months ago, when she thought she’d be along for this third act, not in the ground. There was flattened grass in the rough shape of a body, which the officer used his flashlight to pick out for us. In the middle of it was the scope. If not the same one that had been hung in the hills behind Crissy’s trailer, it was a perfect facsimile.

  I looked at Pargiter and he nodded. “I know about this. The forensics team who went up to your mom’s place when you called Maitland said they bagged and brought it back into evidence, but Maitland bullshitted it out of their hands, telling them it was getting sent to LA for some advanced tests.”

  “He knows who this guy is, Pargiter. That was the lie he was telling me—that he didn’t know who else Crissy had enlisted. The other cultists. Maitland got the scope back to this psycho.”

  “Bennet,” Pargiter said to the thus-far nameless cop, whose name I would forget again almost instantly. “Leave the flashlight. Get back to the car.”

  “Sir?”

  “Now.”

  Pargiter turned to me when Bennet was sitting back in his driver’s seat with the door shut.

  “You have got to spell out this cult thing for me, Ms. Potter, because right now it sounds like some wild goose tangential garbage that’s going to get in the way of us finding this man,” Pargiter said. “Chuck Varner have a church? Robes? I know he used to spout garbage around town and hand out little cards, but I thought that was all over when he went on his spree.”

  “Killing those people gave it new life, Detective. Crissy knew that people, that boys and men, were obsessed with that shooting, that if she found the right ones she could turn them. I don’t need you to believe in the message. Fuck knows I don’t. Chuck was crazy and I’m incredibly glad that he’s dead. But I do need you to believe me. Crissy kept on preaching his antisocial crap to impressionable men like Maitland, and one of them is out there with a gun. A lot of people are going to get killed unless we find him. Him or them.” I had a sense that Crissy had kept her following small, intimate, but it was just a feeling. And I’d been wrong on those at almost every turn since I got back, including her enlistment of Kindt. I’d had a feeling that I could handle the Reilly interview, too, that Jaya and I were making progress. His spill of blood and brains was a lot more concrete than that feeling. It was Crissy who knew me, not the other way around—she’d gotten me exactly where she wanted for this final act.

  I checked my phone—it was only six thirty, just a couple hours since we’d picked up Reilly.

  “I think this is going to be a longer conversation than we want to have up here, isn’t it?” he said.

  “Yes. But before we have it, I need two favors.”

  “Stop for a second, first. You’re saying your mother had sway over these people, that she had some sort of mind-control grip on them?”

  “Nothing supernatural or conspiracy theory about it,” I said, having winced when the detective said “mind control,” which I associated with the worst of right-wing pundit panic fantasists. “She carried on Chuck’s system of belief and found weak-minded people to prey on for obedience. That’s it.”

  “And Emil Chadwick is a coat tail grabber, intimately connected to your father’s massacre through his own mother’s work, and has had at least one and possibly multiple conversations and moments of contact with your mother?” He looked worried. Damn worried.

  “It’s not him. I’ve sat down with Chadwick, and I know—my sense of people, of psychos, can’t be that dull, not after everything I’ve seen. She could have used him, yes, but it would be like Kindt, not for violence. He doesn’t have the stuff.” I knew what drove Chadwick because he’d told me—and because it was what usually drove me. “Chadwick wants the story. He wants a big story that will make his career and his life mean something. He thought he wanted it bad enough to let people get killed, but I guess he figured differently in the end.”

  “He knew this was coming.” Pargiter raised an eyebrow, and made a gesture down the hill to the target zone in front of the Denny’s. I could see Jaya’s car, the door now open, her shape standing next to it. With the scope, I’d be able to see her face. The shooter had been able to see us, brush our bodies with his projected vision before ending Vernon Reilly’s life.

  “Yeah, Chadwick knew it was coming. And I think it scared the shit out of him when he realized how close it was,” I said.

  Pargiter’s furrow was becoming one big eyebrow.

  “Look,” I went on. “I lived with two insane people for my early childhood and one for what was left of it after Chuck went on his suicide run. I know crazy when I see it, at least. Chadwick is a coward, he’s a liar, but he’s not a shooter.”

  Pargiter sighed, calculating what he was going to say next. Jaya would be getting impatient, and if I knew anything about her wildly varying body temperatures, she would have handed her space blanket back to the paramedics by now.

  “I don’t want to place my expertise over yours for various reasons, Ms. Potter. So I’ll ask this way. Can you tell me why, exactly, you’d rule Emil Chadwick out as a potential shooting suspect? If he’s crazy enough to let people get killed for a book or a magazine story or what have you, he isn’t crazy enough to do some shooting himself?”

  “I know Chuck. I know Crissy. And they’d never choose him. They’d call him a mule, a carrier, unworthy. They’d tell their real disciples, their trusted, core members, that some of our family existed to be burnt up around us, a protective layer that kept us safe, pure, and clean for the real work ahead. Whoever killed Crissy is that key disciple, the one who thinks he’s the chosen leader now. And it’s him that got Maitland to lie to you, to me, to collude with Reilly and get him in prison.” I didn’t even need to put on Chuck’s voice on purpose—when I remembered how he preached, it came naturally. Pargiter looked dry-mouthed and, though he tried to hide it, disgusted. Like he’d taken a bite of bad shellfish but wasn’t in a place where he could spit it out politely.

  “Right. Chadwick wasn’t our shooter today, anyhow, so that checks out,” Pargiter said. “I have eyes on the man and he’s not here. I won’t tell you where he is but I will tell you that I feel like visiting him quite urgently just now. Now, these two favors you want?” We started walking back to the squad car, but slowly, giving me enough time for my proposal and Pargiter enough time to refuse or maybe, maybe, to say yes.

  “I need to talk to my friend
alone first. Jaya. For about an hour.”

  “With the time frame you’re guessing, a shooting tonight, you think that’s a good use of our time? Really?”

  “I don’t know a way that I can help you directly, Detective. I don’t know how to find out who’s doing this, if Maitland doesn’t want to give him up. You’ve got to make him talk any way you can, after I’ve told Jaya what I need to tell her.” And what I pray he’s not going to tell you, I added silently.

  Pargiter nodded. “I told you to be fully truthful with me, Ms. Potter. So I’m going to believe that whatever you’re holding back from me is not something that can save my people, in my city, from getting murdered.”

  “I don’t know anything that can help you that I haven’t told you,” I said, truthfully. “Get Maitland talking.”

  “They’re working on him at the station.”

  “Then get Chadwick in again. Someone. Warn people to stay inside, I don’t fucking know.” We were back at the car now, trying to avoid eye contact so we didn’t have to see exactly how hopeless we both looked.

  “What’s the other favor?”

  “I asked the first cop on scene to send a car to Jaya’s mother’s house. Did they do that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then just keep it there. Keep her safe. She’s the only other person I love in this city, and that makes her vulnerable.”

  We got in the car and started driving. I kept talking through the mesh. Pargiter didn’t turn around.

  “Get the cop to tell Padma to stay away from the windows, not to leave the place, and not to panic. And that I love her and I’m about to explain everything.”

  The last part was a lie. I couldn’t actually explain everything to Padma without losing her for good. The way I was about to risk losing Jaya for good.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  * * *

  JAYA DID THE initial set-up on the camera and the two portable lights she’d rented and stashed in the trunk of the car. If I hadn’t known her and worked with her for years, the level of prep would have surprised me.

  She’d persuaded the doddering start-up on the third floor of One Stilford Plaza, the only office that still had lights on and people in it, to give us the use of their conference room for a quick shoot, a hundred bucks cash. Asking all of them to leave the office so we could have a quiet set was one step beyond, but she pulled that off, too, simply by acting like it was completely expected, intuitive stuff. Anyone who knew anything about shooting should know that clearing out of your own workplace as soon as someone with a camera and spending cash turns up makes perfect sense, right?

  “It’ll buy all of you dinner,” Jaya told the CEO, a thirty-six-year-old man with the misplaced remnants of a punk haircut up top.

  “At Taco Bell, maybe,” he’d replied, gesturing to the ten-odd people in the room, all of whom had started to look much busier at their laptops when we entered. One of them, a Hispanic girl with a butterfly tattoo just behind her ear, so fresh its turquoise color was still ocean vivid, had a screenwriting program open, toggling back and forth between that and a blank email. She nodded knowingly at us, definitely onside. Jaya handed the boss another couple of bills.

  “Upgrade it to Del Taco.” The boss, whose name was Chad or Jim, let us into the small conference room, which was flooded with harsh overhead light that was absorbed by a dark green wall on the far side. While Jaya took out the minitripod, I found myself a position, clicked off most of the overheads and got our portables in place, then waited for her to ask me to finish the framing. She did, acting as my stand-in while I got everything right. We switched back, Jaya closing the room’s door with a clicking sound of finality before she went back to her seat.

  “So why are we doing this again?” she said.

  “This is what we do. We record, we shoot, we build the story that we find. I want us to remember that and feel normal for a second.”

  “I just saw a man’s head explode,” Jaya whispered, her upper lip moving in the way it did when she was trying to control either rage or tears. There’d been a strange, runny-egg-white look to her eyes since I’d dragged her inside the Denny’s and we’d hidden, facing each other in a huddled crouch under a booth. I’d muttered things to her, words I’d forgotten by now, trying to keep us both out of shock and as calm as possible. And she’d held it together perfectly while she was executing the job of getting us into this office and rolling, just the way I knew she would. Work, and her and Padma, were all that had kept me sane after I escaped Crissy.

  “I’m not feeling normal,” she went on. “I don’t think I ever will again.”

  “You’re telling me that handling that douche and herding his team of nerds out of their own workplace in under fifteen minutes didn’t make you feel—no, not feel, but know—that you’re in control of our shit, whatever else is happening out there?”

  Jaya registered this and visibly looked better for a moment.

  “We’re going to make the movie that Emil Chadwick wanted to make,” I said. “That’s what we’ve been doing since Crissy got killed. All this audio I’ve recorded, the video that you’ve rolled, the stills we’ve taken was for a reason.” I wished for gum, or a cigarette, anything to put in my mouth to gnaw on while I stopped the wrong words from seeping into the air and onto the digital tape. A purpose, a future for this. A movie would make sense of what Jaya had just witnessed, and what I was about to tell her. That’s what continuing Chuck’s cult had meant to me, at first, when I was a child who’d watched bodies blow apart in front of her: Mom and Dad had said there was a reason. That it made sense. That’s how you keep your sanity in chaos. You pretend there’s a good reason for everything.

  “Keep going,” Jaya said.

  “The only reasons you haven’t pushed me to work on a Chuck Varner movie are your decency and that you love me. It’s something that we’re supposed to do, and we’re going to run into the question for the rest of our careers once it gets out that it didn’t end at Harlow Mall. That Crissy kept this cult going and it earned her a bullet.” There were inspirational posters on the walls of this conference room, the manly kind about Gravitas and Beast Mode, alongside a whiteboard covered with terms like Monetize and Engagement, connected by marker lines to a swirling dark center.

  “We’re making that Blackwood movie.”

  “They won’t let us. Not yet. As long as we work together, especially after my name comes out after all this shit right now, I’m going to get the Chuck Varner question, and you’re going to have to ignore it to support me, and know that deep down I’m holding our careers back. That eventually we’ll be lucky to get enough credibility to make Lexus commercials, but we’ll never get to consistently make the work we want to. Because I didn’t want to make the movie about my past that everyone wants to see. Does that sound true?”

  Jaya had started looking down while I talked, not avoiding my eyes, but absorbing herself into her own thoughts. Putting it together. Admitting it.

  “You’re right.”

  “There are two parts to this, Jaya. The first, I told you this afternoon. But I want to tell the camera. But the second part is just for you. For us. It’s something you need to know, because if we do a Chuck Varner movie, it’s not going to be about me. It’s going to be about us.”

  “All our movies are by us.”

  “No. About us. Chuck Varner is a part of your past, too, okay?”

  Jaya didn’t understand, and looked like she was scared to. So she just flicked the camera on and got me aligned in the shot.

  “All right, Blanche. Chuck Varner. Go.”

  And that was all I needed. The name, his name, and the command—from her, specifically. From my best friend Jaya Chauhan, who I’d lied to from before I first met her, who I loved and needed more than anyone else I’d ever met who hadn’t fooled me into thinking I needed them.

  “I was there in Harlow Mall that day. I watched my father, Chuck Varner, murder those people, one at a time. The cops don’t know.
The media never found out. I only told my closest friend about it today.

  “The only person I ever spoke to about it before today was my mother, who used to ask for the story like a kid asking for her favorite fairy tale. I’d tell it to her when she was in bed after a long shift. She was a server, right? I’d massage her feet for her while she dozed and tell her about Dad shooting those people, how they fell, how it took a few seconds for anyone who hadn’t been shot yet to understand that this was real, that they were in the abattoir now.

  “That’s what Chuck Varner called crowded public places. Abattoirs. He stole most of his lines from death metal lyrics, but it is absolute nonsense that any of his ideas or anger came from there. He was just gathering whatever he could to give shape to his ego. That included me, and my mother. Crissy. She was his first cultist, and I honestly think that they had me so Chuck could try out training someone to worship him from the cradle up. And it worked for a few years.”

  I gave Jaya another ten minutes of this, the Chuck Varner story that I was ready for the public to know, before I asked her to shut off the camera. She was crying for real, now, knowing more about those years in the trailer than I’d ever told anyone else. And, of course, what would seem like the biggest deal possible to anyone who hadn’t actually been there.

  “You had to watch him kill all those people. You were so little. A little girl,” she said. “Today has been so fucked up that I barely thought about it since you told Mom and me.”

  “That’s not the worst, Jaya. The worst part is that it isn’t the worst part, my memory of seeing those people go down, spilling their lives out. I can’t dissociate enough from what Chuck told me to actually feel the killings that day for what they were—simple murder, the robbing of life. I’d be lying if I said I did. I still remember them, all of them, as something my dad was doing to become what he wanted to be. It was like visiting him at work. That’s the worst part. I still don’t feel like I saw people being murdered, even though I know that’s exactly what I saw. Does that make sense?”