“No. But it doesn’t have to. This—Jesus, this is all so awful, Blanche.”
I breathed for a few seconds. Noticed myself doing it, tried to remind myself that I would still be doing it when I finished telling Jaya what I had to.
“I’m so sorry, Jaya. I need you to know, to remember, that I’m not a killer. Just remember that while I’m talking. Please.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
* * *
JUST WAIT FOR me to be done. Just wait. My father was raising me to be his lead disciple, his lure, his ‘high priestess,’ he said. He was supposed to keep to the sniping for the first few sprees—stay up on the overpass, move to different buildings all over Stilford—trees, hills, tarped under in the back of a moving truck that Crissy was piloting—he had a plan for steadily unrolling minor, small-scale chaos that would always stop just short of mass chaos. But he couldn’t resist the intimate kill, couldn’t help himself from getting—this is how he said it—‘closer than a handshake’ before putting a bullet in someone. We’d drive around town for hours on days he got off work, after he gave me the sign at the breakfast table that I should tell my teacher I had a tummy ache and needed to get picked up. We’d cruise. He taught me how to steal gas by siphon, taught me how to take apart and put together his rifle, taught me how to wait. But he couldn’t teach himself the kind of patience he needed to carry out the plan he wanted to.
“And that’s what should have told me the truth, right there. I was a little kid but I was smart, just not smart enough to truly pick apart the kind of boring, average psycho my dad was. That day he went into the mall, where he played out the fantasy that he planned to be a ‘high-peak kill,’ something he was only going to do after a decade of sniper kills all over California, chaos murders that would attract more boys and girls to his cult. He just couldn’t wait another day, let alone a decade. I should have known he was full of shit. That he was just a routine murderer. Like these fucking kids at the high schools, any psycho in the tower with a gun—that was all Chuck Varner ever was. A void of a person who thought he was brilliant and unacknowledged, convinced one woman that it was the case, made another human being with her to guarantee a disciple, then spread his emptiness as bullets.
“But my mom and I—before I ever called her Crissy, before I ever dared to disrespect or disbelieve her—we chose to keep believing Chuck’s reality. Reality—that’s more or less what he called the cult, what it would have been if he’d become the shadowy leader he wanted to become before setting me up in his place. Not Your Life Is Mine, but Reality. We were the only people tuned in to how fucked up and death-driven the world—not just Stilford, because that’s obvious—but the world as a whole, really was. How it needed to be—this was his fundamental, baseline quote: ‘Not erased, but corrected. We are the X, we are the checkmark. I go before, then you follow. And soon, they’ll all follow.’
“That hill where I found his scope is where he used to teach us. Mom and I, cross-legged, long after dark, when all the rest of the trailer park kids were inside, dinner over, the heat sticking our clothes to our bodies and the grass to our clothes. He’d sort of declaim, worse than any prof you and me ever had, pretending he was Socrates and that the child and the woman he had staring up at him were the birth of a new generation, his legacy. That’s why I never wanted to say a thing about him once I got away from Crissy. Anything I say about him is legacy. Anything I say about Chuck Varner is Chuck Varner getting into the world again.”
I stopped. I didn’t know how long I’d been talking for, how long Jaya had been watching me with a compassion that I was about to stomp all over.
“I’m so sorry, baby,” she said. “Why didn’t you want to say that on video? Why just to me?”
“I want you to understand what was in our minds when Crissy and I lived the next ten years together in that trailer. How she kept that poison in me. I need you to know that.
“You have to remember, please remember, Jaya, that randomness was the most important part of Chuck’s instructional. That’s what my mom absorbed the most. Pick disciples at random, pick victims at random.”
Jaya was inert beside the dead eye of the camera, and soon the expression leached out of her eyes, too. Her mouth didn’t open, but I could see her jaw droop, as her face went slack—not in relaxation, but in shock. I think that in that moment, she predicted what I was going to say. Because, maybe, she’d been carrying uncertain knowledge about it ever since I first pressed my friendship on her in high school, starting us out by telling her that I knew what it was like to have everyone talking about your family and pretending you couldn’t hear. That day, outside Mrs. Martin’s Applied Math class. She’d looked at me that day with suspicion, but I hadn’t imagined she knew what to be suspicious of. She just expected me to make fun of her, or ask an exploitative question. And I didn’t. But she was right to be suspicious.
“At random, Jaya. I could never have known. Please stay with me through this, okay? Not because you owe it to me, but because I owe it to you. We—Crissy—picked him at random, but I chose you and your mom myself. I chose to love you myself and try to fix what she’d done. To protect you.”
Jaya pulled her legs up onto the chair with her.
“Oh my god. Oh my. Oh. You killed him.”
“No. No, I didn’t. Crissy did. Until I really saw what Chuck’s teachings meant, Jaya—until I saw your dad on that pavement and walked another block and saw you waiting in the back seat of the car while your mom sat up front, reading the paper and waiting for her husband to come back and start the car. But I saw you, mostly. Thank god you didn’t see me or we never would have—none of this could be. Nothing we’ve done together. Nothing in my life. It all exists because Jaya Chauhan convinced her mom to foster the kid who kept bothering her at school, the girl who kept trying to insert herself into her life because she thought she needed to be there. To apologize. To make up for Neesh Chauhan lying on that pavement while you and your mom waited for him to come back.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
* * *
PARGITER HAD AN officer he liked, Clem Broward, following Blanche Potter and Jaya Chauhan from an invisible distance. Broward was on his day off but needed the overtime, and a daylight public sniper shooting had apparently been enough for Pargiter to saw off some extra resources. So there was no risk of losing the two women, if they decided to take off. There was a slight risk of losing them the other way, but Pargiter had stopped Clem before sending him after the two women as they left the parking lot.
“You’re following them but also looking ahead of and around. Scan all vantage points. Pretend to be the fucking Terminator. See everything. We don’t lose one more citizen today, got it?”
“They’re LA,” Broward said. “Not really our citizens.” He was being bratty, and Pargiter was in no mood, but decided to pretend he was. Kid was in on his day off.
“Even worse. Tourism’s bad enough as it is.”
Pargiter had left on his own catch-up mission: tailing Emil Chadwick, quick, before getting back to a possibly more hands-on version of his interrogation of Dan Maitland, who remained mute in a cell.
Pargiter had called in Chadwick’s rental plates and model, and gotten periodic reports on his whereabouts while he was on scene at the Denny’s shooting.
The last report, which came in right after Blanche Potter left to have her little chat with her friend, had Chadwick’s Acura in the parking lot of Harlow Mall, booting a talk with Chadwick higher up on the priority list than Maitland. They hadn’t had any legal cause to keep Chadwick at the station when he turned in Maitland, but Pargiter was going to invent one or just lock the boy up in a basement somewhere and get any information he had out of him. The car was still there, Chadwick presumably still somewhere in that mall.
“It’s important not to panic,” Pargiter said on the drive to find him, both talking to himself and rehearsing what he was going to tell the head of mall security once he got there. Pargiter had already sent a
couple of uniforms down to walk the halls in front of the storefronts—half of which had been empty since 2008—to keep watching and listening.
“Watching and listening for what?” they’d asked when he radioed them. He’d asked them to call his cell back to keep his answer away from any police scanner hobbyists, a plentiful breed in Stilford.
“Watch for guns and listen for shots,” Pargiter said when his phone rang just as he was getting into his car. “I am about absolutely sure that nothing is going to happen there, and I don’t want to waste an evacuation order that I may seriously have to implement soon, but I want to be cautious.” He described Emil Chadwick to the officers, requested a total lack of interference, and told them he was on his way. He knew that Chadwick couldn’t have shot Reilly, but the Potter girl’s babble about this goddamn cult had gotten to him. Maybe Chadwick had strangled Kindt on his boat. Maybe there were a hundred of these psychotic motherfuckers about to rain killings down on Stilford.
Pargiter drove as though he had the cherry on top of his car, darting through traffic. He made good time to the mall and parked near Chadwick’s Acura in the south lot. There were papers and a white T-shirt in the back seat, two Starbucks cups in the cup holders up front. No lipstick on either, not that that meant anything. If Chadwick drank coffee at the rate of the reporters that Pargiter dealt with, it meant he drank as much coffee as cops do, and both cups were likely his.
The mall was quiet, as it normally would be on a weeknight. News of the shooting at Denny’s had echoed all over the city already, of course, but the Harlow Mall shootings were over a decade ago. More important, they were dozens of mass shootings ago—connecting a murder in the here and now to Chuck Varner’s spree would make as much sense to the average Stilford citizen as drawing a direct link between Vernon Reilly’s headshot and JFK’s.
A woman in a loose red T-shirt pushed a shopping cart with a toddler and five Walmart bags by Pargiter as he walked down the sidewalk to the south entrance, past the empty patio of the Fuddruckers that he used to take his kid to some Sundays. Chocolate milkshakes and cheese pizza, until Eric had exhibited prediabetic symptoms and they’d stopped allowing him anything sweeter than fruit. By now, Eric was ten and slim and seemed to have forgotten what candy tasted like through a sheer desire to obey his mother, Harriet. Eric asked him for kiwis when he came over on a visit, and Pargiter didn’t dare tempt him into cheating with some Twizzlers or even a Mounds bar, which had so much coconut in it that it justly should have been counted as a fruit, if it was his call. Eric would have told his mom, and he would have been right to, Pargiter had to admit: he would be offering the kid treats to sway his loyalty, to hurt his bond to his mother, not out of pure love or a desire to see his son have fun.
“I’m a sick fuck,” Pargiter muttered as he pushed the doors open and entered the frigid halls of Harlow. He brought his thumbnail up to flick against the outside of his blazer, checking to see that the weight of his holstered service piece was resting where it should be, ready to be pulled out. An Asian family of four, a young black couple, and a few Hispanic kids were walking in front of him, as though they were milling around waiting for a multiethnic advertisement for Harlow Mall: The Reinvention. They’d gotten the blood out of the tile but not out of the reputation. Even people who didn’t remember the shooting itself hadn’t forgotten that something bad had happened here. Something that had left a stain.
Pargiter took the advice he’d given Clem Broward and started Terminator-scanning the stores he passed, looking for Chadwick. He also couldn’t help looking for Harriet and Eric, even though he knew she was at work and that Eric was at basketball camp. It was this talk of cults and mothers that Blanche Potter had brought up, and the threat of the shooter, of course. Divorced men who never managed to sort out relations with their ex-wives wanted to see these women as controlling, maybe even deranged: Pargiter had arrested enough men who’d screamed about their exes while they were being cuffed, processed, right up through the trial, that it had snapped him out of the worst of his own bitterness. Blanche had no reason to snap out of hers, from the vague shape of the situation that he’d been able to grasp so far. Her father was fucked and her mother was, too. Which often led to an obvious conclusion, but not always. And Blanche did not seem fucked up to Pargiter.
Pargiter stopped in front of the Gap, looking at the back of a man seated on a bench facing the store opposite, a brightly lit Microsoft Store with white, digital-screen-covered walls and a snap laminate floor. It was Chadwick, sitting with both arms extended along the back of the bench, as though he were waiting for two women to join him. His hands were empty and far from his pockets, so Pargiter continued to extend him the privilege of doubt as he circled around to the front of the bench.
“Hey, Detective Pargiter,” Chadwick said when he refocused his eyes and saw the big cop who’d obscured the video-game-playing kids he’d been watching in the Microsoft Store. “Should they be in school or what?”
“It’s August. And nighttime.”
“Oh, yeah,” Chadwick said. He scratched his nose, which was dry and flaky, skin turning to dust in the summer air, a long way from the humid New York neighborhood where he belonged, and his eyes glazed over again.
“Yeah,” Pargiter said, trying to hide his impatience by speaking more slowly than usual. “There’s been a shooting, Mr. Chadwick, and we want to make sure—we want to ask you some questions because we think you can help us, and not because we suspect you of any wrongdoing. In fact, we know you can’t possibly be directly involved, based on when I last spoke to you and when the shooting happened. I’d just like to talk to you.”
“Was it Blanche?” Chadwick asked. He straightened up, alarmed, and looked almost heroic for a moment, in his pure concern for someone else. It was a strange, naked moment that Pargiter noted—it was a special kind of weirdo who concealed the better part of his nature and let the wormy aspects take up most of his living stage time.
“Ms. Potter and her friend are fine. It was the man that Maitland had hooked up for the murder of Crissy Varner.”
“Reilly,” Chadwick said, nodding and looking relieved. “He’s the kickoff. I get it.” He slouched again and patted the seat beside him, inviting Pargiter to sit.
“You came to us with information on Officer Maitland, Emil,” Pargiter said, switching to first names to try to make Chadwick more comfortable, to pull him into a more responsive state. “You told us that he had undisclosed connections to Mrs. Crissy Varner, that he had conspired with Alfred Kindt—”
“What did Kindt say? I met him a couple times. Weird old character.” Chadwick grinned, then lost the smile just as quickly, staring back into the store and its bright screens.
If he wasn’t doped up, Pargiter figured he was fading into a mental break where he wouldn’t be much use to anyone. He resisted the urge to slap Chadwick awake and kept talking.
“Never mind Kindt. Look, you gave me all this information, Emil. You backed it up with text messages that Maitland must have been unhinged to send you, but that he confirmed he had when we had him in lockup. You know things, Emil. We want to know those things, too, so people can stop getting killed. That’s what you want, too.” Pargiter wasn’t sure about this last, but it always helped to flatter a perp’s, or citizen’s, self-perceived better instincts.
“I didn’t know what he was going to do next. Not Maitland, but the one out there. The one making the shots. I really didn’t,” Chadwick said. His eyes were glistening now, slightly more with it. “I just wanted the story. I thought I was getting out of its way, letting history happen, but I was just—helping these guys. I don’t know what I’m doing.”
Chadwick stared at Pargiter. He looked like a little boy, despite the gym meat on his bones and his sharp, handsome face. “Like Blanche has probably told you. Like my mom’s told me. I don’t know what I’m doing, right? You pick up the data, you talk to the people, but what happens when what you find out scares the shit out of you and you just
want to go home and forget all of it?” Chadwick’s eyes went from glistening to tears and he wiped at them. Pargiter wished he was able to pity him instead of being disgusted; it said something about the limits of his empathy.
A tour bus group, no doubt disappointed to be touring this part of California instead of whichever region their Chinese vacation planner had promised them, walked past the bench on both sides, temporarily giving the mall the illusion of a pre-recession, pre-shooting population. Chadwick kept crying and Pargiter gave him a moment before snapping his fingers in front of his face.
“Emil, I know how you feel. But we need to focus. You can help me do my job, and that’s what’s most important here. The lives. Now, you said you didn’t know what he was going to do next. Who’s he?”
“I don’t know who he is,” Chadwick said, wiping his nose and eyes with his sleeve, leaving tracks of liquid on the blue cotton. “Crissy was the only one who knew. Maybe Maitland, he was slick. Found stuff out. I’ve seen him, seen his face, but that’s all.”
“You’ve seen our shooter? Where?” Chadwick was silent, glassy. If Pargiter was any more patient with him, Chadwick would have time to start looking at his trembling hands and continue with the goddamn ethical dilemma he should have had before any of this crap started, about whether or not he was an accessory to all the bad shit that had already happened, and all that bad shit that was potentially about to happen. And that dilemma was usually followed up by the sobbing crazies or a sober headshake and a request for a lawyer.
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