by Saul Black
“Oh,” Rachel said. “You have other photographs.”
“I’m afraid so,” Valerie said. “Clearly the same woman, and clearly taken here in your home. I’m really—”
“Show me,” Rachel said.
“Mrs. Grant, it’s not going to—”
“Show me the rest of the pictures.”
Valerie understood. Rachel Grant had received her first hit of horror through the murder of her husband—and horror was masochistically addictive. Now she wanted more, all of it. Now she wanted to know exactly how much shit the world was made of, and exactly how stupid she’d been to believe otherwise. There was satisfaction in it, experiencing your nude self, stripped of its delusions. If not for her daughter, Valerie thought, Rachel Grant was the sort of person for whom a brush with monstrosity would be more than enough to turn her into a monster herself.
She handed her the rest of the photographs. Observed first the shock then the quivering disgust as Rachel went through them. And beneath both shock and disgust yet another stratum of sadness, when she’d thought there could be no more. The death of your husband. Then the lie of your husband, so that even the grief couldn’t be clean. Valerie felt another “I’m sorry” burgeoning. Suppressed it. Pointless. And craven.
Rachel passed the photographs back to her. Elsewhere in the house the nurse opened and closed a cupboard door.
Then Rachel smiled. This, too, was one of horror’s demands, that you saw the possibility of laughing along with it. “I was going to say you still can’t really tell if it’s the same woman,” she said. “But where does that get me? One of these women was in my house. Being photographed by my husband. Being fucked by my husband, presumably, since that’s what you’re not saying.” Then she added, vaguely: “All these things we don’t say.”
“I wouldn’t have brought this to you,” Valerie said. “But there’s good reason to suppose this individual was one of the last to see Dwight Jenner before he went off the grid. She could be crucial to finding him.”
Rachel lay back on the couch and looked at Valerie, still with a slight smile. The saying was Don’t shoot the messenger. One of the dumbest sayings, Valerie knew. The messenger always got shot. And police were always the messengers.
“How do you do it?” Rachel asked her.
“Do what?”
“This. Every day. Bring people ugliness and betrayal and death. It must do something to you.”
Well, here was the messenger, getting shot.
At the last moment before Valerie replied, she changed what she was going to say. She’d been going to offer something professionally platitudinous. It’s part of the job, Mrs. Grant. The worst part. Believe me, if there were any other way … But Rachel Grant was looking at her from the calm eye of her hurricane as if she really, in her new state of raw curiosity where anything was permissible, wanted to know.
“It probably has done something to me,” Valerie said. “I’m not sure what. Pushed me past surprise, I suppose. Burned out some human circuits. But without being that way we don’t catch the people we need to catch.”
For a moment the two of them looked at each other. Rachel’s face was a fusion of exhaustion and energy, fascination and despair. Again, Valerie thought how easy it would be for this woman to surrender, to break down into madness, perhaps even death. If not for the daughter. I thank God for her. Maybe, Valerie thought. But loving a child was a vicious blessing: It took certain options off the table, no matter how much you were suffering. If you loved your child then you had to survive. You had to survive anything. For them. That was love’s price.
“Yes,” Rachel said. “I suppose it has to be that way.”
For a crazy moment Valerie thought Rachel Grant had read her mind. Then realized the response was to what she’d said. Burned out some human circuits, etc.
“I hope you’re right,” Rachel added. “I hope that being the way you are means you get him. Whatever Adam…” She didn’t finish. Just shook her head, looked away. Then said, still with her face averted: “Unless I’m supposed to care less now that you tell me he was fucking another woman. Is that what’s supposed to happen? Am I supposed to think it served him right?”
Rhetorical. And in any case irrelevant to Valerie’s purposes. But it didn’t stop her wondering. Did it make a difference? Did betrayal register at all in the din of loss? Maybe not now—but Rachel Grant would have the rest of her life for the emotional math to settle. Time’s subtle recalibration.
She got to her feet. There was nothing left here.
“I’ll call you as soon as we have anything,” she said.
Rachel didn’t answer.
“Oh, actually, one last minor thing.” She didn’t even know why she’d remembered it. Desperation?
Rachel exhaled. Rose above her contempt. Looked Valerie in the eye.
“Did Adam take a sleeping pill that night?”
At first Rachel’s look was just one of disbelief that the questions were still coming, that there really was no end to it.
But she rose above that, too. Shook her head, looked away. Didn’t care. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s possible. Sometimes he took one of my Ambien if he was wired and had an early start.”
The nurse, Tala, appeared in the kitchen doorway when Valerie was on her way through the hall.
“Are you finished?” she asked, with distinct peremptoriness.
“Yes,” Valerie said.
“Good. We’re late with the meds.”
Tala went back into the kitchen. A sound made Valerie turn and look up. Elspeth was sitting halfway up the glass stairs, hunched with her arms wrapped around her shins, watching her. The girl looked exhausted. The big eyes were bright. One pale knee showed through a (designer) tear in the dark blue jeans. Her white T-shirt had a small brown smear on the left shoulder. An elf in the process of transforming into something much darker.
“Hello, Elspeth,” Valerie said. Mainly because the girl’s stare was discomfiting. She couldn’t, Valerie decided, have overheard the conversation with Rachel Grant. “You doing okay?”
Elspeth didn’t answer. Valerie couldn’t look away.
Suddenly Elspeth wrenched herself to her feet, turned and, with a strange, low mewling sound, ran up the stairs and disappeared.
21
August 1, 2017
The alarm clock on her phone went off, as set, at 11:00 A.M. She woke in the bedroom’s pale light with her body aching. Had it not been for what she’d done the night before, she would have thought she was coming down with the flu. But she had done what she had done. Look no further for explanation. This was how it would be now: She was in new territory. There would be surprises. Existence itself would be one long surprise for the rest of her life.
Besides, the flu—any illness, debilitation, weakness—was prohibited. She had work to do.
Still, for a few sweet, illicit moments, she lay where she was. The white muslin drapes were an oblong of mother-of-pearl light. The bedroom was sparsely populated by expensive things, each occupying its space with a distinct, assured personality. Life had brought her so much of what she’d wanted. But only after doing sufficient damage to prevent her ever enjoying it. Her sense of her own worth was one of the things Larry had needed to destroy. He had known she was better than him. Which had been unacceptable to him. Not such a princess after all, huh, he’d said to her, after coming on her face, though even as he said it she knew it hadn’t been enough for him, that he was still raging. In some part of herself she’d understood the drab truth that nothing he did to her would ever be enough for him. His hatred was an infinite disease no finite object could satisfy, though he was compelled to keep trying, to keep repeating the failed cure.
Enough.
She got up, washed her face and brushed her teeth, dressed. She wanted coffee but dismissed the desire as more procrastination. In the kitchen she opened the cupboard under the sink and tore open a new pack of heavy-duty rubber washing-up gloves. (Redundant items, if
anyone had bothered to check, given the state-of-the-art dishwasher, but the kitchen and its equipment were under her sole jurisdiction.) Wearing them, she took last night’s clothes and the scrubs from the Volvo, stuffed them into a plastic garbage bag, and carried it into the sprawling green backyard.
It was already warm outdoors. A high blue sky with low-lying quills of cloud. The roses were soft knots of color. Red. Yellow. Peach. The jasmine needed trimming. Here it was again: People made sonnets or gas chambers. The planet carried on cashing out its flora and fauna regardless.
The chiminea was in the shed. In fact there were three chimineas (if that was the correct plural), since affluence insisted that one of any given thing was rarely enough. She wanted the biggest of the three, which, her rehearsals had established, she could just about shift by herself. She’d bought kindling and wood a week ago. Firelighters. A can of lighter fluid just in case.
She dragged it outside to what she decided was a safe distance from the shed, set it on its wrought-iron stand, loaded it with fuel, and got a small fire started. Then she went back inside the shed, selected the large garden shears, and began work on cutting up the clothes, the scrubs, the props.
It turned out to be a calming ritual. She went through it four times, feeding in only enough material as wouldn’t choke the flames. The discomfort was that her need to watch the evidence being consumed kept drawing her closer to the open grate. She had to keep backing away, face hot.
Eventually, satisfied that everything had been reduced to ash, she tipped the residue into the storm drain at the back of the yard, bleached the grate for good measure, then went inside to shower.
22
August 12, 2017
There were two different kinds of murder, Valerie knew, one engaging, the other dull. The engaging murder was one in which you had to figure out who’d done it. (Fiction didn’t mass-produce “whodunnits” for nothing. They engaged police for the same reason they engaged audiences, the perennial appeal of solving the central mystery of responsibility.) The dull murder, on the other hand, was one in which you already knew who’d done it—but you couldn’t find the fucker. And unfortunately, with every day that passed, it was becoming increasingly obvious that the murder of Adam Grant fell into this second category. The question was migraine-inducingly simple: Where is Dwight Jenner? The answer was migraine-inducingly simple, too: Somewhere in North America. In the twenty-first century, allegedly an age of public passivity in the face of ubiquitous national surveillance, surely it was only a matter of time before your culprit popped up on film? The U.S. had an estimated thirty million CCTV cameras in use, recording four billion hours of footage every week. How hard could it be to find someone?
Quite hard, Valerie imagined herself saying, through gritted teeth. Especially if he knows you’re looking for him.
The traffic cam footage was a washout. Both blind. The entrance camera (as I said, she repeated, mentally, quite hard) simply wasn’t working. It had been out for days. The camera covering the exit road was working—and had allowed the gods to cook up a subtler frustration. Highway maintenance crews were at work just beyond the slip road. Along with the cones and diggers and the high-vis jackets of the beavering crew were half a dozen mounted LED balloon lights, two of which bounced their illumination directly off the windshields of exiting vehicles, nicely obscuring their drivers. Ed was running the number plates through DMV (Valerie hadn’t entirely ruled out the possibility that Kyle Cornell’s Ford would show up) but so far nothing had flagged.
Her desk phone rang. It was coming up on 9:30 A.M.
“Hey,” Nick said. “Want a straw to clutch at?”
“I’ll take a blade of grass. I’ll take a hair.”
“Where’d you go to check out the bike cop’s Jenner sighting?”
“Orland rest stop.”
Nick paused. “Orland … Hold on a second…” She could hear him hitting keys. “Okay. That’s maybe forty miles from what I’m looking at.”
“Which is?”
“Scanned deeds to the Grants’ country place. They’ve got a house just outside Campbellville. You put that with Jenner and Adam Grant’s phone calls…”
“They met.”
“Maybe. Unless you know some other reason Jenner would’ve been in the neighborhood.”
“Christ, maybe it was a three-way with Sophia after all.”
“What?”
“Nothing. I’m kidding—I think. Wait. You got Adam’s work calendar? Check what he had for July thirty-first.”
It took Nick a few moments, during which Valerie shuffled the facts. Met for what? To negotiate screwing rights? And if Jenner was going to kill him, why not do it there? Why the fuck would he—
“Oh,” Nick said. “Not very cooperative. According to his calendar, Grant was in Los Angeles. Four-day law symposium at UCLA. Keynote speaker on the opening day, in fact.”
“Fuck. Okay. I’ll check.”
Which she did, and got the obstructive confirmation that Adam Grant did in fact speak to at least two hundred people—a mix of professionals and final-year law students—on the afternoon of July 31, commencing at 2 P.M. He stuck around at the drinks reception, then according to his colleague from Willard & Gould (a fellow speaker, who had taken the early-morning flight down with him) retired to the hotel around 5 P.M. They got together for dinner at nine and went for drinks afterward. There was simply no way Adam Grant could have met with Dwight Jenner on the night of the 31st. Credit card transactions proved he stayed in L.A. for the symposium’s duration. He didn’t fly home to San Francisco until the night of August 3.
Two steps forward, three steps back.
Still, Jenner had been forty miles from the Grants’ country house with no good reason for being there. Or no known reason, at least. Valerie called Kyle Cornell.
“Can’t get me out of your mind,” he said. “I know how it is. Don’t feel bad about it.”
Valerie pictured the smile with which this was being delivered.
“Dwight have any business up north?” she asked. “Any buddies? Job interviews? Additional lady friends? Think Orland, Hamilton City, Campbellville. Anything that would take him upstate on the 5.”
“You’ve got a beautiful phone voice. You know that?”
“Please don’t fuck around. Yes or no?”
In the pause that followed, she had a little pang of regret (and guilt) that she’d used the word “fuck.”
“No,” Kyle said. “Nothing I know of. Why?”
“Forget it,” Valerie said, and hung up before she said anything else she’d regret.
She drove to Pacific Heights, mentally grinding the options. Maybe it had been Jenner’s plan to kill Adam Grant at the Campbellville place, assuming he had somehow (via Sophia?) found out about it. Maybe he was casing it. Maybe he just got tired of waiting for Adam to show up there.
She had other, more elaborate theories. Suppose the intention wasn’t murder? Adam Grant had money. By Dwight Jenner’s standards, plenty of money. Put blackmail aside for a moment. How about kidnapping? Could Jenner (and Sophia) have planned to snatch Elspeth—or Rachel? Sophia starts fucking Adam as leverage against him going to the cops when the ransom demand comes in. Keep it out of the press, keep your career, keep your life—just pay up with no shenanigans. Maybe Adam wasn’t supposed to be home that night? Maybe Elspeth wasn’t supposed to be at a friend’s for a sleepover? Jenner gets in, realizes Sophia’s intel’s for shit, panics, ends up with a homicide on his hands. Valerie pictured him going over the Grants’ bedroom balcony in a flurry of adrenaline, thinking fuck … fuck … fuck … Dropping the knife. In the dark. Can’t find it. More panic. Murder. Back to San Q—or the Chair. Get out. Get the fuck out of here now.
Maybe, maybe, maybe. They were all maybes. And none of them explained Jenner’s not bothering with gloves. Kidnapping wasn’t murder, but that was no reason to leave your prints all over the scene.
“You can’t see her,” Tala told Valerie, when Offic
er Riordan had let her into the Grants’ front hall. “She’s sleeping.”
“I’m afraid I have to,” Valerie said.
“As it is she’s moving around too much. It’s ridiculous.”
“Is she under sedation?”
“No. She is sleeping.”
Emphasized as if to get through to a moron. Valerie was mildly amused. The nurse was so small and neat and had such compressed annoyance. Presumably she wasn’t happy. Presumably Rachel Grant was not proving to be a biddable patient.
“Well, as I said, I’m afraid I have to see her,” she repeated. Then she smiled and bent a little closer toward the nurse’s face. “If she is sleeping I will wake her up.”
For a moment Tala simply stood there, hands in her uniform pockets, tiny nostrils flaring.
“Fine,” she said, turning her back on Valerie and walking away. “Do what you want. It’s on your conscience.”
Rachel and Elspeth were asleep together on the couch, the girl with her head in her mother’s lap. Valerie watched them. Even asleep, Rachel’s face wore its recent trauma like a thin veil. Elspeth looked worse—and on closer inspection was, if REM was an indicator, dreaming. Her lips moved, though they didn’t part, as if a nightmare had them sealed with duct tape.
I was nothing before I had Elspeth. At the time, Valerie hadn’t paid much attention to that, but on reflection it seemed extreme. Rachel Grant didn’t strike her as the type for metaphorical excesses. Still, the woman had been in shock. And in any case these were superfluous preoccupations, derived, Valerie admitted to herself, from the perpetual subsonic noise of her own potential motherhood. Nick hadn’t asked her what time she was likely to be home (for which she would have read: Are we going to have biology?) but he knew her menstrual cycle. Right now she was in the golden zone. She didn’t know which irritated her (irrationally) more, the fact that he was tracking her like the goddamned fertility police or that he was doing such a good job of not mentioning it. She was being, she knew, completely unreasonable. That was what irritated her (rationally) the most.