by Boston Teran
They shake. She motions with a wave of her hand. “I’ll show you to the elevator.”
They start down the long hallway with its worn-out runner of carpet. Both are quiet. Bob looks the place over, sneaking glances into any apartment with an open door. Anne uses the time to get a picture of the man.
“By the way,” Anne says, “I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am about what happened to your ex-wife and daughter.”
Bob nods stoically.
They reach the elevator. Anne presses the button. Bob stares back down the hall. One of the women from the waiting area is now by the desk and staring at him.
“Are all these women here for rehab?”
Anne picks up a tone in his voice that she’s heard before, judgment disguised as curiosity.
“It also doubles as a shelter for battered women. That’s why we have the guard up front.”
“I was curious about that.”
He switches the heavy leather case from one hand to the other, then opens and closes his free hand to get the blood back into it. “I assume being the resident manager you’re some kind of therapist.”
She smiles. “Some kind. Yes.”
“Can I ask you a few questions about this woman?”
There’s that tone again, drifting over “this woman.”
“Why not ask her?”
“Listen, since the murder I’m confronted with all kinds of people offering me … hope. A lot of them turn out to be flakes. Flakes I can deal with. It’s disappointing, but I can deal with it. I don’t come at this with any legal authority. But there are a few people I’ve met, on the other hand …”
He doesn’t know this woman’s relationship with Case, so he’s not sure quite how to get where he wants.
“A few,” interjects Anne, picking up where he faltered, “are untrustworthy. And potentially dangerous. And I assume you’re carrying in that satchel files that might be sensitive.”
“I couldn’t have said it any better.”
“You didn’t say it at all.”
His throat tightens a bit. “I don’t want to get off to a bad start here.”
“Then just approach it, before you judge it, with an open mind. I’m sure you talked to the police in San Diego about Case.”
His eyebrows raise in halfhearted enthusiasm.
“She was in a cult for seventeen years. She is a heroin addict going through recovery. She is what she is.”
“Is she trustworthy?”
“She’s not a saint, but she’s not a congressman either.”
The elevator arrives. Anne pulls open the worn metal door. “Room 333. Turn right when you get out of the elevator, back up the hall, last door on the left by the street. And good luck, Mr. Hightower.”
“She was in a cult for Christ sake,” said John Lee. He grabbed her file off his desk, the one that had been sent from San Diego, and waved it to punctuate his statement. “Assault with a knife. Six months for conspiracy to sell heroin. Do you think this person is trustworthy?”
“I’m only going to ask her a few questions.”
“You want to ask her questions. Fine. Bring her in.”
“She’s in rehab down in L.A.”
“I’ll pay for the fuckin’ cab.”
“People like her aren’t comfortable comin’ in here to talk. I want to try and …”
“No shit, they’re not comfortable.”
“She contacted us.”
“And I’d like to know why. What does she want? Bring her in here. Sit her junkie ass across from both of us.”
“We haven’t gotten anywhere with this investigation. It’s been six weeks, there’s no telling what Gabi is going through out there. If she’s alive at all.”
The words fall with a dead thud. Both men face each other soberly.
“She was in a cult. She is an addict. But she’s also an expert of sorts. For profiling alone, she’d be—”
“Bob. Time out. Okay. Time out.”
Bob leaned back, quieted. He didn’t want to, but he did.
“I let you take all those files and run down every lead no matter what. I let you because it has to be done, and I let you … you … because I know I wouldn’t want it otherwise if I were in your spot.
“But this. This chick is a junkie who was in a cult. She could have her own agenda. Maybe she’s had it with methadone, if she’s on that program, and she’s trying to figure out how to score. Maybe she thinks she could wheel and deal a little info from you that she could sell. Who knows what goes on in those junked-out heads. If you were an experienced investigator who’d handled a few of these before, that would be one thing. But you’re a desk cowboy, okay?”
Bob sat there listening impassively as he was told in no uncertain terms that he was incompetent. At least that’s how he heard it.
“You want to question her. You bring her in. She won’t come in, forget it. Then give her name over to the FBI. You understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
Bob steps out of the elevator and hesitates. He knows he’s broken his word. But what is more troubling yet, he’s not sure if he’s done this wholly because of Gabi or because of a need to prove himself.
Is it pride? The air stinks with something burned on a stove. He can hear laughter, doors closing. More laughter, a wispy uprising of voices till they dust away.
It is pride. A door at the end of the hall opens and the light outlines a woman. At this distance she looks more like a girl, really. Wiry slim, with faded jeans and black boots and hair cropped like a Marine’s.
She steps out into the hall. “Hightower? Mr. Hightower?” Her voice is like dry leaves brushing over wood.
“Yes.”
He starts down the hall. A few long seconds and they are face-to-face.
“Case Hardin?”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
Case wears a sleeveless T-shirt, and Bob can see that her arms are covered with tattoos, a fever line of ink designs from wrists to shoulders.
“You want to come in?”
“Yes.”
“Did you find this place okay?”
“Okay, yes.”
She steps back clumsily over the threshold and he follows. She sidesteps to let him pass.
“We should go in the kitchen there, it’s got a table, we could sit and talk.”
He sets the leather satchel down on the couch so he can take off his oilskin raincoat. She stares at the satchel, assuming the horror of his life is there.
“I just wanted to tell you, up front, how sorry I am. I watched it all on TV and … I’m sorry. Your wife … ex-wife, she looked—”
He cuts her off clumsily: “Thanks.”
“—nice …”
Thanks.
He finishes slipping off the oilskin. “Where can I hang it?”
“Drop it anywhere.”
“It’s wet.”
“It’s alright.”
“Maybe we should …” He points toward the closet.
The whole process of going over there and getting a hanger and hanging it up, the whole ritual of it, is a little too much for her nerve endings.
“Drop it right there. I mean, you can see the place ain’t the Ramada Inn.”
She tries to smile. He takes the coat and neatly arranges it over the back of a chair by a wobbly wooden desk.
She glances at the satchel again, then at him. He is taller than she imagined from seeing him on the news.
He follows her into the kitchen silently, carrying the satchel under one arm and eyeing the shabby rooms.
“Sit down. You want some coffee? I need some.”
“Yeah, that would be alright. I’ve been going at it since six this morning.”
“I’d offer you a beer,” she says, “but I’m on the wagon for the next forty or fifty fuckin’ years.”
Case takes a small packet of coffee and tears at the plastic wrapping with her teeth. She turns to him. “The coffee is shit. It’s one of those mail samples.”
“If you smoke, go ahead. Use anything handy for an ashtray.”
Bob smokes, watches her make the coffee. They don’t talk. Her hands tremble. Her moves are jagged and taut at the same time, as if she were cranked up on speed yet bound by some invisible wire. There is something sadly benign about her face, with its broad forehead and jawline of bones that protrude like the thin spine under a bird’s skin. Her eyes are dark, almost black, and they seem blacker against her white flesh.
They sit and talk. Bob opens his satchel and takes out a yellow legal pad. He begins by asking Case questions about her past and her life in a cult, about her time in San Diego, her falls back into drugs. He makes little sidesteps into her illegal activities, into her present state of mind. His eyes slide back and forth between Case and his notes. She sits there, answering each question. She smokes and coils her hands one around the other until she’s a knot of venom over this interrogation.
“Can I ask you something?”
He looks up from his notes.
“You don’t trust me, do you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you’ve grilled me with this Nazi kind of attitude and asked every fuckin’ question except what size Tampax I use and do I like takin’ it up the ass. Jesus bullshit Christ, what do you think I …”
Without any indication of being startled, Bob replaces the upturned pages of the notepad. Case sits back and presses one booted foot against the rim of the table.
“If I’d have asked you,” says Bob, “to come out to Clay, to the Sheriff’s Department, would you have come?”
She eyes him a long time, her jaw forming a bias across her cheeks. Her arms spread out across the back of the chair like the wings of a hawk getting ready for fight or flight. “I read you, Lieutenant,” she says. “Or is it Sergeant? Or Squire? Or Boss Man? Or is it … Desk Boy?”
Angered, he slips the notepad into the leather case. He closes it, stands. He walks out of the room without a word or a look. She gives his back the finger.
At the front door, though, something comes over him and he stops. The rain gutters along the roof and down through rusty drains. A harsh rattling, comfortless sound. Case stares at him through the framework of the doorway. He’s boxed in like some character on a strange, dark stage.
His voice is barely audible across the lightless room, but she can hear in it waves of sorrow through slow breaths. “I have lost a wife,” he says. “I have lost a daughter. I do not know if she is dead or alive or how to find her or if I ever can. I’m desperate and close to giving up. I am here. Maybe I did not approach you quite … Maybe you could help me a little?”
She leans forward and rests her elbows on the table and presses her thumbs into the wedges of flesh above her eyes.
“I’m a junkie,” Case says, “and junkies tend to be short of patience and manners on the ride back to that other reality. I’m fighting with myself most of the trip, and I don’t sleep, and I shake, and I hate most everything I see. I shouldn’t have said what I did. I should have ‘asshole’ tattooed across my mouth.”
She looks up and through the door. “Please. Come and sit down.”
Bob drops a stack of manila folders on the table, then looks across at Case. “Do you consider yourself an expert on satanic cults?”
She can see that the top two folders are filled with photographs. “There are no experts. Only survivors.”
He considers this. His fingers tap at the edges of the top folder. “Yes, I can see your point. Survivors.”
Case notices a beaded Indian bracelet tautly wound around his left wrist. It seems out of place somehow. Too delicate, really. And yet …
“I believe this was a cult murder,” he says, “not a front for a kidnapping or a failed kidnapping or a robbery or any of that crap you get in the paper or on ‘Inside Edition.’ I have photos here from that night. Do you think you could deal with looking at them and telling me what you think?”
She stares at the stack coldly. She lights a cigarette. There is something absolute and terrible to this, and she wishes more than ever she hadn’t written. She is sick inside, but she won’t let on. She reaches for the folders as if she were reaching into a fire for a perfectly flamed coal.
“I’ll deal with it,” she says.
“What I’m doing now,” he says, “I have no authorization to do.”
“Oh?”
“Do you understand my position?”
She considers this in light of her own human weaknesses. “Maybe you shouldn’t, then.”
She waits to see if he will take back the folders, but he just sits there, pulls a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, and lights one. He sits there, breathing deeply and studying her. There is something steady and remorseless to his face.
She pulls the folders toward her. She opens the one on top. It is filled with family photos. With snapshots of Sarah and Sam, of Gabi riding bareback out the corral gate, of Poncho caught in the act with a steak bone on the kitchen steps. Case spreads the snapshots across the table. It is a simple collage of middle-class life with all the trimmings. In one of the snapshots she notices Gabi wearing a beaded Indian bracelet similar to Bob’s.
“Can I ask you a few questions?” she says.
“Sure.”
“Was Gabi into drugs?”
“Not at all.”
“Not even a little bit?”
“Nooo.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“She hang with a druggie crowd?”
“A druggie crowd … Noooo …”
“Any of her friends into satanic shit of any kind?”
“Look at those photos. Look.” He pushes one toward Case, then another. “Does that look like the kind of girl who’s into drugs or hangs out with that kind of crowd? Come on. I know my daughter. And this is a small, family-oriented Christian community. We don’t have much in the way of deviant behav …”
He stops.
“It’s alright,” she says. “We all came from one of those small family-oriented communities. Once. Even me.”
She opens the next folder, and there the remains of that night confront her.
Sarah stumbled, or thought she stumbled. She didn’t know that spray from a shotgun blast had ruptured one of the veins leading from her shoulder to her neck. The hallway was a black tunnel, a wild menagerie of sounds.
She snatched at the air, trying to reach her daughter’s cries. There was smoke and another gravel of gunfire and she thought she saw a boy with a shaved head and metal spikes shaped like a cockscomb growing out of the center of his skull leap over her with a banshee yell.
The glass wall of patio doors and the moon’s eye and the winking lights along the pool all seemed to swim and slur together in one queer molten image that swallowed her, and then another shot hit her full in the back after she had cleared the doors.
Case takes the photo of Sarah floating in the pool and turns it facedown. She glances up at Bob. He is a wall of silent rage.
He pushes himself up on his arms and turns away. He stands by the counter and rests his hands on the ledge of the sink. He stares at the chipped face of the wall, a faded yellow.
Case begins the walk from photo to photo. The next ones are of the dog shot and stuffed down into the toilet and spittles of blood along the tub and tiles. The ones after that are of the horse lying dead in its stall, its eyes gouged out and its genitals hacked off and its groin damp and dark and shiny.
Case turns to the photo of what was once a man’s face.
Cyrus kneeled into Sam. He curled his fingers through the wire that trussed him up like a pig. He rammed him back against the wall. Cyrus took him by the cock with one hand and with the other scored a letter opener along Sam’s teeth. “You like to put your tongue where it don’t belong and get that black dick of yours hard.”
The metal blade of the opener pried apart the row of white mola
rs. Cyrus whispered into Sam’s ear, “You’re crossing over tonight, Mr. Hard Cock. And it’ll be a slow crossing over and triple-X all the way.”
Case sits there lost within the eyes of a dead man. A heartless host of horribles comes warring up through her belly. Junkie witch revisits revenants. A silver blade for gutting, and blood token prizes. Screaming apostles bent and misshapen in moments of life burglary. All headlight bright to the memory.
The next photos show Sam lying on the autopsy table. He has been cleaned up for viewing, with his eyes fixed in the half-moon of sleep. The shots after that frame each wound, followed by a series that focus on his right arm, each one cropped up closer and closer till they’ve framed an area of veins in the forearm that look to be bruised from a syringe.
“Was Sam a drug addict?”
Bob turns. “No.”
“This is a syringe mark.”
“Is it?”
The way he asks her, she thinks he might already know the answer and is working her toward it.
“Syringe marks are a specialty of mine. Was he an addict?”
Bob doesn’t answer.
She lays the photos aside. She is being handled and she now knows it. The next stack comes upon her like a thunderbolt. A dozen or so of Sam as he was left after death.
She begins to feel the acrid taste of bile in her throat. Even though she’s seen the dead before. Even though she’s been in on a kill, playing one of Cyrus’s catch dogs. Even with all that, the formal brooding flatness of each shot can in no way neutralize the complete, unadulterated fury behind how he had been cut and branded and dissected.
Her fingers slowly push each photo aside. Then her vision blurs. The ashes from her cigarette fall to the floor in a nervous turn.
Bob notices a slight hitch to her expression. “What?” he says.
She shakes her head in an odd, confused gesture.
“What?” he says again, coming forward.
She looks up at him as he looks down at the photo of Sam’s chest, where pinned to his heart with a stiletto and stained with blood is a playing card, or what at least looks at that distance like a playing card.
“Is there a close-up picture of that card?”
“Why?”
“Is there?”