by Saul Black
They had love enough to sense the moments.
“What?” he said. Quiet. Calm. Whatever it is it won’t make any difference. He didn’t need to say it. It was coming off him like radiant heat.
“When I was a kid, about I guess nine or ten. There was a girl in our neighborhood, Dalia Poole. I think she was a couple of years older, but she was mentally not all there. She couldn’t resist us, you know, the little gang. She wanted to be part of it, even though we tormented her.”
“Every neighborhood had one,” Nick said. “Ours was a kid we called Mr. Ed. Because he looked like a horse.”
“It wasn’t just that we tormented her,” Valerie continued. “We used to trick her. Into thinking that this time it was going to be different. Like whatever game we were playing, we’d let her join in. The thing was to lull her into a false sense of security. You could see the transition in her face. She’d approach us nervously because she remembered what happened last time, what happened every time. But we’d be friendly to her, and her face would go from suspicion to trust. That was the thing: we had to make sure she wasn’t expecting anything bad to happen.”
“And then you made bad things happen. It’s nothing. It’s kids. We did the same shit.”
“One day there were four of us at this guy Joel Gaynor’s house. Me, him, Dalia, and my friend Frieda Sumner. We had Dalia pinned down and we all took turns pinching her and scaring her and lifting her dress.”
“Come on. Kids are cruel. You have to learn your way out of it. You did.”
“Joel let his spit drip into her face. Frieda did it, too. When it was my turn, I couldn’t do it.”
Nick had the sense to wait. Valerie could feel him thinking it was nothing, making room for it, easily, consigning it to the category of childhood peccadillos.
“I couldn’t do it. I don’t know why. I think it was because I imagined some weird mix of my mom and God watching. But I wanted to. Not just the usual shit of not wanting to be the odd one out, the sissy. I remember the fascination, that I could do this thing and nothing would happen. It was as if I would know something, something secret and momentous if I did it.”
“So you did it.”
“No, I didn’t. But while I was sitting there, on Dalia’s legs, and Frieda had her arms, Joel put his hand under my skirt, between my legs.”
“And it felt good.”
“Yes. I liked it. The two things were connected. Dalia’s face wrecked with misery and the good feeling from Joel’s hand. It was like the room’s heat had been turned up. I felt rich.”
Nick turned toward her and draped his arm across her. Pulled her toward him. “How many people do you think have something like that?” he said. “It’s what we do. It’s what we find our way out of. You can’t seriously … I mean, it’s just—”
“I know,” Valerie said. “I know all that.”
“So?”
“I know,” she repeated. “But for a long time afterward, when I got myself off, I thought about it.”
“These are small things,” Nick said. “You know this. These are the small things. The common things.”
“I know,” Valerie said again. “I’ve done all that. Put it in perspective. I know it’s a common thing. I know I’m not a monster.” A pause. Then she added: “I know I’m not Katherine.”
“So why are you telling me?”
“I’ve never told anyone. You say it’s a small thing, but I still wanted you to know.”
“Valerie, for God’s sake. I assume something like that anyway. I assume something like that for everyone. It’s nothing. It’s not even worth remembering. We pulled Mr. Ed’s pants down and Tony Cardillo put molasses and Cheerios all over his dick. You think I’m proud of that?”
They lay for a while without speaking. She didn’t know whether she felt better or worse. Better, she supposed, both for having opened this small closet to the man she loved and for having him confirm it didn’t matter. But Katherine’s question wouldn’t go away: Do you think Nick fantasized about me? It was Mrs. Hillyard and Napoleon’s white horse all over again: if Valerie asked Nick and he hadn’t fantasized about Katherine it would be all but impossible for him not to now, just by having the idea in his head. And if he had fantasized about her, would he own up to it? Would he consider it in the same department of harmless peccadillos? Would she? That, of course, had been Katherine’s entire motive in asking her in the first place: to put her in an impossible position.
“Just don’t say anything,” Valerie said.
“Okay.”
“Let’s go to sleep.”
They lay still. The rain stopped. A block away, a truck downshifted with a gasp of hydraulics.
“Can I say one thing?” Nick asked.
“What?”
“You’re the best person I know. You’re the best person I’ve ever known. I know you don’t think so, but there it is, for the record.”
“You’ve got low standards, that’s all.”
“That’s probably true, but they’re my standards, regardless. Or it could just be you’ve got the prettiest ass in the Western world.”
“Good. Don’t go east.”
To Valerie it seemed as if she’d slept for seconds when her phone rang, but when she opened her eyes it was gray daylight outside and Nick was already up, making coffee. She was annoyed at herself for getting sucked back into the useless recorded interviews with Katherine: all those hours she could have been getting the rest her body screamed it needed. Now here was the day again, with its demands—and the silent perpetual insistence that for someone, somewhere, time was running out.
She groped on the nightstand for her phone and checked the screen: VIC MCLUHAN CALLING. The familiar cocktail of excitement and dread.
“Hey, Vic,” she said.
“I just got off the phone with Portland Homicide,” McLuhan said. “We’ve got another one.”
Now Valerie felt sick that she’d slept at all.
“Our guy?”
McLuhan paused. She could sense him wishing he had something else to tell her.
“’Fraid so,” he said. “There’s another note for you.”
15
“He put her clothes back on when he was done with her,” Carlton Reed told Valerie and McLuhan. “Presumably because he needed somewhere secure to put the note and the rest. Make sure you guys got it.”
Reed was Portland Homicide, a tall guy in his late thirties, with long eyelashes and a calm, sensual mouth, skin the color of a strong latte. He’d met Valerie and McLuhan at the airport and driven them straight to the scene, an area of woodland some four miles northwest of the blink-and-you-miss-it town of Estacada, about thirty miles southeast of Portland and a couple of miles west of Mount Hood National Forest, where the body had been discovered by an insomniac dog-walker just before dawn. Portland CSI had found the note in the victim’s pocket, and Reed—having actually read the Bureau bulletin that had gone out after the Elizabeth Lambert murder—had called the local field office straightaway. As a result, word had reached McLuhan, and two of the FBI’s Evidence Response Team had come in to assist. Valerie had read a scanned copy of the note on the flight.
Dear Valerie,
Manifestly, you have been too slow. Perhaps Raylene will help you toward the nonrandom nature of my selection? Do keep an eye on your inbox for the next special delivery—although since you couldn’t solve the first puzzle, I fear for your chances with the second, which will be more demanding. You are getting the best possible minds on the job, aren’t you?
In the meantime, happy viewing. Apologies for the format, but I’m sure you understand.
“The format” was a DVD, sealed in waterproof packaging and shoved into the back of the victim’s jeans. The Portland team had taken the prints and run the disc on a laptop. Because he hadn’t been able to stop himself, Reed had watched the footage. Beyond telling them that it recorded the torture and murder of Raylene Ashe he’d said nothing, but Valerie knew he wasn’t the same man
he’d been a few hours ago. She was live to the admission of another person to the wretched club, the latest initiate into the sad freemasonry. She wanted to take him aside for a moment and say: I’m sorry. If I’d known, I would’ve told you not to watch.
“ME puts time of death at forty-eight hours plus,” Reed said. They’d left the nearest road a few minutes ago and been on foot since then. It was warm and dry under the evergreens, with a soft layer of pine needles underfoot, that smell of an old wardrobe and the deadened acoustics of trees packed close, like a soundproofed room. “Her purse was right by the body. Driver’s license, credit cards, even a few dollars cash. There’s a second CSI at her address right now. Blood on the living room floor and, weirdly, on the front lawn. We’ve got a poor-quality tire dry-cast from near where we parked, but there’s no way of knowing it’s his. Make and specs are coming. Okay, here you go.”
Reed lifted the tape and they ducked under. The scene was tented, and four CSI personnel were wrapping up their sweep. Valerie, McLuhan, and Reed donned protective gear and entered the tent. Inside were two Portland agents, Juliette Niles, a tall, slim woman in her early thirties, with copper-colored hair tied back in a ponytail, and Louis Frost, slightly shorter than his colleague, with a dark crew cut and fierce blue eyes. Reed did the introductions.
“The ME’s gone,” Niles said. “But he’d determined strangulation before we ran the disc. Multiple cuts and contusions. Her left ulna’s broken. Cigarette burns. It’s all as per the footage, obviously.”
And here’s another one, Valerie thought. Another two, in fact, since it was obvious from Frost’s drained expression that he’d watched the DVD, too. Both agents were making an effort to remain crisp and professional, but there was no disguising that they’d paid the voyeur’s price.
“She had this clipped into her hair,” Niles said. “She’s not wearing it in the footage, so he definitely put it there.”
“This” was a small flower. Purple, half browned since it had been plucked, and about the size of a gumball, sealed and labeled in clear plastic.
“Mean anything to you?” McLuhan asked Valerie.
“No.”
“I’ve sent an image of it to our forensic botanist,” Niles said. “We’re waiting for an ID.”
Which won’t help, Valerie’s bitter inner voice said. Aloud, she said: “Let’s take a look at her.”
The body of Raylene Ashe had been bagged, but at McLuhan’s insistence not removed from the scene. Juliette undid the zipper. The sound of the little mechanism seemed loud and raw in the stillness of the tent.
No matter how many times Valerie went through this the moment of shock remained. Not the shock horror of her first months on Homicide, but the poignant shock to which it had given way, the sad jolt that testified to the victim’s lost personhood, a living being brutally translated into a corpse. All that life, all the feelings and experiences, memories, thoughts, dreams, anxieties, desires, the perpetual prosaic symphony that Raylene Ashe would, just like everyone else, have taken for granted—gone. Some people, Valerie knew, were not so unthinking as to never consider their own death. Hardly anyone considered their own murder. Not until their murder was staring them in the face. In that moment it would seem to them that their entire life had been leading them, treacherously, to this. It would seem that their entire life had been an act of cruel distraction, a long joke designed to conceal its disgusting punch line.
There was nothing to say. Everyone in the tent stood in silence. The gendered responses flickered between them: Valerie and Niles excruciatingly sensitive to their own bodies, imagined in place of Raylene’s (the burns in the V of her shirt were clear to see); McLuhan, Reed, and Frost conceding that a man had done this to a woman. A man, as they were men, a woman, as Valerie and Niles were women. The questions surged, unspoken and useless.
“I just wanted to see her face,” Valerie said.
Niles closed the zipper with slightly ugly haste. “She’s been swabbed,” she said. “But we know what we’re going to find. The DVD makes it clear, unfortunately.”
“Run it,” McLuhan said. Valerie was aware of him forcing procedure back in, after the moment of nauseous intimacy.
“I don’t need to see it again,” Frost said. “I’ll step out, if no one minds.”
“Go ahead,” McLuhan said. “I want to see if it gives us anything by way of location.”
“It doesn’t,” Niles said, but she took her laptop from her shoulder bag and flipped it open.
* * *
Back at Reed’s car Valerie lit a Marlboro. The video hadn’t, as Niles had predicted, helped them. It showed a windowless room, bare but for plastic sheets on the floor and the sad heap of Raylene’s clothes and purse in a corner. Raylene cuffed, wrists hooked to the ceiling, ankles—a metal rod kept her legs apart—bolted to the floor. On almost tiptoe, as he obviously liked it. (The cold ironist in Valerie noted that Katherine spent a lot of her time these days wearing just such restraints.) The killer was in the mask familiar from the footage six years ago, a strange, eye-holed leather thing that covered his hair, nose and cheeks, a twist on Valerie’s notion of a Viking helmet. No tattoos or scars, no distinguishing marks at all. Just a medium-build white guy in good, trim, muscular shape. Not a Baywatch lifeguard, but women would approve when he took his shirt off. Valerie remembered the earlier footage: Katherine running her gold-painted fingernails lightly over his abdomen, doodling in Danielle Freyer’s blood.
McLuhan’s phone pinged the arrival of a text: Niles had heard back from the forensic botanist on the flower clipped into Raylene’s hair. McLuhan read the message aloud:
“Globe amaranth. Gomphrena … globosa. Clover-like flower heads. Papery flowers that last a long time. Depending on the variety, flowers are white, red, pink, lilac, or purple. ‘Strawberry Fields,’ with bright-red blossoms, and ‘All Around Purple’ are popular. Requires full sun to partial shade, moderate water. Grows as an annual in all zones.”
“All zones,” Reed said. “Fucking great. What’s next?”
“Raylene’s home,” Valerie said. “We have to know how he’s getting in. You’ve got door-to-door going on there, right?”
“My partner’s been there since this morning. So far zippo.”
“Let’s go,” McLuhan said.
* * *
Raylene’s two-story was middle-class Portland suburbia, a whitewashed building with red roof tiles and a faux Spanish facade. Some developer’s misguided idea of a hacienda villa.
Reed’s partner, Burdeck, a gaunt guy with dirty-golden hair and greasy skin, was still on the scene.
“No one saw anything,” he said, after Reed had introduced them. “There’s blood on the lawn and inside, but not much. No street cams here, obviously. Would your guy have known that?”
“Yep,” Valerie said. “I’m sure he would.”
One of the CSI team appeared in Raylene’s doorway, one hand in a thumbs-up, the other raised, holding a sealed Baggie. “I guess they found what you said they’d find,” Burdeck said. “Here. Gloves.”
The Baggie contained another painting on a postcard, sans stamp and postmark. This time the picture’s title was printed on the back: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus—Pieter Bruegel the Elder c. 1525–1569. Of the image itself, Valerie noted a guy in period dress with a horse-drawn plow in a field on a cliff by the sea. Galleon-type ships on the water. More cliffs, clouds. Beyond remembering from high school that Icarus was the mythological guy who flew too close to the sun, so that the wax on his homemade wings melted, and he fell, Valerie knew nothing of what it might mean. The handwriting was the same as on the postcard she’d found at Elizabeth’s, and the message was, to her, unambiguous:
Number Two: 073115
“July 31, 2015,” McLuhan said. “Fuck.”
“You’re looking for an envelope, too,” Valerie told the CSI guy, beyond whose scrub mask she could see only a tan face and gentle hazel eyes. “McLuhan? You got the image? The last one was printed,
but just bag every envelope you find. Trash, recycling, the house, everything.”
They were interrupted by the arrival of a large SUV, which was halted by the two uniforms at the taped barrier. A worried-looking elderly couple and a guy in his late thirties got out. After a few moments’ tense confab, one of the officers came over.
“Karl and Jessica Bradley,” he said. “And their son, Christopher. They live right there.” He indicated the bungalow opposite Raylene’s. “They just got back from their daughter’s in Seattle.”
“Let them through,” Valerie said. “Stick to the perimeter. I want to talk to them.”
It took a while. Following the Bradleys into their house, Valerie could feel their quivering mix of excitement and fear. The police. The dizzying discrepancy between TV cop shows and the actual arrival of crime, in your life. Jessica Bradley, a small hawkish woman in her seventies with large, neurotic eyes and pinned-up gray curls, couldn’t get the key in the door, her hands were shaking so badly. Her husband, tall, headmasterly, with a shock of white hair and a tough, thinned-down masculinity, had to take over. The son, Christopher, had his father’s height, but he looked like his mother. He was carrying at least thirty pounds more than was good for him.
“We were with our daughter,” Jessica kept repeating, as if it were the credential that would resolve everything—whatever everything was. “I mean, we’re never away. We’re always here. Normally she comes to us. But it was Matty’s birthday. That’s Janine’s middle boy, just turned twelve. What’s happened? I mean what is this?”
The Bradleys’ home was scrupulously tidy and unassumingly furnished, with a smell of carpet cleaner and, faintly, medicine. The living room was a photo gallery of children and grandchildren: thin fair hair and Jessica’s slightly unhinged eyes had been inherited here and there. You shouldn’t notice that a family was plain—not under these circumstances—but Valerie couldn’t help it. She came from a good-looking clan. Nick was good-looking. Unjust life was unjustly kinder to you if you were. She thought of Katherine again, for whom “good-looking” was a ludicrous understatement. Maybe if you looked the way she did, your life went too far past kindness, into the wide-open territory beyond, where anything was possible.