LoveMurder

by Saul Black

If it hadn’t been for the fact that the little girl in the yellow cardigan was her.

  20

  “It’s me,” she said to Will, via cell phone, from her car.

  “I know. What’s up?”

  “No, I mean it’s me. I’m what Raylene and Elizabeth had in common.”

  Elizabeth Lambert—Elizabeth Turner in those premarital days—had spent a month as a classroom assistant at Happy Learners Preschool during her year out from finishing her degree. Valerie didn’t quite remember it. She had only a generic memory of preschool: the smells of chalk and ammonia and clay; the strange privacy of the cloth playhouse; the general noise and the occasional boom or bark from the adults; the alarming otherness of other kids. There were a very few specific memories. A small freckled boy gouging a lump of earwax out and wiping it on his shorts. A girl with a large, porcelainish head tripping over in the yard and biting her own tongue, the astonishing amount of blood and the panicked teachers grabbing more and more paper towels. A dark-skinned boy with liquid black eyes and very white teeth putting his hand down the back of Valerie’s shorts, her turning and slapping him. She didn’t remember Elizabeth, but the photographic evidence was incontrovertible.

  “Raylene delivered my mail,” she said. “Elizabeth worked at my preschool. It’s people connected to me.”

  “How the fuck did he know Elizabeth worked at your preschool?”

  “There’ll be a record, somewhere. There’s a record, you dig it up. These are the times.”

  “You think you know this guy?”

  “I don’t have to know him. He knows me. And he wants me to know he knows me.”

  “Okay. You coming back now?”

  “Not yet. I’ve got to go to Union City.”

  “How come?”

  “I need to tell my mom and Cassie. Call my brother, too, I guess.”

  Will processed. Worked out the logic. “Even if you’re right about Elizabeth and Raylene,” he said, “the connections are remote.”

  “They’re remote so far. The next one could be closer. I’m not taking any chances. They need a heads-up. My mom lives on her own. Go down to Nick’s department and fill him in, will you?”

  “Got it.”

  “I’m going to talk to Deerholt, get a couple of uniforms out there.”

  “Fair enough.” Pause. “Shit. Now you’ve got me worried. Marion, the kids. I mean, I’m connected to you. Christ, we’re going to have to draw up a list.”

  Valerie drove out to her mother’s house, called Cassie en route to meet her there.

  Deerholt, all but audibly biting back the suggestion that she was being paranoid, promised her two uniforms.

  * * *

  “What are we supposed to do?” Cassie said. “Lock ourselves in until you catch this guy?”

  Valerie just looked at her. Don’t make this harder than it is.

  “No, you don’t have to lock yourselves in. There’ll always be at least one officer here at Mom’s and at your place and when you need to go out he’ll go with you. You can do all your normal stuff, but you’re going to have a little police company for a while. I’m sorry, but I’m not taking any chances.”

  “I’m not going around with a police officer the whole time, Val,” Cassie said. “Owen can take me to and from work, for God’s sake.” Owen was a graphic designer who worked from home. They’d converted the loft into a studio ten years ago.

  “If it’s Owen, then fine,” Valerie said. “But there might be times when he’s not available. There’ll be a uniform here just in case. Owen’s not going away anytime soon, is he?” she asked her sister.

  “No.”

  “Fine. Just be aware. That’s all I’m saying. You take the kids to school and pick them up—right?”

  “It’s summer break.”

  “Okay, but they don’t go anywhere without you or Owen. Don’t go out alone at night, and during the day stay public, stay where there are people.”

  “Val, we live in a city. There are always people, everywhere.”

  Valerie thought: Elizabeth Lambert lived in a city. So did Raylene Ashe. And now both of them are dead.

  Cassie walked her to her car. “This is fucked,” she said.

  “Yeah, I know,” Valerie said. “But be careful, will you?”

  “You know, just once in a while I’d like to be the one looking out for you.”

  “You’ve done your share.”

  “Holding your hair out of the toilet while you puked up tequila is hardly the same thing.”

  “It felt like it to me at the time. Times, I should say. Let the officers open your mail.”

  “What?”

  “The postcards. The fair warning.”

  “He’s not going to send me fair warning, is he?”

  “We don’t know what he’s going to do.”

  “And Katherine Glass?”

  “Don’t worry about Katherine Glass. I’m dealing with her.”

  “That’s what worries me.”

  Valerie’s phone rang. McLuhan.

  “Where are you?”

  “Union City. Heading back. What’s happened?” Jesus Christ, not another one. Please, not yet, not so soon.

  “You’ve got another package,” McLuhan said.

  21

  Dear Valerie

  How close did you get? Are you seeing the connection yet? I confess, I find myself wondering if I’ve overestimated you. But then I remind myself that you’re the woman who put Katherine Glass away—so how can that be?

  Regardless, we have no choice but to proceed. Here is everything you—and your specialist(s)—need to save the life of Number Three. It’s a little more cunningly gift-wrapped than last time, but the rewards are potentially greater: not only the victim’s name, but the intended scene of the crime.

  You’ll be wondering how long you’ve got. (I’m in danger here, of allowing my misgivings to increase my handicap.) Tradition dictates that these things start slowly, then speed up, but you’ll know by now that I have no respect for tradition.

  Let’s say days rather than weeks.

  Good luck.

  The material had gone, electronically, via Susanna Arden, up to Katherine at Red Ridge yesterday, as well as to the FBI team working the clues. The contents this time were six pages, each with a single image:

  1. A map of Iraq, with the east point of the compass icon circled in red

  2. An early edition of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

  3. A still of Scarlett Johansson from Lost in Translation

  4. A letter grid, numbered as before, but twice the size of the first ones

  5. A highly magnified photograph of what looked like the tip of a needle

  6. A line of apparently random digits

  So far they’d had nothing back.

  “What are you doing?” Valerie asked Will. They were both at their desks. She’d just taken the headphones off: the Katherine interviews. Again.

  “You won’t like it.”

  “What?”

  Will sat back in his chair. “It’s a profile list of prison personnel,” he said. “McLuhan’s not convinced there isn’t a snitch to Katherine. And frankly neither am I. The Bureau’s still chasing two of the people known to have visited her while she’s been inside. One potential biographer, who apparently didn’t last, one Catholic priest bent on saving her soul. That’s plus three attorneys and her financial adviser, but none of them seems dumb enough to get into anything like this.”

  “Why wouldn’t I like it?”

  “Because you think it’s a waste of time.”

  “I don’t think it’s a waste of time. It’s elimination. In fact I’ll help you. I’ve got one more of these to go through, then I’m never listening to them again.”

  “Still think she gave something away we missed?”

  “It was six years ago,” Valerie said. “My memory’s not what it used to be.”

  “I’ve noticed a lot of alcoholics say that.”

  “Hey,
I’m practically teetotal these days.”

  This was a gross exaggeration, but it was true that Valerie had cut down on the booze. The weekly glass recycling bag now looked more like forgivable hedonism than a shameful addiction. She’d told herself it was good physical accounting in preparation for Having a Child with Nick. But the truth was that she just didn’t need it anything like she used to. Love was generous like that, casually relieved you of your other dependencies—so that you depended solely, perilously, on love. Love’s generosity was purely self-serving.

  “I was looking at some of the trial footage last night,” Will said.

  “And?”

  “I was wondering how come you’ve got skinnier and I’ve got fatter.”

  “Try asking Ashan for a smaller sandwich now and again. Why were you looking?”

  “I had the weirdest feeling that he might have been at the trial. In disguise. I think he’d have gotten a kick out of it.”

  “Katherine would have recognized him,” Valerie said. “Disguise or no disguise. She could have cut herself a deal and pointed him out.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Anyway, you’re skinnier, but I’m aging better. I’ve got understated gravitas.”

  “What?” Valerie said.

  Will laughed. “We had a parents’ evening at Logan’s school. When he came home next day he said he’d overheard two of his teachers discussing me and Marion. According to Ms. Vickery—who looks younger than Logan, by the way—I’ve got understated gravitas. I like it.”

  Valerie put the headphones back on, picked up where she’d left off.

  K: I know what you want to know.

  V: What’s that?

  K: You want to know why.

  V: Actually I’m not really interested in why. That’s not my department.

  K: It’s everyone’s department. You’re Police, yes, but you’re human first. Worse than that, you’re a woman. I’m letting the team down egregiously.

  Pause.

  K: Very badly.

  V: I see. Well, as I said, I’m not really interested in—

  K: Has it occurred to you that Nick hates you?

  Longer pause.

  V: What I can’t figure out is why you think asking me things like that could possibly help you.

  K: Oh, I know they’re of no practical use, but they help me enormously, psychologically. I’m compelled to unwrap things. My mother had very well-kept fingernails, and she had this slow, methodical way of peeling an orange. As a little girl, I used to watch her, mesmerized. Life offers us these objective correlatives, but so often we can only see them with adulthood’s hindsight. Do you want me to rein in the vocabulary?

  V: What I want is an answer to the question I asked: You never, after that first time in New York, stayed in a hotel?

  K: No, not to my memory. An objective correlative is an outer world representation of an inner state.

  V: Thank you very much for explaining that. You said his money was European. Which part of Europe?

  K: No idea. If his name had really been “Lucien Chastain” you could have gotten a genealogist to look into it. Since it was an alias, you’ll be better off with a Freudian literary critic. The conventional wisdom is that all such noms de guerre reveal something about their subject. Not that it takes a genius. “Lucien” evokes “Lucifer” and “Chastain” suggests “chaste,” “stain,” “chain,” and “chastise.” It’s not just me, by the way. Read Germaine Greer: “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.” Don’t you feel the subtle accents of contempt when he’s fucking you in a certain way? A certain position? Does he fuck you in the ass? On his birthday?

  V: Did you ever use a false name?

  K: Oh, I wish I had! It amazes me that I didn’t. Not for practical reasons. I’ve just always liked the idea of disguise. And this is the perverse universe: when I actually needed to be in disguise, when I had the perfect rationale, I let it pass me by. What a consummate moron! The only thing more astonishing to me than the stupidity of other people is the stupidity of myself. And to the eventual transcriber of these tapes I can only apologize for the gracelessness of that last sentence. Have you read Wuthering Heights?

  V: No. If you—

  K: You don’t know what you’re missing. The heroine—or I suppose one must say antiheroine—is another Katherine, albeit Catherine with a “C.” A gorgeous little sadist, as it happens, but that’s not the point. That’s not my point. My point is that the author, Emily Brontë, and all her siblings—goody-two-shoes Charlotte, drippy Anne, and hopeless, talentless asshole Branwell—were all, as children, forced by their father to wear masks from time to time. Actual physical masks. Because he, the father, a parson, naturally, believed that having their faces hidden would encourage them to reveal their true characters, to act without lies or dissemblance. Obviously—witness “Lucien”—a false assumption. An ironic assumption, too, since all three girls went on to publish their novels under androgynous pseudonyms. Branwell just went on to be an annoying waste of time. What do you think Nick would do if he were an interrogator given carte blanche with a hot nineteen-year-old girl suspect?

  Long pause.

  V: You do understand that these interviews are being conducted on the basis that you’re willing to talk to us in a meaningful way? They can be terminated at any time.

  Pause.

  K: I’m sorry. It’s possible I have ADHD. In the nicest possible way, obviously. Ask me anything, and I’ll tell you the truth.

  V: Where did he live?

  K: I asked him. Now wait, Valerie, this is the truth: I asked him and he just said: “Lots of places.” A deliberate imitation of that simian Christopher Lambert in Highlander. He told me he had a house in Pasadena, but I never went there. And he made it very clear that I never would go there. He was much more foresighted than me. For the first few months I assumed he was secretly married. But he had places—if his testimony is to be taken at face value—everywhere. Zurich. London. São Paulo. He was either the most strategic budgeter in history or he really was fabulously rich.

  V: What do you mean?

  K: You’ve searched my apartment, right? You’ve seen the jewels?

  V: Yes.

  K: They’re all kosher. That diamond necklace is worth three years’ salary for you. Do you want to borrow it? Maybe I’ll leave it to you in my will. Can you imagine the fun the newspapers would have with that? If you saw what was in my safe-deposit box …

  V: We’re getting a warrant for that, so I guess I will.

  K: Oh, you minx. I knew I should have inventoried it. Now half the SFPD’s ladies are going to be walking around in gold. There’s a garnet bracelet that would suit you. Red stones look so much better on brunettes. And you’ve got pretty hands. I mean, they’re not in my league, let’s be honest, but—

  V: Did he ever visit the gallery?

  K: Never.

  V: Did he ever mention family? Ex-wives, girlfriends?

  K: Only one. The legendary Selene. Although who knows if that was her real name?

  V: An ex?

  K: My failed predecessor. He thought she had what it takes. It turned out she didn’t. They were all set to go in Rio, if you can believe that, but Selene got cold feet at the last minute.

  V: When was this?

  K: God knows. A couple of years before he met me. At least a couple of years, I should say. Maybe more.

  V: Had he done this before?

  K: Apart from the abortive adventure with Selene, no, I don’t believe he had. We lost our you-know-what virginity together. Afterward it was as if for the first time in my life all my muscles and joints had come into their proper alignment. Now come on, admit it: you do want to know why, really. I know you do.

  Another pause.

  Listening back now, Valerie remembered the effort she’d had to make not to ask why. In the silence of the pause between them on the recording she felt the same claustrophobic curiosity she’d suffered at the time. And yes, Katherine had been right: the
curiosity was gendered. Even back then Valerie had been Police long enough to be dead to the mystery of why men did these things. With men there was no mystery. The world—especially her world—was a daily reminder that she’d accepted male violence as a fact of the universe, like the hardness of stone or the coldness of ice. She would have been incapable of doing her job if she hadn’t. The job made mystification an unaffordable luxury. If a stone hit you in the face it would hurt, and if you lay on a frozen lake long enough you’d freeze to death. Those were the only relevant facts. Rapists and murderers had always done what they did and always would. Or perhaps in some remote future version of the world there would be no rapists or murderers. She doubted it. Regardless, it wasn’t her world—and never had been. Her world was the one where men did what they did. But Katherine was a woman. It had shocked Valerie that in spite of herself this made a difference. Intellectually she knew there were cruel women, violent women, homicidal women. But she was forced to admit, faced with Katherine Glass, that she, Valerie, had always taken it vaguely for granted that the behavior of such women derived from something that had happened to them. Look hard enough into their pasts and you’d find the damage, the spoilage, the derailment, the pain. You’d find something that went a way to explaining the extremities at which they’d ended up. Women, she’d assumed, were driven to it. Yet the whole time with Katherine she’d felt that assumption short-circuiting. Before the trial the psychologists had, one by one, effectively given up. Not because they doubted that Katherine’s “supernatural evil” had very natural antecedents, but because she, Katherine, seemed determined to deny them. All the shrinks had concluded (shrugging, throwing up their hands, or calmly drawing a line under their pages of notes) that Katherine was a psychopath. She met, in one doctor’s words, “enough of the standard criteria.” For all its controversy, the twenty-point Hare PCL-R Checklist from the mid-seventies still informed a lot of evaluation. Katherine was (mockingly) familiar with it. Let’s save some time, she’d told one psychiatrist. Superficial charm? Check—and more than “superficial,” I think we can agree. Grandiose sense of self-worth? Perhaps, but leavened by a sense of irony and a taste for the absurd. Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom? Oh, check. Pathological lying? No. (But then of course what pathological liar would say otherwise?) Cunning/manipulative? Check. Lack of remorse or guilt? Let’s leave that one for now. I’m not sure I can answer it without poetry. Shallow affect? No. Callous/lack of empathy? Well, actions speak louder than words, you’ll say, but you’d be missing the point. Parasitic lifestyle? No, but not for want of trying! Poor behavioral controls? No. Promiscuous sexual behavior? No. Early behavior problems? They’re only problems if you get caught, and I never was. Lack of realistic long-term goals? No. Impulsivity? No. Irresponsibility? No. Failure to accept responsibility for own actions? No. Many short-term marital relationships? Hilarious. No. Juvenile delinquency? No. Revocation of conditional release? Not applicable, nor imaginable, since I doubt I’ll ever be released, conditionally or otherwise. Criminal versatility? Probably. I’m smart and resourceful. There you are, doctor. I’d score myself about eleven or twelve out of the maximum forty. And I don’t need to remind you that that dreadful potato of a woman, Karla Homolka, only scored five. Where will you go next? Hybristophilia? Malignant narcissism? The first doesn’t quite cover it, does it? Obviously I’m attracted to sadistic men, but we can put that as much in the category of practical necessity as we can pathology. The second is a good contender, but I don’t have a hair-trigger, nor do I dehumanize the people with whom I associate. Including the victims. Quite the contrary, in fact. Their humanity is essential.