by Saul Black
All the way to the apartment and throughout the fruitless search there for Nick’s phone, Valerie oscillated between the mechanics of rationalization and the fall into nightmare. But as the minutes and hours passed the nightmare’s gravity grew, until the rationalizations were frail, distant things. The ordinary world persisted—the evening lowering into Californian dusk, the weight of her phone in her hand, the city’s sluggish traffic, the station’s mix of fluorescent light and muttering keyboards—but all of it with a surreal energy and mass, and she moved through it as if wading the invisible weight of a dream.
Nick, in a crisp white shirt and Levi’s, toting his sports bag, was on the Bay Club CCTV, exiting at 12:16 P.M. It hurt Valerie to see him not knowing whatever it was he didn’t, at that moment, know. McLuhan’s guys had tracked his Chrysler via street cams heading east on Pine toward Pacific Heights, but lost it just south of Lafayette Park at 12:43 P.M. Valerie had been out there herself to scour the streets, and door-to-door inquiries were still going on. So far no sign. No reports at the hospitals. Nothing back from Eugene. There was now an APB out on him as well as Nick. Valerie had called everyone she could think of who Nick knew. No joy. Serena, naturally, was freaking out.
Valerie’s phone rang. McLuhan.
“I’m sending over DMV pictures of California registered owners named ‘Eugene’ or ‘Gene Trent,’” he said. “You know what he looks like, right?”
Valerie felt her throat constrict. She had only the vaguest memory of having met Eugene, one bright afternoon maybe a year ago, when Nick’s car was in the shop and she’d driven him to the Bay Club for his game. They’d run into Eugene in the parking lot. She remembered a toned, athletic guy with a fruitily alive face and a buzz cut. She’d felt, in his first glance, sexual appraisal, but there was nothing unusual about that. Nick had already entertained her with tales of Eugene’s alleged satyriasis. The entire encounter had lasted less than two minutes. Still, she thought she’d recognize him if she saw him again. In any case, Will knew what he looked like, and Will was still here, fifteen hours into the working day.
“Yeah,” she said. “If he’s there we can ID him.”
It took Will maybe three minutes to scan the thirty-four images and confirm what Valerie already knew.
“None of these guys is him,” he said.
Valerie’s desk phone rang. She had an immediate surge of certainty that it was Nick. She could hear his voice as she reached for the receiver. She could feel the weight of relief waiting for its release.
“Valerie Hart,” she said. Her own voice felt intimately deafening, as if all other sounds had been silenced.
“Check your in-box, Valerie,” the male speaker said—then hung up.
The newest e-mail in Valerie’s inbox was from the address [email protected].
The single attachment was a five-second video clip.
It showed Nicholas Blaskovitch in a bare brick room, hands cuffed above his head, shirt open, duct tape over his mouth, face swollen, eyes open, blinking.
On a small table in front of him was the leather helmet-mask worn by Katherine Glass’s lover.
41
McLuhan’s crew worked fast. The call had been made from a place called Headspace, a collection of purpose-built artists’ and designers’ studios in the Haight, though no one expected to find the caller sitting by the phone. They didn’t. What they found in one of the units was a landline and laptop rigged for remote operation. “The space is registered to John Hendricks,” McLuhan said. “One of our boy’s ghosts, obviously, albeit this time presumably without the blindness and the dog. We’ll get tech down here, but it looks like he can run this setup from a goddamned cell phone. He could be anywhere. There’s one security camera out front that might give us a license plate, but we know he’s already thought of that. Have to go through it anyway. We’re pulling a list of the other occupants, but he’ll have fed them horseshit.”
“He knew we’d find this place,” Will said. “He wants us to know he could be anywhere.”
Valerie was simultaneously numb and sickeningly alive. The world around her was an unwanted intimacy. The image of Nick from the video was a continuous loop in her head. Nick. Alive. The killer wanted her to know the man she loved was still alive—and completely at his mercy. He wanted her to feel the preciousness of the time between now and Nick’s death like sand slipping through the hourglass’s midriff. He wanted her hope. Just as he and Katherine had wanted their victims’ hope, renewed, repeatedly, for as long as their own desire could bear it. Hope, renewed and betrayed, was their aphrodisiacal drug of choice. Her body ached with sensitivity. It was as if she could feel her own hands cuffed above her head, her torso stretched, warmed by the nearness of all the damage waiting to be done. There was no shutting out the images. They flashed and bloomed. Nick screaming, his face wrecked with pain. The calibrated subtraction of all resistance, dignity, personhood, the full, indifferent ugliness of suffering, the body with no choice but to report its sensations, until there was nothing of the person left to receive them. In those moments all her and Nick’s love and shared life would count for nothing. In the faces of the victims on the tapes there was always a final stage in which even the reflex to feel pity for themselves was worn away, as if the soul had nothing left—not even the appeal to mercy nor the rage at its absence. Just the resignation to waiting for its release. Her mind refused. Not Nick. Not my love. But the refusal wouldn’t hold. Yes, Nick. Yes, your love. It was unbearable and she could do nothing but bear it. There was no escape.
“Tech is on its way,” McLuhan said. “We may be able to get a fix on the remote. Unless he’s doing some shit with the IP addresses. Christ, he could have a dozen of these setups, like fucking Russian dolls.”
Valerie had her phone in her hand. When it rang, it tore through her tension as if she’d been slashed with a blade.
SUSANNA ARDEN CALLING.
Even hitting ACCEPT was a challenge. Her hands were haywire.
“Go ahead,” Valerie said.
“We’ve got a location,” Arden said. She sounded different. Precariously balanced. In spite of which Valerie’s hope surged.
“Name it.”
“I can’t. Glass says she’ll only talk to you. In person.”
“What?”
“She knows the location. She won’t release it, except to you, I repeat: face-to-face.”
Valerie burned through the rage in a second. The flamed feeling of having walked into an idiot trap—but it would have to wait. Just get the information. Even knowing there might not be information made no difference. There was no choice. No choice.
“I’m on my way,” she said. Then, when she’d hung up, to McLuhan: “We need a chopper to Red Ridge, right now. I’ll explain en route.”
Will was visibly hurt when Valerie told him she didn’t want him with her.
“It’s just me and her,” she said. “I don’t want any other element for her to fuck with. I don’t want McLuhan in there with me, either, though I know he’s not going to like that.” They were driving flat out to the helipad, sirens carving them clean through the night traffic. The city rushed by in planes of black and scrolls of neon. Valerie’s system had shed its numbness. She flowed into the relief of action, of doing something, like water through a burst dam. Nothing had changed except that there was no longer nothing she could do. “And besides,” she added, “for all we know Nick could be half a mile from the station. I need you here to move fast and make sure no one fucks that up.”
“Okay,” Will said. “I’m not going anywhere. But for Christ’s sake be careful.”
* * *
McLuhan didn’t like it. It took Valerie the entire short flight up to Red Ridge to talk him into letting her speak with Katherine alone—at least initially.
“As you sow, so shall you reap,” he said. “This is where we find out what she wants. We should have killed her instead of just talking about it. Fuck.”
In a state visibly
combining misery and rage, he waited outside the visiting room, in the silent company of two guards, neither of whom Valerie recognized. Inside the room, Susanna Arden was on her feet, leaning against the wall and staring at the back of Katherine Glass’s head. The agent looked raw-eyed and pale, drained not just by the hours she’d put in but by the continual exposure to Katherine’s wretched psychic vampirism. The room itself contained too much energy, as if Katherine had turned the dial of her aura up to max, an effect like the heat and density of a tropical greenhouse.
“Valerie,” Katherine said. “You came. Thank you.”
The smile was there, but for once it didn’t look arch. The laptop on the desk in front of her was switched off. The usual mess of papers was in a neat stack, topped by a paperback road atlas of California. She wanted it to be as plain as possible that her work was done.
“McLuhan’s outside,” Valerie said to Susanna Arden. “I need to speak with her alone.”
When the agent had exited, Katherine said: “I take it the pronoun is to let me know I’m not in your good books?”
“What?”
“‘I need to speak to her alone.’ Not ‘Katherine’ or ‘Ms. Glass.’ ‘Her.’ I am here, you know. I am present.”
Valerie felt sick with the need to get the information without letting Katherine know how much it mattered. Contained frenzy. She might as well have had her mouth full of vomit.
“I got your message,” she said. “I’m here, we’re face-to-face. What’s the location?”
Katherine raised her eyebrows. “You are angry. I haven’t seen you this agitated, though I can see you’re trying to control it. You’re quite terrifying when you control your anger. Nick must have to tread very carefully. I can picture him, tiptoeing, psychically. You’re one of those people for whom the phrase ‘seeing red’ was invented. I must mind myself.”
Nick. Don’t give her that. Could she know? Maybe there was more to the ciphers than just the location. It was a private language. A private language of two speakers.
“Do you have the location or not?”
“Yes. But who is she?”
She. She didn’t know. Or was making it seem she didn’t. For every possibility its opposite. That was Katherine. That was Katherine. The image from the video clip bloomed, died, bloomed again. The wrongness of seeing Nick like that. The inversion of everything. The end of everything. Unless.
“We don’t know,” Valerie said. “Tell me the location.”
“I see,” Katherine said. “The clock must be ticking awfully loudly to make you this way. What an opportunity for wicked old me! I suppose that’s what you’re expecting, to be tantalized, to be made to jump through my ringmistress hoops.”
Valerie was sick with what it was costing her not to do violence. Her jaws ached. She thought of the killer’s e-mail address: notbuilttolast. Not built to last. It meant both things: that the address itself would evaporate from cyberspace—and, of course, that Nick was on borrowed time. She was very close to some sort of madness.
“All right,” Katherine said. “You’re obviously in extremis. I don’t want to make you hate me. I’ll play against type and give it to you straight.”
Again, as if she could switch it on and off at will, Katherine dropped the cruel-cat demeanor. It fell away like a veil and there she was, apparently without strategy—though to Valerie the room still felt crammed, as if a small storm had gathered and was pressing on her head. For a moment she thought she was going to pass out.
“You got close last time,” Katherine said. “You might have caught him. And if you had, you wouldn’t need me anymore. I know you’ve promised to come and see me, but…”
“I’ll come,” Valerie said. “Just give me the location.”
Katherine shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said. “No, I won’t give it to you.”
Valerie had a very clear image of herself holding the gun she didn’t have to Katherine’s head. Give me the fucking location, you cunt, or I’m going to shoot you in the skull right now.
“I won’t give it to you,” Katherine repeated, as if she’d seen precisely what was in Valerie’s mind. “I won’t give it to you, but I will show it to you.”
Valerie’s throat tightened. “What?” she said.
“I’ll show it to you. You put me in a vehicle. I have a map of California. I give you directions.”
“We don’t have time—”
“No choppers. I can’t direct you through the air. Roads only.”
“You’re out of your fucking mind.”
“No, I don’t think so. I want a day out, Valerie. I want to see the sky. I want to see anything that isn’t the inside of this place, even if it’s just for a few hours.”
“You can’t possibly think—”
“Don’t waste the time you were so quick to remind me you don’t have. Or she doesn’t have, whoever she is. I’m making no other conditions. You can have me chained up, bolted to the roof of a Humvee, guarded by an entire SWAT team for all I care. But I want to experience not being in here. This might be my last chance, and I don’t intend to let it go by.”
“You’re lying,” Valerie said. “You don’t have the location.”
Katherine sat back in her chair. She, too, looked tired. But relaxed. Completely at her ease.
“I’m not going to try to persuade you that I do,” she said. “I’m not going to try to persuade you because I don’t have to. I’m all you’ve got. We both know that.”
“I can’t make it happen. For God’s sake, just give me the—”
“Who’s McLuhan? FBI?”
“Yes.”
“He can make it happen.”
Valerie hesitated. Could he? More important: Would he? It was hopeless: no matter the calculations her rational self was busy with (mainly, whether Katherine was lying), her nonrational self simply insisted: You have to do this. You have to do this because if you don’t, Nick dies. To which, amid its chaos of second guesses, the rational self replied: He could die anyway. He could be dead already for all you know.
“Don’t think about it,” Katherine said. “There’s no point. There are no games here. I want what I want. It costs you nothing. Well, virtually nothing. Bureau gymnastics. A great deal less than the value of a life, at any rate, back in the utilitarian moral world.”
Valerie burned. Every second of deliberation was an unaffordable luxury. I want to see anything that isn’t the inside of this place, even if it’s just for a few hours. She could neither stop the doubt nor ignore the fact that she had to proceed in spite of it.
“You’re thinking about it,” Katherine said. “I told you: don’t. That’s a waste of time. You can come at it from any angle you like, but it won’t change a thing. You give me this or you don’t. If you do, I get to feel like a human being for a few hours and maybe a woman doesn’t get raped and tortured and murdered. If you don’t, maybe you’ve cost her all that just because you’re worried I’m smarter than you. You’re telling yourself you’ve got a choice, but we both know that’s a lie. In your heart the decision’s already been made.”
Stop. Stop. Stop.
Valerie was out the door without even being aware that she was in motion.
In the hallway, McLuhan looked at her from under his dark brows.
“Well?” he said.
There was no thinking, now. There was only whatever she could put between Nick and his death. There was only love.
“There’s something you have to do,” she said.
42
Detective Will Fraser lay on his bed, naked. He was exhausted. Seventeen hours today, same as yesterday. His body had begun sending him abrupt bulletins that he wasn’t as young as he used to be. The night before, he’d come home so whacked he’d fallen asleep at the kitchen table. His daughter, Deborah, had come downstairs for a snack in the small hours and found him. She was home for summer break from her first year at Michigan and now seemed completely nocturnal. Jesus, Dad, she’d said, go to bed. Wi
ll had been dreaming of his own father, who had died two years ago. In the dream, Will had been in the hospital, trying to resuscitate the old man, screaming for doctors, all of whom seemed to have vanished. In fact the entire hospital was deserted. He’d woken, at Deborah’s shaking, in a fragile emotional state. He’d been so confused he’d thought for a moment Deborah hadn’t left home for college last year, that that whole thing had been a dream, too. He was overcome with love for his daughter, and put his arms around her. What a good girl you are, he’d said. Her leaving had hit him and Marion hard, not just her absence, but its testimony to their no longer being young, to life thinning out a little, to the gradual subtraction of precious things. When Will had woken and found his daughter near him, it had felt like a gift from God. Deborah had said: Holy moly, are you drunk? But she’d hugged him back anyway, laughing, and the sound of her laughter and the feel of her in his arms had all but broken his heart.
Now he lay on his bed wondering at the passage of his time. He was forty-four years old. How the hell had that happened? It seemed only yesterday they were driving home from the hospital with Deborah newborn, Marion looking both exhausted and strangely renewed. The pregnancy hadn’t, strictly speaking, been planned, but as soon as Marion had told him he’d known he was ready to be a father. Ready only in the sense that it was a deep confirmation of an instinct that had, up until that moment, been vague: he was a family man. There was the Job, of course. There was the Work. But the true center of his being demanded the warmth of flesh and blood, the intimacy of home. Love.
He knew where these thoughts were coming from. The case. Valerie and Nick. Ever since it had become apparent that the victims were connected to Valerie, Will had been filled with a ferocious sense of the madness waiting for him if anything happened to his family. He’d gone through contortions, bribery, bullying, cajoling, to get uniform cover at his home when he was on duty. Thank God Deborah was home for the holidays. What would he have done if this was during term time? Roped in the Detroit PD? Pulled her out of school?