Why might your prints have appeared here, in the middle of the field, right after Troy’s death? Bruno asked in his slow, dry voice.
Jimmy snuffled again, his face empty. He turned from Sarian to Bruno, then finally to me, and said, I don’t know. I mean, I live here, don’t I? I walk around.
Bruno nodded and said, Yes, you do. That’s true.
I said, There’s one other thing we’d like you to look at.
What?
I walked around the taped-off boot prints, I felt bold and angry. It was starting to snow. The police photographer had taken a whole roll of shots and they were bringing out a protective covering, but we would still lose the tracks pretty soon. I walked behind the tracks to the small grove of trees until I was standing in the shadow of the wild old oak.
Bruno said, Perhaps you never noticed that Troy liked to play in this tree.
Actually, I did know that, Jimmy said mournfully. I saw him out here all the time.
Then we hope you can explain what this means, Bruno said and nodded at me. I reached for something in the branches just a few feet over my head. As I did this, someone took my photograph, the flash blinding me for a moment. The flash subsided and I watched Jimmy’s eyes adjust as he looked up, squinting.
I carefully lifted the thing from the tree (Bruno, Sarian, and I had agreed on this bit of stagecraft beforehand). As I held it out, Jimmy turned pale. What is that? he asked.
It’s a bird’s nest, Jimmy, Bruno said. Isn’t it interesting how birds will reuse an old nest? See, this one’s a little different because they tufted it with feathers. Birds will do that, they literally feather their nests to make them warmer. Bruno walked to the big hollow tree trunk. And do you know what sort of feathers these are?
No, sir.
Well, they’re down, Jimmy. They’re nice goose feathers, the sort that might come from a pillow.
OH . . . JIMMY’S LEGS WOBBLED. His mouth fell open. Bruno asked, Do you want to tell us where the feathers in this nest came from?
Jimmy closed his eyes and tears ran down into his mouth.
Bruno’s voice went even lower: They’re from your pillow, Jimmy.
Jimmy fell to his knees in the snow.
I think you didn’t mean to do it, Bruno said. But we found feather traces from your pillow in Troy’s lungs. At first we didn’t know where they came from, since it appeared that you slept on a foam pillow. When we saw this—he pointed to the nest again—we found your other pillow.
Jimmy had covered the knothole with bark and leaves. It had been well camouflaged—until the winter birds found it, created an opening, and started plucking away pillow feathers for their nest. That’s when I discovered the opening in the trunk.
A detective extracted the pillow with a pair of tongs. One corner of the pillow ticking was torn; a few strands of down poked out. Now it was sealed in an evidence bag, as were hairs collected from the pillow for DNA analysis.
Jimmy covered his face with his hands, his body rigid. He confessed to the murder, holding his face in his hands, hunched over those tracks: I never meant to go that far—never, never—I just wanted the numbers. It was night and they were all sleeping, but when I woke him up, he started crying right away, and—and— He knew what was coming better than I did! I just couldn’t get him to be quiet—that was the whole problem. He never listened to me, that boy—if he just would’ve been quiet, everything would’ve been fine!
He was arrested and Mirandized by that point, but there was one more thing. Bruno kept us all waiting in the cold field as Anita walked slowly toward us across the yard. Jimmy kept talking as he watched his wife approach:
It was like the boy knew what was going to happen. But I didn’t know! It was like—like— Jimmy held his hands out, curved, as if grasping something. I came to him and I shook him, I was talking really nice—I swear it! Just saying, C’mon, Troy, I got one little question. Only he was already crying—I think he was awake before I even touched him. Jimmy looked dazed, his face vague and smooth. Anita had stopped about seven feet away, staring, arms limp.
Jimmy said, The way he was acting—he was really really calm, but he was crying at the same time—you know how he does that, sweetheart? he asked his wife, as if Troy were just inside the house watching TV. Jimmy shook his head then, lapsed back into his own puzzling memories. There was always something about Troy that way, I swear! Like he always knew something was coming for him, but he never told us what. That’s why he always looked at me that way, honey. That’s how he looked that night—crying in that way—and I—and I— His voice cracked, broke into pieces, and it took a long time for him to collect himself enough to tell the rest of it.
Jimmy had smothered Troy with a pillow—“by accident” he’d said. He was just trying to “quiet him down.” But Troy didn’t really struggle at all, after the pillow went over his face, he went still as cat, Jimmy said. Almost like he wanted to help me. It was over so fast. No time at all.
When Jimmy realized Troy wasn’t breathing he ran out the back door in a panic, clutching the pillow. He ran and ran, terrified by what he’d just done. He ran in the cold night, crunching through the ice crust filming the snow, until he was out of breath. He finally paused beside a big oak, gasping, his mind stunned and empty. And only then did he spot the open knothole in the trunk—big enough to squeeze a pillow into. Then he notice the filaments of snow—thickening, covering his tracks right before his own eyes. He’d be safe, he thought. It was an accident: no one needed to know the truth. The way Troy had acted, it was almost as though he knew all along he was meant to die that way. Almost like it was all just fine with him. It was a sign from Jesus, Jimmy thought. Jesus was telling him that it was going to be all right. He had sent the snow for that reason.
Anita stared at him, eyes like embers. A tremor wicking through her little finger.
The day after Jimmy confessed, I returned to the house to gather some of my dusting powders and brushes. A neighbor came by and glared at me suspiciously. It was them religious fanatics did it, the neighbor said. Them religious kooks. The woman pulled her old woolen coat more tightly and began to trudge away. Then she stopped and said, Nothing was ever normal at that house—that little boy upset things in nature. All over the neighborhood.
I stared at her. He upset things? Like what?
She gestured to the trees. Like them, the birds. Everyone knows birds don’t build nests in the winter.
OVER THE NEXT FEW WEEKS, Jimmy was arraigned on involuntary manslaughter, then released on bail, at which point he stole a car and disappeared without a trace. I spoke to Anita Haverstraw once more when I saw her coming out of the police station, a month after Jimmy’s disappearance. She shook her head and said, There’s no justice. Then she said, I don’t blame him. Jimmy was too stupid to be evil.
Well, it wasn’t your fault, I said.
Oh, but it was. She tipped her gaze as if she were consulting with the treetops. I should have watched out for Troy better. I was too busy with everything else, all the running around, when I should’ve been watching.
You were doing your best, I said awkwardly. I had a sense that I knew what she meant: I’d felt haunted by something similar.
Do you have children? she asked me.
No.
No, she said, and she looked away from me. That’s why, she said.
What did she mean by that? I was afraid to ask. I already felt the accusation and the self-blame settling inside of me. I’d done the best I could for Troy, but it wasn’t enough to save him, or to achieve any sense of justice. It seemed at that moment that I’d have to go through the rest of my life knowing that even my best was far too little.
CHAPTER 8
I CUT ACROSS THE PARKING LOT ON MY WAY INTO WORK (HAVING slept so poorly the night before, it seems that I’ve barely been home at all. All I could do was
drift in and out of sleep, hearing Frank’s warning from the night before: None of us wants to go through that again). So it’s not until I’m halfway across the lot that I notice Keller Duseky standing by the entryway to the Lab. His shoulders are hunched against the cold and steam rises from his breath. He turns in my direction, his gaze skimming over my head.
As I approach, his face shifts, eyes refocusing in a precise way. Alyce said he’d been promoted practically right out of the academy, and she predicted he’d retire on a half-pay pension, age forty. “You watch,” she said. “He’ll go work as a consultant for one of those cop shows in Hollywood.” She crossed her arms over her narrow chest and added, “He never leaves that computer of his. He wears those nice dress shirts—I mean, even for a detective.” She shook her head. “I don’t know about that one.”
But when Keller originally transferred to Syracuse from Utica almost four years ago, Charlie and the other cops spoke of him with grudging admiration (detectives are always slightly suspect). Charlie had heard Keller had sustained some “significant injuries” while out on a call. He dropped his voice reverentially—almost enviously—to indicate he was talking about gunshots and no body armor. Now Keller was able to pick and choose what assignments he went out on, and word was, he never went to crime scenes anymore. Mostly he did computer research—identity theft, insurance fraud, white-collar crime.
Keller didn’t fraternize much with the rest of the department. He was perfectly friendly but remote in a deskbound way: he didn’t join the Forensics Hockey League or campaign for any of the Benevolent Association drives. I’d run into him a handful of times at police functions. Then, at some point earlier last year, several months after it became common knowledge that Charlie and I had split up, he started watching me—he was careful and professionally covert about it—frequently materializing in, or just exiting, the corners of the rooms I entered. But I’m even more expert at picking up on such attentions.
FOR SOME REASON, last summer, I let Alyce cajole me into attending the firemen’s ball at the Hotel Syracuse—an activity to be filed, apparently, under the heading of “getting out there.” It’s one of the big social fund-raisers for County Medical Services, an elaborate production featuring alcohol and a six-piece jazz ensemble. Every year Frank sends memos around the Lab, coaxing us to spend the forty bucks on tickets, though no one in my section ever does. At any rate, Charlie bought tickets, invited me, and Alyce said this meant he wanted to get back together—wasn’t that what I wanted?
The ballroom was packed with guests and waiters carrying trays. I was wearing heels and a satin cocktail dress that I’d borrowed from Alyce, tight under the arms, across the hips, and much too short. I’d had to take the bus to the hotel because the shoes were impossible to walk in. I wobbled in place, jostled by people, scanning the crowd for Charlie, who’d arranged to meet me there (I suspected he had another, earlier date to attend to). It seemed as if something was wrong with me—I put it down to my nightmarish outfit. Charlie wasn’t there, but I kept looking anyway.
I watched the people moving around me. I studied faces, nuances—a lonely smile, a snub. The patrol officers were ganged up around the bar, knocking back shots—all of them loud and unruly, heckling a gang of drunken, crimson-faced firemen at a nearby table. Suddenly a mirrored ball suspended from the ceiling began to rotate, dotting the room with flakes of light.
It was insanely crowded and I was lost in the press of people. A few detectives and their wives braved the dance floor and the patrolmen and firemen started heckling the detectives in unison. At one point someone fell against me; I tripped, nearly tumbling off the shoes onto my knees, but someone grabbed my arm and said, “Whoa, there.” I turned and caught a glimpse of Keller. A brief, flickering smile. Then someone broke between us; he released me and shrank into the crowd.
I decided to leave the party not long after that. I’d lost interest in waiting for Charlie. That evening I began to sense, in fact, that I’d actually lost interest in waiting for him months ago. This thought made me cheerful, and I didn’t feel the slightest compunction about strolling out of that ballroom before I’d had a drink or danced, or done any of the other things that Alyce had coached me to do. When it came to parties, Charlie told me I was a wet blanket, and it was a pure delight to realize I really didn’t give a damn anymore what he thought.
I got as far as the ballroom door, facing the corridor into the hotel lobby, when I realized that Keller was standing out front, gazing through the windows at the haze of streetlights in the summer heat. I waited just inside the hotel corridor, watching him, puzzling over how one went about starting a conversation. I stood there, trembling in the air-conditioning, imagining what it would be like to just go ahead and pursue someone so deliciously unknown. I had never tried to do anything like it before; I’d never imagined I was entitled to do something that audacious.
He shifted a little, almost enough to notice me, but then turned back, paused, and strolled through the big lobby doors, drifting out of the room like a stream of smoke. The tip of a thought nudged into my mind: He wants you to follow him. It seemed ridiculous, but I reached down anyway to slide off my shoes. And at that moment I heard the sound of Charlie’s voice. I craned around and spotted him near the ballroom entrance, laughing among a group of Syracuse’s finest, slapping a crony on the back. Dutifully, I straightened up, my shoes in place, and turned to rejoin the party. For a moment, I paused, just long enough to watch Keller walk away.
NOW, AS I WALK toward Keller, his smile seems held in, private as a confession. He tucks his chin, as if we share a joke.
“Um, Lena?” he says. And then, crystallized in the cold air, his scent comes to me—the cuplike plants that grow at the edge of the rain forest, their transparent perfume. I’d never noticed his cologne before and I don’t mind stopping near him and inhaling it. Up close, I notice that his lower lip is full and curved, his eyes nearly violet, watering with the cold. Charlie has dark eyes too, but a different way of looking—not so long or patient, not this slow carving into my own thoughts. He says, “Uh, Sarian wants you out at the Douglas Road house. Since I’ve got a light day today, I thought, well . . .” He shrugs. “I can run you over there if you want. . . .”
The red crib house. The Cogans.
I turn sideways to him, the wind pressing my back. I haven’t been to a crime scene in years. “I still can’t believe they’ve reopened this case,” I say.
He holds his coat closed against the wind. “I know. But there you go. We’re treating it as a homicide. They’re going through the house top to bottom, but there’s trouble getting good prints—they’re in layers—on top of each other.” His voice sounds hoarse. A pebbly anxiety. “I stopped in up at the office,” he adds, as if to cut off my objection. “Grabbed an investigator’s kit—it’s out in my trunk.”
I look at him, my smile growing imperceptibly. “That’s great,” I say, barely hesitating. “Sure, I’ll go with you.”
ON THE DRIVE over in his Camaro, Keller Duseky keeps adjusting his rearview mirror, touching the controls on his dashboard. I’m not quite comfortable myself: my skin feels too thin, as if it’s been polished. I’m nervous sitting right beside him and glad that he isn’t saying much. I’ve been single for two years now, working in a lab full of women, and I’m no longer so used to being alone with men. He turns up his car heater so it roars over us. I remove my coat—he reaches over and helps me, then takes back his hand. He’s distracted and anxious—the car surging after red lights—rushing too quickly up to stop signs, braking too often. So I shift on one hip, try for a reassuring, wise-guy expression, and say, “Charlie thinks you follow me around.” Immediately I regret this declaration.
Car surge. “Char—? Oh! He does?” The sun is burning away some of the milky air and when he looks right at me, I can see a blue vein under the skin of his forehead. “I wasn’t aware that Officer Dawson likes to talk abo
ut me.”
“No—no, I mean, he doesn’t like to,” I say quickly. I stop myself. “No, I meant—”
“Why does he say that I’m following you?” he asks, but then looks away, as if he doesn’t expect an answer.
I start rummaging through my satchel for no clear reason. I pull out my keys, stare at them a moment, drop them back in. I push down the electric control on my window—the glass descends—he doesn’t keep it locked like Charlie does. It goes down too far and I get hit with icy wind. I raise it, lower it. Finally I get it open to a cool ribbon of air.
“Are you warm?” His voice is easier. Is he laughing? He nudges his heater lower, his eyes flicker to me, then back to the road. He twists his hands around on the wheel.
I ask to borrow his cell phone and he fishes it two-fingered from his coat pocket. “You’re not calling for backup, are you?” Yes, he’s laughing.
I duck, press my fingers against the other ear to try and block the noise as we bump over a series of train tracks. “Peggy—it’s Lena—can I talk to Frank?”
“Lena?” Peggy says in her aggrieved, rusting voice. “You’re really late—you’re in a lot of trouble. You can’t just not come in.”
“Can you please put Frank on?”
“Just so you know. A lot of trouble.”
“Okay, that’s fine. Now I know.”
She punches the line over and Frank answers. “Lena, what’s up? Where are you?”
“Detective Duseky is taking me over to the Cogan house. He says that Sarian wanted me there.”
“Yeah, he does.” There’s a long pause. “Keller Duseky?”
“Yes.”
“He’s driving you?” Frank sounds dubious.
“Is this not right? Should I come back?” In my peripheral vision I see Keller glance in my direction.
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