Kupier shook his head no.
Eric shrugged, said he didn’t go anymore because Group was for people who needed support—people who needed to deal with having had cancer. It wasn’t for people who were having it again.
“What were you doing in the park?” Kupier asked.
“It’s a public place.”
Kupier leaned back. “Do you need anything, then?” he asked.
Eric smiled, raised his eyebrows. “A pancreas,” he said, “yeah. You?”
“I told you,” Kupier said. “They got it the first time.”
Eric shrugged whatever.
“I was meeting somebody,” he said.
Kupier didn’t bite on this like he knew he was supposed to. Instead he laid a twenty down for their two coffees, stood into the fluorescent light. He called for the waitress to give Eric the change. Eric shrugged.
“Still using?” Kupier asked.
“Asking as a cop?” Eric asked.
Kupier just stared down at him.
“Tell me why I shouldn’t,” Eric said.
Kupier went home to his living room and sat, going through his own file this time. He didn’t throw up anymore, but he wasn’t moving either, just sitting there. When his beeper shook he thumbed it off, and when his alarm clock rang he walked upstairs, killed it too, then called Natty at the front desk, told her he wouldn’t be in today. He had thirty-two hours of the joke left. He saw the oncologist’s golf ball receding into the sky. He ate tomato soup so that when it came back up, if there was blood in it, he wouldn’t have to know.
The next time he opened his front door it was Stevenson on the stoop.
“Two days, hoss,” Stevenson said.
“It’s Cooper,” Kupier said. “Don’t you read the papers?”
Stevenson wormed his way in. He had two coffees in the crook of his arm, both sloshing over the rim, and a bagful of grease that was supposed to be breakfast.
“Captain said to hand-deliver this,” he said.
It was Kupier’s FINGER, R. RING: J DOE file.
“You went in my office?” Kupier said, taking it the manila folder.
“Not me,” Stevenson said around his cup. “But look.”
Kupier did: there was a third lab report now.
“Our first soft tissue,” Stevenson said, widening his eyes with how important this was.
Kupier scanned for a location, but it looked like a misprint. “The park?” he said.
“Nearly the same-ass exact spot,” Stevenson said. He’d been saving it. “And here—” He flipped the page back to a black and white photograph of a cast of a footprint.
“Who found this?” Kupier asked.
Stevenson shrugged, looked away, his off-hand pointing at himself from the back of the couch.
It was Kupier’s footprint, Kupier’s blood. Farther out, past the edge of the crime scene, would be another footprint. Eric’s, if Eric had even been real.
“Anything else?” he asked.
“Just that he’s sick or something,” Stevenson said. “His blood-tox came back but loaded, man. I mean, it’s like I’m working Narc again all over. Oh, oh, and this guy’s not O-positive anymore, either, going by the puke. Know what I think?”
Kupier looked at the food soaking into his coffee table.
Stevenson rolled on: “—that this nutjob’s like feeding the vics to each other, man. See?”
Kupier pushed his lower lip out with his tongue.
“Got a car here?” he asked.
Stevenson nodded.
Kupier went upstairs and got dressed. The only thing different from every other day was his shoes.
“You okay?” Stevenson asked, slumped in the driver’s seat.
Kupier was looking away from whatever pill Stevenson thought he was getting away with palming into his mouth. It was yellow. In his office, the second lab report was facedown right where he’d left it. Kupier read it again, then slid it under the veneer surface of his desk, pushed the glue down around it with his elbows and held his head with his hands. The only other choice was telling Stevenson it had been him in the park, that he was sick again. But then he’d be pulled off the case, have to take another extended sick leave.
Now he was the only one who knew, though. Meaning he was the one responsible for cleaning up—stopping it all.
“What now?” Stevenson asked from the door.
Kupier stared at him for long seconds, deciding. It was obvious, though. There was only one thing. “It’s a cycle,” he said. “We stake out the rest of the drops, wait for him.”
The next morning it hit the papers, the bloody sputum in the park.
Mrs. Lambert was waiting on line one for him.
“Is it him?” she asked.
Kupier closed his eyes.
“Yes,” he said, “yes,”
The next lab report identified the particulate soft tissue as the malignant bronchial matter of a lifetime smoker. Which gave them a range of ages, from forty to maybe sixty, just because sixty was the oldest active pattern killer to date. And the spectrum of pharmaceuticals in the bloody sputum from the park broke down in the lab’s pie tin as medicines for medicine—chemotherapy.
“He’s dying,” Stevenson said, another joke.
Kupier got in his car and drove the streets for bones, until Ellen showed up one night bruised around the face, silent, Kupier’s hand dropping to the gun he didn’t wear to bed.
“Ellen,” he said.
She laid her head against his chest and moved in. Moved out again a week later.
“Still working on that Maneater thing?” she asked when she came back for a dress from her old closet. The kids were standing in the living room waiting for the television to warm up.
“That’s just what the paper calls it,” Kupier said.
Sometime after that—a week, a month, no bones, the stake-outs all dry, abandoned—Kupier saw Eric again, at the bus stop on the east side of the park. The bus came, lowered itself onto its forelegs, then stood up again, left. Eric was still there.
That he was waiting for something illegal was obvious. He had that nervous stance, moving gravel around with his toes.
Kupier eased into the diner half a block down, sat by the plate glass. When it finally happened, the drop, Kupier wished he wasn’t there: it was Stevenson. He walked out into the grass with Eric, away from the streetlight. Kupier left a ten on the table and followed them, arcing wide to come up out of the darkness. They were talking low when he stepped in with them.
“K—Harold . . .” Stevenson said, stuffing both hands into his pockets.
Kupier looked away. To Eric.
“What do you want?” Eric said.
Kupier pursed his lips.
“Harold,” Stevenson was saying. “A little late, aren’t we?”
“Just saw you here,” Kupier said back, still watching Eric.
“Well here I am,” Stevenson said, holding his empty hands up.
There was nothing to do, really, so Kupier rubbed his eyes, left.
The next morning Stevenson was in his office door again. “Eric Waynes,” he was saying.
“I’m not—” Kupier started to say.
“It’s not what you think,” Stevenson was already saying, “not what I know you’re thinking.”
Kupier looked up. “What is it, then?” he said.
Stevenson blew a pink bubble of gum, collapsed it. “He’s a . . . contact. From the old days. We’ve got kind of a system worked out.”
“This isn’t Narcotics,” Kupier said.
“I know it’s not Narc,” Stevenson said. “I tell myself that every day, man. But listen. This guy, this Eric Waynes, he says he was in the park the other night. That he could maybe give us a description of the Maneater.”
Kupier breathed in, made himself exhale.
“In trade?” he led.
Stevenson shrugged, did something with his lips.
“I don’t want to know,” Kupier said then, “do I?”
That night Kupier called Eric. He still had the number from the list they’d made at group, passed around from left to right, the pen tied onto the top of the tablet with kite string.
“What do you want?” Kupier asked.
“Relax, man,” Eric said. “I’m not going to tell him anything.”
Kupier laughed through his nose, hung up.
That night, drinking coffee at the cafeteria, Kupier threw up again, spilling red out onto the table.
The waitress backed away.
This was what the Maneater was in all the papers for.
Kupier made himself breathe, breathe, then rose calmly for a wet dish towel.
The night shift was all gathered around, watching him.
“You don’t have to . . . ” one of them said—clean it up—but Kupier did. He took the towel with him too, after wiping his cup down with it, and the seat, and the napkin holder, and the door. They knew who he was, though. If anybody came around asking.
Kupier quit going to Group again, because he thought they could see it in him, eating him, then sat in the parking lot of the clinic for as long as his nine-month check-up would have lasted.
It had been two more weeks now, and still no bones.
“He’s dead,” Stevenson pronounced. “Choked on a kneecap or something . . . ”
But then he showed up with a sketch. It was in Eric’s anonymous hand. It was Kupier in the park, a silhouette lurching from tree to tree, all in black except for the lungs, which were red C’s, facing each other.
“What was he on when he drew that?” McNeel said.
“All points bulletin,” Stevenson said, covering the smile on his face with the CB he didn’t have.
That night Kupier called his captain at three in the morning again, after the Amyl River had closed, and asked about early retirement. His captain outlined what was involved like he was reading from an index card, like he’d had this all ready for some time now, and Kupier leaned into the phone booth and pretended he could hear the captain’s wife in the bedsheets on the other end, listening to all this with her eyes closed. She was beautiful. She was there.
Next he called Eric, and asked him in another voice if he had it?
“Thought you did,” Eric said, using another voice too.
Kupier drove, drove, parked in front of Penny the dog’s house. Twenty-five years. His gun was on the dash. Penny was a crown of reddish hair jumping for the top of the fence every four seconds.
When the security floodlights over the garage glowed on, he pulled away.
He wrote Rita in his notebook. And Thomas.
FINGER, R. RING: J DOE was the only case he had that was still open. Kupier did the one thing he could: he drove to Ellen’s, knocked on the door.
“Dad,” she said.
“Just wondering if the kids—” he said.
She was clutching her robe at her neck.
“What’s that in your mouth?” she said, quieter.
Kupier pulled his lips over the plaster teeth.
“You alright?” she asked. “It’s late.”
Kupier nodded. It was.
Thomas appeared in the doorway off the living room, dragging an old ski jacket of his mother’s he’d been sleeping in. It scratched across the carpet, one arm trailing. Kupier thought of the black and white photograph of the James woman looking up from behind her washing machine.
“Just wanted to see if they wanted to stay with Grandpa tonight,” Kupier finally got out.
It was too late, though. All the other excuses.
In her complex’s parking lot, Kupier held the wheel with both hands. It was for the best. What he had been going to get them to do was open Penny’s gate for him.
He found Stevenson instead.
Kupier rolled his car alongside, unlocked the passenger door.
“On the job,” Stevenson said, after he’d climbed in. Both hands in his pocket. He smelled like sweat.
“Talked to Eric Waynes?” Kupier asked, pulling away from the curb.
The corners of Stevenson’s eyes crinkled. He shook his head no as if this was the funniest question he’d had all week. “You?” he asked back.
Kupier drove. “That blood in the park,” he said.
Stevenson looked at him, patted the dashboard above the radio for some reason.
“Blood?” he said.
Stevenson’s hand was trembling, yellowed.
Kupier nodded.
Stevenson watched him from his side of the car.
They rolled to a stop behind Penny the dog’s house.
“Should I ask?” Stevenson said.
“Personal,” Kupier said back. He hooked his chin at the gate. “Just open it,” he said.
Stevenson snorted. “That all?”
“I need to be in the car.”
Stevenson shrugged, rolled out into the alley, leading with his shoulders. The dome light didn’t come on because Kupier had already disabled it. He watched Stevenson over the hood—hunching towards the gate, his long, careless steps eating up the gravel and the weeds.
He looked back to Kupier once before he did it, to be sure, and then flipped the handle with the belt of his jacket. To leave no prints, if this was coming to that. The door swung in and a metallic flash of red exploded from the tails of Stevenson’s jacket.
He smiled, held his hands up, and Kupier gunned the car.
Stevenson chased behind for a few steps, filling the rearview, then slapped the trunk bye, stood there trying to breathe.
Kupier kept Penny at the leading edge of his headlights, and, for a moment, couldn’t remember if she’d lived through the surgery or not—couldn’t remember what he was chasing, where she was leading him. He coasted to a stop at the end of the alley.
Minutes later, Stevenson leaned down by his side mirror.
“Let me guess,” he was saying. “Ex-wife got the dog in the divorce, and you—”
Kupier looked over at him. Stevenson. Who always had morning breath in the middle of the afternoon.
He showed Stevenson the drawing of his wife Thomas or Rita had done. It was creased from his wallet.
“I’m sorry,” Stevenson said.
“Where do you want to go?” Kupier said.
Stevenson stood, staring past the hood. “To hell, now,” he said.
Kupier smiled, blinked. “Get in,” he said.
On Tuesday, Kupier started canvassing the houses downstreet from Penny’s. In the direction she’d run without thinking. Police work. It took a week, up one street, down another, his notebook clammy in his palm. He wrote down the numbers of the houses that he didn’t know about—where no one answered the door—and then he came back after five-thirty, got them crossed off the list. Except for eight. Out of seventy-two. It was just him doing it.
He watched the houses at night, then. Off the clock, out of radio contact. Nobody was calling him anymore anyway. Not since the fast draw at the hospital. It was supposed to be a kindness—not opening any more files he wouldn’t be able to close—but it wasn’t. It gave him too much time to think.
At work on a Thursday morning he pulled the reverse directory, attached names to the eight houses in Terranova where no one was ever home. He ran their sheets. Nothing. One had various handicap privileges, so he marked him off. Another was an international something or the other. Kupier had the front desk call his employer, see if he’d been out of the country at any of the right times. He had. So had two more of the people. Which left five. Kupier crossed the woman off, got it down to four, then crossed the two married men off. So now it was two. He alternated nights, watching one then the other, until he knew Terranova’s schedule, which kids would explode from which door, when. It was like being part of it.
But then his beeper interrupted.
It was another drop, an old one. Just a finger.
McNeel took multiple pictures of which wa
y it was pointing, like it had been arranged in the grass after being vomited up.
Kupier left the two men remaining on his list to themselves, visited Penny at Animal Control.
“They know she’s here?” he asked the man in the wheelchair.
The man nodded, disappointed.
“Anything show up lately?” Kupier asked.
“Like what?” the man said, wheeling back in jest, “a skull ?”
After two weeks, Kupier paid the twenty-eight dollars to have Penny spayed, then delivered her to Rita and Thomas.
“I’m sorry,” he said to Ellen.
“No,” she said, watching the kids, the dog. “They need something just like this.”
There was a thin scar on Penny’s belly. It was like a little ridge, like she’d been cut in half, glued back together.
“She’s good with kids,” Kupier said.
He didn’t know what he was doing anymore. He could feel a tiny homunculus of bones in his stomach—himself—waiting to be thrown up. His notebook was full of words he didn’t remember writing down. He had to mark them out each morning.
After Halloween—Rita and Thomas dressed up as a race-car driver and a zombie cowboy—Kupier met his replacement. It was another transplant from Narcotics. Like they were taking over. He looked around Kupier’s office, leaning back on his heels, both hands buried deep in the pockets of his oversize, probably-stylish slacks.
All Kupier’s stuff was in boxes around the desk.
“Maneater,” the transplant said, in appreciation.
Kupier nodded. The skeleton was still on the wall, but tacked over now with other cases, other dead people.
“Merry Christmas,” the transplant said, to himself it seemed—taking in the office—then caught Stevenson flashing by, palmed his shoulder like a bike messenger will a truck, let himself be pulled down the hall.
Kupier had four days left. Early retirement. Rat off a sinking ship, McNeel said in the mornings, smiling. Kupier smiled too. The line in his toilet at home that had been sterile blue for years now—accumulated crystals you could scratch off—was red now. From the tomato soup.
Kupier clenched his fists.
For retirement someone had already left him an aluminum walker. It still had its Evidence tag wired onto it. Alone in his office at night Kupier leaned on it, tried it out, and fell over the front, crashing into the filing cabinets.
The Ones That Got Away Page 15