“I don’t know if he was innocent. I don’t know if he was guilty. Neither do you.”
Dan dabbed at his lips with a napkin and stood up, smoothing his suit. He took the pot of coffee and poured himself a cup. “Well, it was brilliant putting Sally at Rachel’s house. What tipped you off?”
“It’s obvious you’ve never raised teenagers,” Gale said, laughing. “She watches another girl come on to her boyfriend, and she just goes home to bed? Not a chance. That was a catfight in the making.”
“And the Kerry McGrath thing?”
“I went looking for connections once I knew Sally had gone to see Rachel that night. When Kevin admitted Kerry had asked him out, it was almost too good to be true.”
Dan shrugged. “Sally’s father went back and checked his calendar. The whole family was in the Cities that weekend for a play. Les Miz. We confirmed the purchase.”
“That’s the kind of evidence a father can produce when his daughter’s in trouble,” Gale said.
“She didn’t do it, Archie.”
“Have it your way. But there’s more to this story than came out in court.”
The room rattled as a thunderclap shook the club. Gale studied the dark sky thoughtfully.
“With Graeme dead, we may never know,” Dan said.
Gale stroked his goatee. “Oh, I wonder. Perhaps Rachel will come back and tell us the secrets herself. Like a ghost.”
Stride listened to the violent rapping of the downpour on the windows and saw a glow behind his eyelids with each stroke of lightning. The oak timbers of the porch groaned under the gusts of wind. He could smell the sweet fresh air, soured by a hint of mildew in the wood.
When the thunder awakened him at four in the morning, he had taken his blankets to the porch, clicked on the space heater, and drifted in and out of a light sleep as the storm rolled overhead in waves from the west. In his bedroom, his alarm had gone off two hours ago. He didn’t care. The sky outside was dark enough that it still looked like night.
The investigation and trial lingered in his mind. Stride felt no closure. He refused to believe that Stoner was innocent. That hadn’t changed. But maybe he was lying to himself, trying to convince his brain that he hadn’t been wrong from the beginning. He would swat his doubts away, but a few minutes later they’d be back, like mosquitoes, buzzing at his ear. Each time louder than before.
He thought about the postcard. It had been waiting in his mailbox when he came home last night. He kept looking at it every few minutes. And hearing the mosquitoes.
The floor groaned under the weight of footsteps. Stride’s eyes snapped open. He craned his neck and saw Maggie standing in the doorway of the porch. Her black hair was soaked. Water dripped from her face and sleeves. She looked tiny and vulnerable.
“I see you’re selling your house,” she said.
The sign had gone up a few days ago. He closed his eyes again and shook his head, angry at himself. “I was going to tell you. Really, Mags.”
“You’re getting married, aren’t you? You and the teacher?”
Stride nodded.
It had happened a week ago over dinner. He wasn’t even sure, looking back on it, who had asked whom. They had started out sober and depressed and ended up, several hours later, drunk and engaged. Andrea clung to him, not wanting to let go. It was a good feeling.
“I’m sorry, Mags,” he said.
She took one hand out of her pocket and pointed her index finger at him like a gun. “Are you out of your mind, boss? You’re making a terrible mistake.”
“I know you’re upset,” he said.
“Damn right I’m upset! I’m watching a friend fuck up his life. I told you not to get too serious, didn’t I? Both of you rebounding from disasters. Cindy always told me you were the densest person on the planet emotionally, and I guess she was right.”
“Leave Cindy out of this,” Stride snapped.
“What? Like she’s not in this up to your eyeballs? I’m going to say it again, boss. You’re making a mistake. Don’t do it.”
Stride shook his head. “You and I, that would have been impossible. It would never have worked. You told me that yourself.”
“You think this is about me?” Maggie asked. She stared at the ceiling, as if pleading for divine guidance. “Unbelievable.”
There was an awkward silence between them. The only sounds were the roar of the storm outside and the dripping of Maggie’s coat on the floor of the porch.
“Is it so wrong for two people who need each other to get together?” Stride asked.
“Yes,” Maggie said. “That’s wrong. It should be two people who love each other.”
“Oh, come on, you’re just playing word games with me.”
“No, I’m not. You’re in love, or you’re not. You belong together forever, or you have no business getting married.”
“I thought maybe you’d be happy for me,” Stride said.
“You want me to smile and pat you on the back and tell you how great it is?” Maggie’s voice grew shrill with anger. “Fuck you. I’m not going to do that. I can’t believe you’d ask.”
Stride didn’t say anything. He listened to her harsh breathing.
Maggie shook her head and sighed, gathering up her emotions like marbles spilled on the floor. “Look, if this is what you have to do, then you go and do it. But I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t say my piece.”
He nodded. “Okay, Mags. You’ve said it.”
They stared at each other for a long while, which was like saying good-bye without words. Not good-bye forever, just to their relationship as it was.
“I came to tell you, it wasn’t Rachel’s body,” Maggie said, slipping back into her cop voice, all business again. “We got the DNA tests back. It was Kerry.”
Stride cursed under his breath. He thought about that sweet, innocent girl—about losing her, about losing Cindy. He was angry all over again. Angry that a killer had gotten away with murder.
And then he thought, It wasn’t Rachel. He heard the mosquitoes at his ear again. Buzzing.
“I got something in the mail last night,” Stride said quietly.
He inclined his head toward the picture postcard lying on the coffee table. Maggie glanced down at the photograph on the card, which showed a strangely proportioned, long-eared gray animal in the desert.
“What the hell is that?”
“A jackalope,” Stride said. “Part jackrabbit, part antelope.”
Maggie screwed up her face. “Huh?”
“It’s a joke,” Stride said. “A myth. It doesn’t exist. People send postcards of jackalopes to see how gullible you are.”
Maggie reached down to pick up the card.
“Edges only, please,” Stride told her.
Maggie stopped, her hand frozen in the air, and gave Stride a curious look, as if she had sensed something horrible. Then she carefully picked up the postcard by the edges and turned it over. She read the message, which was scrawled in red ink, its letters dripping into streaks where rain had spattered the postcard:
He deserved to die.
“Son of a bitch,” Maggie blurted out. She stared at Stride and shook her head fiercely. “This can’t be from her. This can’t be from Rachel. The girl is dead.”
“I don’t know, Mags. Just how gullible are we?”
Maggie eyed the postmark. “Las Vegas.”
Stride nodded. “The city of lost souls,” he said.
PART FOUR
THREE YEARS LATER
33
Jerky Bob lived in a trailer moored off a minor road a few miles south of Las Vegas. He had arrived, as so many vagabonds in the Las Vegas valley do, out of nowhere. About a year ago, the trailer appeared, dragged perilously by a truck that waited barely long enough to unhitch it before disappearing back into the city. A day after the trailer took up permanent residence off the dusty road, a hand-scrawled sign on a wooden stake appeared near the California highway. It read:
Jerky
Bob
And then below it:
New Age Gifts
Psychic Poetry
Beef Jerky
Bob curtained off one end of the trailer, where the rear entrance was, put up a rickety table and cash box, and opened for business. He hung dozens of stained glass wind chimes, stuck pyramid magnets to a metal plate nailed to the wall, filled shelves with incense burners and sandalwood candles, and handwrote epic poetry that he copied on an ancient duplicating machine and tied up in scrolls with purple ribbons.
His repeat customers didn’t come back for the wind chimes or the poetry, though. They came for the dried meats: beef jerky, chicken jerky, and turkey jerky, sold in flavors like teriyaki and Cajun from shoe boxes inside an old refrigerator. Most of the people who stopped were truckers. It only took a couple of them, stopping out of curiosity, to start a buzz that made its way through the trucker network of the Southwest. Word got passed. Going to Vegas? Stop at Jerky Bob. They came twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, which were his regular hours. If they came while he was sleeping, they simply woke him up, and he sold them jerky. He made enough money each month that, if it had stayed in his pocket, he could have moved back to the city and opened a real shop, complying with health codes and paying taxes instead of flying under the government radar.
But money didn’t last long with Bob. Half of it ended up down the gullet of slot machines. Half ended up in empty gin bottles, tossed from the back of his trailer into the desert, where they glistened like a field of diamonds.
He had committed suicide a year ago, but his body hadn’t figured it out yet.
The truckers talked about it. Bob looked normal enough, a year ago, for a man marooned in the desert. From that point, month by month, he got older. He never shaved, other than cutting tangles out of his long, graying beard. His hair dangled in messy strands below his shoulders. His skin was shriveled and gray, and his eyes receded into his skull. He ate little but jerky himself, getting thinner and thinner until he was barely a hundred and twenty pounds. He never washed his clothes, which usually consisted of jeans and a Las Vegas T-shirt hanging on his skinny frame. The stench got so bad that some of his trucker customers refused to come inside, and they told him that even the jerky was beginning to smell. Bob just opened a window, letting dry, dusty air blow through the trailer.
He couldn’t go into the casinos anymore. They turned him away at the door. Instead, he spent time every few days at a bar a half mile up the highway from his trailer, where he played video poker until the bartender got sick of the smell. Then he’d buy another bottle of gin and go home, drink, and pass out. In the morning, or whenever a trucker pounded loudly enough to wake him up, he would throw the bottle out back.
Last night had been a two-bottle night. Or maybe it had been two nights ago, or even three. He didn’t know.
He didn’t remember much. On the television it said Wednesday, but he couldn’t remember when he had started his binge. His last visitor had arrived in the afternoon, and that night, whichever night it was, he had begun pouring glass after glass of gin. And now it was Wednesday.
Bob sighed. He had to piss.
He stood up, propping himself against the wall for balance. The trailer spun in his head for a few seconds before righting itself. He stepped down off the mattress onto the floor and watched a few bugs skitter away from him. The two gin bottles lay empty a few feet away. He crouched, picking them up and staring inside. There was a small puddle of gin in each one, clinging to the glass, enough to wet his tongue when he turned the bottles upside down over his mouth. His body was sufficiently poisoned that the taste caused his stomach to heave, and he had to swallow hard to avoid retching.
Bob held the two bottles by their necks. He looked around for his sandals, saw them under a chair, and stuck his feet into them. The sandals flapped as he padded to the center door of the trailer. The latch had long since broken. With his knee, he nudged the door open, and daylight roared in. Still naked, Bob shuffled down the rusty steps into the desert behind his trailer.
The sun was ferocious, like a yellow fire burning out of control above the hills. His eyes squinted, barely able to open, and his skin tightened, starting to cook. As he sucked in each labored breath, a furnace of air seared his lungs.
His penis twitched, ready to release. He began pissing a virtually clear stream of urine onto the ground. The liquid raised a cloud of dust, then gathered into a small pool in an indentation in the earth. He kept pissing into the center, causing droplets to splatter onto his toes. He watched the flow intently, as if it were his life’s blood leaking out of him. The urine was frothy and reeked of gin. In a few seconds, the pool would be gone, baked away by the sun.
The stream dissipated to a trickle.
Underhanded, he heaved one of the gin bottles into the air, watching it glint in the sun in a shallow arc before crashing back to earth. He heard the glass shatter and saw shards burst in every direction. Carefully, he repeated the ritual with the second bottle, enjoying the noise as it whooshed in the air and then smashed on the ground.
There were dozens of bottles in pieces out there. It was his private little minefield. Most of the shards quickly gathered dust, but the recent ones shined, reflecting the sunlight like laser beams.
He squinted, staring at the desert. He had only been outside a few minutes, but it was already time to go inside, where there was no relief from the heat but where at least his body didn’t shrivel from the direct sun. His wizened skin had burned so often that he had small sores that oozed and never healed. He could feel them now, stinging as the sun burned them.
Even so, Bob lingered.
He didn’t know what it was, but something caught his eye. He saw the tough little windswept creosote bushes and the yuccas that looked like dwarf palm trees. They were right where they should be. And the hills in the distance were the same. And the broken bottles glinted like they always did. Like diamonds.
Except—no, that wasn’t true.
Something was out of place. He saw the sun shining, glinting, but not in the minefield where he always tossed the bottles. The reflections catching his eye were farther away, and off to the side, nowhere near any of the other shards he could see. But they shimmered in the hot sun, little diamonds winking at him from under one of the creosote bushes.
What were they?
Bob frowned. He didn’t know why, but he found himself shuffling across the desert, wanting to know what it was he saw. The closer he got, the faster he walked, until he was almost running. He was out of shape and out of breath, but he jogged naked across the last twenty yards until he was right over the spot where the diamonds lay hidden. Then he stopped and stared down at his feet.
The glinting diamonds were really the shine of glitter sprinkled on skin, sparkling on a woman’s body in the dirt.
It lay, face up, partially obscured by the overhanging bush. The body was as naked as he was, but utterly lifeless and ageless, a shrunken corpse whose cooked skin had collapsed in on itself, whose eyes were wide open but shrunk to tiny marbles, whose blonde hair was grayed with dust, whose mouth was open in a silent scream as desert beetles led a parade to eat her flesh from inside. It was almost unrecognizable as anything that had once been human and beautiful.
Bob sank to his knees.
She was staring at him. And her lips, which had no color at all, were curled into a smile. He tentatively reached a hand out to touch her skin, as if he was afraid she would suddenly awaken and grab him. But she didn’t move. Her skin felt like sandpaper under his touch.
Then he saw her face twitch. It was like a nightmare. She couldn’t be alive!
Bob stared in horror as a fat roach squeezed its way out of the corpse’s nose and wiggled its antennae at him. He stumbled backward, then ran. He didn’t head back to his trailer, just turned and sprinted clumsily for the road. His sandals fell away. The rocky floor of the desert scratched and cut his feet until he left blood trails with each footfall. He ran anyway, not
slowing down or looking behind him, as if the girl’s ghost were on his heels.
34
Serena Dial of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department pushed her sunglasses to the tip of her nose and stared down at the body.
“Nice.”
She said it to no one in particular. In fact, the scene wasn’t nice at all. She hated desert corpses. They all looked about a hundred years old, and sometimes, if you got there after the birds and animals did, they were chewed up, with missing eyeballs, flesh eaten away, the kind of thing that flashed back in a nightmare. She mostly saw dead people with knives in their backs or gunshot wounds, which, when you got past the blood, were not really so hard to stomach. At least the body still looked like a body. Not like this.
Definitely a woman. That was easy enough to determine. The sun did terrible things to people who had the bad fortune to lie deceased in a desert, but it wasn’t known to make cocks disappear. Breasts, on the other hand, flattened out into nothing. Except, she realized, this corpse still had a pretty good set. That was interesting. The body also seemed to glint in the sun, twinkling at her. That was interesting, too.
Serena got on her hands and knees, getting close to the body, staring at it from an inch or two away without touching it. She started at the girl’s feet, moved up her legs, spent more time than she wanted to at her crotch, then her stomach, her breasts, and finally her face and lips, which looked ready to give her a macabre kiss.
Serena stood up, slid a digital tape recorder from her pocket, and dictated a few notes.
The wind tousled her hair, which was lush and black, shoulder length. She was as statuesque as a showgirl, which was what most strangers in Las Vegas mistook her for when they met her. She had taken to wearing her shield on the outside, which tended to cut down on the unwelcome advances from drunk convention rats. Serena was nearly six feet tall, lithe and well proportioned. She wore a sleeveless white tank top, tucked into snug, faded jeans. She was muscled and strong, from an intense workout routine. Her skin was tanned golden brown from days spent mostly in the sun.
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