“Climb up in there, piggy,” Calavera said.
Barnes shook his head no.
Calavera showed him the pickax. “Get in.”
Chunk struggled up and over the wall of the dumpster. He crash-landed on his back. For the first time he reached down to touch his stomach. Barnes’s hands felt Chunk’s slick insides like water weenies in a pool of oil. I’m going to die a virgin. One lousy blow job from Becky Hartley. Barnes felt the phantom pain where Becky Hartley had dragged her teeth along Chunk Philips’s dick. He looked up from Chunk’s dying body to see Calavera above him, standing in the dumpster with the pickax in hand. He said into Chunk’s dimming eyes, “Hey, Watkins, find your next clue. Ten-three, good buddy.” Then he reared the pickax back over his head.
Chunk’s mind returned to that night with Becky. She was a sweet girl, had aimed to please. After he picked her up, she looked at him adoringly and said she was so happy to be out of the house for once. They’d had dinner at a coney island, had seen a movie, and all the while she’d had nothing interesting to say. The mind of a chipmunk. Maybe he’d been too judgmental? After all, who was he?
After the movie they’d parked a few blocks down from her house. Becky reached over and touched his belly. She left her hand there for a moment, and then drew down toward his pants. She struggled with his zipper. Chunk threw back his car seat to give her room to work. She started out by literally blowing on him, not understanding the concept. It felt unexpectedly nice. The poor girl did her best.
The pickax came down. Chunk Philips died to the sound of Jordy’s voice calling down the alley, “Hey, Chunk, where’d you go?”
That’s Raymond to you, sir. Only my friends call me Chunk.
Darkness and silence.
“End of transmission.”
The Vitruvian Man test pattern.
Please Stand By.
Barnes opened his eyes. He sat up to a lightning-rod migraine. Chunk’s memory fog was with him. Barnes stayed still until it began to clear out. His chest felt empty, his face crushed, his body weak from Chunk’s blood loss.
“You all right?”
It was Martinez.
Barnes nodded.
“Ready for Chamberlain?”
“Not yet.”
Barnes lay back and tried to think. The use of Watkins’s name—instead of the generic term, detectives—was thought to be a break in the case back when Watkins was the secondary, the man on the machine. The assumption was that Calavera had returned to the scene of the MacKenzie murders and had possibly spoken with Watkins or Franklin, posing as a witness or just a gawking bystander. But the clue had led them nowhere.
I’m going to die a virgin.
“Write this down,” Barnes said.
“Go ahead,” Martinez said.
“Both Kendra MacKenzie and Raymond Philips were virgins when they died.”
“Got it.”
“Do you have the poems on hand?”
Martinez said, “Yep, which one do you want?”
“Philips.”
Barnes kept his eyes closed. He heard Martinez flipping through the pages of the logbook attached by a chain to the machine. He recalled that Chunk Philips’s poem had been written on the inside wall of the dumpster, had been slicked over with fish grease and garbage.
“Here it is,” Martinez said. She read it aloud.
You delivered seafood
And ate what you wanted,
You drank from the ocean
Like a humpback whale;
But krill was inside you
As the sky was above,
A piano-size coffin
For a piano-size male;
With a spoon in your flipper
For scooping pea-size calaveras.
Barnes knew the poem by heart, had read it a thousand times, could have recited it with her. All the poems were pictured in his phone—the photos he took himself, plus those he’d downloaded from the case files prior to his assignment—but he’d needed it from a new source, needed it read aloud to get a new feel for it. A lead was germinating. It was like a deer tick boring into him and giving him Lyme disease. He was hardly aware of the tick but felt the disease’s effect.
“What’s the list say next to Chamberlain?” Barnes said.
“Robert Morris Chamberlain,” Martinez said. “Son, two months old.”
“Load him.”
The test pattern appeared and faded.
Moe Chamberlain’s body hummed. Crack cocaine coursed through him like electric current. Thoughts of collection agencies and arrest warrants and starvation faded away. Visions appeared before his eyes, sounds caressed his buzzing ears.
“Hey, baby, they’re playing our song.”
It was Donna. She swayed before him in a cartoon dress, which was a far sight better than that ragged T-shirt and jeans she always wore. Those ridiculous high-top sneakers.
She twirled like Beauty.
“I’ll be your Beast,” Moe said. His voice was low and full of reverberation.
“Come here, you,” Donna said. She curled her finger to beckon him.
Moe moved toward her, slick as you please. A confident man’s walk. He was cool. She led him through the abandoned house transformed into a dope crib. Axminster on the floors. That hole is a stainless-steel laundry chute. That smear a stroke of paint on canvas—Rembrandt or something. He wasn’t a squatter. Nah. He wasn’t even a man. He was the man.
Donna gripped his hand and pulled him through the hallways, one after another in the beautiful, cavernous house.
Finally, the bedroom.
That filthy mattress on the floor is a waterbed. That bald bulb on the cracked lamp is a collection of candles. That drooping drywall tape from the ceiling? Silk drapes.
“Girl,” Moe said, “you about to get it.”
She giggled.
Moe lay down on the bed and patted the place where he expected her to lie. It was then he noted his hand was shaking. He brought the hand close to his face. No, it wasn’t his hand that shook, but his eyes. They were rocketing madly in their sockets. The whole room shook. Everything he could see.
Donna evaporated. The painted panels returned to dreary, battered drywall. The floor became a mess of scrapes, holes, and drug kits. Moe’s eyelids flickered. His head fell to the mattress with a thump.
Footsteps in the room.
Donna?
Moe smiled, kept his shivering eyes shut.
She caressed his feet, tied them together with a silk scarf. His smile widened—they’d played this game before. She drew a finger along his leg as she came to his side and took his wrist.
“Hey, now,” Moe said. “Not too tight.”
“Quiet, you.” She tied his wrists behind his back.
Moe ruminated on the feeling of her touch, on memories of the last time Donna felt so kinky. Christ, it’d been forever.
A third scarf connected his bound wrists to his bound ankles. He was trussed up like a Thanksgiving bird.
Roughly, she tilted him onto his back.
“Careful,” Moe said, eyes still closed.
“Shhh.” She caressed his head with one hand, pressed down on his chin with the other, forcing his mouth open.
The pressure hurt his jaw, his teeth. How long since Donna died? Gotta be four years now. Moe opened his eyes to find a funnel coming down toward his mouth. He gagged when the narrow end stabbed the back of his throat. Above him there was a man, not Donna, and he was wearing a white mask.
Moe tried to scream but only strangled.
The masked man poured talcum powder into the funnel. No doubt from the same talc Moe used to cut the drugs he shared with friends. He coughed and hacked, but it only opened more space for the talcum to fill his mouth, his throat.
Christ, it filled his lungs.
Water spilled from Moe’s eyes, cold on his skin. His body shivered with anxiety. His lungs contracted and stayed that way—taut and small. His wrists and ankles burned against the hemp ropes that bound
him.
Moe Chamberlain couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t cry for help, couldn’t scream, couldn’t even moan. His drugged-out body was paralyzed in shock and fear.
The man in the mask, who was dressed in all black, showed him the useful end of a pickax. “Want it to end?”
Moe nodded.
The man raised his weapon. Moe thought of that old Right Dig commercial, where some seventies guy in bell-bottoms ignores the idea that he should call the power company before digging in his backyard. He ends up electrocuting himself on a buried line.
Before you dig, call RIGHT DIG.
“Hello, Watkins,” the masked man said. “It’s a pity you can’t figure out my clues. I don’t want to do this forever.”
The pickax came down.
“Ten-three, good buddy.”
Darkness and silence.
“End of transmission.”
The Vitruvian Man test pattern.
Please Stand By.
Barnes sat up. He choked on talcum powder and felt the drain of Moe Chamberlain’s drug use the same way he’d felt Chunk Philips’s blood loss. Like the MacKenzies, he recalled nothing new in Moe’s memories, nothing that sparked. He felt delirious. He opened his eyes, looked at Martinez, saw Calavera’s sugar-skull mask on her face. It frightened him, but he held himself in check, feeling Chamberlain’s fog still on him, the taste of talcum in his mouth. He blinked and the mask faded.
Martinez sat there, concern on her face.
Barnes said, “Chamberlain’s poem?”
Martinez flipped forward two pages in the logbook. “It was written beneath the mattress.”
“Read it.”
You inhaled the whirlwind
And wolfed down the earth,
Your veins were subways
Your brain the central station;
But poison was delivered
Instead of thoughts,
Like delivering fire
To a burned-out nation;
With a glass pipe in your hand
Clutched by five calaveras.
That deer-tick feeling was still there, the disease growing stronger. Barnes lay back down. “What name is next to Nancy Fulmer?”
“David. Brother. Thirty-one years old.”
“Load her up.”
23
Barnes felt drunk. His head swam with endorphins. Nancy Fulmer had stayed up late on the last night of her life, reading and drinking wine. The novel was poorly written, but the sex scenes were more stimulating than Janine said they’d be, almost more than Nancy could have imagined.
Almost.
Already she’d stopped once to go get some relief from her vibrator, and now she was back into the pages, searching for more. Barnes shivered with the aftershocks of Nancy’s orgasm, still emanating from his genitals, up through his chest and arms, down through his legs. She reached for her wineglass and thought, Whoa, slow down there, sister.
Then aloud she said, “Oh, screw it,” and drank deeply from her glass.
Her mind drifted from the pages of the book to a woman sitting in an office chair, looking up at her. She had cropped hair and a secret smile. Janine. Nancy’s heart fluttered inside Barnes’s chest. In her memory, Janine handed her the book and said, “I know it’s got men in it, but just pretend Christian is me”—she winked—“only with a strap-on.” She flicked out a hand and slapped Nancy’s behind.
Barnes’s cheeks flared with Nancy’s embarrassment.
“Stop that,” Nancy had said through clenched teeth, but at home on her couch she was smiling at the recollection. She set down her book and began caressing herself, imagining the very scene Janine had described—her lover before her, naked, save for the strap-on, which was all black leather and buckles.
A sound of cracking wood stopped Nancy’s hands. Janine vaporized from her mind. The house was suddenly quiet; the air felt tactile, cold against her skin. Nancy stood, grimacing at the floorboards creaking beneath her feet. She padded quietly toward the kitchen. Her legs felt weak. She leaned against the doorjamb to steady herself. She peered around the corner into the kitchen and froze at the sight of the shadowy shape just a couple of steps away—a man, arms above his head, something held there. It knocked hollowly against the cupboard behind him, and then flashed forward, clipping Nancy’s cheek as it came down.
Barnes felt a loss of gravity as she fell. He gripped the bars of the hospital bed.
Nancy rolled and scrambled back to her feet, felt cold air against her cheek where a flap of skin had been sliced back. Blood blurred the vision in her left eye, but she could see well enough to find the front door. She ran to it, gripped the handle, and pulled.
It didn’t budge.
She fumbled with the dead bolt, got it open.
She found the chain lock.
A hand grabbed her hair from behind, whipped her back into the living room. She crashed against the coffee table, landed on the carpet, looked up at the sugar-skull mask.
Her brother came to mind. A full-grown man standing before her with a gold-leaf Bible clutched in one hand. He was thumping the Bible with an open palm, saying, “Their blood shall be on their own hands.”
“He said he’d tell them,” she screamed at the masked man. “What else could I do?”
Calavera said, “A guilty conscience, piglet? Whatever for?”
Nancy envisioned her parents, David standing before them. The older couple was sitting on a couch beneath a cross on the wall, Jesus’s sunken face staring off to the side, their own faces catatonic with the news of Nancy’s sexual orientation delivered to them by their pious son. “You’re here because of him,” she said, “because of what I did?”
“I’m here for what you didn’t do,” Calavera said, his tone like he was speaking to a child. “But tell me, anyway. What did you do?”
“I killed him, goddammit!”
Calavera cocked his head. “Isn’t that something?” He leaned in closer. “You should check into that, Watkins. We can’t do this forever.”
“Watkins? Who the fu—”
Calavera drew back the pickax. “Ten-three, good buddy.”
Nancy Fulmer’s hands covered Barnes’s face. His neck cracked from the pickax’s impact.
Darkness and silence.
“End of transmission.”
The Vitruvian Man test pattern.
Please Stand By.
“Relax.”
It was Martinez. He opened his eyes. His extremities felt numb, his cheek cold and damp, his head as heavy as a stone. Calavera had used the flat blade of his pickax to sever Nancy Fulmer’s head clean away from her neck. Barnes tried to move his hands, but they wouldn’t go. He tried his feet. Nothing.
“Quiet now.” Martinez again. “Slowly now. Slowly. You’re Detective John Barnes, Homicide Division, Detroit Police.”
Barnes blinked back the fog. Sharp pains in his body, a dozen different places, like wounds all over him, every bone broken. His cell phone buzzed against his leg. He willed his hand to reach for it. It slowly responded and, by degrees, came to his pocket. By the time the phone was clutched in his shaky grip, Barnes felt he could sit up. He did so slowly, then swung his legs around to dangle from the hospital bed.
“You’re done,” Martinez said.
Barnes looked down at the message on his cell phone. It was from Jessica.
Miss you already.
Some of his ache abated, the fog receded. He closed the phone and put it away. He opened his jaw to let the bit fall out. “I’m here for what you didn’t do.”
“What’s that?” Martinez said.
“That’s what he told her. She admitted killing her brother, but he was there for what she didn’t do. Never made the link before.”
“Says here David Fulmer’s death was ruled accidental.”
Barnes nodded. “It was how I was introduced to this case. I had the David Fulmer file. Open-and-shut. He and his sister had gone ice-climbing at Pictured Rocks. Frayed rope. He fell and that was it.
I looked into the sister, but not hard. No reason to.”
“You didn’t look hard enough.” Nancy Fulmer.
“Huh?” Martinez said.
Barnes shook his head. “I didn’t look hard enough. Watkins came to me and checked what I had. But why follow up when the man’s murderer was already dead? Why put his parents through the additional pain of knowing their only daughter killed their only son?”
“Okay,” Martinez said, “so what didn’t she do?”
“She didn’t visit her brother’s grave. Read her poem.”
Martinez read out loud.
Your love was forbidden
Considered abomination,
On the shape of a woman
Your eyes saw fire;
But to touch is hot
A blister of water,
Bitten and flattened
The taste of desire;
With a scar on your hand
Where you ate calaveras.
“What time is it?” Barnes said.
Martinez checked the wall clock. “Six twenty-two.”
“Go get some rest. We’ll finish later.”
“When?”
“When’s Warden coming in?”
“He’s on call for the weekend, so you’re stuck with me.”
“Noon, then.”
“I’ll be here.”
Barnes pulled the needle from his arm. He applied his own cotton ball and Band-Aid while Martinez pulled the tubes from the machine and wound them up. He stood and put on his gun, his jacket.
“Where are you going?” Martinez said.
“To see Watkins.”
24
Barnes finished a large coffee and half a pint of bourbon on the half-hour drive to Bracken, Michigan. He pulled into the parking lot at the Bracken Institute and threw the gearshift into park. His body was racked with pain at the elbows, the chest, his head, his neck. A mixture of other people’s voices fought for time in his head. They threw one another aside like wrestlers in a battle royal. The alcohol helped slow them down. Taking a cue from Martinez’s psych book, he imagined a filing cabinet in his head and a drawer labeled OTHER PEOPLE’S MEMORIES. He imagined himself stuffing the MacKenzies in there, stuffing Chunk Philips, Moe Chamberlain, and Nancy Fulmer. They spilled out over the sides like children’s toys.
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