“How are you doing?” Moira asked. This ordeal was taking a heavy toll on her; she looked more haggard and wan every day.
“Okay.”
“Your work’s okay?”
“It’s going okay. Seeing her makes me feel better.”
“She looks forward to seeing you. It’s the high point of her day.” She hesitated. “It’s awkward between us. I’ll feel guilty all of a sudden, the guilt will come like a wave washing over me, and I wonder how she feels. She hasn’t said anything to me about it, at all. Nothing:” She took his hand, looking at him, searching his face. “You haven’t, either.”
“This isn’t the time,” he said.
“I hope you won’t shut me out forever,” she replied.
The elevator doors opened. Her lips were receptive to his light kiss, more than they had been.
“I won’t,” he promised, as the doors closed and the elevator took him away.
It was dark by the time Wyatt reached his house, but he went for a run anyway. The night was vibrant with sound. Bullfrogs called to each other across the lake, crickets by the thousands buzzed with a whirrlike rattle, an owl hooted. He knew this road so well he could run it with his eyes closed, and sometimes he did for short stretches, listening to the sounds around him and to his own inner sounds as well, his heartbeat, his breathing, deep inhale-exhale five steps to a breath, feet slapping pavement. He ran on the blacktop road from his house to the main intersection, a three-mile loop. Enough to clear his head, for the moment. Except instead of his head getting clearer, it filled up with thoughts he couldn’t avoid thinking about anymore.
His marriage was falling apart. He and Moira had been drifting ever since he took leave from the firm and went to work at the Public Defender’s office. Taking Marvin White’s defense had exacerbated the situation. And now the shooting. On his way to the hospital this evening he had thought of how much he wanted to be with Michaela, how much he needed her—not her needing him, the strong father, but him needing her, the daughter who needed a strong father. And still, he hadn’t wanted to go, because Moira would be there.
As he was approaching his driveway on the final leg of his run he saw Ted Sprague. His elderly neighbor was wrestling a garbage can out to the curb for pickup. Wyatt stopped and helped Ted with the heavy load.
“You need to get a trash can on wheels,” Wyatt said.
“The gardener usually does this,” Ted wheezed. “He forgot today.” He wiped the sweat off his brow with a handkerchief. “How’s Michaela?” Ted asked solicitously.
“As well as can be expected. The doctor operates day after tomorrow.”
“Enid and I are praying for her.”
“Thanks. I’ll tell her.” He was getting cool, standing there in his sheen of sweat. “I’ll see you around.”
Before he could finish his jog home, Ted stopped him. “They caught the … burglars who did our house,” he said. “I thought you’d want to know.”
Wyatt was surprised. That almost never happened. You collected your insurance and forgot about it. “That’s good. How did they catch them?”
“Trying to sell our video equipment. To an undercover cop. The cops were running a sting, and they flushed them.”
“Great. So were they a couple of black kids, like you thought? From a gang?”
Ted looked away, embarrassment spreading across his face. “They weren’t kids.” He paused. “And they weren’t black.”
Wyatt took a step back. “Oh?”
The old man shook his head unhappily. “They were white men. Who used to work for the security agency, like you said.”
Wyatt stared at his neighbor’s miserable face. You bastard, he thought. You and Enid scared my wife so badly that she went out and bought a gun and shot my daughter with it. Which wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t been a latent bigot and a coward.
Ted didn’t want to hear that; couldn’t. So Wyatt merely shrugged.
The old man turned away. “Better be getting back inside. See you.”
ALL THE MURDERS HAD taken place within the city limits, so the files were kept at the city’s Department of Records at the old Police Annex, down by the old warehouse district. The sheriff’s office ran the jail, that was county jurisdiction, but the detective work was done by city cops.
Wyatt handed the Request for Information form to the police officer in charge of records, an old albino cop named Whitey who was counting the days until his retirement at eighty-five percent pay.
Whitey looked the request over. “You want a list of everyone who accessed the Alley Slasher files? That’s a lot of names.”
“You do keep track of everyone who removes a file or reads one, don’t you?” Wyatt asked.
“Oh, yeah. That’s one regulation we don’t mess around with, looking at confidential files. You want every name, starting with the first murder?”
Wyatt considered. “I don’t need to go back that far.” Dwayne had given testimony about every one of the murders, including the last one. “I only need to see the names of anyone who had any access to the files from the time the last murder was committed until now. Make that second to last.” Dwayne could have gotten enough about the last murder from the television news to make his claim plausible; earlier than that, he had to have another source.
Whitey smiled gratefully. “That’s going to make this a hell of a lot easier. Come back in about an hour. I have to cross-check a bunch of different sources.”
Wyatt spent the time in a doughnut shop across the street going over some notes. An hour later he presented himself again. “Do you have what I need?”
Whitey handed him a computer printout of several pages. “There’s a lot of redundancy there,” he pointed out. “Some of the detectives working these murders have taken them out dozens of times.”
Wyatt leafed through the list page by page, speed-reading the names. City police detectives mostly, some sheriff’s deputies from their homicide division, with a few state detectives as well. He came to the last page, read the names thoroughly. “This is it?” he asked, looking up.
“That’s everyone.”
“There’s no way someone could have looked at these records and not got their name on this?”
“Shit no! Like I said, the protocol for taking out confidential files is strict and unyielding. They have to be formally requested, and the request is logged in, whether they do it in person or over the phone.”
“No exceptions?”
“None.”
“What about people who work here? They couldn’t just walk in and take a look?”
“No sir. Not even the chief of police or the sheriff could do that. If you’ve seen these, your name is on that list. If it isn’t, you haven’t seen them.”
Doris Blake’s name was not on the list.
“THOMPSON, YOU GOT A CIGARETTE?”
“You got five dollars?”
“I got something’s worth a lot more than one Abe Lincoln. To you.”
Night on D-block, the tier where Dwayne was now housed. A crowded, noisy, pestilent hole, like every other cellblock in the old facility. Three men in every space where there were supposed to be two. Televisions hung from the ceiling, broadcasting garbage in English and Spanish. Inmates lounged in the common corridor, playing cards and dominoes, watching the tube, gossiping, passing time. Nothing else to do and forever to do it in. In most of the cellblocks in the jail, like this one, where the inmates were deemed manageable, not in need of constant lock-down, they were allowed out of their cells from wake-up to lights-out (which was a figure of speech, because the lights were never turned out completely). Some of the men on this tier had been in the place long enough that they had graduated to trustee status. They worked day jobs, manning food trays and working in the kitchen and laundry. Trustee status gave them a range of movement within the huge complex, considerably more than that of the normal inmate.
Smoking wasn’t allowed but the men did it anyway, under the noses of the guards, w
ho were powerless to stop it—there were too many convicts and not enough jailers. Cigarettes were contraband, valuable. So were whiskey and drugs. All found their way into the system. Prisoners weren’t supposed to engage in sex, either, but at this moment several acts of fornication, not all of them consensual, were taking place in various cells, and other locations.
Dwayne was bunking alone—one of the perks of his situation. He had three cartons of Marlboros stashed under the mattress in his cell that had been brought in by various men entering the system and passed on to him, courtesy of his friends at Durban. The deputies knew he had this shit and could have busted him easily, anytime—he wasn’t hiding it very stealthily. But the word had come down from the top on the day he was moved into this block from his cushy accommodations in the infirmary: Leave this man alone. He’s important to the district attorney, thus important to the sheriff. Getting along with Alex Pagano was smart politics, and Sheriff Lowenthal was one of the smartest men in city/county government, which was why he kept getting reelected.
“Tell me what you want to tell me,” Dwayne told his fellow inmate, a weaselly Latino junkie named Raul who was awaiting trial on selling a small quantity of drugs to an undercover cop, “and I’ll decide what your information’s worth.” Raul was a compliant, laid-back guy who never gave anyone shit. He’d been a short-order cook on the outside, and recently had made trustee, cooking meals in the huge kitchen.
Raul trusted Dwayne, in the oblique fashion of one con trusting another. Dwayne was doing his current stretch at Durban, which meant he was a lifer in the system, which meant, in the particular fashion of the world of these men, that he was a stand-up guy.
“They had me cooking lunch in the deputy’s mess this afternoon,” Raul said, “and this guy comes in, this civilian. Nice suit, good haircut, sharp shoes. Lawyer type. He sits down next to one of the officers, they start talking. Then after a while they leave there, and go someplace else. Together, just the two of them. The way this deputy is looking around, it’s like being seen talking to this lawyer wasn’t something she wanted people picking up on.”
Dwayne’s antennae shot up. “She?”
“So Lester, this other cook working alongside me,” Raul went on, ignoring Dwayne’s interjection, “he says to me, ‘You know who that was with that deputy? It’s that hot-shit society lawyer who’s defending that kid they got upstairs in maximum security, Marvin White.’ ”
It was hot as hell on the tier, but Dwayne felt a chill all of a sudden.
Raul picked his nose with his pinkie, regarded the booger with a critical eye, wiped it off on his orange jail-issue sweatpants. The trustees wore orange to differentiate them from the regular population, who were clad in puke green. “You’re part of the case against this kid White, ain’t you?” he asked Dwayne. “I figured it’s worth a couple cigarettes to know White’s lawyer was in here, nosing around.”
Dwayne disregarded Raul’s previous question about his participation in the trial. He forced himself to breathe deeply, normally. “The deputy he was talking to. You said it was a she. Who was she?” He was able to keep his voice from going frantic; he couldn’t let this piece of shit see him losing it.
“Can I have my cigarette first?” Raul asked coyly.
Dwayne leaned over and hooked his index finger under the other man’s chin, pulling Raul close to him, inches from his face. “The name of the deputy,” he intoned.
Raul choked out the answer. “It was Man-mountain Blake. You know who she is,” he gasped.
That’s why he had been pulled out of the infirmary this afternoon, for no discernible reason. That lawyer must have been down there, talking to that pussy-lipped nurse. And that simpering little shit definitely had stories he could tell. The infirmary nurse was nothing, though, compared to Blake, to what she could do if she cracked. She could destroy him.
Dwayne let go his hold on Raul, who slumped back, massaging his throbbing chin. That Thompson is one strong fucker, Raul thought, it felt like his jaw was almost broken from one fingerhold.
Dwayne maneuvered his way through the cluster of rancid bodies and slipped into his cell. A moment later he came out with something cupped in his hand. He and Raul shook. Dwayne withdrew his hand and moved away, to a place of darkness and solitude.
Raul glanced down. “Thanks, man,” he called out softly.
Snake-eyes had given him a half pack of cigarettes, fresh out of the carton.
WYATT AWOKE BEFORE DAWN. He hadn’t slept well. He felt alienated in his own house. It was empty—no wife, no child. Since the shooting, and Moira’s staying at the hospital with Michaela, Cloris had been coming in a couple hours a day, but she puttered around because she had nothing to do. She had waited for him last night, in case he wanted her to cook him some dinner, but he had sent her home, instructing her to come in every third day, that he wouldn’t need her on a daily basis.
The first shafts of morning sunlight broke through the tops of the trees to the east. The kitchen glowed from it, the pale yellow light moving perceptibly across the floor. Normally this transformation from darkness to light would have elevated his spirits, but today it didn’t. It was just light on a floor. He was not tuned in to seeing or feeling beauty this morning.
He didn’t want to be here. He especially didn’t want to be here alone.
He called his office at the firm. As it wasn’t even seven, no one was in yet, not even the hard-charging young associates. The answering service connected him with his secretary’s voice mail. “Annetta, I’m going to be staying in town this week, while Michaela’s in the hospital. Book me a suite at the Four Seasons, starting tonight.”
The firm was still family, his real home other than this one. Over a hundred lawyers and secretaries had called or sent cards of condolence. He had spoken to all the senior partners personally. They were all there for him and his family, whatever they needed. Talking to Ben Turner, he had thought about what this all meant—leaving the security and prestige of his job, alienating his wife, putting his own life on the line. Was he really getting what he wanted out of this?
He packed enough clothes to get him to the weekend. He’d come home then and do laundry, look at the week ahead. He also brought a few changes for Moira, casual, comfortable stuff. He knew she wasn’t going to come home, either, until she could bring Michaela with her. The sounds of her gun firing and Michaela screaming were playing over and over inside her head, he was sure of that.
Nothing left to do but leave. He set the alarm and drove away.
At the hospital he told Moira about his temporary move to the hotel for the week; to be closer to the hospital and his office was the reason he gave her. The unspoken reason, that the house was haunted by demons, was best left alone for now. Later, when their lives were back on a more even keel—if they were, an open question—they could talk about those demons and figure out how to exorcise them.
She accepted his explanation without question—he knew she wouldn’t have been able to stay there alone, either, if their roles in this tragedy were reversed. He remained for forty-five minutes, talking mostly to Michaela. Moira used his presence as an excuse to get some exercise walking the hallways. The vibe she was throwing, under the husband-wife togetherness veneer, was “I can’t be in the same space with you.” Or “I’m afraid to be.” Same difference, it felt like.
The operation was scheduled for tomorrow, seven in the morning. Michaela was getting scared about it, about what the outcome might be. Again he reassured her, as best he could, that everything was going to be fine.
Moira returned from her short exile. They talked inconsequentially for a few minutes, avoiding anything personal or substantive; then he left and went to work. As soon as he was out of her presence he felt relieved, and hated that he felt that way.
He spent the first part of the morning with Walcott, who climbed the stairs to his office, noting with amusement and admiration the jerry-built game-plan apparatus he and Josephine had built. Stacks of cardboar
d file boxes crammed with copies of all the detective reports from all the rape-murders, dozens of them, hugged the walls outside their offices. Photos of the various crime scenes were taped to the walls above the cartons, and photos of the victims were taped on one of his interior office walls, as was the huge crime-scene aerial map, with pushpins stuck in where each assault had occurred.
And there were seven sets of photos, two or three per victim, side by side: in one, the victim as she had appeared in life, taken from various sources—high school yearbooks, family-album-type pictures, pictures taken on the run by friends. Some smiling, some serious, some looking straight into the camera lens, others taken when the subject was unaware. Those were the best ones—there was real life to those pictures, and to the people in them.
Then there were the police photos, one per victim. What they looked like in death. Features distorted—bulging eyes, black-and-blue eyes, lacerated jaws, fractured necks. Sad, brutal photos.
The pictures were arranged in sequential order, from the first murder to the most recent one. Walcott studied them.
“This feels more like a prosecutor’s wall than a defense lawyer’s,” he commented. “What’s the point?”
“They’re part of the package. I want them to be my allies. Allies from the grave, as it were. We’ve already alibied Marvin for two of these killings,” he added, tapping the pictures of the two women who had been murdered on nights when Marvin was with Mrs. Carpenter and Leticia, “and I’m hoping we can find more.” He walked over to the set of pictures of the most recent victim, Paula Briggs. “The videotape of the robbery,” he said, tapping his knuckle on Paula’s face, in the picture taken of her when she was alive, “that’s our alibi for this one, if it comes to that.”
Walcott frowned. “How do you figure that?”
“The time frame. It’s too tight. I know it’s doable, but it isn’t reasonable. Maybe it would be by a cold-blooded killer who murders by a stopwatch, timing his movements to the minute. But not a kid. Don’t forget, Marvin was sixteen when half of these murders occurred.”
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