by Alan Drew
He cut the shovel into the dirt now and watched this new woman; she clipped wilted flowers from the bushes, her shoulders slumped as though Death were teasing her bones toward the peat earth at her feet.
Soon after he was released from the state hospital with the doctors who tried to fix what was wrong in him, he tried to go back to that house, the one with the basement and the mattress and the lock on the door. He took a bus to the town and walked to the edge of the street, his eleven-year-old self thrashing around inside his adult body, but he couldn’t make himself go, and he sat alone in a motel that night, cursing names at his face in the bathroom mirror.
When this new woman was finished with the flowers, she drank tea on her porch and stared at the grass. Later in the afternoon, she sat in a recliner and watched people kiss on television—he could see her, her back to the windows. She was alone. A widow maybe, an old maid.
He had learned to avoid men. He’d had to shatter the skull of one with a statue, the brain like melon seed spilling out. It was brutal, beneath him. He wanted it to be calm, quiet, like an act of love. He didn’t hate them; he simply needed what they gave him.
Tonight he sat in the car and listened to the song—the cutting guitar, the bludgeoning bass, the singer’s voice devouring the eleven-year-old self—then listened to it again, his muscles electrified, his hands becoming clamps. Music had waves, and they pulsed in his body. When he slipped through the sliding glass door, she was asleep, breathing quietly on the couch—her nightgown loosely tied around her waist, her gray head lolled against the headrest. He had learned how to move quietly, like a cat, soft on the balls of his feet, his weight hovering in the air, wraithlike.
His thumbs pressed into the notch at the base of her neck even before she opened her eyes, her fish mouth gasping. Her irises were gray, with yellow starbursts exploding from the pupils. The dark holes dilated with shock. Is this really happening, her eyes seemed to ask, is this a nightmare? Yes, he said. It’s really happening. Tonight I’m taking you with me. She kicked the footrest, scratched at his forearms, but soon her muscles slackened and her eyes gazed at him, milky and floating, her lids finally closing.
He let go of her then and watched her, her neck ringed red, her lips contorted but softening, her chest rising and dropping. Asleep. They were beautiful when they were sleeping. This is what his eleven-year-old self must have looked like to the man, his father, the man who locked him in the basement. He understood this about that man: They looked so innocent that you needed to own them, wanted them for yourself. He leaned over her, admiring the placid look on her face, watching the pulsing vein in her neck. Her face made him think of milk, for some reason. White and clean. He could do anything to her while she was asleep, anything at all. But he didn’t want those things. He didn’t want what that man, his father, had wanted from his eleven-year-old self. They were dirty things, animal things. He had been so small then. A bird with a hood over his eyes.
She started to move, her mouth gasping air as though she’d been held underwater. He sat on her lap and clasped his fingers over her throat again. He heard the singer’s voice in his head, the urgent pummel of the music, and he felt his body grow, his gargantuan self filling the room. He could feel her pulse on the edge of his thumb—arrhythmic, out of time with the song, a thrumming persistence against his skin. Find a little strip, find a little stranger. He had been so small, but he was gargantuan now, and she lay there between his legs, asleep, a false mirror of her coming death, and he loved her. Loved what she would give him, loved that he could take it. It was like food, sustenance. That man had made him do things for food, disgusting things, and he was no longer hungry. Had to force himself to eat, the smell of each bite conjuring his father’s body, billowing that man with ugly life.
Nothing in my dreams, just some ugly memories. Still her pulse, beating against his palm, her eyes erratic beneath the lids. The song looped in his head, the guitars, the bass, the singer’s growl filling his body. Swear you’re gonna feel my hand. The wind shuddered the windowpanes, a gust blowing papers from the kitchen table. A siren wailed in the distance, carried aloft on the wind and growing faint. The soul of the body was electricity. There was no heaven or hell. The soul became clouds, joined the thrum of power lines, dissipated in the desert air if you didn’t catch it.
8
THE GROVE BEHIND THE HOUSE exhaled a sharp methane of rotting oranges. Ben was in the backyard, kneeling over a footprint, shielding his eyes from the spotlight set on a tripod on the edge of the patio, while Jacob Pass, the forensics investigator, sprinkled talcum powder across the tread.
“Not a big guy, is he?” Jacob said, pouring out the dental cement now, the footprint turning white in the harsh light.
“Five foot five,” Ben said, nodding his head in agreement. “Five six.” A kid? A woman?
A flash burst through the sliding glass door and Ben glanced up to see Natasha snapping pictures, her knees on the edge of the carpet, where they had found the body lying next to the couch. Strangled. Broken hyoid bone. Crazy lyric scratched into the living room wall. Definitely the serial. April Howard, a widow. Alone, as usual. Natasha was whispering as she worked, her face close to the woman’s stunned eyes. Ben could see her lips move—even from here, bent in the wet soil of the flower bed—talking to the woman as though easing the transition into another world.
A light flashed behind Ben.
“Detective,” someone called.
Ben spun around.
“Detective, is it the serial?” A reporter and his cameraman were standing on the edge of the backyard fence, the orange grove looming dark behind them.
“Jesus Christ,” Ben said, pointing to two uniforms standing watch on the edge of the patio. “Get these jerks out of here.”
“Is it the Night Prowler?” the reporter said again, as the uniforms hopped the fence and pushed him backward into the grove. “Has he hit in Santa Elena?”
Yeah, Ben said to himself. Welcome to the world.
“Give it thirty,” Jacob said, slapping his hands free of cement dust. “It’s not a deep print. It’s like he barely touched the ground. Can’t guarantee it won’t crack.”
“It’s the same as the others,” Ben said. “Just need to make it official.”
The whole house was lit up like a movie set—the backyard white with spotlight, every bulb in the house flipped on as if it were a party. It stank out here, the air humid with rot, the early fruit falling and browning months before the pickers came in. Maybe he was tired, but the stink of it tonight was too much, like the whole world was decomposing. He had some Vicks in his coat pocket, left over from the morgue, and he slicked the skin beneath his nose.
Inside, the house was broiling, all the windows shut to keep the wind from blowing dust across the scene. Two cops dusted the handles of the sliding glass door, but they weren’t going to find his prints, Ben knew. Latex gloves. Lieutenant Hernandez was directing traffic: “You, print that door. You two, start gridding the place.” Marco was in his cruiser, on the horn with the lead investigators of other crime scenes, running checks on the Stooges song, trying to piece together some message that would tip them off to the killer’s next move. Natasha was on the floor, the camera pressed to her eye, snapping shots of the woman’s fingernails.
“You made him bleed,” she whispered to the body. “You hurt him.”
Flash.
“Officers,” Hernandez said. “Get out there and push back the perimeter.” Hernandez was rarely on scene, but he was taking over this one, barking orders, seeming to enjoy being in charge, enjoying the show of it. Ben wondered what spin he’d put on this to keep the politicians happy. “Get these media people at least three houses down.”
“We need a perimeter into the grove,” Ben said.
“Walters and Beck”—Hernandez pointed—“go pick some oranges.”
The light from the television crews cast an oblong reflection of the bay window against the far wall.
Hern
andez ran a handkerchief across his wet forehead, sweating it out in the stifling heat.
“Come with me, Ben,” he said. “We got a number of possible witnesses out at the van.”
Then they were outside into the blinding glare of television-crew spots, forensics lanterns, black-and-white light-bar circulars. It was so bright that the cars and crime-scene vans, the people milling around, cast shadows across the pavement. Hernandez was out in front of him, striding between cruisers. The lieutenant got to the witnesses first, pulling two women aside before Ben realized who was in front of him: the high school swim coach, Lewis Wakeland.
“They said you might have seen something?” Ben said, his voice coiled in his throat.
Wakeland swallowed, his blue eyes darting back and forth.
“They said you might have seen something,” Ben said again, his voice getting away from him. He glanced at Hernandez, who was taking the testimony of one of the women. Keep it cool, Ben thought. Keep it cool.
“Is she dead?” Wakeland said, scratching the meat of his left thumb with the nails of his right hand. “Is April dead?”
“She’s dead.”
Wakeland blinked. “She was a good neighbor,” he said. “Kept to herself, never bothered anyone.”
“Did you see something or not?”
Wakeland blinked again, water in his eyes as he stared at Ben. Ben thought he probably hadn’t seen a damn thing.
“I live two doors down,” Wakeland said.
Ben knew that. A rose-colored stucco. A Bayliner Bowrider sitting on a tow in the driveway. Wakeland was married, two kids: the good life.
“I was in the kitchen,” Wakeland said. “And I saw something run along the fence line…”
Ben was scribbling on his legal pad, but he didn’t know what he was writing. The lights were so bright, blinding almost, and he had the strange feeling that the wavelengths passed through his body, making his skin transparent.
“…he was bent over, dressed in black…”
Ben’s hand scratched across the page, his words a strange hieroglyphics he couldn’t make out. The light was hot on his face, the stupid reporters and their spots.
“It’s nice to see you,” Wakeland said.
“Did I ask you a goddamned question?” Ben said, startled by his own outburst.
Wakeland flinched and backed up against the police van.
“Did I?”
Hernandez turned away from his witness, eyed Ben.
“No,” Wakeland said quietly.
Suddenly Hernandez was by his side. “Coach.” He nodded at Wakeland. To Ben: “Detective, maybe you can check on forensics inside.”
Then Ben was striding back to the house, the lights casting his shadow in front of him, Hernandez blabbering apologies behind his back, spewing some bullshit about professionalism and the stress of investigations.
—
“THIS GUY HIT the wrong house,” Ben said.
He was balanced on his haunches in front of the body. He should have gone out back to get some air, to get his head back, to cool off, but something pulled him here to the center of things. Natasha’s hand was under the woman’s neck, lifting it an inch to get a picture of the red marks striated there. She pulled the camera viewfinder away from her eye and studied him.
“Serials never kill the right people,” she said. “I’d let them run wild if they did.”
The yellow pad was shaking in his hand, the chicken scratches on the page indecipherable. Natasha noticed before he could turn it facedown. She gently released the woman’s neck and touched his hands, cupping them in hers, steadying them.
“You need a rest,” she said, but he could see other questions in her eyes. She held his hands a moment, the latex cool and plastic-feeling. But her touch allowed him to breathe and he got his hands under control.
“Which house would be a good one?” she said, almost a rhetorical question.
“Not this one,” he said.
She let go of his hands and got back down on the floor to take pictures.
“No,” she agreed. “Not this one.”
And then she was talking to the woman again, whispers he could barely make out. He thought he loved Natasha then—or at least he felt something urgent like love. It wasn’t the first time he’d felt it, but the way the feeling hit him frightened him; it was pure need, utterly exposed.
“Why do you do that?” he said.
“Excuse me,” he heard her whisper to the body.
“Why do you talk to them?”
Natasha set the camera down and offered him the kind of patient smile reserved for the ignorant.
“A little kindness to take with them,” she said.
9
“IT’S SATURDAY,” BEN’S MOTHER SAID through the phone receiver. It was 7:46 A.M.
“Not today, Mom.” He sat up, found the NoDoz on the bedside table. He’d left the scene at 1:45, finished the paperwork nearing 3:00, checked the windows and doors at Rachel’s, and then sat in the barn until 4:30, putting away three beers while listening to the scanner. It was hard to sleep when you knew someone was out there, someone who would strike again. “We’ll go tomorrow.”
“It’s Saturday the twenty-fifth,” she said. “It’s circled on the calendar.”
There was no use arguing. If they didn’t go, she’d be agitated all day, even after she’d forgotten what she was agitated about. He took a shower, grabbed his case notes from the barn office, and drove the truck out to pick her up. By 8:45 they were parked in the lot beside Pacific Crest Cemetery in Orange, which was neither near the ocean nor situated on a crest but crammed between a strip mall dotted with taquerias and a cement wall that separated the cemetery from the rush of the Santa Ana Freeway.
“Yes,” his mother said, nodding. “I remember this place.”
Margaret was working at the seatbelt, her fingers searching around for the button. He softly took her hand and pressed the release and the belt came loose. “Oh,” she said, as though searching for words. “Oh.” And then her hand was pressed against her nose and she was crying.
“It’s all right, Mom. It gets stuck sometimes.”
When she calmed, he walked her by the elbow to the wrought-iron gate but stopped there and let her go on alone.
“The disrespect,” she muttered as she shuffled down the palm-lined path. He’d driven her out here the last Saturday of every month for the last six years, ever since Will Voorhees, Ben’s stepfather, had died of colon cancer. He wouldn’t join her at graveside, though, never had. “You better visit mine,” she said.
Ben got a coffee at a taqueria across the street and then settled himself in the cab of the truck. She might be there ten minutes or two hours, he never knew, and there was no use rushing her; she’d thrown a fit once, bombarding him with insults while other mourners laid flowers at gravestones. So he sipped the coffee and watched her stand sloped-shouldered beneath the swaying palm trees, conversing with a stone.
There was no plot of land for Ben to visit, no spot of grass he could speak to. Ben’s father had wanted to be cremated, his ashes sprinkled into the Pacific. He and his mother had walked the cheap plastic urn out to Abalone Point at Crystal Cove, just eight months before she met Voorhees, and poured the ashes in with the rockweed and gooseneck barnacles. But Ben wanted a monument, felt his father more deserving than Will Voorhees of something permanent.
Ben had never liked his stepfather, from the moment he met the man at New Life Mission Church’s spring picnic—and these visits always got Ben chewing on things that were long over. The Rancho had kicked Ben and his mother out of their house—no more employee of the Rancho Santa Elena Corporation, no more house. His mother found a one-bedroom apartment surrounded by a sweltering cement parking lot, and from the living room window they could watch backhoes dredge Moro Creek—a prime watering spot for cattle—to build a fifty-yard-wide “greenbelt.”
On the ranch, Margaret had always been up before Ben and his father, frying eggs and bea
ns and wrapping orange wedges in napkins for the ride into the hills. On the ranch, she could rope a calf at full canter or reach inside a cow to deliver a breech calf. But she had no degree, not even a high school diploma, no skills that would serve this new California. She had been raised in Orange by a domineering man who worked in a glass-bottle factory, a man who taught his daughters to be quiet, to look pretty, to marry up in the world. A cowboy made little money; a cowboy had a tiny Social Security pension that barely covered the rent and left just enough to purchase butter and salt and thirty-nine-cent spaghetti from the new Lucky, with its piped-in music and bleached checkered floors.
So five months after being evicted from the ranch, five months of rejected job applications, five months of buttered pasta, Margaret took her pretty self to New Life Mission Church. Dresses she hadn’t worn in years fit her again. She grew two inches in high heels. Her hair curled around her made-up face like the tendrils of a vine. On Sundays she and Ben walked the quarter mile to the church. Inside, skylights cast desert light across the wooden pews, light that lit up the curve of Margaret’s calf at the crossed knee, light across the triangle of skin that fell into her blouse. They prayed and they sang and the minister spoke about sins of the flesh, sins of the mind, sins of the heart, sins of the appetite. You sneezed, it was a sin.
At the spring picnic, Ben and this girl Elizabeta had run off while the adults played a game of volleyball. Ben dreamed about Elizabeta—her coiled black hair, the question mark of her back, her accented English, which made his full name sound like something exotic. In the courtyard after church, they’d sip lemonade together and tell stupid stories about kids at school, but mostly they just sweltered in the heat of each other’s gaze. They found a spot to be alone behind the plastic geodesic-dome gym on the edge of the duck pond. There Elizabeta agreed to show him her new bra. It was embroidered with tiny flowers, and through the blooming center of one he thought he could see the darker skin of Elizabeta’s nipple. Fair is fair, so he unzipped his pants and showed her his penis—just a quick look, because she’d never seen one before and her older sister, back from college, had told her they were gross.