by Nevada Barr
It was time for Clare Sullivan to vanish.
She had spent three of her four decades slipping into other people’s clothes, their words, their worlds, their skins. There was no greater escape than to walk in someone else’s shoes. For a long while she sat on the commode lost in thought. Several times Mackie tried to make good his escape, but the memory of his past transgression was still sufficiently vivid that she held tightly to his collar.
Though not yet committed to her next role, the act of stepping away from herself, a mental divesting of the trappings of Clare Sullivan, allowed her brain to shift gears. Grief, guilt, and survival were left behind in the abandoned psyche. The new one, the one that had never been written on, opened up with freshness and clarity of thought. Darkness lapped around the edges, the former life too strong for its losses to be banished entirely, but at least, here, she could think.
The dark-haired child whispered “alive.” The little girl was Arabian, maybe Iranian, perhaps Saudi, Iraqi, or Kuwaiti. Possibly even Egyptian. Clare could speak and understand a good deal of Arabic but was not capable of distinguishing dialects or accents from one region to the next. Or even from one nation to the next.
The man who had jerked her arm and called her “brat” was Cajun. Unless it was Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, he had no business with that little girl at an arson/murder site. Unless the child was not his daughter but somehow connected to the fire and the killings.
The sun had risen into a clearing sunny sky, unusual for Seattle in the spring. Behind the white shower curtain a window brightened, throwing Clare’s shadow against the glossy white enamel on the wood. Beyond that door was more white-on-white, painted-on purity that David had required to cover . . .
To cover what?
Clare let that question go for the moment.
The stark white beyond had been ruined by the colorful spent life of the au pair. Dead, Jalila was of no use to Clare. She could not answer the questions: why she and David had run out of the house, why only David had returned, why they’d both been killed, why two murderers from Louisiana had a key to David’s apartment.
Clare pushed her head between her hands, fists closing tightly in her thick hair. The dog jumped from her lap, and she was wrenched out of her self-absorption. Having recaptured Mackie lest he be tempted beyond his small canine will to resist the edible, she walked through the defiled bedroom, careful not to look at the body, careful not to note whether the skirt or the panties or the legs had been disarranged, and into the living room. Still clutching the dog, she closed the bedroom door firmly behind them.
As she got a bowl of water for Mackie and crumbled outrageously expensive gourmet crackers onto a plate for his breakfast, she cast and recast herself.
A suspected child murderer; the search would be nationwide and intense. She needed money.
She needed to become invisible to the police.
EIGHTEEN
“Lord,” Paul breathed a word and prayer. “And I thought carrying a bunch of vomiting boys from Alcorn to jail was vile duty.”
“Odd thing was,” Anna said, shoving her toes down into the corners of the bed where the sheets were still cool, “I liked the people. I mean Betty and Star and Candy and even Delilah.”
“Not the men?”
Anna thought about that for a moment, not wanting to damn her beloved’s gender unnecessarily. “I didn’t know them. The women, talking, I knew them for people, I guess. Maybe not the folks I’d necessarily gravitate to, but if you cut them, they’d bleed, as the bard said. The men . . . I don’t know. They all seemed so bent.” She shifted the cell phone to the other ear. Two hours past midnight, and the murmur of the Quarter had dulled to a lullaby; still, cell phones always gave her the sensation she couldn’t hear, even when the reception was good. “Not the college boys. They were just your basic run-of-the-mill sowers of wild oats.”
For a few moments they were safe in companionable silence. Over the phone silence was like dead air on a radio; it was a testament to their connection that they could sit, each in his or her own space, miles and miles apart, and be together quietly.
“The bald guy and Jordan were the creepy ones,” Anna said. “The way the dancers spoke of things lent an ambient creepiness. That and the black, black hole the owner had built for perverts to crawl into and indulge.” Before her visit to the strip club, Anna would have referred to the women as strippers. They were strippers; they stripped off their clothes professionally. After talking with them and sharing their smoke, albeit unwillingly, she gave them the courtesy of the title “dancers,” though she’d have hated to excuse it to Alvin Ailey or Martha Graham.
“It’s good I wasn’t there,” Paul said, breaking the silence. “You wouldn’t have gotten anything if I’d been there.”
Paul not only took responsibility for his actions, he made a point of letting others know when they’d been right and he’d been wrong. It was a generosity of spirit that made Anna respect and love him a little more each time he did it. Lying there, naked and alone, it occurred to her that it was an unbelievably manly thing to do. A quiver went through her.
“I wish you were here,” she said and laughed because her voice was slightly husky.
“Me, too. I’m dead on my feet. I always sleep better with you.”
“Not tonight you wouldn’t,” Anna said. They held that thought for a few seconds.
“What do I do now?” she asked. She wasn’t in a park, she wasn’t in uniform, and she wasn’t in the backcountry. Urban nastiness wasn’t unknown to her, but her brushes with it had been few and far between, and usually she’d worked with other law enforcement, real cops, not tree cops.
“Leave it alone?” Paul suggested hopefully.
Anna knew he didn’t mean it. Had it been drug dealers, car thieves, or jaywalkers, he would have urged her to leave it to the NOPD. Where children were concerned, a different set of rules applied. This had been true for Anna even before baby Helena had come into her life in Big Bend. Occasionally she’d noticed the same sort of thing with animals. An old tomcat a friend of hers had, a beastly creature, who, given the chance, would shred the hand that fed it, let the new baby chew on its tail without complaint. When things went too far, the raddled old cat would merely levitate out of the baby’s reach. If there was an altruism gene, this was probably its manifestation, a tendency to let the little ones live.
“With the highest murder rate per capita in the nation and, from what I hear, a lousy public response record, I don’t think that the police will be of much help at this point,” Paul said. “Being a pervert, asking about where to be a pervert, and thinking perverted thoughts—none of that’s illegal. You’ll have to catch this guy acting out before you’ll get any juice with law enforcement.”
“That’s what—”
Paul spoke over her words, unusual for him. “I don’t mean following him down the mean streets in the dark of night. Just keep an eye on him. These guys usually screw up. Most of them don’t think what they’re doing is wrong, just politically incorrect. They have support systems—not 12-step—fellow perverts that reinforce their belief that they’re normal. Good for their psyches, I suppose, but it is bad for their freedom. They forget they are criminal and act out more in the open. Then we catch them.”
“You sound tired,” Anna said. His voice was hollow enough that he could have been giving a speech he’d given a thousand times to a painted audience.
“Dog tired.”
“Why don’t you get some sleep? You have another long day tomorrow?”
“Yeah. I’ve got two guys coming in to interview. Maybe I’ll get somebody to help out by the end of the month.”
“Priests or cops?”
“One of each.”
“Love you,” Anna said.
“And I you,” Paul replied. The phone went dead. Her husband was probably asleep before the plastic had cooled.
The lateness of the hour and the excitements of the day were telling on Anna as well, but she wasn’t
sleepy. The fun-house feel of Stephen King–like clowns and pregnant children lay in the pit of her stomach, a buzz that mimicked nausea. In a city she was not familiar with—at least not in any but a surface, tourist, sense—it would be too easy to stumble into organized crime networks and get hurt or killed. When people thought of organized crime, it was the Mafia or the tongs or, in recent years, the banks, careless of whom they destroyed in their grasping for money. The big guys were scary, but the networks most regular people ran afoul of were the small-time franchises, pimps who “owned” prostitutes and prostitutes who “owned” street corners and drug dealers who “owned” territories. The criminal equivalent of mom-and-pop stores. Every city, and a lot of small towns, were riddled with them.
In New Orleans the streets were littered with the bodies of gang members. Drug dealers, who’d moved back to town and were trying to reclaim the patch they’d had before Katrina, stirred up the muck on the city’s floor. Anna knew most of the black drug crime was in Center City. Geneva had told her a brand of violent gutter punks had moved into the Marigny east of the French Quarter. Anybody with a brain knew that, as squeaky clean as the more famous strip clubs on Bourbon were, some of the women were hooking some of the time. There’d be whorehouses and pimps, and so more territory worth defending.
In a way, Anna was less frightened of Organized Crime with capital letters than she was of small-time local thugs. Hit men had a lot to lose, a reason not to kill or rough up anybody they weren’t paid to.
Local boys often didn’t care whether they went to prison or not. Life was short and brutal, and they would kill you for the laces in your shoes if the mood was upon them. Under duress, Anna had been known to attack creatures larger than she, take on burdens too heavy for her frame or mountains too steep for her skill. Now she wasn’t under duress; she was on vacation. One of the tenets of a good vacation was that the holidaymakers all come back alive.
So, no sticking her nose into the dark underbelly of this particular beast.
As a private citizen there were things she could do that law enforcement could not, fairly safe things. A member of law enforcement could not break into a person’s house and expect any judge in the nation to rule the evidence found there as admissible in court. As a private citizen, Anna could. If she found anything of note, she would call the police. An anonymous tip would do it. Given this was the New Orleans PD, maybe several anonymous tips and a trail of breadcrumbs. Or cash, she thought uncharitably.
She picked up the cell phone from beside her on the bed and poked a number to make it light up: 2:23 A.M. In less free-spirited cities the bars closed at midnight or two in the morning. Bourbon Street partied till 4:00 A.M.
No time like the present for a little B and E.
She rose and dressed in the dark. The easy way to accomplish her objective would be to wake Geneva and ask for the key to Jordan’s apartment, but Anna hated to drag her friend into the middle of her sleuthing. Besides, she didn’t know the legalities of a landlord discovering evidence of a crime in a rental and reporting it. Especially with Geneva. The plain sight ruling might not apply to a blind woman.
If the lock on her cottage was any indication of the state of affairs on Jordan’s door, she shouldn’t have any trouble getting in. Armed with a flashlight and her library card to jimmy the lock, she descended the stairs and slipped into the courtyard. In the city it was never truly dark. She had no need of a flashlight to find her way, but, once inside Jordan’s apartment, she’d feel more secure with a flashlight than if she turned on the overheads.
The alleyway on his side of the house was slightly wider than that on Geneva’s, but paved with the same style old brick and verdant with things that loved heat and moisture. This included mosquitoes, and Anna cursed the whining bloodsuckers as she studied the door and window into Jordan’s rental. There were no double French doors as on the owner’s side. Here was only a plain window, six by four and paned and blinded by closely drawn shades, and a cheap wooden door the previous owner had bought at Home Depot or Lowe’s and hung in place of the heavy one that had come with the original house. The window was dark; no light leaked out around the shades or under the door. Emboldened, Anna stepped up to the lock and took out her library card, hard plastic like a credit card, and slipped it into the generous crack between door and frame. An easy snick let her know the plastic had eased aside the lock just as a sharp yelp froze her in place.
Jordan’s mutt. She’d forgotten about the little black dog. Because he was little and soft and smelled of lilacs didn’t mean he wouldn’t take a bite out of a burglar in the wee hours of the morning. Anna steeled herself to kick the dog if she had to. It took more effort than readying to kick a member of her own species. Animals, by definition, might occasionally be guilty, but they were never culpable.
Slowly, she opened the door an inch or two to see if slavering hound’s teeth would Cujo through. Only the sound of panting and another low moan, like a teensy-weensy wolf howl, trickled out.
“I’m coming in, little guy. Don’t be afraid,” Anna said softly as she toed the door open another foot, then two. The inside of the apartment was as dark as human paranoia could make it, the windows not only shaded but draped. Ambient light from the city night drifted around Anna and cast a pale green square on the floor. In the middle was the dog, black as a Rorschach test, tongue hanging drunkenly from one side of its mouth, black feathery tail sweeping enthusiastically across the oaken planks.
“Not much of a watchdog, are you?” Anna asked as she squatted and petted him. Again the funny little howl. “But cute as all get-out,” she said. “If I’ve got to send your daddy to jail, I promise I’ll find you a good home. Maybe right here with Sammy and M’Boya. A pack. How would you like that?” The dog looked at her happily. Dogs were so easy to please.
In the precise beam of the flashlight she could see the dog wasn’t truly black. As she ruffled his short fur, white showed at the roots. Punk to the bone, Jordan had dyed his dog’s fur black. “Lucky you,” Anna said. “It could have been tattoos or piercings.”
The dog wagged his tail.
“Time to ransack,” she told the little beast, and, with a last ruffle of his silky ears, she stood and shined her light around the room. “Holy shit,” she whispered.
The room was tiny, eight by seven at best, with only the one window and a door in the back wall leading to either bath or bedroom. The furnishings consisted of an old desk that had probably been rescued from the street on garbage day or dragged out of the maze of salvage that clogged most of Geneva’s property, a chair of the same vintage, a few dishes on a counter with a sink and a microwave, and a laptop and printer. There was nothing to suggest comfort: no couch, rug, television set, or upholstered chair.
There was, however, wall decoration. As she played her light over it Anna wanted to weep and gnash her teeth. Most of all, she wanted to tie Jordan into a granny knot and lock him away for all eternity. Nearly every inch of space was covered with pictures downloaded from the Internet, printed out, and thumbtacked to the walls. Hundreds of pictures of children—little girls mostly—in sexually explicit poses. Some of the children were photographed having sex, with one another, with adults, with animals. Two were of babies, not yet two, being used.
“God damn it,” Anna hissed. “God damn it!” She clicked the flashlight off so she could breathe. Still she could feel the images pressing in from the walls. Anna might have spent most of her adult life with squirrels and pine trees, but she, like every other American, was aware pedophiles stalked playgrounds and the Internet. What she hadn’t wrapped her mind around was the sheer magnitude of the horror. In her brief and truncated passage through the photographs Jordan lived amid, she’d been drenched with the cruelty; hundreds of children being used like objects. Did the monsters not see their victims’ eyes in the pictures? Dead eyes in five-year-olds, frightened grimaces, terror, dull acceptance, frozen smiles? How could anyone see past those to the point of his perversion? Or was t
he palpable misery part of the payoff for the pervert?
“God damn,” Anna whispered, and it wasn’t an empty curse; it was a request for the Almighty to put each and every one of them into everlasting hellfire.
She had no desire to crawl deeper into Jordan’s lair. She had all she needed. She would call the police and tell them she’d peeked in the window and seen what she’d seen. Regardless of the murders perpetrated in New Orleans on any given night, there wasn’t a policeman in a thousand who wouldn’t jump at the chance to put a bastard like Jordan away.
Anna backed toward the door as if, in the black pitch of the hole, should she turn her back on the images, the very walls would pour forth sufficient blood and tears to drown her. The dog, invisible in the ink she couldn’t bear to disturb with her light, woofed. For a moment she was overwhelmed by a desperate need to rescue the little guy. Surely even a dog did not deserve to live with images like this poisoning the air around him.
Another woof, and she felt the silk of his fur brush her calf. The dog was headed for the door as if he, too, needed to get away before the lights came on and the tragedy on the walls filled the room like concrete. Then he was barking a happy bark and scratching at the wood.
Welcoming his master home.
A key struck the lock with a metallic click. The slimy wretch had come home early.
It was just the sort of thing a prick like Jordan would do, Anna thought.
NINETEEN
The sun was well up by the time Clare had gathered together the tools of her trade—this time a trade of her life for that of a man. Laid out on the counter of the kitchenette, like all else white-on-white but for stainless steel drawer pulls, were the items she had walked two miles to the Walmart to buy with David’s money. The bathroom would have been the logical place for the transformation, but Jalila had exclusive use of the bedroom and Clare hadn’t had the courage to commute through it to the bath except as nature demanded.