Someone Like Me

by M. R. Carey

  “Quick question,” Beebee said. “Did you keep the bag? The one that had the message on it?”

  “No! It had dogshit all over it. It went right in the trash.” Liz only realized as she said it what a stupid move that was.

  “And the trash has been taken out since then?”

  Liz nodded. “Sorry.”

  Beebee shrugged it off. “Never mind. I was just thinking aloud, you know … the guy’s handwriting, maybe a fingerprint or two. Would have been nice to have that if it was there to be had. But anyway, there’s more than enough here to prove you’re being deliberately targeted. Stalking laws apply, if we catch the son of a bitch. Pardon my French.”

  “I’ve called him worse inside my head, believe me,” Liz said. “So is there anything we can do about this?”

  “Well, the first thing is you fit locks on the windows. He’s stayed outside up to now, but you shouldn’t assume he’ll stick to that.”

  “The windows have all got cockspur handles. But we’re still getting the last of the hot days and we don’t have any AC. I need to let the bedrooms cool down so Moll can sleep.”

  “Lockable window screens,” Lowenthal said. “You need the solid ones that sit in a frame.” Which would cost hundreds of dollars, Liz knew. She’d have to use the credit card, which she was trying really hard not to do.

  “Plus you should fit a chain on the door,” the cop went on. “Or better yet a security bar. And some outside lights if you don’t have any. Good and bright. Cameras are really useful too, especially at the back of the building.”

  Liz shook her head. They were straying into fantasy fiction now. “I definitely can’t afford to fit cameras.”

  “Maybe you can,” Beebee said. “There’s got to be a neighborhood watch around here. Join it, and ask if they’ve got a bulk-buy scheme. They can get you a discount on most of this stuff, and probably fit it for you so you don’t have to pay for someone to install them.”

  Lowenthal’s turn. “Get into the habit of checking every door and window before you go out. Never leave anything unlocked.”

  Then Beebee again. They had a great little double act going, which made Liz uncomfortably aware that they must have done this a lot of times. Was the world full of bird-killing, dogshit-hurling creeps? “Park the car on the drive, not the street. Might be whoever it is will think twice before coming over your property line, especially if the lights are on.”

  “Which you should leave one on all the time, even at night,” Lowenthal chipped in. “You’d be amazed how well that works as a deterrent.”

  “So that’s you,” Beebee said. “The other half of the equation is what we can do. There’s a car on flexible patrol most nights. I’ll see if we can shift it to this side of Lincoln for the next week or so, so if anything does happen and you have to dial 911 you’ll get a quicker response.”

  That was comforting. “Thanks, Beebee.”

  “You’re welcome. Okay, I’m thinking aloud here. There are some CCTV cameras up on Meadow Street. I’m going to pull the footage and take a look. If your perp isn’t local, he most likely came in along that route. We’ve got the dates and times of the incidents to go on. We might get lucky. If the same face keeps popping up, we can feed it into the face recognition program and see what falls out.”

  “Thanks,” Liz said again. “Thank you.”

  “If there’s another incident, let us know right away,” Beebee said. “Or if you see someone hanging around, or especially if you get another written message.” Her tone had become brisk. She shifted her weight, preparing to stand. “We’re right on the end of the phone, okay?”

  Zac looked from one cop to the other, and then to Liz. He seemed surprised that things were wrapping up so fast. “What about my dad?” he demanded.

  Beebee and Lowenthal both looked at him, wearing identical deadpans.

  “How do you mean, Zac?” Beebee asked.

  “Well, shouldn’t you haul him in and question him?”

  Liz had been thinking the same thing, but had fought shy of saying it. A part of her just found it too hard to go there. In spite of the violence and the verbal take-downs, the years of intimidation and grinding down, she couldn’t make herself believe that the man she’d loved and lived beside and made a family with could put so much thought and effort into making her unhappy.

  “It’s reasonable to raise the question,” Beebee said, but her hands were raised with the palms out. Hold your horses. “I don’t think interviewing Marc would be a good idea. That is, unless there’s something that points to his being involved. Is there anything?”

  “The message on the bag of shit,” Zac said with an incredulous laugh like it was obvious. “That was a threat. Like, this isn’t just someone playing stupid tricks, it’s an attack. A … a campaign. And the bird, you know. It was killed with a wire snare. My dad taught me how to make one of those when I was ten and he was trying to get me to try out for wilderness scouts. You should look to see if he’s got wire and garden stakes in his house.”

  “Lots of people do, son,” Lowenthal said. “Wouldn’t actually prove anything now, would it?”

  Beebee closed her notebook and put it away as if to show that she was going off the record. “Here’s the thing,” she said—to Liz, not to Zac. “We haven’t gone to trial yet. When we do, your ex-husband’s lawyer will be looking to poke some nice big holes in the police evidence, because it’s strong and it’s damning. If we go and brace Marc about this without anything to show by way of due cause, well, we’re just strengthening his hand. We’re actually giving him ammunition to prove a prejudicial process, and he could use that to get an acquittal. You could have him all up in your lives again.”

  “So you can’t go after the most likely suspect because that would mean admitting he’s a suspect,” Liz summed up.

  “It sounds stupid, but yeah. That’s it exactly. You’re always tempted to join the dots when something like this happens. Why wouldn’t you? But you’ve got to wait until you’ve got enough dots to make a shape.”

  “Get those cameras,” Lowenthal said. “If you possibly can.”

  “Yeah,” Beebee said, nodding. “If you were to catch Marc on your property, breaching his restraining order, then we’d be off to the races.” The two officers stood up. “Call me if you just want to talk,” Beebee said. “Any time.”

  Liz promised she would. She was doing sums in her head, trying to see if there was any way of buying a security camera. Maybe one of the pawnshops down from the church on Frankstown Avenue would sell her a second-hand one, but it didn’t seem all that likely.

  Lowenthal examined the door jamb on the way out. “You could fit a nice, thick slide bar on here, see?” he said.

  “Yeah,” Liz said, trying to sound enthusiastic. “Good idea.”

  She closed the door behind the two cops. The visit had done little to reassure her, despite Beebee’s kindness and very evident wish to help.

  Zac was even more unhappy, not to mention frustrated and angry. “Okay,” he said, “maybe they can’t talk to him, but we can. We can let him know we’re onto him.”

  Liz went back to the door and turned the key in the lock. “If it is him, Zac, I’d rather leave him to make his own mistakes, rather than telling him what we’re thinking. Whoever it is, our best chance is if they screw up.” After a few moments, she said, “I don’t know how, but I’m getting those cameras.”

  She did her best to lift the mood, offering to take her son on at Sonic the Hedgehog—a Neolithic console game that Liz had played in her youth and had introduced to her kids courtesy of a Greatest Hits of the Nineties compilation for Zac’s console. Zac agreed, but they only got halfway through the Green Hill Zone before they folded. Sonic was a feel-good game, and they just couldn’t get there.

  “I guess I’ll turn in,” Liz said, kissing Zac on the cheek.

  “I guess I’ll play some Mass Effect,” Zac said.

  Neither of them stuck to those plans. When Liz passed Z
ac’s door on her way back from the bathroom, she saw him talking to Francine Watts on Skype.

  And in her own room she sat awake, listening to the house and to the occasional gusts of wind hitting the side wall. Everything at night sounds like a home invasion, if you’re in the right mood. She wearied herself with the strain of constant attention and constant reading in.

  Liz’s cell rang twice. The same unfamiliar number both times. She didn’t bother to answer. Cold call or wrong number, she didn’t want to have to deal with either. She was still thinking about the cameras, and the security bar for the door. She had the money her mom had left her, almost three thousand dollars. It was sitting in a savings account where she’d hoped it would become the core of a little nest egg for Zac and Moll. She’d never been able to add so much as a dime to it. Maybe now was the time to smash that piggy bank, however much she hated the thought of her mom telling her I told you so from beyond the grave.

  When she finally dozed off, around about 2:30 in the morning, Beth was waiting for her.

  Fran lay on her bed, fully clothed and with her laptop propped up on her knees. Lady Jinx was curled up beside her, lightly asleep or else pretending to be. It was well after midnight, but someone down the street who was learning guitar was still playing languid chords, just about in tune. The sound came in through her open window like a reminder that the city never sleeps.

  Her dad did, though, and tonight he’d crashed out early after three hours’ overtime at the firehouse and their first Chinese takeout in absolutely ages. Chinese food and a DVD screening of Who Framed Roger Rabbit had been Fran’s ultimate treat through most of her childhood. It reliably cheered her up, which of course was why Gil had suggested it. He could see that his little girl was preoccupied, and he must have assumed that meant she was sad. If anything, though, the opposite was true. The quest Fran had embarked on with Zac Kendall filled her with a tense, prickly excitement.

  She had tried to medicate her fear away, and that hadn’t worked out so well. Her visit to the Perry Friendly had been another kind of medication, trying to domesticate the fear into something she could cope with. That hadn’t worked either.

  Now she was hunting it. She had equipped an expedition. A small one, admittedly, but every quest has to start somewhere. Even the Fellowship of the Ring had just been a bag of random hobbits until Frodo got Elrond to handle the crowdfunding.

  That skinny little white boy is not Elrond, Jinx growled without opening her eyes.

  Maybe he’s Samwise, Fran said, inside her mind so Zac wouldn’t hear.

  His mom is a ring-wraith!

  Zac’s face loomed and lurched on the screen in front of Fran, her laptop’s crappy video card chopping up his movements into jerky stop-motion. She could see glimpses of his bedroom behind him, teasingly revealed and hidden as he moved. It was the first boy’s room Fran had ever visited, even virtually. The superhero figurines, the drum kit, the iPod dock whose speaker was in the shape of the little robot beachball from Star Wars … it was all kind of thrilling and exotic. Like everything in the room was made out of Y chromosomes.

  “So shall we, like, do a mission briefing before we start?” Zac asked her. “Because I got a ton of stuff here, but I fell down a little bit on the quality control. A lot of it is tabloid crap. Bruno Picota, portrait of a psycho, kind of thing.” He held up a thin sheaf of papers in front of the webcam so she could see he’d done his homework.

  “Mission is to accumulate facts,” Fran said. “Nothing is irrelevant. The more I know, the more I understand, the better.”

  “Do we need to know where the gaps in your memories are? Like, make a list, or something, so we can tick them off as we go?”

  “It’s hard to see a gap, Zachary. If you don’t know what’s meant to be there, you don’t notice it when it’s not. Ditto with stuff you remember wrong. I vote we throw our net real wide to start with, and narrow in as we go.”

  “Cool,” Zac said. “Well, I found out why the TV news started calling Picota the Shadowman.”

  The name brought a soft, rumbling growl from Lady Jinx.

  “I know that one,” Fran said.

  “Of course you do. You were there. See, you’ve got an unfair advantage on all this stuff.”

  Fran stuck her tongue out at him. “I don’t know it from when I was six, goon. I told you, after the cops pulled me out of that room my brain was scrambled eggs. And my mom and dad kept me away from all the trial coverage. I was the one kid in Pittsburgh who didn’t know one thing about Bruno Picota.

  “But then when I was eleven there was a TV special. My dad made sure I was nowhere near the TV when it came on, but he forgot about the magic of the internet. I was round at Maisie’s house one afternoon—Maisie from chess club—and she downloaded it from some pirate site she found. She thought it was cool, and she was pissed with me when I wouldn’t watch it with her. She ended up watching it by herself, and then she told me some of the best parts. She thought I had to be interested. Until I started crying and wouldn’t stop. That showed her.”

  Zac was staring at her with a troubled look on his face. “Hey,” Fran said. “I’m not eleven anymore. No tears, look.” She drew trickle-lines down her dry cheeks, which made him laugh and stop being freaked out. Freaked out was no good to either of them.

  “Shadowman,” she said. “Go.”

  “Picota said there was something wrong with your shadow. That was how he knew there was something wrong with you. He also said you might actually be a shadow in disguise.” Zac took a quick glance at his crib notes, but he seemed to have it pretty much by heart. “Shadows kept on being a key theme all through the trial. His lawyers read out a whole bunch of stuff he’d said to the psychiatrists who were examining him, and most of that was about shadows too. It seems weird that it all got said out loud in court, because it’s nine miles north of nuts. But I guess the defense was based on his being insane, so yeah. Probably didn’t do him any harm.”

  “Probably not,” Fran agreed. “You think that’s what he was doing? Trying for the fruit bat defense?”

  “Personally? I think he was a for-real lunatic, so it’s moot.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I think too. He had this whole touched-by-Jesus thing going on, didn’t he? Like, he believed there were all these people walking around Pittsburgh who were really devils or had a bit of the devil inside of them. But if you were on God’s team, you could tell them by their shadows so you knew who you had to fight.”

  Zac consulted his notes again. “He didn’t mention devils,” he said.

  “Yeah, he did.” That was one of the things Fran remembered from Maisie’s summary.

  “Not according to the newspaper reports. He said something else. Something out of Native American mythology that I can’t pronounce. Skank-God-Munch, or something like that. It was some kind of monster.”

  “Devil, monster. Comes down to the same thing, right?”

  “Not if you’re a Native American, would be my guess.”

  “I thought Picota’s family was Italian.”

  “On his dad’s side they were Italian. His mom had an ancestor who was First Nations. A long way back, though. Maybe he heard the stories when he was a kid and they stayed in the back of his mind.”

  “Okay. Something that’s like the devil only different. Picota grabbed me because I was one of the people he thought had been …”

  “Touched.”

  “Corrupted.”

  “Affected.”

  “Poisoned. Come on, Zac, he was gonna cut the evil right out of me. There’s no point in trying to find a polite word for it.”

  Stand down, Lady J, she added inside her mind. Don’t sweat this.

  I wouldn’t have let him cut you! The little fox had come out of her curl and was showing her blindingly white teeth in a battle snarl.

  I didn’t even know you then, Fran said. You didn’t come along until afterward.

  Jinx didn’t answer. Fran looked down to see that she had retreated
further under the bed and turned to face the other way.

  “Okay, poisoned it is,” Zac said, oblivious to all this drama. “He was on a crusade. Trying to stop all these Skank-God shenanigans before shit got real. It turned out he’d attacked a man in the street a few days before he took you. Hit him with a wrench about a million times, and then ran away thinking he’d killed him. The police were already investigating that assault when the word came in about you. But the MO was different, so nobody made the connection.”

  “Because Bruno grabbed me and took me somewhere instead of attacking me on the spot.”

  “Right.”

  “And I’m very grateful for it, believe me. Profoundly fucked up, but not dead. I will take that to the bank.”

  “By the way, the guy who Picota attacked—Jeffrey Mallen—confirms all this shadow stuff. He said Picota was going on about his shadow, yelling and freaking out about it, right before he started hitting him.”

  Zac flicked through his stack of printouts until he found the one he was looking for, and read aloud. “He said, “Where did you get that?” I thought he was pointing at something I was wearing, so I said, “What? Where did I get what?”

  “He said, “The shadow! The shadow! Where did you get it? You better tell me.” He was getting angry, and I tried to calm him down. I made a joke out of it, saying I’d always had it. “We’re born with them. Haven’t you got one?” The next thing I knew he had this wrench in his hand and he hit me in the face with it. I went down, trying to protect my head. He kept on hitting me, then walking away, then coming back and hitting me again. He was shouting the whole time, and I think he was crying.

  “Finally he hit me a good one and I lost consciousness. I only found out about the rest afterward. If that couple hadn’t come running up I would have been dead. He was clearly insane. There was no way he was going to stop until he’d killed me.”

  Zac had read Jeffrey Mallen’s testimony in a flat, inflectionless voice. Fran thought that she would have put some drama into it, but she could understand why he hadn’t wanted to do that. It might have felt like he was turning it into a joke.