The Edge of Sleep

by Wiltse, David

  Becker shared Karen’s small laugh at the expense of “Hairy” Hemmings. He found that his chest seemed lighter. The sense that his cheeks and ears were ablaze with humiliation had lessened. He still didn’t want to look Karen in the eye, but he was able to feign levity.

  She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel, waiting for Malva to answer. It wasn’t much, but at least they were working.

  Chapter 19

  DEE FOUND THEM A MOTEL OUTSIDE of Hinsdale in the Berkshires. From the window Ash could see the mountains rising softly on all sides with the gentle curves of a woman’s body. If he squinted he could imagine he was lying on the floor, looking up at Dee’s naked body where she lay on the bed, one mountain being the rounded mound of her breast, another the swell of hip and thigh.

  Dee was away, looking for work, and Ash was alone. The television was very disappointing; the mountains interfered with reception and there was no cable service. It was the least modem of all the many motels in which Dee and Ash had stayed together. Too far from the Berkshire Festival and Tanglewood to get the summer tourists, too remote from any sizable city to attract traveling businessmen, located on too small a road to pull in even random travelers, the motel existed primarily on local trade, which meant high schoolers looking for a place to drink after the prom, illicit lovers, homeowners whose bedrooms were being painted or whose houses were being fumigated.

  Fifty yards from the motel, without any line of demarcation, a car sat on cement blocks next to a pickup truck, its engine parts scattered among the weedy lawn. Immediately beyond the autos was a ramshackle house with a line of wash hanging behind it. Two children played under the clothesline, screaming at each other with abandon as they slashed with sticks at each other’s shins.

  Behind the motel, parallel to the road, was the forest that surrounded all of man’s incursions in this part of the country. Ash could not see from his side window just how close it was to the motel in the back, but he knew it was there, close by, a perfect home for bears. He imagined himself venturing into it some night, shuffling up the mountain amid the trees, smelling the trails of the other animals, hearing them scurry off at his approach. It pleased him to think of finding a cave high up the mountain, one known to other bears before him but never seen by man, where he could live on berries and fish and water from the high country streams. Dee could find him, of course—an eagle could go anywhere—but his lair would be too high and too steep for anyone else to dare. When winter came he would curl up amongst the leaves and sleep for months. No one would suffer because he slept because none would be within his reach.

  Ash looked at the distant mountain with simple longing. Perhaps, if Dee brought no one home, she would let him seek the woods and mountains one night soon. But he knew she would bring someone home. And soon. She had taken no pills since Tommy left but had not crashed into her abyss of depression. There was a difference in her mood, however. It was no longer wide-ranging ebullience but seemed tempered and directed by a strain of hostility. Dee appeared to have found a target for her energies and was focusing on it in a way Ash had never seen before. When she got work, which never took her long, Ash expected her to bring someone home again. His chances to get into the woods were fading quickly.

  Dee was successful at the third nursing home she tried. As usual the manager looked at her as if she were a gift from heaven. In a business with a chronic shortage of qualified personnel, a young, attractive, white registered nurse with experience and the willingness to work in less than glamorous conditions on any shift and for low pay was even too much to pray for. And, of course, too good to be true. The manager understood that the woman was recently divorced and relocated, along with the implicit suggestion that this job would be temporary. How long could it be before someone like this found a better job or remarried or moved to a big city? Not very long, the manager thought, but however long it was, it was worth it. As usual, she asked Dee as few questions as possible and hired her on the spot.

  Driving back to the motel. Dee formulated her plans. The situation was new for her. She had never had a specific target before, and thus had never really had a plan. Just a method. She had employed it when the circumstances seemed right and the need was overwhelming, but always with a strong element of randomness in the process. This time was different.

  She felt a swelling sense of excitement. This time she would not only fulfill her irresistible need, she would also be performing an act of retribution. Take and it shall be taken from you, she thought triumphantly. There was a Biblical ring to it, and a Biblical fitness to what she would do as well. She would have her son back at long last, and those who had taken him away would suffer. Dee felt exceptionally good. The laughter bubbled in her chest and burst from her throat as she approached the motel. She was quickly laughing so hard she had to slow down to avoid swerving into the wrong lane.

  She could see Ash’s finger stuck between the slots of the room’s Venetian blind. He was gazing out at the mountains again, and exposing himself to discovery in the process, but Dee could not be angry with him, she felt too good.

  “Put on your hiking boots,” she said as she opened the motel door. Ash sprang guiltily away from the window.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To the mountains, of course,” Dee said. “I tried, but they won’t come to us.”

  She was smiling so broadly that Ash’s heart sank.

  Becker wished he were a drinker. Rejection and sorrow seemed to call for burying one’s nose in a glass of sour mash, but Becker only found himself getting sleepy after the first drink and downright stupid if he forced himself to have the second. The sense of being out of control that alcohol caused frightened him far worse than being unhappy, so he took his mourning sober.

  “A little nip couldn’t hurt,” said Tee, tipping up a beer to prove his point. The police chief had brought over a cold six-pack on a mission of commiseration. Receiving no cooperation from his friend. Tee had undertaken the six-pack on his own. He was making impressive progress.

  “It heartens the disconsolate,” Tee said. “I read that somewhere. On a cereal box. I think.”

  “What heartens the disconsolate?” Becker asked.

  Tee lifted the beer can. “Getting shit-faced.”

  “Are you disconsolate. Tee?”

  “No, you are, but if you’re not going to do it, somebody has to.”

  “That’s what friends are for,” Becker said.

  “Is that what they’re for? I always wondered. Well, it’s a small sacrifice to make for a buddy. I know you’d do the same for me if I got dumped.”

  “What I will do is drive you home after you finish your sacrifice. It wouldn’t look good if the chief got arrested for DWI.”

  Tee belched loudly, then tapped his chest with his fist, looking immensely pleased with himself.

  “So why are these fine women dumping you all over the place?” he asked. “What do you do to them?”

  Becker studied empty space for a moment before answering. “I think I make the mistake of falling in love with them,” he said at last.

  Becker’s distress and confusion were so obvious that Tee shifted uncomfortably in his chair and examined the top of his beer can.

  “I think in the beginning I’m a mystery to them and they find that intriguing and challenging. But once I fall in love with them. I’m not a mystery anymore because I make an effort for them to really get to know me.”

  Tee wished Becker would not be quite so open about the whole business. He was not accustomed to being spoken to like this by another man. He didn’t know how to respond. If Becker were a woman, there would be no problem, of course. Tee would already be on the sofa beside her, a comforting arm on her shoulder. A comforting arm on Becker’s shoulder would make them both so uncomfortable that Tee could not imagine placing his there.

  “Once they get to know the real me, it scares them,” Becker continued.

  “You’re not so scary,” Tee said.

  B
ecker looked at him directly.

  “You don’t know the real me,” Becker said in a tone that implied that Tee was much better off in ignorance. Tee drank again, then broached a new subject.

  “So, you’re retired again, or what?”

  “She didn’t think she could continue to work with me, under the circumstances.”

  Tee did not inquire what the circumstances were for fear of setting off further confessionals.

  “Must be nice, sitting around, doing nothing.”

  “It sucks,” Becker said.

  “Well, except for that part it must be nice. You get awful broody when you’re on a case, you know. On the other hand, look how bright and cheery you are now that you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

  “I haven’t stopped thinking about it just because I’m not officially on the case,” said Becker.

  “Could have fooled me. You’re just so carefree ...”

  “A kid is going to be killed. Tee. We’re going to find the body of Bobby Reynolds and then another kid will be taken and I know it as sure as I know you’re sitting here, and there’s not a god damned thing I can do about it—except think.”

  “You ought to cultivate some bad habits ...”

  “And every kid from here on is on my head. It’s going to keep happening because I couldn’t stop it from happening.”

  “It’s not your fault, for Christ’s sake ...”

  “I fucked it. Tee. I just plain fucked it. I got off on the wrong foot because I was so sure it had to be a certain very specific kind of person. I thought I understood exactly who that person was and everything I did after that was wrong, and everything everyone else did was wrong, too, as a result of my being wrong and being sure I was right.”

  “What are you. Sherlock Holmes? You never fucked up before?”

  Becker paused for a moment.

  “I always understood them before,” he said.

  “Understood who?”

  “The killers. The animals. The monsters. Whatever you want to call them.”

  “What’s to understand? They’re shitheads.”

  “Spoken like a cop.”

  “You telling me they’re not shitheads? You specialize in serial killers, no? You’re the expert on psychos who kill again and again and again, right? You’re saying these people are not shitheads?”

  Becker paused again. He fiddled briefly with his shoelace.

  “We’re all shitheads. Tee. That’s why I could always understand them.”

  “Maybe it’s the beer,” Tee said, “but it sounds to me as if you’re lumping me in the same category as the shitheads, and I resent that.”

  “Maybe it’s the beer,” Becker agreed.

  “Because I personally, have never drained the blood out of people and boiled their bones, the way what’s-his-name did. I have never grabbed a kid from a shopping mall and beaten him to death.”

  “They weren’t beaten to death.” Becker said. “They were beaten to dying. And then they were smothered.”

  “A nice distinction.”

  “A merciful one, maybe.”

  “You got a funny idea of mercy.”

  “You ever been beaten. Tee?”

  “No.”

  “Beaten regularly, viciously, by someone you were dependent on for your food, your shelter, your life?”

  “No.”

  “Beaten by somebody you loved and you didn’t know what you had done to make them so angry at you?”

  “I said no.”

  “Someone who kept reminding you that he loved you even while he was beating you? No? Then maybe you don’t know if it was mercy or not.”

  “What are you pissed off at me about?”

  “For that matter, have you ever killed anybody?”

  “In Clamden? It’s against the law.” Tee chuckled, hoping Becker would join him, but Becker continued, his visage darkening steadily.

  “What if you did. Tee? What if in the line of duty, perfectly legitimately, you put a hole through some shithead and watched the life ooze out of him?”

  “I guess I’d deal ...”

  “And what if you found out, to your great surprise, it didn’t bother you all that much? What if you discovered you even kind of liked it?”

  Tee felt as if he was being hammered by the queries that were not questions. He wanted to be away, but the room seemed to have shrunk and the power of Becker’s anger—if that’s what it was—was pinning Tee to the chair.

  “You didn’t wish it, you hadn’t planned on it, but suddenly there it was. Just an accident, a result of something else you were doing, but there it was. You liked killing the shithead. You liked it throughout your whole god damned body and mind and soul, it gave you a thrill like nothing else could or ever had. What then, Tee?”

  “I’d see a shrink pretty damned fast.”

  “Good thinking. What if you discovered that the shrink was fascinated by you but had no clue how to change you? What if half a dozen shrinks were powerless to erase that thrill that came to you in only one way?”

  “Then I guess I’d have a problem.”

  Becker laughed, sharply, bitterly.

  “That would be correct,” he said. “Now assume that you were, and are, an outstanding peace officer, sworn to uphold the law and preserve the Constitution. What if you were the fucking Chief of Police, but you had this little problem? Then suddenly you came upon a shithead who had a similar problem, had a tendency to thrill a little too much when he killed someone, you know, but with the difference that he wasn’t an outstanding officer of the law and local Chief of Police so his chances to kill people legally were rather limited. So, lacking your own native strength of will and inbred desire to do good works, this shithead has taken to getting his thrills as best he can. Not always in the same manly, straightforward way as yourself, of course, not by just doing away with people in the course of duty, but in more inventive and leisurely ways more in keeping with his individual temperament and personality—such as slowly draining the blood out of his house guests as you mentioned or hanging them from the basement pipes to study anatomy before stuffing pillows with their hair or maybe just tying them up and practicing all the positions in the Kama Sutra on their bodies before he feels called upon to get rid of them out of embarrassment over his excesses. See, whatever his peculiarities, he still suffers from essentially the same little problem that you have. Now, under those circumstances, and bearing in mind that you are the chief of fucking police and have an inherent tendency to consider yourself a human being despite your problem, don’t you think you might make an effort to try to understand these shitheads? Since you have the same affliction and all. Like fellow stutterers, say. In terms of insight, you might be one step ahead of the average peace officer who not only doesn’t stutter but also regards stutterers as an alien and therefore downright different species altogether. What do you think?”

  “It must be the beer,” Tee said. “But I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about ...”

  “I thought we were discussing bad habits.”

  “... and tomorrow you’re going to be glad I don’t remember it, either.” Tee tipped up the last of the six-pack of beers. He rose shakily to his feet. “A pleasure, as always,” Tee said.

  “I’m sorry,” Becker said, suddenly contrite.

  “Not at all.”

  “I had no right to dump that on you.”

  “Only glad I could help,” said Tee. He clung to the chair to steady himself. “I live to serve. Besides, I’ve already forgotten what you said.”

  Becker drove Tee home and walked him to the door, where Tee turned and dropped a heavy hand on Becker’s shoulder.

  “You’re not nearly as big an asshole as you think you are,” Tee said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because if you were, I wouldn’t enjoy drinking with you so much.”

  “I am awfully good company,” Becker said. “It’s one of my better qualities.”

  “It is one
of your qualities. And I didn’t hear you stutter once all night, so what was that all about, anyway?” Fumbling with his key, shushing Becker with a finger to his lips to keep from waking his wife. Tee stepped into his house in a half crouch.

  Once inside. Tee drew himself erect and stopped staggering. He leaned against the door and sighed heavily with relief. It was not good, he thought, to know your friends too well. An awful lot of secrets were best kept that way.

  Becker called Hemmings on his direct line, avoiding the switchboard and the resultant entry of the call in the log.

  “You know officially I’m no longer on the case,” Becker said.

  “Back on medical extension, I understand,” Hemmings said cautiously. “Sorry to hear about that.”

  “Thank you.” Becker wondered how much of the sarcasm he heard in Hemmings’s voice was his own imagination. Just how crazy did the agents think he was? Drooling, unable to tie his own shoelaces? Living on medication? Or just taking advantage of a good opportunity to get out while clinging to the pension rights. Or did they think about him at all?

  “Just wanted to make sure you know my status,” Becker continued. “I don’t want you to end up with your ass in a ditch.”

  “I appreciate the thought. What can I do for you?” Hemmings asked.

  “I was curious, Hairy. About the Reynolds case, and the others ...”

  “Can’t get it out of your mind, right?”

  “Right, I’m afraid.”

  “Don’t apologize. We’re all obsessive/compulsive or we wouldn’t be with the Bureau. What about it?”

  “What have you turned up on the search for a nurse’s uniform?”

  “Well,” Hemmings said, and Becker could detect in the single word the enthusiasm rising. A technician happy to complain about his problems. “I’m working only with a map and the yellow pages, you know. I started with the Amell Wicker case because I figured since the Reynolds snatch is only three weeks old, any uniform might not even have come to the attention of the cleaners as unclaimed yet. The Wicker case is two years old. They would have noticed an unclaimed uniform by now if they are ever going to. So I started there and I’m working my way forward in time. I began with a ten-mile radius around the point of seizure, which was the Upper Saddle River mall, and called every cleaner listed in the yellow pages in the towns within that circle. That’s a little better than 314 square miles, you understand. A lot of cleaners. When that didn’t produce anything, I increased the radius to twenty miles and started over. I don’t know how quick your math is, Becker, but that increases the area to cover by another 942 square miles. You go to a thirty-mile radius and that’s another 1,884 square miles and so forth out to the fifty-mile radius we figure is the maximum. That’s a lot of phone calls.”