Skin Privilege

by Karin Slaughter

  Sara noticed that he was using the sheriff's first name now. Only two cops could bond over one of them getting their face punched.

  Valentine told Sara, 'Lucky thing you told me to bring him along this morning. You'd probably have me on that table right now if he hadn't been there.'

  'Shit,' Jeffrey replied. 'Probably be both of us if you hadn't tripped the old fool.'

  Sara resisted the urge to roll her eyes. 'I take it Mr. Gibson is not coming in to do the formal identification?'

  Valentine explained, 'He wasn't too broke up about losing his son. They weren't exactly close.' He shrugged, allowing a hint of seriousness to enter his voice. 'Maybe when he sobers up, it'll hit him.'

  Jeffrey turned serious as well, telling Sara, 'He was out of control. We cuffed him, took him to the station, so he could sleep it off. Not the first time he's been there, from the looks of it.'

  'No,' Valentine agreed. 'Probably won't be the last, either.'

  'I took several photographs of his face,' Sara offered. 'You can show those to his father. It might make things easier.'

  Jeffrey asked Sara, 'Did you find anything?'

  'Not really.' She picked up the murder weapon and placed it on a sheet of brown paper so that she could photograph it. This was the first time Sara had really examined the full blade and handle. Looking at it now, she noticed two things about the knife: the blade was thin, maybe half an inch wide, and it was at least four inches long. Most important, unlike the majority of folding knives Sara had seen, there was no serration. The blade was smooth on one side and sharp on the other.

  Valentine's cell phone rang, the opening bars of ' Dixie ' filling the room. He checked the caller ID, then told them, 'If y'all could excuse me for a minute?'

  Sara waited until the door closed before picking up the camera and scrolling through the photographs.

  Jeffrey asked, 'Did you call the hospitals to see if Lena or Hank have been admitted?'

  'There are three within a fifty mile radius,' she told him, scanning through the photos. 'No sign at any of them.'

  'I guess that's good,' he said, though she could tell he was disappointed. If Lena had been tucked up in a hospital last night, there was no way she could have been out killing Boyd Gibson.

  Sara found the photo she wanted. 'This should make you feel better.'

  'What's that?'

  'Look at the wound,' she said, finding the series of close-ups she'd taken. 'It's jagged at the bottom and jagged at the top. I knew something wasn't right.'

  Jeffrey looked at the knife on the table, then back at the camera's LCD. He obviously knew where she was going with this, but still said, 'Okay.'

  'The knife – this knife' – she indicated Lena 's knife on the table-'Would have made a wound with a V-shaped bottom and a squared edge at the top. A serration leaves a jagged edge in the skin. The top and bottom of the wound in Boyd Gibson's back is jagged.'

  He was nodding. 'Based on the wound, the knife that killed Gibson was double-edged, serrated.' She could hear the excitement in his voice. Statistically, most stabbing victims were killed with single-edge serrated knives because that was what was usually in the kitchen drawer. Sara had never seen a double-edged serrated knife, let alone a stab wound from one. If there was someone out there in Elawah carrying such a weapon, he was more than likely the killer.

  Jeffrey tapped his fingers on the table, processing the new lead. 'I'd bet it was a custom job. Maybe something off-market for the military. Definitely full tang, probably a custom handle to match the sheath… How long do you think the blade would have to be?'

  'From the hilt to the point of the blade would have to be at least six inches long, then I'd guess from the wound that it's around an inch and a half wide, tops.' She pointed to Gibson. 'Look at how big he is. His chest is huge, his heart was enlarged. I found an entrance and exit wound through the left chamber.' She indicated Lena 's knife again. This blade might have pierced the back of the heart, but there's no way it could have gone all the way through the heart and out the front. It's not long enough – the whole thing tip to handle is eight inches long.'

  'There's got to be a local who makes these things.' He could not wipe the smile off his face. 'With the handle, a six-inch knife would run close to nine, ten inches. The guy we saw outside the hospital had a big knife on his belt. He left it in his car before he got out.'

  'It's not unusual for men to carry knives,' Sara pointed out. 'My dad keeps one on his belt for work.'

  'Last time I checked, your dad doesn't have a big fat swastika on his arm,' Jeffrey countered. 'Whoever did this was trying to frame Lena. No wonder she ran.'

  'Or maybe he was close to his knife and didn't want to let it go.' She walked over to the table where she had bagged Gibson's personal effects. 'Look at Gibson's knife. It's not off-the-shelf. He paid some good money for it. This isn't something you'd easily let go of.'

  The door opened and Valentine appeared. He kept the door propped open with his foot, as if he didn't plan to stay long. The man was obviously furious when he told them, 'That was the principal from the high school on the phone.'

  Jeffrey exchanged a look with Sara. 'And?'

  'He found some blankets and a couple of empty bags of potato chips in one of the temporary classrooms.' He shook his head, his teeth clenched so tight that his jaw stood out like a carved relief. 'Looks like we've found out where your detective's been sleeping.' Jeffrey flashed a smile that sent Valentine straight over the edge. 'My wife works at that school, you fuckwad.'

  Jeffrey offered, 'Well, I wouldn't feel too bad, Jake. I'm sure Myra didn't let her sleep there on purpose.'

  Valentine pressed his lips together, obviously struggling to think of a cutting response. He finally settled on, 'Go to hell,' then turned on his heel and slammed the door shut behind him.

  LENA

  SIXTEEN

  Two years ago, Jeffrey had thrown Ethan Green's arrest jacket in Lena 's face, ordering her to read it.

  Of course she never had.

  She had pretended to skim the file, taking in every fifth or sixth word, then pushed it back in his face with a belligerent, 'So?'

  Jeffrey had given her the highlights, the rundown of Ethan's crimes: grand theft auto, felony assault, forcible sodomy, rape. None of his words had penetrated – Lena was still in that phase where she thought of Ethan as two different people: the one who loved her and the one who would eventually kill her. The duality was not much of a stretch; at the time, Lena thought of herself in much the same terms.

  Sibyl had been dead almost a year when Lena first met Ethan. She was living at the college dorms, working campus security, struggling to get through each day without putting a gun to her head. Ethan was working on his master's degree. He had pursued Lena relentlessly, almost wearing her down.

  A few months later, Lena got her job back with the police force and moved in with Nan Thomas. Ethan was still in her life; Ethan was still her life. His arrest file had stayed in her Celica the whole time, well concealed behind the CD changer in her trunk. Lena hadn't wanted Nan to accidentally come across it. Truth be told, she hadn't wanted to take it into the house where Sibyl had once lived. It was bad enough when Ethan slept over.

  Lena walked across the weedy strip of land between the motel and the bar, her shoes crunching on broken glass and other debris that had been swept off the road. She passed the motel lobby on the way to her Celica. Though the night air was turning cold, Lena could still feel herself sweating as if she was sitting back in Hank's hellhole of a house.

  Grand theft auto. Felony assault.

  The file was exactly where she had secreted it two years ago, black tire treads marring the State of Connecticut seal on the outside of the yellowing folder. Lena took it out and for some reason felt the need to hide the file under her shirt as she bolted up the stairs to her motel room. No one was watching her. There was no need for these furtive moves. She still felt guilty, though. Still felt as if someone, somewhere was disapprov
ing.

  Maybe it would be better not to know. Ethan may have been calling Hank for money or support or perhaps he'd simply wanted to get in touch with Lena. She had moved from Nan 's and had a new phone number now. Had he sent letters to Nan? Had Nan hidden them from Lena, hoping she could sever the connection?

  Lena hooked the do-not-disturb sign on her door. She yanked the curtains closed and sat cross-legged on the bed, still holding the file to her chest. She could feel her beating heart thumping against the thick stack of pages, sweat making the manila folder stick to her skin.

  Slowly, she slid the file out from under her shirt.

  She ran her hand along the print, tracing the circle of the seal. Her fingers found the edge and she opened the file to find exactly the thing she never wanted to see again: Ethan staring back at her.

  The mug shot had been taken a few years before Lena had met Ethan, back when he was eighteen. He'd kept his hair cut short when she knew him, but in the photo, his head was shaved bald. His lips curled into a sneer as he glared at the camera, and the little sign he held in his hand was askew, as if he couldn't be bothered to keep it straight. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, something he never did anymore – or maybe he had stopped hiding his tattoos now that he was back in prison. They would serve him well inside.

  ETHAN ALLEN GREEN a/k/a ETHAN ALLEN WHITE a/k/a ETHAN ALLEN MUELLER.

  Lena could remember the time Ethan had explained the origins of his name. They were both in his dorm room, squeezed together on his single bed. He was on his back and she had wrapped herself around him so that she wouldn't fall off the narrow twin bed. Ethan was fairly short – he was only a few inches taller than Lena – but his muscles stood out from his body as if they were cut from granite. She'd had her head tucked under his arm, and the sound of his voice had vibrated in her ear.

  Sometime around the American Revolution, he told her, Ethan Allen had been the leader of the Green Mountain boys, a group that had pledged its life to Vermont 's independence. During the war, Allen and his crew had captured a British fort. By some accounts he was a military genius, by others an ignorant, cold-blooded killer.

  She had thought then as she did now that the namesake was not far off.

  Forcible sodomy. Rape.

  Lena knew only a little bit about Ethan's life before he'd moved to Grant County. Ethan's father had run out on him when he was a kid. His mother, a rabid racist, had married a man named Ezekiel White, a preacher of some kind. Ethan had changed his name to Green when he dropped out of his skinhead family. Lena had no idea why he didn't go back to Mueller, his biological father's name. Ethan didn't like to talk about his dad.

  When Lena had first met Ethan, he had claimed that he was working hard to change himself. Lena had accepted that, even respected it. As time passed, she had told herself there was no way he would be dating her if he still held on to his old beliefs. She was Hispanic – clearly so. She had become roommates with a lesbian – not just any lesbian, but Sibyl's lover. Ethan seemed not to care. He was more than cordial to Nan. He had said that he was in love with Lena, wanted to share the rest of his life with her. He had said that being with her was the only good thing he had ever done with his life. That his words from his mouth so sharply contrasted with the blows from his fists wasn't something she let herself think about too long.

  HEIGHT: 5'6" WEIGHT: 160 SEX: MALE HAIR COLOR: BROWN EYE COLOR: BLUE RACE: WHITE

  Race. His skin privilege, he called it. His white birthright.

  TATTOOS.

  There were so many – some Lena had even forgotten about. The arresting officer had documented them all, making notations about their origin, what they symbolized. Lena studied the photographs, really looking at the tattoos for the first time. She had always averted her gaze or kept her eyes closed when he took off his clothes. Even then, some of the images had managed to bleed through.

  A row of SS soldiers on the left side of his chest saluted an image of Hitler on the right. Below this was a large black swastika that undulated across his ripped abs. His left arm was covered with scenes of war, soldiers shouldering rifles, their hats emblazoned with the double S. The other arm had barbed wire snaking up it, faint outlines of camp barracks in the background.

  How had she touched this body? How had she let this body touch hers?

  Lena turned the page, found yet another photograph, Ethan's thick, brown hair had concealed more tattoos. In an arc at the base of his shaved skull were the words Sieg Heil. On the top of his head was another black swastika.

  Beside the photo, someone had explained, Hitler salute on back of head generally given after six years of active involvement. Swastika on head usual tag for leaders of North Conn, skinhead group.

  The last photo was a close-up of the underside of his left arm. Just at the base of his bicep was the letter A with a dash beside it. A-negative. The cop

  had written an explanation on the back of the picture, Hitler's Waff en SS, the Death's Head Battalion who guarded the concentration camps, all had their blood types tattooed under their arms. Symbolizes rank of general in white power movement.

  Lena had never asked about the letter under Ethan's arm, never wanted to know the truth of his past. Now, she was confronted with the truth -overwhelmed with it. Every photo was like a slap in the face.

  This was the father of the child she had left in some trashcan at the clinic in Atlanta. This was the man with whom she had shared her days, two whole years of her life.

  After Ethan had been taken back to prison, Lena had tried and failed miserably to be with another man. Greg Mitchell had lived with her several years before, and it seemed like fate when he reentered her life around the same time Ethan was leaving it. Nothing worked between them, though. She was not that same person from before, something that at first Greg took as a good thing. Later he came to be almost frightened of her.

  From the beginning, Lena had tried to hide her true self from Greg, to cloak her darkness and rough edges. She reined in her emotions so much that she spent most of her time with Greg feeling like a shell of what a human being should be. Sex between them was disastrous. After Ethan, she no longer knew how to be with a man who was gentle, how to kiss him and hold him and take pleasure from him instead of pain.

  If Angela Adams had stuck around, if she had been a mother to her two young girls instead of abandoning them to Hank, would Lena have ended up with Ethan? Would that defect inside of her, the one that drew her to his violence, his ruthless control, never have been triggered? Or would Lena have ended up like Charlotte Warren, still living in Reece, raising a couple of kids, waiting for her husband to come home from work so she could put supper on the table?

  Ethan's rap sheet was nearly thirty pages long. Most of the notes were written in the dry, minimalist style of a seasoned cop who knew better than to put too much on the page so some dickhead lawyer could later twist it all around and throw it back in his face during a trial. Lena knew how to read between the lines, though, and as she scanned records of arrest after arrest, she started to get a sharper picture of Ethan's life before they met.

  He'd started young, his first arrest coming when he was thirteen. He'd stolen some clothes from the local Belk. At fifteen, he was arrested for trying to steal a car. Both cases had been referred to juvenile court. Both times, he had been given probation. That couldn't have been it, though. You didn't go from stealing clothes to stealing cars without something in between. Lena knew that for every one crime you caught these guys doing, there were four more hiding in their closet. She would have bet good money that Ethan had boosted at least ten cars before they caught him in the act.

  His record stayed clean until he reached the age of seventeen. Then, he'd been accused of sodomizing a fifteen-year-old girl. Two weeks later, the charges were dropped. Lena gathered from the terse language in the report that the girl's parents hadn't wanted to put her through a trial. This was fairly common and probably wise. The world liked to believe differently, but any cop could
tell you that there was nothing more horrible – or more likely to ruin a woman's life – than a protracted rape trial.

  There was a notation on this arrest: Suspect bears tattoos and markings associated with violent neo-Nazi sect. Suggest referral to FBI for monitoring.

  Ethan was nineteen when he was arrested for assault. He'd used a knife during a fight, which brought it to a felony charge. The victim had apparently been cut pretty badly, but he refused to cooperate with police so the charges were reduced. Again, Ethan walked away from a serious charge.

  Three more years passed before the Connecticut State Police heard from Ethan Green again. Lena imagined this was during the time Ethan had finished his undergraduate degree and started his master's. That was probably the one thing about Ethan that scared people the most: he was smart, even gifted. He gave lie to the ignorant redneck racist. When Lena had first met him, he was trying to get into the PhD program at Grant Tech and probably would have made it had he not been arrested.

  Oddly enough, the charge that the Connecticut State Police finally managed to make stick was for kiting checks. Ethan had written a check to A amp;P for twenty-eight bucks and change when his bank account showed a balance of twelve dollars. He'd put his payroll check in to cover it the next day, but it was still illegal to knowingly float a check. This was the kind of arrest that indicated the cops had just been waiting to pounce on him. Millions of people shifted around money like this every day. You didn't get caught unless somebody was watching.

  Ethan had been caught, though. If the judge was in a bad mood, he was looking at ten years in a federal penitentiary.

  Lena was turning the page to find out what happened when the phone rang. She jumped, papers scattering on the bed. Her first thought was that no one knew she was here, then she remembered Hank. She leaned over to pick up the receiver, then stopped, letting the phone keep ringing. A photograph had fallen to the floor and she bent to retrieve it, freezing in midair as she saw the image of a beaten woman lying in a pool of blood.