by Saul Black
She worked through the images. Two hours went by. She lost focus. Told herself she was wasting her time. Got so sick of the process that she went back to the Katrina footage, dipping in at random. But there was nothing there. She’d seen it all before. Too many times before, the crowds milling around the concession stands, families deep in their own lives, kids laughing in the monkey house, the visible collective thrill in front of the big cats.
But the dead women throbbed silently around her.
She forced herself back to the CCTV from the zoo’s entrance. Spent another hour zooming and pulling back, rewinding, pausing, screen-grabbing, filing, her mind a surrealist mess of moments with Blasko and yawning lions and among the Filthy, filthy too and the exhausting catalogue of Katrina’s wounds and another drink and another cigarette and The Case Kansas mid-point goose fork balloon acceleration we don’t even know job or maybe none Dale won’t make it timecode 15.36.14… 15… 16… 17…
She leaned forward in her chair, rested her head on her arms on the desk. Don’t fall asleep here. If you’re ready for sleep, go to bed. Not sleeping in your bed when you could was like not drinking from a waterhole when you were lost in a desert.
Her eyes closed. It was sweet, the surrender, the yielding of the wiser part of herself. It was like childhood.
She woke with a start from a dream of falling.
Goddammit.
The timecode now said 37.11.06… 07… 08…
She’d lost twenty-two minutes.
Her intention, stretching, feeling her vertebrae tick, was to just rewind to the point at which she’d fallen asleep, shut down, then pick it up again tomorrow.
But for no reason she could identify – beyond guilt for having fallen asleep in the first place, a perverse or superstitious feeling of having been cheated of twenty-two minutes – she went back to where she’d nodded off, hit play, let the tape run.
15.36.14… 15… 16… 17… 18… 19…
She stopped the tape.
Had she seen this guy before?
The hundreds of faces shuffled in her head.
These were the intervals in which the God who wasn’t there operated. The two seconds after your eyes closed.
Her scalp tingled. The dead women gathered their sad energy around her.
White male, approximately six foot and one eighty, dark brown hair, dark eyes, possibly early thirties. Khaki combat pants, navy blue Raiders T-shirt, no wristwatch, no visible jewellery.
Her head was a station crowd of lone men. It was like straining to find a familiar face in the throng. It was like looking for a loved one. The fear you’d miss them in the confusion…
The Raiders shirt tantalised her.
She’d seen him before. Surely she’d seen him before? A different day. A different timecode. A different visit to the zoo. The same clothes. The fact of the same clothes was that kind of fact.
Calm down.
She pulled up the filed stills as thumbnails. There were more than three hundred, but her mind burned through its mess of dream and booze into unnatural awakeness.
Faces. Faces. Faces.
Half an hour in she stopped.
Same guy. Same clothes.
Three days earlier.
Alone. Definitely alone at the entrance on both occasions. The dark eyes simultaneously intense and remote.
Valerie stubbed out her cigarette. Kept the two stills open, then raced back into the footage of Katrina that corresponded to the two dates of the guy’s visits. If she had to she’d go frame by frame. But right now she went at double speed. The Raiders shirt would jump out at her, she believed. Her eyes itched. The pixels had a fizzing life of their own. She was balanced between certainty and hopelessness. Everyone else had given up on the zoo footage. She’d given up on it herself, except as a form of self-help, a form of hypnosis, a sop to her inexhaustibly dissatisfied conscience.
All the while she scanned she told herself not to get excited. There was no law against a lone white male visiting a zoo – every day of the week if he wanted to.
But it wasn’t nothing. She’d been doing the job long enough.
Five minutes. Ten. Twenty.
Stop.
Jesus.
Raiders.
She replayed what she’d just been watching. Katrina was with a mixed group (adults and children) by the Sumatran tiger enclosure. It was a day of flaring and subsiding sunlight. She was wearing one of the zoo’s black, yellow-logoed T-shirts, canvas hiking shorts (she’d outgrown hating the crescent birthmark, Adele had said), white ankle socks and white Nike sneakers. She was, as always, talking with bright animation, the ordinary happiness of a person who liked her job. Every member of the group was transfixed by the tigers.
Except the dark-haired guy in the Raiders shirt on the very edge of it.
He didn’t take his eyes off Katrina.
Calm down, she repeated. All right, this isn’t nothing, but it’s not much.
Cop-sense said otherwise. The stillness of the guy. The obliviousness to everything but Katrina. The fact that he was alone at the zoo. Twice. At least twice. Tomorrow she would get one of the team to go back through more of the footage. She knew they’d find him again. She had no right to know, but she did.
It was just after five in the morning. She called the office. Ed Perez answered.
‘Write this down,’ Valerie said, and gave him the description.
‘Got it,’ Ed said. He sounded strung out. Valerie wondered if this case was the one that was going to fuck up Ed’s life. She knew exactly the state he’d be in, slumped at his desk, in need of a shave, one white shirt-tail hanging out, paunch at full liberty.
‘I’m sending stills and footage,’ she said. ‘Get it out to all the other agencies.’
‘Press?’
‘If I get my way. Have video go back to the pre-edits and get everything you can from the ticket booth at the zoo entrance. He’s probably not dumb enough to have paid with a credit card, but you never know. Ditto parking lot footage. If he drove there we’ll get a plate. I’ll be there in an hour.’
Excitement pushed through the exhaustion. The booze lay in not quite shreds in her system. Christ, why had she drunk so much? (Because that’s how much we drink these days, my love…) She would take a shower and force down a pint of black coffee and eat whatever carbohydrates were in the refrigerator.
Twenty minutes later she was showered, dressed and brutally caffeined into a kind of shocked brightness. Her eyes were raw and her sinuses pounded. She felt tender but sharp.
She was walking out the door when her phone rang. It was Carla York.
‘We may have another one,’ Carla said.
Valerie’s cells gathered, tight.
‘Nevada. About fifteen miles south of Reno. It’s in dry decay so it could have been there for anything between two months and a year. Or more. Can you be at the station in an hour?’
‘I’m on my way now.’
‘There’s a chopper. We should go.’
How many? Dale Mulvaney had said. Seven. Jesus Christ don’t let it be eight. But Valerie already knew it would be. The killer’s magical revenge for the zoo footage. You couldn’t help but make these disturbing equations. But if that were true, it meant at least the guy caught on camera was him.
‘What makes them think it’s ours?’ she said.
Carla’s phone rustled slightly, as if she had it cradled against her shoulder while her hands were doing something else. Valerie didn’t catch her answer.
‘Say again?’
‘I said there’s a travelling wind-up alarm clock wedged in the corpse’s mouth.’
TWENTY-THREE
Xander King wasn’t sleeping. He was back at Mama Jean’s house. Somewhere on the edge of himself he could feel the flicker of the RV’s interior light and hear Paulie talking, asking him why they’d stopped, but it was a thin outer reality he couldn’t reach. He knew this was happening because the woman and the kid yesterday had been out of the scheme of
things. If there’d been a milk jug he could’ve made it right, could have brought it in. But there wasn’t a goddamned jug, and now because of that here he was back at Mama Jean’s. This was what happened when you didn’t do it right. And we’re going to keep doing this until you get it right, Mama Jean said. Always. He never got it right. He could feel the dry ache of his eyes having been open too long, but in Mama Jean’s house he was blinking normally.
He was in the living room. The alive things in the living room were the sunburst wall clock and the black fireplace and the green couch and the drinks cabinet with its crowd of bottles like winking jewels, and each of them was alive, too. They were pretty things, but they were more Mama Jean’s than anything else in the house, except maybe the television. None of the alive things talked to him. They just watched everything that happened.
The television was on. Different-coloured people in bright vests and shorts doing sports. An orange running track with peaceful white lines. A deep green field.
Leon wanted to go there.
He was Leon in Mama Jean’s house. Long before he became Xander King. Long before the money came.
He wanted to be sitting at the very edge of the orange running track with all the people watching from the seats behind him and feel the thrilling whoosh of the runners going by. Just before the ads came on five linked circles appeared on the screen, a row of three and two. Leon had learned the colours: blue, black, red, yellow, green. The circles gave him a strange feeling of a world a long way away.
‘How about some ice cream?’ Mama Jean said.
Leon looked up. Just looking up at Mama Jean was like lifting a big weight with his neck.
‘You can have a scoop of chocolate and a scoop of vanilla. How’s that sound?’
Leon felt his face go hot and his hands thicken and he needed to pee. But they’d already been up to the room today, just a little while ago. Surely it was just a little while ago? It hadn’t worked. The brain demon was still in his head, Mama Jean had told him, afterwards. Like a hand made of black smoke. If it was still there when he had to start school, every girl would laugh at him. Did he want that?
Without speaking, Leon got to his feet and followed Mama Jean into the kitchen. The worktops were scrubbed and bright, the windows full of sunshine. Outside, the leaves on the trees shivered.
He got halfway through his ice cream before he felt Mama Jean go the way she went.
When Mama Jean went the way she went a kind of stillness and heat and quietness came off her. Leon could always feel it. When it happened, all the objects in the house went kind of hard and tight, because they knew, too. He wanted to spit out the spoonful of ice cream he’d just put in his mouth. The smell of Mama Jean’s big pale blue jeans and hairspray and tobacco swelled in the kitchen.
Leon took a few paces towards the back door, holding the red plastic bowl of ice cream very carefully in both hands.
He got all the way to the threshold before Mama Jean said, ‘Where the fuck do you think you’re going?’
TWENTY-FOUR
For Paulie, the long drive with his bad knee had been no kind of fun, but it was no kind of fun to be stopped here in the middle of nowhere with Xander looking like a fucking hypnotised person, either. They’d only just crossed the border into Utah and were heading east down to the 15 when he’d been woken by the RV’s swerve and Xander apparently asleep at the wheel. He’d nearly shit himself in the struggle to get Xander’s foot off the gas and the RV safely halted at the side of the road. It was still early, not much after ten.
‘Hey,’ he said, shaking Xander’s shoulder for the umpteenth time. ‘Hey.’
It wasn’t the first time this had happened. And it had been happening more often recently. It terrified Paulie, Xander’s absence. It measured how alone he would be in the world without him.
And he still couldn’t believe he hadn’t got his time with the woman. It had filled him with a hot weakness and desperation, as if his anger were a cripple in a wheelchair. It had made him think, for just a moment, that he should leave Xander. But the thought – even for its moment – had made the open land’s darkness yawn with a kind of gravity that made him feel sick.
Xander turned his head, slowly, and looked at him.
‘Jesus,’ Paulie said. ‘You OK? What the fuck?’
Xander blinked. Moved the muscles of his face around. ‘I’m real thirsty,’ he said. ‘Get me some water.’
‘Christ, man, you—’
‘How long’ve we been stopped?’
‘I don’t know. Half an hour maybe.’
‘Get me some water.’
Paulie went to the back of the RV and took a plastic bottle of deVine from the cooler. Xander drank all of it. Paulie was mesmerised by the movement of his Adam’s apple. He had a vivid memory of the little girl running ahead of him in the forest. He should’ve told Xander. Why hadn’t he told him? It had been crazy not to tell him. A little kid got away from me. Shame had stopped him. Shame and fear. Don’t think about it. We can’t go back now. Fuck.
‘Tomorrow we have to get a jug,’ Xander said.
‘What?’
‘A milk jug. One of those little jugs with a lip. For milk. And batteries.’
‘Batteries?’
‘I want to shave.’
‘OK. But now we need to get going. We need to get going now, right?’
Xander sat still, staring out the windshield at the road’s pale meander through the empty land. Paulie felt desperate, suspended. It was agony when Xander’s will, which was normally like a warm searchlight on him, moved away somewhere else.
And when Xander turned to him this time, it was with a blank look that could have meant anything. Paulie couldn’t bear it. He almost blurted the whole story of the little girl out right there and then.
‘Go on in the back now,’ Xander said. ‘Make some coffee.’
Paulie forced a laugh. ‘Man, when you nod out like that… Sheesh. I don’t know whether to… I mean, you know?’
‘Go on in the back,’ Xander repeated, shifting the RV into drive.
Paulie, still forcing laughter, went to put his hand on Xander’s shoulder to give it a friendly shake. Somehow couldn’t. Xander gunned the engine. Holding his wrecked knee, Paulie clambered between the seats into the back of the vehicle. Praying that they weren’t – as he suspected they were – out of fucking coffee.
TWENTY-FIVE
The body – it felt wrong calling it ‘a body’ when there was so little of it left – had been found by night hikers en route to Carson City from Reno through the state parks bordering Washoe Lake. It’s a new thing, apparently, Carla had said in the chopper, people walking in the dark. She said it without surprise. No one in law enforcement was surprised at anything. He must become the whole of boredom, Valerie thought. Poetry, like dreams, had delayed detonation. The scene was barely a quarter-mile from shore, in a thicket of bare trees.
The corpse had been buried, but dug at and worked to the surface by wildlife. All the organs and soft tissue were gone. Scraps of leathery cartilage clung to the bone. The bottom jaw was off, either through natural collapse or because it had been broken to get the alarm clock in. The clock itself was about three inches in diameter, black-faced with white numerals marked with luminous dots, surrounded by a brass effect plastic rim. You could buy one for less than ten bucks. It was the sort of thing saved from obsolescence by nostalgia.
Three Nevada CSI were still here, taking photographs. All the measurements were done. A taped perimeter had been set up and the grave site was tented. Two Reno Homicide detectives, the medical officer, a half-dozen uniformed RPD officers on guard. Everyone in the protective gear that would look ridiculous if you didn’t know why they were wearing it. It was a dull morning, gloomy under the trees. The land smelled damp and loamy.
‘At least they read the memos,’ Will said to Valerie. He looked like shit. They’d landed at Reno and been driven down in a squad car. Of the three of them only Carla appeared to h
ave slept. Either that or she’d evolved past the need for sleep altogether.
‘Yeah,’ Valerie said, again feeling the gap where a quip would have been, long ago. They read the memos. Objects in the mouth? Vagina? Anus? Call the San Francisco team. They’re collecting them. Instead of catching the guys who are putting them there.
‘Detective Hart?’
Valerie turned.
‘Sam Derne,’ the man approaching said. ‘Reno Homicide.’
‘Hey,’ Valerie said. Derne was late forties, a short, compact guy with pale skin, a grey crew-cut and glittery blue eyes. He was holding a large format digital camera.
‘According to the medical officer there’s no telling how old the remains are until we get forensic entomology,’ he said. ‘And maybe not even then. But months, for sure. Possibly more than a year. We left the clock where it was for you to see, but we did remove this.’
He handed Valerie the camera. ‘It’s on screen,’ he said. ‘It’s been bagged. Found it next to her right hand.’
The shot on screen was of a torn piece of dark blue fabric, canvas or denim, Valerie guessed, embroidered with what might have been letters, maybe the bottom part of an ‘R’ with the curve of a ‘U’ or a ‘J’ overlapping it. The colour of the thread was impossible to make out, since it was heavily soiled.
‘Looks like part of a bowling shirt pocket,’ Valerie said, handing it on to Will. ‘Except it’s too heavy. Blue-collar uniform?’ Mentally she raced through bus truck train driver auto-shop utilities car plant delivery maintenance…