by Joe Hill
The second e-mail came from Alyona herself, a half hour after Lanternglass went to bed but while she was still awake, lying under a single sheet and staring at the ceiling. Her phone pinged, and she rolled over to have a peek. Alyona’s personal e-mail address was Alyo_Lewis [email protected], and her message was just a single sentence long:
I bet he was fucking her.
Lanternglass didn’t see how she could quote that e-mail either.
July 9, 5:28 A.M.
RASHID HASWAR DIDN’T HAVE A listed landline; he didn’t have a Twitter handle or an Instagram profile; his wife’s Facebook account was private. He had a job at the Flagler-Atlantic Natural Gas Corporation, in the accounting department, but the receptionist refused to give Lanternglass the number for his cell.
“If he wanted to talk to you, to any of you newspeople, he’d call you,” the receptionist said in a thin, indignant tone. “But he hasn’t, because he doesn’t.”
Lanternglass had one other idea, though, so Tuesday morning she woke Dorothy before dawn and walked her out to the car. Dorothy was still about two-thirds asleep, her eyes partly shut as she tramped across the dew-soaked grass. Today she had on a thick white fluffy cap with a polar bear’s face on it. She fell back to sleep in the rear of the car, on the drive across town.
The Islamic Center was in the Black & Blue, in a low and ugly concrete building, across the street from a strip mall that contained a Honey Dew Donuts, a bail bondsman, and a discount shoe store. The last worshippers were already going in for morning prayers, women through a door in the side of the building, the men through the double doors in the front. A lot of them were brothers in dashikis and kufis, although there were a few Middle Easterners among them. Lanternglass parked herself in the Honey Dew, found seats at a counter by the window where she could keep an eye on the street. Dorothy got up on a high stool beside her with a glazed and a big bottle of milk, but she had only one bite and then put her head down. Outside, the sky was a shade of royal purple, the clouds kissed with gold. The wind was freshening, and the palms rattled their fronds.
Lanternglass had been watching the mosque for ten minutes when she noticed a slender, wiry man in a black baseball cap, his arms crossed over his sunken chest, standing just inside the doughnut shop’s door. He was watching the street, too. The first time she looked at him, she noticed dark circles under his bloodshot eyes. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days. What made her glance at him a second time were the words FLAGLER-ATLANTIC NGC embroidered on the breast pocket of his blue denim shirt. Lanternglass kissed Dorothy on the cheek—her daughter didn’t seem to notice—and slid three stools to the right, taking her doughnut and coffee with her, so she was almost right next to the guy.
“Mr. Haswar?” she said gently.
He twitched as if he’d been stung with a fizzle of static electricity and looked around, his eyes wide and surprised and a little frightened. She almost expected him to dart out the door and away from her, but he didn’t, only stood there holding himself very tightly.
“Yes?” he asked, no accent.
“You’re not praying?”
He blinked at her. When he spoke again, there was no anger, no defensiveness, just curiosity. “You with the press?”
“I’m afraid so. I’m Aisha Lanternglass from the Digest. We’ve been trying to reach you. We were hoping you might share a photo with us, of your wife and baby. We’d like to do our best to honor them. And you, your loss. Your family’s loss. It’s awful.” She thought she had never sounded more phony.
He blinked again and rotated his head and looked back out at the mosque. “I read your piece about the massacre.”
He didn’t go anywhere further with this statement, didn’t seem to feel the need to add to it.
“Mr. Haswar? Do you know why your wife was there that morning?”
“For me,” he said, not looking at her. “I asked her to go. My boss, Mrs. Oakley, was retiring. I was being promoted to her position. Yasmin ran by the mall to pick something out that I could give to Mrs. Oakley at the party. Yasmin . . . always got excited when she had a chance to buy something for someone else. Giving gifts was her favorite thing. She was excited for Ibrahim to be older so we could give him things on Eid. You know Eid al-Fitr?”
“Yes,” Lanternglass said. “It’s when Ramadan ends.”
He nodded. “And you know today is the first day of Ramadan?” Then he snorted with amusement—although there was no real humor in it—and added, “But of course you know. That’s why you’re staking out the mosque.” He did not say it angrily, like an accusation. In some ways his mildness was worse. She wasn’t sure how to respond. She was still trying to think what to say when he added, “I walked Yasmin’s mother here. She’s inside with the other women. She doesn’t know I am not praying myself, because the men and women pray in different rooms. You know that?”
She nodded.
“Yasmin’s father couldn’t walk her to the dawn prayer. He’s in the hospital for observation. He’s fainted several times since he heard the news. We’re all scared to death for him. He had a bypass operation last year.” Tapping his chest with his thumb. “She was his only child.” He stroked his breastbone with the edge of his thumb, rubbing the place where his wife had been shot. He gazed blankly out at the temple and added finally, “Do you think it was because she was Muslim?”
“What?” Lanternglass asked.
“That she was shot. That they were both shot.”
“I don’t know. We may never know.”
“Good. I don’t want to know. I dreamed last night my son said his first word. It was ‘cake.’ He said, ‘Mm, cake!’ Probably not a very realistic first word. I haven’t dreamed about Yasmin yet. But then I’m not sleeping much,” he said. “You’re not eating your doughnut.”
“I hate these things,” Lanternglass said, pushing it away from her. “I don’t know why I got it.”
“Shame to let it go to waste. Smells lovely,” he said, and picked her doughnut off her plate without asking and, making steady eye contact, took a large bite. “Mm. Cake.”
July 10, 5:40 P.M.
AFTER THEY RECORDED THE INTERVIEW for Telling Stories, Jay Rickles said why not come to his house for supper. He wanted Kellaway to meet the family. They could open some beers and watch the show when it aired at nine. Kellaway didn’t have anything else to do.
Rickles lived on Kiwi Boulevard. It wasn’t a mansion. No fountain out front, no white stucco wall enclosing the property, not even a swimming pool. But it was pretty nice all the same, a big hacienda with a red Spanish-tile roof and an enormous courtyard of crushed white shells. The front steps were flanked by a pair of green copper koi statues the size of Welsh corgis.
Inside, the house was like a Tex-Mex restaurant, with lassos and bleached longhorn skulls mounted on the walls. It was crowded, too, with willowy young women in tooled-leather boots and denim skirts and squads of little kids who crashed from room to room. At first Kellaway thought Rickles must have decided to throw a party and had invited half the neighborhood. He was there for most of an hour before he gradually realized the girls with golden hair were all his daughters and the small children were his grandkids.
They rooted themselves on a couch the size of a Cadillac, done in tribal patterns, in front of a television as large as a Cadillac’s hood. There was already a big steel bucket full of ice and Coronas on the coffee table, next to a dish of salt and a bowl of lime wedges. Rickles helped himself to a beer with one hand. The other snaked around the hip of a tall, leggy woman in a pair of Wranglers so tight they were close to obscene. At first glance Kellaway thought Rickles was patting one of his daughters on the butt. At second he saw that the woman next to Rickles was maybe as old as sixty, thick makeup covering the finer creases at the corners of her mouth and eyes and the yellow of her hair almost certainly a dye job. She had the toned beauty of someone like Christie Brinkley, of someone who had always been beautiful and always would be, was beautiful almost by habit.
“Is it Mr. Kellaway?” she asked. “Or Deputy Kellaway?”
Rickles cracked her rear with one hand, and she jumped away, laughing and rubbing her bottom. “You hush up, woman. You ruin everything.”
“Ruining men’s plans is my life’s work,” she said, and wandered off, swinging her hips in a provocative sort of way. Or maybe that was just how she walked.
When she’d gone, Kellaway looked at Rickles and said, “Deputy?”
The police chief’s eyes glittered damply with emotion. “That’s supposed to be a surprise. We’re going to make you an honorary deputy next month. Give you a key to the city, too. Big ceremony. When we announce it, try and pretend you didn’t know.”
“Do I get my very own badge?”
“Bet your ass,” Rickles said, and laughed a husky, beery laugh. “What I wonder, how come you’re not a deputy for real?”
“I applied. You turned me down.”
“Me?” Rickles put a hand to his chest and opened his eyes wide in stunned disbelief.
“Well. The department anyway.”
“Didn’t you serve in Iraq?”
“Mm-hm.”
“And we turned you down? Why?”
“One position, fifty applicants, and I came up short in the melanin department.”
Rickles nodded sadly. “Christ, isn’t that always the story. Though, no matter how much you do to show you care about diversity, it’s never enough. Did you read that hit piece the Digest ran, about the drama student? No? So twenty years ago, there’s an APB out for a deranged African American with a knife who cut up a white couple and stole their Miata and a Hermès purse full of loot. Wife died, husband pulled through. Cops traced the Miata to a parking lot in the Black & Blue and saw a guy matching the description walking away from it, holding a knife, purse over his shoulder. They tell him to get facedown, he runs instead. He goes around the corner of a little shopping plaza—then changes his mind and turns back. When the cops come around the corner, they run smack into him. They think he’s charging, and one of them blasts his black ass. Well, turned out he wasn’t holding a knife. It was a CD. The Hermès purse over his shoulder? It was a Little Mermaid backpack he was carrying for a cousin of his. He was a seventeen-year-old slickster who did summer-stock theater and who was applying to the London School of Drama. He ran because he’d been wandering around opening cars, grabbing stuff, petty thievery. Basically, he died of a guilty conscience.”
In his mind Kellaway shot the Muslim woman all over again. It made him angry, thinking about her, trying to figure out why the bitch had stood up, why she didn’t stay still. He resented her for making him shoot her.
“Adrenaline gets pumping,” Kellaway said. “It’s dark. You know the guy you’re hunting has already sliced some people up, that he’s crazy. I don’t see how you blame the cops for shooting.”
“You don’t, and a grand jury didn’t. But it was a scandal and a heartbreak. The cop who shot the kid developed a serious drug and alcohol problem, poor guy, and later had to be fired for domestic abuse. Anyway. The cousin with the Little Mermaid backpack witnesses the shooting. Fifteen years later she’s working for the St. Possenti Digest, and she writes this great big goddamn exposé about it. All about systemic racism in Florida policing and the reflexive tendency to protect officers who abuse the badge. Anyway. I sat down with her, gave her an interview, said all the things I had to say. I bragged on our hiring of minorities, said 1993 was literally a different century, said that it’s our job to make certain the black community sees us as an ally, not an occupying power. I made sure there were nothing but black faces in the typing pool when I led her to my office. I even had our IT guy sitting at one detective’s desk. I had the dude who cleans our windows at another. It was so black in there you’d think she walked into a Luther Vandross concert instead of a police station. You do an interview like that, you got two choices. Either you say what they want you to say or you get smeared by the press for committing a thought crime. I didn’t like doing it, but I got through it. You might want to remember that when she talks to you.”
“What do you mean, when she talks to me?”
“She’s on your ass now, partner. Aisha Lanternglass. The girl who wrote up the story of the dead drama student and who made my whole department look like the local chapter of the KKK. They’ve got her covering the mall story. You want to watch out for her, Kellaway. She does hate whitey.”
Kellaway sipped his Corona and thought it over.
“They ever get the guy who sliced up the couple?” he asked finally. “The black dude with the knife?”
Rickles shook his head ruefully. “There was no black dude with a knife. Turned out hubby had a girlfriend. He murdered his wife, then had his honey stab him a few times to make it look like he’d been attacked as well. Then he had her drive off in the Miata and park it in the Black & Blue. We got the girlfriend on a security camera, abandoning the car in the lot.” He sighed. “Shit, I wish we had more security footage of what happened in Devotion Diamonds. We’ve got her going in, but nothing from what went down in there. I wish we did. I know Telling Stories would sure as shit like to have it.”
“So you can’t lift it off Roger Lewis’s computer?” The security footage for Devotion Diamonds fed to the big iMac in Lewis’s office, and at some point the computer had toppled off the desk. Kellaway had made sure it couldn’t be turned on again by giving it his boot a time or two.
Rickles wiggled one hand in a gesture that seemed to mean maybe yes, maybe no. “The tech guys think there’s a chance they can rescue the hard drive, but I’ll believe it when I see it.” He sipped his beer and said, “Maybe if we can save it, Telling Stories will want to have us back on.”
If the tech guys rescued the hard drive, it would show Kellaway putting a bullet through a six-month-old and his mother, then using Becki Kolbert’s gun to kill Bobby Lutz. Kellaway hoped that if such a thing did come to pass, he had another gun by then. He could imagine quite calmly sitting on the toilet in the master bathroom and putting the snub nose of a .38 against the roof of his mouth while cops shouted in the next room. He could do it. He knew he could do it—swallow a bullet. Better to die his way than to live life mocked by the tabloids, loathed by the public, and separated from his child. To say nothing of what would happen to him if he wound up in prison.
The thought of sitting on one toilet brought to mind another, and he said, “When do you think I’ll be able to get back into the mall? I’d like to collect some of my things. And maybe . . . I don’t know. Walk the scene.”
“Give it a week. After they open again. We’ll walk the scene together, if you want. I’d like that myself. See it again, through your eyes.”
Kellaway wondered if Rickles was going to move in with him, if he should buy bunk beds.
When Kellaway looked around, a perfect ten was standing in front of him, a blonde who had to be at least six feet tall, wearing a flower-print pencil skirt and a satiny white silk blouse and a straw cowboy hat. She held the hands of two small children, one on either side of her. One of them was a profoundly ugly fat girl with an upturned piggy nose, her pink Hannah Montana shirt riding up her bulging belly. The boy looked like the Mini-Me version of Jay Rickles, a towhead with narrow blue eyes and a stubborn, mulish expression on his face. Their mother was so tall they had to stretch their arms up to reach her hands.
“Mr. Kellaway,” said the perfect ten. “I’m Maryanne Winslow, Jay’s daughter, and my children would like to say something to you.”
“Thank you,” the children recited together.
“What for?” Maryanne said, pulling one arm, then the other.
The girl with the porcine features said, “For saving our lives,” and began to pick her nose.
The boy said, “For shooting the bad guy.”
“They were in the mall,” Rickles said, turning his head and giving Kellaway a watery-eyed look of wonder and gratitude. “Bullets flying a couple hundred feet away from them. They
were on the carousel.”
“Oh, Dad,” Maryanne said. “We didn’t even get inside. We were going to ride the carousel, but when we reached the doors, a security guard sent us back to our car. It was all over by then. We missed the action by ten minutes.”
Rickles told Kellaway, “But for the grace of God,” and held out his bottle. They clinked longnecks.
“What’d you shoot her with?” the little boy asked Kellaway.
Maryanne jerked his arm. “Merritt! Rude!”
“A .327. Ruger Federal,” said Kellaway. “You know about guns?”
The boy said, “I got a Browning Buck Mark .22.”
“Merritt! You do not ‘got a Browning Buck Mark.’”
“I do too!”
“You have a Browning Buck Mark,” Maryanne said, and rolled her eyes at her son’s disgraceful indifference to proper grammar.
“You like guns?” Kellaway asked, leaning forward, resting his elbows on his knees.
Merritt nodded.
“I have a boy only a bit younger than you. He likes guns, too. Sometimes we go fishing together, and then afterward we’ll walk along the beach and find bottles to shoot. Once we found a smelly old pair of boots and shot them. We were trying to make them dance.”
“Did you?” Merritt asked.
Kellaway shook his head. “No. We just knocked them over.”
Merritt stared at him with his deep blue eyes for another moment, as if in a trance, then jerked his head up and looked at his mom. “Can I play Xbox now?”
“Merritt Winslow! So rude!”
“It’s all right. Old people are boring,” Kellaway said. “My own son told me so once.”
Maryanne Winslow mouthed the words “Thank you” and walked the children away, still holding their arms up over their heads so they had to skip and hurry to stay on their feet.
Rickles sighed and leaned back into the couch. He was staring absently at the TV when he said, “I keep meaning to ask you about the gun.”
“Hm?” Kellaway asked. The back of his neck prickled.