by Jess Walter
Caroline burst through the front door and only then realized she’d been holding her breath the whole time. On Sprague, she saw the dark-jacketed man on the sidewalk rounding another corner, back to the darkness of the side streets.
She ran down the sidewalk after him, pausing just before she reached the corner. This was insane. She was three blocks from her car. What if she did catch Ryan? Then what? She stood still, three feet from the corner, staring at the place where the brick wall stopped and the darkness began. She listened for his footsteps, but it was quiet. A car blew past and Caroline jumped. She thought about Jacqueline. Then it was Ryan she’d seen watching Jacqueline earlier. That’s what finally made Caroline take the next step and the next, around the corner. She desperately wanted the little girl with the big appetite to be safe, just as she wanted this man to be someone other than Lenny Ryan.
She eased around the dark corner, her eyes adjusting like those of a person walking down a staircase at night. She gasped when she saw him, no longer running but facing her at the end of the short block, his hands in his pockets, waiting for her. His hair was shorter and he’d grown a mustache, but it was him. When he was sure she’d seen him, Ryan turned casually and walked behind the building, into another alley.
Caroline’s breath was short, her muscles tense. “Goddamn!” No way she should follow. She looked back at the businesses on Sprague, where there would be telephones, where there would be help. She shuddered once, a chill of anger and frustration. Then she pulled her gun from her waistband and plunged forward, no longer trying to hide her footsteps on the pavement, just marching forward stubbornly and stupidly. “All right,” she said quietly. “I’m coming.”
The alley led to another side street and another alley, closed at the far end by a cyclone fence that turned it into a kind of narrow courtyard, filled with old building supplies—appliances, windows, doors, and odd scraps of lumber. The light from a street lamp cast half the courtyard in dull glow, and threw the other half into darkness. He must be in the shadows, watching her. She stood for a moment at the edge of the courtyard, reached up and felt where the chain-link gate had been pried open. She pushed on the gate, and it swung open with a rusty sigh.
“Mr. Ryan. You’re under arrest.” She was surprised by the frailty of her voice. No response. She slipped inside the gate, both hands on her gun. Building supplies were stacked against brick walls and divided into rows and like piles—cracked doors, cabinets and rotted window frames, odd lumber pieces, appliances, and plumbing supplies. She backed into the shadows and allowed her eyes to adjust again. Nothing. Farther into the courtyard, she walked through plumbing supplies—mounds of old sinks and tubs—and at the end of the courtyard an old refrigerator, lying on its back, had been pushed up against the chain-link fence. It looked as though he’d escaped that way, or wanted her to think he had. She approached carefully, her mind racing: Why would he urge her on like that, coax her to follow him, only to escape over a fence? Even in the dark she could see the silhouette of something on top of the refrigerator. A shoe box. Caroline stepped carefully toward it, checking behind each row and stand of appliances before moving forward. A wet, moldering smell crept up on her as she moved toward the box. She crouched, covered her mouth and nose, and used the barrel of her gun to nudge the top off the box. Inside were some papers and a pair of earrings. She lifted one of the earrings from the box and turned it toward the light. It was a pinpoint, a stone so small it had to be real. Caroline had been holding her breath, but now she breathed in and the smell hit her, stronger than before. But there was nothing in the box that could make that smell.
The refrigerator. She set the shoe box on the ground. Three other refrigerators sat beneath a loading dock fifteen feet away. They were chained and padlocked shut. But this one wasn’t locked. What am I doing here? Caroline thought. She began to back out of the alley, the gun in front of her, pointed at a forty-five-degree angle to the ground. She could feel him watching, his disappointment. He wanted her to open the refrigerator.
“Jesus, don’t do this,” she told herself quietly. But she thought about Jacqueline again. She clenched her teeth, stopped herself from backing up, and stood in the center of the fenced-off courtyard, surrounded by stacked lumber and building supplies, half in the glow of the streetlight and half in the shadows, like a magician’s assistant cut cleanly in half. Brick walls rose up four stories on either side. She could hear her own heart.
Caroline pulled the neck of her sweatshirt over her nose and mouth, and eased forward until she reached the refrigerator and rested her hand on its door handle—the old kind that latched shut. She lifted. It clicked and opened easily, and Caroline pulled the door up a few degrees, the streetlight revealing a decaying body. Patches of darkened flesh. A tangle of black hair, blue jeans, a flowered blouse. Even with the shirt pulled over her nose, even though she was holding her breath, the smell knocked Caroline back.
The door fell shut and latched itself and Caroline stood facing the other way, breathing into her cupped hand, ordering her stomach to settle, her nerves to cool. Her eyes moved back and forth along the courtyard as she waited for Ryan to come at her any second. But he didn’t.
Finally the face in the refrigerator began to rearrange itself in her mind, and with horror Caroline found it familiar. She knew by the smell and the early decay that it was too soon to be Jacqueline, who’d been very much alive earlier in the day. Still, the familiarity was a knot in her chest.
When her pulse evened out, Caroline took a breath and walked back to the refrigerator. She lifted the door and looked down on the decomposing face.
Of course it wasn’t Jacqueline. This girl had been dead at least a week, maybe longer, depending on the effect the refrigerator would have on the body’s decay. But Caroline had seen that face before, and not while this woman was alive. It was the particular drift of the eyes and mouth—all the elements in the right place, but everything slipped and dislocated. Not at all like a sleeping person. On patrol, Caroline sometimes came upon a sleeping transient and nudged him with her foot, worried that he might be dead. She would never again mistake a sleeping person for a dead one. The detachment in a dead person’s face was the saddest thing Caroline had ever seen. How many dead people had she seen in twelve years as a police officer? Maybe a dozen a year: car wrecks and suicides and all manner of cruelty. But until her mother died she’d never seen dead people, not the way she saw live people, with empathy and understanding.
Caroline lowered the refrigerator door and closed it purposefully, then backed out of the courtyard, keeping her gun pointed at the ground. At the gate she swung around, but no one was there. She backed up to a brick wall and leaned against it, her head back, trying again to slow her breathing. She could hear traffic out on Sprague, the bass thud of car stereos. And she could hear faint footfalls, or imagined she could, careful steps on the other side of the courtyard, as someone walked away.
19
The tires bounded once off the curb and then Dupree stood on the brakes, squealed the car to a stop, and was out. Lights from patrol cars rolled across the brick facades of buildings on East Sprague and along the expectant faces of people who stood shoulder-to-shoulder behind the police tape. The lights and activity had a flow to them, a current that pulled Dupree, or that he followed instinctively, until he arrived at the mouth of the alley where the latest body had been found.
He’d been on his way to a beer with Pollard when Caroline’s phone call came. In the scramble to get to the scene Dupree wasn’t sure whether he was more angry at Lane for leaving her behind after the sting or at Caroline for traipsing through alleys after Lenny Ryan. The drive from the Public Safety Building to East Sprague had been filled with imaginary lectures for both.
In the alley the first evidence tech was waiting for the rest of the crew so they could begin processing and videotaping and photographing, once the detectives had made their first run through the crime scene. Patrol officers were hanging around too, wait
ing for instructions on traffic flow and interviews of potential witnesses. They all looked at Dupree, and something—the late hour or the impotent sameness of the process—left a bitterness in his mouth. They all knew what to do. What did they want from him? He’d been at work eighteen straight hours. There was no telling when he might go home now. Five? Six? Would he make it home before Debbie got up with the kids at seven? Would he go home at all? Hell, why not just work around the clock, cataloguing bodies forever?
A portable electric lantern lit the alley until the light stands arrived with the crime scene van. But even with the lantern the alley was dark, and Dupree fumed at Caroline for venturing down this strip of pavement by herself, with Ryan hiding in the shadows.
He walked to the refrigerator, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, and carefully opened the latch, touching as little of the surface as he could manage. He propped the refrigerator door with his elbow and used the handkerchief to cover his mouth and nose. When he saw the body, Dupree felt the tug through his chest again, as if a cord connected his toes to his balls to his throat. A flashlight beam lit the body from over his shoulder.
“Victim is female,” he heard Spivey say from somewhere behind the flashlight. “GSW. Strangulation. Ligature marks. Apparent homicidal violence.”
Dupree lowered the handkerchief from his face. “So you’re ruling out accident?”
Spivey ignored Dupree and continued speaking into his microcassette recorder. “Evidence of environmental activity.” He was talking about bugs into his tape recorder. Maggots. “Memo to bring in an entomologist to pinpoint microbial and insect activity.”
Dupree was too tired to fight with Spivey now, so he put on his gloves and turned back to the body as the young detective continued to narrate. “Entrance wound in left upper quadrant of victim’s torso. Body’s position is covering possible exit wound. Apparent ligature on the neck. Body is decomposing.”
She was curled up on her right side in the refrigerator, so Dupree reached in and eased her back slightly. He shined his flashlight beneath her and saw what he expected to see, two twenties attached by a rubber band stretched around her clutched right hand. “Ah, Jesus,” Dupree said quietly.
“Victim displays signature twenty-dollar bills banded to right hand,” Spivey continued. “Two fingernails appear to have been removed…”
Dupree eased the refrigerator door closed and turned to Spivey. “You wanna get the techs in here? Then talk to the people in the building supply place; find out who’s been poking around the alley.” When he realized Spivey was recording the instructions, Dupree grabbed the microcassette recorder and spoke into it. “Memo to self: Tell chief he has sweet ass.”
Spivey swiped his recorder back and trudged off. Dupree watched him walk to the end of the alley, where Sergeant Lane was talking to the sneaky Special Investigations detective, Gerraghty. Dupree walked over and addressed the sergeant. “So the whole time you’re running this sting, Lenny Ryan’s watching Caroline? Is that what you got?”
“Yeah,” Lane said, not meeting his eyes. “Seems like that, huh?”
On Sprague, Lane pointed out the blocks that Caroline had paced, the motel down the street where Gerraghty and Solaita had been, and the warehouse where he and the other officers had been waiting to arrest the guys and confiscate their cars. Dupree looked across the street and then back, trying to imagine the thing—Caroline cruising back and forth under the harsh streetlights, Ryan somewhere nearby. But where? One of the bars?
“Do me a favor,” Dupree said. “Before the bars close, take a picture of Ryan and just ask around, find out if anyone’s seen him.”
“Actually”—Lane shuffled his feet—“Caroline’s doing that.”
“She didn’t go home?” Dupree was incredulous. “She’s out there by herself?”
“I’ll send Gerraghty to help her.”
Dupree waved him off angrily. “Don’t bother. I’ll do it.”
Lane shifted his weight and made eye contact finally with Dupree. “I don’t get this, Alan. This guy Ryan is killing these women? Then why does he lead Caroline into the alley and not…Why didn’t he…”
Gerraghty followed Lane’s gaze back toward the alley. “Once he got her in there,” Gerraghty said, “why didn’t he…I mean, it would have been easy to…”
Dupree nodded to get him to stop talking. “I don’t know.” He walked off toward the closest tavern, not wanting to think about what it would have been easy for Ryan to do with Caroline in the fenced-off alley.
Dupree pulled his cell phone and called her. When Caroline didn’t answer right away, he hung up and hit redial; this time she picked up but continued what she was doing, interviewing someone above the tinny music of a country jukebox and the scattering of pool balls.
“You’ve never heard of a girl named Jacqueline?” Dupree heard faintly over his phone. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I see. How about this guy?” Dupree walked down the block as he listened to her conduct the interview, feeling strangely close to her, this shared intimacy, listening to her use the skills and style he’d taught her a decade earlier. “And you’re sure he wasn’t in here tonight?”
The phone shuffled and she was on the line. “Mabry,” she said simply.
“What do you get for a game of headboard Yahtzee these days?”
“Guy was gonna give me seventy-five.”
He dropped the casual air. “Jesus, Caroline. You chased this guy into a fuckin’ alley? By yourself? What are you doing?”
But she was ready for the lecture. “If I go for backup, I lose him.”
“You didn’t have your phone?”
“I had my gun. What would you do?”
Dupree sighed. “Where are you?”
“On a beach in the south of France, tanning my stomach.” He saw her then, straight down the row of businesses, two blocks away, emerging into a streetlight. She must’ve stepped out of a bar, but from his angle it was as if she’d materialized out of the wall, from the darkness. She had the tiny phone to her ear; she was wearing sweatpants that seemed to exaggerate her long legs and narrow waist. She looked good. They locked eyes and walked toward each other, continuing their phone conversation.
“What do you think he wanted?” Dupree asked. “Why’d he let you follow him?”
“I don’t know…he wanted to show off the body?”
They were two blocks apart now, staring at each other as they spoke into their phones. “You think he killed her?” Dupree asked.
“I don’t know,” Caroline said. “What about you? What do you think?”
“His girlfriend was a hooker who got killed here a couple months ago. While he was in prison. For what it’s worth.”
“What is that worth?”
Dupree crossed at the corner and they were speaking from opposite ends of the same block now, still staring at each other. They slowly lowered their phones as they met in the middle of the block.
“So you’re all right?” Dupree asked.
“Tired.” She reached down and flipped his tie. “Things have gotten pretty formal around the Dupree estate.”
“Actually, I haven’t made it home yet. I was putting in a late night.”
“You should go home.”
He knew that. He was thinking of another theory, how if you paired a young man and a young woman on patrol duty, they would end up sleeping together. Other cops attributed that to adrenaline or the huge amount of trust required for the job, but Dupree had a better explanation: The attraction between two people was directly proportional to their proximity to death. For cops, male and female officers were most susceptible to affairs during times of stress and danger—this case, for instance. Or six years ago, when Caroline shot the drunk during the domestic violence call. She was right; he should definitely go home.
But he didn’t answer and they walked slowly back toward the body, Caroline telling him about the girl who’d given her name as Jacqueline and everything that had happened that night, Dupree updating her on w
hat he’d found out about Lenny Ryan from the pawnshop owner and Shelly Nordling’s foster father.
“So we think his girlfriend’s death made Ryan decide to kill hookers,” Dupree said. “Some kind of displaced rage or…I don’t know.”
“So he’s your suspect?”
“For now? He’s a person of interest, I guess.”
“What’d you call it? Displaced rage?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know, Caroline. Until we find a better theory. Hell, he’s responsible for every other crime in this town.”
“Is the psychology good?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “In the morning, I’ll run it past the FeeBIes.” The local FBI agent Jerry Castle—Pyle—had become the task force’s contact with the Bureau’s Behavioral Science Unit in Virginia and would likely contact the muscle-bound Bureau profiler, Jeff McDaniel.
Caroline stopped walking near the adult bookstore where she’d begun her chase of Lenny Ryan. She looked up at the dirty curtained windows, heavy wood door, and yellow neon sign. Suddenly the fatigue seemed to hit her. “He ran through here,” she said. “I chased him through here.”
Dupree looked up and saw what it was—the peep shows and sex toys, the dirty magazines. He felt strangely embarrassed. “Why don’t I have Spivey take care of it?”
“That’ll be fine,” Caroline said. “I’m gonna hit a couple more bars down the other way, see if I can find this girl. She said her name was Jacqueline,” she said quietly, an afterthought, and Dupree saw how Caroline hoped that a name, even an obviously fake name, would somehow give this girl an identity, a place in the world.