Over Tumbled Graves

by Jess Walter

  The task force has had difficulty verifying Ryan’s whereabouts between 20 March and 4 June, during the period of four prostitute homicides and the disappearance of two others.

  Current Status: The investigation remains open. After exhausting thousands of leads, the task force has identified Leonard Ryan as its primary suspect, the potential motive being displaced rage (see accompanying definition in attached source material from the FBI Behavioral Science Unit) over the death of Shelly Nordling and anger toward prostitutes.

  Subsequent to criticism in the local media, SPD officials suggested I apologize to Special Agent Jeff McDaniel of the FBI’s Investigative Support Unit, for my being “brusque” and seeming “unimpressed” with his unique abilities and charm. In addition, I was told to contact former FBI profiler Curtis Blanton, now a law enforcement consultant working in New Orleans, LA. I was instructed to ask both experts to evaluate the crime scene signatures and methodology and to determine Ryan’s plausibility as a suspect. To that end, Det. Mabry, whose recent work for the task force has been exemplary, is flying to New Orleans, LA, this week to review Blanton’s assessment and to receive a general critique of the investigation to this point.

  Recommendation: On 2 June, I telephoned Special Agent McDaniel in Sacramento, where he is assisting authorities on a multiple homicide case. He accepted my apology and explained it would be at least a month before he had time to provide any more expertise for our case. The same day I telephoned Curtis Blanton and he expressed, in no uncertain terms, his lack of interest in working on this case and his disdain for our efforts so far. That day, I recommended that we honor Mr. McDaniel’s prior commitment and Mr. Blanton’s request that we leave him alone and that we actually try to “do our own damn work.” Since, two days later, my superiors sent the entire case file to Mr. Blanton in New Orleans anyway, without my knowledge, it is apparent that my earlier recommendation was treated like a flaming turd, so pardon me if I don’t squat right down and pinch off another loaf of meaningless opinion for you.

  Addendum: This morning, 5 June, at 0800 hours, I was informed that the pawnshop owner Daniel Melling had died during the night of complications arising from his wounds. The attempted murder charge against Leonard Ryan has been amended to another charge of murder I.

  24

  When she was little, Caroline called the sunrise “Mr. Pink Sun.” An early riser, she loved the look on her father’s face when he descended the stairs to find her sitting there in her footed pajamas, holding her blankie, curled up in the window seat next to the banister, watching the horizon for the tiny shifts in light that marked the dawn. As she got older, Caroline’s fascination with the sunrise became more scientific and she tried to pinpoint the precise moment that morning began. She would remind herself to pay better attention, but some small detail would catch her eye, the shape of a cloud, the pine needles on a tree, dew on the lawn, and before she knew it a moment had slipped past—and perhaps that moment wasn’t a defining one, but how could she ever know? The moments seemed stolen and she felt cheated, a premonition that there was a danger in missing much of her life, that she could be so distracted by the details of living that she failed to notice life. The next weekend she would be at the window seat even earlier, concentrating even harder, trying to see the coming light without seeing the details—a kind of unfocusing that she could sometimes sustain for several minutes.

  Her father would come down the stairs, tucking in the flannel shirt he wore on weekends, and find her in this trance, letting the images play on her retinas, absorbing the light without processing it. Caroline would blink the trance away and smile at her father, and if it was Saturday they would put on their coats and walk downtown together while her mother and brother slept, the embers of morning still cooling in the east.

  “Amazing,” he’d sometimes say, “the prettiest part of the day and ninety-five percent of the people miss it.”

  On these Saturdays, they slowed down when they crossed the Monroe Street bridge, Caroline’s hand lost in his, and she would run her other hand along the concrete railing of the bridge, catching strobed glimpses of the waterfall between the rails.

  “Water’s high,” her father might say. Or, “Late runoff.” Or, “Spillway must be closed,” or a thousand other remarks about the river, never the same one twice. His knowledge of the flow and the seasons and the string of dams downstream amazed her. Across the bridge, she would sometimes look back over the banks, to that point where the Monroe Street Dam began to coax the river over its face. She remembered seeing an eddied pool of trash once—empty bottles and cardboard boxes—moving in a swirl and then disappearing over the lip of the dam.

  At the grocery store, he would buy a newspaper, bagels for him and Caroline’s mother, and donuts for Caroline and her brother, and they’d walk home along the same route. And even though she couldn’t eat her donut until her sleepy-headed brother woke up, Caroline didn’t mind, because for another hour, it would just be Caroline and her father and the revelations of growing light.

  Joel’s hand on her shoulder brought her back. “You all right?”

  She stood at the large window at the end of the tarmac, staring out at the horizon, fully engulfed now in the sunrise. Caroline smiled. “I missed it.”

  Joel turned to the gate, where passengers were just beginning to board the plane. “No you didn’t. They’re still doing the back of the plane.”

  She turned to face him. His eyes were downcast, like those of a kid afraid of saying something wrong. She reached up and touched his short hair, running her fingers along the top of it, like a gust through bunch grass. “I was thinking of something else.”

  He nodded. He never asked what she was thinking. “You have your books?”

  She opened her bag and held them up, two black paperbacks with the same photo on the back, a slightly askance, more than slightly overweight Curtis Blanton, the leading expert in the country on serial murder, a former FBI criminal profiler who had made his reputation interviewing and studying psychopaths, chiefly one nicknamed the Pacific Coast Killer, for his habit of littering that highway with dead hookers. Now Blanton was a kind of free-lance profiler, working with local cops when he wasn’t consulting on movies and TV shows. He also was the author of two books, Hunting America’s Most Notorious Killers and Catching America’s Most Notorious Serial Murderers. Caroline felt a low-grade nausea when she went to find his books on the Internet. Rather than type Blanton’s name in the search field, she typed the words “serial” and “killer.” The result: eighty-six nonfiction books concerning serial killers currently in print. Their titles screamed: “Amazing,” “Evil” killers and “Fantastic,” “Bizarre” cases. There was an encyclopedia of serial killers. Trading cards. A self-published how-to booklet. She had set out to investigate a murder and had stumbled across a genre; this thing infecting her city was a thriving industry. Alive, a woman like Jacqueline was worth a couple hundred bucks a day until her looks ran out or she died of AIDS or hepatitis or was shot by an angry john. But if this monster got hold of her, she could be worth a chapter in one of these books, perhaps even a composite character for the miniseries.

  Blanton’s books had arrived two days ago. Immediately, she was put off by his descriptions of serial sexual murders. She recognized so many of the details from the case they were investigating, it felt almost like prediction on his part. But it was more than that: The books were a strange blend of overheated, graphic detail and psychiatric guesswork, full of phrases that sounded like the random pairing of pop-psychology terms: “psycho-sexual objectification” and “postmortem, postcoital model infatuation.”

  She put the books back in her bag. “What are you going to do while I’m gone?” Caroline asked.

  Joel shrugged. “Hang out. Maybe go rock climbing with Derek and Jay. Wait for you to come home.” He’d been so nice to her since her mother died. And even sweeter since her father’s short visit. She wondered if her dad had said something to him, suggested that
Joel take better care of his little girl.

  Joel kissed her so gently, it made her wince a little bit. She turned then and walked toward the jetway, thinking of her father again. The whole family used to accompany him to the airport for his business trips when Caroline was a child. Each time, he would get halfway down the jetway and then look back and wave with his fingers, the way you wave to little kids. After his trip last month, Caroline had driven him to the airport. They were supposed to go over her mother’s belongings, but that’s when the case picked up, and a day later she was on the task force and the weekend just got away from them. They’d decided to go through her mother’s things later in the summer, and Caroline promised to take vacation in August. Still, she felt as if they’d accomplished something, maybe allowing her to forgive him a little bit. At least that’s what she was thinking that day when she watched her father walk halfway down the jetway, stop, and turn. She expected him to wave, but he didn’t, just smiled sadly as other passengers walked around him. He stared at her for a long moment and then turned and disappeared down the jetway.

  “Ma’am?” The ticket agent had her hand out, and for the second time that morning Caroline shook herself from memory’s grip. She handed over her ticket, resettled her bag on her shoulder, and walked down the jetway. Halfway there, she turned to wave to Joel. But he was gone.

  25

  The girl goalie was coming right at Marc Dupree. He had broken out and run alone into the clear with a couple of long dribbles, and was slowing up to shoot when the goalie left the net and began coming at him, the way goalies were taught to do but rarely did in Marc’s experience with eleven-year-old goalies. Yet there was no doubt. This goalie was coming, lips pared back to reveal a scowl built of braces and slitted eyes. This goalie was coming for Marc, and she was big.

  He heard Coach’s voice—“Shoot!”—but he couldn’t. His cleats planted in the dark grass, weight on his left foot, right toe point-down, an action figure die cast in a moment of inaction. Something had frozen Marc, something about this big girl goalie, rumbling out of the net like that. He felt as if he were on TV or maybe PlayStation, the controller paused while someone went to the bathroom.

  But after a few seconds, fear replaced Marc’s indecision. He forced himself to move, a short dribble to his right, into position to shoot, and then he began bringing his right foot forward, into the ball. The goalie arrived at the same time as Marc’s foot, and the ball was kicked from both sides at the same time. It thumped like a drum and didn’t move at all. Marc did move, his weight pivoting over the stationary ball, flipping him forward over the ball and the goalie’s leg, sprawled onto his back in the grass. Soccer sucks, he thought, and wished he would’ve played baseball like last year.

  Then he was just mad, and he got up like a shot, running after the ball, which had gone from the girl goalie to a defenseman to the good kid on the Lancers, the kid who Brian’s cousin said had already fingered a girl, and a seventh grade girl at that, and who was just now taking the black-and-white ball up the right sideline. And even though Coach was trying to teach them positions this year instead of just letting them run “nilly-billy” or whatever he called it, Marc clearly had left his position and was following the ball up the field, teeth clenched and cheeks red, breathing in grunts through his nose.

  At midfield, he heard Coach’s voice zoom past like a race car—“Dupreeee!”—but Marc ignored him and kept running after the good kid, gaining on him so that when the good kid stopped to change direction, Marc was on him from behind, too close and going too fast to slow down. He ran into the good kid full-bore, like a football player, and for the second time in the last thirty seconds Marc Dupree was on the ground. He looked over at the stunned and bloody-lipped Lancers kid and had the briefest urge to ask what, exactly, it meant to finger someone.

  But the ref called a penalty kick and gave Marc a yellow card and Marc felt the glare of his coach as he looked sheepishly over at the sideline, past Coach, trying to find his dad. He finally found him, in a pack of parents with camcorders, his back to the field as he gestured with his arm and talked on that stupid cell phone. Coach sent in Andrew to replace him and Marc slumped over to the sidelines.

  “What happens when you run around out there, willy-nilly?” Coach said. “You’re in fifth grade, Dupree. Start acting like it.” Marc sat down on the cooler between the coach and his father, who still had his back to the game.

  “Yes, I’m defensive,” his father was saying into the phone. “If you were the lead investigator and the chief went over your head to bring in some retired FBI agent to evaluate your investigation, you’d be defensive too.”

  His father listened for a moment. “I know who he is. I got a TV. But Christ, Lieutenant, I asked the guy for help and he made it very clear he had better things to do.” He listened and then launched right back in. “The guy treated me like I was a groupie for his rock band. So now I gotta send my best detective to Louisiana so Officer Gump can read our reports, pull a bunch of voodoo psychology out of his fat ass, and tell us that Lenny Ryan is mad at hookers? Fuck that!”

  Marc looked around at the other parents. A couple of them had turned when his dad raised his voice. They looked at Marc, then back to the field. Marc looked at the field too. The good kid for the Lancers had cleared the cobwebs and was stepping into his penalty kick, a real wussie kick that went wide right by five feet. Marc looked back at his dad. He’d never heard him use the F-word, although he said “shit” when Marc dropped Hot Wheels into the cold air return. Marc had heard other adults use the F-word before and it always sounded funny, like they were crazy people or criminals or were trying to show off to their kid’s friends or something. Marc didn’t like to think of his dad as one of those adults who used the F-word.

  “I’m not making excuses.” His dad rubbed his forehead. “But when I read the chief’s letter, sucking up to these FBI pricks…maybe I got carried away.”

  Without the cusswords, whatever his father was talking about sure was boring. Marc guessed it had something to do with the problems between his mother and father and the apartment his father had rented. Not that Marc was entirely opposed to them getting a divorce, if that’s what happened. At first it had made him angry, but shoot, his mom didn’t seem any sadder, and his dad always took him and Staci for pizza and hamburgers. And some kids whose parents were divorced got more stuff, like his cousin Andrea, who had a phone and a Sega Dreamcast in her room.

  “If Ryan was in town, we’d have him by now.” His father took a step away from the game. “He’s gone now. He’s got no reason to stay. And if he is here, how will some retired fat FeeBIe in New Orleans help us catch him? You put way too much stock in these federales.”

  Boring crap. Marc stood and opened the cooler beneath him, pulled out a juice box, and drank it. He looked up at Coach to see if he might get back into the game, but Coach didn’t even look at Marc.

  His father paced back toward the game now, finishing his conversation. When he moved out he told Marc it was temporary, that as soon as he and Mom “worked through some things” he’d come back. But Marc hadn’t seen them working at all, just avoiding each other. When he came back from his dad’s apartment—which wasn’t so awful except it had only basic cable—Marc didn’t know whether to say anything about it to his mom. It was like a giant game where they pretended with their mother that their father was dead. His dad sometimes asked about his mom, but like you’d ask about a sick person, like you don’t really want an answer. “How’s your mom doing?” “Fine.” “That’s good.”

  Brian said Marc’s dad would start dating a babe; Marc thought that would be okay and maybe he’d see her in her underwear or something, but that hadn’t happened yet, and anyway, when he thought about it, his dad didn’t seem like the babe type.

  “It was a joke, Lieutenant. One joke in a dry report.” His father listened, nodding and mmm-hmming as he walked back toward the sideline, right past Marc and between two parents with camcorders. “I c
an’t come down right now,” he said. “I’m at my kid’s game. First thing in the morning. I’ll see you then.” He turned the phone off and slid it back into his jacket. From behind, Marc watched him try to look casual as he focused back on the game. Marc was suddenly aware that his father didn’t even know he’d come out of the game. It gave him a weird thrill, to know this thing that his father didn’t, to watch his dad scan the field and slowly realize that the person he’d come to watch wasn’t even there.

  It was good, in a way, that he was out. Otherwise, Marc would never have known that his dad drifted off with his phone and didn’t even watch the game. Afterward, he would’ve told Marc to play with more discipline, or pass sooner, or any of that crap he said after games, and Marc would’ve just taken it as truth. But the truth was, his dad hadn’t even watched the stupid game. It was an amazing revelation that made Marc feel both sad and powerful, and when his father began moving his head more frantically, up and down the field, Marc thought about hiding behind the coach, to keep this going as long as possible. But his father spun around and saw him sitting on the cooler and grinned.

  “There you are,” he said. “What happened?”

  Marc just shrugged. Staring at him, his dad got a weird look on his face—not a look that had anything to do with the game, but the kind of look that Marc imagined on his own face, the way you look when everything around you changes and you feel like you don’t have a say in anything anymore.

  “Are you okay?” his dad asked.

  And even though he was fine, Marc didn’t answer, just turned back to the game.

  26

  Burgundy Street stunk. Not like Bourbon, of course, which ran a small stream of vomited hurricanes and daiquiris along its cobblestone curb, but it stunk nonetheless, with the more general stench of the French Quarter, seeping down narrow streets, currents of hot wet stink that flowed around the posts of sagging balconies and tired rowhouses. At Burgundy and Dumaine, a young white guy in sunglasses, maitre d’ coat, surf shorts, and flip-flops stood with a garden hose, spraying some unidentifiable soup from the sidewalk in front of his door, with no hope of cleaning it, just moving it down a ways.