Over Tumbled Graves

by Jess Walter

  Ryan turned toward the younger Verloc, who’d managed to roll over onto his back so that he was facing up, his arms behind him, wiggling with his cuffed hands a few inches at a time. Ryan took a step toward Verloc, who screamed, and Caroline was up and rushing the big man. She hit Lenny in the waist with her shoulder and they both toppled onto the ledge and over it, into the darkness above the river. They rolled through the weeds, and Caroline felt his weight on her chest and lost her breath and then Ryan caught himself on the bank, Caroline still holding on to his legs. He hit her twice with the back of his hand and she fell away. Her head felt as if it had been split open, something dark and warm muddying her eyes. She looked up the hill, and through the blood and dizziness, she could see Ryan pulling himself up the bank again. Caroline took one more breath, got to her feet, and followed him.

  Amazingly, Verloc had managed to wiggle on his back about two feet with a broken leg; Caroline wondered at the strength of those shoulders and hands, and thought about the poor women with their broken necks. Staring at the figure of Lenny Ryan in front of him, Verloc began to cry and to mumble. Caroline found the flashlight shell again, then stood and took two heavy steps toward Lenny Ryan. She swung the tube weakly and it hit him in the shoulder without moving him at all. He turned, as if unable to believe she was still trying to fight him. Then his face grew cold and blank and she recognized the look from that day on the bridge, so long ago now. He ripped the black flashlight tube from her hand and lifted it to hit her, but stopped. Dizzy, Caroline lurched forward anyway, onto her knees, and then fell down, her body racked with pain. She threw up in the grass. There was a sound in her ears, a ringing or a siren in the distance. Caroline crawled away, toward a reflection in the tall grass at the edge of the hillside.

  Lenny heard the sirens too. He considered the figure of Verloc in front of him, curled up on his side and crying, and Caroline crawling away behind him, toward the edge of the embankment. He felt stumped by something that he couldn’t quite get his arms around, as if he were processing this information in a foreign language. Had he come to Spokane simply looking for revenge? Or was it really for an explanation—why he’d lost the only person he’d ever loved, the only thing that made him happy? If that was it, then here he was at the end of it, and all he knew were empty patterns and sad outcomes—the dog on the leash, the calf in the draw. With the sirens in the distance, Lenny felt the urge to talk to someone before he stomped Kevin Verloc to death, to explain what he had wanted. He turned to Caroline, and the empty flashlight fell to his side. But all he managed to say was, “I’m tired.”

  “Me too,” she said. She rolled onto her side, her face streaked with blood, her right arm in the thick weeds. It appeared she was trying to get up.

  “You have the right to remain silent,” she rasped.

  Lenny found himself smiling. Even now, lying on her side, bleeding and beaten, she was trying to pull herself up, trying to arrest him. He’d never seen a woman as strong as this one. Did he know anyone this strong? He thought at one time that she looked like Shelly. But she didn’t. Not really. The hair was close, but that was it. He had thought about her so much, had replayed that day on the bridge and the day he led her through the alley to the body he’d found. He had driven by her house all those times and had seen her come outside that one evening. All that time, the distance had allowed Lenny Ryan to begin imagining her as Shelly. But standing over her, he could see this wasn’t her. This woman was someone else entirely. Shelly was gone.

  She managed to sit up, propping herself on her left arm. Her face was streaked with blood. She brought her right arm forward out of the tall grass, and that’s when Lenny saw that she had found her gun. Leaning on her left arm, with her legs out, she pulled the gun into her lap and pointed it at his chest. She was about twenty feet away. If he rushed her, would she do it this time? Would she shoot him? He looked down at her face and knew she would.

  He should never have left Angela. He could have stayed on her porch forever. He liked that creek. He liked nights like this, the heat slipping from the air, the hushed cackle of water over rocks and the dry flashes of summer lightning.

  Lenny crouched down in front of her, on the balls of his feet. He shrugged and smiled and was almost relieved that it was finally over. “What happened to your shoes?”

  A flashlight beam zipped from the house across the yard frantically and then fell on Lenny Ryan, who snapped upright and turned back to look over his shoulder. Caroline could see what it would look like from the house. She and Ryan were at the edge of the lawn, just a few feet apart. He was standing above her with the broken black tube from the flashlight. She was aware then of how gravity speeds everything up, how it even causes events to roll and crash and froth up around us.

  A man’s voice, Dupree’s voice, came from the shadows at the edge of the house. “Drop the gun!”

  Confused for a moment, Caroline looked down at the gun in her own hand. She peered into the lights from the house and knew what the flashlight casing must look like. Lenny looked down at it too. Caroline began to speak, “It’s okay, Alan.”

  Lenny’s eyes had just turned to hers—locked in pinpoint awareness of each other—when a crack split the air like an ax hitting wood, and another and another, and Caroline screamed, “No!” as Lenny Ryan pitched forward in the grass next to her.

  From the corner of the house Dupree’s voice was frantic. “Caroline!”

  “What did you do?” she whispered as she crawled through the grass and took Lenny Ryan’s hand. His eyelids fluttered and he made noises like a child with hiccups. Then his eyes opened and he seemed to focus on her face, but the lids drifted closed and Caroline heard the gurgle of blood in his chest, his breath bubbling out from his lungs back into the air.

  She felt Dupree at her shoulder, trying to pull her away, but she wouldn’t let go, not yet, and she curled her whole body over Lenny Ryan’s hand. There were sirens everywhere now and the sounds of car doors closing and radio traffic, and Caroline found herself whispering, “Shh, shh, shh,” trying to hear the river below them.

  He heard it too, as he receded into darkness, into himself. And even when there was nothing else to see or remember and no more pain, he felt her grip on his hand and it was a small, bearable thing, the last good thing before Lenny Ryan slipped away.

  Caroline held on even after he was gone, remembering how six years earlier she’d been afraid to touch the body of Glenn Ritter as he lay dead in front of her. That night, she hadn’t wanted to move at all, as if within that twenty-four feet lay salvation, as if everything she believed could be contained by a kill zone—an arbitrary distance at which a person poses an immediate threat, not just for protection, but for justification too. She had imagined that distance as a great channel, a gulf that keeps us not only safe but apart, that allows us to believe that there are things we are incapable of doing.

  But as she sat over the body of Lenny Ryan, Caroline was struck by just how close twenty-four feet really is, how little space really exists between us. Of course they were different, Lenny Ryan’s shooting of the pawnbroker, her own shooting of the wife beater. But that meant there was a difference between what Lenny Ryan did and what Kevin Verloc did, that in the end we are separated not by distance, but degree. And in that truth was another; none of us knows, in the tumble of events, what she is capable of doing.

  “Caroline? Did I…didn’t he…”

  Caroline looked up at the fear in Dupree’s eyes, at the uncertainty, and reached out for the living.

  “I’m all right, Alan,” she said, and finally allowed Dupree to pull her away from the body. She let go of Lenny Ryan’s hand and it fell back into the grass, the fingers now closed around the handle of Caroline’s gun.

  54

  Spokane Police Dept.

  Serial Crime Task Force

  Interview Transcript

  Paul Verloc

  Tape Three

  Date: 15 August, 1000 hours

  SPIVEY: W
ant some more coffee?

  PAUL VERLOC: Sure. Creamer? Thanks.

  SPIVEY: Okay, we got the tape changed…We all ready? Okay, go ahead.

  PAUL VERLOC: Well, like I was saying, at first I was just chasing girlies off the boats. Especially when it was cold outside, they used the boats. It really bugged Kevin that we couldn’t keep the girlies away. He was afraid of losing the contract with Landers. Before that I used to bring girlies home to him sometimes. I know that sounds terrible, but because of the shooting, sometimes he had, what do you call it, dysfunction? You know, when you can’t…

  MCDANIEL:…achieve orgasm?

  PAUL VERLOC: Right. Well, around February, he came back from a meeting and said there was a bonus structure set up now.

  MCDANIEL: Bonuses for driving the prostitutes away? PAUL VERLOC: Yeah. He told me to call him the next time I found someone, you know, having sex in the boats. So I found this one girl and chased off her john. I called Kevin and he came out and took her for a drive.

  MCDANIEL: This was Shelly Nordling.

  PAUL VERLOC: I guess. I found the next one sleeping in one of the boats. He took her for a drive too. But this time he came back after thirty minutes and said he needed my help. He brought me to the truck and…he said she’d tried to attack him and he choked her. But I knew he was lying. See, he’s got this problem with dysfunction.

  SPIVEY: Yeah, you said.

  PAUL VERLOC: Not that it’s any excuse but I know he gets…frustrated. So we drove her body to the house and Kevin started showing me in all of these books, how if we did certain things, people would assume it was someone else, like in the books.

  MCDANIEL: Curtis Blanton’s books.

  PAUL VERLOC: Oh, he had all kinds of books. He said you guys would make all these assumptions if we did it right and that if they thought there was a serial killer, it might frighten the girlies away. And he was right. So that’s why we did a lot of the weird stuff, like shooting them in the head afterwards. He said them books called it…oh, what’s it called. When you do too much of something?

  MCDANIEL: Overkill.

  PAUL VERLOC: Yeah. Right. And that you guys would think it was a real psycho who hated women. And he did other stuff, like tearing off their fingernails and moving the bodies. You’ll have to ask him, I didn’t understand it all.

  MCDANIEL: How did you get the bodies down to the river?

  PAUL VERLOC: We had a plastic sled and it just pulled over the grass and dirt without leaving a mark. Then he worked on the shallow graves, you know, putting the sticks a certain way. After the second one, he promised he wouldn’t do it no more, so I thought it was over. But he watched you guys find that body by the river with his binoculars, and he kind of liked that and he thought it would really be something if we put another body down there, and it just got so…

  SPIVEY: But you never tried to stop him?

  PAUL VERLOC: Even before they found the bodies, the girlies stopped coming around and we got our bonus…I guess I thought he would quit once we got the money. And maybe I knew how much trouble I was in. Since my wife died, Kevin is all I have and after the shooting, he had a hard time. You’re probably thinking the apple don’t fall far from the tree, huh?

  MCDANIEL: You’re saying he did all of this…for a few thousand bucks?

  PAUL VERLOC: At first, I think so. But just between you and me? After a while, I think Kevin kind of got a taste for it.

  Spokane Police Dept.

  Serial Crime Task Force

  Interview Transcript

  John Landers

  Tape Two

  Date: 16 August, 900 hours

  LAIRD: We’re going in circles here. No one is suggesting that you told Verloc to kill anyone. All we want to know is the general context of your conversations with him.

  DARREN MOORE: I told you, my client feels it is not in his best interest at this time to discuss the nature of his discussions with Mr. Verloc, other than to state emphatically that he had no knowledge of any of the crimes Mr. Verloc is alleged to have committed.

  LAIRD: So it didn’t strike you as strange that when you started paying this guy to clean up the neighborhood, hookers started getting killed?

  DARREN MOORE: Look, my client has been through a terrible ordeal. Now he has agreed to cooperate, but I’m not about to let him incriminate himself in some sort of witch hunt!

  MCDANIEL: Okay, let’s back up, then. The first time you mentioned the bonus situation to him, do you recall what his reaction might have been?

  DARREN MOORE: No. I’m not going to let him answer that. I am not about to let my client say anything that might be misconstrued in some misguided attempt to prosecute him until I have a piece of paper from the district attorney that gives my client unlimited immunity from any prosecution in this matter or subsequent prosecution.

  SPIVEY: Here you go. Here’s your coffee.

  Spokane Police Dept.

  Serial Crime Task Force

  Interview Transcript

  Kevin Verloc

  Tape Thirteen

  Date: 17 August, 1900 hours

  KEVIN VERLOC: Yeah. The fingernails were textbook, too obvious, probably. I was conscious of you realizing the killer was a cop because of that, but I just couldn’t think of any way around it. I didn’t want to leave any skin behind. But replacing the bodies, changing the dump sites to indicate a change in the killer’s MO, I got a lot of that straight from Mr. Blanton’s descriptions of the guy in Texas. Oh, and the Pacific Coast Highway guy. That was really the model, I suppose. And the killer’s overall preparation of the bodies for discovery? Some of that I got from the job, of course, but the fingernails…I’m thinking it was the Pacific Coast Highway guy. Is Mr. Blanton coming back? I’d really like to clear some of this up with him.

  SPIVEY: No. Mr. Blanton has…decided not to work on this case anymore.

  KEVIN VERLOC: Oh. That’s too bad. I suppose he’ll see this transcript? Because I thought he’d be interested in the forty bucks. That was my own idea, my signature. You don’t know anyone else who ever did that, do you? ’Cause I don’t think I read it anywhere, I think it was all mine.

  MCDANIEL: No. I’d never seen that before. In fact we were wondering why you kept receipts for the money. Why you billed Landers for it.

  KEVIN VERLOC: As a rule I keep exceptional records, Mr. McDaniel. Always have. And I’m not a thief. I paid these women and I knew that detail might become important some day.

  MCDANIEL: I don’t understand.

  KEVIN VERLOC: Well, think about it. If you kill someone to cover up another crime, let’s say felony robbery, that’s aggravated murder. A capital crime. But if the killer doesn’t steal the money back, if he leaves it on the victim—

  MCDANIEL: My God.

  KEVIN VERLOC: No robbery. No aggravating circumstances. No death penalty. It’s just plain murder. And I knew you would find psychological underpinnings for the money. That’s why I put the money in the girl’s mouth. Did you get that?

  SPIVEY: Jeff? You okay?

  KEVIN VERLOC: By the way, do you know what Mr. Blanton thought of the name? I just thought they could have come up with a much better name than Southbank Strangler, especially with the fingernails and the money and the moving of bodies…I just wished Mr. Blanton had been able to name me. He’s really good at that, don’t you think?

  EPILOGUE

  Caroline brought out the last box of clothing from her mother’s house and found her father leaning against the trunk of her car, holding a long silk glove that had been white but was now a neglected gray. When Caroline set her box in the trunk, he looked up as if he’d just noticed her.

  “She didn’t still wear these?” He held the glove out for her to see.

  “She was saving them for me,” Caroline said. It was surprising how little her father knew sometimes, the way he could pretend that his life hadn’t once been another life. She looked down at the open box, filled with slacks and sweaters and light blouses and on the top, the mate to
this long, white glove, which her mother had worn at her wedding forty years ago.

  Her father picked up the other glove. “Maybe we should save these,” he said, his voice unsteady.

  “Okay.” Caroline looked up at his lined broadening face, his gray eyebrows. He was sixty. When he ran off to California he was thirty-six, Caroline’s age. Somehow that fact seemed crucial to whatever they would make of this now.

  “Are you coming, Dad?” she asked, and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “You go ahead,” he said. “I’d like to stay here for a while.”

  From the car she watched him walk back toward the house, the gray gloves dangling from his thick fingers. She drove slowly through her neighborhood and stopped at every intersection. She still wasn’t used to the patch over her left eye, which limited her peripheral vision. It made her especially nervous when she drove.

  She remembered waking up in the hospital after the surgery on her eye and seeing Dupree sitting by her bed, remembered him saying that he had moved back in with his family. “Anyway,” he said, “I didn’t get a chance to congratulate you.”