“I don’t know how you can go out and run in weather like this,” Anna says to her.
“I like pain.” Lucy snaps on her butt pack, a pistol inside it.
“We need to talk more about this, figure out what you’re going to do.” Caffeine defibrillates my slow heart and jolts me back into a clear head.
“After I run, I’m going to work out in the gym,” Lucy tells us. “I’ll be gone for a while.”
“Pain and more pain,” Anna muses.
All I can think of when I look at my niece is how extraordinary she is and how much unfairness life has dealt her. She never knew her biological father, and then Benton came along and was the father she never had, and she lost him, too. Her mother is a self-centered woman who is too competitive with Lucy to love her, if my sister, Dorothy, is capable of loving anyone, and I really don’t believe she is. Lucy is possibly the most intelligent, intricate person I know. It has not earned her many fans. She has always been irrepressible and as I watch her spring out of the kitchen like an Olympic runner, armed and dangerous, I am reminded of when she began the first grade at age four and a half and flunked conduct.
“How do you flunk conduct?” I asked Dorothy when she called me in a rage to complain about the horrible hardship of being Lucy’s mother.
“She talks all the time and interrupts the other students and is always raising her hand to answer questions!” Dorothy blurted over the phone. “Do you know what her teacher wrote on her report card? Here! Let me read it to you! Lucy does not work and play well with others. She is a show-off and a know-it-all and is constantly taking things apart, such as the pencil sharpener and doorknobs.”
Lucy is gay. That is probably most unfair of all because she can’t outgrow it or get over it. Homosexuality is unfair because it creates unfairness. For that reason, it broke my heart when I found out this part of my niece’s life. I desperately don’t want her to suffer. I also force myself to admit that I have managed to ignore the obvious up until now. ATF isn’t going to be generous or forgiving, and Lucy has probably known this for a while. Administration in D.C. won’t look at all she has accomplished, but will focus on her through the distorting lens of prejudice and jealousy.
“It’ll be a witch hunt,” I say after Lucy has left the house.
Anna cracks eggs into a bowl.
“They want her gone, Anna.”
She drops shells into the sink and opens the refrigerator, pulling out a carton of milk, glancing at the expiration date. “There are those who think she is a hero,” she says.
“Law enforcement tolerates women. It doesn’t celebrate them and punishes those who become heroes. That’s the dirty little secret no one wants to talk about,” I say.
Anna vigorously whips eggs with a fork.
“It’s our same story,” I continue. “We went to medical school in a day when we had to apologize for taking men’s slots. In some cases, we were shunned, sabotaged. I had three other women in my first-year medical school class. How many did you have?”
“It was different in Vienna.”
“Vienna?” My thoughts evaporate.
“Where I was trained,” she informs me.
“Oh.” I experience guilt again as I learn another detail I don’t know about my good friend.
“When I came here, everything you are saying about how it is for women was exactly like that.” Anna’s mouth is set in a hard line as she pours egg batter into a cast-iron skillet. “I remember what it was like when I moved to Virginia. How I was treated.”
“Believe me, I know all about it.”
“I was thirty years ahead of you, Kay. You really don’t know all about it.”
Eggs steam and bubble. I lean against the counter, drinking black coffee, wishing I had been awake when Lucy came in last night, aching because I didn’t talk to her. I had to find out her news like this, almost as a by the way. “Did she talk to you?” I ask Anna. “About what she just told us?”
She folds the eggs over and over. “Looking back on it, I think she showed up with champagne because she wanted to tell you. Rather an inappropriate effect, considering her news.” She pops multi-grain English muffins out of the toaster. “It is easy to assume that psychiatrists have such deep conversations with everyone, when in truth, people rarely tell me their true feelings, even when they pay me by the hour.” She carries our plates to the table. “Mostly, people tell me what they think. That is the problem. People think too much.”
“They won’t be blatant.” I am preoccupied with ATF again as Anna and I sit across from each other. “Their attack will be covert, like the FBI. And in truth, the FBI ran her off for the same reason. She was their rising star, a computer wizard, a helicopter pilot, the first female member of the Hostage Rescue Team.” I rush through Lucy’s resume as Anna’s expression turns increasingly skeptical. We both know it is unnecessary for me to recite all this. She has known Lucy since Lucy was a child. “Then the gay card was played.” I can’t stop. “Well, she left them for ATF and here we go again. On and on, history repeated. Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Because you are consuming yourself with Lucy’s problems when your own loom larger than Mont Blanc.”
My attention wanders out the window. A blue jay helps himself to the bird feeder, feathers ruffling, sunflower seeds falling and peppering the snowy earth like lead shot. Pale fingers of sunlight probe the overcast morning. I nervously turn my coffee cup in small circles on the table. My elbow throbs slowly and deeply as we eat. Whatever my problems are, I resist talking about them, as if to voice them will somehow give them life—as if they don’t have life already. Anna doesn’t push. We are quiet. Silverware clinks against plates and snow drifts down more thickly, frosting shrubbery and trees and hovering foggily over the river. I return to my room and take a long, hot bath, my cast propped on the side of the tub. I am dressing with difficulty, realizing that I am not likely to ever master tying shoes with one hand, when the doorbell rings. Moments later, Anna knocks and asks me if I am decent.
Thoughts bloom darkly and roll like storms. I am not expecting company. “Who is it?” I call out.
“Buford Righter,” she says.
CHAPTER 4
BEHIND HIS BACK, the city commonweath’s attorney is called many things: Easy Righter (he is weak), Righter Wrong (wishy-washy), Fighter Righter (anything but), Booford (scared of his own shadow). Always proper, always appropriate, Righter is always the Virginia gentleman he was trained to be in the Caroline County horse country of his roots. No one loves him. No one hates him. He is neither feared nor respected. Righter has no fire. I can’t recall ever seeing him emotional, no matter how cruel or heart-wrenching the case. Worse, he is squeamish when it comes to the details I bring to the forum, preferring to focus on points of law and not the appalling human messiness left by its violations.
His avoidance of the morgue has resulted in his not being as well versed in forensic science and medicine as he ought to be. In fact, he is the only seasoned prosecutor I know who doesn’t seem to mind stipulating cause of death. In other words, he allows the paper record to speak for the medical examiner in the courtroom. This is a travesty. To me it constitutes malpractice. When the medical examiner isn’t in the courtroom, then, in a sense, neither is the body, and jurors don’t envision the victim or what he went through during the process of dying violently. Clinical words on protocols simply don’t evoke the terror or the suffering, and for this reason, it is usually the defense, not the prosecution, who wants to stipulate cause of death.
“Buford, how are you?” I hold out my hand and he glances at my cast and my sling, and down at my untied shoelaces and my shirttail hanging out. He has never seen me in anything less than a suit and in a setting that befits my professional rank, and his brow knits into an expression that is supposed to evince genteel compassion and understanding, the humility and caring of those handpicked by God to rule the rest of us lesser creatures. His type abounds among the first families of Vi
rginia, a privileged, dusty people who have refined the skill of disguising their elitism and arrogance beneath a heavy aura of burden, as if it is so damn hard to be them.
“The question is, how are you?” he says, sitting back down in Anna’s handsome oval living room with its vaulted ceiling and view of the river.
“I really don’t know how to answer that, Buford.” I choose a rocking chair. “Every time someone asks, my mind reboots.” Anna must have just gotten the fire going and has vanished, and I have the uneasy sensation that her absence is about more than her being politely unobtrusive.
“No small wonder. Don’t even know how you’re able to function after what you’ve been through.” Righter speaks with a syrupy Virginia drawl. “Sure am sorry to barge in like this, Kay, but something’s come up, something unexpected. Nice place, isn’t it?” He continues to survey his surroundings. “She build or was it already here?”
I don’t know or care.
“You two are pretty close, I gather,” he adds.
I am not sure if he is making small talk or fishing. “She’s been a good friend,” I reply.
“I know she thinks the world of you. All of which is to say,” he goes on, “that you couldn’t be in better hands right now, in my opinion.”
I resent his implying that I am in anybody’s hands, as if I am a patient on a ward, and I say so.
“Oh, I see.” He continues his scan of oil paintings on pale rose walls, of art glass and sculptures and European furniture. “Then you don’t have a professional relationship? Never have?”
“Not literally,” I reply testily. “I have never had an appointment.”
“She ever prescribe medications for you?” he blandly goes on.
“Not that I recall.”
“Well, can’t believe it’s almost Christmas.” Righter sighs, his attention wandering back in from the river, back to me.
To use a Lucy term, he looks dorky in Bavarian button-up heavy green wool pants tucked into fleece-lined rubber boots with big tread. He wears a plaid Burberry-type wool sweater buttoned up to his chin, as if he can’t decide whether he will climb a mountain or play golf in Scotland this day.
“Well,” he says, “let me tell you why I’m here. Marino called a couple hours ago. There’s been an unanticipated development in the Chandonne case.”
The stab of betrayal is instant. Marino has told me nothing. He hasn’t even bothered to see how I am doing this morning.
“I’ll give you a summation as best I can.” Righter crosses his legs and demurely places his hands in his lap, a thin wedding band and University of Virginia class ring glinting in lamplight. “Kay, I’m sure you’re aware the news of what happened at your house and the subsequent apprehension of Chandonne has been broadcast all over. I mean all over. I’m sure you’ve followed it and can appreciate the magnitude of what I’m about to say.”
Fear is a fascinating emotion. I have studied it endlessly and often tell people the best example of how it works is to recall the reaction of another driver you have pulled in front of and almost hit. Panic instantly turns to rage and the other person lays on the horn, makes obscene gestures or, these days, shoots you. I go through the progression completely, flawlessly, shrill fear turning to fury. “I’ve not followed the news deliberately and certainly won’t appreciate the magnitude of it,” I reply. “I never appreciate having my privacy violated.”
“The murders of Kim Luong and Diane Bray created a lot of attention, but nothing like this—the murder attempt on you,” he continues. “I’m supposing, then, you didn’t see The Washington Post this morning?”
I just stare at him, seething.
“Front-page photo of Chandonne in the stretcher being carried into the E.R., his hairy shoulders sticking out of the sheets like some sort of long-haired dog. Of course, his face was covered by bandages, but you certainly could get the sense of how grotesque he is. And the tabloids. You can imagine. Werewolf in Richmond, Beauty and the Beast, that sort of thing.” Disdain creeps around the edges of his voice, as if sensationalism is obscene, and I am subjected to an unwanted image of him making love to his wife. I can envision him fucking with his socks on. I suspect he would consider sex an indignity, the primitive judge of biology overruling his higher self. I have heard rumors. In the men’s room, he won’t use the urinals or toilets in front of anybody. He is a compulsive hand-washer. All of this is buzzing through my mind as he continues to sit so properly and disclose the wilting public exposure Chandonne has caused me.
“Do you know if photographs of my house have shown up anywhere?” I have to ask. “There were photographers when I came out of my driveway last night.”
“Well, I do know there have been some helicopters flying over this morning. Someone told me that,” he replies, making me instantly suspicious that he has been back at my house again and witnessed this for himself. “Taking aerial shots.” He stares out at snow drifting down. “I guess the weather’s put a stop to it. The guard gate’s been turning away quite a few cars. The press, the curious. In an unexpected way, a damn good thing you’re staying with Dr. Zenner. Funny how things work out.” He pauses, staring off toward the river again. A flock of Canada geese circles, as if waiting for instructions from the tower. “Normally, what I’d recommend is you don’t return to your house until after the trial. . . .”
“Until after the trial?” I interrupt.
“That would be if the trial were here,” he leads up to his next revelation, which I automatically assume is a reference to a change of venue.
“You’re saying, the trial will probably be moved out of Richmond,” I interpolate. “And what do you mean by normally?”
“That’s what I’m getting to. Marino got a call from the Manhattan D.A.’s office.”
“This morning? This is the new development?” I am baffled. “What does New York have to do with anything?”
“This was a few hours ago,” he goes on. “The head of the sex crimes division, a woman named Jaime Berger—a weird name, spelled J-A-I-M-E but pronounced Jamie. You may have heard of her. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if you two know each other.”
“We’ve never met,” I reply. “But I’ve heard of her.”
“Friday, December fifth, two years ago,” Righter goes on, “the body of a twenty-eight-year-old black female was found in New York, an apartment in the area of Second Avenue and Seventy-seventh Street, Upper East Side. Apparently a woman who was a television meteorologist, uh, did the weather, on CNBC. Don’t know if you heard about the case?”
I begin to make connections against my will.
“When she didn’t show up at the studio early that morning, the morning of the fifth, and didn’t answer the phone, someone checked on her. The victim”—Righter pulls a tiny leather notebook out of his back pants pocket and flips through pages—“name of Susan Pless. Well, her body’s back in her bedroom on the rug by the bed. Clothes ripped off from the waist up, face and head so badly beaten it looks like she was in a plane crash.” He glances up at me. “And that’s a quote, the plane crash part—supposedly how Berger described it to Marino. What was the word you used to use? Remember that case where the drunk teenagers were racing in a pickup truck and one of them decides to hang halfway out his window and has the misfortune of encountering a tree?”
“Bogging,” I dully reply as I take in what he is saying. “Face caved in from severe impact, such as you might find in plane crashes or in cases where people have jumped or fallen from high places and hit face first. Two years ago?” My thoughts spin. “How can that be?”
“I won’t go into all the gory detail.” He is flipping more pages in his notebook. “But there were bite marks, including on the hands and feet, and a lot of strange, long pale hairs adhering to blood that at first were presumed to be animal hairs. Maybe a long-haired Angora cat or something.” He looks up at me. “You’re getting the drift.”
All along we have assumed Chandonne’s trip to Richmond was his first to the Un
ited States. We have no logical reason for this assumption beyond our painting him as a Quasimodo of sorts who spent his life hidden in the basement of his powerful family’s Paris home. We also assumed he sailed to Richmond from Antwerp at the same time his brother’s dead body was headed our way. Are we wrong about that, too? I toss this out to Righter.
“You know what Interpol conjectured, at any rate,” he comments.
“That he was aboard the Sirius under an alias,” I recall, “a man named Pascal who was immediately taken to the airport when the ship came to port here in Richmond in early December. Supposedly a family emergency required him to fly back to Europe.” I repeat information Jay Talley presented while I was in Lyon at Interpol last week. “But no one ever actually saw him board the plane, so it’s been assumed Pascal was really Chandonne and he never flew anywhere but stayed here and started killing. But if this guy readily travels in and out of the U.S., no telling how long he’s been in the States or when he got here or anything. So much for theories.”
“Well, I suppose a lot of them may end up revised before it’s all over. No disrespect to Interpol or anyone else intended.” Righter recrosses his legs and seems strangely pleased.
“Has he been located? This Pascal person?”
Righter doesn’t know, but he speculates that whoever the real Pascal is—assuming he exists—he is probably just one more rotten apple involved with the Chandonne family’s criminal cartel. “Another guy with an alias, possibly even an associate of the dead guy in the cargo container,” Righter speculates. “The brother, I guess. Thomas Chandonne, who we certainly know was involved in the family business.”
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