Dig Your Grave

by Steven Cooper

  Alex tells him about the crime scene, about Barry Schultz, about the doctor’s wife. He pushes the box toward Gus. “The wife gave us a bunch of stuff, like a hat, some gloves, the guy’s water bottle.”

  Gus takes the box. “I don’t think there’s any emotion attached to this stuff.”

  Alex looks up squarely into Gus’s face. “Right. You work with emotion.”

  “That’s why I like to be at the crime scene.”

  “If there’s nothing useful for you here, I can take you to the cemetery maybe tomorrow,” Alex tells him. “What about the beret?”

  Gus removes it from the box. He shrugs, then closes his eyes. “Did he wear this playing golf?”

  “Man, that was quick.”

  Gus, eyes still closed, smiles. “No. That wasn’t a vision. I figured the golfing gloves, the water bottle . . . Give me a minute.”

  “Take two.”

  Gus brushes his hands over the feltlike texture of the beret. The surface is, at once, a soft meadow and a worn, beaten path. His fingers create fleeting grooves of bending grass as they graze the material. He then goes underneath and lets the hat rest on the tips of two fingers. He amuses himself with the thought of touching the synapses of the doctor’s brain, but that’s a power far above his pay grade. Instead, he searches for a climactic memory, a pivotal moment in the doctor’s life.

  And nothing.

  He pauses, takes a deep mental breath, and wills himself to see a door opening. The door is fully of his imagination, not a vision; it’s a tool, a device he often uses when he can’t break through the wall. He slides the door in from the left, pushes it across the horizon, lets it float to the right. He’s like a stagehand in his mind’s eye, setting the props where they need to go before the scene can begin. His doors usually open to a brilliantly blue sky and an invitation to probe the unfathomable. They usher in possibility, the arcanum of a psychic’s power. Not so this one.

  Beyond this door is a room of pulsing red light. He stands at the threshold, peering into the crimson haze. Then he sees the photographs. They’re hanging from the ceiling, but Gus can’t make out the images; he pokes his head in, sees the formulas in the tubs, smells the chemicals, and he realizes that the chamber in front of him is a photographer’s darkroom from the old days. With that revelation comes the whirring and snapping sounds of old cameras, from the pre–digital age, and the flashing of bulbs that mitigates the blood redness of the lab. With a change of aperture, Gus can, indeed, make out the image in one of the hanging photographs: it’s a man in scrubs donning a surgical mask, peering down into the lens of the camera, as if a patient on a gurney below is taking the shot. This has to be the doctor, Gus assumes, so he studies the photo with vigilance; he probes until the image comes to life, and when it does Gus sees the doctor at work. But the man is not so much performing surgery as he is impaling the patient. He’s not making an incision. He’s digging a hole. The patient, her insides splattering the walls, shrieks bloody murder.

  Not of his own volition, Gus’s eyes bolt open.

  “You see a ghost?”

  “Huh?”

  “It looks like you saw a ghost,” Alex says.

  “I might have.” Gus clenches his stomach, trying to divert a tsunami of nausea. “Look, I don’t know really what I saw, but I did see the man digging.”

  “Which man?”

  “A guy dressed like a doctor.”

  “So, he did dig his own grave,” Alex concludes.

  “He was digging something.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure. I’m not often sure. But this I’m sure of,” Gus says. “And I think there’s something else.”

  Gus describes the darkroom.

  “What do you think it means?” Alex asks.

  “I don’t have a precise message about it, but I have an interpretation. I think you need to gather photos.”

  “Photos?”

  Gus takes a final swig of beer. “Yeah. I think you’ll want to get photographs. Maybe old ones. This goes back to my hunch about the CEO’s past.”

  “So you think the victims are connected?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Something’s connected. Obviously.”

  “I’m getting a terribly deep sense about history,” Gus says. “And photographs are your map to get there.”

  “So I need to ask the CEO’s wife for family photos?” Alex asks. “That ought to warm her frigid heart.”

  “And you’ll need to get some pictures from the doctor’s family, as well,” Gus tells him. “I’m suggesting that together, an album, of sorts, of your victims will help you in your investigation. Photos tell a story, Alex. The story will fall into place. Things will be revealed.”

  Alex’s eyes bounce.

  “You don’t believe me?” Gus asks.

  “I most certainly believe you,” Alex replies. “I’m just psyched, you know, listening to my psychic. Get it?”

  Gus looks at him deadpan. “You want another beer?”

  “I do.”

  As Gus fetches the beer from the outdoor kitchen, his phone rings. He doesn’t recognize the number, and when he answers he only hears music, Spanish music, playing in the distance.

  12

  A few nights later, back at his own place, Gus gets ready for Blaine Wrigley, his third client of the week. Washing his face, he’s surprised to see how tired those eyes are staring back at him from the mirror, given the slow, nearly effortless shift at work today. But he’s probably the only person he knows who sees crow’s-feet and rejoices. He likes the affirmation of age. There’s not one laugh line or one wisdom line he’d erase.

  As he’s toweling off his face, Billie calls. She’ll be coming back to Phoenix tomorrow, and she says she’s ready to be in her house now that the perimeter is fully alarmed. She says she misses him. He says the same. But there’s something about the cadence of the conversation, the volley of dialogue, that suggests to Gus they’re riding in a car and that he’s seated behind her. When he says he has to go get ready for a client, Gus can viscerally feel the car pull to a stop to drop him at the curb.

  Despite his misgivings about caffeine at seven o’clock in the evening, he brews a pot, and when Blaine Wrigley arrives about twenty-five minutes later, Gus Parker is in full throttle. “You’re having problems with your ex,” Gus says moments after he opens the door.

  “How’d you know?” the man asks.

  “I’m psychic,” Gus says with a laugh. “Or it could be that you mentioned it last time.”

  The two of them settle in the office. “But now she wants to reconcile,” Blaine tells him.

  “Then you’re not having a problem with your ex.”

  Blaine, baby-faced and muscle-bound for a guy of fifty, is nervous. His leg shakes. He looks away when he says, “No. It’s not her. It’s our son, rather her son from another marriage. He’s the problem.”

  The first time Blaine had come to see Gus, the guy had been offered a chance to invest in a small chain of low-powered radio stations throughout Arizona. Gus had advised against the move, not based on a vision, specifically, but rather a hunch that Blaine had been bouncing from one bad investment to the next, without a real business plan for any of them; he was a low-grade get-rich-quick schemer, not the kind who causes injury to others—the kind who only causes injury to himself, repeatedly.

  “How old is your stepson?”

  “He’s twenty-three and angry,” the man replies. “He doesn’t want us to get back together.”

  “Because?”

  Blaine’s voice goes MIA. He just sits there, says nothing, looks down.

  “You were unfaithful,” Gus says.

  The man nods.

  “And your stepson watched his mother fall apart.”

  The client lifts his head, locks eyes on Gus. “Damn, you’re good.”

  Gus smiles. “That wasn’t psychic. That was just a good guess.”

  “Well, I’m paying you to be psychic,” B
laine reminds him. “So, if you wouldn’t mind telling me what our future looks like . . .”

  “Do you have a picture of her?”

  The man digs out his wallet it, opens it, and hands a photo to Gus. The woman’s neck is beautifully sculpted; that’s the first thing Gus notices. Her hair is up, her eyes wide and ingratiating, and her skin flawless, as if she’s just toweled off from a Dove commercial.

  “Some sons will do almost anything to protect their mothers,” Gus says. “That’s what I’m seeing.”

  “Meaning what? How far will he go?”

  “Has he threatened you?” Gus asks.

  “More like a warning,” Blaine says. “Every time I try to see my wife, this kid shows up and tells me to stay away from her. He always causes a scene, enough to get me to leave.”

  Gus’s stomach rattles. He ignores the disruption and says, “First of all, I do see the two of you together.”

  “But Henry, that’s her kid, is now calling me every day warning me to stay away from her.”

  Another rattle inside Gus. Then something falls down the stairs of his spine. “He says those exact words? ‘Stay away from her’?” Gus asks.

  Blaine thinks for a moment, then says, “Pretty much.”

  An affirmation of something. Maybe that explains Gus’s recent visions.

  “Are you afraid of your stepson?”

  “Not physically,” the man replies. “I played football in college, and as you can probably tell, I’m not exactly a little guy like—”

  “Like me?”

  “No, man, I didn’t mean that,” Blaine says, a blush rising across his wide face. “You’re kinda skinny, but you’re not little. You’re in good shape, you know, for someone your age.”

  Gus nods. “Thanks. I think.”

  “I’m just saying that I might be a lot bigger than my stepson, but size doesn’t matter if the kid’s got a gun.”

  Gus stares at the wall behind his client into his imaginary vortex of clues. “I don’t think he has a gun.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “It’s just what I see,” Gus tells him. “I see a very angry young guy. And he’s not so much angry with you as he is with his biological father. His biological father died in some kind of accident, right?”

  “You nailed it,” Blaine says. “Small plane crash. Years ago.”

  Gus looks at the photo of the woman again. He grips it in his hands. “I have a strong feeling that you and your wife will reconcile. But it won’t be here,” he says. “I think your stepson is actually helping you, not in a good way, but he’s helping.”

  “Like how?”

  “You’re going to have to leave Phoenix to get her back,” Gus tells him. “That’s what I’m seeing. This whole thing suggests a trip, maybe like a second honeymoon. If you can, invite her someplace special for a long weekend. Maybe Cabo, or Tahoe, or even Flagstaff. I think with the son out of the way, you and she can finally have those really important talks.”

  “He can’t control where she goes.”

  “No. He can’t.”

  “It’s a great idea, Gus,” the man says. “I should have thought of it myself.”

  “You were too focused on what to do about the son,” Gus replies. “I focused on what to do without the son.”

  “Wow. Huge relief, man.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Nah, that’s it for now. Thanks for clearing my head,” Blaine says. “I should send some of my buddies to see you. You’d blow ’em away.”

  Gus rises from his chair. “That’s kind of you to offer. But I’m about as booked up as I can be now. I don’t do this full-time.”

  Blaine says, “You should.” Then he hands Gus his fee and leaves.

  About an hour later, savoring some relief of his own, Gus returns to his office and sits on the floor to meditate. He chooses Tibetan chanting on his iPod and rests his noise-canceling headphones over his ears. At the moment, he’s convinced the nefarious visions—those words on the CT scan, and again on the wall at Billie’s house—were messages about his client, not about him. This kind of wholesale distribution of signs is not uncommon. He’s soothed by the chanting. He’s almost a sensory speck of nothing in the universe, when the quiet hum of Zen gives way to a flurry of static. Without surrendering his Zen completely, he feels for the wire that connects to his iPod, tries to give it a gentle twist; it’s an instinctive move that requires no consciousness, but it doesn’t work. The static grows louder, buzzing in Gus’s ears like a brigade of mosquitoes out for blood. He catches himself shooing the noise away with his hand, and, as he does, the racket stops, giving way to a voice that is decidedly not Tibetan. “Stay away from her,” it says. “Stay away from her.” Gus comes barreling back to earth. It’s a woman’s voice. Not a stepson’s voice.

  “Stay away from her.”

  He rips the headphones off, then tosses them to the floor. He is a speck no longer but rather a full bundle of nerves.

  “Stay away from her.”

  This woman’s voice. It echoes in his head. It becomes a ghostly chant. He sits in a stupor. Then later, the chant follows him to bed, and, not helped in the least by the caffeine he had ingested earlier that evening, Gus Parker tosses and turns all night.

  13

  Perfect call to start the day. By “perfect,” he means “worst.”

  Alex Mills just got off the phone with the mayor’s press secretary, who was calling to remind Mills, in case he had forgotten, that there were two unsolved homicide cases without substantial leads and that the press was getting restless.

  “Whatever we can do to help,” said Nathan Hedges. “I’ve got a ton of resources I can throw at the press, including a spare public information officer who speaks Spanish.”

  As if, suddenly, Phoenix cares about Telemundo, or Latinos, in general.

  “Grácias, but we have PIOs to handle the press,” Mills told him. “But thanks for the offer.”

  Nathan Hedges doesn’t give a shit about the press. Mayor Hurley doesn’t give a shit about the press. The mayor’s office cares about a quick, neat wrap-up of the cases, and that call was nothing more than an attempt by Hurley and friends to put on the pressure. Hurley wants his accolades, his crime-free accolades (which have a tendency to show up in national listicles of “Safest Places to Live” and “Top 10 Places to Raise Children” and “Best Mayors in America”). Hurley, ultimately, doesn’t care about the press. Hurley cares about Hurley.

  Sadly for Hurley, Mills doesn’t care about Hurley.

  He must be wearing his disgust on his face because when Preston and Myers file into his office a minute later, Preston says, “You have a hairball, Detective?”

  Mills winces. “Good morning, gentlemen, to what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “You want videotape from Thomas and Sixteenth?” Myers asks him.

  “Sure. Why the fuck not?”

  “There’s a gas station at the intersection. Cameras everywhere as you might imagine,” Preston says. “I doubt we’ll need a search warrant or subpoena. You know, these businesses are usually real good with helping out.”

  “Usually,” Mills says. “Get me video from the nights in question. It would make sense if the killer arranged to meet his victims there. Someplace random, unsuspicious.”

  “Will do,” Preston says. “But while we’re talking search warrants and subpoenas, I want to let you know the good doctor’s colleagues aren’t cooperating. So we’ll need a warrant for the practice.”

  “Get one,” Mills says. “Shouldn’t be a big deal.”

  “They’ve already lawyered up,” Preston informs him.

  “Not surprised.”

  “We’re not having any better luck with Schultz’s answering service,” Preston says.

  “How so?”

  “The company says it has grounds to fight the subpoena based on HIPAA laws, alone,” Preston explains. “They say they have a duty to fight it.”

  Mills scoffs. “Jesus Christ,
doesn’t anyone want to know why Barry Schultz ended up dead?” he grouses. “Did you tell them that a homicide investigation supersedes HIPAA?”

  “You might want to have a talk with their lawyer,” Myers says.

  Mills gets up. “Fuck that,” he says. “Give me the address. It’s time for me to pay a visit.”

  Physicians Messaging sits on the first floor of a generic office building in one of the generic office parks that have recently cropped up around Broadway and Forty-Eighth. They’re everywhere now, these concrete-and-glass barracks of business, killing the dreams of people who would rather be doing anything than pushing papers and answering phones and making copies and chasing spreadsheets and overusing PowerPoint. Mills knows Phoenix. He knows people. He can’t imagine being most of them.

  The office manager introduces herself, and Mills forgets her name as soon as she says it. She’s as generic as the building in which she toils. Five-something, hairstyle-of-the moment, red lipstick, and a cross around her neck. “I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to discuss this, Detective,” she says. “It’s already gone to our Legal department.”

  “We don’t need to talk on the record,” he tells her.

  He’s standing in the reception area. Gray fabric climbs the walls, threatening to encase the whole office and its workers, yielding only to a display of inspirational posters that offer banalities like “Teamwork Will Make You Soar!” with a murmuration of starlings against a harvest moon to illustrate the message.

  “I’m sorry,” the office manager says, shaking her head to accentuate her feigned sorrow. “But I’m prohibited from sharing information. We’ll respond to the subpoena accordingly.”

  “Fine,” Mills says. “But if you fail to provide the information we need, we can get a search warrant to turn this place upside down. I’d hate to do that.”

  The woman reddens but braces herself. Her jaw clenches, neck stiffens. “On what grounds, Detective? How could you possibly justify a search warrant?”

  “I’m prohibited from sharing information at this point, ma’am,” Mills says with as much snark as he can muster. “But let me just say in very layman terms that the doctor received a call from this answering service immediately before his disappearance. For all we know, an employee here could be implicated in the crime. Perhaps one of your operators lured the doctor to his death. We have to investigate all angles. And an inside job, which doesn’t involve a patient, removes the hurdle of HIPAA that your lawyers are so fond of.”