Over coffee and cake, mostly cake, Gus describes the visions he had at the doctor’s office. “The Spanish music, the woman falling, falling from the roof, I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know how or why or where it fits into the context of these crimes.”
“Not yet,” she says. “I sense something is coming, gathering.”
“Like what?”
She squeezes her eyes closed. She’s chewing up another morsel of cake (German chocolate). She savors and swallows and says, “I don’t know. Like a storm. A hurricane.”
Gus laughs. “A hurricane? In Phoenix? That’s crazy.”
She opens her eyes and smiles. “I don’t see it as much as I sense it. It’s very convincing. Be prepared to evacuate.”
“Well, I’m evacuating now, Beatrice. Gotta head home.”
She gets up and grabs him by the arm. “You watch yourself. And open those eyes in the back of your head. Do not take Alex’s warning lightly, my darling. Do not take it lightly.”
With that sunny advice, Gus goes home and meets with his client. Barbara Rosenstein has to be one of the sunniest people who’s ever walked into Gus’s life. She wears it on her face, this warmth. She’s a seventy-five-year-old woman, and she’s been coming to see Gus once a month for the past year ever since her older sister passed away. Even in grief, Barbara Rosenstein refuses to be unhappy. Sometimes she just comes to talk, free of questions, free of concerns. Early on, Gus told her that he rarely, if ever, talks to dead people. He’s not a medium like that. To which, she simply shrugged and said, “I already have one of those.” She sits opposite him now with her blondish hair coiffed and her fingernails polished a shiny blood red. Her voice is from the old days when elocution was perfect and the accents favored a proper English, not like the British, more like the Boston Brahmins. “You’re better than a therapist, Gus.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“Trust me. I’ve tried a few.”
“Give me your hands.”
She complies, and he holds her dainty hands in his as if he’s holding a tiny finch. He closes his eyes. He waits for those dark curtains to part and reveal. While he does, he feels the heat from her hands flow into his palms and tingle his wrists and radiate up his arms. She rises through his chest, and the curtains open, and there she is on the open sea, her face to the sun, her peace indelible. The ocean sparkles like a million jewels. She’s laughing now in his vision, and she’s truly free, there on the veranda of a majestic cruise ship, brilliant white on brilliant blue. He opens his eyes.
“I have to ask this question,” he says. “I’m sorry if it feels inappropriate. But did you have your sister cremated?”
“Her children did,” she replies. “We haven’t done anything with the ashes.”
“Right. I’m getting that.”
“Go on!” she cries. “Go on, Gus.”
“As sure as I’m holding your hands right now, I’m seeing something I’m profoundly sure of. It’s in my bones,” he says. “Have you thought about spreading them at sea?”
“Oh, Gus! That’s exactly what she wanted.”
“I know it probably sounds like a cliché or a likely guess,” he concedes, “but I truly see you liberating yourself as you liberate her on the open ocean.”
She squeezes his hands. “Amazing,” she says. “We’ve been planning to do a cruise, the kids and I, and to bring her ashes along to be spread at sea, but we can’t agree on the sea! Can you believe that? We’re having a hard time picking the right body of water.”
She laughs cheerfully at her own conundrum.
He wants to grab her by the shoulders and hug her tightly. Had he had a mother like Barbara Rosenstein he would have worshipped her. She would have mothered from a pedestal in the clouds. But he had not had such a parent. Not even close. Meg Parker did not believe in holding hands, did not believe in warmth, doled out affection even less than she doled out approval. She had been more tethered to the church than to her children. If he were to blame anyone or anything, and he really doesn’t at this point in his life, he would blame the church for getting in the way of good parenting.
“Stay away from her. Stay away from her.”
“What did you say, Gus?” Barbara asks.
“Huh?”
“You were talking about my sister’s ashes.”
“Stay away from her!”
“Gus! What are you saying?”
The desperation in her voice breaks his trance. “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
“I’m so confused,” she tells him.
“What did you hear me say?”
“You were telling me to stay away from her,” she says, her voice shaking. “You said it a couple of times.”
“No, no, no,” he begs. He squeezes her hands tighter. “I’m so sorry. My visions got crossed. That had nothing to do with you.”
He’s tapping the floor, his knee bouncing. Jesus Christ, he gets it. Stay away from her. How many times does he need to be reminded? He’s staying away from her. He’s doing just what the stalker has asked. He closes his eyes tightly, wills away the malevolence. He gets it. He gets it. Enough. He stands in the rain. He’s drenched, and then he’s clean. He’s wearing linen. He’s perched at the stern of a ship. A valley of water spreads from the wake all the way to the horizon. The wind and the spray permeate. There are beaches out there, some with thick groves of palms. The lazy trees, bending low over the azure waters, glow in the golden fire of a late-afternoon sun. “I would say the Caribbean Sea, or the Mediterranean,” he tells Barbara. “And I say this not necessarily because of their beauty.”
He hears a tiny laugh. “Then why?” she asks.
“My sense is that the big oceans are too big,” he replies. “I can tell how hard it is for you to let go. The Caribbean and the Mediterranean are big enough for her freedom but not so big that you won’t be able to pinpoint. My hunch is that you’ll want to pinpoint. You’ll want to look at a map and say, ‘See there she is.’ I think the big oceans are too vast for you to do that, Barbara.”
He opens his eyes.
“Oh, you’re brilliant,” she gushes. “Just the answer I needed to hear!”
She leans forward and kisses his cheek, and he sits there as it lands, letting it sink in.
Mills has homework. After dinner he’s on his laptop and downloads the PDF Myers had attached containing the secretary of state records on Student Blast Travel. The company has filed its paperwork every year as required. The only significant change came three years ago when Joseph Sr. and Joseph Jr. swapped roles as president and vice president. Joseph Jr. is the owner of record and has been since the swap of titles. This corroborates with what Mills heard earlier in the day. He scrolls down. As far as the state is concerned, the company has had no meaningful events in almost fifteen years since it changed its name from Vacation Express & Student Escapes to Student Blast Travel. There’s no explanation for the name change, and there wouldn’t be in the state record; Joseph Sr. was president and owner of record at the time and had been since the company’s inception. State records fail to excite Alex Mills, and these are no exception, so his next stop is Google, if for no other reason than pure entertainment. There’s nothing like pulling the lever of a search engine and waiting for slots to fall into place. Mills remembers the days before the instant gratification of Google; research was real research, with phone calls, clandestine meetings (there are still clandestine meetings, but they’re usually the by-product of finding someone on Google), and real fucking sweat.
He types, “Vacation Express & Student Escapes.”
He knows it’s a long shot since the name change dates back fifteen years, but he also knows that most newspapers have digitized their archives a lot further back, even if state agencies have not kept the exact pace. Still, the results are weedy. When he doesn’t see an exact match word for word on the first page of results, he balks at the prospect of clicking secondary pages. He’s not interested in a cyber goose chase. But the
n, what the hell, he clicks on page two. And then page three. And there on the third page is this headline:
PHOENIX GIRL DIES ON COLLEGE TRIP
LED BY LOCAL COMPANY
The archived story recounts the death of nineteen-year-old Rory Clarke, a sophomore at Northern Arizona University. The student had traveled to Mexico on a spring break trip led by Vacation Express & Student Escapes, a Phoenix-based travel agency. With one day left on the trip, the teenager died when two speedboats crashed in front of the Cancun resort where she had been staying as part of the chartered vacation. The boat in which she was riding splintered into a dozen pieces. Three other students were critically injured. Mills looks at the date of the article, does the math. The accident happened fifteen years ago and just six months before the Gaffings filed paperwork to change the name of their company. Alone in his office, just the dim glow of the desk lamp lighting the room, Mills feels a shadow of antipathy cover his face. It’s the disgust and the sadness and the entire fucking dark hole of the human condition to which he too often permits occupancy in his head. Vacation Express & Student Escapes denied all culpability in the death of Rory Clarke. The company, according to the article, insisted that Clarke had booked the speedboat excursion independently and that the outing was not a tour-sponsored activity. Mills clicks on related articles and reads about the lawsuit filed by Rory Clarke’s parents, claiming negligence and lack of supervision against Gaffing’s company, a lawsuit that was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount.
After Googling “Student Blast Travel,” Mills finds that the past fifteen years have been somewhat less eventful for the Gaffings, save for half a dozen lawsuits alleging the company cheated students and other customers out of money and one investigation, two years ago, by the state attorney general’s office into (1) false and misleading advertising, (2) unfair and deceptive business practices, and (3) fraud.
In other words, a scam. The company paid a fine.
Mills logs off and heads to bed. He pulls Kelly close to him. Her damp, sweet nakedness makes him hard. But she’s sleeping.
The irony of waking up to the sound of a woodpecker is not lost on him. The creature has been stalking the neighborhood for months, pecking at house trim, leaving clear evidence of his vandalism in the form of modest craters from one house to another. Looks like the aftermath of a drive-by shooting. Kelly is up. He hears the blow-dryer. Trevor knocks on the door. Mills tells him to enter.
“I need fifty bucks,” his son announces.
“For what?”
“Senior day,” Trevor replies.
“When is it?”
“Next month. The deadline’s today.”
“Well, it’s a good thing you didn’t put it off ’til the last minute.”
The boy scoffs. “C’mon, Dad.”
“What if I didn’t have the cash today, Trevor?”
“I’d ask Mom, or follow you to the ATM.”
Mills laughs. “You’re hysterical, young man.”
“Ask Mom what?” It’s Kelly emerging from the bathroom.
Trevor repeats the request.
“That’s a lot of money,” she says.
“It includes everything. All meals, entertainment, the water park, everything.”
Mills reaches for his wallet, then stops. “You think you’re old enough to have sex, right? Then I think you’re old enough to earn the money yourself.”
“What do you mean?” Trevor asks.
“It means I have a garage that needs to be cleaned out. Our guest bath needs a paint job. And the windows! It’s time to clean them inside and out. Could take days!”
“I see your point.”
“Agreed, then?”
“Agreed.”
When Trevor leaves the room, Kelly gives her husband a high five. And that’s all he needs. That’s enough to renew his vigor. So he showers, shaves, shoves breakfast in his mouth. His whole cadence is different. Add that to his new fuel for work and his footsteps have more bounce, less drudgery. His eyes are open. His brain, usually flatlining at this hour, has a pulse. His routine flies.
Only to come to a skidding, slamming, crashing thud when he and his team are summoned to Sergeant Jacob Woods’s conference room and enter to find Mayor Scott Hurley sitting at the head of the table. Woods is next to him at the left-hand corner.
“Come in. Have a seat,” the sergeant tells them. “Sorry to call you up on such short notice, but as you can see we have a guest.”
Mills nods at his team, and they all sit. And all he can think is Jesus fucking Christ. There’s not enough caffeine in the world to face this douchebag first thing in the morning. “Good morning, Mr. Mayor,” he says with a straight face.
“Am I next?” Hurley asks.
“Huh?”
“Am I next?”
The man has always appeared to Mills as half human, half Donald Duck. He’s not exactly sure what it is, the shape of the face, maybe, or the shape of the mouth, or the permanent craze in his eyes like two emblems of happy insanity, but the voters of Phoenix most certainly elected a leader with at least partial roots in cartoon lore.
“Maybe we haven’t had enough coffee this morning,” Mills tells the mayor. “But I don’t think we follow you.”
He dares to turn to the rest of his team who dare to uniformly shake their heads.
The mayor leans forward, resting his arms on the table in front of him. “Let me elaborate,” he says, as if he’s already articulated a meaningful reason for this meeting. “You keep finding signs that say, ‘Who’s Next?’ and I want to know if I’m next.”
“You mean next to be murdered?” Mills asks.
“That’s what I mean.”
“First of all,” Mills begins, “we’ve only found one or two signs that say exactly that, and they’ve both been followed by dead bodies. So, all accounted for. The most recent sign was discovered Tuesday with Mr. Gaffing’s body. It didn’t suggest anyone would be next.”
“So, are you just going to wait for another threatening sign to turn up before you do something?” Hurley asks.
“You mean another ‘Who’s Next?’ sign?”
Hurley lets out a gust of air that imparts his disgust. “I hope you catch on faster when you’re out there investigating, Detective.”
“I assure you this has nothing to do with catching on,” Mills says. “But I deal in certitudes, Mr. Mayor. And I’m, honestly, not at all certain why you would think you’d be our killer’s next victim.”
Mills can hear Powell try to stifle a laugh. He kicks her under the table.
“Because,” the half man, half duck begins to answer, “it might as well be me. You got three victims so far. You don’t have any solid leads. I might as well die right along with my city.”
Mills looks directly at his sergeant. In his eyes, Mills is clearly but mutely begging his boss to explain why the fuck he was called up here to respond to such utter fucking nonsense. Woods looks down, feigning interest in his notes.
Fine, then.
“Well, come on, Scott,” Mills says to the mayor. “You dying right along with your city? Don’t you think that’s a stretch?”
Woods coughs out loud. Powell stifles another laugh. Preston smiles.
“No, I don’t think it’s a stretch,” the mayor says to the team. “The other victims are fairly prominent men in the valley. Why wouldn’t I be next?”
Now it’s Mills who must stifle a laugh. “Because, contrary to your assertion that we have no leads, we believe our victims knew one another. We’re fairly certain they’re connected,” he explains. “So, if you had any personal relationships with Davis Klink, Barry Schultz, or Joe Gaffing, it would be in your best interests to tell us. Since you have not indicated that to us thus far in our investigation, Scott, we feel fairly confident that you are not on the killer’s radar.”
Nobody speaks.
Woods shuffles papers around as if he’s actually looking for something.
An airplane roars o
verhead.
Morton Myers yawns unabashedly.
And then Preston says, “You know, Mr. Mayor, I’ve been sitting here listening to this whole meeting, and I’m still not sure what you’re here to tell us.”
The half man, half duck coughs so vigorously that his neck vibrates and his puffy cheeks shake at the force. “I’m here to tell you that I’m doing a press conference today.” He emphasizes the word “today,” and it lands with the intended thud. “And,” the mayor continues, “I want all four of you there with your sergeant. I’ll speak. The sergeant will speak. But we’ll refer all questions to you, Detective Mills, and your squad. I think you all should go now and prepare. Fully prepare. Any questions?”
“No questions,” Mills says.
“Good,” the mayor says. “Because my office has been absolutely swamped with calls. This department has been too quiet. The public has a right to know. People are scared. This is no way to stay on the list of the ten best places to raise your kids!”
His pronouncements done, Scott Hurley gets up and briskly rubs his hands together as if he’s washing them after the first mayoral shit of the day. When he’s gone, the rest of them get up to file out, and, to Mills’s surprise, Woods turns and says, “Good job, Alex.”
There was no sarcasm. No snark.
The three-thirty press conference starts precisely at three fifty because the reporters and the photographers can’t get out of each other’s way. Radio reporters, television reporters, and newspaper reporters all jockey for the best seat in the house, particularly the front two rows, while the photographers scramble to run cables, erect tripods, and test microphones. Mills has seen it all before. He’s watching from a window outside the community room. He can tell the TV reporters from the rest of them, in part because he recognizes some of them, but mostly because they’re the highly coiffed ones, particularly the women in their tight, loudly colored pantsuits and luxury jewelry, their dubiously high but matching heels, and their heavily made-up faces (though there’s no lack of makeup on the TV guys, either). The newspaper reporters make an effort to look presentable but lack the crispness and conspicuous indulgences of their television counterparts. The radio reporters mostly don’t give a fuck as reflected in their pajama-quality attire, rumpled at best. They’ve come from all over today: the TV affiliates from Phoenix and Tucson, one all the way from Yuma, and newspapers and radio stations from cities and towns throughout the state. You’d think there’d been an outbreak of Ebola. Mills assumes Mayor Scott “Duckling” Hurley sent out a press release first thing this morning before he even met with the police department. But if the crowd is meant to pressure Mills, it doesn’t. The mayor had ordered him and his team to prepare, and they did, not in any extraordinary fashion, just to the extent that they practiced what they would or would not say.
Dig Your Grave Page 25
