Black Feathers

by Robert J. Wiersema

  As he tucked the pen back into his pocket, Boris stood up, hitched up his pants. “You’ll need to check your side arm,” he said, going through the steps exactly as the policies and procedures dictated.

  Harrison forced a smile. “This ain’t my first rodeo, Boris,” he said. He held his breath as he held his jacket open so Boris could see he wasn’t wearing his gun belt. “Left it locked up,” he said. “Figured I’d save you the hassle.” Prayed silently that he wouldn’t be asked to turn around.

  When Boris nodded, he lowered his jacket, waited.

  Harrison tried not to breathe a sigh of relief. He wasn’t going to come around the desk. He wasn’t going to ask him to turn around or lift his coat.

  Instead, Boris spun the clipboard to face himself, checked it carefully and nodded, initialling the line.

  “All right,” he said, tucking the clipboard back down behind the ledge. “He’s in three. I’ll buzz you through.”

  “Thanks, Boris,” he said, as he stepped toward the door to the cellblock.

  “Pfft,” he grunted, and the door buzzed and clicked.

  Harrison pulled it open and stepped through, waiting for it to shut and lock behind him before he stepped forward.

  It was almost like a hospital corridor: wide and white and bright, smelling of heavy antiseptic cleaners. Doors lined both sides of the corridor, each with a small window at face height, all the glass wire-reinforced.

  As he walked along the hallway, Harrison glanced behind himself and up at the video camera mounted above the door he had just stepped through, a red light solid and unblinking at its base.

  When he stopped in front of the door to holding cell number three, he nodded at the camera.

  A moment later, there was a buzz, and the lock clicked free.

  Wolcott didn’t even look up as he walked into the cell, as the door closed behind him.

  Sitting on the bed, he reminded Harrison of those statues of Buddha in the windows in Chinatown. Not the laughing ones, the serene ones, the ones where he was just sitting there, utterly still.

  The difference was striking, though. Those Buddha statues had a calming effect. Hell, he had even bought one for Farrow, as a bit of a joke; she still had it in her locker.

  Cliff Wolcott’s stillness made the hair on the back of his neck stand up.

  “Wolcott,” he said.

  He didn’t move.

  The older cops always talked about how they could tell if a suspect was guilty just by watching them in holding. The thinking went that innocent suspects would be stressed and anxious, pacing, working themselves up to a good, distraught frenzy within a matter of hours at most. The guilty ones, though, they were calm, unruffled, like they were protected inside a shell.

  Over time, Harrison had come to realize that the theory was bullshit; looking at Cliff Wolcott, he wondered if there might be something to it after all.

  “Wolcott,” he said again, a little louder, taking a step forward.

  Nothing.

  The collar of his uniform pinched his neck, cut off his breath. He tried to calm down: it wouldn’t do to be angry, but he couldn’t help it. There was something about this fucker, just sitting there, calm as could fucking be, like he didn’t have the blood of those girls on his hands, like he hadn’t—

  The fingers of his right hand tightened and relaxed, tightened and relaxed.

  The gun was heavy at the small of his back.

  He crossed the room in four steps. “Hey,” he almost shouted, kicking at one of the legs of the bed. “Wolcott.”

  His eyes opened languidly as he lifted his head. “Hello, Officer,” he said, fixing his gaze on Harrison.

  The temperature dropped in the room, and a shudder ran through him.

  “This is unbelievably sexist,” Collette called back into the living room. “I just thought you men should know that.” As she turned back into the kitchen, she barked out a laugh. Her pale skin was pink and flushed, her red ringlets limp and sticking to her forehead.

  “Men,” she said. “Why do we keep them around?”

  “That’s always been my feeling,” Ali said, turning off the water. The sink was full and steaming, bubbles high over the edge. “But you can’t seem to keep away.” She shook her head in mock sadness.

  Collette opened her eyes wide, twisted the dishtowel she was holding and snapped it toward Ali.

  Ali jumped out of the way, bumping into Cassie. Her eyes were bright, shining.

  “That’s enough of that,” Erin said, grinning just as widely despite the mock sternness in her voice. “Don’t make me put you in time out.”

  When Collette stuck her tongue out at Erin, both Cassie and Ali had to turn away to keep from cracking up.

  Ali started washing the dishes, placing them in the rack in the second sink. Cassie tried to keep up, drying each piece as it came and passing it to Erin to put away, but she quickly fell behind, and the rack began to fill.

  “I’m just saying, could it be any more sexist?” Collette asked no one in particular, draining her wineglass. “The men-folk in the living room, burping and farting, while the womenfolk do the dishes?”

  Cassie half-turned. “That’d be a lot more convincing if you were actually doing anything.”

  Her heart thudded to the pit of her stomach as soon as the words left her lips and she waited for Collette’s reaction. She had meant it to be funny, but it wasn’t funny, was it? She had just insulted Ali’s friend and their host and—

  Collette cocked her head, her eyes going wide. “Oh yeah?” she said, as she began to twist her dishtowel again, but a smile was breaking over her mouth.

  Cassie wasn’t quick enough to get out of the way, and the towel caught her on the hip with a stinging snap. “Hey!”

  Collette looked at her with mock defiance, a come-and-get-me look that she only managed to hold for a moment before she stuck her tongue out.

  Even May, putting leftover food into storage containers at the table, laughed.

  With all of them working, they made short work of the dishes. As Ali pulled the plug, the water beginning to drain with a roaring gurgle, Collette stepped back into the living room, her wineglass in one hand, a bottle in the other.

  “Oh, not fair,” she called out a moment later. “They started without us!”

  Cassie looked at Ali to see if she knew what was going on, and then the smell of pot smoke tickled at the base of her nose.

  “Yeah,” Ali said, then took a concerned second look at Cassie. “Oh. Is that—”

  “I grew up in a small town,” she said. “Not a convent.”

  “So you’re okay with—” She gestured toward the living room. In the corner of her eye, Cassie saw Erin hanging her dishtowel on the handle of the oven door and stepping into the other room.

  “Sure,” Cassie said. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  Ali shrugged and shook her head, smiling a little. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m just being overly careful.”

  “Why?” Cassie asked, and Ali hunched over the sink, scrubbing the metal walls as the water drained, not looking up.

  “Ali?” She touched her at the small of the back, let her hand linger there. “You don’t have to be careful,” she said quietly.

  “You don’t either,” Ali said, and the look that she gave Cassie melted her legs. When Ali reached up and brushed Cassie’s hair back from her forehead, tucking it loosely behind her ear again, Cassie trembled.

  She glanced toward the living room. “So,” she said. “What happens now?”

  A few steps away from the man on the bed, Harrison straightened, feet shoulder-width apart, balanced and firm in place, his training coming back without him even realizing it.

  Bracing himself for a shot.

  “Cliff Wolcott?” he asked, now that he had the man’s attention.

  Wolcott looked from side to side, checking if there was anyone else in the cell. “Yes, Officer?”

  “I’m Constable Harrison. I’d like to ask you a few
questions.” He reached into his pocket for his notebook and pen, trying to make it appear as professional as possible.

  The back of his jacket brushed against the gun.

  “Really?” Wolcott asked. As he unfolded his legs, Harrison fought an instinct to take a step back. “Is that how it usually works?”

  The question seemed to come out of nowhere.

  Wolcott ran his fingers through his short, thinning hair. “The last few times someone wanted to talk to me, they brought me upstairs into one of those little rooms. You know, the ones with the table and the three chairs and the mirror along one wall? It was like I was in an episode of Law & Order.”

  Harrison nodded. “Usually. But we’re going to talk here.” He gestured over his right shoulder at the video camera in the upper left corner of the room. “If that’s all right with you.”

  Wolcott shrugged. “Sure.”

  Harrison nodded, clicked his pen. “I wanted to talk to you about those girls.”

  “The ones I killed?”

  Harrison couldn’t move his hand to write.

  Wolcott smiled, a harmless, friendly smile. “You don’t need to dance around it. I figure you guys have been all through the house, the freezer.” He paused, watching Harrison’s face. “So you found my packages. What’s the point in mincing words now, right?” He shrugged again. “You’ve got me. What do you want to know?”

  Harrison was completely unprepared for a full confession, and the line of questioning he had devised, all the feints to draw him out, all the little tricks to trip him up, fell apart. “Well,” he said. “Start at the beginning, I guess.”

  Wolcott smiled. “Constable Harrison. How far back do you want me to go?” He chuckled. “Do you want me to tell you about Janet Colburn, back in the seventh grade? She was a year older, fourteen, and one day, in the storage room off the music room at school, she lifted up her skirt and showed me her pussy. She told me I could touch it if I wanted to. And I did. Is that what you had in mind?”

  Harrison shook his head, even as he scrawled across the lines in his notebook.

  “No,” Wolcott said. “I don’t think that’s it, is it? That’s all ancient history. You want to know why I did it, right?”

  Wolcott shuffled off the bed, stretching as he stood up.

  “Of course you do,” he said.

  Wolcott cracked his knuckles, swivelled his head in a deep, slow circle, like he was working out a kink.

  It would be so easy to reach behind his back, right now, to draw the pistol. To fire.

  “But you already know,” Wolcott said. “I can see it in your eyes.”

  Harrison took a step back, cursed himself immediately. “No, I don’t,” he said, forcing his voice to remain calm and level. “Why don’t you tell me?”

  Wolcott smiled. “There’s something in us,” he said. “Inside all of us. We all feel it, every day. It’s not sadness or depression … Well, it’s part of those things, I guess, but … It’s something different. You know that. You’ve felt it. I can see it.”

  Harrison took another step back.

  Wolcott stepped toward him. “What is it for you, Constable Harrison? Do you cheat on your wife? Or your taxes? Drive too fast?” He backed off. “No, that’s not it.”

  “Why did you kill them, Cliff?” he asked, trying to take control of the conversation again. “Those girls …”

  Wolcott pivoted on his heel, stopped.

  “Because I could,” he said, his voice flat, uninflected. “Because I wanted to.”

  Harrison swallowed hard, pushed the bile back down, glanced behind himself again and up at the unblinking red light on the video camera.

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “It’s the only answer, Constable. It’s the only reason any of us do anything. Dress it up however you like.”

  “This is a waste of time,” Harrison muttered, snapping his notebook shut.

  Wolcott smiled. “I’m answering your questions, Constable. You just don’t like what you’re hearing.”

  “No, you’re not,” Harrison said. “You’re handing me this lukewarm Psych 101 crap that reads like a textbook diminished-capacity defence. You can practise that with your lawyer. I’m not going to help you set it up.” Harrison turned toward the door.

  Wolcott laughed. “Is that what you think? A diminished-capacity defence? Constable, I’m going to plead guilty in the morning.”

  Harrison stopped, turned around.

  “Why?” It was all Harrison could think to ask.

  “Because I did it. I killed those girls.” It sounded like he was describing any other event in the course of a typical day: I got up, I went to work, I killed those girls.

  “But why?”

  “Have you ever known a fat girl on a diet, Constable?” Wolcott asked. “My sister, she was a big girl. Solid, my mother called her. Anyway, when we were growing up, my sister was always on a diet. Always. And do you know what always happened?”

  Harrison nodded, hating the fact that he had been drawn in.

  “She became obsessed. All that food she couldn’t eat? She couldn’t think about anything else. The more she resisted, the worse it got.”

  Wolcott shook his head, looked toward the ground.

  “That’s how it works. That’s how we work, Constable. Isn’t it?”

  He looked like he was genuinely waiting for a response.

  “The darkness is going to have you, no matter what you do. If you fight it, it gets stronger. You’re on a diet, and all you can think about is cake. Until you give in. The hunger”—he took a deep breath—“it wins, either way.”

  “So that’s it?” Harrison asked, his voice tight, bristling. “You killed those girls because you, what? Got obsessed? Because you couldn’t think about anything else?” He snorted derisively. “That’s the lamest defence I’ve ever heard.”

  “It wasn’t intended as a defence, Constable,” Wolcott said, and Harrison had to fight against the way the anger rose in him every time Wolcott used the word “constable.” “It was an explanation, that’s all. I thought you would understand.”

  And Cliff Wolcott smiled, a cold, flat smile that showed his teeth. “I thought you’d be able to relate.”

  Harrison’s hand dropped to his waist, within easy reach of the gun.

  He shook his head.

  “Can I ask you a question, Constable? How old is your daughter?”

  Harrison’s breath caught in his throat. “How—how did you—”

  Wolcott smiled again. “I knew it. You look at me and you see the bodies of those girls, and you see your daughter … She’s what, ten? Eleven?”

  He couldn’t reply.

  Wolcott nodded. “You can’t stop thinking about it, can you? Those bodies. Your little girl. Me. They just keep”—he made a ratcheting motion near his right ear—“ticking and ticking and ticking, and you can’t sleep, and you can’t think about anything else but what you would do …” Wolcott raised an eyebrow. “‘If I ever get my hands on that son of a bitch,’” he mocked, slowing his voice, putting on a bit of a drawl.

  He looked up, and Harrison followed his gaze to the camera in the corner of the room. “So what are you going to do, Constable?” he asked, his lips working back into a smile. “You’ve got me right here, all to yourself.”

  Harrison’s fingers twitched, but he didn’t notice.

  “It’s not going to bring those girls back. It’s not going to keep your daughter safe.” The pity in Wolcott’s voice was almost mocking. “But you want to do it. It’s not really about them at all, is it?”

  Wolcott smiled.

  “What will you do, Constable?”

  Harrison stopped his right hand as it started to slide into his jacket, and turned toward the camera. Looking directly at the lens, he made a circling motion with his index finger at the level of his right ear. “Wrap it up,” he mouthed.

  He tucked his notebook and pen back into his pocket. He let his hands fall to his waist.

>   The lock on the door clicked almost immediately.

  When he looked back at Wolcott, there was an expression somewhere between disappointment and confusion on the killer’s face.

  Harrison turned the knob and opened the door. “I don’t do things just because I want to.”

  He didn’t breathe again until the door closed behind him, until he was watching Wolcott through the wired glass.

  He shivered in the chill air; he was soaked with sweat.

  Cassie turned the CD case over in her hand, closely studying the song titles as the music pulsed and flowed out of the speakers.

  “It’s good, isn’t it?”

  Ali’s friend Murray looked at her expectantly over his wire-framed glasses. His eyes were green and bright.

  “They’re from the UK. Manchester, I think.”

  “Bristol,” she said. “They’re named after a town close by.”

  A smile twitched at the corners of his mouth.

  “What?” she asked. “I read about them in Rolling Stone or somewhere.”

  “So, are you a big Portishead fan?” He pointed at the CD case.

  “No, this is the first time I’ve heard it. It was on my list, though.”

  “Your list?”

  “I used to keep a list of records to look for the next time I got to the city.”

  “No record store where you’re from?”

  She stopped herself from reflexively answering.

  He smiled kindly as her face flushed.

  “Okay, I’ll quit prying,” he said. “But I have to admit, we’re all pretty curious. We all love Ali, and she shows up here tonight with someone we’ve never even heard about, let alone met. And you’re”—he paused—“a bit younger. You know Hong, so you’ve been to the restaurant. Ali says you met there …” He nodded slowly, then smiled again. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m a bit of a writer …. I’m always looking for the story. Imagining things.” He shrugged. “Mostly we just want Ali to be happy.”

  He took a sip of his wine. “You do have a story, though, don’t you?”

  Cassie shook her head. “No, no story. Nothing important.”

  He looked at her. “I don’t believe that.”

  “It’s true,” she said, unable to keep her voice from catching.