by Saul Black
In the dark she caught her jacket on what turned out to be a barbed-wire fence. Beyond it the trees thinned into a rough meadow. She could see him now. He had a flashlight of his own. Its white ellipse shivered on the grass. He was maybe fifty feet away, moving directly across the field. She turned to her right and followed the fence, grateful for her standard wardrobe choice: jeans, leather bomber jacket, and the Van Gorkom hikers that were halfway between a shoe and a boot: tough, pliable, and in their own humble way capable of convincing her there was no physical gearshift she couldn’t handle. Unless you were either a moron or inveterately vain, the job soon swept the aesthetic niceties aside. “Lady clothes” as she called them—skirts, dresses, heels—were for leisure time only. Nick had no complaints. As he had put it: The great thing about you dressing like a guy 90 percent of the time is that it makes the 10 percent when you dress like a woman worth the wait. It’s pornography.
The clank of metal, she discovered after twenty paces, was a small five-bar gate with a chained padlock. Someone’s land. A farm? She grabbed the chain to muffle it, got a foot up, slithered down the other side, and set off after Kyle. She left her light off. The bobbing flicker of his was easy to follow. The field was maybe seventy meters across but its length disappeared into darkness. The air was warm and still. Smell of the pines and dry grass—then rust: an abandoned water trough she skirted just as she saw Kyle go over a second gate and into another belt of trees.
These, too, gave onto a field, more baked dust than grass, crumbly underfoot. He stopped, checked his bearings, looked to his left. She crouched down, tracking his look: barely visible fifty meters away, a fenced yard of pale asphalt and a couple of low-lying outbuildings lit by a weak security lamp, presumably barns or sheds. He went the other way. Valerie followed. She was sweating. Underarms, forehead. All he had to do was turn around and he’d see her. She reached under her jacket, popped the shoulder holster, and took out her Glock. She didn’t believe he was armed, but belief was a long and potentially lethal way from certainty. He didn’t turn.
She lost sight of him when he entered the woods bordering the bottom edge of the field, but it was obvious where he’d gone: A tiny, derelict trailer missing both wheels stood on cinder blocks in a small clearing. A scatter of litter around it: beer cans and plastic bags, a busted and weather-rotted armchair, half its stuffing coming out like ectoplasm. The door was open but there was no light from inside.
She stopped. Watch and wait. Police version of the Hippocratic oath: In the first instance, do no harm. She got her back against a tree, crouched down, trained the Glock on the doorway.
Silence.
A minute passed. Two.
Nothing.
She waited. Her left leg started to cramp. She was thirsty.
After maybe five minutes of soundless stasis, she lost patience. She eased herself upright. Felt the blood flow back into her leg. Took a moment to plot her route avoiding the garbage, then—
She heard him a split second before he hit her, side on, with his full bodyweight. He must have been barely three paces to her left, behind a neighboring tree. She got a sudden whiff of him: denim, cigarette smoke, light sweat, and something synthetically fruity, as if he’d washed his hair with a strawberry shampoo—then the wind went out of her as his shoulder struck her just below her ribs and she felt the dark ground swing up and smack the side of her head.
He was half on top of her, their legs tangled, his left hand buried in her hair, his right grappling for the gun. Adrenaline went through her in a rapture, scalp to toenails. The sound of his breath and hers was abrasively intimate after the silence. His fingers fought for a grip on her sleeve. She didn’t have long. The speed of events had an expanding mass of their own. In seconds it would eclipse her options.
But the recent physical training classes had refreshed her Academy circuitry, unlocked the drilled routines and maneuvers, the angles, trajectories, leverages, shifts. The impulse, in this position—the untrained impulse—was to push against your attacker. The reflex was resistance. Which was precisely what the Academy taught you to override. Kyle was behind her, almost (her lawless imagination let it in without fuss) in the lovers’ spoons position, and what he wanted was to force her onto her belly. All his energy right now was devoted to rolling her over. The math and physics were simple. She feigned for a moment, pushed against him—then as soon as he pushed back, she went with it. One horrifying instant when she was, actually, facedown in the dirt with him on her back—then it was done. He was a victim of his own momentum. Their roll left him on his back with her on top of him. She lifted her head then smashed it backward into his face. He cried out as she wrenched her gun hand from his grip, scrabbled off him, and got to her knees. She made sure he could see very clearly the Glock held two-handed and steady, trained on him.
“Jesus,” he spat. “You? What the fuck?”
“Over on your front, hands behind your head.”
“What the fuck are you doing?”
“On your front, hands behind your head. Do it.”
“I didn’t know it was you!”
“Otherwise you’d have invited me in for a beer? Move.”
“I think you broke my goddamned nose.”
But, struggling, he assumed the position. Best she could do without cuffs, which, of course, she hadn’t brought. She moved forward, held the nozzle to the back of his skull, frisked him. No firearm, no weapons.
“You can’t do this,” he said.
“And yet here I am, doing it.” She stepped back a couple of paces. Shot a glance at the trailer doorway. Empty. No sounds of movement within.
“Jenner?” she called. “Dwight Jenner? SFPD. Come out with your hands where I can see them.”
“He’s not in there,” Kyle said. “He’s not here, for Christ’s sake.”
“Get up,” she said. “Keep your hands behind your head. Move slowly toward the trailer. When you get there, get back on the ground just as you are now.”
“He’s not here.”
“Don’t make this a labor. It’s undignified.”
He laughed, once, half into the dirt. “You’re something,” he said. “Jesus.”
But again, in awkward increments, he complied.
The trailer, a quick look showed her, was empty. Relics of furniture, a camping stove, more garbage. A ragged hole in the floor the size of a soccer ball, long grass growing through as if with shy curiosity. Smells of kerosene, cat piss, mold.
“Look, this is ridiculous,” Kyle said. “I’m not armed. I’m not resisting. And more to the fucking point, I’m not doing anything illegal.”
“Assault, I think you’ll find, is illegal,” Valerie said. “And assaulting a police officer is, you know, illegal deluxe.”
“I told you: I didn’t know it was you. Can we just calm down here? Because I’m starting to think you’re getting more than just professional satisfaction out of this. I know you like me, but how about we go out for dinner first, like normal people?”
“Are you early or late?” Valerie asked.
“What?”
“For the rendezvous with Dwight.”
“There’s no rendezvous.”
“Look, we can go through all the boring crap of commandeering your phone and finding out when you talked to him, or you can just tell me now. You tell me now and I’ll think about not charging you with obstruction.”
Kyle didn’t answer.
“Or as an accessory after the fact, for that matter,” Valerie added. “I’m pretty sure your girlfriend wouldn’t be thrilled.”
Kyle laughed again. There was genuine warmth in it, as if Valerie had admitted a collusion. As if the girlfriend was the object of their shared superior awareness.
“You’ve been watching me,” he said. “Nice.”
“Not me, personally. Come on. Let’s not waste each other’s time.”
“We still talking about Dwight?”
“You can hit on me later. For now, tell me where your b
rother is.”
For a moment Kyle just lay there with his eyes closed. The trees around the clearing were a quiet collective, observing. Valerie had a brief intimation of how small this event was in the earth’s history. Countless tiny dramas. Billions of lives like scraps of paper being sucked into a furnace. It made your own urgency absurd. Which was why she shut all such thoughts down. They got in the way of the Work.
“Can I get up?” Kyle said. “If I lie here much longer I might doze off.”
Valerie stepped around in front of him, kept the Glock trained. “You can sit up,” she said. “But for God’s sake don’t try anything gymnastic, will you?”
Kyle got into a sitting position. Knees bent, elbows resting on them, wrists loose. He had the gift of looking wholly at ease in his body. A black-guy thing, Valerie thought, that languid assurance. (A racist thought, she supposed. All right, not all black guys. But certainly very few white guys.) He looked up at her, then away. Smiled. Some inner capitulation.
“I haven’t seen Dwight,” he said. “I haven’t seen him or spoken to him, like I said, for more than a week. His phone’s off, or dead. This place…” He shook his head. “It’s my aunt’s. My mom’s sister. Used to be an alpaca farm, believe it or not. We used to come here when we were kids. Me and Dwight.”
He lowered his head for a moment. Exhaled. Valerie could sense his mix of anger, resignation, fear. This shift into candor softened her, slightly.
“It’s nothing,” he said. “Me being here. Just a long shot. We used to say we’d come here, you know, if things … If some shit went down. If ever we needed a place to hole up.” He shook his head. “I didn’t really think he’d be here. There’s no sign of him, nothing.”
Valerie observed him for a moment in silence. Decided he wasn’t lying. Decided nonetheless that she was going to have to request a watch on this place, too. More manpower. More resources the department didn’t have.
“The truth is I don’t know whether I’m worried about him or sick to fucking death of him,” Kyle said. “Way I feel right now, if I knew where he was, I’d probably tell you.”
Valerie doubted that. Still, the gun pointed at him felt a tad redundant. She lowered it. No reaction from Kyle. Her flush of adrenaline was subsiding, leaving its characteristic afterglow, a heightened sensitivity to her body, its simple miracle of breathing in, breathing out.
Kyle looked at her again. “You’ll think I’m naïve,” he said. “But I just don’t believe he could’ve done something this crazy. He was getting his act together. He really was.”
“People surprise us,” Valerie said, surprising herself, her tone of sympathy. It wasn’t good that there was such ease and directness between them. It wasn’t good that they understood each other. Kyle looked at her—as if he’d had precisely the same thought. He ought, she thought, to have smiled or winked, with deliberate sexual mischief. She could have dealt with that. But he didn’t. He just looked. It was appalling, the silent, palpable attraction. It made her look away. And though he said nothing, she knew he was reading her. She even sensed him letting it go, deciding this wasn’t the moment. There won’t be a moment, hotshot. It’s nice, but there won’t be a moment. I’m a little cracked, a little perverse, but I’m not completely fucking insane.
“And you really don’t know anything about this woman he’s seeing?”
Kyle shook his head. “Name’s Sophia. Former pole dancer. That’s all I know. Way Dwight told it, she’s a class act. Gave him instructions, where to meet. Hotels. At first I thought he was making it up. He’s susceptible to his own fantasies. It didn’t sound feasible.”
He handled certain words with precarious satisfaction in having acquired them. Susceptible. Feasible. Precarious because he didn’t yet trust his entitlement to them. Valerie imagined the hours of community college. The determination that would have required. With what must have been an extraordinary act of will, he’d marshaled his rogue energies, forced them to submit to education like wild horses to a harness. If he hadn’t, there was no telling where such energies would have taken him. He’d saved himself just in time. Unlike his half brother.
“You’re not going to call me if he gets in touch,” she said. Not a question.
“Neither would you, in my shoes.”
Would she? If it were her sister? If it were Nick? Did love trump the law? She felt the admission that it did coming off her like heat. Another illicit understanding between them. Nothing to do but consign it to the collection of ignorable truths. Know it was possible and hope it never happened. Moral consistency was a doomed enterprise.
“Time to go,” she said. “Walk ahead of me.”
He waited a moment, then got with that same provoking lazy grace to his feet. Now he did smile—and there was the sexual mischief. “Yes, ma’am,” he said.
20
August 10, 2017
Against her doctor’s advice, Rachel Grant had discharged herself from the hospital and was back at home under police protection (Officer Riordan on babysitting duty again) and attended by a private nurse, a dyspeptic Filipina with a small face and very large eyes, so small and well proportioned a woman that she looked like a specially designed miniature.
“I don’t like hospitals,” Rachel told Valerie. “Besides, I need to be with Elspeth.”
A hospital bed had been set up in the TV room, though Rachel wasn’t in it. She was reclined instead on the couch, wearing a white bathrobe over a pink T-shirt. Gray fur slipper boots. Her face looked as if she’d scrubbed it too hard. Or as if it had reached the phase where no more tears would come. The short coppery hair was greasy. The olive-green nail varnish was still on, an incongruous touch of goth glamor in the atmosphere of dreary convalescence.
“The nurse changes the dressings and keeps the pain meds flowing. I don’t need anything more than that.”
“How’s Elspeth doing?” Valerie asked.
Rachel closed her eyes for a moment. Opened them. “She’s in a nightmare,” she said. “She’s awake in the middle of a nightmare.”
Valerie groped mentally for something encouraging. Rachel Grant got there first.
“She’s strong,” she said. “She’s got strength like stubbornness. She amazes me. I thank God for it. I thank God for her.”
Valerie nodded, feeling sick. Along with her purse she had a manila envelope on her lap. Containing the photographs of Sophia. She’d bought Rachel Grant another day of innocence yesterday by checking the CCTV images with Adam Grant’s friends and colleagues—none of whom could ID the subject, nor knew that Adam had a relationship with anyone named Sophia. Now there was only Rachel left to ask. Obviously the best thing was to get it over with. But the celluloid evidence of Adam Grant’s secret life had refreshed the fact that she, Valerie, had been (however drunkenly and without consummation) a player in it. Again, the sense of her own bankruptcy needled her. She’d done the wrong thing in taking the case. The sort of wrong thing that expanded, fractally, around you, until as far as you could see in any direction there it was, wrongness, an inescapable matrix of your own making.
“Have you found him?” Rachel said.
“No. I’m sorry. Not yet. But we will.”
Rachel looked as if she believed her. The belief wouldn’t last forever. Right now it was fueled by grief and the need for vengeance. Soon, Valerie knew, it would turn to frustration, then anger, then cynicism, then a sort of nullity, an acceptance that this was not, after all, a world in which the good were rewarded and the wicked punished.
“Mrs. Grant,” she said, “this is going to be difficult. I’m sorry. I have something I need to ask you.”
“What?”
Valerie took out the photographs. Selected the best single shot from Will’s CCTV stills and handed it to Rachel. “Do you know this woman?”
Rachel’s force field shifted. There was no physical sign, but Valerie felt it. Fear, she thought. She already knows what I’m going to ask her.
Rachel studied the image. �
�No. I don’t know her. Who is she?” Her eyes were already on the other photographs, still held in Valerie’s lap.
“We don’t have her surname,” Valerie said. “But we think her first name is Sophia. It’s almost certain that she was involved with Dwight Jenner. As far as we can tell, they met regularly, at various hotels in the Bay Area.”
A lesser woman than Rachel Grant might have allowed herself the reflex response: So? So what? What’s that got to do with…? But Rachel Grant wasn’t that sort of woman. The inner calculations were being worked through. Her hand holding the print, Valerie now saw, was trembling. Her face was stark, the green eyes wildly alive.
Valerie chose what she regarded as the least explicit of the Adam Grant shots: Sophia sitting on the kitchen worktop, head back, body lit prettily by the window-filtered sun. She handed it to Rachel. “This is the same woman,” she said.
Then said nothing more. Instead watched Rachel Grant recognizing the kitchen, the fridge, the Post-its.
Silence. Valerie’s face was warm.
“You recognize the—”
“Yes.”
More silence. The nurse put her head around the door, big eyes inquiring.
“I’ll take the pills later, Tala,” Rachel Grant said. The nurse tutted and withdrew.
“I’m sorry,” Valerie repeated. (How many times was she going to say “sorry” to this woman, knowing that no amount of apologies would ever, if she knew the whole truth, be enough?) “The fact is I found this picture in Adam’s darkroom. In one of only two drawers that were locked.”
Rachel Grant stared at the image. Her effort not to succumb—either to rage or tears—was all but audible. The big window behind her showed a cruelly perfect afternoon. Blue sky and a flawless green lawn. A laburnum tree’s yellow blossom brilliant in the sun. Beauty carried on, regardless of human misery.
“How can you know it’s the same woman?” Rachel said, not looking at Valerie. “You can’t see her face.” She spoke quietly. A terrible forced calm. Valerie looked down at the next of the Adam Grant photographs. Sophia, blindfolded, tied to the bed. Rachel’s bed.
