by Saul Black
She didn’t know, as he straightened and moved toward her, that she was choosing to keep her life. She only knew that this wasn’t, after all, the moment she was choosing to wreck it.
He was facing her, close enough so that she could feel his body heat. She opened her mouth to stop it going any further—but he got there before her.
“This isn’t that movie,” he said quietly.
She waited. But his silence insisted it was her job, not his.
“No,” she said. “It isn’t. I know.”
The heat coming off him wasn’t just grief. It wasn’t just desire, either. It was, she saw, anger. Justified.
“You really are a piece of work,” he said.
Valerie kept very still. She deserved this. Here was his half brother’s death, reduced by her to a factor in the math of desire.
“You need to think about something,” he said.
She saw him beyond this moment, alone in the apartment with nothing to do but let the realization that Dwight was dead do its work of emptying him. She hoped the girlfriend would come over. Let him lose himself through his body, the humble solace of flesh and blood, if he could be kind enough to himself to accept it. She doubted he would. It was just as likely this would be the thing to make him dump her. Somewhere back in his life he’d acquired the belief that strength came through the self’s searing. Comfort was cheating. Comfort was for the weak.
“What do I need to think about?” she said. She didn’t know specifically how he was going to put it, but she knew what he was going to mean.
“Whether there’s a limit to your narcissism,” he said.
Deserved that, too. She didn’t say anything. He was too smart not to take an apology as condescension. And who could blame him? Even as she thought this she thought, too, that he was using this as part of the self-searing, refusing himself something he wanted, rising above it. Afterward, when the grief and anger had lessened, he might wish he’d fucked her, even if only to have spent the anger.
And so, Kyle, no, I don’t really need to think about it. I already know there’s no limit to my narcissism. Maybe having a kid will cure it.
They were still looking at each other, face-to-face. Instead of the apology, Valerie looked away. Hoped it would give him something, a feeling of superiority. He was entitled to it.
She turned and went to the door.
“I’ll arrange for Dwight’s body to be brought back to the morgue here,” she said. “Shouldn’t be more than forty-eight hours.”
She opened the door.
“Hey,” he said.
“Yes?”
“You better get whoever did this.”
She nodded, still not looking at him.
“Because if you don’t, I will.”
39
August 2, 2017
Problems. The skin. The gloves. The prints. The time. They were like precious jewels of horror, these problems. No matter how often she turned them over in her mind they never lost their luster. Like the memories of Larry.
She was in the kitchen. The big white house was quiet. It knew what was coming. It raised no resistance. She was its mistress. It was afraid of her now that she’d shown it what she could do.
No such thing as the perfect murder. She’d absorbed this maxim, culturally, she supposed. It didn’t stop people from committing murder. Why should it? Murder might be imperfect by definition but that didn’t mean it wasn’t necessary. She had an image of herself saying this, calmly, to students in lecture theater. Intro to the Philosophy of Homicide. Week 1: On Doing What You Have To Do.
The question was, having done what she had to do, would she have the strength to do what else she had to do to get away with it? Not a moral question, a practical one. The biggest unknown was the physical state she’d be in in those moments immediately afterward. When she tried to imagine the pain—the necessary pain—all she got was a red, soft-edged sensation of heat and dizziness. She would be swimming. In blood. She was in no doubt about the murder. She already knew—had proved—what she was capable of. That Rubicon had already been crossed. There was no question of what she could do to someone else. The question was what she would be capable of doing to herself.
She went to the utility room and unpacked the chest freezer, methodically. (All the food would have to be trashed and replaced afterward, obviously, albeit by stealth. The prospect of eating any of it was repellant, even in her new state of dark hilarity.) The large, plastic, airtight freezer box, the biggest Kmart had to offer, was intact, its contents still snugly sealed and duct-taped in the heavy-duty garbage bags.
Shed or greenhouse? She’d been vacillating from the beginning. Her main concern was wildlife. In twelve hours this would be fully defrosted. Animal noses would know. They’d had rats in the shed before, though not for some time. She’d been diligent with the poison in both outbuildings. Coyotes? She’d never actually seen one in the neighborhood, though there were stories in the papers now and then about someone’s dog or cat getting mauled. Foxes, too, apparently, had been spotted in the city.
In the end she decided on the greenhouse. It had a concrete floor and base wall beneath the glass, and according to her last inspection showed no sign of critter incursion. Besides, the whole caboodle was going inside an old tin chest she’d picked up at a garage sale, ostensibly to use as a novelty plant holder. It even had a working lock.
The greenhouse warmth was palliative, the smell of ripening tomatoes and the glow of chilies. It had been an astonishment to her that she—she!—had the capacity to grow things she could eat, after her life of food in cardboard and plastic and cans. There had been so many chapters in the world’s book her childhood should have opened. And too many it should have left closed. That, she thought, had been the story of her youth: an absence of the simple things and a superabundance of the complex. She’d been empty of innocence and stuffed with guilt. Her stubborn irony pointed out that at least now she had something to be guilty of. Give a dog a bad name.
She fitted the freezer box into the chest, locked it, and set it on a length of tarp. It couldn’t, she thought, leak, but in murder there was no such thing as an unnecessary precaution. In murder the capacity for precaution was infinite—and insufficient. She dragged the tarp back under a bench and concealed it with four hefted bags of potting compost. For a few moments she stood there in the green light, letting her muscles relax in the magnified warmth. Nature’s indifference was the dependable endorsement, if you needed it.
But time was passing. She went back to the house.
In the kitchen she opened the cupboard under the sink and took a pair of gloves from the box. Gripstrong Vinyl 4.2 mil Powder-free Gloves. Kitchen and Dining. FDA approved for food handling. Size: Small. She plucked the knife from the block. It livened in her hand, gave her a silent admission of its blameless potential.
Her legs were weak going up the stairs. The greenhouse’s drug had worn off. In the moments since coming back indoors, her body had acquired a faint tremor. Hadn’t been like that three days ago. Three days ago she’d been smooth and steady. Three days ago it had been as if invisible forces—in the car, in the woods, in the lake air and the desert darkness—had surrounded her with suave support. Her movements had been seductively choreographed. A trick of the psyche, she supposed, to relieve you of responsibility, to persuade you that it wasn’t, when you got right down to it, you, doing this.
In the bedroom she opened the French windows and stepped out onto the sunlit balcony. The potted plants were distinct personalities in the static heat. Fuchsia. Golden bamboo. Lavender. Daphne “Eternal Fragrance,” which even without a breeze gave her its sugary citrus scent.
Only one of the pots was light enough to lift out of its tray, a little photinia “Red Robin” she’d bought a month ago. By design? Not consciously, she thought now. But of course even a month ago the jewel-problems were established, winking in her head. You’ll need somewhere to stash the gloves. Somewhere close to hand, somewhere that
even swimming in blood you’ll be able to …
She brought the photinia pot as close as she could to the bedroom, while still leaving it clear of the French window’s opening arc. She scrunched up the vinyl gloves in her left hand, then lay down on the floor on her side and slid herself toward the pot. What she’d thought of originally was preparing a hole in the soil, stuffing the gloves in, and covering them over. But that would leave soil on her hands, under her nails. And her nails, above all, had to be protected. Hence Plan B.
And now the dress rehearsal.
Even unimpeded it wasn’t easy. In her prone position she could only just lift the pot with one hand. She put the gloves in the tray, replaced the pot. It had weight enough to press the gloves flat, more or less. They wouldn’t see it unless they knew exactly what they were looking for. But the blood. The blood was going to be an issue. Being careful was going to be an issue. The only issue, in fact, once she’d done what she had to do. And in that state, how careful could she be? Flailing in the red darkness, precision would suffer. Everything would suffer. Including her. Her most of all.
No such thing as the perfect murder. These compromises were the imperfections. They were written into the contract, the small print that could grow large under the right eyes, become the pertinent print, the only print, the damning print.
There was no alternative. I am in blood stepped in so far that should I wade no more / Returning were as tedious as go o’er. Another fragment. All the belated education, never knowing it would gather to this redundancy. The power of fictional murder died once actual murder arrived in your life. Of course it did. If Shakespeare had really lived, he’d never have written. Art was a kind of envy of life’s wealth. It was absurd that she was capable of these thoughts. But the Absurd was unsurprising.
She removed the gloves and replaced the pot.
Her hands were hot. Sweat nettled her hairline.
She fitted the knife handle into the French window’s hinge. Carefully eased the door toward its closed position until the handle was, effectively, clamped. The tip of the blade was a question for her.
Well, yes, that was the question.
There was only so far a dress rehearsal could go.
40
September 16, 2017
Tanner Riley, sixteen, worked part-time at his uncle’s auto repair shop in North Beach, and was just rolling up the shutters when Valerie arrived the following morning.
The night, mercifully, had passed without further damage. Nick had been in bed when she’d got back; eyes closed, but not, she thought, asleep. She’d undressed quietly and slid in beside him, without touching. There had been an hour of silence in which she could sense him weighing up whether to speak—but he’d kept his mouth shut, and eventually had fallen asleep. She’d lain awake herself until just before first light, then risen, dressed, and left before he stirred. But the postponement was over. Tonight, for better or worse, she was going to tell him. Everything. Even that she wasn’t sure if she wanted to go ahead. One way or another, life after tonight wouldn’t be the same.
“Morning,” Valerie said to Tanner Riley, flashing the badge. “Got a minute?”
She’d watched him from the car for a while before approaching, a skinny, suntanned kid with blond and brown hair and a flinty blue-eyed face that said yes, this was the auto repair shop, but so obviously a fleeting irrelevance en route to greater things that it was all he could do to keep a straight face while it lasted.
His face went straight, however, confronted with a cop.
“What?”
“Detective Hart, Homicide,” she said. “What can you tell me about Elspeth Grant?”
“Who?”
“Elspeth Grant. The thirteen-year-old girl from Drew.”
Tanner was so suddenly and comprehensively scared shitless, she knew the direct route would be the most profitable. “Word is you and your buddies had a little encounter with her a while back. I need you to tell me about it.”
He blinked, mouth open, stunned. Where the fuck had this come from? Jesus! Valerie was tempted to smile herself: All that teen cool—gone in an instant, as if a trapdoor had opened under him and the whole lot had dropped through. The sunny morning was blue and silver around them. For him, she knew, it would be spinning, sickeningly. Normally he wore the auto shop overalls with patient irony. Now they were a hot torment.
“I don’t … I don’t know what the fuck—”
“You don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about.”
“I “don’t know what the fuck you’re—”
“Well, let’s start with the fact that she’s a minor and I’m a homicide detective. We can talk here or at the station. I’ll square it with your uncle when he gets here.”
“Jesus Christ. I didn’t do anything. She said she was fifteen. I didn’t do anything!”
She had to work fast. First because she wanted to press him while his fear was still fresh, and second because she wanted to get what she needed before his uncle showed up and started making difficulties. She found his story, once she’d burned through the fumbling denials, depressingly unsurprising. Elspeth had been with a trio of older girls (one of whom, Anita Willox, he knew through his sister) at the mall one Saturday afternoon, when Tanner and a couple of his friends had run into them. There followed an hour of driving around, then they’d all gone to Anita’s home in Laurel Heights. Her parents were away for the weekend. Valerie filled in the predictable blanks—a raid on the domestic booze, maybe a joint or two, some version of Truth or Dare. The upshot was that at some point in the afternoon, Elspeth found him alone in one of the bedrooms. According to Tanner, he was half-asleep—and woke up to find her standing there in just her T-shirt and panties.
“I don’t care what anyone’s told you,” Tanner said. His face had thickened as she’d wrung the narrative out of him. It had brought a much younger version of himself to the surface. “Nothing—absolutely nothing happened. I told her to get the hell out.”
“Why?”
“What?”
“Why’d you tell her to get out? She’s a pretty girl. You thought she was fifteen. You telling me you didn’t even make out a little? There’s no law against that.”
Tanner dragged his hair off his forehead. He was sweating. Not, Valerie decided, out of guilt, but out of the realization that you could be deemed guilty even if you were innocent.
“Look, Jesus, I’m telling you the truth. I didn’t … There was something wrong with her. Mentally. She gave me the fucking creeps, okay?”
Valerie believed him. More or less. It might have taken a little more than Elspeth’s appearing half-undressed to give him the creeps (perhaps the beginning of making out, when her not-fifteenness might have insinuated itself) but unless she’d completely lost her mojo, Tanner Riley wasn’t, substantially, lying.
“All right,” she said, putting away her notebook. “If I need to talk to you again I’ll know where to find you.”
* * *
She drove to Bay Domestic and picked up contact details for the Grants’ former housekeeper. Isabella Hernandez. Who, it turned out, was neither at home nor answering her cell. Valerie went back to the station.
She was eating a chicken chat and paratha when Nathan came up from Computer Forensics.
“All the Grant hardware,” he said. “We’re done, as far as I’m concerned. Okay to release it?”
“I didn’t know we still had it,” Valerie said. The computers from Willard & Gould had been returned, cleared by Deerholt, and she’d assumed he’d done the same for the domestic equipment.
“Yeah, normally they’re breaking down the door to get their stuff back. You good to sign the release?”
“Sure. Nick in yet?”
“No, he’s over at the Pullman for the CTIN conference today. Didn’t he tell you?”
“Oh, actually, yeah, I forgot about that. You not going?”
“I’m going tomorrow. It’s three days. Nerd heaven. I’ll email you the release.”
The paperwork arrived in her in-box ten minutes later. She’d just put pen to paper to sign the printouts when something stopped her.
Or rather, something and nothing.
The nothing was Nathan’s remark about hardware owners normally clamoring for the return of their gizmos.
The something was a combination of two facts.
Fact one was that with the exception of tracking down the housekeeper in the fragile hope that she had useful intel on Adam Grant’s secret life, Valerie had absolutely nothing practical to do.
Fact two was that she’d never looked through the computer material herself.
So what? There was no reason to suppose Nick and Nathan had missed anything. They knew what they were looking for, and they hadn’t found it.
Maybe that was the problem. They’d known what they were looking for. She’d given them specific targets. It invited selective scrutiny. But what about the other way of looking? When you didn’t know what you were looking for? You looked peripherally, intuitively, tangentially—all the fancy words for simply opening yourself to whatever might be there.
She was glad Nick was at the conference. The state they were in right now, he’d take her going through material he’d already trawled as an insult. Nathan wouldn’t be convinced either, but he wouldn’t be offended. He was in on the half joke of Valerie’s reputation as an instinct-follower, a left-field merchant, a practitioner of Police Occultism. She was in on it herself, unashamedly. It could only be a half joke, because her results were beyond question. When her colleagues laughed it was openly, the laughter of baffled admiration, since so many of her hunches proved her right.
