by Saul Black
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For the sustaining mix of professional support, friendship, hospitality, and occasional gratis psychotherapy my thanks to: Jonny Geller, Jane Gelfman, Bill Massey, Charlie Spicer, Kim Teasdale, Stephen Coates, Nicola Stewart, Mike Loteryman, Anna Baker Jones, Peter Sollett, Eva Vives, Susanna Moore, Louise Maker, Marina Hardiman, Lydia Hardiman, Alice Naylor, Sarah Williams, Ben Ball, Tracy Ryan, Emma Jane Unsworth, Rachel Willis, Rene Unischewski, Joanna Yeldham, April Osborn, Bethany Reis, and Henrietta Rose-Innes. For unpaid editorial labors, I’m especially grateful to Mark Duncan, and for taking the time to answer my legal queries, Evan Marshall. As always, a big hats-off to my dear Ma and Pa.
Between them, Jonathan Field and Vicky Hutchinson made an incalculably generous contribution to the completion of this novel. I am forever in their debt.
PROLOGUE
May 2009
Exquisitely beautiful Katherine Glass was the most hated woman in America, and on a wet Tuesday afternoon in May 2009, San Francisco homicide detective Valerie Hart sat in the Bryant Street courtroom staring at the back of her infamous blond head. The verdicts had just been delivered, and now, despite Justice Amanda Delgado’s gavel-whacking and repeated calls for order, the place sounded like a cocktail party at its thudding zenith. Six charges of Murder One. Guilty, six for six. The public gallery was in an ecstasy of self-righteous titillation. Faces were greedy and alive. Serves the bitch right. Pure. Fucking. Evil.
“Order,” Justice Delgado drawled, for the fourth time. “Order!” Delgado, a whittled Latina in her early fifties, had a small coltish face long past surprise, but Valerie had watched its jaded composure fracture through the course of the trial. Like the jury, Delgado had seen the videos that convicted Katherine Glass. So, too, obviously, had Valerie. The images were with her now for the rest of her life. The images were with all of them.
“Order!”
Valerie released a breath she hadn’t been aware of holding. Her body’s tension remained. No relief. Granted, she’d caught Katherine Glass. Granted, Katherine Glass was being removed from the equation.
But Katherine Glass was, as everyone knew, only half the equation.
The videos had a costar. Katherine’s masked male lover, director, choreographer, soulmate, and partner in extraordinary crime. Despite the months of investigation and everything Katherine had given them, he was still out there. He was still unknown, untouched, and almost certainly undeterred. Six women were dead and he was still—the word sent a neural charge of weakness down Valerie’s abdomen—free.
Meanwhile, white and golden and jewel-eyed Katherine Glass, not free, stood motionless in the dock. Her blond hair was pulled back in its signature tight ponytail. If she was suffering there was no outward sign of it. Not that the verdict could have surprised her, Valerie knew. The trial’s issue had been whether the defendant was—fuck the clinical niceties—completely out of her mind. The quaint moral reflex said she couldn’t, given what she’d done, be considered otherwise. Her actions guaranteed her madness. But this was the twenty-first century. The binary certainties were gone. The world had gotten used to the idea that you could be in all respects rational, sound, intelligent, normal—except for your delight in doing the things Katherine and her lover had done. The world could no longer pretend the words “human” and “monster” referred to two different species. Monstrosity was just another human option, like vegetarianism or Tai Chi.
Naturally, Katherine’s defense had gone through the motions. Psychological disorder and diminished responsibility. No one had bought it. No one was ever going to buy it. The collective will craved raw vengeance. If Katherine had been plain, Valerie thought, she might have had a chance. But looking the way she did, it was a fait accompli. The New York Times had indulged itself with a description of her as “a living koan of corruption and beauty.” A Chronicle editorial with literary ambitions had called her “the grotesque and compelling offspring of Aphrodite and Lucifer.” The National Enquirer, true to its readership, had dubbed her “The Sex-Angel of Death,” while Twitter had, among its countless inanities, supplied: “Katherine Glass makes Helen of Troy look like a fucking bag of chisels.” She might be the most hated woman in America, but the hatred was swimming in desire, and that fact, more than her crimes, meant she had to be destroyed.
Which would, Valerie knew, give Justice Delgado a major headache between now and sentencing. Since 2006, when a district judge had halted executions in California after finding flaws in the lethal injection process, undischarged executions had stacked up like airplanes over a jammed airport. The judicial review of the allegedly improved death-kit was taking forever, and in any case the legal battles between prisoners’ lawyers and the state’s attorney general just kept going. In effect, there was a moratorium on killing death row inmates, and, by unspoken extension, on issuing death sentences. Katherine Glass would be locked up for the rest of her life, but for the baying majority that wouldn’t be enough. Nothing short of death would do.
Valerie got to her feet and headed through the warm crowd to the double oak doors at the rear of the courtroom. The trial had drained her, and the hours of interviews with Katherine Glass had left dirty marks on her that would never fade. What she wanted now was to get out into the damp San Francisco air, light a Marlboro, walk the two blocks to the nearest bar, and order herself a triple vodka and tonic. Followed by at least three more of the same, since she had the day off. But at the exit, an impulse forced her to turn and look back.
Katherine was still on her feet, cuffed and guard-flanked. Valerie thought of the videos, the weeping victims, the calibrated escalation of their suffering, the calculated false endings and postponements, the begging, the manifest subtlety Katherine and her lover brought to what they were doing, the mordant humor they shared—and the strange, screen-captured deflation between them when the moment came at last, and the victim’s life was gone, and there was nothing more they could do for their pleasure. She thought of all the conversations she’d had with Katherine, separated from the woman’s concussive physical beauty by only the width of the table in the interview room, Katherine with the lovely white hands and calm mouth and omniscient green eyes (bitch eyes, as Will had described them) speaking with quiet, articulate precision, as if she were in possession of a wisdom toward which the rest of humanity was lumbering with laughable slowness.
Don’t look at her. Turn and walk away.
But as she hesitated Katherine Glass turned and looked at her—and smiled.
1
July 2015
“This is the thing you’ve been dreading,” Nick Blaskovitch called from the locker room showers at the Bay Club. “The great shift in the balance of power. Like all dreaded things it’s probably come as a relief. It’s okay to cry, by the way.”
“Look, I had an off day,” Eugene Trent replied from the bench, where he sat in his white Calvins, drying his toes. Nick had just beaten him at squash for the
first time since they’d begun playing, eighteen months ago.
“I’m exhausted from screwing all night,” Eugene said. “Not a problem you have, obviously—which is the real story here, by the way. Today was just you channeling your jealousy and rage. That gave you an edge against a sex-weakened opponent, but you’re deluded if you think it was anything more than a glitch. In fact it was a cruel glimpse of something you’ll never experience again.”
“It was so obviously psychological,” Nick said. “I could feel it in you: you’ve exhausted your repertoire. You know you’re not going to get any better. Whereas I”—he shut off the water and reached for his towel—“am still expanding mine. I am still … ascending.”
“Don’t talk to me about repertoire,” Eugene said. “This girl last night was twenty-seven, and she stuck her finger in her ass. Her ass, mind you, not mine. I’m just saying: these things take their toll.”
Their postmatch ritual was two beers apiece in the club bar. After the depletions of the gladiatorial squash court, two was enough to give Nick a pleasant buzz. More than two and he wouldn’t be able to drive home.
“Seriously,” Eugene said, “these girls today … I don’t know what’s happened. I mean, okay, she’s got thirteen years on me, and what the fuck do I know, et cetera, but it’s like a whole porn generation thing. I don’t like it. I want to be the corrupting influence, you know? I want to talk a girl into putting her finger in her ass. I’m a traditionalist. In fact, when it comes to filth, I’m a romantic.”
This, too, was ritualized, Eugene’s long-suffering satyr to Nick’s settled monogamist. Nick and Valerie had been together (second time around) for just over two years, ever since he’d come back to San Francisco and the department’s computer forensics unit.
“I know you think I want what you’ve got,” Nick said. “But the truth is you have to think that, because you want what I’ve got.”
“Eventually,” Eugene said. “Of course, eventually. But not now. Now I’m in my prime. It’s a sin against masculinity to waste your prime. Be honest: What are you guys down to now? Once a week? Twice a month?”
“Just pick a number that makes you feel better about dying old and alone.”
“What’s so terrible about dying old and alone? I’ll get a dog. I’ll get a maid. I can imagine a quite beautiful relationship with a maid. Like Philip Roth but with tenderness.”
It was an odd friendship between them, Nick thought, formed from the sort of accident you imagined the hyperscheduled twenty-first century no longer had to offer. Nick’s game was racquetball, and his usual opponent was Valerie’s partner, Detective Will Fraser. But five minutes into a game a year and a half ago Will had pulled a calf muscle, and they’d had to retire to the bar. Eugene, whom they recognized as a fellow regular, had been stood up by his squash opponent and, as he had a spare racquet, had asked Nick if he felt like giving it a try. Since then, they’d been playing every two or three weeks. Eugene was one of those nuts who felt he had to balance his Caligulan excesses with a superhuman fitness regimen. The early games had seen Nick struggling to get through without having a nosebleed or throwing up, but his natural talent for racquet sports (and what Eugene referred to as his “devious mongrel style”) had, over time, closed the gap between them. Hence today’s milestone victory. The loser in all this was Will Fraser. The squash had so improved Nick’s racquetball that Will hadn’t won a game in months. Meanwhile Nick was in the best physical shape of his life. Valerie, running her hands over his lean muscles, had joked: “Are you sure this is just the squash? I mean, you’re not working up to telling me you’re gay, right?”
“I assume you’re seeing her again?” Nick said to Eugene. “She sounds perfect for you.”
“That’s what I thought,” Eugene said. “But this morning she was up and dressed while I was still in fucking REM sleep. If I hadn’t heard the door open she’d have been out of there without me knowing. As it was, I’m like, hey, what’s the rush? Come back to bed. I know a great place for breakfast. She looked at me like I was retarded.”
“Maybe she sensed your confusion when she stuck her finger in her ass?”
“Don’t joke about it. I was hurt. I thought there was a real connection. We fell asleep with our arms around each other, for Christ’s sake. I gave her a foot massage.”
Nick smiled. He took these tales of sexual conquest with a pinch of salt, but this time Eugene looked genuinely wounded.
“You know what she said to me?” Eugene said, his shoulders slumped. “She said: ‘You’re sweet.’ Sweet! She didn’t even leave her number. I mean, she could’ve left me a fake number at least. That’s what a civilized person would do.”
“What’s it like, knowing you’ve been a sexual disappointment?”
“It’s not easy. I’m not used to it. After she’d gone, I sat down in the shower. You don’t sit down in the shower unless you’re really upset.”
They walked out to the parking lot together. It was a warm bright day, with a breeze bringing the fresh salt smell of the bay. Nick rarely took the risk of noticing his own happiness but occasionally a flash got through. He felt it now, via the sunlit cars and the rough scent of the ocean and his body’s honest exhaustion and the gentle influence of the beer. These things had power again, now that he had Valerie, now that he had (this was the flash that shocked him with a sort of delighted absurdity) love.
“So what have you guys got planned for the weekend?” Eugene said. “No, wait, let me guess: You’re going to watch TV together. Pair up the odd socks. Bleach the toilet.”
“Actually, we’re going upstate,” Nick said. “Wineries and a great little hotel in Calistoga. Then the beach.”
“What, cops get weekends off now?”
“Once every decade.”
“This is what I’m paying my taxes for? Who’s going to catch all the murderers while your lady’s having her mimosas on the beach?”
“What can I tell you? Lock your windows and doors.”
They made a loose date to play again in a couple of weeks, then headed to their vehicles.
“Hey,” Nick called over his shoulder.
Eugene stopped. “What?”
“Good luck at the STD clinic.”
Eugene opened his mouth for a reply but was distracted by a stunning red-haired girl emerging from a bottle-green Jaguar convertible. Sunlight glowed on her bare legs and shoulders. Eugene looked at Nick: See? All this is still available to me.
Nick, shaking his head, turned and walked away. Wineries and a great little hotel in Calistoga. Then the beach. What he hadn’t added was: Oh yeah, and I’m going to ask Valerie to marry me. Not because he dreaded Eugene’s astonishment (in fact he was looking forward to it, to seeing Eugene’s face caught between outrage and envy; he would break the news next game, just as Eugene released the ball to serve) but because it offended something in him to speak of it to anyone. He hadn’t spoken of it to anyone. He’d simply been walking around for a weird indeterminate time with the vague feeling that he was going to propose, until, a few weeks ago, the vague feeling had stopped being vague and become the central certainty of his life. It had happened, this epiphany, when he’d been on one of his occasional solitary afternoon hikes in Cascade Canyon, where he used to go with his father as a boy. Love (you had to laugh; he laughed, at himself) simplified aesthetics. He’d found himself wanting elemental things: sky, rock, trees, water. He felt archetypal: a Man who had found his Woman. He knew this idiom was ridiculous, but he was helpless. Whether he liked it or not this was a great benign, almost comical truth into which he had been released, like a horse into a field of delicious grass. He supposed it had been this way for prehistoric people, this primal recognition. To him the necessity of Valerie was a fact like the heat of a flame or the sweetness of honey. It was a wonderful thing to have been confronted by something against which there was no argument, however embarrassed he would be to explain it if someone asked. So he’d spent the day walking, and each time h
e put one foot in front of the other it confirmed him.
You’re going to marry Valerie.
Well, now that you mention it, yes, I believe I am.
Then get a ring, dumbass.
Okay.
So he had. It had taken a while. A farcical while, in fact. Valerie wore only one ring (not on her wedding finger), which was one of a pair her parents had had made for her and her older sister, Cassie, and presented to each of them when they’d turned eighteen. She wore only this one ring (silver and amethyst), but she had a dozen or more in the jewelry box on her dresser. Hey, how come you never wear any of these? He’d waited until they were both slightly drunk, then got her to try them on, one by one. He took note of the ring that fit her wedding finger and used it to size the Actual Ring a few days later. With which he was going to present her (probably not down on one knee, which would make her think he’d lost his mind, but there was no telling what his life would spring on him at the last minute) this weekend at the Calistoga bed-and-breakfast just before bed. Oddly, he liked the idea of proposing to her while she was standing, naked, brushing her teeth. He wanted to watch her face reacting in the semi-fogged mirror. He liked the thought of her, dark eyes wide and mouth foamy with toothpaste, decoding what he’d just said, letting it sink in, spitting out toothpaste, then saying: yes. He knew she would say yes. They’d never discussed marriage. But there it was: he would ask her and she would say yes. It wasn’t arrogance on his part. It was just pure revealed knowledge.
He started the car, put on his sunglasses, and eased the vehicle out of the lot. He had a couple of hours before Valerie got home, during which he planned to look up possible honeymoon destinations. He didn’t care where they went. He only knew that he wanted to see her lying in a hammock drinking an elaborate cocktail, her hands and ankles gleaming with sunscreen. He had these visions, now. They were the tenets of his strange new religion.
