by Saul Black
On one of the bookshelves she found a pretty little pewter letter holder.
Look carefully, please.
An invitation to someone’s art opening. A receipt for cookware. A couple of takeout menus. Ticket stubs from museum and gallery visits. Valerie wondered if looking carefully was just to amuse him. These were the times: he could have hidden cameras filming her right now. He could be gearing up to post her bewilderment on YouTube.
She dismissed it. The tone of his note implied a low tolerance for cartoon villainy or stock genre idiom. He wasn’t fucking with her. Language was transparent that way. If you were being addressed respectfully, as an equal, you could tell.
She had started in the kitchen, gone through the living room and into the bedroom. There was only the bathroom left. CSI had cordoned off the footprints. The barefoot prints of Elizabeth and the grip-tread prints of whatever her killer had been wearing. Valerie had an image of Elizabeth, neck-deep in bath foam, hearing a noise in the bedroom, turning her head, seeing him. A peaceful evening for a civilized woman alone in her apartment blasted in a moment’s horror, scented candles soft-lighting her nightmare. The familiar disgust surfaced. She forced it down. There was no place for disgust. Disgust didn’t catch the men who did this. Only obsessive attention to detail. Only the Machine.
The medicine cabinet had nothing unusual to report. She trailed her gloved fingers along the window frame’s upper rim. Dust. Nothing. The footprints were annoying her. The image of him pacing in here between assaults, glancing back at Elizabeth through the doorway, weighing what to do to her next. There was nothing in the note to suggest he wasn’t working solo now. What was that like for him? A diminishment, surely? A cold space where the warmth of Katherine’s collusion used to be. Maybe he would recruit someone new. Maybe he already had.
She went back out to the porch, removed her mask, and checked her phone. A text from Nick: “Managed to get B&B cancellation with no charge, so come home when you’re done. I’ll give you a massage. xN”
A couple of houses down the block, someone tossed an empty bottle into a recycling barrel.
I’ll give you a massage. One of the worst things about the video footage was seeing the genuine intimacy between Katherine and the Man in the Mask, all the casual touches beyond the sex. You wanted it to be ritualized, robotic, a soulless dependence on fixed permutations. But it wasn’t. There was visible ease and fit and trust. With a slight amoral contortion they were enviable. That, of course, was one of the reasons they’d stirred such profound public hatred. Whatever else was true of them, they were, literally, two against the world. They recognized no authority but their own. Once, when she was laughing particularly hard, Katherine had put her hand on his arm to keep her balance in the high heels. He said: “Easy there, tiger,” and that made her laugh harder, as he’d known it would. Subtract the morality—subtract what they were laughing at—and they were the romantic ideal. An America of dead marriages was outraged, though they thought it was just the murders, the torture, the pure fucking evil.
Recycling. Bottles, cans, cardboard, paper.
Paper.
Valerie walked to the trash cans at the end of Elizabeth’s yard, removed the plastic bag from the recycling barrel and toted it back to the light of the porch.
A cop gift—one of the accepted Police Magics—was that you knew a thing just a split-second before you knew it.
In among the junk mail and menus, old Chronicles and torn-up envelopes, was a bent postcard bearing, on its front, a reproduced painting of Adam and Eve standing under the tree of forbidden fruit, and on its back, in confident black felt-tip longhand the handwritten message:
You’ll be the first. 072315.
For a moment, the numbers meant nothing. Then she saw. 07.23.15. Twenty-third of July, 2015. The day before yesterday. Almost certainly the day Elizabeth Lambert died.
Valerie looked again. No stamp. No postmark. Could he have delivered it by hand? Would he have taken that kind of risk? Since there was no street CCTV it wouldn’t necessarily help if he had. But someone might have seen him. Seen him and assumed he was dropping junk mail or menus. Disguised? As a mailman? These neighborhoods, people knew their mailmen, or -women. Wouldn’t he have risked running into someone from the building at the door, running into Elizabeth herself, for that matter? Surely?
She went back through the recycling. There were at least twenty empty envelopes, mostly junk or utilities, but three of them (all torn in half) didn’t fall into either category. Two were handwritten, though the handwriting didn’t appear to match the postcard. The third had been addressed using a printer. All were stamped and postmarked, though even with her phone’s flashlight she couldn’t make out the details of where and when. She couldn’t, but tech could. They would know where and when it was mailed—though as soon as she thought that, she knew he would have anticipated it, would have driven to a red herring location to drop it in a box.
Run DNA and prints on all of them. Since he hadn’t been shy of slinging biology around the scene, there was no reason to suppose his correspondence would be any different. She began to think to herself: It’s better than nothing—but stopped. That needn’t be true. If it was designed to point them in the wrong direction it would be worse than nothing.
Fair warning. More to follow.
7
Valerie dropped the evidence at the station, filed her report, and drove home. The darkness and the city lights were mildly palliative, as were the vague demands of steering the Taurus. Her face was sensitive and overfull, her hands throbbed.
You’ve been waiting for this.
Well? Hadn’t she? Hadn’t she wanted him to ignite the cold trail and give her the chance to finish the job? If that were true, what did it make her?
Years ago, her grandfather, a homicide cop himself, had said to her: Watch out for the Drift, Valerie. There are cases … there are cases that make it seem like it’s not about doing the work. There are cases that wrangle your soul into the equation. That’s the Drift. That’s the undercurrent. Resist it. It won’t help you. Crime is crime. It’s never magic, it’s never cosmic, it’s never uncanny, it never means anything. It’s just people breaking the law. Which means you do the work, that’s all. Ignore your soul. You work homicide, your soul’s no good to you. Homicide, your soul’s a false lead.
Watch out for the Drift. She’d felt it six years ago and she could feel it now. Katherine Glass woke the Drift. To be in the same room with her co-opted you into a terrible unveiling. The covers came off everything and you were exposed to the raw elements of existence. She made you realize how everyone else you dealt with depended for their sanity on delusions, approximations, fantasies, compromises, denial, habits, lies, avoidance, displacement, postponement, an absolute refusal to look at themselves honestly. Katherine—morality aside—was sheer, present, resolved, unmysterious to herself. She was both her own unblinking scrutiny and its stripped object. Everything she’d done demanded you consign her to the scrap heap of dumb psychosis. Everything she’d done asked you to renew your subscription to the doctrine of the banality of evil. And every moment you spent with her made it impossible. You were in the Drift. Your soul was roped in. It mattered, beyond the practical. It meant.
Valerie changed lanes and lit a Marlboro. I’ll give you a massage. She was nervous, suddenly, of her own domestic bliss. She had a fleeting televisual image of herself just now, a dark-haired woman, usefully scarred, live, dangerous, pragmatic, and more or less all right, driving home to love. It was nothing, a quirk of consciousness—and yet for a moment it was as if the universe shifted and revealed all her certainties from a damning new angle, showed the whole apparatus of her life—Nick, home, her family, her job, her self—as something piteously frail.
You going to talk to Glass?
I imagine I’ll have to. Oh joy.
Understatement. Sarcasm. Always. Small utterances that were the tips of icebergs flaring thousands of feet below the surface.
&
nbsp; You’ve been waiting for this.
Yes, she had. Six years. Yearning and dreading were not mutually exclusive. Again, the either/or world was gone. It was one of the first things you learned as a cop. Katherine had said: It’s no accident police cars are black and white. America needs its morality simple. How many weeks did you spend on the force before you realized that all police cars, the world over, should be gray?
By the time Valerie was working homicide, academia and investigative journalism had between them done away with the cinematically peddled vision of the serial killer—charismatic genius apex predator who hummed Bartók and quoted Shakespeare—and replaced it with the unritzy truth: that by and large the people who did these things were dull and damaged, bereft of insight and driven by dreary compulsions, imaginatively and emotionally dead, cognitively impaired, and not infrequently impotent without the Viagra of psychotic violence. Even the ones who could string a sentence together had nothing to express beyond their own laughable megalomania. If you didn’t know they’d killed people you could put them behind a mic onstage at the Comedy Store and they’d be brilliant serial-killer parodies. In short, hypothetical stand-up aside, they were boring. More boring still once the psychopathic gene was admitted to the party. Granted, it was neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for multiple murder, but still, there had been palpable cultural disappointment when killjoy Science reported that the great monsters might reduce to nothing more thrilling than lousy DNA.
Then, like a last hurrah for dark romance, Katherine Glass and the Man in the Mask.
Over three years they abducted, raped, tortured, and killed six young women, all between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five. They did it because they wanted to and because they could. They were articulate, good-looking, extremely intelligent, organized, calculating—and absolutely without remorse. It was as if the universe had had quite enough of all this uninspiring psychological reductivism, all this FBI profiling, and had decided to remind everyone that it could still go mythic old-school if it wanted to. Think you’re over psychos? Get a load of these guys.
We knew, instantly, Katherine told Valerie, in one of the early interviews. From the moment we met. It was the simplest recognition. It always is. You see each other and you know. It’s that moment of stepping from cold shade into warm sunlight. Every part of you says yes. I know that you know this. I know that you know love. I can see it. Love leaves an imprint in the tiny nebulae of the eyes. Yours have it. It’s part of your beauty.
Children of their times, Katherine and the Man in the Mask had recorded the killings. Not just the killings, but a great deal of what preceded the killings. What preceded the killings were hours—days, in fact—of them doing whatever they wanted to their victims. Valerie had forced herself, courtesy of some bitter imperative to bear witness, to sit through all of it, a gesture of retroactive solidarity with the women who’d died, a futile attempt to stay with them through what they had endured. What they had endured was comprehensively thought-out torture, designed to make the suffering last. Katherine and her lover made the suffering last because their victims’ suffering was what gave Katherine and her lover pleasure. The more suffering, the more pleasure, and the longer the suffering went on the longer their pleasure lasted. The simple equation. The Devil’s math.
The images were in Valerie’s head now, whether she liked it or not. The carefully administered cigarette burns, the broken flesh, the gagged screams, and the pleading. The Man in the Mask working up a sweat, Katherine blowing her blond hair off her forehead. Once you’d seen it there was no memory-wipe available, except the kind that might have come via a complete nervous breakdown. Watching the videos had been an education in the logic of extreme sadism, its brutality and nuance, the strange space it left its aficionados for black humor, a paradigm away from the playacting of consensual S&M, where the “victims” were willing participants, by definition not victims at all. Katherine and her man laughed, quietly and often, with what looked like exquisite, sophisticated delight. They shared a subtle ingenuity, a dedication to maximizing the contrast between their power and their victims’ helplessness. The girls were always made to kiss and worship Katherine in exactly the places on her body she’d just burned or beaten on theirs: hands, feet, breasts, vagina, anus. Always with the promise that if they did that, if they degraded themselves sufficiently, the torture would stop and they would be released. Always, naturally, a lie. The Man in the Mask loved that, their repeated forced veneration, the complete inversion of their most basic value system. You’re an angel, he said to Katherine, caressing her between her legs while Katherine dug her stiletto into a wound on Danielle Freyer’s breast. You’re a sweet, perfect angel. The girl’s scream dulled behind her gag, her head flung from side to side. Nowhere for her to go and nothing for her to do except bear it. Press harder, angel. I don’t think she’s feeling it. Katherine had laughed, cozily, as if this were an indulgence in minor mischief. It went on. It went on, and on, and on. The repetition was integral. They wanted it to go on forever.
But it couldn’t. Without exception, there came a point at which their pleasure turned to frustration, as if no matter what they did it was never sufficient, never wholly matched their imagination. Irritation crept in. Their contempt and desire became toxic, turned to rage. Or despair. They reached a point where nothing but the victim’s death was enough, and though they knew death would end it, they couldn’t draw back.
Valerie had been obliged to see one of the SFPD’s psych counselors, Gayle Werner, a calm woman in her midforties with thick cropped curls of graying hair and pale-green eyes that suggested this was her umpteenth incarnation.
You watched all the footage?
Yes.
How did it make you feel?
Valerie had felt, at that moment, exhausted. She’d been impatient with the whole counseling process. It required the opposite of her usual verbal economy.
I didn’t feel anything much. It’s my job to stop the people who do that sort of thing. It’s what I signed up for.
Did you feel guilty?
Why would I feel guilty?
A lot of the officers I see feel complicit. As if knowing about—or in your case watching—this kind of behavior makes them somehow a party to it. It’s not an uncommon response.
Valerie hadn’t answered immediately. Then, after a few moments of something building up in her—a combination of annoyance and frustration and claustrophobia—she’d said:
I felt like I was watching people with rage and despair inside them. Not even evil. Just rage and despair.
She left out her other feelings. That seeing what she saw gave her a glimpse of the way the universe really was. That it was a completely indifferent machine. That whatever happened in it was just another thing that happened in it. That there was no cosmic moral order, no God, no meaning. The victims screamed and pleaded for help, and no help came. There was no help, no consolation, no justice. In their faces you could see the transition from hope (for rescue, for reversal) to the complete absence of hope. The complete absence of everything but the desire for death, the only kind of release left to them. Which, since by that point they had come to understand their torturers’ needs, they knew would be a long, long time coming. By that point they had come to understand that their own death was literally the last thing their torturers wanted.
The responses to seeing this kind of behavior are unpredictable and frequently disturbing, Gayle had said. Valerie knew what she was getting at. It pushed her over whatever limit she’d been observing.
Look, I didn’t get off on it. I know it’s contagious. I know it works its way in. The police disease. I know that can happen, but it hasn’t happened to me. I don’t have it. That’s what you’re here to check, so let’s not waste any more of our time.
And Gayle Werner, in the maddening way shrinks had collectively perfected, nodded calmly and made a long note on her yellow legal pad. Valerie had thought that would be the end of it, but Gayle said:<
br />
That’s good to know. It’s good that you understand. And I’m sorry if I seem patronizing. If everyone I talked to was as direct as you’re being, my job would be a lot easier.
Interview clearly not over. Valerie regretted the outburst. She remembered a quote from high school Shakespeare: The lady doth protest too much, methinks. Could almost hear Gayle turning the same phrase over in her head.
Just out of curiosity, why do you think you feel so confident in your immunity?
Gayle’s turn to be direct. Valerie thought: Shrinks have to be like cops. Beyond surprise. Beyond shock. Beyond good and evil. It gave her a grudging respect for the woman sitting opposite her. It also made her consider the phrasing: Why do you think you feel so confident? As in, the feeling might be a delusion.
Good genes, she said.
Gayle didn’t react. The nonreaction was her waiting for Valerie to give a proper answer.
Valerie didn’t have a proper answer to give. All she said was:
I guess I’m not made that way.
Gayle had let it go. But the question had stuck in Valerie’s head. Superficially, in the years that followed, she ignored it. Yet she knew some quiet mental apparatus was working away at it, revisiting it, probing it with the tense delicacy of a bomb-disposal expert. And gradually, over time, she had come to a tentative conclusion: She was immune because she had love in her life. The darkest part of herself understood the appeal of cruelty, of doing what Katherine Glass and her lover had done. She’d had the odd guilty fantasy herself, over the years. History testified that there was a dark part to all of us, cells of the human soul that could, given the right circumstances, mutate into a lethal cancer. What stopped that from happening, she came to believe (what stopped the fantasies becoming reality), was nothing more or less than the kind of life you’d lived by the time the right circumstances found you. The antibodies were love and warmth and imagination and humor. You could have cruelty or love. Not both. If you did what Katherine had done, you forfeited your ability to love. And if you had the kind of love she, Valerie, had in her life, the dark cells of the soul couldn’t mutate.
