by Saul Black
“Stop,” he said. “If you struggle, it’ll be worse for you. Please understand that.”
His weight shifted again and she felt his fingers in her hair. Her head was yanked back and smashed down against the floor. Red pain exploded in her nose. The gun jammed hard against her ear. She was aware of the sound of herself, sobbing. It was as if she were hearing it from a long way away.
“Do you understand?”
The wild reflex was a single firework, spent in a second, her will the fading trail of sparks. Something in her that wasn’t her body strained to get out. This part of her was desperate to leave her body behind. She thought of all the times she’d heard about rape. For the first time she felt it as a real thing. She knew now that, for every woman this happened to, none of the hearing about or thinking about or trying to imagine it would mean anything. There was only ever one real rape. The rape that happened to you.
He cuffed her legs.
Her voice was an automatic thing, a separate mechanism out of her control. She was saying: “Don’t hurt me. Please don’t hurt me. You don’t have to do—”
He grabbed her and flipped her over onto her back, her tied wrists trapped under her. She felt a warm trickle from her nose. Blood. The sensation brought her childhood close. The surprise of it, the sudden little tenderness and sympathy for yourself. She was glad her parents were dead. They wouldn’t have to know this had happened to her. At the same time she felt the dark openness of death and the unknown beyond rearing up on the edge of her awareness like a part of deep space where there were no stars. She wondered if she would cross over and see her mother and father again. If there was an afterlife, maybe they were watching this right now. Their little girl.
He ripped a length of duct tape and plastered it over her mouth. Her screams with nowhere to go dinned in her head. Hope rose in her that he was just going to rob the place. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of this until now. She’d been so stupid. She should have said: There’s money, credit cards in my purse. Right there on the couch. She tried to communicate it now, with her eyes, but he turned and walked away.
She heard him close the front door. When he came back in he was carrying the dog. He laid the animal down on the floor and went past her into the kitchen. The dog blinked at her, groggily. It had an aura of sadness. She pictured him jabbing at it with a knife. She wondered how the creature could stand being handled by him. Some indestructible loyalty. She felt vomit rising. Fought it down. She would choke.
More sounds. He was in the utility room, which opened off the kitchen. From the utility you could get into the garage. He was stealing the car. He was stealing the car! Thank God. Thank God.
He came back into the living room and went straight to her purse on the couch. He was a thief. She couldn’t believe he would kill her if he was just a thief. She was going to live. It was a great upwelling of relief to her. She was going to live. There were tears on her face. There was the warmth of the blood and the cutting pain of the ties on her wrists. There were all these sensations that testified to the life she still had and the life she would have beyond this moment. It was almost unbearable that she couldn’t be certain of it.
He took her keys. For the car. And her wallet. Money. Good. Good. He was taking the car, cash, and credit cards. If she’d been able to speak she would have urged him on: Yes, yes, take it all. It’s yours. Take them, please, and go.
Just don’t hurt me.
He didn’t look at her. He carried himself as if he were alone in her home.
He left her again. Every atom of her being devoted itself to listening. To confirming that he was here to rob her, nothing else.
Sure enough, she heard the car start and the garage door open. It was hard to breathe through her smashed nose. The initial explosion there had receded. Now there was a deep rhythm of pain. Very bad pain. Getting worse. She imagined herself in the hospital. Nurses. The smell of antiseptic. Calm, routine capability, devoted to addressing her injuries. Just let me have that. Just let me have that and I’ll never ask for anything else as long as I live.
She tracked the sounds, built the picture from listening. He pulled the Honda out of the garage and down the drive. The engine idled for a few moments, then died. The driver door opened and clunked shut.
Pause.
Drive away. Please, God, just drive away.
The car door opened and closed again. It sounded farther away. How was that possible? The engine started up. Wait. Not her Honda. A different car.
The same sequence of sounds in reverse. A vehicle coming up the drive and pulling into the garage. The garage door’s mechanism cranking to life. The garage door closing.
He wasn’t stealing her car.
Before she had time to think through what had just happened he was back in the living room. He was a little more aware of her now, as if he couldn’t quite deny she was there. He still didn’t look at her. Instead, he picked the dog up and went back into the kitchen.
He was putting the dog in the car?
What was this?
Her mind raced through a mess of possibilities. Got nothing. She couldn’t make sense.
He came back to her. For a moment he stood over her. She shook her head: No, no, no. It was the only gesture of negation she had left. His face was wet with sweat, his mouth clamped shut. He breathed heavily through his nose. He looked remote and furious.
Then he bent down, grabbed her under her arms, and began hauling her toward the kitchen. She struggled. Adrenaline was frantic in her limbs. He ignored her. The bright furnishings of the clean kitchen and the bamboo shadows on the countertop. All the moments here, coffee and her father shaking his head at the latest political nonsense in the newspaper. Her and Allie sitting here after the wake, when everyone had left and the strange reality of both their parents dead had asserted itself like a new quality to the room’s sunlight and silence. There had been love in the family. This house had been filled with taken-for-granted blessings. That time when her father, out of the blue, had put his hand over hers across the breakfast bar and said, with an awkward, quiet intensity: You’re a good girl, Ray. What’d I do to deserve such good daughters?
They were through the utility room.
He turned her. Her knees scraped the edge of the doorway into the garage.
A silver car she didn’t recognize backed in.
The trunk was open.
14
Valerie sat at her desk in the apartment, headphones on, listening to the tapes of the original interviews with Katherine Glass. It was late. Nick was in bed, asleep. But for the light from her screen the place was in darkness. It had been a hot, humid day, the city laboring under the weight of a storm that refused to break. Even indoors Valerie could feel it, as if the sky had piled up slabs of iron. It had given her a headache, though that hadn’t stopped her getting halfway through a bottle of Smirnoff.
Ten days in, the investigation had made little progress since the discovery of the replaced padlock on Elizabeth’s side gate. Or rather, only the cold comfort progress of routine elimination. McLuhan’s people hadn’t gotten anywhere with the paintings, poems, and letter grids. They’d conscripted a mathematician, an art historian, a linguist, and a professor of English literature, as well as their own code specialists. So far every attempt to find a coherent message in any form had failed. McLuhan, Valerie knew, was no longer convinced that there was a coherent message to be found. He’d managed to persuade Donna Clayton to grant Katherine access to a computer, under the strict supervision of Agent Arden, via whom Katherine had sent two communiqués back. The first was in response to the photo of the Noe Hill “pest controller.”
Dear Valerie,
I’ve looked long and hard at the picture you sent. I can imagine how badly you want a positive ID from me. Believe me, I wish I could oblige. The truth is that while none of the superficial characteristics match—beyond skin color, height, and build—I can’t definitively rule him out. However ludicrous this might so
und, there’s something about the cast of the shoulders (he always had enviable posture) that is pure “Lucien.” In addition, the hands, which, for obvious reasons, I know very well. The image isn’t sufficiently clear, but they look deeply familiar. If it is him, he’s had work done. The nose, possibly even the jawline. (This over and above changing his hair; or is it a wig? It looks suspiciously lustrous.) I’m assuming the Bureau is looking into cosmetic surgery patients to match whatever maddening short list they’ve drawn up? But I should warn you that if he went under the knife for this he won’t have been dumb enough to have had it done locally, or even nationally. Again, I remind you: he has the resources. He could have gone to India for all we know. He’s had six years.
I’m sorry to be inconclusive, but honesty (I know: a dirty word from my mouth) is better than either false elimination or false hope.
Thank you for working your magic with Warden Clayton. I am behaving myself scrupulously with the computer, as dear vigilant Agent Arden will aver, but even with cyberspace at my disposal, it’s painfully slow going. Slow going, but not, I think, a waste of time.
K
The second came a few days later:
Dear Valerie,
The Bureau eggheads must all be committed skeptics by now, but there is something here. The references he’s sent are just markers. We’ve got to look between them. For example: Any idiot can find the relevant dates for the paintings and the poem, or birth and death dates for their creators—and though I believe the key to the letter grids has to be numerical, the numbers won’t be in the surface information. They’ll more likely derive from events the dates bookend. There’s a great deal more I’m working on, but it would take time to explain, and since time—obviously—is what we don’t have, I shan’t waste any on hypotheses. The FBI will give up on this. I will not. Please don’t let them pull the plug. I know what I’m doing.
K
For the rest of the investigation they had gone through the motions. They’d interviewed everyone identifiably connected with Elizabeth Lambert and had built a near complete picture of her movements in the days preceding her murder. Nothing out of the ordinary. On the assumption that the killer had watched her, they looked at all the available CCTV footage from places Elizabeth had been in recent weeks. Nothing suspicious and no one matching either Katherine’s description of the man who wasn’t “Lucien Chastain,” nor the pest controller. Elizabeth’s surprising sexual encounter with Luke Russell yielded nothing except for the consensus that her getting laid was long overdue. For the period in question Russell had a rock-solid alibi: flight records verified that he’d left San Francisco the day after his birthday party and hadn’t returned until two days after Elizabeth’s death. On the Thursday Elizabeth was killed, he was on camera at his niece’s school concert in Los Angeles, which took place between five and seven P.M. His sister’s family confirmed (incredulous at being asked) that aside from when they were asleep, he was in the sight of at least one of them for the entire duration of his visit. He volunteered fingerprints and DNA. No match. Game over.
Not that Valerie had had the remotest belief it would be any other way. Katherine’s lover wouldn’t have fucked a target—let alone in such a socially visible way—a week before he killed her.
Everyone had been going through the six original case files, and everyone had been forced to concede that they yielded nothing new. After Katherine’s arrest and apparent cooperation Valerie had asked her for places she’d been with “Lucien.” Restaurants, gas stations, airports, hotels, in the hope that somewhere—somewhere—he would show up on CCTV. Katherine had said: You don’t seem to be getting this, Valerie: it wasn’t that kind of relationship, candlelit dinners and movies and walks on the beach. We knew what we wanted from each other, so we maximized that. That, and nothing else, aside from telepathically transparent conversation. All the things you do with Nick, all the ordinary things that knit you together with casual ease—we didn’t do any of them. We didn’t need any of them. The time we spent together wasn’t measured in minutes and hours, it was measured by what we did with it.
Katherine hadn’t seen him use the same vehicle more than twice, and of those she could remember only two: a silver Mitsubishi and a black Prius. She had no clue what years or license plates, but all the cars felt new. They ran traces on registered vehicles matching the descriptions going back five years. No dice. Several had been reported stolen—and never recovered. The ensuing probe into car-theft gangs and distributors turned up a single lead: in return for a blind eye to his trade, one of the fences they questioned admitted doing a deal on a silver Mitsubishi a few weeks before the first murder. The customer description didn’t match Katherine’s—and the vehicle itself was never found.
A shiver of lightning lit the apartment. Thunder. A sound like a cosmic explosion that made it through the headphones. Valerie looked up from the screen. The first berry-sized droplets were striking the windows. Within seconds it was a furious downpour. She lit a Marlboro and increased the volume.
K: I’ve always liked it. For as long as I can remember. Even as a child it seemed the most natural thing. Though even as a child I knew it had to be hidden. None of this would even be worth mentioning if I were a man. But a woman? I do realize that as far as the world’s concerned there’s no excuse for any of this if you don’t have a dick.
V: That’s very interesting, but where did you meet Lucien Chastain?
K: In a cocktail bar in Manhattan. A place called Full Moon on Second Avenue, in the East Village, but I don’t think it’s there anymore.
V: What were you doing in New York?
K: I had some free time. I felt like going, so I went. There was a Mondrian show at MoMA. I stayed at the Empire Hotel on Broadway, where we spent the night. I don’t know how long they keep their CCTV, but of course you’ll check that. He told me he was staying at the Plaza, but that could have been a lie. He did have a cute opening line.
V: What did he say?
K: He sat down next to me and said: Only in Manhattan is a beautiful woman alone at a bar actually a beautiful woman alone at a bar.
V: What was he doing in New York?
K: He just said business. Finance. He wasn’t specific. Don’t you know what it’s like when you know someone, instantly? Wasn’t it like that for you and Nick?
V: And where did you meet after that, when you were back in San Francisco?
K: Monstrosity gives you the gift of being able to recognize other monsters when you meet them. I’ve wondered if it’s actually pheromonal. And if it’s peculiar to monsters. Surely when you and Nick laid eyes on each other—
V: Where did you meet in San Francisco?
K: Are you blushing?
V: Please just answer the question.
K: My apartment. Always and only my apartment. Always and only at night. If it had been a horror movie—a different kind of horror movie—I’m sure I’d have found myself wondering if I was sleeping with a vampire.
V: And in all that time you never knew where he lived, what he did for a living?
K: It was only later that he told me he was rich. He didn’t do anything for a living. You’re not understanding this, Valerie. Recognition on this scale, you don’t bother with favorite colors and what music you like. After our first night together all the relevant information was in. We knew what we needed to know about each other. We knew everything we needed to know. Telepathy’s not a rumor, it’s a fact. There’s a flicker of it between you and me, as you well know. I can see it in your face. You’ve got a little tumor of anxiety about what it might be like to have someone completely at your mercy. Or what it might be like for Nick. Only the very dull never wonder. It’s the refined consciousness, the subtle soul, for whom the question never quite gets answered. And for better or worse, you are a refined consciousness, a subtle soul. Nick, too. It’s why you became cops. You needed an antidote to your own latency. Stupider people become priests and nuns, but we’ve all seen where that leads. It fails
as an antidote because it’s a closed world. It encourages secrecy. Cops have to wear their morality in public. You’ve done the smart thing: you’ve made your own potential an unaffordable luxury.…
Valerie switched off the recording and removed her headphones. The rain was a deafening static. Six years ago she’d been less the cop than she was now, but even allowing for that she should never have given Katherine the room she had to talk. Nick had stopped sitting in on the interviews after the first two or three. It’s not worth it, he’d said. She seems like a mystery, but she’s not. She’s just another person with the same old disease. We should leave it to the Feds. She’s a dull contaminant, that’s all. I don’t need it and neither do you. But Valerie had carried on. She’d persisted. Why?
The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
“Hey,” Nick said, startling her.
“Jesus Christ.”
He put his hands on her shoulders, laughing. She had jumped, visibly, in her chair. “Sorry,” he said. “I thought you heard me.”
“You nearly gave me a fucking heart attack.”
He bent and kissed her neck. “Come to bed,” he said. “I just had a dream.”
“About me?”
“No, sorry. Kylie Minogue.”
“That midget?”
“She rescued me from hell and then insisted I go down on her.”
“What was hell like?”
“A huge moldy basement with depressing water pipes and air ducts.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad.”
“Well, I wasn’t happy there, I can tell you. There were people with huge axes for heads and their limbs on backwards. And all I had on were my socks.”
Valerie looked at the desktop clock: 3:42. She’d have to be up in three hours. “Okay,” she said, “but I’m disappointed with this Kylie business. If I come to bed I’m going straight to sleep.”
She didn’t go straight to sleep. After a few minutes of lying next to Nick and knowing he was awake, too, she said: “Something I never told you.”
