by J. Bertrand
“Brad,” I say. “You do know Fauk’s guilty?”
“How can you even say that?” he shouts, coming right out of his chair. “Did you hear a word I just said to you? Fauk was in jail when most of these murders were committed. You put him there, and I made you a hero for doing it.”
“Calm down, Brad.”
“Just get out of here, all right? I’m done with your questions.”
“I still need more—”
“If you want more, make sure your Texas Monthly subscription is up-to-date. You can read about it with everybody else!”
“You said before I used you, but you got it wrong. Fauk’s the one using you. So is Lauterbach. And you’re letting them do it.”
“Get. Out. Now.”
This time I use the front door, crossing through a pair of cacti and giving the rocks a good kick, sending one of them along the concrete and into my car door. Serves me right. I toss it back and get behind the wheel, conscious of Templeton’s face in the front window. Part of me wants to go back inside and shake him until he sees reason. But if his raw show of unaccustomed emotion tells me anything, it’s that he’s a true believer.
He was stringing me along before, telling me what he thought I wanted to hear. Not leveling with me because, in his eyes, I’m tainted. He really thinks Fauk is innocent.
And that I’m responsible for putting away the wrong man.
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 11 — 4:30 P.M.
Back in October, the city clocked a streak of days without a single homicide. Every morning we’d sit hunkered by the phones waiting for the inevitable call, only to have it not come. Two, three days. Four. Five. We kept ourselves busy with open cases, knowing the respite wouldn’t last.
It did, though, day after day.
Nobody could remember anything like it before. The shifts stacked up like a house of cards, and the higher they went the more afraid we were just to breathe.
We went from talking about the streak all the time to saying nothing, afraid of jinxing the run. Nine days and counting. I remember getting up on the morning of the tenth day, wondering what would happen if all the sudden people stopped murdering each other. Just like that, for some random reason, they finally stopped.
Lying in bed staring up at the fan, pretending I didn’t have to go in that day because the city didn’t need me anymore . . . on that day, the tenth day, I loved my job.
On day eleven we got a call: a body found in an empty house. On ten I was in love, and on eleven I hated it more than I ever had, and I’m still not sure I could explain why.
Staring at Jason Young across the table, I feel that way again. Maybe it’s a reflection of the hate Templeton turned on me, making me loathe myself and what I do.
“I’m sorry to have to ask you this, Jason, but were you aware that Simone was involved in a relationship with another man?”
He rubs at the puffy flesh under his right eye, shakes his head.
“Can you answer out loud, please? For the recording.”
“No,” he says.
There are fresh cuts and bruises on his face and hands, livid against the backdrop of the fading injuries of a week ago. Another fight at another bar, though he is naturally reticent on the subject, deferring to his attorney, a young, fat counselor cinched too tightly into his suit at the waist and throat, his button-down collar flapping free on one side. Despite his slovenly demeanor, the lawyer is sharp, scrutinizing every word out of my mouth as if he can actually see them on the air. I’ve had enough of lawyers for one day.
“Did she ever say anything that would give you reason to suspect?”
He shakes his head again. “No.”
“When she came to you for money,” I ask, “did she mention anything about being pregnant?”
His eyes flash in surprise.
“Did she say anything about needing the money for an abortion?”
“A what?”
He tucks his head down, shoulders rolled forward, almost like he’s trying to curl up into a ball. I take no pleasure in this line of questioning. If I’m going to eliminate him as a suspect, though, I have no choice. If he knew about Epps and the pregnancy ploy, that might be enough in a jury’s eyes. But judging from the reaction, I doubt he knew a thing.
“There’s something I’ve been wondering about,” I ask finally. “When you gave us consent to search your apartment—” The lawyer interrupts with an audible huff, letting me know how much he thinks of that consent. “When we searched, there was something I found surprising, something missing. Do you know what I mean?”
“No.”
“There weren’t any books. I was looking for one in particular. I showed it to you, remember? You didn’t recognize it, and there wasn’t a copy in the apartment, but I started to wonder if maybe you had a storage unit or kept some things over at a friend’s house. It’s strange not to find any books at all.”
“So what?”
“Where are the books? You do have some, don’t you?”
He looks to the attorney, then back at me. “I sold them. Put ’em all in a couple of boxes and brought ’em to Half Price Books, the one on Westheimer.”
“What kind of books were they?”
“The kind they don’t give you much for,” he says.
I place The Kingwood Killing on the table, drawing a raised eyebrow from the lawyer. He motions me to slide it over, which I do, his strategy being to glean as much information from my questions as possible without letting his client answer anything detrimental. Turning the pages, he glances up with recognition and I half expect him to say something. Instead, he slides the book back across the table and makes a note on his pad.
“You ever read this book?” I ask.
“It’s a free country, Detective,” the lawyer says. “People can’t be prosecuted for what they read. I think this line of questioning has run its course.”
“It’s okay,” Young says. “I never even seen that book before. That’s not my kind of thing, anyway.”
“What is your thing?” I ask, expecting him to say the Bible.
He rubs his eye again. “I don’t have a thing. This is my thing.” Pounding the table. “This is all I think about anymore, and I . . . I don’t think I can stand it.”
This is not my thing either, not anymore. We wrap the interview and I ask the attorney to meet with me for a second, leaving Young at the table. With another impatient huff, he accompanies me back to my cubicle, where I pull up the Silk Cut surveillance footage for him to watch. He asks to see it a second time.
“What is this?”
“You can see what it is.”
“What I mean is, are you charging him with something related to the incident?”
“I’m not. But it looks to me like he’s been in another fight, and that combined with what he said just now makes me wonder about his emotional state. Your client seems to have some kind of death wish.”
“He loved his wife, and she’s been brutally murdered, and now he has you telling him she was cheating on him and pregnant with someone else’s kid. Maybe he’s just upset.”
Something Candace Walker said comes back to me. “She liked them bad,” she’d said, referring to the kind of men her daughter had once preferred. Now that she’s dead, Jason Young seems well on his way to becoming one.
“You’re right,” I say. “Maybe it would be a good idea to see about getting him some help.”
“I’m touched by your concern. I wish I’d seen more evidence of it in the interview room.”
“My concern is genuine.”
“And so is my skepticism. Now if that’s all?”
He collects Young and leads him out, putting a paternal hand on his client’s back despite the similarity in their ages. That hand makes me feel better, but not enough. I pick up the phone and dial Reverend Blunt, the only person in Young’s life who might feel an obligation to help and have the means to do so. He doesn’t pick up, and though I’m reluctant to leave a message, I do it anyway, war
ning him to keep an eye on Young.
When I hang up, Bascombe appears over the cubicle wall, the first time I’ve laid eyes on him since this morning’s conference.
“How did that go in there?”
I shrug. “He’s not looking like a suspect to me.”
“I’m sorry to hear that ’cause you could sure use one about now. I had a look at Detective Lauterbach’s case after you left, and if we don’t close this thing quick, it might never get closed. For sheer insanity, that guy is brilliant. He’s come up with a way to link all those different cases and left enough wiggle room so the inconsistencies can all be explained away.”
“In other words, the cases don’t connect.”
A hard smile. “They do when it’s him talking. There are some real similarities, too, enough to get you thinking. It wouldn’t surprise me if some of these really are the work of the same person. Just not all of them.”
I give another noncommittal shrug, not wanting to concede even a partial victory to Lauterbach.
“I think you’re being sold a bill of goods,” I say. “I talked to Templeton today, and it turns out he’s the one behind all this. He met Lauterbach at a talk he gave, then they collected all these cases and concocted a theory for how they could fit together. And I helped them out, though I didn’t mean to. I gave Templeton some details on Simone Walker—but even then, he already knew about the case—and he realized she could plug into their grouping just as easily. It was probably him that sent Lauterbach over here, all out of spite. He blames me for letting a serial killer run amok.”
“So you think there’s nothing to it at all?” he asks. “The district attorney isn’t so sure. And frankly I’m not, either. There could be something to this, even if the Walker case doesn’t connect. I want you to take a look at the cases—”
“Even if ? ”
“Don’t hassle me on this, March. I’m trying to help.”
“You’ve got a funny way of doing it.”
“You know something, you are one piece of work. Some of us have been doing this longer than you, March, and maybe you should listen for a change.” He throws his hands up in mock surrender and turns to go. “All I’m saying is, if you’re determined to dig your own grave, it’s only gotta be six feet down. You can stop shoveling anytime.”
Over dinner, Charlotte listens as I run my mouth, decompressing after a day of insanity. The conference with the district attorney piques her interest, and she asks a lot of questions about who was in the room, which for the most part I can’t answer. She even sits through my lecture on the problem with hyping the work of serial killers, the way it can blind ordinarily solid cops to the more mundane and far more likely explanations. It’s a good lecture, well rehearsed, and she does everything but applaud at the end.
I’ve worked three legit serial killer cases in the ten years I’ve been on murder. I’ve seen plenty more shoehorned into the mold, usually by young and inexperienced investigators who think that when a bona fide serial killer wields the instrument, death has more meaning than it otherwise would.
“You take so much of this to heart,” Charlotte says, running her fingers through my hair. “This will sound stupid, I’m sure, but it’s almost like you—all of you, the police, I mean—it’s like you’re the victims, too. The things you have to deal with, the things you have to witness.”
“Victim isn’t the word,” I say.
“That’s why I could never have practiced criminal law. When you get that close to the darkness, even if you’re there for the right reasons, it can’t help but affect you, can it?”
“It hasn’t affected me.”
She laughs. “No, of course not.”
“Other people can see what I see and call it what it is, but then they get to move on. They’re not expected to do anything. The difference is, I am.”
“Sometimes there’s nothing you can do, either.”
“Sometimes,” I say.
After dinner she puts a rental movie in the player, a romantic comedy, and after half an hour I wander into my home office, flipping up the laptop screen. I can’t remember the address Templeton entered to pull up my cousin’s website, so I type in a few search terms until the right link pops up. Although I’ve known of the site’s existence for a while, this is the first time I’ve actually gotten up the nerve to visit.
As the page loads I start to feel queasy, the way I always do when it comes to her: the Tammy Effect. With such a close-knit family, Charlotte has never understood the networks of estrangement in the March clan. My father, a widower in his early sixties, took up with his thirty-two-year-old secretary much to the consternation of his adult children, who only discovered the liaison when the secretary, my mother, turned up pregnant on my uncle’s doorstep. I call him my uncle, but in fact he was my brother, which makes my cousins actually my nieces and nephews, but the relations were reclassified for public consumption and I’ve grown so accustomed to them I can’t change.
It was left to my brother/uncle to sort out the mess. There was no question of my parents marrying. Neither of them was particularly keen on my arrival. In fact, if I’d been born a decade later, I probably wouldn’t have been born at all. So my uncle took me, raising me alongside his five-year-old son, Moody. Tammy was nine, and in just a few years became our de facto baby-sitter when her mother got a job as a secretary, despite the choice words my aunt had for working women whenever the topic of my own mother came up.
A disapproving Presbyterian whose elegant outward appearance concealed a jumble of superstitions and prejudices, though not very well, my aunt drove us like cattle to church each week, making it clear that of us all, I was the one most in need of cleansing. She would catch me out at awkward moments, firing off questions from the catechism.
What is the chief end of man?
To glorify God and . . . something.
Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever, she’d say, adding a swat sometimes to aid the memory. Because she was beautiful, and because making impossible sacrifices for the children in her care was part of her marrow, I grew up wanting to please this woman and never feeling like I had succeeded. Noting this, my uncle took a special interest in me.
All this talk about chiefs and their ends, he would say. What about the braves and their ends? This is the land of the brave, ain’t it?
Who are the braves?
You and me, he’d say. We’re the braves. The ones put on this earth to get the job done.
What job?
But he’d just smile. I knew the job he meant, though, because he had a gun and a badge. Later on, after retiring on disability, he would hobble on his cane between the glass cases full of revolvers and automatics, holding court among the band of brothers he’d served alongside, who uniformly held him in esteem. At least they did when I was there.
Her website includes a page dedicated to Daddy, as she calls him, with a photo of him in uniform and a much later one taken in the gun shop not long before he sold it, when he’d traded in his cane for a wheelchair. There’s a juvenile poem, awkward in meter and rhyme, apparently written by Tammy herself, followed by the text of my uncle’s obituary. At the bottom of the column, his headstone at the cemetery, decked with fresh flowers. According to the caption: A GRAVESTONE FOR DADDY, BUT NO MARKER TO REMEMBER HIS SON.
There’s no tribute to her mother that I can find.
Tammy inherited all of her mother’s bad qualities and none of the good. No, that’s not fair. If I put on my psychoanalyst’s hat, it’s not so hard to come up with the formula that creates someone like her. Starved of attention, either through neglect or because she craved so much of it, Tammy found ways of standing out.
When I was in first grade, for example, she fed me laxatives wrapped in foil like chocolate, then skipped a day of school to take care of me during my “sickness.” Then there was the time a few years later when she sent Moody and me on a trek through the neighborhood after school, then called her mother at work t
o say we’d both run away from home. She didn’t do this to get us into trouble; she just wanted to be the focal point of the crisis. But often her plans had a way of producing unintended results, which often included an appointment with my uncle’s belt—for me and Moody, not for her.
It’s strange to think that the boy she did so much to torment early on is now her cause in life. Though of course Moody isn’t the cause, only the means to an end. Once again she’s using him to get attention.
When Moody disappeared in 1973, I was just eleven and he was fifteen, about to turn sixteen. Tammy had graduated high school and shown no interest either in college or getting a job. Her presence in the house kept me and Moody on the streets after school, though by then we were not often together. Tired of his prepubescent shadow, Moody had taken advantage of his new ten-speed to leave me in the dust.
The afternoon it happened, I came home to find Tammy alone on the couch watching television. My aunt drove my uncle home, arriving just before six, and there was an argument over who was supposed to set the table. When Moody missed dinner, my aunt fretted some, but it wasn’t the first time. At nine, my uncle told me to go to bed. From behind my door I could hear the three of them talking, my aunt accusatory and Tammy shrill and defensive, my uncle trying to calm them both down. He made calls to the parents of some of Moody’s friends—though of course he didn’t know the identities of Moody’s real friends—and then took my aunt out in the car to search, leaving Tammy with me.
I fell asleep waiting for their return.
Wake up, Tammy said.
She was on top of me, straddling my chest, her knees cinching the blanket over me in an inescapable cocoon. I thrashed a little, which only made her laugh. Then she leaned down very close to me in the dark, close enough that her hair brushed my cheek.
Now, she said. You’re gonna tell me where Moody went, do you understand? I know he tells you everything, so either you tell me or else.
Or else what?
Or else this. She took a fistful of my hair and started to squeeze, pushing down into the pillow with all her strength. My head caught fire and I tried to kick free, but she was too heavy for me to move. I clenched my teeth, tried to take the pain, but the tears welled up regardless. Don’t cry, you little baby, just tell me. If she’d known about waterboarding, I might have cracked, but that night I discovered a reserve inside me, a tank of fortitude lined with rage. Sensing this, she let go of my hair. She sat back, still trapping me, taking a moment to catch her breath. Then she grabbed the pillow, tore it out from under my head, and held it above me just an inch or two. If you don’t say something, I’m gonna smother you.
