He heard the screen door rattle open and then close, and he smelled Ananberg’s perfume-light and citrusy-when she was still a few steps behind him.
“Got a light?”
Her hand hooked around his side and slid into the front pocket of his jacket. He grabbed her wrist, withdrew her hand, and turned. Their faces were inches apart. “I don’t smoke.”
She smirked. “Relax, Rackley. Cops aren’t my type.”
“That’s right. Teacher’s pet.”
She seemed genuinely pleased. “A sense of humor. Who’da thunk it?”
Her hair, fine and dark, looked as though it would be silken. Ananberg was Dray’s opposite-petite, brunette, flirtatious-and she evoked in Tim a distinct discomfort. He turned back to the dark sprawl of the gardens. Rows of box shrubs zigzagged before fading into darkness.
Ananberg pulled a cigarette from her pack, stuck it into her mouth, and patted her pockets fruitlessly. “What are you looking at?”
“Just the darkness.”
“You like playing Mr. Mysterious, don’t you? The brooding routine, the strong, silent thing. I think it gives you distance, comfort.”
“You got me all figured out.”
“I wouldn’t go that far.” She set her hands on her hips, studying him. Her curt amusement was gone. “Thanks for sticking up for me in there.”
“You don’t need sticking up for. I was just speaking my mind.”
“Robert can be pretty aggressive.”
“Agreed.”
“Does that concern you?”
“Absolutely.” Tim gave a glance back at the lit windows of the house. Dumone, the Stork, and Robert were waiting at the conference-room table. He scanned the side of the house, spotting Rayner in the kitchen pulling a bottled water from the fridge. Mitchell stepped into view, near his side, and Rayner drew him near, hand resting on his shoulder, whispering something in his ear. Tim glanced back over at Dumone and wondered if he knew that Rayner and Mitchell were swapping secrets two rooms over. Tim had assumed the two disliked each other-the egghead and the redneck enduring each other only as necessary instruments to help attain their respective aims.
“Dumone can keep him in line. Him and Mitchell.”
Tim chewed the inside of his cheek. “Your acuity threatens him. And your consistency.”
“Does it threaten you?”
“I think it’s exactly what we need.”
“Maybe so. But it feels petty, somehow. Even to me.”
“How so?”
“You see”-her eyes got shy, darted away-“I think it’s great that you’re seeking an idea of justice that you can hold in your hands. It’s courageous, almost. But for me that’s like believing in God. I think it would be fun. It would certainly be reassuring. But I stick with my statistics and little dogmatic regurgitations because I know the rules of that game.”
A thoughtful noise escaped Tim, but he didn’t respond. He worked his cheek, studied the dark shapes of the bushes.
She stood by his side, gazing at the garden as if trying to figure out what he was looking at. “That was something else you pulled off. The Lane hit.”
“Team effort.”
“Well, you had to front the lion’s share of the nerve.” She shook her head, and again he smelled her fragrance, thought about her hair. “Robert’s right on one count-I’m about as far from the street as you can get. I’m glad I’m on this side of things. Discussing, reviewing, analyzing. I could never do what you do. The risk, the danger, the courage under pressure.” She slapped him lightly on the arm. “Are you smiling at me? Why?”
“It’s not about courage. Or the thrill.”
“Why do you do it, then? Fight wars. Enforce the law. Risk your life.”
“We don’t talk about it, really.”
“But if you did?”
Tim took a moment to consider. “I guess we do it because we’re worried no one else is willing to.”
She pulled the unlit cigarette from her mouth and slid it back into the pack. “Not all of you.” She padded back to the house, head down, dodging snails on the patio.
The wind picked up, bone-cold and wet, and Tim slid his hands into his pockets. His fingertips touched a scrap of paper, which he withdrew, puzzled. A phone number and an address, written in a woman’s hand.
He turned, but Ananberg had already disappeared back into the house. After a moment he followed.
•All six members of the Commission were seated, awaiting Tim’s return. Centered perfectly before Rayner, like an awaiting plate of dinner, was a black binder.
The fourth, Tim thought. Then two more, then Kindell’s.
Lost in a blissful contentedness, the Stork was folding blank sheets into paper airplanes and humming to himself-the theme from The Green Hornet. Dumone sat cocked back in his chair, a fresh-poured bourbon chilling the V of his crotch.
Rayner leaned over, spreading a hand on the cover. “Buzani Debuffier.”
Blank looks all around, except Dumone, who grimaced. “Debuffier’s a big, mean, Santero. Goes about six-six on a bad day.”
Tim slid into his chair. “Santero?”
“Voodoo priest. They’re Cuban mostly, but Debuffier’s a Haitian mix.”
The Stork’s humming reached an annoying pitch.
“Would you shut the hell up?” Robert said.
The Stork stopped, his puffy little hands midfold. He rode his glasses back up the bridge of his nose with a knuckle, blinking apologetically. “Was I doing that out loud?”
Tim reached for Debuffier’s booking photo. A displeased man with a shaved head stared back at him, the whites of his eyes pronounced against pitch-dark skin. He wore a flannel, ripped to expose his bare shoulders. His deltoids stood out, ridged and firm, as though he were straining against the cuffs. From the look of his build, he was probably making some pretty good headway. “What’s the case?”
Dumone flipped open the binder and paged through the crime-scene report. “Ritual sacrifice of Aimee Kayes, a seventeen-year-old girl. Her body was found headless in an alley, draped in a multicolored cloth, raw salt, honey, and butter smeared on the bleeding neck stump. The top vertebra had been removed. LAPD’s ritual-crimes expert found these details to be consistent with Santeria sacrificial rites.”
“They sacrifice people? Regularly?” the Stork asked.
“Only in James Bond movies,” Ananberg said, reaching for the medical examiner’s report. “The Santeros mostly kill birds and lambs. Even in Cuba. I did an anthropology study on them in college.”
“So what gives?” Robert asked.
“We’ve got a Froot Loop, that’s what gives.”
Dumone’s chuckle turned into a racking cough. He lowered his fist from his face, then drained the last of his bourbon. “The ritual-crimes expert testified that, based on the specifics of the sacrifice, Debuffier probably believed that the victim was a threatening evil spirit.”
“Stomach contents included sunflower leaves and coconut.” Ananberg looked up from the pages. “The meal before the slaughter. If she eats, it shows the gods approve of her for sacrifice.”
“I’m sure she found that slender consolation,” Rayner said.
The Stork waved a hand before his yawning mouth. “I’m sorry. Past my bedtime.”
Robert slid a glossy crime-scene photo across the table. “This should wake you up.”
“What links Debuffier to the body?” Tim asked. “Aside from the fact that he’s a voodoo priest?”
Dumone tossed the eyewitness testimonies at Tim. “Two eyewitnesses. The first, Julie Pacetti, was Kayes’s best friend. The two girls were at the movies a few nights before Kayes’s abduction. After the show Pacetti went to the bathroom and Kayes waited for her in the lobby. When Pacetti came out, Kayes claimed Debuffier had just approached her and asked her to go for a ride with him. He’d frightened her, and she’d refused. When the girls went out in the parking lot, Debuffier was waiting in a black El Camino. He saw that Kayes was not alone and to
ok off, but not before Pacetti got a good eyeful.”
“A six-foot-six bald Haitian,” Mitchell said. “Not exactly inconspicuous.”
“The second witness?” Tim asked.
“A USC girl returning from a party saw a man fitting Debuffier’s description pull Kayes’s body from the bed of a black El Camino and drag it into the alley.”
Ananberg whistled. “I’d say that’s pretty damning.”
“She ran a few blocks, then phoned 911 at”-Dumone checked the report-“three-seventeen A.M. With a physical description of the suspect and the car, the cops got to Debuffier before daybreak. They found him outside his house, scouring the bed of his El Camino with bleach.”
“Anything in the house?”
“Altars and tureens and animal hides. There were bloodstains on the basement floor, later determined to be from animals.”
“Crazy motherfucker,” Robert said.
“Not so crazy he can’t resort to premeditated criminality to maintain his blood lust,” Rayner said.
“Can I see the witnesses’ rap sheets?” Tim said.
Rayner slid them down the table, and Tim reviewed them as the others spoke. Neither witness had any felonies or misdemeanors-nothing a DA could drive a wedge under to get leverage for embellished testimony.
“…urged no bail, but knowing that Debuffier was broke, the judge just had him surrender his passport and set bail at one mil,” Dumone was saying. “The American Religious Protection Association came parading into town, claiming he was being harassed, and posted his bail. Within a day both witnesses were found murdered, stabbed in the jugular-another Santeria sacrificial rite. Cops looked into it, got zip. Good clean hits this time around-evidently he’d learned his lesson. Since the witnesses are dead, their statements to police become hearsay, case dismissed. The ARPA reps left town a little more quietly than they came in.”
A palpable sense of disgust circled the table.
Rayner put on his best musing face. “It’s a sad, sad day when the system itself provides motivation to commit murder.”
Tim thought Rayner’s assessment evinced a misplacement of accountability, but he elected to dig back into the file rather than comment. An exhaustive review of the remaining documentation didn’t turn up any compelling evidence suggesting Debuffier’s innocence.
The Commission’s vote went seven to zero.
22
TIM PARKED MORE than a mile away from the graveled drive leading to Kindell’s converted garage. The air out here was sharp and fresh, tinged with the scent of burned sap and ash from the long-ago fire that had claimed the accompanying house. Tim stayed off the gravel, his boots quiet on the dirt. He held his. 357 low to his side, forefinger resting along the barrel outside the trigger guard. A slanted but still-standing mailbox loomed up out of a crumbled bank of earth. The night felt flat and oddly static, as if it were receding, airless; every sound and movement seemed dulled by its residency within the vastness.
Tim was surprised to see no light up ahead. Maybe Kindell had moved away, scurried off after the trial to inhabit a new dark corner of a new town. If so, he’d taken with him his remembrance of that night-the snatch, the kill, the sawing, the man who had been with him before, planning, eager to partake of Tim’s daughter.
The moon shone almost full, an imperfect orb visible through the skeletal branches of the eucalyptus. Tim approached the house silently, freezing when he heard a clattering inside. Someone had tripped, knocking a pan, a lamp to the floor. Tim’s first thought was of an intruder, another intruder, but then he heard Kindell cursing to himself. Tim stayed wolf-still, gun lowered, standing equidistant between two eucalyptus trunks.
The garage door swung open with a bang. Kindell stumbled outside, tugging at an unzipped sleeping bag that he’d wrapped around his body like a toga, bobbling a dying flashlight that gave off the faintest yellow-eye glimmer.
Tim stood in plain view less than twenty yards from Kindell, hidden only by the darkness and his own immobility, which matched that of the tree trunks rising around him and the dead weight of the night.
Shivering violently, Kindell shoved open a rusting fuse box and tinkered inside. His other hand, clutching the ends of the sleeping bag at his waist, looked thin and impossibly pale, matching nothing in the night save the bone-whiteness of the moon.
“Damnit, damnit, damnit.” Kindell slammed the fuse-box lid, slapped at it, then stood shaking and miserable and unmoving, as if paralyzed by hopelessness. Finally he trudged inside, one end of the sleeping bag trailing him like the train of a gown. Kindell’s suffering, however petty, evoked in Tim an immense gratification.
Tim waited until the garage door creaked down, whoomping closed against the concrete, then eased up to the pair of windows. Inside, Kindell was curled into the fetal position on the couch, huddled inside the unfurled sleeping bag. His eyes were closed, and he breathed deeply and evenly, his head rocking slightly on the bunched pillow. His shivering had calmed.
Kindell would never help in identifying his accomplice-this had been made perfectly clear to Dray. If the answers were to be found anywhere, they were in the papers stuffed in Rayner’s safe.
Kindell had torn apart Ginny’s precious body and now was sleeping contentedly, the truths about her last wretched hours hidden safely inside his skull like personal, horrid keepsakes. Her pleas, the panic smell of her sweat, her last scream. The other face she’d seen beside Kindell’s, grinning through wet lips, lascivious in the eyes, not yet anticipating that the turn of events would move from depraved to deadly.
Acid washed through Tim’s stomach, seething and curdling.
Numbly, mechanically, Tim set his stance, placed both hands on the pistol, and sighted just above Kindell’s ear. His finger slid on the metal and hooked inside the guard, coming to rest against the trigger. He felt the pre-shoot calm descend over him, a precise unmotion. He stood for a moment, watching the delicate rise and fall of Kindell’s head through the alignment of the sights.
He floated away, seeing himself from above in his mind’s eye. A figure hidden in darkness, gun aimed through a greasy window. Through a confused and solitary childhood, Tim had clung to a desperate belief that there was something that shone in the human spirit that elevated it above meat and bone. With frantic hope and blind knowing, he’d fought his father’s code year after strenuous year, and yet here he stood, seized in the grasp of his own want and rage, bent on satiating his own needs at any cost. His father’s son.
He lowered the gun and walked away.
Replacing the pistol in the back of his waistband, he sat on the weedy concrete of the charred foundation, facing the freestanding garage. The tremendous responsibility the Commission, a by-all-accounts-illegitimate body of justices, had elected to shoulder struck Tim anew. To deem who was society’s scourge, to condemn justly, to be the voice of the people-these were responsibilities that could not be taken too seriously. And they demanded an impeccability of character, for the law was not to be meted out but acted; it was not a promise but a code.
He vowed to uphold that code even when the last binder moved from Rayner’s safe to the table, even as he picked through paperwork detailing the dismemberment of his daughter. If he didn’t honor it, he was no better than Robert or Mitchell or his father, selling fraudulent burial plots to lonely widows.
Something rustled to his right in the weeds, and his pistol was drawn and aimed as quickly as he turned his head. Dray’s form resolved from the dark, clad in black jeans, a black sweatshirt, and a denim jacket. She approached, unbothered by the gun, and sat beside him. Another ghost, another watcher in the night. Sliding her hands into the pouch pocket of her sweatshirt, she flicked her head toward his gun, then the garage. “Second thoughts?”
“Every minute.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah.” She propped her elbows on her knees, pressed her hands together, and rested her chin on the ledge of her thumbs. She seemed to remember something and quickly put her left hand back
in her pocket. The collar of her jean jacket was up; she looked like Debbie Gibson with an attitude problem. “Saw your handiwork on the news. You’re creating quite a buzz.”
“We aim to please.”
“Funny, I never would have thought street justice was your style.”
“It isn’t. But my old style was found wanting. At least to some people.”
“How’s the new one fit?”
“A little tight in the shoulders, but I’m hoping I’ll adjust.”
“You tailor the suit to the man, not vice versa.”
He reached over and patted her down casually with one hand. She wasn’t hiding a weapon beneath her bulky sweatshirt. “What are you doing here?”
“Just keeping an eye on things. I like to have the creep under my thumb.”
The dim flashlight bobbed inside the garage, then a fierce rattling broke the silence.
“What the hell’s going on in there?” Tim said.
“I rerouted his mail to a drop box. I got his credit-card numbers, his telephone, gas, and power account numbers, then I canceled everything. It’s petty and small, but it makes me feel better.”
Tim extended a fist to her, which Dray matched. They knocked knuckles, a modified high five they used only on the range or the softball diamond. Dray leaned into him slightly, touching at the hip, the elbow. He pressed his lips to the top of her head, inhaling the scent of her hair. They sat for a bit in silence.
“You get anything new on the case?”
She shook her head. “I’ve pretty much run out the leads. I wanted to see if you’d gotten your hands on that case binder.”
“No, it’ll be a while, unfortunately.”
“We’ll have to wait, I guess.” Her face crinkled. “It’s wrecking me. The waiting. Bracing to find out something even more awful, or maybe to not find out anything at all.”
They stared at Kindell’s shack for a few moments. Tim bit his lip. “I hear Mac’s been hanging out at the house.”
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