The Shining Girls

by Lauren Beukes

  It takes another twenty minutes of sweating and heaving for him to drag it to a dumpster he has scouted out in an alleyway two blocks away. But when he flips open the heavy metal lid, there is a corpse already in there. The face is swollen and purple from strangulation, the pink tongue protruding between the teeth, eyes bloodshot and froggy, but the mane of hair is instantly recognizable. The doctor from Mercy Hospital. This should surprise him. But there are limits to his imagination. The man’s body is here because it’s supposed to be, and that is enough.

  He hefts Bartek in on top of the doctor and pulls some trash over them. They’ll keep each other company, feeding the maggots.

  He always returns home. The House feels like a no-man’s land, but when he steps outside, thinking about his own time, it is to find that the days have passed as usual.

  He accidentally misses New Year, 1932, but on the day after he takes himself out for a steak dinner. On the way home, he comes across a young colored girl and is hit with the unmistakable lightning jolt of recognition and inevitability. One of his.

  She’s sitting on the steps with a little boy beside her, both of them bundled up in jackets and scarves, tearing pages out of a newspaper and folding them into little darts.

  ‘Hello, there, sweetheart,’ Harper says, real neighborly. ‘What are you doing? I thought newspapers were for reading.”

  ‘I c’n read just fine, mister,’ the girl says, meeting his eyes, brazen. The kind of look to get you slapped, She’s much older than he first thought. Practically a young woman.

  ‘You shouldn’t be talking to no white man, Zee,’ the boy hisses.

  ‘It’s all right, we don’t have to stand on all those formalities,’ Harper soothes. ‘Besides, I talked to her first, right? No disrespect there, huh, little man?’

  We’re makin’ airplanes.’ She flicks out her wrist, sending one of the darts swooping through the air for long graceful seconds before it nose-dives and plummets into the frosted sidewalk in front of him.

  He is about to ask if he can have a go, anything to prolong the interaction, when a neighbor comes out from one of the adjoining houses, holding a potato peeler, the screen door banging behind her. She glares at Harper.

  ‘Zora Ellis! James! You get inside now.’

  ‘Told you,’ the boy says, equal parts smug and bitter.

  ‘Well, see you again soon, sweetheart,’ Harper says.

  She gives him that cool look again. ‘I don’t think so, mister. My daddy wouldn’t like it.’

  ‘Wouldn’t want to make your daddy mad. You give him my regards, you hear.’

  He walks away, whistling, his hands jammed in his pockets to stop them from shaking. It’s no matter. He’ll find her again. He has all the time in the world.

  But his head is so full of her, Zora-Zora-Zora-Zora, that he makes a mistake and opens the House to find the goddamn corpse back in the hallway, the blood wet on the floorboards and the turkey still frozen. He stares at it, shocked. And then ducks back over the threshold, under the wooden X of the planks and pulls the door shut.

  His hands are shaking as he fumbles the key back in the lock. He concentrates intently on today’s date. Second of January 1932. To his relief, when he bumps the door open with his crutch, it’s to find Mr Bartek gone. Now you see him! Now you don’t! A sideshow magic trick.

  It was a misstep. like the gramophone needle skipping a groove on the record. Natural that he should be drawn back to this day. The beginning of everything. He wasn’t concentrating. He will have to be more focused.

  But the urge is still on him. And now that he is returned to the correct day, he can feel the objects thrumming like a hornet’s nest. He drops the fold-out knife into his pocket. He will go find Jin-Sook. Fulfill the promise he made to her.

  She’s the kind of girl who wants to soar. He’ll take her a pair of wings.

  Dan

  2 MARCH 1992

  What Dan should be doing is packing for Arizona. Spring training starts tomorrow and he’s on the early flight because it’s cheapest, but honestly, the thought of packing his single guy’s carry-on suitcase is too depressing.

  He’s just settled in to watch the highlights from the Winter Olympics on replay when his doorbell makes that sickly electronic wheeze it’s been reduced to. Another thing to fix. Not like he doesn’t already have to swap out the batteries from the VCR remote for the TV remote. He hauls himself out of the couch and opens up to find Kirby standing on the other side of the screen, holding a trio of beer bottles.

  ‘Hey, Dan, can I come in?’

  ‘Oh, I gotta choice now?’

  ‘Please? It’s fucking freezing out here. I brought beer.’

  ‘I don’t drink, remember?’

  ‘It’s non-alcoholic. Unless you’d prefer me to run down to the store for some carrot sticks instead.’

  ‘Nah, you’re good,’ he says, even though calling Miller Sharp’s alcohol-free brew ‘beer’ is optimistic. He shoves open the screen door. ‘As long as you don’t expect me to tidy up.’

  ‘I would never,’ she says, darting under his arm. ‘Hey, nice place.’

  Dan snorts.

  ‘Well, nice to have a place then.’

  ‘You living with your mom?’ He’s done his homework, looked up her news story and his notes to reacquaint himself with the salient details. On the typed-up transcript of the interview with the mother, Rachel, he’d written: Beautiful woman! Distracted. (distracting). Kept asking about the dog. Ways of dealing with grief?

  His favorite quote from the interview with her was: ‘We do this to ourselves. Society is a poisonous hamster wheel.’ Of course the subeditor slashed it on the first pass.

  ‘I have an apartment in Wicker Park,’ Kirby says. ‘Gets noisy between the bands and the crack addicts, but I like it. Having people around.’

  ‘Safety in numbers, sure. So why’d you say that? “Nice to have a place”?’

  ‘Making conversation, I guess. Because some people don’t.’

  ‘You stay alone?’

  ‘I don’t really play well with others. And I get nightmares.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘You can’t.’

  Dan shrugs agreeably. No denying that. ‘So what did you get from our friends at the library?’

  ‘A boatload of stuff.’ She takes a beer for herself before she hands off the other two. She sits down, tucking the bottle under her armpit so she can lever off her big black boots. She folds herself into the couch in her socks, which somehow seems terribly forward to Dan.

  She shoves aside the clutter on his coffee table – bills, more bills, a Reader’s Digest sweepstake announcement with the gold foil scratch-off sticker (You’re already a winner!) and, cringingly, a Hustler he bought on a whim, feeling lonely and horny, which seemed like the least embarrassing choice then. But she doesn’t seem to notice. Or is too polite to comment. Or she’s sorry for him. God.

  She pulls a folder out of her bag and starts laying out the clippings on the table. Originals, Dan notices, and he wonders how the hell she sneaked that past Harrison. He puts on his glasses to have a better look. Gruesome stabbing deaths aplenty. All the kind of uniformly depressing stuff he used to write about. It makes him feel tired.

  ‘So what do you think?’ Kirby challenges.

  ‘Ay bendito, kiddo’ he says, picking out a few of the clippings. ‘Look at your victim profile. It’s all over the place. You got a black prostitute dumped in a playground through to a housewife stabbed in her driveway, which is obviously a carjacking. And this one, 1957? Seriously? It’s not even the same MO. Her head was found in a barrel. Besides, your statement said your guy was in his early thirties. You got nothing here.’

  ‘Not yet.’ She shrugs, unmoved. ‘Start wide, narrow it down. Serial killers have a type. I’m trying to figure out what his was. Bundy liked college girls. Long hair, middle parting, wearing pants.’

  ‘I think we can eliminate Bundy,’ Dan says, without thinking about how cr
ass that sounds until it’s out of his mouth.

  ‘Bzzzt,’ Kirby says in imitation of an electric chair, absolutely dead-pan, which makes it more inappropriately funny. It rocks him. How easily they’re able to talk about this, make stupid jokes. Not like he and the cops didn’t crack wise with the gallows humor when he was reporting on equally horrible crimes every other week. Frogs in boiling water. You can get used to anything. But that wasn’t personal.

  ‘Okay, okay, hilarious. Let’s assume your guy is not going for the usual easy targets of prostitutes, junkies, runaways and homeless men. Who else has traits in common with you?’

  ‘Julia Madrigal. Same age range, early twenties. College student. Secluded forested area.’

  ‘Solved. Her killers are rotting in Cook County. Next?’

  ‘Oh please, you don’t buy that.’

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want to believe it because Julia’s killers are black and the guy who hurt you was white?’ Dan asks.

  ‘What? No. It’s because the cops are incompetent and under pressure. She’s from a nice middle-class family. It was an excuse to wrap it up.’

  ‘What about the MO? If this was the same killer, how come he didn’t use your insides to re-decorate the forest, huh? Don’t these guys get more violent as they go? Like that cannibal freak they just caught in Milwaukee?’

  ‘Dahmer? Sure. It’s all about the escalation. They get more elaborate because the rush wears off. You have to keep upping the game.’ She gets up and paces, waving her bottle, eight and a half steps across his living room and back again. ‘And he would have, Dan, with me. I’m sure he would, if he hadn’t been interrupted. He’s a classic mix of disorganized, organized and delusional.’

  ‘You’ve been reading up on this.’

  ‘I kinda had to. I couldn’t scrape the money together to hire a PI. And I figure I’m more motivated anyway. So: disorganized killers are impetuous. Kill ’em when you can. It means they get caught quicker. The organized guys come prepared. They have a plan. They carry restraints. They take more care to dispose of the bodies, but they like to play head-games. They’re the ones that’ll write to the newspapers to brag, like the Zodiac with his cryptograms. Then you get the lost-the-plot freaks who think they’re possessed or whatever, like BTK – who is still on the loose, by the way. His letters are all over the place. He swings from bragging about his crimes to terrible regret and blaming the demon in his head who makes him do it.’

  ‘All right, Miss FBI. Here’s a hard question. Do you know for sure it’s a serial killer? I mean, the guy who did …’ he falters and waves his beer in her direction, unconsciously echoing the motion of an attempted disembowelment, until he realizes what he’s doing and shoves the bottle against his lips instead, wishing the fucking thing was alcoholic, even two per cent. ‘…He was a sick fuck, no mistake. But it could have been random opportunistic violence. Isn’t that the prevailing theory? Hopped up on PCP?’

  In his practically illegible shorthand, his interview with Detective Diggs states it more baldly: ‘Most likely drug-related.’ ‘Victim shouldn’t have been alone.’ As if that was an invitation to be gutted, for Chrissake.

  ‘You interviewing me now, Dan?’ She raises her beer and takes a long slow sip. He notices that unlike the pale imitation he’s drinking, hers is the real deal. ‘Because you didn’t before.’

  ‘Hey, you were in the hospital. Practically comatose. They wouldn’t let me near you.’ This is only partly true. He could have Prince Charminged his way in, the way he’d done a hundred times before. Nurse Williams at the front desk could have been persuaded to turn a blind eye if he’d flirted with her enough, because people need to feel wanted. But he was so over all of it – already burned out, even if it took another year to hit for real.

  He found the whole thing depressing. Detective Digg’s insinuations, the mother who snapped out of her initial numbness and started phoning him in the middle of the night because the cops couldn’t find the guy and she thought maybe he might have the answers, and then started screaming at him when he didn’t. She thought it was personal for him, like it was for her. But it was just another fucked-up story of the fucked-up shit that people do to each other, and he didn’t have any other explanation for her. And he couldn’t tell her that the only reason he’d given her his number was because he thought she was hot.

  So that by the time Kirby was out of critical care, he was sick of the whole affair, and didn’t want to do a follow-up. And he appreciated that there was a dog, thank you, Mr Matthew Harrison, and that was a nice angle because everyone loves dogs, especially brave ones who die trying to save their mistresses, making this story Lassie meets The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but it wasn’t like there was any new information or leads or any fucking movement from the cops on finding, let alone catching the twisted bastard who had done this to her, and who was still out there waiting to do it to someone else. So fuck the dog and fuck the fucking story.

  Which meant that Harrison sent Richie to do the follow-up, but by then the mom had decided all journalists were assholes, and refused to talk to anyone. Dan was made to do penance by covering a series of shootings in K-Town, which was textbook thug-life stupid.

  And this year, the murder rate is even worse. Which makes him even happier he’s not stuck doing homicide. Sports is theoretically more stressful, with all the travel. But it gives him an excuse to get away and not to have to think about being stuck in a lonely apartment. Sucking up to managers is much the same as sucking up to cops, and baseball isn’t as tediously repetitive as murder.

  ‘That’s such an easy scapegoat,’ Kirby complains, dragging him back to the present. ‘Drugs. He wasn’t on drugs. Or not any I’m familiar with.’

  ‘Expert, huh?’

  ‘Have you met my mom? You would have taken drugs too. Although I was never terribly good at it.’

  ‘It doesn’t work, what you’re doing, Deflecting with humor. Just tells me that there’s something you need to deflect from.’

  ‘Years on the homicide beat had made him a keen-eyed observer of humanity, a philosopher of life,’ she intones in a movie-trailer voice, two octaves down.

  ‘Still doing it,’ says Dan. His cheeks are hot. She gets to him in a way that’s infuriating. Like when he started out as a kid fresh out of college, working the society pages with that old bat Lois, who was so annoyed by him being in her department that she only ever referred to him in the third person. As in: ‘Gemma, tell that boy that’s not how we write wedding announcements.’

  ‘I had a rough patch as a teenager. I started going to church, Methodist, which drove my mom nuts because at least it should have been Shul, right? I’d come home overflowing with piety and forgiveness and I’d flush her weed down the toilet, and then we’d have a screaming match for three hours and she’d storm out and only come back the next day. It got so bad that I moved in with Pastor Todd and his wife. They were trying to start a halfway house for troubled youth.’

  ‘Let me guess, he tried to put his hand in your pants?’

  ‘Jeez, dude.’ She shakes her head. ‘Not every church leader has to be a kiddie fiddler. They were sweet people. They just weren’t my kind of people. Too fucking earnest. It was fine that they wanted to change the world, but I didn’t want to be their pet project. And you know, daddy issues, whatever.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Which is what religion is based on, really. Trying to live up to the expectations of Big Sky Dad.’

  ‘Now who’s the amateur philosopher?’

  ‘Theologist, please. My point is that it didn’t work out. I thought I craved stability, but it turned out it was boring as hell. So I swung one-eighty.’

  ‘Started hanging with the wrong crowd.’

  ‘I was the wrong crowd.’ She grins.

  ‘Punk music will do that.’ He toasts her with the almost-empty bottle.

  ‘No doubt. I’ve seen a lot of drugged-up people. This guy wasn’t one of them.’ She stops. But Dan knows thi
s species of pause. It’s the glass teetering on the edge of the desk, fighting against gravity. The thing about gravity is that it wins every single time.

  ‘There’s something else. It’s in the police report, but not in the papers.’

  Bingo, Dan thinks. ‘They often do that. Leave out important details so they can flush out the crazies phoning in from any real tips.’ He downs the last dregs of the bottle, unable to meet her eyes, afraid of what she’s going to say, feeling a churning of guilt that he never read the follow-up articles.

  ‘He threw something at me. After he’d … A cigarette lighter, black and silver, sort of vintage art nouveau. It was engraved. “WR”.’

  ‘That mean anything to you?’

  ‘No. The cops cross-referenced it with possible suspects, and victims too.’

  ‘Fingerprints?’

  ‘Sure, but too smudged to be any use. Fucking typical.

  ‘Or some decrepit fence, if they had his prints on record.’

  ‘They couldn’t track him down. And before you ask, I’ve already gone through the phonebook. And called every “WR” in the greater Chicagoland area.’

  ‘And that’s all they know about it?’

  ‘I described it to a collector at a roadshow, and he said it’s probably a Ronson Princess De-Light. Not the rarest lighter out there, but maybe worth a couple of hundred bucks. He had a similar one he showed me, from around the same time, 1930s, 1940s. Offered to sell it to me for two hundred and fifty dollars.’

  ‘Two hundred and fifty bucks? I’m in the wrong business.’

  ‘The Boston Strangler tied his girls up with nylon stockings. The Night Stalker left pentagrams on the scene.’

  ‘You know way too much about this stuff. It’s not good for you to spend so much time in these people’s heads.’

  ‘Only way to get him out of mine. Ask me anything. Typical starting age is twenty-four to thirty, although they’ll keep killing long as they can get away with it. They’re usually white, male. Lack of empathy, which can manifest as antisocial behavior or extremely egotistical charm. History of violence, breaking and entering, torturing animals, messed-up childhoods, sexual hang-ups. Which doesn’t mean they’re not functioning members of society. There have been some fine upstanding community leaders, married with kids even.’