The Killing Lessons

by Saul Black

  Pregnant. 5–6 weeks.

  She’d wondered, knees hunched up to her middle, bare shoulders tender, why they didn’t make two kinds of home test kit: one for women who were trying to conceive, in which a positive result flashed-up: Congratulations! You’re PREGNANT; and one for women who were dreading it, in which the same result came with: Fuck. Sorry. You’re PREGNANT.

  But of course she knew the manufacturers had done their research. Neutrality. No expectation. No judgement. Just the facts. Pregnant. 5–6 weeks.

  The impulse had been to phone Deerholt and tell him she was sick. But the thought of spending the day alone in her apartment had terrified her. Because by that time, only weeks after the Suzie Fallon case and the death of love, she was alone.

  Instead she’d forced herself up off the floor. Got dressed. Gone to work. Spent the day behaving normally while inside she churned loss and panic and all the damage she’d already done.

  That night, lying in a foamless bath up to her throat, she’d told herself: You don’t have to decide anything yet. You have some time. You can wait.

  So she’d waited. Spent days going through the same wretched circles, dropping off into the same unknowns. Multiple futures shuddered in her, fighting each other. And still she’d waited.

  Until the decision had been taken out of her hands.

  She ought to have had a nervous breakdown, but she hadn’t. Instead, after the Suzie Fallon case, after the death of love, after what had been taken out of her hands, she simply carried on. She wasn’t the same. She brought a new seared clarity to her work, a relentless, mechanical energy. She became a better cop. Everyone noticed. No one said anything.

  Three years had gone by, granted. But in imaginal time that morning in the bathroom was only a moment ago. Would always be only a moment ago. Imaginal time had no respect for chronology. Especially the past.

  Her cold was worse. Her nostrils were raw and her body ached. The booze had crept up, these weeks, these months, these three years. Her recycling sack yesterday had been half Smirnoff empties. She could do with a drink right now, when the rest of the world was drinking coffee. It was a line of thinking she’d got used to ignoring.

  When she was a little girl, she’d hated going to school. In the mornings, her mother used to say: I know you feel like killing yourself, honey, but brush your teeth and you’ll feel a little better. And she was right. Washed and dressed, Valerie was always forced to admit, grudgingly, sheepishly, that life was, after all, bearable.

  She went to the washbasin and reached for her toothbrush. Her hands were shaking.

  Blasko’s message was still by the medicine cabinet mirror, where he’d tacked it to the wall three years ago, written in black permanent marker on a clean sheet of legal: NOT TODAY.

  As in, you can quit being a cop anytime you like. Just not today. It was the only trace of him still in her apartment. Not even a lone sock or a toothbrush or a department issue pencil. And whose fault was that—

  Leah’s eye was out and she’d swallowed four of her teeth the tyres are Goodyear G647RSS too many too many Lisbeth unicorn crystal lacerations to anus and vagina I can’t do this YES TODAY YES TODAY YES TODAY…

  Brush your teeth, for Christ’s sake. You’ll feel better.

  Halfway through brushing, she threw up in the washbasin.

  TWELVE

  Eighty minutes later (eighty minutes divided between standing under the near-scalding jets of her shower, then staring out her apartment window at the Mission’s pre-dawn start-up – delivery trucks, joggers, dog-walkers and people still drunk from the night’s revels) Valerie sat in the incident room at the station, thinking the thought that had been part of her for so long now she couldn’t remember what life had been like without it: that they were no nearer to catching the man, or most likely men, who did this than they had been at the discovery of the first body three years ago.

  Katrina Mulvaney, thirty-one years old. Educational outreach officer at the San Francisco zoo. First reported missing June 3rd, 2010. Her body had been found three weeks later in a shallow grave a mile east of Route 1, halfway between San Francisco and Santa Cruz. She’d lived in a fifth-floor walk-up in the Castro. Without knowing each other, she and Valerie had practically been neighbours.

  Among the photographs Katrina’s boyfriend had supplied – the ‘before’ photographs – there was one Valerie had gone back to, repeatedly. In it, Katrina had obviously not been expecting to be photographed. The boyfriend had probably just gone ‘Hey,’ and she’d turned. It was what Valerie thought of as an ‘outlook’ shot. As in, outlook on life. You could see it in people caught like that, unprepared. Katrina’s outlook was one of cautious hope. The look said she wasn’t stupid, she knew the world could fuck you up without warning. But it also said she knew she’d been loved as a child, and that she was still moved by beauty, and that she knew her faults and weaknesses but knew too that she wasn’t a bad person. The look said she had not long before realised that she was in love. That was part of the fear still left in her outlook: that the love, somehow, might go wrong.

  Love hadn’t gone wrong.

  What had gone wrong was that someone had abducted, raped, mutilated and murdered her.

  Then that person – persons – had abducted, raped, mutilated and murdered Sarah Keller, twenty-four years old. Then Angelica Martinez, then Shyla Lee-Johnson, then Yun-seo Hahn, then Leah Halberstam, then Lisbeth Cole. Seven women between the ages of twenty-four and forty. And it had taken the better part of three years for the authorities to realise that what all these women had in common was that the same man – or men – had killed them.

  Valerie imagined the millions of astonished TV crime show addicts. Three years? Are these retarded cops?

  If she thought of trying to answer that question she came up against fatigue like a wall of raw earth. The way the shows’ crime scenes exploded with evidence. The way the leads always led somewhere. The way the investigative net tightened in a whisk of phone calls and snappy deduction. The way detectives tossed out requests like ‘Get me a list of every place that sells roll asphalt and transaction records for the last four years’ – and got what they wanted in a matter of minutes. Crime show TV was an industry devoted to peddling the necessary fairy tale: you can’t do terrible things and get away with it. You do a terrible thing, sooner or later you will have to pay.

  Whereas…

  She imagined taking the complaint to her grandfather’s God, that sinners were supposed to get punished. And God smiling and raising his Santa Claus eyebrows and saying: Whereas…

  ‘Cappuccino?’ Will asked. ‘I’m going.’ There were three other detectives in the low-ceilinged and strip-lit room. Will Fraser (Valerie’s partner), Laura Flynn and Ed Perez. Along with Valerie, the insomniacs. The spooked. The obsessed. The burning-out. Over the next couple of hours the rest of the team would assemble and the incident room would fill with the collective vibe of irritation and effort and frustration and exhaustion and boredom. In spite of which, Valerie knew, she’d have to gather herself to brief the new FBI liaison. She thought of Callum last night saying: Your ass is an argument-winner. She thought of the distance she’d travelled from her body since Blasko. Since love. Blasko had said to her, in the first few weeks of their relationship: You’re prettier than a seahorse. His compliments were delivered like dispassionate scientific conclusions. They’d filled her with shy pride. Some men, he’d said, will be scanning the room for the icy blondes with pneumatic tits. For other men – a minority, I’ll grant you – you’ll be the only woman in the room. I’m one of those men. Just remember that when you start thinking about dumping me.

  ‘Yeah, thanks,’ she said to Will, without looking up from her desktop screen. There was a time when she would have answered more creatively. Something like: ‘Two sugars. And stir it anticlockwise, dickhead.’ She’d lost the impulse to joke. Will still had it. He was the kind of good human being whose goodness derived from knowing the precise degree to which he wa
s a shitty human being but not letting it cancel out the degree to which he wasn’t.

  ‘Today’s rating?’ he asked.

  Valerie looked up at him. He was forty-two, tall and leanly built, skin the colour of faded mahogany, long eyelashes and an expression of languid mischief.

  ‘Five,’ Valerie lied. ‘You?’

  The ‘rating’ was on a scale of one to ten. One being certainty that what you were doing was going to solve the case and be a victory over the Powers of Darkness, ten being a terminal admission of failure, walking out the door and never being a cop again. And possibly joining the Powers of Darkness.

  NOT TODAY.

  ‘Eight,’ Will said. ‘But Marion told me this morning she’s not sure she desires me any more. Also, I’ve got a huge boil on my ass. It’s possible the two facts are connected.’

  When he’d gone for the coffees Valerie sat listening to Laura Flynn’s superhumanly fast fingers at work on her laptop. She knew that very soon she’d have to get up, walk across the room and stand in front of the murder map. She’d have to stand in front of the murder map and try for the ten-thousandth time to make it talk. The murder map didn’t want to talk. The murder map’s line was that it had nothing new to say. But the murder map was a liar. You had to believe the whole case was a liar. You had to believe the whole case was trying desperately to keep something from you. You had to believe that eventually you’d catch The Case out. And you had to do it before The Case killed you. Or before it made you break your lover’s heart.

  THIRTEEN

  ‘As you know,’ Captain Deerholt said, when the task force had gathered, ‘Special Agent Myskow is on sick leave. So as of today Special Agent York will be joining us. She’ll be meeting with each of you individually later. I know you’re up to your necks, but please try to make yourselves available within the next twenty-four hours. Right now I want to give her an overview while you’re all here. Detective Hart?’

  Valerie stood by the murder map. She didn’t need notes. She didn’t need to refresh her memory. Most of the time there was nothing else in her memory. (Apart from Blasko, and the Suzie Fallon case, and the death of love.) Special Agent Carla York was early thirties. A petite but visibly fit woman with hazel eyes and precise, understated make-up. Mousy hair scraped back into a short ponytail. Navy blue pants suit. Low-heeled snug-fitting black boots. No wedding ring. No jewellery at all, in fact, as far as Valerie could see. The thought of dealing with her – someone new – had been draining her all morning. A new person was a restatement of the only fact that mattered: You haven’t caught him yet.

  ‘OK,’ Valerie said, indicating the ‘before’ photograph of Katrina on the map. ‘First victim, Katrina Mulvaney, thirty-one-year-old white female. Educational outreach officer at the San Francisco zoo. Resident of the Bay Area, body found in the Bay Area. Second victim, Sarah Keller, twenty-four-year-old white female, prostitute, resident of St Louis, Missouri, body found near Richfield, Utah. Third victim, Angelica Martinez, twenty-eight-year-old Hispanic female, schoolteacher, resident of Lubbock, Texas, body found near Laramie, Wyoming. Fourth victim, Shyla Lee-Johnson, thirty-four-year-old white female, prostitute, drug addict, resident of Lincoln, Nebraska, body found near Elk City, Oklahoma. Fifth victim, Yun-seo Hahn, twenty-five-year-old Korean-American female, grad student at Berkeley, resident of the Bay Area, body found in the Bay Area. Sixth victim, Leah Halberstam, forty-year-old white female, housewife, resident of Plano, Texas, body found near Salina, Kansas. Latest victim, Lisbeth Cole, thirty-four-year-old white female, prostitute, resident of Omaha, Nebraska, body found near Algona, Iowa. This is not the order in which the bodies were discovered. It’s the best guess order based on approximate date of death.’

  Valerie paused. She wished there were windows in here. It would have done a lot for her right then to be able to look out and see the sky, even a mid-December sky in San Francisco. From their long way away the dead women had turned their attention on her. Not with urgency. Not with expectation. Just with dumb sadness. Because they knew she felt nothing for them.

  ‘All the victims were mutilated, most likely before being killed. Mixture of knives and tools. We know for certain three of them – Katrina, Yun-seo and Lisbeth – were raped. All of them carry fingerprints and DNA from the same individual, and the last three victims – Yun-seo, Leah and Lisbeth – carry fingerprints and DNA from a second individual. We don’t know if it’s been two guys from the start, or if the second guy’s been recruited. Neither, in any case, has a match in the databases.’

  The impatience and boredom in the room was palpable. This meeting was tactically redundant: York was going to get all the information anyway, through the eight investigators working the case, and Valerie was going to sit down with her in private later this afternoon. The real reason Deerholt had got them together was because he was worried about the creeping sense of futility. He was worried about morale. This was a reminder: Hey, come on, we’re doing this together, we’ll get there, don’t give up. We’re a family.

  ‘Linkage blindness was inevitable,’ Valerie said. ‘Given the timeline, the geographical spread and the victim demographic, three years isn’t bad. If it weren’t for the signature and DNA we’d probably still be blind, at least beyond the two Bay Area victims.’

  The two Bay Area victims were Valerie’s blessing. And her curse. It was the only site for more than one of the murders. It was assumed (desperation, Valerie admitted, privately) that Katrina’s killer was either from or had close connections here. Everything else was scattered around Middle America. The Bay Area (desperation insisted) was special. It was Valerie’s belief that if the killers had known any of their victims before they became their victims, that victim was Katrina Mulvaney. Start with what you know, was what Valerie’s creative writing tutor had told her in a class she’d taken when she was a teenager. Now applied to the reasoning of murderers. Life never tired of these perverse connections. On the surface Yun-seo Hahn didn’t help, since serial killers, as Jodie Foster had made big screen gospel, tended to hunt within their own racial and social group. But since they had nothing better than geography to go on, the working principle was to set up the task force in the place where it was believed the unknown subjects either currently lived, had formerly lived, or at the very least had forged some sort of connection to the first – and possibly fifth – victim. That was part of the San Francisco rationale. That and the simple fact that they had a bigger budget and better resources than any of the other states involved.

  ‘As far as the signature goes,’ Valerie continued, ‘it’s probably the one thing that doesn’t need repeating. But for the record, our guys leave objects inside their victims. Random objects or objects with significance, we don’t know yet. No rare moths or butterflies, sadly. Nothing, in fact, that helps us narrow it down. They leave them in the vagina, mouth, or anus, except in the cases of Yun-seo and Leah, when they left them in the opened abdomen. We’re assuming because the objects were simply too large for their first choice orifices.’

  Valerie had spent hypnotic hours with the body photographs – the ‘after’ shots in the murder-makeover. Yun-seo’s gaping guts. A heavy duty claw hammer jammed in between the large and small intestines. Surreally worse than this – a hammer was at least a potential instrument of violence, was at least grimly congruent – was the glazed and depressingly cheery pottery goose her murderers left in Leah Halberstam. It wasn’t life-sized but they’d still had to cut out half her internal organs to make room for it. According to the forensics report the evisceration had been done with a serrated fish knife. In the movies the goose would have borne a maker’s mark, would have been an antique, would have reduced the number of people who might own or know where to find one. But this wasn’t the movies. The goose had been mass-produced throughout the seventies. There were tens if not hundreds of thousands of them out there – or rather there had been. If you wanted to buy one now you’d have to trawl garage sales or junk shops or kitsch vintage boutiques that
depended on people with more money than sense. It was the sort of object that would feature on an emo-hipster website called something like thingsmypa‌rentsownth‌atfreakmeout.com.

  ‘Katrina Mulvaney had the remains of a candy apple in her vagina,’ Valerie said. ‘Sarah Keller had a deflated balloon shoved down her throat. Angelica Martinez had a scrunched-up flyer from the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History’s dinosaur exhibit stuffed into her anus. Shyla Lee-Johnson had a fork in her vagina. Lisbeth Cole had a two-inch-long piece of clear crystal – the consensus is it’s meant to be a unicorn’s horn – in her anus. If they’re trying to tell us something’ – Valerie looked at Carla York, not with hope but with reassurance that she didn’t expect her to confirm this hypothesis – ‘we don’t know what it is yet.’

  She could feel the room’s deadness to the dead women. And her own. The homicide wisdom she’d come to late: in order to figure out who had done these things to a person you had to get the reality of the person out of the way. The person became a victim. A victim was a conundrum in flesh and blood. Catching the perp was earning the right to think of the victim as a person again. Trouble was, by the time you caught the perp (if you did) you were so fucking fried that you didn’t give a shit about the person anyway. You just wanted to get drunk and watch sports. Or go out and fuck a complete stranger. You wanted to do anything, in fact, to postpone the reality, which was that tomorrow there would be another dead body, another conundrum in flesh and blood, another testimony in the case against the world as a place of hope, and light, and love. Especially if you’d already killed love yourself. That, for Valerie, had been the trade-off, the lesson she’d learned, eventually. Before the Suzie Fallon case three years ago her weakness as a cop was that she couldn’t stop thinking of the victims as people. Because she’d had love in her life she’d been unable to stop thinking of the love the victims had had in theirs. Then, with the help of the Suzie Fallon case, she’d killed love. Now the victims were just ugly puzzles to be solved. She knew it had made her better at her job. But she saw the way people looked at her sometimes, the question their eyes asked: How come you’re so cold, so clinical, so fucking dead?