The Killing Lessons

by Saul Black

  Who was she running from? He consulted Sylvia. Could feel her shaking her head, see her dark eyes bright with the mystery.

  When he’d had to undress the girl he’d wanted to do it briskly, out of a panicky care for her dignity. But the swollen ankle meant he’d had to be careful and slow (who knew what else was broken?) and he’d been ambushed by an awkward piercing sadness at the sight of her pale legs and hairless vulva. The forlornness of her bare legs. As soon as her panties were dry he’d slipped them back on for her.

  The world was full of awful things happening to kids. He and Sylvia had been childless. Sylvia had had scarring from a miscarriage when she was eighteen and he had sperm with such low motility they might as well have been dead. They’d tried in the early years of their marriage, five attempts at IVF without success. They’d felt it start to consume them, the cycle of hope and disappointment. They’d had the wisdom to know when to stop. It had made a little sadness between them. But it had also asked the necessary question: in the absence of a child to love, will this be enough? Will the two of you, for each other, be enough? And the answer, they’d both known, was yes. It had brought them closer, gently. It had confirmed them.

  Looking at this child now, Angelo was appalled by her vulnerability, the small wrists and tender throat, the eyes like shut buds. When her jeans were dry, he decided, he’d put those back on for her too.

  He felt her forehead. The chill had gone, but she didn’t stir. Her stillness was awful. If she was shivering or raving it would be something, a sign that she was still here. As it was, he imagined her spirit wandering somewhere between here and the afterlife, lost, confused, alone. No, I can’t help with that, Sylvia said. She’s still with you.

  There were more difficulties. Even with the wood-stove he was going to be pretty cold without his sleeping bag. There was one moth-eaten blanket in the chest in the bedroom (no bed) and two bath towels he’d dried yesterday, but that would be the limit of his insulation. He’d been sleeping on the Karrimor on the floor by the stove, but she needed that, so he’d have to take his chances on the busted couch, which would almost certainly make his back worse, if it could get worse. He’d have to put on extra clothes. Which meant moving again. Which meant ringing the L5 to S1 doorbell.

  Who was she running from?

  In a minute, he decided, when he’d gathered his strength, he’d go through every drawer in the place for anything he might – however pointlessly – use as a weapon.

  TWENTY

  Shock had addled his brain. He spent an agonising, indeterminate time crawling around the cabin – he found a rusted file, a broken saw, a broom with half its bristles gone – before being forced to conclude that all he really had at his disposal was the wood-stove’s brass-handled poker, which was barely a foot long.

  Then, astonished at his own dimness, he remembered the axe.

  Which was, of course, in the woodshed that adjoined the cabin.

  Forget it. The search indoors had exhausted him. He had nothing left.

  But the image of the girl running in terror through the woods wouldn’t go away. Nor the poignancy of her bare legs and the state of utter helplessness she’d been reduced to.

  I can’t do this.

  Try.

  He tried to argue Sylvia out of it. Even if he got the axe, what, exactly, was he going to do with it? In his state, did she seriously think he was going to be any kind of match for an attacker? He might as well hurl insults. And why were they getting so obsessed with the idea of an attacker? The kid could have been… The kid could have been what? Playing hide and seek? Fallen out of a tree she’d climbed? Escaped from an asylum?

  It was terrible, the clarity with which he felt the need to protect her. It was a new measure of his own weakness, as if he needed one.

  Sylvia’s energy bristled near him: It’s fifteen paces to the shed. Or a short crawl in the snow. Come on. Put the gloves on.

  Shock had also, apparently, erased his hangover. The last of the Scotch winked its promise.

  No. Don’t dull yourself.

  OK.

  Come on. Do it.

  By the time he got back – he’d managed five paces bent double with the cane, then been forced down onto his hands and knees in the snow by grinning L5 – he was certain of one thing: that if an attacker kicked in the door right now there would be no resistance he could offer.

  He shoved the axe under the stove, out of sight. Not the sort of thing he wanted to have on him when she opened her eyes.

  She was shivering now. Not in a good way. She was covered in sweat. Her forehead, when he put his hand on it, was burning. Fever. He should get water into her. Somehow.

  Shaking, and in a sweat of his own, Angelo wrestled himself to the sink and filled a tin mug with water. Repeated the wrestle in reverse to get back down on the floor next to her.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, lifting her head and cradling it in his left arm. ‘Drink. It’s good for you. Please. Come on. Take a sip. You can do it.’

  But she couldn’t do it. He’d been hoping for some rehydration reflex deep within her to kick in. He’d been hoping that wherever her soul was wandering her body would know it needed water, would feel the cup at its lips, would open her mouth, sip, swallow.

  That didn’t happen. The water just ran down her chin.

  You’ve done what you can for now. Rest for a while.

  Gently, he laid her head back down on the pillow.

  TWENTY-ONE

  ‘Actually I’ve been back a few weeks,’ Nick Blaskovitch said. ‘My dad died. My mom’s in no shape to be out here on her own. Serena can’t move home. She’s got a life.’

  Whereas I haven’t. Not since you broke my heart.

  Valerie’s hands were shaking. She’d forced them flat on the desk for disguise.

  Three years.

  Three years that disappeared into nothing the minute the two of you were in the same room again. In this case a room humming with the cramped energy of police, working. Love didn’t care which room it was. Love wasn’t criminal. Love was breezily amoral.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. Sorry. The air went dense with the history of that word between them. Quickly, she added: ‘I’m so sorry about your dad. What happened?’

  ‘Cancer. Ugly, but quick.’

  ‘Oh God, Blasko, I’m so sorry.’

  Three sorrys in five seconds. There would never be enough.

  ‘I know.’

  They looked at each other. What was there to do except look at each other? What was there to see except that it was all still there? Everything they’d had. Everything she’d wrecked.

  He was seeing it too. They’d always been mutually transparent, fundamentally in cahoots. When they’d been together the world had revealed itself as a beautiful-ugly horror-joke they were both in on. Sometimes you laughed your ass off and sometimes you despaired, but once you’d discovered each other you never had to do either alone.

  Except there’s something I never told you, Nick. You thought you hated me before? Just wait.

  ‘You’re back at work here?’ she said.

  ‘’Fraid so.’

  Seeing him every day. The calm, dark-featured face with its look of tired but restless intelligence. The familiar smell of him. His voice. She had a quick, compressed vision of herself moving away to a hot poor country where no one knew anything about her. An adobe hut. Red dust. Bare feet in the sun. Liquor. Loneliness.

  ‘Still Vice?’

  ‘Computer Forensics. A lot of desk. I retrained. High-tech. Do you know what a hardware write blocker is? You don’t, do you. I do.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Seriously. So if your TiVo crashes, call me.’

  Call me.

  No wedding ring, but that proved nothing. She was looking for the presence of another woman in his eyes. She couldn’t help it. It shocked her, the reflex. He knew. His look said there wasn’t anyone. It also said take nothing for granted. You nearly killed me. You could nearly kill me
again.

  ‘You’re on the serial duo,’ he said, glancing down at the shoebox. ‘You getting there?’

  She shook her head, looked away. Let’s not talk about that. Too close to history. Too close to home, to the Suzie Fallon case, to love, and her protracted murdering of it.

  You’ve done this because you don’t feel entitled to happiness, he’d said, three years ago, weeks before the bathroom, the test, the language of impersonal biology. You think shitting on love is going to bring Suzie Fallon back? It won’t bring any of them back. And he’d been right.

  ‘Holy Christ on a cracker,’ Laura Flynn said. ‘You?’

  She’d been walking past, Starbucks in one hand, half-eaten Sub in the other, three bulging files under her arm.

  Blasko smiled at her. Two of the files slipped from under her arm, spat their contents out in a slew on the floor. She nearly lost the coffee, too.

  ‘Easy,’ Blasko said, laughing. ‘Easy there, tiger.’

  ‘Fucking great,’ Laura Flynn said. ‘This is your fault.’ But she set the rest of her burdens down and put her arms around him. She was a small, fiery woman with very dark hair and very blue eyes, and could beat at least half the guys in the station in an arm wrestle. ‘What are you doing here?’ she said, looking over his shoulder at Valerie while he hugged her. A look that said: Holy shit. You OK? What does this mean? Is it all going to start again?

  Valerie’s look back at her said: No. I don’t know. I can’t. I don’t know. He won’t. I don’t know.

  And now I’m going to have to tell him. Everything.

  TWENTY-TWO

  At her apartment in the small hours, Valerie sat in front of her desktop going through the new San Francisco Zoo CCTV footage. Or rather, she sat with the footage running without being able to focus on any of it. She was halfway through a bottle of Smirnoff and there were too many Marlboro butts in the ashtray. Someone had said to her a long time back: Once you’ve agreed to let them kill you, cigarettes will stick with you through thick and thin. Cigarettes will be there for you. The apathetic snow had given up. Now rain purred against the windows. Her eyes itched and her body ached.

  Blasko.

  Nick.

  She’d only ever called him Nick in bed. In bed they’d belonged only to each other. Everywhere else they were Police. Everywhere else they belonged to the City, the raped, the beaten, the abducted, the abused, the dead. Bed had been their refuge, the one bit of reality that made the rest of reality bearable.

  Until the rest of reality had got greedy and decided to drive Valerie mad, by murdering Suzie Fallon.

  Watch out for the One Case, her grandfather had told her, when she’d joined Homicide. There’s always one that gets to you. There’s no explanation for it but every cop gets one, eventually. Every homicide cop. You won’t see it coming. All you can do is recognise it when it hits and hold on. Listen to me. I know. By the time he’d told her this he had an upstanding thatch of white hair and fractured green eyes and deep lines in the thin dough of his face. He’d been Homicide himself, for twenty years. Valerie had asked, of course, what his One Case had been. I don’t talk about it, he’d said. And it wouldn’t help you if I did. Valerie knew it was the case that changed his Catholicism: it did away with belief in God, but left his belief in the Devil stronger than ever.

  You won’t see it coming. She hadn’t. She knew Suzie Fallon’s dead body was the worst thing she’d ever seen, but initially she took it the way she took every other corpse, as another conundrum in flesh and blood, another challenge. If you were Homicide the world presented you with horror after horror and asked the same two questions:

  1. Can you deal with this?

  2. Can you catch the person who did it?

  Valerie’s answers were always the same:

  1. Yes.

  2. I can try.

  Seventeen-year-old Suzie Fallon had been abducted on her way home from a Saturday night party in Presidio. Or rather not on her way home. She and two friends, Nina Madden and Aiden Delaney, a couple, had taken LSD, and at some point in the evening wandered out into the streets. According to Nina and Aiden, the plan was to go into the park, but Suzie had become paranoid and run back to the party. Aside from her murderer, Nina and Aiden were the last people to see her alive. Her body was discovered two weeks later, dumped between the 580 and the Brushy Peak Reserve. It was barely recognisable as a body. The autopsy revealed that she couldn’t have been dead for more than four days. She’d spent ten days captive, during which time she was repeatedly raped and tortured, with everything from an acetylene torch to sulphuric acid. They needed dental records to confirm her identity.

  The investigation lasted six months. Valerie couldn’t say at what point it shifted for her from professional rigour to personal obsession. She couldn’t say at what point she stopped being able to shut out the images from Suzie’s last ten days. She couldn’t say at what point she was living in the room of terrible things. She couldn’t say at what point she started hating herself. She couldn’t say at what point she started trying to ruin love. Only that she did, and that she knew she was doing it, and that she couldn’t stop.

  The more she screamed at Blasko the more he absorbed it. It became her mission, to see how far he would stretch. She began to hate him for loving her. Love became an obscenity. An obscenity next to the obscene things that had been done to Suzie Fallon. It was the only thing that gave Valerie ease, the knowledge that she was, day by day, torturing and murdering what was between them. It seemed the most natural and inevitable thing in the world.

  In the end, in despair at his tolerance, she took the FBI agent working with them – Carter, a complete asshole – home to her apartment and fucked him over and over, until, as she’d known he would, Blasko came home and walked in on them.

  Two days later, as if the world had agreed that she was finally entitled to a release, she arrested the man who’d murdered Suzie Fallon.

  But by that time the world had exacted its price. Nick Blaskovitch transferred out of San Francisco, and she didn’t see him again.

  Until today.

  Just in time for it to all happen again.

  He’d gone before she’d realised she was pregnant.

  You don’t have to decide anything right now. You’ve got time. You can wait.

  But she’d woken in pain bleeding heavily one night in her eighth week. Put a towel on the car seat and driven herself, in agony (you deserve this), to the ER, where, midway through her explanation of what was wrong, the pain had doubled her and she’d dropped to her knees. She’d spent what had seemed a long time on a gurney in a brightly lit room, waiting to be seen. The attending doctor was a young woman with a tired face and a long froth of dark curly hair, pulled back into a ponytail. There was a large round lamp above Valerie from which she could feel soft heat on her exposed belly and legs and which reminded her of the time she and Nick had gone on vacation to Brazil and sunbathed nude on an utterly isolated beach, the feeling of shocking licence, the sense that Adam and Eve would’ve felt like this, before the Fall. After a little while the doctor said: Yes, it’s come away. That’s the whole thing. I’m sorry. Do you want to see it? Valerie had wondered what there could possibly be to see at eight weeks, but she looked anyway. And added what she saw to the many things she had already seen. The tiny head webbed in blood vessels. The putative eye like a precise blot of ink. The snub beginning of a nose.

  They’d kept her in overnight. In the morning she’d driven home. A bright, blue-skied day. Traffic. People. Life.

  There was a baby, Nick. But I didn’t know if it was yours. I lost it, anyway.

  Valerie finished the half glass of vodka in a gulp, lit another Marlboro and forced herself to look at the new footage. You will have to think about him. You will have to tell him. But not yet. Not yet.

  The zoo’s CCTV material had only ever been a long shot: the hope the cameras would’ve caught Katrina talking to someone they hadn’t interviewed, something odd in the inter
action, something slightly off that police eyes would spot. Myskow, Carla York’s predecessor, had put the killer into the ‘organised’ category, which would mean prep, planning, stalking, familiarising himself with the victim’s routine (although along with all the other profile points it was best-guess stuff; and there was no saying an organised predator wouldn’t start losing his shit as the victims piled up) but how much footage could you look at? The week before the incident? The month? The year? Only Valerie was still looking. And right now she was looking mainly to take her mind off Nick Blaskovitch.

  Valerie thought of any case as a series of concentric circles, like an archery target. You started from the centre, the bullseye. Finding what you needed in the bullseye – via hard evidence, interviews, detection while the whole thing was fresh – meant the case took hours, days, maybe two or three weeks to solve. But if you didn’t find what you needed there you moved out to the next circle – less-likely suspects, broader interviews, circumstantial evidence. Weeks turned into months. Each circle you moved out into was less likely to give you what you needed. But there was nothing to do but move through them. And the circles went on for ever.

  The circle she was now operating in – the new zoo footage – was a long way from the bullseye. The new material was six months’ worth from the whole zoo, not just, as the previous stuff had been, camera angles featuring Katrina. Nor was it really new. Valerie had had it for four weeks now, and every night she spent hours trawling through it. It had become a ritual. It was what she did to maintain the sense – in the wretched time between getting home and falling asleep – that she was doing something, however desperate.

  She’d restricted herself to the zoo’s entrance footage, excluding (in the first instance) women, family groups, the elderly. She was looking for a man on his own, or two men together. (Two men together? her inner sceptic had scoffed. This is San Francisco, for Christ’s sake.) It wasn’t (the gay male couples problem excepted) such a crazy idea. It didn’t take much footage to establish that lone male visitors to a zoo were a minority. Of course there was the possibility such men were meeting someone inside but short of going through all the extant footage from the entire zoo there was no way of checking that. That would be, she thought, the next fucking circle of desperation. It wasn’t a crazy idea, no. But it was pitifully remote. Her method was simple: each time a single male in the age range entered the zoo, she froze the frame, screen-grabbed a time-coded still of the guy and filed it. Which left her with a growing gallery of – the phrase was laughable – ‘potential suspects’. All this based on the optimistic assumption that if someone wanted to stalk Katrina, the zoo was the place to do it.