The Killing Lessons

by Saul Black

  Claudia wasn’t aware of closing her eyes. Only of moments of blackness. When her entire being collapsed into nothingness.

  But was forced back. Saw. Believed and disbelieved. Knew and refused the knowledge.

  The screaming came tinnily from the iPad. Reached a crescendo.

  Then silence. Xander on his knees over her, working something with dense concentration. Paulie’s voice off-camera saying, quietly, ‘That ain’t gonna fit, man.’

  Xander sitting back on his heels, breathing through his nose.

  The flesh of the woman’s midriff gone.

  Something inside her, instead of her insides.

  Something big, white, hard, shiny.

  ‘See that?’ Paulie asked Claudia. ‘See what that is? Can you make it out?’

  He turned the screen back to himself, briefly, to double-check she was seeing what she needed to see.

  ‘It’s a goose!’ Paulie said, then laughed. ‘A goddamned… I mean where does he get this stuff?’

  The camera pulled back.

  Claudia recognised the room in the film.

  It was the room she was in.

  She found herself on her hands and knees. The world crowded back, put its whole weight on her.

  ‘I got all of them on here,’ Paulie said, finger-swiping again. ‘Here, take a look. Come on, look.’

  Claudia remained where she was. She wanted to wrap her arms around her abdomen but she had no strength to move. Her mother and father and Alison and her utter aloneness and her whole life a beautiful mass of detail leading only to this. She wanted to die now, this instant go for ever into the blackness. Go out, go out, quite go out. She’d accept death if only it was immediate, if only it would spare her what would happen, what they’d do.

  But the moments came and went – innocently, like children filing past – and here she still was, alive, and the facts of where she was and what had just happened and what would happen did not change. Could not change. The facts were innocent, too. If they tied you down and pushed the knife your body opened. The knife had no choice and your body had no choice. It was part of a universe of cause and effect. Morality was irrelevant.

  ‘And this one?’ Paulie continued, as if to himself. ‘Jesus. Wriggliest bitch I’ve ever seen. She was like a goddamned bag of snakes. Come on, you’re not looking.’

  Shaking, Claudia crawled to the furnace. She put her back to its heat, drew up her knees, turned her face away from him, at last managed to wrap her arms around herself. It brought her childhood back, small traumas, the intimate warmth of tears on her cheeks, pity for herself.

  ‘Not playing, huh?’ Paulie said.

  She didn’t answer. A remote part of herself wondered about the woman in the video. Who she’d been. Her life. Her family. The sadness and horror and disgust of what she’d been reduced to. In the churning sickness of her state Claudia imagined meeting her in a neutral afterlife, something like an infinite dull waiting room. They would know each other. What they’d shared.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Paulie said. ‘We got plenty of time.’ He chuckled to himself again. ‘We got all the time in the world.’

  FORTY

  Xander hadn’t been ill for a long time. The odd cough or cold. That ingrown toenail that had gone septic, so it was like having a little volcano in his shoe. Diarrhoea from lousy takeout now and then. But nothing like this since he was Leon, at Mama Jean’s house.

  He lay on the bed in the big damp room upstairs, shivering. His face ached. His head was warm. It was getting light outside.

  The objects revolved and overlapped in his mind’s eye: balloon, goose, apple, hammer, clock, fork… jug. The goddamned jug. In Colorado Paulie had said to him: I’m gonna do one. Let me do one. And he, Xander – fucking idiot – had let him. Except of course when it had come to it Paulie couldn’t do it, chickenshit that he was. He couldn’t do it so Xander had to. Why in God’s name had Xander agreed to even let him try? What had he been thinking? It was no wonder he was sick. That could never happen again. You started letting things like that happen and the whole… You just… Things started drifting away from each other.

  A wave of heat went over him, made him feel like the way the air buckled in the desert, that shimmer on the road. The jacket normally hanging over the wardrobe’s long mirror had fallen to the floor. His reflection, even though he wasn’t looking at it, was another ache. He’d never liked mirrors. A part of him didn’t believe it was a reflection. A part of him always thought the movements of the person in the mirror never quite matched his own. Like it was someone else who looked just like him, watching him from the world on the other side.

  His mother had always covered mirrors up.

  He was very small when she went away but he remembered her. He remembered her not being there. Long dreamlike stretches of time when he wandered around the two-room apartment in the hot afternoons. It smelled of drains and garbage. He was too small even to reach the light switches. Daylight leaked away. At night monsters had the run of the place and he’d shove himself into the cupboard under the sink until he heard her come back (with someone, different men, but always a man) by which time he would’ve pissed or shit himself and would know she was going to punish him for it. It was like a car crash in his head, seeing her when she came back, because she was glitterily beautiful. Her green eyes were like Christmas, her hair a fascinating gold tinselly mess. It was the beauty and the rage coming off her that crashed the cars in his head. It seemed impossible that they went together, but they did. If she and the man had already injected themselves he might get away with being locked in his room. If not, there was no telling. If not, even the monsters would draw back to watch.

  The last clear memory he had of his mother was the day at the fairground. It had been a strange time when one man – Jimmy – had been around a lot. He barely spoke to Leon and Leon kept out of his way – but somehow the three of them were at a fairground and Leon was sensitised by the lights and the rides and the smells of cotton candy and hot dogs. It was evening, the sky beyond the neons dark silver blue with thin feathers of black cloud. Leon wanted to go on the carousel. Up and down horses with bulging eyes and saddles in thrilling colours. Some of their faces were frightening, but all the kids on them were laughing and waving and sometimes letting go of the reins and just gripping with their legs. It was a world to him, the horses and the riders. It seemed like an astonishing magic, that he could get up there and be one of them. If he got up there he would be one of them. They wouldn’t talk or anything, but they would look at each other and know that they were all riders together.

  She said: You’re too small for that. I’ll have to go on with you. Jesus Christ – wait till it stops, will you?

  She and Jimmy were drinking beer from plastic cups. She had her hair tied back and her face looked small and hard.

  When it stops, for Christ’s sake. Get off me.

  But when it stopped, she and Jimmy had moved away to a stall where Jimmy was firing a gun at playing cards pinned to a board.

  Leon went through agony. The kids got off and other kids got on. There was one horse he wanted, white with a golden mane and a green saddle. In a minute someone else would get on it and the carousel would start again and again he wouldn’t be in the magical world. He went back to her and pulled at her hand. Not hard, but she was wobbly on her high heels and she lurched and nearly fell. She spilled some of her drink and bumped Jimmy and he missed his shot.

  Leon didn’t fall when Jimmy hit him on the side of the head, but the blow felt huge and hot.

  His mother was shaking beer from her fingertips, her bracelets clattering, saying Jesus Christ, Jesus fucking Christ.

  Leon went back to the ride. It had started again. His horse didn’t have anyone on it. It was unbearable, his need to be on the white horse with the green saddle, to be in the world of the laughing riders.

  He crawled under the guard rail. The speed and the rise and fall of the horses. But every time the white one came
around its eyes invited him to grab hold and jump on.

  Leon stepped closer. Two more steps. One more would take him up onto the carousel’s round wooden floor.

  Someone’s voice shouted, Jesus, kid, hey – stop!

  But Leon felt as if he were being moved forward by invisible hands. The sounds of the fairground dropped away. The white horse passed him again. Said: Next time. Next time around. Leon could feel the joy waiting.

  He took another step. He could do this. He knew he could do this.

  The girl was wearing white knee-socks and buckled leather sandals, and her outstretched leg hit Leon – harder than the blow from Jimmy – on the softly throbbing side of his head.

  He didn’t remember much more after that. Just the fairground noises falling back onto him like an ocean wave and a few screams and the smell of the floor’s flaking paint and undersides of the horses’ hooves dropping down to within a couple of inches of his face, hundreds of them, it seemed, over and over, for hours or days – until someone’s hands grabbed his ankles and pulled him so that his shirt rode up and the boards scraped his bare back and he had a vivid image of a fat woman in a pink dress holding an ice cream, gawping at him from the guard rail, her mouth open, her face lit by the neons.

  There were other, confused, memories after that, but glimpsed through a warm daze: the dirty vinyl smell of Jimmy’s car; road lights; his mother forcing him to eat potato chips; Mama Jean standing in her doorway smoking a cigarette, shaking her head.

  It was at Mama Jean’s house that the lessons began.

  Shuddering, he rolled to the edge of the bed and reached under it.

  For the only possession he’d kept from his days at Mama Jean’s.

  FORTY-ONE

  Valerie gathered enough consciousness to read the incoming on her phone’s screen: Liza Terrill calling.

  ‘Liza?’ she croaked. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Hey, Val,’ Liza said. ‘You still sleeping?’

  Valerie looked at her watch. Six thirty. She should’ve been up half an hour ago. She’d forgotten to set the radio alarm. No poetry.

  ‘No, I’m good,’ she lied. ‘Anything wrong?’

  Liza worked Homicide in Santa Cruz. She and Valerie had been friends since the Academy. These days they were lucky if they saw each other three times in a year, but whenever they did it was just picking up the conversation wherever they’d left off.

  ‘I’m fine. I might have something for you. Since you said you’re happy to clutch at straws.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Missing girl. Well, a probably missing girl. It’s only been twenty-four hours, and the guy who called it in is barely even a boyfriend. You told me you wanted anything like this as soon as it came in, so here I am, doing as I’m told.’

  ‘You think it’s more than a straw or you wouldn’t be calling,’ Valerie said.

  There was a pause. ‘Yeah,’ Liza said. ‘I know. I wish I didn’t. But the fucking Machine’s been working since I picked it up.’

  Valerie understood. The Machine. Cop sense. The inexplicable certainty. It was both a dread and a thrill. And it was coming from Liza even down the phone.

  ‘Let me grab a pen,’ she said. She was already halfway to the desk, her circuits rushing into life. ‘OK,’ she said, when she was seated, legal pad open in front of her. ‘Give me everything you’ve got.’

  Claudia Grey. British national. Twenty-six years old. Living and working illegally in Santa Cruz.

  Two photographs. The first from her passport taken when she was just eighteen. The second run off her roommate’s phone, taken only a couple of weeks ago: Claudia holding a glass of wine and looking straight into camera with a slightly exasperated expression. Dark hair cut in a soft, jaw-length bob. A look of warmth, humour and potentially cruel intelligence.

  Valerie’s own Machine moved up a gear as soon as she saw it.

  The afternoon in Santa Cruz was spent in four straightforward interviews. Carlos Diaz (the employer), Wayne Bauer (the bus driver), Ryan Wells (the boyfriend), and Stephanie Argyle (the roommate). Carlos confirmed that Claudia had left the Whole Food Feast at eight p.m. Wayne Bauer (plus the city bus CCTV) confirmed that she’d boarded at 8.17 p.m. and got off at the Graham Hill Road stop at 8.38 p.m. Ryan confirmed that she hadn’t made it to the party. Stephanie confirmed that she hadn’t come home. Somewhere between the bus stop and Ryan Wells’s, she’d disappeared.

  Valerie showed all four interviewees, plus the staff at the restaurant, the image of the zoo footage suspect. No recognition. If the killer or killers had been shadowing Claudia they’d done it without being noticed by any of the victim’s people. She sent the Whole Food Feast’s CCTV material to Liza at the SCPD, who would pass it on to Valerie’s team in San Francisco. Valerie had hoped, too, for a camera angle on the parking lot, but the shot was only partial; at least a third of the bays were out of frame. None of the Feast’s staff recalled seeing an RV, but that didn’t mean there hadn’t been an RV there.

  She worked her way through the guests who’d been at the barbecue, all of whom had driven there, with the exception of Ryan Wells’s brother and sister-in-law, who were staying with him on vacation. On the phone with guest number eight of fourteen, she caught a break.

  Damien Court had arrived at the party on his Harley.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, when she asked if he’d seen an RV en route. ‘Actually there was one parked on the hill. In a bad spot, too, just before the bend.’

  ‘I need you to show me where it was,’ Valerie said. ‘How soon can we meet?’

  ‘I just ordered short ribs,’ Damien said. ‘Like… in a couple of hours?’

  ‘No,’ Valerie said. ‘Like right now. Give me the name of the restaurant. I’ll come get you.’

  Damien Court, Ryan Wells’s chief digital editor, was early thirties, tall, with soft brown eyes, a short dark ponytail and a goatee. He was also, by the time Valerie picked him up, in the heightened state people entered when they found themselves witnesses, when ‘crime’ stopped being something on a crime show and started being something in their lives. Valerie could feel the thrill coming off him in the car. The dark eyes a little wider than they’d normally be. The current of fear that ran through the innocent when dealing with the police, because the world was crazy and innocence was no guarantee against anything and after all they weren’t as innocent as they wanted to be. One of the first and most quickly wearying things you discovered if you were a cop was that everyone – everyone – reacted to you as if they had something to hide. Because everyone does have something to hide, her grandfather had told her. It might only be a sugar habit or kinky fantasy – but a cop shows up and it’s like the eye of God turned on them. It’s depressing.

  ‘I’d say about a hundred yards from here,’ Damien told her. They were slightly more than halfway up Graham Hill Road. ‘But that’s a rough guess.’

  ‘It’ll do,’ Valerie said. She didn’t want to drive over the site and fuck up any tracks. She’d called Liza and told her she might need a CSI team.

  ‘Are you even going to be able to see anything?’ Damien Court asked. It was almost dusk, and under the cedars almost dark. Valerie didn’t answer. Just pulled over and took the flashlight from the Taurus’s trunk. Gloves, evidence packets, tweezers, two sets of over-shoe plastics. ‘Put these on,’ she told him. ‘Walk behind me.’

  She was excited. There was no other honest way to describe it. Racing up through her body’s exhaustion was the knowledge that this was – please God – a live case. Not a corpse. Not a too-late. Not another reiteration that they’d got away with it. Claudia Grey was – please, please, please, God – still alive. Which meant her life was in Valerie’s hands. A beating heart and a ticking clock. Valerie felt The Case stirring, the mountain of details and reports, the interview transcripts, the forensics data, the murder map, the wretched gallery of signature objects and most of all the dead women. And under the excitement her own nearness to collapse. The dregs of her fue
l that would somehow have to be enough. That would have to be made to be enough.

  ‘I’d say about another twenty paces,’ Damien said.

  ‘OK. Stop. Stay there.’

  She needed the flashlight. She went slowly, moved the beam back and forth across the asphalt and grass shoulder section by section. No substitute for CSI’s micro-scrupulousness, but the rhythm of the beating heart and the ticking clock were already embedded in her pulse. Every second was a second that moved Claudia Grey closer to death. It was as if she could hear the girl breathing.

  She halted in the middle of the flashlight’s arc.

  Tracks.

  Clear in even the battery light. The finest film of dirt between the grass and the road, maybe only six inches in width – but a vehicle had definitely stopped here. Goodyear G647RSS. The dry-cast had become one of Valerie’s neural pathways. She’d let SCPD forensics confirm it, but her own mind was already made up. Besides the gap between front and rear wheels fitting RV length, it was as if the dark air here was still raw from where Claudia Grey had been torn into her nightmare, as if the atmosphere was still in shock from what it had seen.

  Valerie mentally taped off the scene and moved through it, methodically. On her second pass (she was peripherally aware of Damien Court standing, tense and still exactly where she’d told him to stand; the casually exercised power of police authority – if she’d told him to stand on his head he would have tried) something glinted in the flashlight’s beam.

  She bent to the ground. Steadied the light.

  A sequin.

  Two more lying within a few inches.

  Silver sequins.

  From Claudia’s purse.

  FORTY-TWO

  ‘How do you want to handle it?’ Liza Terrill asked Valerie. They were back at the Santa Cruz station, drinking too-strong coffee. Calling Claudia Grey’s family couldn’t be put off any longer. Technically to idiot-check that Claudia hadn’t upped sticks and flown back to England on a whim. But neither Valerie nor Liza regarded that as remotely likely.