The Killing Lessons

by Saul Black

  ‘It’s a missing person,’ Valerie said. ‘That’s nightmare enough. Who’ve you got on it?’

  ‘Larson. He’s fine. He gets it.’

  ‘OK. Plug it in to NCIS and get a rush on forensics. Hit everyone you can with Zoo Guy. Looks like they’re still using the RV but we can’t rule out vehicle swaps unless they’re complete morons.’

  Valerie’s phone rang. It was Carla.

  ‘I gather you’re down in Santa Cruz?’ she said.

  ‘I’m heading back shortly. We’ve got another one.’

  Pause. Loud with Carla controlling what Valerie imagined was irritation.

  ‘I got the call early this morning,’ Valerie said, caught between guilt and annoyance herself. ‘Had to leave at short notice.’

  ‘I’m supposed to be with you on this,’ Carla said. She sounded wounded. Or rather, she sounded as if she’d spent the pause crafting a tone of woundedness.

  ‘Together as in surgically attached?’ Valerie said. Regretted saying it.

  Another pause.

  ‘I just want to be as useful as I can be,’ Carla said. ‘I don’t know why you wouldn’t call me.’

  ‘It was four in the morning,’ Valerie lied. ‘It didn’t need both of us.’ It was as if she could hear Carla architecting her responses in the silences. The next was preceded by an audible sigh.

  ‘OK,’ Carla said. ‘What’ve we got?’

  It took Valerie a few minutes to bring her up to speed, and a tremendous effort not to tell her to back off and let her get on with doing her job. Liza observed Valerie’s facial expression with obvious understanding.

  ‘It’s not going to help that our girl’s illegal,’ Liza said, when Valerie had hung up the call.

  ‘I know,’ Valerie said. ‘We’ll just have to push. This is the first live one in three years. And if we don’t get this right she’s going to end up dead regardless of when her visa ran out.’

  ‘No joy on the press release?’

  ‘Too much. Reports from a dozen states. The agencies are doing what they’re supposed to, but we don’t have a name or a licence plate, and the one thing we know for sure about these guys is they’re super-mobile. See me in Nebraska? Good for you. Next day I’m in fucking Texas.’

  ‘You don’t think they’re still here?’

  ‘They could be. If there’s no HQ they’re driving around in an abattoir on wheels. And this is the third California victim so there’s an argument for assuming an in-state base. But the spread so far makes it look like the victim’s displacement is part of the process. They grab her then break the geographical connection. Makes whatever they leave behind go cold fast. I don’t know. Gut says they’re on the road, far from here already. But there’s some West Coast factor. I think the alpha grew up here. Lived here. He keeps coming back.’

  *

  Driving back to San Francisco in heavy rain, Valerie had to fight the absurd temptation to just start cruising the off-freeway roads, looking for them. It was what the families of the missing often did. To fight the impotence. To fight the guilt that quickly attached to doing anything that wasn’t driving around, looking for them. In the early stages of a loved one’s disappearance the families (their minds naturally assuming the worst) lost any claim on their own lives. The simple act of making a cup of coffee or taking out the trash – anything that testified to normal life going on – had the power to fill them with shame and disgust.

  The families, she reminded herself. Not you. Not the police.

  You’ve done this because you don’t feel entitled to happiness, Blasko had said, three years ago, when Suzie Fallon had been missing and missing and missing, and the ticking clock and the beating heart and the unknown life in her hands had driven Valerie mad. You think shitting on love is going to bring her back? It won’t bring any of them back. And of course he’d been right. It hadn’t brought her back. Not until there was nothing left of her anyone would recognise.

  Now it was as if Blasko were in the passenger seat next to her, silent, looking at her, calmly and sadly seeing the same madness ready to blossom again. She wouldn’t let it.

  But it was hard. She liked the Claudia in the picture. The humour around the mouth and in the warm dark eyes, the look of being able to laugh at herself, the hint of not suffering fools. She’s like, really smart, the blonde roommate had said, with nervy amazement. I mean… I mean like you need a dictionary.

  It hit her: You like her because you’re seeing her as a person. And why are you doing that?

  Because of Nick. Because in spite of everything that’s happened and everything you’ve become, when love comes back it has the power to reverse everything. You think you’ve changed? You haven’t changed. You’ve just been waiting.

  Valerie wondered if Claudia had been following the story of the murders in the press, if she’d recognised Zoo Guy from the pictures they’d released to the media, if she’d been left in no doubt about what was going to happen to her. But the fact was it didn’t make any difference: a man had abducted her. Whether she recognised him or not she’d assume he was going to do all of it to her, all the terrible things, all the worst things, all the final things. They’d probably already started. Claudia had probably already been changed, for ever.

  The moral impulse, thinking this, was to fire up, make an inner vow built of rage: I’ll find her. I swear by all the… If it takes… by God I will not let this one die…

  But the impulse failed. If you were anything other than a rookie it had to. Oaths didn’t catch murderers, nor promises save the lives of their victims. Only the Machine did. The endless work, the stubborn instincts, the refusal to stop.

  I can promise you that, Valerie thought. I can promise you I won’t fucking stop.

  But even as she thought it she had an image of a heavy pair of household scissors closing around Claudia’s breast, razor wire tugged between her legs, a fish knife hammer fork machete axe—

  Stop. Stop that.

  The Taurus had crept up to ninety-five. The rain was coming down harder. Wipers on what looked like self-destructive speed and she still had to lean forward and peer through the windshield. Her head ached. She hadn’t seen her mother for a while, but she knew that when she did her mother would ask what she always asked: Are you taking care of yourself, sweetheart?

  She pulled it back down to eighty. Lit a Marlboro and took a swallow of the station’s now cold coffee. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten hot food off a plate, with cutlery. She could barely remember the last time she’d eaten. It mattered. Not because she was hungry (her appetite was dead) but because she understood that she had to put food in her stomach to avoid collapse. She had to eat to carry on working.

  Eat when you get home. (And there’s a bottle of Smirnoff in the freezer.)

  You’re becoming an alcoholic.

  (I know.) No, I’m not.

  No, that’s right, you’re not. You are an alcoholic. You’ve got that to offer him, along with all the other things that should make you leave him alone.

  She switched lanes to pass a pickup truck loaded with rubble. Picturing, as she did so, the dead women travelling with her, hovering just above the roof of the Taurus in a sad, trailing constellation.

  Then everything went black.

  Or rather, something happened that ended in total blackness. Her peripheral vision went rainbow-edged, as if light were passing through a prism, then collapsed in on her like the walls of a bevelled glass tunnel.

  She thought, quite calmly: I’m dying. The colours darkened. Blackness around a narrowing aperture, her view of the windshield, the road, the world reduced to a shrinking dot. Then blackness.

  Light.

  Brake light, singular.

  BRAKE!

  The light exploded the world back fully into view. She was aware of her foot down hard on the brake, calf muscle straining. She thought, calmly: There’s not enough time. I’m going to hit it.

  She didn’t hit it.

  Nor,
courtesy of ABS, did she go into a skid.

  But there was a yawning, suspended moment in which the single red brake light of the van that had stopped in front of her rushed through the windshield’s skin of rain towards her like an unblinking demonic eye, thrilled at the prospect of introducing her to her death.

  Horns blared. The pickup rushed past her. Her back, neck, shoulders screamed their reflex preparation for impact from behind.

  But nothing hit her. Nothing hit her because the driver behind was going under the speed limit, at a rain-safe distance. Unlike her.

  If ignored, extreme stress can cause severe reactions, including blackouts.

  She imagined describing what had just happened to her doctor, Rachel Miller. Rachel, a calm, competent woman only five years older than Valerie, would listen in unjudgemental silence, making notes in her illegible freehand, then tell Valerie that she’d need to take at least two weeks off work.

  People always know what the right thing to do is, her grandfather had told her. They just pretend they don’t. The right thing to do. Accept that she was falling apart. Accept that her efficiency was compromised. Stop working The Case. Stop.

  The reasoning terrified her. Because it was sound. Underneath it was her trying and failing to convince herself that what had just happened hadn’t happened. Like trying to stop yourself from shivering in the cold just by telling yourself you were warm.

  All right, it had happened.

  It had happened but it was a one-off. Not enough food, not enough sleep. It wouldn’t happen again. Because she wouldn’t let it.

  And if it did?

  If it did… If it did she’d do something about it.

  She pictured Blasko shaking his head, smiling, sadly, knowing her.

  She pictured Carla York sitting next to her, saying: OK. Enough. That’s all I need to see.

  Valerie sat with her hands on the wheel, letting the rush subside. The cigarette, incredibly, was still between her fingers. She rolled down the window and tossed it out. The damp air refreshed her hot face. She ought, she knew, to hit the siren and pull the van with the busted tail-light over.

  But as the snarl-up ahead unpacked and the lane started to flow, she also knew (driving too fast, too close, and with a bloodstream still presided over by last night’s vodka) that she wasn’t going to.

  And she was supposed to be Claudia Grey’s best hope.

  FORTY-THREE

  Will Fraser couldn’t sleep. He’d been in bed three hours and now the clock said 4.48 a.m. The red digits throbbed as with gremlin glee. His wife Marion was snoring, softly. By rights, given they’d had miraculous sex when he’d come home at midnight, he ought to be snoring softly himself. But The Case was an insomniac brain infestation that didn’t give a fuck whether he’d just had sex with the entire Raiders’ cheerleading squad. ‘Miraculous’ sex was no joke. First time in maybe six months. A Christmas miracle, he’d been tempted to whisper, when he came. (He resisted. He wasn’t an idiot.) He and Marion loved each other. In which ‘loved’ meant knew each other inside out, drove each other to daily, weary domestic distraction, frequently didn’t bother to have the next available argument because they were too tired and knew deep down it wouldn’t go anywhere apocalyptic, that they were in for the duration (they had prosaic mutual tenderness exactly equal to their irritation), were welded together through their exhausting kids (Deborah, seventeen, Logan, fourteen) and when they were apart for more than a couple of days were ambushed by how much they missed the small things in each other. In Will’s case the sound of Marion’s laugh, which was as honest and good as anything from Eden before the Fall. But they’d been married twenty-three years. Sex was more often than not half-hearted or functional. Still, lust, when it did put in a rare appearance, was a rich rejuvenation. Hey, Marion had said, when he’d finished brushing his teeth, earlier. I’m feeling dirty. She’d been lying on her front in a long pink T-shirt and nothing else, and suddenly the soles of her bare feet and the little tangle of varicoses on her thigh had driven him crazy, had, in a few seconds, reminded him of the wealth of her flesh – the half-dozen beauty spots on her back, the creases behind her knees, the softness of her mouth – and they’d fucked with intense, entitled, languorous greed. Afterwards, he’d lain with his face in her bare underarm and thought, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. He’d kissed the length of her flank. Then she’d said, Fuck, I needed that – turned over and fallen asleep.

  Since then, despite his body’s razed bliss, Will had been wide awake.

  It was the pocket (if it was a pocket) from the body in Reno. The embroidered letters (if they were letters) wouldn’t leave him alone. And he’d been a cop long enough to know when to listen to whatever it was that wouldn’t leave him alone.

  Will eased himself out of bed, dressed, and went, via the kids’ rooms (Deborah had fallen asleep with her iPod headphones on, lying in exactly the position Marion had been in when he’d finished brushing his teeth; it sent him an anxious bulletin of his daughter’s burgeoning womanhood – while Logan slept open-mouthed on his back, one leg outside the comforter, lit by his screensaver’s still of Liv Tyler on horseback from The Lord of the Rings), downstairs to the kitchen.

  He made coffee and sat at the scrubbed oak table, going through his notes. The Case was kicking Valerie’s ass, he knew, but his own wasn’t exactly getting off lightly. Each body that turned up was an indictment of his share in the task force’s failure. They’d been on it so long it was his brain’s permanent depressing weather. Torn-off pocket, he’d written in his notebook. Possibly overalls? Maybe edge of a J, def R and poss S. Check back – familiar.

  It was no good. He needed all the files and to see the pocket again. He knew it was something, rang some maddeningly vague bell, was (he laughed, mentally, at the phrase) ‘a clue’. He pictured Marion waking to get up to pee and finding him gone, saw her face’s annoyance and disappointment and resignation. Married to a cop? she’d said, drunk, at a party, years ago. Might as well be married to a crack-head. Get used to coming second in the scheme of things. Get used to crumbs. The thought of her, the way she’d been with him earlier – focused and impersonal and selfish for her own pleasure – stirred the blood in his cock again, tempted him to go back upstairs and wrap his arms around her and bury his nose in the soft warmth of her nape and gloat. Maybe, if the universe had gone truly, wonderfully insane, she’d be in the mood again when she woke up?

  But Valerie’s call from Santa Cruz only hours ago was still an abrasion in his head: We’ve got a live one, Will. Whatever we’ve been doing, we need to do it faster. Starting right now.

  With regret, and some realism (the chances of Marion wanting more sex first thing in the morning were laughably slim), he wrote his wife a note and left it on the table. It was 5.17 a.m. The evidence room didn’t open until eight, but the off-hours supervisor would be there. The pocket itself hadn’t come back from the lab, but there was a print of the photograph the Reno guy had taken. He swallowed the last mouthful of his coffee – possibly J, R, maybe S revolving in his head – grabbed his car keys and headed out into the pre-dawn light.

  FORTY-FOUR

  ‘Here,’ Angelo said. ‘I made you this.’ It was a packet chicken noodle soup. ‘It’s hot. Be careful.’

  They hadn’t spoken again about her mother and Josh. He understood. Trauma had given her a small allowance of language to report what she’d been through. Now it was spent. It couldn’t be spoken again. She had a child’s ability to recognise the facts of her situation. Childhood was rich in imagination, yes, but it provided an under-appreciated gift for the real, too. Children were brutal realists. The only alternative was outright suppression. They had no knack for kidding themselves. It took adulthood to bring that dubious talent.

  In spite of this, he’d thought, under Sylvia’s occasional guidance, that he was getting better at talking to her. He had two safe subjects: himself, and the immediate concerns of their shared present. Neither took her back to her past nor forward i
nto her future. Neither reiterated the passage of time. The passage of time was verboten. The passage of time meant nothing except all the time her mother had been bleeding. He hoped she didn’t have an understanding of how long it would take a person to bleed to death. A forlorn hope: he saw the look that came into her face at moments; the failed effort not to know; the will to hope running smack into the stone wall of knowledge. It was terrible to him that he had nothing to give her in answer to that. He fought his own impulse to lie, to concoct fabulous contingencies by virtue of which her mother and brother would somehow be saved. She wasn’t young or stupid enough for any of that. He was watching her hour by hour being force-delivered into a new, brutal existence. Every breath she drew was heartbreaking evidence that she was trying to survive it, though its only purpose seemed to be to destroy her through violence and grief. She was, in fact, only dimly aware of him. It wouldn’t have been much more strange to her if she’d found herself in the care of a talking animal or a benign extraterrestrial. A remote practical part of her had, at some point in their time together, decided that he was not dangerous to her. It was a great relief to him that at least that had been established, that his every word or movement didn’t trip the switch of her fear.

  Now that the first shocks of the situation had subsided, a little of Angelo’s deeper self had woken up. A little, in fact (this was the first thought in a long time that came close to making him laugh), of the novelist. He could see how he’d write it. He could see the obvious architecture: the dead-hearted old man given a chance to come back to life through the innocence of a child. Sylvia’s response to this thought had been her distinctive smile – of recognition and mischief. He had come out here, he now knew, to decide whether he wanted to live or die. To stay or to go. To carry on without his love – or to follow her into the mystery. He had imagined, coming to this admission, that Sylvia would have something to say about it. But again, all he got was the smile. The look of quiet, delighted conspiracy. It was the look which had always defined her for him. It was the look she gave him across the room at parties they were bored by. It was the look she gave him at moments of unexpected happiness. It was the look she gave him in her favourite sexual position, sitting astride him, when she knew he was just about to come. It was the look of knowing him as well as he knew himself, and it had made his life worth living. He had come out here to determine whether he could live without it.