The Silent Hour

by Michael Koryta

  "And stay away from case work."

  "Yes. Stay away from case work."

  He was quiet again, then said, "I'm sorry it didn't work out better for you, Lincoln. Like you said, I'm the one who brought you into it. At the time, I thought I was doing the right thing. You were a detective. That was as natural and deeply ingrained in you as in anybody else I'd ever seen. I thought it would be good for you, but more than that, I thought you needed it."

  That night, when we were alone in our hotel room, I told Amy about my conversation with Joe. I was sitting in a chair by the sliding glass door, she was on the bed and outside the rain fell in sheets. I thought she might make some arguments, raise some of the same points that Joe had, remind me that when we'd met I was trying to make a living off the gym alone and I was a generally unhappy person. She didn't say any of those things, though. When

  I was done talking she got to her feet and walked across the room to me and sat on my lap, straddling me, her hands on either side of my face.

  "If you can't do it anymore, then there's no decision to be made," she said. "You just need to step back. Don't feel bad about it, just do it."

  I nodded.

  "One rule," she said.

  "Yeah—"

  "You can leave the job. You can leave the city if you want to. You can leave damn near anything, but you better not leave me."

  I shook my head. "Not going to happen."

  "I've invested way too much into this ill-advised Lincoln Perry rehabilitation plan to give up now."

  "If anybody ends this, it'll be you."

  "Remember that," she said, and then she leaned forward and kissed me before moving to rest her head on my chest. We sat like that for a long time, and then she stood and took my hand and brought me to the bed.

  When she was asleep and the rain was gone, sometime around four in the morning, I sat on the balcony with a pad of the hotel stationery and tried to write a letter to Ken's daughter, the one who'd loved TV cop shows. I wanted to apologize for missing the funeral, tell her how much I'd thought of her father, and explain that he'd been a damn fine detective and that his work had mattered, that what he'd been doing on the day he was murdered had an impact on her world. I sat there for more than an hour, wrote a few poor sentences, and then crumpled the pages in my hand and went back inside.

  * * *

  Chapter Thirty

  Amy and I stayed for a week. We hung out with Joe and sometimes Gena, ate seafood, had drinks of fruit juice and rum, bitched about the heat. All the things you're supposed to do in Florida.

  I checked the office voice mail daily. There was no word about Ken. Many days, I played his last message again. I listened to words I already knew by heart, and I tried to imagine what had provoked them. I had no luck. You rarely do with that approach to detective work. The way it gets done is out on the street. I stayed on the beach.

  On the day before we left, I ended up sitting on a chair outside Joe's hotel, alone, while he and Amy made a run to the store. Gena was coming by for an afternoon cocktail before dinner, and she showed up before they got back and came down to join me. We made small talk for a bit. I found out that while she had lived in other states and, for one year, in Europe, she always came back to Idaho in the end. Both parents were still alive, and she had two sisters; all of them lived within a fifteen-minute drive.

  "So are you going to move to Cleveland or make him move to Idaho—" It was supposed to be a joke, but her pause told me it was a discussion they'd actually had.

  "Maybe either, maybe neither, maybe something completely different," she said.

  "Egypt—" I was still trying to keep it light, because I was caught off guard by the idea that they were this serious.

  "One person moving to join the other is the obvious option," she said, stretching out on the chair beside me and kicking off her sandals, "but there's an element of it that could feel selfish either way, you know— We both have our own lives at home, so to have one person make the sacrifice seems unfair. So we've talked about a compromise. Moving somewhere new to both of us."

  "Oh," I said. Can always count on me for insight.

  She looked over at me, sunglasses shading her eyes. The wind was fanning her brown hair out. "Would I like Cleveland—"

  "Probably not."

  "Really—"

  "You live in a college town in the mountains, right— Well, the city's a change. Most people head the other way. Leave the city for mountains." I waved out at the water. "Or a beach."

  "I lived in New York for seven years. Never minded being in a city. Of course, I was twenty-five then, too."

  I didn't say anything.

  "Either way, it won't be happening overnight," she said. "Joe's not the sort of person who rushes into things."

  That made me laugh. "No, he's not."

  She smiled but looked away from me. "He's worried about you."

  "Doesn't need to be."

  "I couldn't speak to that. I don't know you well enough to say. I do know that he's worried. He's afraid that the way he left was unfair to you. That you're carrying guilt about it when you shouldn't be."

  "I got him shot, Gena. Seems to warrant a small dose of guilt. But that's really not the issue, not anymore. He's happy again, and I'm glad of that. Thrilled."

  "You're not. Happy, I mean."

  "Happy," I said, "seems like a hell of a subjective thing. I'm working on it.

  So is Joe. So is everybody. And I can tell you this—you're good for him. I can see that so clearly, and you have no idea how nice it is. He's been alone for a long time."

  "Had you, though."

  "Yeah, but he never liked my hairstyle as much as yours." She smiled. "There's one thing I'd like you to know." "Yeah—"

  "When we've talked about moving," she said, "and the things that we'd miss the most, just hate the idea of being away from, I talk about my family. Joe talks about you."

  A call from Graham came later that night, and the message he left offered no sense of progress but some news—Joshua Cantrell's family had won a preliminary legal motion to claim the house on Whisper Ridge.

  * * *

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Life, or the lack thereof, always seemed to me like something that had to be established medically, not legally, through beating hearts and functioning brains rather than notarized paperwork. That's not always the case. The judge had ruled that the Cantrells were entitled to post legal notice of Alexandra's presumed death, which would run in a variety of newspapers, and there would be a ninety-day period to contest the claim. Either Alexandra herself could appear, proving it wrong while welcoming the approaches of police, or someone else could bring forward proof of life. If those ninety days passed without either occurrence, the Cantrells could begin maneuvering to claim their share of the estate. Graham's understanding was that they'd have to split the estate with Dominic Sanabria.

  "He probably killed their son," I said when I called him back the next morning, "and now they're going to have to share the money with him—"

  "That's what the law seems to say."

  When we got back to Cleveland, I bought a paper in the airport and flipped through it to the public notice section while we stood beside the luggage carousel. There was the first notice of Alexandra Cantrell, buried amid pages of fine-print legalese. It seemed too quiet a way to announce the end of a life.

  "You should do an article," I told Amy. "If anything's going to produce Alexandra or proof she's alive, it won't be this notice. It'll take more publicity than that."

  She agreed with me, and a day later so did her editor. The story appeared on the following Sunday, front page and above the fold. The TV news picked it up by that evening, and several Associated Press papers around the country ran shortened versions of the "missing, presumed dead" story in the days to come. The story never gathered the national steam I'd hoped for—CNN, talk show features, that sort of thing—but for several weeks, Graham, the newspaper, and the Cantrell legal team wer
e flooded with tips. I called Graham to see if anything was coming of it. Just the tips, he said, most crazy, none credible. If Alexandra was still alive, there was no sign.

  I wrapped up what case work I had left when I got back to the city, then put out a memo to our core clients explaining that Joe and I were stepping aside from field investigations. I referred them to other people in town, brushed aside inquiries, and waited for the outcry of disappointment and anger. It never came. Perry and Pritchard Investigations wasn't the community institution I'd believed it to be, evidently.

  I listened to Ken's message daily for a while. Then, a month after he'd been killed, the voice mail informed me the message would be deleted from the system. It had been there too long, evidently. You couldn't keep it forever. Eventually the computer decided that the time elapsed required the message to go away even if I didn't want it to. By the next morning, it was gone.

  I invested thirty thousand dollars into new equipment for the gym. I paid for a larger phone-book ad and hired a friend of Amy's to create a Web site. I did most of the work on the gym by myself, largely because it kept me busy. When I wasn't working on it, I was working out in it. That summer I took thirty seconds off my time in the mile and added forty pounds to my bench press, got it back up to a max of three hundred and ten pounds, my all-time high and a mark I'd set when I was a rookie. My attention to diet changed, and I started taking amino acids and fish oils and any number of other things that were rumored to have some sort of health benefit. By August, if I wasn't in the best shape of my life, I was damn close to it. My workouts had become feverish, almost obsessive. Do one more rep, Lincoln, run one more mile, take one more pill. You'll be stronger, leaner, faster. You'll have no vulnerability. None.

  I'd been spending more and more nights at Amy's apartment, and one evening I felt her eyes on me and turned to see her watching me with a frown from across the room.

  "What have I done—"

  "Quit your job," she said.

  "This is an unemployment lecture—"

  "That gym won't be enough for you."

  "You don't know that. I could make plenty of money—"

  "Not money, Lincoln. It won't be enough for you. Don't you get that—"

  "You're enough for me," I said.

  "Romantically speaking— I sure as shit better be. If I'm not, then you're a cheating bastard. If you mean I'm enough, period, all you need… that's not true."

  "Actually, it is."

  "Well, it shouldn't be. You're not enough for me."

  I raised my eyebrows. "Gee, thanks. You're a sweetheart tonight."

  "I'm serious. I love you, but you don't define my entire existence, either. You wouldn't want to be around me if you did. So to sit there and tell me that I'm enough for you, that's a lot of pressure, and when you finally realize it's not the truth, I don't want to be the one who gets hurt."

  "I'm not sure I follow your logic there, but I don't intend to hurt you, Amy."

  She came over and kissed me, then leaned back and stood with her hands on my shoulders and looked into my eyes.

  "You just removed a large piece of yourself, and now you're pretending that it was never there. It's been a hell of a thing to watch, trust me. Impressive at times. You're a master of denial, Lincoln, an absolute master—but I'm scared of where it's going to take you."

  She kissed me again then and walked out of the room. I sat and watched her go and thought that I should follow and say more. I didn't know what I would say, though. I really didn't.

  At the end of August, Graham called again, this time to tell me that he finally had his lab results on Joshua Cantrell's grave. The backlog had loosened up, and he'd used Ken's murder as a means to bump his request higher in priority.

  "We got nothing," he said. "No DNA results. Nothing that connects to Harrison, or anybody else. The only DNA they could find was Cantrell's."

  I felt defeat sweep through me, realized just how much hope I'd been holding out.

  "What next—" I said.

  Graham was quiet.

  "You're done—"

  "I'm not done, Linc, but it's a cold case, and without new—"

  "Ken Merriman was murdered in May, Graham. That's not a cold case."

  "That's also not my case. Talk to your boys in Cleveland on that one. I'm sitting here in Pennsylvania with a full caseload and a bunch of supervisors who don't want me spending time in Cleveland. Look, nobody's more disappointed about this than me. I come to a case with one goal—to close it. I haven't done that on this one. I won't deny that, but I also won't bullshit you. My focus has to be out here, where I'm paid to work. I'd love to take Sanabria down, love to take Harrison down, but I can't."

  "Somebody will," I said. "In time."

  "Right," he said, and then neither of us was comfortable with the other's silence, so we said a hurried goodbye and hung up.

  * * *

  Chapter Thirty-two

  The same day Graham gave me the news about the lack of lab results from the grave, he gave it to John Dunbar, who, evidently, had continued his regular calls asking for updates and offering his help. I hadn't heard from Dunbar since I'd asked him to leave my apartment, but at noon on the day after Graham's call he showed up again.

  I was on a ladder in the gym, applying paint to a band around the ceiling I'd decided to make a different color than the rest of the wall. It was an aesthetic effect, completely unnecessary, but I'd decided to do it anyhow, because it was good to stay busy. I was finding all sorts of ways to stay busy.

  Grace told him where to find me, and he came and stood quietly beneath the ladder and watched me paint until I felt his presence and turned and looked down.

  "What are you doing here—" I said.

  "Wanted to buy you a beer."

  "I don't drink in the middle of the day."

  "A cup of coffee, then."

  "I'm off caffeine."

  "A bottle of water."

  He never blinked, just stood with his hands in his pockets and an even stare on his face, watching me. I gave it a moment, and then I sighed and came down off the ladder.

  "Let me rinse out the brush."

  We walked up the street to an Irish pub that had gone in on the corner. Neither of us spoke. Once inside, I went to a table across from the bar and ordered a beer.

  "Thought you didn't drink in the middle of the day," Dunbar said.

  I didn't answer.

  "So you're not happy to see me," he said. "I get it."

  "I just don't know why you came. Why you're not willing to make phone calls instead of personal visits, at least."

  "Tougher to blow me off in person," he said. It was a line straight out of Joe's mouth, one of his guiding principles for detective work—you wore out shoe leather before you burned up the phone lines.

  "I'll give you that much," I said.

  They brought my beer, and he asked for a Jameson and water, and we waited while they poured that and brought it over.

  "I talked to Graham," he said after taking an experimental sip.

  "As did I."

  "Pretty disappointing news."

  "It was."

  "It'll go back to where it was twelve years ago now," he said. "Go back to nobody looking or even thinking about looking. It'll be unsolved, and forgotten."

  I drank some beer.

  "Ken Merriman's case is open," he said. "You talked to anybody on that—"

  "Not lately."

  "I have. I was calling a couple times a week. Guy I've talked to down there got tired of it, though. Asked me to stop. Said he'd let me know if they got an update. So in my professional opinion, that one's moving along about as well as the Cantroll investigation. Which is to say, it's not."

  "That could be an unfair assessment."

  "You think—"

  "The rangers aren't bad at what they do, Dunbar. Give them time."

  "Time." He nodded and turned the glass with his fingers. "Twelve years of time, that's what we've had on Cantrell. I d
on't want to see Ken Merriman's case go another twelve."

  "I know it."

  "But you're not doing anything to help," he said, "and I don't understand that. Somebody else, sure, they'd feel hopeless and useless and I'd get that. I've read about you though. I've talked to people. Your reputation as a detective is extraordinary, Perry. Good instincts, they tell me, good experience, a real natural—but what people talk about most— It's how damned dogged you've been. How determined. How relentless."

  I blew out a breath, looked away.

  "I see you've closed your office," he said, "and now it's the middle of the week and you're in the gym, painting. Is that the new you—"

  "What if it is—"

  "I'd say that's a shame. I'd say that's as much of a shame as anything I've heard in a long time, because the world is full of evil, and there aren't enough people who can do something about it."

  He paused. "Dominic Sanabria is a killer. He has gone unpunished for that. He sits around in his fancy house drinking afternoon cocktails and smiling about it. I cannot let that last."

  When I didn't answer, a glow of anger came into his face, and he took a deep breath and looked away, as if he couldn't stand the sight of me.

  "You remember the kid Sanabria killed, Lamarca—" he said after a while. "I told you about him. It's the case we had him for at the motel if the son of a bitch had only rented his own room."

  "I remember."

  "The reason he was killed— Sanabria thought the kid was talking to an informant. Thought he was. In truth, he wasn't, but that didn't matter to Sanabria. When Joseph Lamarca's body was found, seven of his fingers were broken. Smashed. Bone showing."

  It was quiet. He said, "That's what he did to someone he thought betrayed him, Perry. Then Joshua Cantrell. Then Ken Merriman. It all goes back to the same place, every single one of those bodies goes back to the damned motel room that he didn't rent. It's about atonement. You bet your ass I'm looking for it, buddy. You better believe it."