by Jess Walter
She was going crazy, looking for significance in every movement, every utterance, drawing lines between things that weren’t connected. And worst of all, she’d begun to expect reasons and patterns beneath the behavior of people. That could be dangerous for a police officer, to start thinking the world was like a children’s book, to start believing that good would be rewarded and evil punished.
Caroline tossed her bag inside the car, suddenly aware of the darkness all around her, the contrast between this shadowed side street and the garish lights from the rows of Chinese restaurants and dive bars on East Sprague.
Someone was watching her. She felt it before she heard it—across the alley, a soft footfall, a crunching, a shoe on broken blacktop, someone trying to step carefully. She turned, but the alley was shadowed and dark and Caroline couldn’t see inside, even when she shielded her eyes against the lights on Sprague. She reached into the bag, fumbled for her handgun, and tucked it into her waistband. Then she stepped into the road and crossed halfway into the shadows, recalling that day in the park, the way she ran away from Lenny Ryan and toward the doomed Burn. In the center of the street her eyes began to adjust and she could see into the shadows, forty feet away, a man turn and walk with purpose back into the alley.
“Hey,” she called, and he began walking faster, past garbage cans, the tongue of a loading dock. She began running and entered the mouth of the alley as he reached the other end, and even though she knew this was wrong, Caroline hurried along the narrow and rough pavement, fully aware that she should return to her car and use her phone to call for help, and aware, too, that the man she was following was not some subconscious reaction to stress, some anxious trick of her eyes. No, she was certain now. It was him. She was chasing Lenny Ryan.
17
By 10 P.M., the picture Dupree had in his mind was larger, if not yet any clearer. Pollard had run Ryan’s photo past families and friends of the three victims and had found nothing. Dupree checked to see if any of the victims lived in Northern California but that was another dead end. They checked Burn’s case files and Melling’s pawnshop records against the names of the dead hookers. Nothing.
As for Ryan himself, the caliber of weapon in the three prostitute deaths didn’t match the caliber from Melling’s shooting. There were no credit cards or rent payments or anything that established his whereabouts after leaving prison two months ago. His probation report indicated he went to just one meeting and then disappeared. No trail of him in Spokane until he shoved Burn over the bridge. No fingerprints or semen samples on the dead women to compare to Ryan. In essence, there was nothing.
The job was like that. Information trickles in so slowly, you begin to obsess over isolated details at the exclusion of all the rest. Take for instance what had happened two weeks earlier, when the lab prelims came back and Dupree found that two of the victims had similar traces of chicken sandwiches in their stomachs and he started imagining the killer waiting outside a certain restaurant or buying them chicken sandwiches before he killed them. And that detail became primary, sending him spinning in pointless, time-consuming directions, until he found himself casing out restaurants and reading packages of frozen chicken breasts. In the end, the chicken turned out to be just an entree from the menu of a restaurant on East Sprague where hookers routinely met late at night. So from that flurry of singular information and action emerged a detail that was meaningless and capricious, amounting to nothing.
In truth, things didn’t always connect, or if they did, the point connecting two separate facts might very well be the least important property of each fact.
Coincidence, in other words. Hardly a thing to contemplate for most people, whose experience with coincidence was usually pleasant. Dream about your old eighth grade teacher and the next day bump into her at the store. What a nice coincidence. But to someone investigating a crime? There are no “nice” coincidences. Coincidence is the devil. Some cops—Spivey was the type—pretend they are immune to coincidence, that every bit of information is equal and that investigating is the same as finding truth. But Dupree knew better.
When you get a break like today, with Melling, the pawnshop owner, pointing to that picture of Lenny Ryan and moaning about hookers, you chased it with a kind of superstitious caution. Because a guy like Lenny Ryan has paid for his share of sex and dope and these worlds will certainly intersect, but you don’t know where; you only know separate facts: the fact of Lenny Ryan showing up in town and killing at least two people and trying to kill a third; the fact of Lenny Ryan asking questions about where to find hookers and talking about a dead hooker. Across the ledger was this man killing prostitutes. You look for intersection in the time frame. In the brutish confidence. In dates and blood samples and credit card receipts and twenty-dollar bills.
But these two independent sets of facts may never intersect. Or maybe they bump up against each other but it doesn’t mean a thing. Or maybe there are other details connecting them, things you know, but which aren’t on the surface anymore, points of true intersection, shadowed, hidden away. An investigation is like trying to remember something without knowing its nature. It was the application of analysis to intuition, trying to see a smell. And that process changed a person, dulled his sense of the present, of the living, of the fabric of a life, of a marriage, even.
They pay a person to piece together lives and pretty soon he begins to piece his own, to see the dark motives, sitting up at the bar, wondering, “What happened to me?”
“What is it?” Pollard asked.
Dupree blinked away the trance. “Hmm?”
“You were staring,” Pollard said. “It was kinda creepy.”
Dupree checked his watch. “It was…I was thinking…” He stretched his arms, and his eyes narrowed as he took in Pollard. “Remember that Italian place we used to go to a couple years back? You and me and Debbie and Natalie.”
Pollard considered for a moment. Then his face softened and he smiled. “Yeah. On Hamilton. Geez. I haven’t been there in…shoot, years.” He checked his watch. “You think they’re still open?”
“I’m not talking about now. I was just trying to remember that night.”
Pollard settled into his chair. “Yeah, that was fun. Debbie’s a hoot.”
“Natalie, too.”
They smiled at the old habit of complimenting a guy’s wife like she was his car. Gentle, meaningless words, they were not meant to condescend, but it was impossible not to read into them the short significance of marriage in their lives.
“I was trying to remember what we were laughing about.”
Pollard wrinkled his face again. He stared at the desk, then looked up. “I don’t…geez, Alan, I must be getting old. I don’t even remember us laughing.”
“How long after that—”
“A year,” he said before Dupree could finish the question about his divorce.
That dinner was a singular fact: They’d had fun. Now add the singular fact of Pollard’s marriage: Within a year it would be over. It wasn’t just coincidences, but also aberrations. How could you know, when you stood so close to something, if you were looking at a structural flaw or a harmless crack? He hadn’t talked to Debbie since six. He was now five hours late for dinner, three hours later than his last estimate of eight o’clock.
Pollard stood. “Let’s get a beer. Maybe it’ll come back to me.”
“Yeah. Okay.” Dupree put loose sheets back into file folders, file folders back into boxes, boxes back under his desk. For a moment, he fantasized that if he were more organized at work he might be a better man at home, that his problems with Debbie were organizational and not structural. Maybe he just needed to remember more, to be conscientious. His anniversary was coming up, and he knew she wanted a mother’s ring. What were the kids’ birthstones? Hell, when were their birthdays?
The thought of birthstones brought him back to jewelry. He looked up at Pollard. “Lenny Ryan came into the pawnshop for some hooker’s bracelet.”
> “That’s what the man said.”
“And he has the ticket from the dead hooker, yeah?”
“But we checked Melling’s records,” Pollard said. Indeed, they had gone over all of Melling’s receipts and hadn’t found the names of any of the three dead prostitutes.
But Dupree was already up and dragging over the boxes of receipts. See, that was another thing that happened. You tried to connect these things by focusing on one set of details and you forgot the other set. They had looked through the receipts for the names of dead hookers. But they hadn’t looked for bracelets. Dupree handed one box of receipts to Melling, took the other for himself, and began paging through them.
Pollard took his box reluctantly. “What am I looking for?” he asked.
“Jewelry,” Dupree said, without looking up from his work.
“Jewelry.”
“That’s right.”
“At a pawnshop.”
“Right.”
“Are you nuts? There might be five hundred receipts for jewelry. And twice as many without receipts.” Pollard was right. If Melling’s shop was anything like the other 125 pawnshops in Spokane, then much of his merchandise was stolen. This was especially true of jewelry, the first thing burglars stole, since it was easy to carry, and the first thing pawned, since it was rarely marked with serial numbers. Pawnshops were required to keep detailed books, so if a pawnshop owner like Melling thought for a minute that a piece was stolen he’d buy it under the table with no receipt, or fill in the receipt with bogus information to protect his client. Melling’s receipts were as vague as he could make them, just a number and a word: “jewelry” or “electronics” or “coins.” Many of the names were obviously fakes—Smiths and Johnsons and one Dr. Seuss.
They stacked the jewelry receipts on the desk between them, looking over the names one by one and comparing them to the known aliases, addresses, or phone numbers of the victims. Dupree had resigned himself to two more hours at the office when he pulled just his tenth receipt, checked it against the victims’ aliases, and then set it down behind him. But he stopped, turned, picked it up again, and stared at the word “bracelet” and a name he never expected to see. Shelly Nordling. Dupree stood.
“What?” Pollard asked.
He walked to a file cabinet, opened it, and found a large folder labeled “Unrelated Cases”—cases of unsolved prostitute murders, assaults, and disappearances from the last ten years in Spokane. He grabbed the last file. “Nordling, Shelly, DOB 9-16-72. Homicide victim, 8 Feb.” Dupree had gone over this case a dozen times, like he’d gone over other unsolved murders and disappearances of women in the city. But he’d seen nothing to connect Shelly Nordling to the three more recent prostitute deaths. The details were completely different. The kind of details that serial killers simply didn’t change, for instance, the fact of hiding bodies. Such details weren’t coincidental, but were basic. Shelly Nordling had been slashed across the throat with her own knife, apparently after an argument with a john or a pimp. The latest three had been strangled and then shot. Shelly Nordling had been dumped in an alley, with almost no thought. The latest three had been prepared, some of their fingernails removed and forty dollars pressed into their hands. The bodies had been planted carefully in shallow graves and covered with branches. So their killers had to be different. Didn’t they?
Dupree read the file, sliding each page across to Pollard. Almost four months earlier, in February, a woman’s body was found in an alley, her throat cut, no fingerprints or other evidence to lead to her killer. Small, manageable traces of methamphetamine, cocaine, and prescription drugs were found in her system, along with signs of sexual activity, but no signs of rape. No skin was found beneath her fingernails, only some cotton clothing and some carpet fibers. The theory was robbery or an argument with a john. For a long time they had trouble identifying the woman except by her street name, Pills. Pills hadn’t been seen by anyone on the street for about a week. She was a leech, a street hooker who stayed with men for long periods of time, weeks sometimes, trading sex for a place to sleep, meals, and drug money. Unlike most hookers, Shelly Nordling had no file in Washington State. No record or fingerprints. No family or friends came forward, and so Jane Doe 22 sat in the morgue for a month until some woman remembered she had been holding a box of Pills’s belongings.
That’s how investigators found her, by opening the box and finding an old California driver’s license for a girl named Shelly Nordling. She turned out to be from Richmond, in the Bay Area, but they found no family there, just the Nordlings, foster parents who hadn’t seen Shelly for years.
And that was it. Dupree stared at a photocopy of the driver’s license. Again he found himself staring at a partial picture, looking for that point of intersection, knowing full well there might not be one, that perhaps Lenny Ryan had come to Spokane looking for Shelly Nordling only to find she had been killed in a robbery or a squabble over payment and that was that. When Pollard was done reading he looked up, trying to catch up with Dupree, who’d been a page ahead of him but seemed even further now.
For his part, Dupree couldn’t stop staring at the photocopy of the driver’s license. In the photo, Shelly Nordling had straight dark hair, to her shoulders, and round eyes set far apart. She was what he would call cute. Dupree set the driver’s license on the desk and reached for the clipboard where he kept his copy of the photograph of Lenny Ryan and Ryan’s dead uncle from San Francisco. He’d forgotten the young girl in the photo, her straight black hair and round eyes, standing between Ryan and his uncle. He turned the picture to show Pollard. It was Shelly Nordling.
Pollard was just now catching up. “Ryan was in prison when she was killed,” Pollard said.
“Right,” Dupree said.
“She’s his girlfriend before he goes to prison? While he’s inside, she moves to Spokane, someone kills her, and it makes him mad?”
“Maybe.”
“And then he starts killing hookers too, because he’s so mad?”
“Maybe.” Dupree opened another file, the detective’s notes from the investigation of Shelly Nordling’s death, and ran his finger down a column of phone numbers until he found the one he wanted and tapped in the number. When the man answered, Dupree apologized for calling so late. Mr. Nordling assured him he wasn’t sleeping. “I’m a night owl.” He made it sound like an affliction.
“There are some other cases that we’re investigating that may have some connection to Shelly’s death,” Dupree said. “I need to ask you a few more questions.”
“All we know is what you guys tell us.”
“I understand. I was just wondering if you knew whether Shelly had a boyfriend in prison,” he said. “A man named Ryan.”
“Boy, I just don’t know. We really hadn’t been in contact with her for…I don’t know, six years. I’m sorry. She didn’t have a whole lot of use for us.” Dupree set his pen down and was about to find a way out of the conversation when Mr. Nordling added, “It’s just like I told the other guy.”
“The other guy?”
“Yeah. The detective up here.”
“A detective contacted you about Shelly?”
“Yeah. Couple months ago.”
“What did he want?”
“He just said he was working on a case that she’d been involved in. You have to understand, when she was living up here, it was fairly common to have the police looking for her about this or that.” Mr. Nordling laughed bitterly. “Speaking of which, you guys should communicate better with the cops up here. He didn’t even know she was dead.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, he just seemed surprised. Really surprised, like he was taking it personal. I asked if I’d screwed up his investigation and he said, ‘Yeah.’ Then he asked if I knew anything else, so I gave him the shoe box of stuff you guys sent…her belongings, or what was left of them. He took the box…and that was about it.”
The shoe box she’d left with a friend. “Do you remember wh
at was in the box?”
“Coupla earrings. A parking ticket. Stuff like that. I remember when it arrived, Theresa just cried and cried. It’s hard to believe that’s all that’s left of a person, you know? Just a box of crap, things you might toss on your dresser or in your glove box—scraps of paper that don’t mean a thing, you know, in the end?”
“This is important. When did this detective come by?”
“Mmm. I guess it was March. Early. Maybe middle of March.”
Dupree locked eyes with Pollard across the desk. “Do you remember,” he asked, “if there was a pawn ticket in the box?”
“Yeah,” Nordling said. “That’s the kind of stuff. Exactly. I think she’d pawned some jewelry or something like that.”
“Anything else you remember from the box?”
“Prescription. A pair of gloves. A couple scraps of paper with numbers on ’em.”
“Phone numbers?”
“Yeah, or pager numbers maybe.”
“You remember the numbers or names?”
“Nah.”
Dupree reached for the photo of Lenny Ryan and Shelly Nordling on the pier in San Francisco. “Mr. Nordling, I’m going to fax a photograph of a man to the police there in Richmond, and tomorrow a detective will contact you, and I wonder if you’d look at some pictures for us and see if you recognize the man who came to see you.”
“You mean he wasn’t a cop? Then what was he?”
Dupree shifted the phone. “I’m not exactly sure.”
18
The alley opened into the parking lot and back entrance of an adult bookstore, a chipped-brick building with a handful of cars parked alongside. Caroline caught a glimpse of a man in a dark jacket going inside and ran to the door behind him, emerging in a narrow hall as dark as the alley outside. She stood between racks of shrink-wrapped magazines and paperbacks with lurid covers. A handful of men stood hunched in the chest-high racks that filled the place, shoulders pulled in on themselves. As Caroline looked around, she heard the bell on the front door and hurried down the narrow aisles, past a wall of sexual devices and porn videos, locking eyes with an older man in a tie and jacket, who chewed so hard on his bottom lip the skin was white beneath his teeth.
