Over Tumbled Graves

by Jess Walter

  TUCKER: The purpose of this meeting is not to debate the merits of these points, Sergeant Dupree, nor is it to hear your quite impressive range of profanities, but to provide you with the rationale used in deciding to replace you as lead investigator.

  DUPREE: Replace me? So what do I do now?

  BRANCH: That’s up to you, Alan. If you want to continue as an investigator on the task force, under a probationary period—

  DUPREE: What about this one? Provided the public with false and misleading information at a crime scene? What’s that?

  TUCKER: On 28 April, while responding to a homicide at the home of Leonard Ryan’s uncle, you in fact told a television reporter that the victim had been castrated and that his heart had been extracted from his body.

  DUPREE: [Unintelligible]

  TUCKER: Sergeant, could you speak into the microphone?

  DUPREE: I said [expletive deleted] Spivey that little [expletive deleted].

  BRANCH: Come on, Alan. Sit down.

  DUPREE: So who’s taking over the task force?

  BRANCH: Alan, I don’t think—

  DUPREE: Are you bringing someone in from outside? Or are you going to promote someone? Pollard?

  TUCKER: We’re promoting Detective Spivey—

  DUPREE: He’s [unintelligible] ten years old!

  BRANCH: He’s thirty-one, Alan.

  DUPREE: He’s an idiot.

  BRANCH: Spivey didn’t come to us, Alan.

  TUCKER: We asked him for an assessment of your performance and McDaniel likes him. McDaniel will work with him.

  DUPREE: I thought I was training him.

  BRANCH: Frankly, Alan, I had hoped when I paired the two of you that you might benefit as much from his recent training—

  DUPREE: What?

  BRANCH: —especially his expertise in the areas of evidence recovery and forensics.

  DUPREE: I don’t…This is…

  TUCKER: Sergeant Dupree, the task force’s failure to apprehend Mr. Ryan or, quite frankly, to provide enough evidence to prosecute him if he is arrested would be enough to replace you at this point. Those things coupled with your failure to—

  DUPREE: You don’t understand. This guy Ryan, he’s like a black hole, like this concentrated darkness, like a top—

  TUCKER: Time will be provided at the end of this meeting for you to defend your behavior—

  BRANCH: —performance.

  TUCKER: Right, your performance.

  DUPREE: I don’t know what to…I’ve never been fired before.

  BRANCH: I told you, no one is being fired.

  DUPREE: You give all you have to a job and you wake up one morning and everything [unintelligible]—

  TUCKER: Detective Spivey has made it clear you can continue with the task force if you like.

  DUPREE: This is hilarious.

  BRANCH: Or you can return to the Major Crimes Unit and your previous assignment.

  DUPREE: No. No. If you don’t want me on this thing, then put me back in a car.

  BRANCH: Alan, let’s not make this worse than it is.

  DUPREE: I’ve apparently made it as bad as it can be. No, you want me off this case, I’ll just ride out the rest of my time on patrol.

  TUCKER: Sergeant Dupree. Sit down. I promise, you will have time for rebuttal.

  DUPREE: Put me back on the street. You guys win. Motion passed. Vote is unanimous. Let’s move on to new business.

  TUCKER: Put the microphone down, Sergeant.

  DUPREE: Point of parliamentary procedure. Motion for consent decree. Meeting is adjourned.

  BRANCH: Alan, come on—

  DUPREE: Where does this thing lead?

  TUCKER: Sergeant Dupree, put the microphone cord down.

  DUPREE: Ah, there it is—

  [Transmission ceased]

  30

  “Okay, now apply the models of pre- and post-offense behavior to your guy.”

  Caroline was lost. “I’m sorry.”

  “The models.” Blanton gritted his teeth and turned away from the steering wheel briefly. “The models. What were we just talking about?”

  “Organized and disorganized crime scenes.”

  “That’s right.”

  Caroline concentrated, tapping her pencil against the yellow legal pad as Blanton cornered in his rental car and McDonald’s wrappers flew from one side of the car to the other. Curtis Blanton seemed more energetic today, and also more patient, although patience on him came across as somewhat forced and manipulative, pushing her to the things she needed to know. His speech today was flat and gave no hint of Cajun inflection or dialect. He also seemed absentminded, a trait that didn’t exactly complement his tendency to drive like someone on speed. The combination was like taking a college class from a stoned professor while trying to elude the police.

  “Remember this when you go back to Spokane,” he said, his pronunciation of the city perfect once again. “Disorganization is different from impulse. Your guy could be impulsive and still be organized. The tools, for instance, can be in his car at all times, showing a planning stage, while the predatory behavior itself—the choosing of the victim; in other words, the hunting—can still be spur-of-the-moment.”

  The light changed to yellow and Blanton stepped on the gas until it became clear the car ahead of him was planning to stop. He stabbed at the brakes, and soda cans and McDonald’s trash flew forward as the car squealed to a stop.

  Caroline ignored his driving. “I’d say he is both organized and impulsive.”

  “How is he organized?”

  “There seems to be a preparation stage. He stores the bodies, washing the hands with bleach, breaking off the fingernails. And then, of course, he puts money in the girls’ hands. And he covers them with branches and debris.”

  “Good. What about impulsive behavior?”

  “Well, when we find a body, he seems to need to replace it with another.”

  “Right.” Blanton looked over at her. “Good. That is the key behavior. The replacement of bodies. I saw that with my guy in the Pacific Coast Highway case. Killing and then storing and then moving the bodies when he needs them. These bodies are his tools, his chess pieces. That’s what the fingernails and the money is about. Your guy feels a need to communicate through these bodies.”

  She winced every time Blanton called the killer “your guy.” She supposed that was partly because of the fact that she felt a very real responsibility for Lenny Ryan, for blowing the drug bust in the park and allowing him to escape.

  The light changed and Blanton was quickly around the cautious driver and had the car flying again. “So why does your guy leave forty bucks on these women?”

  “So the world knows these are hookers he’s killing.”

  “And why does he replace the bodies?”

  “He wants people to see what he’s done?”

  “People?” Blanton ran the car up over the curb and into a small parking lot. “What people?”

  “I don’t know. Everyone.”

  The funeral home was a two-story, white building with huge pillars in front and two hearses parked bumper-to-bumper along the side. Blanton parked next to the hearses and they climbed out. He looked over the car at her. “Think about which people he wants to notice.”

  Caroline followed Blanton past the hearses to a narrow side staircase that led to a basement door. He beat on the door with his open hand. A droopy-eyed white man in his fifties, wearing a long, shiny gray apron and matching shiny gloves, pushed open the heavy door. They followed him into the dark basement hallway.

  “Hey, Curty,” said the man. “How you been?”

  “Hey, Russell.” Blanton dropped right back into his wet delta drawl. “This here’s Agent Mabry. Specialist from Washington.”

  Caroline looked curiously over at Blanton, wondering why he would imply she was an FBI agent, but he didn’t meet her eyes.

  Russell gave her a slight bow. “It is my pleasure to meet you and let me say you a pretty lady for a
gub’ment man.”

  “Russell’s that rare gen-a-man who can be embalmin’ one minute and flirtin’ the very next,” Blanton said.

  “Ren’ssance man,” said Russell.

  “The ME here yet?”

  “No, sir,” Russell said. “He called and say he be ’bout an hour yet. It’s just you and me. And the lady, of course.”

  They followed Russell through a metal door into an ice-cold embalming room, with two deep, stainless-steel gurneys wheeled up against the wall. What looked like an old reclining barber chair leaned against the opposite wall, and Caroline had turned to nod at the old man sitting in it when she realized the man reclining in the chair was dead. He was naked, covered with a thin blanket, everything about him pinched and wrinkled and pale. The fingers on his left hand were clenched in a rigor fist, but the right hand was reaching out, like he’d died shaking hands. The fingers had apparently stiffened in perfect position to hold a Coca-Cola.

  Blanton followed her eyes. “Russell, you-all…uh…your friend, there.”

  “Oh geez. M’ cupholder. I’m sorry.” Russell walked over and took the Coke from the dead man’s hand.

  All three of them stared at the dead man still, and Russell clucked with his tongue and took a drink of his Coke. “Eighty-one years old. Died in his sleep night ’fore last. We should all be so lucky, eh Curty?” Russell pushed the dead man’s hand down but it popped right back up. Russell ran his hand over the man’s rooster hair. “I gotta help these nice people, here, Mr. Beauchamp. I’ll be with you in jus’ a minute.”

  Caroline tried to make eye contact with Blanton but he was looking at Mr. Beauchamp with a cocked head, staring into the dead man’s empty eyes. He noticed Caroline watching him and shuffled his feet. “I can’t remember the last time I saw someone who died of old age,” Blanton whispered.

  Russell left Mr. Beauchamp and shuffled over to another door. “You wanna wait for that ME then?”

  “Naw,” Blanton said. “Ain’t gonna hurt nothin’ if we just take a little look,” He turned to Caroline. “If you wanna wait out here…”

  “I’m fine,” Caroline said.

  Russell offered them each some VapoRub and they spread it on their upper lips, beneath their noses, to combat the smell. They went through another metal door to a smaller room, with a large stainless-steel tub in the center of the room and rust-colored streaks leading to a drain in the floor. The body was in the tub, covered with a plastic sheet. Even with the Vicks on her lip the smell choked Caroline, reminded her of the formaldehyde and decay of her college biology lab.

  “I don’t guess this is going to do much for my insomnia,” Caroline said quietly.

  Blanton turned and gave her a strange, understanding smile, and she wondered what his dreams must look like.

  “Girl was in the water at least two days,” Russell said. “Didn’t bloat so much, which is the su’prisin’ thing with the heat and all, but then she jus’ float along, right beneath the surface and soak up half the damn lake. Weigh t’other side of two hundred pound when they finally fished her out.”

  Blanton pulled on a pair of rubber gloves and offered another pair to Caroline but she shook her head no. Russell and Blanton stepped toward the body, but Caroline stayed back a step. The plastic sheet was pulled away and Caroline watched Blanton for a reaction, but saw none. She looked past Blanton to the girl’s feet—one of which was still contained in a tennis shoe. A Reebok. An old one. Like the kind Caroline used to wear to her aerobics class.

  “Excuse me,” Caroline said. She turned and left the room and walked to the embalming room. She sat down in a chair with her back to Mr. Beauchamp, pulled out her notebook, and continued making notes of her conversation with Blanton.

  Blanton and Russell were in with the girl for about ten minutes. When they returned, Blanton peeling off his rubber gloves, Russell finishing his Coke, they both seemed embarrassed. Caroline could tell they’d been talking about her, and she felt as if she’d flunked some test by leaving the room, as if she were no longer the specialist from Washington, D.C., but just some squeamish girl from Washington State.

  “I apologize for my insensitivity earlier, Miss Mabry,” Russell said. “I forget myself down here, sometimes.”

  “No apology necessary,” Caroline said. She turned to Blanton and tried to speak the way he would. “Not your guy.”

  “No,” Blanton said, the drawl put away again. “No signs of sexual assault or violence. There was enough water in her lungs to wash a car. She just drowned. The family doesn’t want an autopsy, ’cause they don’t want to know what drugs she was on.”

  “So there won’t be an autopsy?”

  “That’s up to the medical examiner.”

  Russell walked them to the door and bowed good-bye to Caroline. Blanton was quiet while they walked to the car.

  She sat down and picked up her yellow legal pad where she’d left it on the floor of the car. Blanton turned the key to start the car, but then turned to face her. “Ms. Mabry, have you considered getting off that case in your city?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “No one will blame you. And they’ll find your guy without you. But there’s a very good reason I don’t see very many women investigators on cases like this. It’s not natural, standing over the bodies of women who have been raped and murdered and even drowned. But if you can’t face up to it…”

  Caroline interrupted him. “Did you read about the kid I tried to save?”

  “I’m not implying that you can’t do the job…”

  “That’s exactly what you were implying.” Caroline felt some need to explain herself. “The kid I tried to save, the kid who was selling drugs to Lenny Ryan, did you read about that in the report?”

  Blanton sighed, turned forward, and shifted the car. He began driving away from the funeral home. “Yes, of course. On the dam.”

  “Right. His hand hit mine and for just a second, I thought I had him, but actually he was pulling me.” She felt a chill just describing it. “And I…I tried to hold him. But maybe I let go. Maybe I was too scared by the river.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “I don’t know. I thought I did everything I could. But your mind won’t let it go, plays it in all these different ways. You start to wonder. I mean, they never recovered the body. I think of that kid in the water all this time, and I feel terrible. And I think of what would’ve happened if he’d pulled me with him.”

  Caroline jerked her head toward the funeral home. “Back there, when he pulled the sheet off, I could see by her shoe that she wasn’t killed by your guy.”

  “Her shoe?”

  “You said he poses the bodies. He’s a perfectionist. He’s not going to leave one shoe on. And I guess the truth…” She sighed. “The truth is that I just didn’t need to see another body, Mr. Blanton, especially a drowning victim. My dreams are specific enough.” She turned to look out the window. “Now if you think that makes me weak…”

  They drove in silence, Caroline staring out her window as they passed grand homes with dark vines climbing the gated walls and wrought-iron porches.

  “Did he watch you?”

  She turned back. “Hmm?”

  “Your killer. Mr. Ryan. Did he watch you try to save the young drug dealer?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I never thought about it.”

  “Well, if he did, what do you think he felt, watching you do that?”

  Caroline tried to imagine what he was proposing, but her thoughts were like a dense fog. “I guess I don’t follow—”

  “You said he gave you a choice. Arrest him or save the boy. Okay, after that, you don’t think he watched you try to save that dealer? And if he did watch that, you don’t think he felt something?”

  Caroline tried to picture herself from Ryan’s vantage point on the other side of the footbridge, looking down, seeing her hanging by the catwalk, swinging by her legs while Burn’s body slipped over the foaming edge of the dam.


  “Your guy is very distinctive. I have to tell you, when I read the report, I was somewhat confused, Ms. Mabry. The combination of behaviors he exhibits is unlike any serial murderer I’ve encountered, or rather, like many of them. The fingernails and the money, the preparation of the bodies, the movement of them, the tokenism, the changing fantasy, sometimes posing, sometimes acting out; the only thing that doesn’t change is the rage. He nearly breaks their necks with his hands and then he shoots them. That sort of overkill, Ms. Mabry, is a sign of great anger, a tremendous urge for retaliation.”

  After not sleeping all night, Caroline felt sleepy, at least two steps behind.

  “Crimes like this are committed along a psychological continuum,” Blanton said, running his hand along the dashboard. “At one end is excitation. Sex. At the other end is pure anger, retaliation against a symbolic victim. So where does your guy fall?”

  When Caroline didn’t answer, he continued.

  “In none of his murders has he left any semen. That, in itself, is notable. Whatever excitation is present early on quickly becomes retaliation. Rage. Your Mr. Ryan was in love with a prostitute. So he longs for prostitutes. But when he went to prison, she returned to being a whore, to sleeping with other men, and he hates her for that. He hates whores and he longs for whores. He couldn’t save his girlfriend and now these other whores can’t be saved either. And at some point when he’s with them, he knows they will go off to sleep with other men. And he can’t take that.