Over Tumbled Graves

by Jess Walter

  36

  Caroline was flipping through the channels when she saw footage of a swamp on CNN. Three or four channels later, she realized what she’d seen and flipped back. A perky news anchor was saying that a suspect had been arrested in the murders of as many as nineteen women in New Orleans, in the deadliest serial murder case in the last three years. The suspect was the custodian at a high school in the Lakeshore neighborhood. He had been caught on a security camera stealing photography supplies from a high school yearbook class. The high school principal sat the custodian down to question him about the darkroom supplies and the man had shocked the principal by suddenly confessing to being a serial murderer. Just like that.

  Curled up on the couch, Caroline marveled at the ironic sense it made. For all Blanton’s efforts and expertise, a high school principal accidentally catches the guy. She opened her briefcase and found Blanton’s office number, grabbed the phone and punched in the number. Her call went straight to his voice mail. She considered paging him. She checked her watch. It was almost eleven; it’d be closing on one in the morning there. While she amused herself thinking about what Blanton might make of a 1 A.M. page, the recorded message ended and his voice mail beeped.

  “Oh,” she said, “hey, Mr. Blanton. This is Caroline Mabry with the Spokane Police Department. I just wanted to”—she started to say “congratulate,” but thought better of it—“I just called to say I was just glad you caught your guy. I guess that’s all.”

  She set the phone down and a minute later, it rang.

  “Am I crazy or did you just call to congratulate me?” Blanton sounded deadened or drunk, like the first night they’d spoken. Caroline was sorry she’d called.

  “I didn’t know what else to say. Are you in the office?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What are you doing there?”

  “Sitting.”

  “At one in the morning?”

  “Is it? Well, I guess that explains why the office is so empty.”

  “Why didn’t you answer my call if you’re just sitting there by yourself?”

  “I didn’t feel like talking.”

  “But you called me back?”

  “I wanted to know what I was being congratulated for.”

  “I thought you might be happy that he got caught.”

  “I had some drinks with some of the detectives earlier. They certainly seem happy. Perhaps you’d like to talk to one of them?”

  Caroline noticed there was no more trace of New Orleans twang, as if now that the crime had been solved, he could put that tool away for next time. His voice was flat and hollow and its bitterness made her feel cold, like the first time they’d met.

  After a short silence, he sighed. “So, aren’t you going to ask how my profile stacked up against the real thing?”

  “How did your profile stack up against the real thing?”

  “Fair in most respects. But I overestimated intelligence again. I had this guy as a college graduate. He’s an imbecile, a fuckin’ janitor. It’s a wonder he didn’t kill himself.”

  She didn’t know what to say, and again there was silence on her end.

  “So, aren’t you going to ask me if I’m troubled by that fact?” he asked.

  “Are you troubled by that fact?”

  “Good question. Yes, I am. It troubles me that this guy could be so much more interesting in the abstract than in reality. Makes me wonder what I’m looking for. I seem to need these guys to be formidable and, I don’t know…evil. This one’s just broken.”

  “You interviewed him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s he like?” Caroline was surprised at how quiet her voice was.

  Blanton answered as quietly. “Like every one of these sick fucks. Unremarkable. Just over forty. White. Short, dark hair. Just…forgettable, you know? Forgettable.” He sighed, and she heard him take a drink. “What about you, Ms. Mabry? Do we need to send this high school administrator to Spow-kaine to solve your crime?”

  “It couldn’t hurt,” Caroline said. “Although we did get a profiler finally.”

  “Who’d you get?”

  “McDaniel.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “I didn’t. The lead investigator brought him in.”

  “McDaniel?” Blanton sounded engaged, the way he’d been the afternoon they saw the drowning victim and Blanton had clued her in about how Lenny Ryan’s fantasy involved her. “Christ, Jeff McDaniel couldn’t profile himself!”

  “What is it with you two?”

  Blanton was quiet for a moment. “What do you mean?”

  “He practically leaves the room when your name comes up.”

  For the first time Caroline could remember, Blanton seemed unsure of what to say. “I retired first and got all the good TV gigs.” He paused and seemed suddenly concerned. “Why? What has he told you?”

  “Nothing. I’m just wondering if he is going to be any help to us.”

  “McDaniel? Nah. He’s completely Freudian. Guy will spend the next six months figuring out that your guy had a fucked-up childhood.”

  Caroline smiled to herself. “He does talk a lot about the offender’s parents moving and being an outsider in school. Torturing pets, stuff like that.”

  “I always thought McDaniel would be a great help if the killer was nine.”

  They were both quiet for a moment.

  “I asked my guy here about the fifteen-year-old girl,” Blanton said finally.

  Caroline didn’t say anything.

  “Says he doesn’t remember picking the girl up.”

  “Is he just screwing with you?”

  “I don’t know. He volunteered to take a lie detector test on it. And he confessed to everything else. But not her. Not the girl.”

  “Copycat?”

  “No. It’s him. Same DNA, prints. Same everything. I think he can justify the others in his simple mind, the crack whores and speed freaks. But I don’t know, maybe even he can’t imagine what kind of person would do that to a fifteen-year-old girl.”

  And then, quietly, Blanton added, “So how come I can imagine it?”

  Caroline didn’t answer and he filled the quiet with a deep breath.

  “We weren’t quite right about the mall, by the way,” Blanton said. “The mall with the cinnamon roll shop wasn’t near his house. It was near the school. The girl went to the school where he worked. That’s probably why she got in his car.”

  “You were right about the girl being different,” Caroline said. “You said the way to catch him was in the aberration.”

  “Yeah?” Blanton sighed. “I say a lot of things.”

  “You should get some sleep,” Caroline said.

  After a moment, he said, “You too, Ms. Mabry.”

  The phone went dead and Caroline stared at it. She checked her watch. It was a little after eleven. She switched the TV over to a local news channel, which was doing a story about Burn’s body being found. The reporter stood on the roadside above Long Lake, gesturing down the hill. Caroline turned up the volume.

  “…a body that investigators believe is that of convicted drug dealer Kevin Hatch, who was pushed to his death in April by Leonard Ryan, a man police now want to question about the deaths of…”

  So how come I can imagine it? Blanton’s words barged into her mind. At the moment he’d said it she’d thought about Burn resurfacing, and about that day in the park. Why didn’t she tell Blanton that Burn’s body had been found? If anyone might understand her ambivalence, her difficulty comprehending Burn’s return and the sequence of events on the bridge that day, it was Blanton. He would appreciate her effort to find some meaningful distinction between—what had Blanton called it, broken and evil—some distinction between the Kevin Hatches and the Lenny Ryans of the world. Some elemental difference between them and her.

  So how come I can imagine it?

  Caroline closed her eyes and saw Lenny Ryan on the bridge again, reaching over, pushing Burn. Then what? T
he look. Ryan had looked at her with…what? The look haunted her. She’d always figured Ryan pushed Burn over the bridge as a way to escape, to force her into choosing to save one or arrest the other. But was that the look? There were easier ways for Ryan to get away. And if he was trying to create a diversion, why didn’t Ryan run after pushing Burn? Why just stand there? Looking at her?

  There was another choice she could have made, of course. She could have shot Lenny Ryan. Certainly, part of her had wanted to do that. And maybe that was the look in his eyes: some combination of anger and challenge and resignation.

  In her mind, Lenny Ryan’s eyes became the eyes of the drunk wife beater six years earlier, the man she killed. In that instant on the bridge, the idea of shooting Ryan had passed through her head, just as it had with the wife beater. Sometimes, as she played it in her head, Caroline allowed hindsight to create enough time to shoot Ryan just as he reached for Burn, before he pushed him over the edge. But that wasn’t what happened. Ryan pushed Burn and she decided to go after Burn rather than face Ryan. Did she really choose to save Burn? She was filled with so much self-doubt lately, she’d even begun to wonder if she went after Burn as a way of ignoring Lenny Ryan, her fear, the fact that she might have to shoot a man to death again. Or be killed by him.

  She stood, walked to the kitchen, and got a glass of tap water. She stared out the dark window into her backyard, seeing the day in the park and all the things that seemed wrong with it, a string of impossible coincidences and well-meaning slapstick, a string of overreactions.

  There was a notebook on the kitchen table. Caroline opened it and drew a small map of the center of the park, where they had set up the surveillance of Burn. She drew X’s to mark herself and the other detectives and the letters B for Burn and R for Ryan. She stared at the page as if she could imagine the letters into action.

  From the moment Ryan approached (she could see him even now, loose khaki pants and black T-shirt, bushy hair) they had figured him for a drug customer. He had the look. But no drugs changed hands. She wrote on the page: “Why didn’t Burn hand over any drugs? Maybe there was no drug deal.”

  Burn and Ryan had run away and hidden. Together. That made no sense. It was easier to be caught that way. She remembered Ryan holding Burn’s arm as they ran, dragging him along. She wrote in her notebook: “Why not split up? Why run away together? Why would Ryan need to keep Burn close by?”

  Then the bridge. She flipped back to her simple drawings, the X’s, the B and R. Now she drew another map, of the bridge, herself, Burn, and Ryan. And then Burn went over the edge. She remembered the look in Ryan’s eyes after he pushed Burn. Stubbornness. Resignation. He was not going to be arrested. She would have to shoot him. But she couldn’t. She thought about Jacqueline, as she often did now. No sign of her since the night her friend Risa disappeared. Were they both dead? Were they dead because Caroline hadn’t been able to deal with Ryan, either by arresting him or by shooting him? She wrote on the page: “What the hell’s the matter with me?”

  She threw the notebook across the room and it hit the wall and slid down to the small table where she kept her telephone, teetered on the edge, and fell.

  So, how come I can imagine it?

  She tried to think like Blanton, by applying the test of aberration, looking for the pattern that was revealed in the breaking of the pattern. The New Orleans janitor might’ve gone around forever picking up and killing prostitutes and drug addicts that he didn’t know. But the fifteen-year-old girl? He worked at her school.

  Caroline imagined Lenny Ryan’s patterns: He kills hookers because he blames his girlfriend for betraying him, for being a hooker and getting herself killed. He killed his uncle and the pawnshop owner during robberies. So why kill Burn? They’d always assumed he killed Burn to create a distraction. Could there be some other reason?

  This whole time she’d been focusing on Ryan. They all had. But what about the young drug dealer? It shocked her, how little she knew about Burn. She’d read his file and had never found any connection to Lenny Ryan, other than the one they heard from the pawnshop owner, that he occasionally pimped some girls. They had gone over his files and talked to his friends and associates, but none of the dead prostitutes’ names had come up. She tried to compose Burn’s file from memory, but she couldn’t, and realized she wouldn’t sleep until she went down to the office and read the whole stupid file. She went to her bedroom, slipped into a pair of sweatpants, socks, and tennis shoes. She pulled her hair back in a short ponytail. In the living room, she turned off a light and caught a sliver of headlight through the drawn curtains of her window as a car pulled up to the curb across the street.

  Dupree. She had been expecting him for weeks. Wanting him to come some nights. Dreading it other nights. Tonight, she didn’t know how she felt. She turned the deadbolt, opened the door, and stepped out onto the porch. And then she froze. It wasn’t Dupree idling across the street from Caroline’s house. It was a man in a small, red sedan, and from her porch she could see his baseball cap and beard.

  37

  Dupree lurched awake in his car, in front of his old house. He checked his watch. Eleven-thirty. He must have fallen asleep. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve, stretched, and looked up at the house. The curtains were closed now. He imagined Debbie waking up on the couch and seeing the patrol car parked in front of the house, staring for a while and then pulling the blinds. This must have seemed to her perfectly in character for a husband who, for so many years, came home without ever really coming home.

  He started the car and drove off, blinking away his fatigue. At the end of the block he turned on his headlights. His shift had ended two hours ago. He didn’t know that he could work any harder to get himself fired. At the end of his shift he was supposed to turn in his patrol car, or at least call in and say he was going to be late. The dispatcher would be going crazy trying to locate him. Understandably, the brass took it pretty seriously when a cop fell asleep in his car, especially at the end of shift, because for all the dispatchers knew he could be lying dead somewhere. Dupree switched his radio back on, prepared to be excoriated on the air. But the radio exploded with the frenzy of a call. “Charley-ten, en route…Charley-two, en route.” Patrol units headed for something. “Be advised, the caller says male subject has a knife.” The dispatcher was apparently on the phone with a witness who described a man and a woman fighting. “Baker-six. You need assistance there?” Cars from other sectors offered help.

  Groggy, Dupree turned on his siren and lights and stepped heavily on the gas, the idea forming inside his sleep-dulled mind that perhaps his two-hour disappearance would be lost in the confusion of a big call.

  He should tell the dispatcher he was en route, but that might just further confuse the situation. He listened, picking up bits and pieces. A domestic? A woman being beaten. He picked up the address, the East 800 block of Sprague, and understood the frenzy. It was right in the middle of the strip where Lenny Ryan was trolling for victims.

  He sped down the rest of the Freya Hill, the trunk of his car slapping against the road as the car leveled off each flat side street and then bounded down the steep hill again. He ran traffic lights, slowing enough to give himself time to dodge drunk drivers, and within a couple of minutes he’d pulled up to Landers’ Cove, the boat dealership surrounded by the high cyclone fence. Two other patrol units were there already, the officers yelling at a couple on the sidewalk across the street, a tall Hispanic woman in a miniskirt and a drunk white guy in dirty jeans. They were locked at the shoulders like Sumo wrestlers, screaming and swinging from close range at each other’s heads.

  “Let go of her!” yelled a cop Dupree recognized as being named Vasquez. Dupree moved to the other side, so that he, Vasquez, and the other officer were coming from different angles, each with his hands out, trying to calm the situation.

  “She’s tryin’ to kill me!” the man yelled. As if to show that he was telling the truth, the woman brought her other hand up and cut th
e man across his side with a stubby little knife. The guy yelped and hit her in the face and she cried out as they lurched away from Dupree, squawking and swinging at each other.

  They danced this way over to the other cop, a younger guy that Dupree didn’t know, who tried to grab the woman’s arm. She jerked her head up—blood spraying out from her nose and mouth—and swung the knife at the officer, who leaped back. The woman’s movement caused the couple to lose their balance and they tumbled to the pavement. The woman landed on the hand holding the knife and it squirted free, but before Vasquez or Dupree or the other cop could do anything the man reached over, grabbed the knife, and tried to slash the woman across her already bleeding face. She got one of her hands up in time and the knife opened her palm and more blood spurted.

  Vasquez threw himself into the man and knocked him off the bleeding, crying woman. The knife flew out of his hand and they rolled off the sidewalk onto the street, and suddenly the man was on top, grabbing Vasquez by his hair and slamming the back of his head into the curb. The other officer was there in a flash, swinging his side handle baton across the drunk man’s shoulder. From Dupree’s vantage point, it looked as if the man had actually been lifted in the air, the blow from the baton raising him off Vasquez and depositing him a few feet away, on his side in the street. Dupree pounced on the man, cranked his left arm up, and pushed his own baton into the man’s neck.

  “Don’t move!” he yelled, and then over his shoulder: “You all right, Vasquez?”

  “I’m gonna kill that fucking bitch!” the man beneath him screamed.

  “I’m okay,” Vasquez said. He started to say something else, but stopped. Dupree could hear a rustle of activity behind him. “Watch out!” Vasquez yelled.

  The next thing Dupree felt was a sharp pain in his shoulder.