Over Tumbled Graves

by Jess Walter

  Verloc just smiled.

  “I’ll come by on Monday, then.”

  “Yeah,” Verloc said. “Monday.”

  He used his upper body to climb up into the truck, fired it, and backed out of his parking spot. He turned on his blinker well before he reached the end of the parking lot, and then pulled out slowly.

  In the car, Dupree picked up his cell phone and used his thumb to hit the numbers.

  “This is Teague.”

  “Hey, it’s Dupree.”

  “What the hell’s the matter with you? You’re acting all crazy. I was about five minutes from calling dispatch and telling ’em you were missing again.”

  “I’m sorry,” Dupree said.

  “I gotta tell you, Sarge, this thing is pretty weird.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, I’m here at the house and the neighbors had a number for Mr. and Mrs. Landers at Lake Coeur d’Alene, so I called. A sheriff’s deputy answered and said Mr. Landers was on his way to Kootenai Medical Center.”

  “What happened?”

  “Don’t know, for sure. The wife came back from the store and saw some guy driving away from their cabin in a red car. When she went inside, someone had done a number on her husband. Broke his collarbone and his leg, knocked out a couple of teeth, and drained him of a little blood.”

  Dupree stared back at the office of All-Safe Security. “Are you in the house?”

  “On the porch.”

  “Go inside,” Dupree said, “into that office next to the living room, where everything was messed up.”

  Dupree could hear Teague’s footsteps on the hardwood floor. “Okay. I’m here.”

  “There are a couple of files open there on the safe. They say ‘Security’ on them.”

  “Got ’em,” Teague said.

  “Open the one that says ‘Expenses.’”

  “Yeah, right here.”

  As he shifted the car into drive, Dupree looked up at the security business once more. “The most recent receipt, it says ‘Miscellaneous.’ How much is that?”

  “Let’s see.” He could hear Teague flipping through pages. “Two-forty.”

  He quickly did the math. Six. Maybe there was one they didn’t know about. “Don’t move. I’m coming up there.” Dupree stomped on the gas and his car bounded over the curb and onto the street just as a red Nissan Sentra was pulling into the parking lot behind him.

  50

  So fucking cold. She whispered, “Kelly, you took all the blankets,” and it was hearing his name that woke her up. She reached out, but he wasn’t there. He would come home from the hospital soon; she began wondering what she might cook and whether there were potatoes in the house. It was dark, and then Rae-Lynn realized she wasn’t in Moses Lake and that the chills were coming from inside. She sat up on a leather couch and looked around, wondering if she could return to the dream in which Kelly came home. She had no idea where she was or how she’d gotten there. She wasn’t wearing shoes. Where the hell were her shoes?

  She stretched and yawned and sat up on the couch, reached over and switched on a tall reading lamp. Her hands felt clammy and cold, and the ache in her head was the only thing that seemed at all familiar. She felt a tightness in her left arm, like a bruise, and remembered shooting up. Her eye hurt where Michael and then the cabdriver had punched her; she thought for a minute, reconstructing the day through aches and bruises. And Timmy’s wallet. He was so nice. Why had she done that? Maybe when people are shitty to you it makes you want to be shitty to someone else, like kids in school.

  She looked around the room, a long, narrow living room or study, a wall of books behind her, the leather couch facing that huge picture window that overlooked the dark river. It was coming back to her now: the nice old security guard taking her to the house overlooking the river. He’d given her something to drink and she must have fallen asleep. She looked for a clock and found a small travel alarm clock open on the bookshelves behind her. Nine-thirty. It was dark. Must be night. The same night or the next night? She still felt stoned. Same night. Then she’d only slept a little while. That was good. She wondered if the security guard had gone back to work.

  The leather couch squeaked as she stood up. She yawned again and looked around the floor for her shoes. She looked at the bookshelves behind the leather couch. The shelves were full of row after row of black paperback books, their titles in emphatic capital letters: CATCHING AMERICA’S MOST NOTORIOUS SERIAL MURDERERS and THE TRUE BLOOD MURDERS and MINDTRAP: THE LIFE OF AN FBI PROFILER. There was something strange about the way all the books were perfectly lined up, their spines forming a flat, black wall with these emphatic block letters. It reminded her of the way Kelly constantly reorganized the tools in his garage. Whoever owned these paperback books had even gone to the trouble of alphabetizing them.

  Something about the books made her uncomfortable, and Rae-Lynn stepped away to look for her shoes again. There was a carpeted staircase next to the bookshelf and she crept up it carefully, until she was at the landing by the front door. The living room was a few steps up, separated from the landing by a small railing. Rae-Lynn looked through the slats of the railing and saw the old security guard, chewing his thumbnail and watching the driveway intently through the house’s front window. A pair of headlights flashed across his body and he seemed to relax. A car was pulling into the driveway. Rae-Lynn peered out the window above the door and saw a maroon pickup.

  She felt her body go stiff and then she brought a shaking hand to her face. The truck door opened and out stepped the man who had tried to kill her, thick arms and tree-trunk neck; it was him.

  She slid down the stairs and saw a phone next to the bookshelf. She picked it up, thought about calling 911, but remembered the business card she carried everywhere—for luck, she supposed. She pulled it out of her jeans, dropped it, and picked it up. Caroline Mabry. Special Investigations Unit. She found the cell phone number and began punching in her number. The front door opened.

  “What took you so long?” the old security guard said.

  “I got held up,” said the other man. “Where is she?”

  “Downstairs. Sleeping.”

  The lady cop’s phone rang once but the men were already on the stairs. Rae-Lynn dropped the phone and ran to the slider, fumbled with the latch, finally got it open, and began running.

  She heard them behind her—“Hey!”—and turned to see the old man hanging up the phone as the young man pushed through the doorway. She plunged through the backyard, over the bank, and into the darkness, toward the sound of the river tearing at its banks.

  51

  Spivey stood a few feet away, chewing on a poppy-seed muffin, watching over the shoulder of a TV cameraman who wheeled his camera along a pair of slender, silver railroad tracks toward a bright bank of lights, to where Blanton crouched, pretending to sift through a handful of dirt, just a few feet from where Rebecca Bennett’s body was found. Blanton’s suit coat scrunched up over his belt and Caroline could see the waistband of his boxer shorts. McDaniel stood behind him more comfortably, arms crossed, in a cowboy shirt and bolo tie, squinting off into the distance.

  “That looks cool,” Spivey whispered to the producer.

  Caroline paced nervously and took another run at Spivey, speaking under her breath. “I really think we ought to get on this. Now.”

  The assistant producer held up her hand for Spivey and Caroline to be quiet and Caroline stepped away again, kicking at the ground anxiously.

  Her cell phone rang and the assistant producer glared at her. But when she turned on the phone to pick up the call, whoever it was had hung up.

  “Does this look to anyone else like I’m sitting on the crapper?” Blanton asked.

  “Please, Mr. Blanton,” said the assistant producer. “Let’s get this shot and then you can leave. All right?”

  “I just don’t see why he gets to stand and I’ve gotta look like I’m taking a dump.”

  They moved the camera to
get a different angle, and Caroline took advantage of the break to take another run at Spivey. “Look, I think Lenny Ryan is in Springdale.”

  Spivey watched the crew set up the camera. “Tell me again,” he said.

  “A guy has been poking around, requesting documents about Landers’ Cove.”

  “This guy Nickell,” Spivey said. “And he lives in Springdale.”

  She had to admit, it was impressive, how well he could soak up raw information—names and dates—although he had more trouble with concepts. “That’s right,” she said. “But Nickell is in jail in Tacoma. And tonight someone broke into Landers’s house.”

  “And this somehow puts Lenny Ryan in a red Nissan?”

  Caroline stepped in front of him and stared into his eyes. “There is a man with a beard and Nickell’s ID requesting court documents on Landers; a man in a beard and a red car is asking about hookers; the car registered to David Nickell is a red Nissan but David Nickell is in jail.” She pressed the pages she’d brought into his hands. “And I saw a red Nissan parked outside my house one night.”

  Spivey glanced at the pages, then handed them back and cocked his head. “I don’t remember you saying anything about a car outside your house.”

  “No,” she said. “I convinced myself it wasn’t Ryan. But it was. I know it was.”

  Spivey stared at the ground for a long moment. “You say someone broke into the house of the guy who owns the boat dealership?”

  “Right.”

  “And there were carpet fibers on one of the bodies from this boat place?”

  “Two, if you count Shelly Nordling.” She looked again at her watch. “I know it sounds complicated, but—”

  “It sounds crazy is what it sounds.” Spivey wrinkled his brow in thought. “Tell you what. You head back to the office and get a warrant for the house in Springdale.” He checked his watch. “In ten minutes, I’ll grab these guys and we’ll see what we’ve got.”

  “And you’ll get someone over to Landers’s house to dust for prints?”

  Spivey’s cell phone rang. He picked it up, looked at the number, and turned it off. “Jesus, Dupree,” he muttered. “Give it a rest.”

  “We were talking about dusting Landers’s house,” Caroline said.

  “As soon as we finish here,” Spivey said, and he turned back to the shoot.

  Caroline threw her hands in the air and stepped away. She circled around the crew and waved at Blanton. He came over, self-consciously picking at the makeup on his face. “This is a good look for me, huh?”

  “I know where Ryan is,” she said.

  “Where?”

  “In Springdale. An hour north of here. Will you come with me?”

  “Yeah, as soon as we’re done.”

  “I’m going now.”

  “Just a few more minutes.” He looked back over his shoulder at McDaniel, who was talking with the producer about the next shot. He came closer, confiding, “I don’t trust him alone with them. I need to listen to what he tells them.”

  It was too much for Caroline, who spun away and began walking toward her car.

  “Ms. Mabry!” He ran to catch up with her, away from the camera and lights.

  “Who cares what he tells them!” she said. “So you got fired from the Bureau. Big fucking deal!”

  Blanton stiffened. “What did he tell you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Tell me what McDaniel told you.”

  Caroline turned to walk away again.

  “Ms. Mabry.” He walked beside her, speaking quickly as she walked away. “If he told you that I took trophies, that isn’t completely true and I’d like a chance to—”

  She stopped and faced him again. “What do you mean, trophies?”

  “Trophies. You know…souvenirs from crime scenes. It wasn’t true. I was cleared. But I did have…a few things. Some shell casings. Ransom notes. A pair of handcuffs.” He stared at the sky. “Some teeth.”

  Caroline edged away, and Blanton seemed to notice.

  “Come on,” he said. “It was for research. Bite marks and such. I was working on my first book. It was not…I’m not…” He looked over his shoulder at McDaniel again and he spit the next words bitterly. “The bastard was jealous that I was writing a book so he told them that I collected goddamn teeth!”

  Caroline put her hands up, turned, and began walking again. This time, he didn’t follow. She had tromped back across the field and up the bank forty yards before turning back. Blanton stood right where she’d left him, watching her.

  Beyond him were the flood lamps of the news crew, and just over the bank was the river, a band of darkness and light, bits of moon reflecting off the black ripples. She felt sick and alone. She looked the other way, upstream, half a mile to the falls, then back at the scrub-grass field where the first bodies had been found, where Blanton was still staring at her.

  She thought about the perpetual argument between Blanton and McDaniel over conscious and subconscious activity and realized they were also talking about themselves, their attraction to and repulsion of this twisted psychology. She turned away from Blanton and climbed in her car, sitting for a second and listening to her own breathing as she tried to imagine who would keep a dead woman’s teeth. She was alone in this, had always been alone. Those men were investigating one crime and she was investigating another.

  The thought made her lonely and she pulled her cell phone from her pocket to call Dupree. She remembered that someone had just called her and hung up. Maybe it was him. She checked the number on her phone, but it wasn’t Dupree’s. In fact, she didn’t recognize it. A 328 prefix. North of the river.

  Caroline started her car and drove through the Peaceful Valley neighborhood, along the south bank of the river. Dupree said he was going to a restaurant. She called the 328 number. After two rings, a machine picked up. “This is Kevin. I can’t come to the phone. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you.”

  Kevin? She turned the phone off without leaving a message and drove up the hill out of Peaceful Valley and into Browne’s Addition. Kevin. She called Crime Check and asked an operator to check the number in the reverse phone directory. After a moment, the operator came back on.

  “Owner is listed as a Kevin Verloc.”

  The name didn’t mean anything to Caroline. “Where is it?” she asked.

  “Falls Avenue,” the operator said, “that little road overlooking the river, just over on the north bank. You know, where it’s real steep. There are only a couple of houses.”

  Caroline was just driving onto the Maple Street Bridge, and she glanced across the river to the steep and dark north bank. “How far west?” she asked.

  “Well, like I said, it’s kind of tucked down in there so there’s no cross street. But I’d say thirty-five, thirty-six blocks.”

  “Thanks,” Caroline said and hung up the phone. She couldn’t see anything over the edge of the bridge, but she could make out the faint light on the other side of the river, where the Dateline crew was still filming. She looked again across the river toward where the phone call had come from. From the north bank of the river you could theoretically see anything on the south bank.

  Caroline turned left and began making her way toward Falls Avenue.

  52

  The backyard extended forty feet behind Kevin Verloc’s house before coming to an abrupt, five-foot ledge onto the steep riverbank, which plunged another sixty yards to the river. The bank was covered with weeds and bushes and scrub trees and a natural dugout about forty yards down the hill, where, pressed against a prickly bush, Rae-Lynn Pierce held her breath and waited to be killed. Thorns poked her skin, and her legs ached from crouching. Behind her, the water chirped and splashed like a running bath. Rae-Lynn knew that her only chance was to break for the river; even if she drowned, it would be better than letting the man in the maroon truck have her again.

  From above, a flashlight beam drifted across the bush. Rae-Lynn covered her mouth. She could hear him on
the trail above her, grunting as he struggled down the bank. His voice was eerily flat, as if there was nothing unusual about the situation they were in. “Hey, I know you’re down here,” he said. “Do you remember me?”

  He wanted her to start crying, or to try to run away. But Rae-Lynn concentrated on remaining completely still. She watched the flashlight beam move farther down the bank, to the river, and then back across the bush she was hiding in.

  “Girlie?” It was the old guy. Their voices seemed to be right on top of her, and Rae-Lynn felt tears roll down her cheeks. “Come on out now. He ain’t gonna hurt you.”

  The guy from the truck laughed. “That ain’t gonna work this time, Dad. She knows better.” He raised his voice. “You know better. Don’t you?”

  The old man spoke quietly. “Maybe you could let this one go, Kevin.”

  “Why don’t you go on up to the house, Dad? I’ll be up in a minute.”

  Rae-Lynn’s legs twitched from the pain of crouching inside the bush. She leaned forward, thinking she could break for the water now. But once again, the flashlight beam rolled across the bush. “I’ll bet you got bruises on your throat from my hands. Is that right? Can you still feel my fingers around your neck?” His breathing was labored. “I didn’t get what I paid for, you know. You owe me.” He grunted, and it sounded as if he fell. The flashlight beam veered off into the sky and Rae-Lynn heard a clunk.

  The old man yelled. “Kevin!”

  Rae-Lynn tried to run but her legs felt frozen in place. She opened her eyes and saw the backs of his legs through the bush. He was right in front of her. It had been a trick. He bent over and picked up the flashlight. In the other hand, he held a gun.

  “I’m okay, Dad,” he said. “Hey, Rae-Lynn. That’s your name, isn’t it? Do you know how I know your name? Your friend told me. Risa. You remember Risa; I picked her up after you left. Do you want to know what I did to Risa? I’ll show you.”

  Rae-Lynn had to cover her mouth to keep from crying out. She squeezed her eyes shut and imagined herself and Risa and Shelly sharing that bottle of wine on the make-believe mountain by the boat place, above the world instead of always being below it.