The Killing Lessons (17 page)

Will Fraser couldn’t sleep. He’d been in bed three hours and now the clock said 4.48 a.m. The red digits throbbed as with gremlin glee. His wife Marion was snoring, softly. By rights, given they’d had miraculous sex when he’d come home at midnight, he ought to be snoring softly himself. But The Case was an insomniac brain infestation that didn’t give a fuck whether he’d just had sex with the entire Raiders’ cheerleading squad. ‘Miraculous’ sex was no joke. First time in maybe six months.
A Christmas miracle
, he’d been tempted to whisper, when he came. (He resisted. He wasn’t an idiot.) He and Marion loved each other. In which ‘loved’ meant knew each other inside out, drove each other to daily, weary domestic distraction, frequently didn’t
bother
to have the next available argument because they were too tired and knew deep down it wouldn’t go anywhere apocalyptic, that they were in for the duration (they had prosaic mutual tenderness exactly equal to their irritation), were welded together through their exhausting kids (Deborah, seventeen, Logan, fourteen) and when they were apart for more than a couple of days were ambushed by how much they missed the small things in each other. In Will’s case the sound of Marion’s laugh, which was as honest and good as anything from Eden before the Fall. But they’d been married twenty-three years. Sex was more often than not half-hearted or functional. Still, lust, when it did put in a rare appearance, was a rich rejuvenation. Hey, Marion had said, when he’d finished brushing his teeth, earlier. I’m feeling dirty. She’d been lying on her front in a long pink T-shirt and nothing else, and suddenly the soles of her bare feet and the little tangle of varicoses on her thigh had driven him crazy, had, in a few seconds, reminded him of the wealth of her flesh – the half-dozen beauty spots on her back, the creases behind her knees, the softness of her mouth – and they’d fucked with intense, entitled, languorous greed. Afterwards, he’d lain with his face in her bare underarm and thought,
Jesus Christ. Jesus
Christ. He’d kissed the length of her flank. Then she’d said, Fuck, I needed that – turned over and fallen asleep.

Since then, despite his body’s razed bliss, Will had been wide awake.

It was the pocket (if it was a pocket) from the body in Reno. The embroidered letters (if they were letters) wouldn’t leave him alone. And he’d been a cop long enough to know when to listen to whatever it was that wouldn’t leave him alone.

Will eased himself out of bed, dressed, and went, via the kids’ rooms (Deborah had fallen asleep with her iPod headphones on, lying in exactly the position Marion had been in when he’d finished brushing his teeth; it sent him an anxious bulletin of his daughter’s burgeoning womanhood – while Logan slept open-mouthed on his back, one leg outside the comforter, lit by his screensaver’s still of Liv Tyler on horseback from
The Lord of the Rings
), downstairs to the kitchen.

He made coffee and sat at the scrubbed oak table, going through his notes. The Case was kicking Valerie’s ass, he knew, but his own wasn’t exactly getting off lightly. Each body that turned up was an indictment of his share in the task force’s failure. They’d been on it so long it was his brain’s permanent depressing weather.
Torn-off pocket
, he’d written in his notebook.
Possibly overalls? Maybe edge of a J, def R and poss S. Check back – familiar.

It was no good. He needed all the files and to see the pocket again. He knew it was something, rang some maddeningly vague bell, was (he laughed, mentally, at the phrase) ‘a clue’. He pictured Marion waking to get up to pee and finding him gone, saw her face’s annoyance and disappointment and resignation. Married to a cop? she’d said, drunk, at a party, years ago. Might as well be married to a crack-head. Get used to coming second in the scheme of things. Get used to
crumbs
. The thought of her, the way she’d been with him earlier – focused and impersonal and selfish for her own pleasure – stirred the blood in his cock again, tempted him to go back upstairs and wrap his arms around her and bury his nose in the soft warmth of her nape and
gloat
. Maybe, if the universe had gone truly, wonderfully insane, she’d be in the mood again when she woke up?

But Valerie’s call from Santa Cruz only hours ago was still an abrasion in his head: We’ve got a live one, Will. Whatever we’ve been doing, we need to do it faster. Starting right now.

With regret, and some realism (the chances of Marion wanting more sex
first thing in the morning
were laughably slim), he wrote his wife a note and left it on the table. It was 5.17 a.m. The evidence room didn’t open until eight, but the off-hours supervisor would be there. The pocket itself hadn’t come back from the lab, but there was a print of the photograph the Reno guy had taken. He swallowed the last mouthful of his coffee –
possibly J, R, maybe S
revolving in his head – grabbed his car keys and headed out into the pre-dawn light.

‘Here,’ Angelo said. ‘I made you this.’ It was a packet chicken noodle soup. ‘It’s hot. Be careful.’

They hadn’t spoken again about her mother and Josh. He understood. Trauma had given her a small allowance of language to report what she’d been through. Now it was spent. It couldn’t be spoken again. She had a child’s ability to recognise the facts of her situation. Childhood was rich in imagination, yes, but it provided an under-appreciated gift for the real, too. Children were brutal realists. The only alternative was outright suppression. They had no knack for kidding themselves. It took adulthood to bring that dubious talent.

In spite of this, he’d thought, under Sylvia’s occasional guidance, that he was getting better at talking to her. He had two safe subjects: himself, and the immediate concerns of their shared present. Neither took her back to her past nor forward into her future. Neither reiterated the passage of time. The passage of time was verboten. The passage of time meant nothing except all the time her mother had been bleeding. He hoped she didn’t have an understanding of how long it would take a person to bleed to death. A forlorn hope: he saw the look that came into her face at moments; the failed effort not to know; the will to hope running smack into the stone wall of knowledge. It was terrible to him that he had nothing to give her in answer to that. He fought his own impulse to lie, to concoct fabulous contingencies by virtue of which her mother and brother would somehow be saved. She wasn’t young or stupid enough for any of that. He was watching her hour by hour being force-delivered into a new, brutal existence. Every breath she drew was heartbreaking evidence that she was trying to survive it, though its only purpose seemed to be to destroy her through violence and grief. She was, in fact, only dimly aware of him. It wouldn’t have been much more strange to her if she’d found herself in the care of a talking animal or a benign extraterrestrial. A remote practical part of her had, at some point in their time together, decided that he was not dangerous to her. It was a great relief to him that at least that had been established, that his every word or movement didn’t trip the switch of her fear.

Now that the first shocks of the situation had subsided, a little of Angelo’s deeper self had woken up. A little, in fact (this was the first thought in a long time that came close to making him laugh), of the novelist. He could see how he’d write it. He could see the obvious architecture: the dead-hearted old man given a chance to come back to life through the innocence of a child. Sylvia’s response to this thought had been her distinctive smile – of recognition and mischief. He had come out here, he now knew, to decide whether he wanted to live or die. To stay or to go. To carry on without his love – or to follow her into the mystery. He had imagined, coming to this admission, that Sylvia would have something to say about it. But again, all he got was the smile. The look of quiet, delighted conspiracy. It was the look which had always defined her for him. It was the look she gave him across the room at parties they were bored by. It was the look she gave him at moments of unexpected happiness. It was the look she gave him in her favourite sexual position, sitting astride him, when she knew he was just about to come. It was the look of knowing him as well as he knew himself, and it had made his life worth living. He had come out here to determine whether he could live without it.

Well? Can you?

Nell was drinking the soup. Angelo bit back the encouragements:
That’s right, honey, good girl
. Such encouragements were unaffordable: any one of them might bring her out of the animal trance, might remind her what she was doing, eating, even though her mother and Josh, even though… No. He must be quiet. He must let her body mesmerise her mind with its need. If he interrupted her now she might never eat again.

But after only a few sips, she stopped. Turned her head and stared out of the window. Tears welled and fell.

‘Hey,’ he said, resisting the urge to go to her. ‘What’s wrong?’

She didn’t answer. His powerlessness to alleviate her suffering brought the worst of the time with Sylvia back. The otherness of the other person. The privacy of her pain. The number of times he’d asked the universe to take the tumour from her and give it to him instead.
I’ll accept any deal you like
, he’d said, inwardly.
Just take it away from her. Just let her be all right again.

I know
, Sylvia’s spirit sent him.
It made leaving bearable, knowing I’d had that kind of love in my life. Knowing I’d had the best thing
.

Nell’s tears stopped as suddenly as they’d started.

‘No one’s going to come,’ she said.

Valerie had been at her desk a couple of hours when Nick Blaskovitch walked up just after nine thirty a.m. and handed her a Manila envelope. She hadn’t spoken to him since the parking garage. Since
I’ll come by later
. Since the sudden bloom of mad hope. (Followed by its not-so-sudden withering.) The shower, the shampoo, the skirt. He’d called her ‘Skirt’ from the start. A satire on police chauvinism. And because it was him, because she knew it meant the opposite of what it would have meant coming from a sexist prick, she’d liked it. She’d only ever worn skirts for him. To feel the pleasure of his hand sliding up inside. The enjoyable shamelessness of it bunched up around her waist, her panties halfway down her legs, him inside her.

‘Not your handwriting, unless you disguised it,’ he said.

Valerie looked at the envelope. It was addressed to NICHOLAS BLASKOVITCH.

Not
her handwriting.

‘What is this?’ she said. He wasn’t looking at her. He was averted. Palpably angry. And sad.

‘Just let me know when you’re ready to talk about it.’

‘Nick?’

But he’d turned and walked away.

She opened the envelope.

The Bryte Clinic.

Oh, God.

For a few moments, after she’d read the appointment form, Valerie just sat still. Then she slid the single sheet back into the envelope, folded it and put it in her purse.

How?

It didn’t matter how. Only
that
. Only that he knew the truth. Or rather half the truth.

Her intention, when she got to her feet, was to go straight to Blasko’s lab. But her phone rang, en route. It was Liza.

‘Tyre dry-cast is a match,’ Liza said. ‘Looks like it’s your guys.’

‘Fuck.’

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘DNA from the sequins?’

‘Couple of hours.’

‘Call me as soon as you have it.’

‘I will. You OK? You sound weird.’

‘I’m fine,’ Valerie said. ‘Just call me as soon as it’s confirmed.’

Blasko was alone in a room filled with baffling equipment, working on a desktop. Valerie saw him kill the screen when she entered. A back room of her mind thought it knew why.

‘It’s not what you think,’ she said.

‘You weren’t pregnant?’

‘Yes, I was pregnant. But I didn’t have an abortion.’

He shook his head. As in, what’s the point of lying
now
?

‘I had a miscarriage.’

Which checked him. Yanked the anger choke chain. It hurt her heart that she could see him thinking, immediately, of her pain. Of what that would have been like for her. Never mind what it was like for him. It pierced her that his reflex was still there, to care for her more than for himself.

‘I made an appointment with the clinic,’ she said, the nakedness of the words shocking to her. ‘To buy myself time. I didn’t know what to do.’

His shoulders – his whole body – relaxed a few degrees. Into sadness.

‘But I lost it anyway,’ she said, bowing her head. ‘A week before I was supposed to go.’

They were silent for a moment. Then he said, very quietly: ‘Was it mine?’

Options shuffled in her head. Her abdomen ached. She remembered the young doctor’s tired face, her outstretched latexed hand. What it held. The fetus curled like a question mark. There was only the truth to offer him.

‘I don’t know. I’m sorry.’

Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. The word was their disease. Along with ‘love’.

The lab was windowless, fluorescent-lit. In a corner, a piece of equipment the size of a washing machine emitted a soft sound.

Valerie sat on the edge of his desk. She didn’t trust her legs to hold her up. Her face was heavy with heat. She kept her hands pressed in her lap.

‘I did everything wrong,’ she said. ‘Don’t think I don’t know that.’

She was aware of him trying to make room in himself for all of it. Because that was how much he loved her.

Eventually he said, ‘Someone put the appointment letter here for me to find.’

Aside from the horror and intensity and exhaustion, this fact had been quietly working at both of them. Cops.

‘I realise that,’ she said.

‘Someone here got it in for you?’

‘Looks that way.’

‘How’d they get access?’

I just want to be as useful as I can be, Carla had said. The FBI could get access. If they put their minds to it. Allowing full paranoia in, Valerie pictured Carla going through her garbage and counting the empties, watching her via hidden cameras in her apartment, clocking her near-miss on the 280, compiling a get-her-off-the-case file.

Then she remembered the envelopes on the passenger seat of the Cherokee. Manila envelopes.

‘I don’t know,’ Valerie said, not quite knowing why she didn’t mention York. ‘I really don’t.’

‘Well, it’s not a small thing,’ Blasko said. ‘We need to find out.’

We. Collusion. Had there ever been a time since they’d met when she’d stopped thinking of them as allies? We. Us. You and me. Thinking of a future without him was like thinking of never being warm enough for the rest of her life, the big world a place of edged draughts and icy currents, the daily building fatigue of restless cold. Which wouldn’t kill you, but which wear you down. Which would leech the joy. Which would leave you empty and functional. Since she’d lost him that was how Valerie had imagined herself growing old. Empty and functional. A dead-hearted, stunted woman you could count on.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’ll find out.’

‘You should have told me.’

‘I know.’

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘Because I didn’t want to drag you back in. What if it hadn’t been yours?’

‘Would you have gone ahead and got rid of it if it had been?’

Well? Would she? She’d barely admitted to herself making the appointment. Just as she’d barely admitted to herself what would be involved in determining paternity. Could they even test for that while the child was a tiny thing inside her? Wouldn’t she have had to
have
it, first? There were so many questions she’d just shoved to the back of her mind, telling herself:
You don’t have to decide anything right now. You have time. You’ve bought yourself some time.

‘I had no right to ask you to come back,’ she said.

‘I had a right to know if I had a kid.’

‘I know. I
know
.’

The machine in the corner exhaled its soft sound. Valerie thought it would be claustrophobic to work in here, no windows. At least from her desk there was a view, uninspiring rooftops, but an occasionally cheering slab of San Francisco sky.

‘Was it a boy or a girl?’ he said.

‘I don’t know. I didn’t want to know.’

His effort to accommodate all this was almost audible. It was as if she could hear his mind or soul trying to expand, to grow around it.
And in his own weak person, if he can, Must suffer dully all the wrongs of Man
. All the wrongs. This wrong. Her wrong. Was there any situation in her life this fucking poem didn’t apply to?

‘Did you want me to come see you last night?’ he said.

Every ounce of her decency gathered and told her to lie.

But the one indecent weakness was stronger.

‘You know I did,’ she said. Then, after a pause: ‘But I understand now why you didn’t.’

She wanted to touch him. Bypass the razor wire of words. Instead, she reached for the desktop’s mouse.

‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Don’t.’

She ignored him. The screen saver’s vortex of coloured dots disappeared and was replaced by rows of thumbnail photos. Their content half evident, even at reduced size.

‘You don’t want to see those,’ he said.

She didn’t know why she did. Except that she wanted so badly to put her arms around him that if she didn’t distract herself that was exactly what she’d do. And even the indecent weakness knew that wouldn’t be fair to him. She clicked on a thumbnail at random.

She’d prepared herself, she thought. But she wasn’t prepared. She’d been expecting pornography, the gross disproportions of paedophilia. What she saw was a child’s scarred torso, latticed with cuts, some healed into silver threads, some rawer, infected. The child was too young for Valerie to tell whether it was a boy or a girl. She felt Blasko’s body go slack with defeat.

‘Christ,’ she said, though the word felt dead in her mouth.

She clicked on another image. And another, and another.

They were all children, all maimed by abuse. By torture, since there was no more honest a word for it. Backs, chests, legs, arms, genitals. Systematic mutilation. Mutilation with thinking behind it. It was wearying, that she could see the delight doing this would have given the people who’d done it.

‘These are… This is…’

‘Yeah,’ Blasko said. ‘It’s an emerging market. You want the icing on the cake? Some of this stuff is coming out of CPS.’

Child Protection Services. The work goes into you. The work sows its seeds.

‘We’ve got fifteen different agencies under investigation,’ he said. ‘America’s not going to want to swallow this. Not that it’s peculiar to America.’

Valerie couldn’t stop. There was an appalling rhythm of disbelief and recognition. It was always the same, whatever the horror. You thought: Surely we couldn’t be doing this? Then immediately felt nauseous déjà vu: Of course we were doing this. We’d always been doing this. This was just another of the things we did. The human story was the story of the things we did. And this, like it or not, was one of them. Along with poetry and the Sistine Chapel and jokes and forgiveness and compassion and love.
Among the Just, Be just, among the Filthy, filthy too…

‘Do you need to see all of them?’ Blasko asked, quietly. Valerie knew he’d understood the question her actions were asking:
What room will any of this leave for us? What room will it leave for love?

‘Please stop,’ Blasko said, putting his hand over hers.

Valerie looked away from the screen.
Could
they remain uninfected by this? It was just their particular version of the standard cop question: Can you see what you have to see every day and yet live whole, with tenderness and humour and hope?

With the last of her perverseness or selflessness or sheer confusion she turned back to the screen and clicked on one more image, his hand still lightly on hers.

It wasn’t the worst she’d seen, but it was the most bizarre. A child’s bare back covered in cuts and burns – dozens, scores, more than a hundred – that at first glance looked random. That still looked random, even after she’d noticed what looked like a letter ‘A’ on the left shoulder, formed of cigarette burns. A fluke, an accidental initial.

Then she looked more closely.

There was an ‘F’ just above the sacrum. A ‘B’ halfway down the spine. A deep, barely healed ‘R’ below the right scapula. Letters. Whoever had done this had carved or scorched or slashed or gouged the alphabet into this young flesh. Sometimes the same letter appeared more than once.

‘Hey,’ Blasko said. ‘Come on. Stop. Enough.’

He lifted her hand from the mouse. Clicked. Killed the screen. They sat, not looking at each other. Sadness and damage and loss. Yes. But in spite of all of it the sweet, flickering insistence of the connection between them.

‘I’ll say this one last time,’ she said. ‘Because if I keep saying it it’ll start to poison both of us: I’m sorry.’

He reached out and put his hand on her knee. The weight and warmth of it there. How starved of intimacy she’d been. How starved of affection. Three years of telling herself that part of her life was over. Three years of not believing what she told herself. Three years (it was obvious to her now) of waiting for their story to start again.

‘OK,’ Blasko said. ‘There’s no—’

But the door opened and a technician entered, talking on his cell phone. Blasko dropped his hand, not quite in time. Valerie stood up straight. She and Blasko exchanged a look. Later? Yes, later.

Halfway back to her office Valerie ran into Carla York in the corridor.

‘Oh, hey,’ Carla said. ‘There you are. Listen, I don’t want to—’

Valerie went to move past her. Carla blocked her.

‘Valerie, Jesus. I’m talking to—’

Valerie pushed her aside. ‘Stay the fuck out of my way,’ she said.

‘What the hell is
wrong
with you?’ Carla said.

‘You think I don’t know what’s going on?’ Valerie said.

‘What?’

‘You think I don’t know what you’re doing here?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Listen to me,’ Valerie said. ‘You’re not going to—’

Valerie froze.

Carla was looking at her as if she
didn’t
know what she was talking about. Or rather Carla was
trying
to look at her as if she didn’t know what she was talking about. And not quite succeeding.

But all of that had become, in an instant, secondary to Valerie.

Oh my God. Holy fuck.

‘Look,’ Carla began, ‘I don’t know what you think is— Hey! Valerie?’

Valerie had turned and was hurrying down the corridor.

A blurred half-minute later she was back at Blasko’s office. The technician had finished his call and was now at his desk, spectacles on, lit by the computer screen’s light. Blasko was over by the quiet machine in the corner. He turned when she entered.

‘Get the last image I was looking at back up,’ she said.

‘What?’

Valerie was at his desk, reaching for the mouse. ‘The pictures I was just looking at. The last one. Jesus…’ She’d clicked the screen open, but it was now on a page of online dialogue exchanges. One of which said:
Vanilla, of course! What’s yours?

‘The pictures, Nick. Fuck.’

‘Hold on, hold on,’ Blasko said. ‘Let me… Wait.’

He closed the page and returned to the desktop. Answered the security prompt with a password Valerie didn’t catch. Opened a folder. The thumbnails reappeared.

‘What’s going on?’

Valerie grabbed the mouse and began opening and closing the images, searching.

‘Wait,’ Blasko said. ‘Here. This one.’

The image of the kid’s body reopened. Valerie scrutinised it. Blasko didn’t ask. Didn’t need to. He knew the shift in her aura. What it meant. His own went the same way, when the work took over. The work took over and everything else –
everything
else – dropped away. It excited him to feel it in her again. It was the other big force that bound them, the disease they’d signed up for, years ago.