The Killing Lessons (9 page)

Except the dark-haired guy in the Raiders shirt on the very edge of it.

He didn’t take his eyes off Katrina.

Calm down, she repeated. All right, this isn’t nothing, but it’s not much.

Cop-sense said otherwise. The stillness of the guy. The obliviousness to everything but Katrina. The fact that he was alone at the zoo. Twice. At least twice. Tomorrow she would get one of the team to go back through more of the footage. She knew they’d find him again. She had no right to know, but she did.

It was just after five in the morning. She called the office. Ed Perez answered.

‘Write this down,’ Valerie said, and gave him the description.

‘Got it,’ Ed said. He sounded strung out. Valerie wondered if this case was the one that was going to fuck up Ed’s life. She knew exactly the state he’d be in, slumped at his desk, in need of a shave, one white shirt-tail hanging out, paunch at full liberty.

‘I’m sending stills and footage,’ she said. ‘Get it out to all the other agencies.’

‘Press?’

‘If I get my way. Have video go back to the pre-edits and get everything you can from the ticket booth at the zoo entrance. He’s probably not dumb enough to have paid with a credit card, but you never know. Ditto parking lot footage. If he drove there we’ll get a plate. I’ll be there in an hour.’

Excitement pushed through the exhaustion. The booze lay in not quite shreds in her system. Christ, why had she drunk so much? (
Because that’s how much we drink these days, my love…
) She would take a shower and force down a pint of black coffee and eat whatever carbohydrates were in the refrigerator.

Twenty minutes later she was showered, dressed and brutally caffeined into a kind of shocked brightness. Her eyes were raw and her sinuses pounded. She felt tender but sharp.

She was walking out the door when her phone rang. It was Carla York.

‘We may have another one,’ Carla said.

Valerie’s cells gathered, tight.

‘Nevada. About fifteen miles south of Reno. It’s in dry decay so it could have been there for anything between two months and a year. Or more. Can you be at the station in an hour?’

‘I’m on my way now.’

‘There’s a chopper. We should go.’

How many? Dale Mulvaney had said. Seven. Jesus Christ don’t let it be eight. But Valerie already knew it would be. The killer’s magical revenge for the zoo footage. You couldn’t help but make these disturbing equations. But if that were true, it meant at least the guy caught on camera was him.

‘What makes them think it’s ours?’ she said.

Carla’s phone rustled slightly, as if she had it cradled against her shoulder while her hands were doing something else. Valerie didn’t catch her answer.

‘Say again?’

‘I said there’s a travelling wind-up alarm clock wedged in the corpse’s mouth.’

Xander King wasn’t sleeping. He was back at Mama Jean’s house. Somewhere on the edge of himself he could feel the flicker of the RV’s interior light and hear Paulie talking, asking him why they’d stopped, but it was a thin outer reality he couldn’t reach. He knew this was happening because the woman and the kid yesterday had been out of the scheme of things. If there’d been a milk jug he could’ve made it right, could have brought it in. But there wasn’t a goddamned jug, and now because of that here he was back at Mama Jean’s. This was what happened when you didn’t do it right.
And we’re going to keep doing this until you get it right
, Mama Jean said. Always. He never got it right. He could feel the dry ache of his eyes having been open too long, but in Mama Jean’s house he was blinking normally.

He was in the living room. The alive things in the living room were the sunburst wall clock and the black fireplace and the green couch and the drinks cabinet with its crowd of bottles like winking jewels, and each of them was alive, too. They were pretty things, but they were more Mama Jean’s than anything else in the house, except maybe the television. None of the alive things talked to him. They just watched everything that happened.

The television was on. Different-coloured people in bright vests and shorts doing sports. An orange running track with peaceful white lines. A deep green field.

Leon wanted to go there.

He was Leon in Mama Jean’s house. Long before he became Xander King. Long before the money came.

He wanted to be sitting at the very edge of the orange running track with all the people watching from the seats behind him and feel the thrilling
whoosh
of the runners going by. Just before the ads came on five linked circles appeared on the screen, a row of three and two. Leon had learned the colours: blue, black, red, yellow, green. The circles gave him a strange feeling of a world a long way away.

‘How about some ice cream?’ Mama Jean said.

Leon looked up. Just looking up at Mama Jean was like lifting a big weight with his neck.

‘You can have a scoop of chocolate and a scoop of vanilla. How’s that sound?’

Leon felt his face go hot and his hands thicken and he needed to pee. But they’d already been up to the room today, just a little while ago. Surely it was just a little while ago? It hadn’t worked. The brain demon was still in his head, Mama Jean had told him, afterwards. Like a hand made of black smoke. If it was still there when he had to start school, every girl would laugh at him. Did he want that?

Without speaking, Leon got to his feet and followed Mama Jean into the kitchen. The worktops were scrubbed and bright, the windows full of sunshine. Outside, the leaves on the trees shivered.

He got halfway through his ice cream before he felt Mama Jean go the way she went.

When Mama Jean went the way she went a kind of stillness and heat and quietness came off her. Leon could always feel it. When it happened, all the objects in the house went kind of hard and tight, because they knew, too. He wanted to spit out the spoonful of ice cream he’d just put in his mouth. The smell of Mama Jean’s big pale blue jeans and hairspray and tobacco swelled in the kitchen.

Leon took a few paces towards the back door, holding the red plastic bowl of ice cream very carefully in both hands.

He got all the way to the threshold before Mama Jean said, ‘Where the fuck do you think you’re going?’

For Paulie, the long drive with his bad knee had been no kind of fun, but it was no kind of fun to be stopped here in the middle of nowhere with Xander looking like a fucking hypnotised person, either. They’d only just crossed the border into Utah and were heading east down to the 15 when he’d been woken by the RV’s swerve and Xander apparently asleep at the wheel. He’d nearly shit himself in the struggle to get Xander’s foot off the gas and the RV safely halted at the side of the road. It was still early, not much after ten.

‘Hey,’ he said, shaking Xander’s shoulder for the umpteenth time. ‘
Hey
.’

It wasn’t the first time this had happened. And it had been happening more often recently. It terrified Paulie, Xander’s absence. It measured how alone he would be in the world without him.

And he still couldn’t believe he hadn’t got his time with the woman. It had filled him with a hot weakness and desperation, as if his anger were a cripple in a wheelchair. It had made him think, for just a moment, that
he
should leave
Xander
. But the thought – even for its moment – had made the open land’s darkness yawn with a kind of gravity that made him feel sick.

Xander turned his head, slowly, and looked at him.

‘Jesus,’ Paulie said. ‘You OK? What the fuck?’

Xander blinked. Moved the muscles of his face around. ‘I’m real thirsty,’ he said. ‘Get me some water.’

‘Christ, man, you—’

‘How long’ve we been stopped?’

‘I don’t know. Half an hour maybe.’

‘Get me some water.’

Paulie went to the back of the RV and took a plastic bottle of deVine from the cooler. Xander drank all of it. Paulie was mesmerised by the movement of his Adam’s apple. He had a vivid memory of the little girl running ahead of him in the forest. He should’ve told Xander. Why hadn’t he told him? It had been crazy not to tell him.
A little kid got away from me
. Shame had stopped him. Shame and fear.
Don’t think about it. We can’t go back now. Fuck.

‘Tomorrow we have to get a jug,’ Xander said.

‘What?’

‘A milk jug. One of those little jugs with a lip. For milk. And batteries.’

‘Batteries?’

‘I want to shave.’

‘OK. But now we need to get going. We need to get going now, right?’

Xander sat still, staring out the windshield at the road’s pale meander through the empty land. Paulie felt desperate, suspended. It was agony when Xander’s will, which was normally like a warm searchlight on him, moved away somewhere else.

And when Xander turned to him this time, it was with a blank look that could have meant anything. Paulie couldn’t bear it. He almost blurted the whole story of the little girl out right there and then.

‘Go on in the back now,’ Xander said. ‘Make some coffee.’

Paulie forced a laugh. ‘Man, when you nod out like that… Sheesh. I don’t know whether to… I mean, you know?’

‘Go on in the back,’ Xander repeated, shifting the RV into drive.

Paulie, still forcing laughter, went to put his hand on Xander’s shoulder to give it a friendly shake. Somehow couldn’t. Xander gunned the engine. Holding his wrecked knee, Paulie clambered between the seats into the back of the vehicle. Praying that they weren’t – as he suspected they were – out of fucking coffee.

The body – it felt wrong calling it ‘a body’ when there was so little of it left – had been found by night hikers en route to Carson City from Reno through the state parks bordering Washoe Lake. It’s a new thing, apparently, Carla had said in the chopper, people walking in the dark. She said it without surprise. No one in law enforcement was surprised at anything.
He must become the whole of boredom
, Valerie thought. Poetry, like dreams, had delayed detonation. The scene was barely a quarter-mile from shore, in a thicket of bare trees.

The corpse had been buried, but dug at and worked to the surface by wildlife. All the organs and soft tissue were gone. Scraps of leathery cartilage clung to the bone. The bottom jaw was off, either through natural collapse or because it had been broken to get the alarm clock in. The clock itself was about three inches in diameter, black-faced with white numerals marked with luminous dots, surrounded by a brass effect plastic rim. You could buy one for less than ten bucks. It was the sort of thing saved from obsolescence by nostalgia.

Three Nevada CSI were still here, taking photographs. All the measurements were done. A taped perimeter had been set up and the grave site was tented. Two Reno Homicide detectives, the medical officer, a half-dozen uniformed RPD officers on guard. Everyone in the protective gear that would look ridiculous if you didn’t know why they were wearing it. It was a dull morning, gloomy under the trees. The land smelled damp and loamy.

‘At least they read the memos,’ Will said to Valerie. He looked like shit. They’d landed at Reno and been driven down in a squad car. Of the three of them only Carla appeared to have slept. Either that or she’d evolved past the need for sleep altogether.

‘Yeah,’ Valerie said, again feeling the gap where a quip would have been, long ago. They read the memos. Objects in the mouth? Vagina? Anus? Call the San Francisco team. They’re collecting them. Instead of catching the guys who are putting them there.

‘Detective Hart?’

Valerie turned.

‘Sam Derne,’ the man approaching said. ‘Reno Homicide.’

‘Hey,’ Valerie said. Derne was late forties, a short, compact guy with pale skin, a grey crew-cut and glittery blue eyes. He was holding a large format digital camera.

‘According to the medical officer there’s no telling how old the remains are until we get forensic entomology,’ he said. ‘And maybe not even then. But months, for sure. Possibly more than a year. We left the clock where it was for you to see, but we did remove this.’

He handed Valerie the camera. ‘It’s on screen,’ he said. ‘It’s been bagged. Found it next to her right hand.’

The shot on screen was of a torn piece of dark blue fabric, canvas or denim, Valerie guessed, embroidered with what might have been letters, maybe the bottom part of an ‘R’ with the curve of a ‘U’ or a ‘J’ overlapping it. The colour of the thread was impossible to make out, since it was heavily soiled.

‘Looks like part of a bowling shirt pocket,’ Valerie said, handing it on to Will. ‘Except it’s too heavy. Blue-collar uniform?’ Mentally she raced through
bus truck train driver auto-shop utilities car plant delivery maintenance
…

Derne nodded. ‘Anyway, we have it.’

‘It is a woman, right?’ Valerie asked.

‘We’ll have to wait for the pathologist’s report,’ Derne said. ‘But at first glance, yeah. Hair, bone size, jaw, pelvic inlet. Medical officer seems pretty sure.’

How many? Seven. No. Eight
.

‘You think this is deliberate?’ Will said, indicating the image of the torn pocket.

‘God knows,’ Valerie said. ‘Maybe it came off in the struggle. But if it’s our guys the primary scene’s elsewhere. She’d have to have had it in her hand all the way here.’

‘But if they froze her they might have missed it.’

‘What’s the nearest freeway?’ Valerie asked Derne. ‘The 580 – right?’

‘Yeah. But I don’t know how long they keep the cam footage, and we’re not exactly short of RV traffic here. There’s Lake Tahoe right over there. If this was done in summer…’

Valerie called Ed Perez and told him to get the zoo suspect images to the Reno office.

‘What is it?’ she said to Will, when she’d hung up. He was studying the photo of the torn pocket.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Too much crap blowing around in my head.’

They’d been at the scene for two hours when Valerie started to feel faint.

‘I’m taking five minutes,’ she said to Will. She ducked under the tape and walked deeper into the trees. Her head was hot. Her bones hurt. She was very conscious of her skeleton. Of the fact that underneath, she was exactly the same as the woman they’d found. She imagined speeded-up film of herself going through the stages of decomposition,
flies arriving, maggots heaving in an ecstatic mass, her flesh disappearing, her bones starting to flash white.

She stopped and leaned against a tree. She was trembling. She went down onto her hands and knees.

The five minutes passed. Then another five. She lost track of how long she’d been gone.

She got to her feet, shivering.

She’d taken maybe ten paces before she heard a twig snap under someone’s foot up ahead of her. She stopped. Convinced she’d been observed.

By Carla York.