The Killing Lessons (26 page)

When Xander woke Mama Jean was sitting in the chair from the old house, drawn up by the window, smoking. His bed was damp.

‘Simplest thing in the world,’ she said. ‘Simplest thing in the world, unless you’re dumb as a rock.’

Xander felt his mouth locked. He knew that he ought to be able to speak. But he couldn’t. The familiar heat and weight and prickling because he was making her lose her patience.

‘J is for?’

She leaned forward in the chair. The wood cricked. She was wearing the blue check shirt and the big faded jeans. Her pale meaty feet were bare. The thick toenails she clipped on the back stoop in the sun. The smoke from her cigarette went up straight for a few inches then rippled, crazily.

‘J is for?’ she repeated.

Jug. Jug. Jug.

The muscles in his face were full of soft electricity.

Mama Jean sighed, heavily. Sat back in her chair. Shook her head. Smiled to herself with a sort of gentleness.

‘I don’t know why you do this,’ she said. ‘I really don’t.’

With an almighty effort, Xander forced himself to sit up. Not just the bed but the whole room seemed to tilt. His hands felt giant and useless.

Mama Jean wobbled, flickered. Started to get to her feet.

Xander closed his eyes.

When he opened them again, she was gone.

The TV was still on, sound still down. An infomercial for an exercise belt. A blonde woman in a neon blue leotard and black pantyhose, walking on a treadmill. A buff guy in green sweatpants and a crisp white polo shirt, his mouth moving non-stop. The camera shifted to the studio audience. All of them looked delighted. Their teeth and eyes. Some of them were shaking their heads as if they couldn’t believe how happy they were.

Xander had got in bed with all his clothes on, even his boots. The clothes felt as if they were knitting themselves to his skin, becoming part of him. He wanted to take them off, but he was cold.

Simplest thing in the world
.

He’d waited too long. He’d let Paulie fuck up the way this needed to be done, and since then everything had gone wrong. He’d had a dream of firing at Paulie. A dream? Where was the gun? Hadn’t he got into bed with the gun?

He searched the bedclothes. Nothing. Images came back. Paulie against the wardrobe.

There was a bullet hole in the wardrobe.

He swung his heavy legs over the edge of the bed. He didn’t feel right. Nothing was right. Since fucking Colorado. The snow. The kid in the bedroom. The woman.

Because he didn’t have the jug. He didn’t have the J.

The J was under his arm. But it glowed when he closed his eyes, too. Like kids writing in the black air with sparklers. He’d waited too long. The room now had a sound of crackling. Time burning away. Mama Jean said:
I can wait all day. I’ve got all the time in the world.

He got to his feet, shivering.

There was a sound from downstairs.

Paulie.

It would be easier without Paulie. It would be, after all these years, a relief.

Claudia was almost at the top of the basement stairs when she thought of the keys. There had been half a dozen on the bunch in Paulie’s hand.

She had an image of herself finding every exit door locked. She hadn’t realised she’d been crying until this thought stopped her. For perhaps two seconds she suffered a perfect balance between the horror of being unable to get out and the horror of going back for the keys.
Going back
. The words made going back impossible. She would throw herself through a window if she had to. There was no going back. She could not go back.

But she had to go back.

The basement door was locked.

Tears welled and fell, instantly. A fracture of weakness through her whole body.

She forced herself back down the stairs. Merely putting one foot in front of the other threatened her with collapse. Each step was shakier than the one before, as if her mental schema for descending a staircase was deserting her.

Paulie was lying on his back, eyes closed, motionless, but visibly still breathing. A very gradually expanding puddle of blood where he’d pulled the metal out of his throat. Catching his smell of tobacco and damp canvas and sweat again dizzied her. She was shivering, in spite of the furnace’s exhaled heat. Touching him seemed inconceivable.

But she jammed her jaws together (the sounds of herself, breathing, sobbing, were loud and raw) and made herself do what she had to do.

The keys were in the right-hand pocket of the combat jacket.

She grabbed them, turned and ran back up the stairs. At the
very
last moment remembered to pick up the shotgun. Even if she couldn’t fire it it was something to hold, it was a club, as she’d already proved.

She made too much noise on the stairs.

Not the first key. Not the second. Not the third.

Her hands were frantic birds tethered to her wrists. She dropped the bunch. Grazed her forehead on the locked door when she bent to snatch them back up.

Which keys had she already tried?

The words
start again
made her sick with rage and fear. Time haemorrhaging. Her time. Going…

The second key she tried fitted.

The door opened with what sounded like an amplified creak.

She was through.

The corridor she found herself in (she remembered very little of her first sight of it in the darkness) led in one direction back towards the kitchen, in the other down to another door with a pane of frosted glass in it above head height. Front door. The glass showed twilight. Dawn? Dusk? She had no clue. Opposite her two more doorways, one (to her left) with its door shut, the other (ten feet to her right) with its door ajar. Scuffed plaster and a bare wooden floor. A rotten hallway runner bunched up near the front door, weighted down with an old iron boot scraper. Chunky Bakelite light switches and two cobwebbed bare bulbs hanging from the flaking ceiling. The house was silent. The world was silent. No traffic. No birdsong. It might have been the sole building on an otherwise empty planet.

The nearness of the exits screamed at her to run. Was overridden – just – by the thought of the other guy hearing her. The other guy. Where was he?

She went on agonised tiptoe to the front door. Tried the handle.

Locked.

The nightmare with the keys. Again. Her hands worse, her face trembling. The need to look at the keys and to look over her shoulder. She couldn’t do both. Every time she looked down at the keys the certainty that someone was approaching at her back. The house watching.

She tried every key.

None of them fitted.

Now it was impossible to go slowly. She turned and ran back down the corridor towards the kitchen.

She was a pace past the ajar door when Xander stepped out behind her, grabbed her by her hair and yanked her backwards, off her sandalled feet.

Valerie checked herself into the Best Western on East St George Boulevard (the two women on reception were both wearing Santa hats), showered, changed and half-slept for the hour and forty minutes before the Red Cliffs Mall opened. It didn’t help. When her phone alarm rang it was like hauling herself up from an underwater realm all but impenetrably choked with weeds. She splashed cold water on her face, brushed her teeth, dropped a couple of Advil and got back into the Taurus, shivering. It occurred to her that in her old life she would have taken her temperature. Her old life. How long had it been since she’d lived her old life? She wasn’t even sure what her old life was any more.

She’d called Will and got him to tell the Mall management office to expect her. There was, of course, the glaring fact of her having zero jurisdiction in Utah, but Will had put the requisite frighteners on them, so there was no resistance (there was deference, in fact) when she turned up a little after seven thirty a.m., cursorily flashed her badge, and was escorted to CCTV headquarters on the second floor.

‘We already sent the stuff to the St George guys,’ the chief security officer told her. ‘If it hasn’t reached your people yet, that’s them sitting on it, not us.’ His name was Marcellus Corey, a handsome black fifty-two-year-old from New Orleans with flecks of grey in his close-cropped hair and a high-cheekboned face and a smile that would politely wait out whatever bullshit you were spewing until you were ready to tell the truth.

‘They’ve sent it through,’ Valerie said. ‘But you know, I’m here now anyway.’

Marcellus smiled. The tiniest parting of his lips revealed the warm glint of a gold tooth.
He feels sorry for me
, Valerie thought.
He knows who I am.

‘I hear you,’ Marcellus said. ‘Well, we got the originals right here.’

The hotline caller hadn’t been sure whether it was a Wednesday or a Thursday she’d seen the suspect, which meant Valerie had, potentially, two shopping days of footage to sit through. Marcellus set her up in the control room with a coffee, but after two hours the feeling of futility had settled on her. The caller hadn’t given them anything beyond ‘the mall’. Valerie had decided to take the general public area footage first, then go store by store. But what for? The best she could hope for was a positive ID. Where did that get her? Leon still had the whole state. So what if he was in St George a week ago? It didn’t prove he lived here. Utah had an area close to 85,000 square miles. Murder HQ – and
maybe
Claudia
Grey, if she was even still alive
–
could be anywhere from here to Logan, two hundred miles north.

Her eyes hurt. The constant strain of trying to visually compress the pixels. She paused the footage, got up, stretched. Her head was pounding, and though she’d put the fleece on under her jacket she was still shivering. She looked in her purse for more Advil. She was out. The purse. The baggie. The test.

Before more women die of your incompetence. Baby killer.

‘Jesus,’ Marcellus said, when he passed her on his way out of the control room. ‘You OK, Detective? You look… You don’t look so good.’

‘Yeah,’ Valerie said. ‘I’ve got a cold.’

‘I’m not a doctor,’ Marcellus said. ‘But it looks like a little more than a cold to me.’

‘I’m fine. Getting a little screen-blind.’

‘Well, I’m going to get coffee. Can I get you anything?’

Advil
, Valerie thought.
Codeine. And some fucking speed while you’re at it.
But she was sick of taking painkillers. It felt like a moral failure. ‘Coffee would be great,’ she said. ‘A cappuccino?’

Alone in the control room (three other security officers had been in and out during the morning, but they were all downstairs now), Valerie paced, trying to reboot her concentration. There were three work stations and several monitors, live-feeding, switching angles. She wondered what it was like for Marcellus, spending his days watching people who didn’t consider for a moment that they were being watched. You’d see everything from up here: flirtations; break-ups; bad parenting; happy people; sad people; lonely people; mostly people just trawling unreflectively through the inexhaustible wealth of their extraordinary ordinariness.
The work goes into you
. You’d feel like a small version of God, up here, hour after hour, day after day. Marcellus had something of that quality, a sort of patient accommodation, beyond any kind of surprise.

With a very slight sense of voyeuristic guilt, she searched for Marcellus now, wondering if he were wondering if she’d do just that. It took a little while, but she found him. He was standing outside Starbucks, the two coffees in a cardboard holder, chatting with one of the mall’s cleaning staff, a small bald black guy holding a bright green cart equipped with mops and brushes.

A toddler who’d obviously slipped his mother’s grasp darted out of the Starbucks entrance just behind Marcellus, face filled with delighted mischief, and ran straight into the legs of a dark-haired, bearded guy in sunglasses walking past. The guy had a shopping bag in either hand, and something Valerie couldn’t make out slotted into one armpit. On the kid’s impact, the package slipped and fell to the floor. The toddler – a blond boy in denim dungarees, looked up at him for a moment, then took off again, unsteadily, pursued a second later by his mother, a pretty young woman, hair identical blond, in a floral sundress, a short leather jacket and bright white Nikes.

The guy bent to retrieve what he’d dropped: a yellow paper kite wrapped in cellophane, while the mother scooped up the kid. It cheered Valerie slightly that the young woman didn’t seem angry, that a part of her took pleasure in her kid’s wayward vitality.

The guy resettled the kite under his arm. He seemed all but oblivious to the young woman’s apology as he walked away. Valerie wondered where he’d managed to buy a kite in the middle of winter. But of course the world of retail had long since stopped paying attention to the seasons. Still, a weird present to give someone at Christmas. Kites were for summer.

She had turned away from the monitors and was heading back to her own dreaded work station when it hit her.

K is for…?

Was it ‘Kite’?

Jesus.

She spun back to the screen, but the guy was out of frame.

The sunglasses and beard had hidden his features.

But the height and build were right.

Fuck.

There was no time.

She ran.

‘Lock down the mall,’ Valerie said to Marcellus.

‘What?’

‘He’s here. Lock it down.’

How many seconds had passed? Minutes? Time. Claudia.

‘I can’t… I mean—’

‘Do it. Right now. How many exits?’

‘Two. But there are store exits too. I guess—’

‘Get your guys on them. White male, dark hair and beard, sunglasses, six foot, one eighty. Jeans and dark blue windbreaker.’

She took off in the direction the guy had gone. ‘And check the parking lot cameras,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘He might be out there. Look for an RV.’

It was an agony in her wake, feeling the time eaten up by Marcellus’s processing. The time it would take for him to walkie the security team, get back up to the office, get the requisite approval, throw the switches.

She scanned the stores as she went by, but the main thing was to get to the exit. One of the
two
exits. For all she knew he could be at the other one, or out through Sears, J. C. Penney, Dillard’s…

The security gates didn’t come down. Human traffic flowed in and out past Valerie. As it would be flowing, she knew, through all the other ways in and out of the building.

Fifteen minutes went by. One of the uniformed security team Valerie had seen earlier appeared. He wasn’t alone. A tall, moon-faced white guy in a dark linen suit introduced himself:

‘Mark Vaughn,’ he said, extending his hand. ‘I’m the mall manager. What’s going on, Detective?’

What’s going on is that you’ve probably just let a serial killer evade arrest. What’s going on is that thanks to not locking the place down another young woman is going to die
.

Before she even began the recap Valerie could feel how long it would take. Mark Vaughn wasn’t trying to be difficult. He was just scared. Shut the place down for what might be several hours on Christmas Eve. Possible crowd panic. There would be someone he was answerable to.

She decided to go in hard. Use his fear.

‘You either shut this place down right now or I’ll charge you with obstruction,’ she said. ‘This is a multiple murder investigation. Do you understand?’

‘Look,’ he began. ‘This is… I mean—’

‘Detective!’ Marcellus was heading towards them. He looked out of breath.

‘He’s gone,’ he said.

Valerie felt her face go hot.

‘Sears exit camera. He must have gone out through the store right after you saw him.’

Mark Vaughn’s fear went up a notch.

‘Parking lots,’ Valerie said, grabbing Marcellus by the elbow and hustling him back towards the stairs.

‘I’m sorry,’ Marcellus said, as they went up. ‘I had to get his clearance. I told him there was no time.’

‘It’s not your fault,’ Valerie said.

She called Nick Blaskovitch.

‘Skirt, how’s it going?’

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Pull up the picture of the kid.’

‘I’m not at my desk.’

‘How long?’

‘I’m in the evidence room.’

‘Get back there.’

‘Val, I’m in the middle of—’

‘Now, Nick. Do it. I’ll stay on the line. Hurry.’

He didn’t argue. They knew each other. They knew the tones. She couldn’t stop her mind:
Catch this fucker and you can try again for love.
She knew it was madness. But what wasn’t madness in her life?

‘What’s going on?’ He was running, she could hear.

‘Possible ID.’

‘You still in St George?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You saw him?’

‘No,’ she lied. ‘A witness. It’s only a possible. You there yet?’

‘One minute.’

Valerie and Marcellus entered the security office. Marcellus began rewinding through what footage there was from the parking lot.

‘OK,’ Blasko said. ‘I’m pulling it up now.’

‘The alphabet chart,’ Valerie said. ‘Is there a kite on it? K for kite?’

‘Enlarging.’

‘Apple, Balloon, Clock, Dinosaur, Elephant, Fork, Goose, Hammer—’

‘Can’t tell,’ Blasko said. ‘After Hammer, Icicle, then Jug. The next thing isn’t in the shot. Just the edge of it. Can’t say for sure it’s a kite.’

‘What colour is it?’

‘Yellow. The bit I can see is yellow.’

‘I’ll call you back.’

‘You got St George PD with you?’

‘Yeah.’ Lies, lies, lies.

‘Don’t lie,’ he said. ‘You get close you call for back-up.’

‘I’ll do it,’ Valerie said. ‘I have to go.’

‘Val, I’m not kid—’

She hung up.

The footage didn’t help. The suspect turned left out of Sears – and that was the last it had of him. There was a solitary camera angle for the parking lot exit. Flaring and subsiding sunlight on the windshields left half the drivers invisible. He was gone. He’d been
right there
and she’d missed him. She could sense Marcellus’s misery joining her own in the windowless room.

‘Fuck,’ he said, quietly. ‘I’m sorry.’ Then, after a pause: ‘What next?’

The adrenalin was still draining. She could feel her body assimilating the reality of the situation all over again: she had nothing.

‘What next?’ she said – and thought:
What next is that I drive around on psychic empty in the fucking idiotic hope that I spot him.

‘What next is I get the updated description out to your locals and every other agency,’ she said. ‘Can you print me a still from this?’