CHAPTER 3
1
Once Lila had the woman cuffed, she wrapped her in the space blanket she kept in the trunk of the cruiser, and thrust her into the backseat. At the same time, she recited the Miranda. The woman, now silent, her brilliant grin faded to a dreamy smile, had limply accepted Lila’s grip on her upper arm. The arrest was completed and the suspect secured in less than five minutes; the dust sprayed up from the cruiser’s tires was still settling as Lila strode back around to the driver’s side.
“They call moth watchers moth-ers, spelled like mothers, but not said like that.”
Lila was turning the cruiser around and pointing it back down Ball’s Hill toward town when her prisoner shared this bit of information. She caught the woman’s eyes, looking at her in the rearview. Her voice was soft, but not especially feminine. There was a wandering quality to her speech. It was unclear to Lila if she was being addressed, or if the woman was talking to herself.
Drugs, Lila thought. PCP was a good bet. So was ketamine.
“You know my name,” Lila said, “so where do I know you from?”
There were three possibilities: the PTA (unlikely), the newspaper, or Lila had arrested her at some point in the last fourteen years and didn’t remember. Door number three seemed the best bet.
“Everyone knows me,” said Evie. “I’m sort of an It Girl.” Her cuffs clinked as she hiked one shoulder to scratch her chin. “Sort of. It and Girl. Me, myself, and I. Father, Son, and Holy Eve. Eave, a roof underhang. Eve, short for evening. When we all go to sleep. Right? Moth-er, get it? Like mother.”
Civilians had no idea how much nonsense you had to listen to when you were a cop. The public loved to salute police officers for their bravery, but no one ever gave you credit for the day-in, day-out fortitude required to put up with the bullshit. While courage was an excellent feature in a police officer, a built-in resistance to gibberish was, in Lila’s opinion, just as important.
As it happened, this was why filling the latest open position for a full-time deputy had proved so difficult. It was the reason she had ultimately passed on the application from the animal control guy, Frank Geary, and hired a young vet named Dan Treater instead, even though Treater had almost no experience in law enforcement. Smart and well-spoken as Geary obviously was, his job-file was too big—he’d generated too much paperwork, written up too many fines. The message between the lines was one of confrontation; this was not the kind of guy who could let the small shit slide. That was no good.
Not that her staff as a whole was some kind of crackerjack crime-fighting squad, and so what, big deal, welcome to real life. You got the best people you could, then tried to help them along. Roger Elway and Terry Coombs, for instance. Roger had probably absorbed one hit too many as a lineman for Coach Wittstock’s Dooling High School football team in the early aughts. Terry was smarter, but could become dispirited and sullen if things weren’t going his way, and he drank too much at parties. On the other hand, both men had fairly long fuses, which meant she could trust them. Mostly.
Lila harbored an unspoken belief that motherhood was the best possible rehearsal for a prospective police officer. (Unspoken especially to Clint, who would have had a field day with it; she could picture how he’d cock his head and twist his mouth in that rather tiresome way of his and say, “That’s interesting,” or “Could be.”) Mothers were naturals for law enforcement, because toddlers, like criminals, were often belligerent and destructive.
If you could get through those early years without losing your cool or blowing your top, you might be able to deal with grown-up crime. The key was to not react, to stay adult—and was she thinking about the naked woman covered in blood who had something to do with the violent deaths of two, or was she thinking about how to handle someone closer to home, much closer, the fellow who rested his head on the pillow next to hers? (When the clock clicked to 00:00, the gymnasium horn had blared, and the boys and girls cheered. The final score: Bridger County Girls AAU 42–Fayette Girls AAU 34.) As Clint might say, “Huh, that’s interesting. Want to tell me a bit more?”
“So many good sales right now,” Evie rattled on. “Washer-dryer. Grills. Babies that eat plastic food and poop it out again. Savings galore all over the store.”
“I see,” said Lila, as if the woman was making sense. “What’s your name?”
“Evie.”
Lila twisted around. “And a last name? How about that?”
The woman’s cheekbones were strong and straight. The pale brown eyes glowed. Her skin had what Lila thought of as a Mediterranean tint, and that dark hair, ooh. A splotch of blood had dried on her forehead.
“Do I need one?” Evie asked.
As far as Lila was concerned, that carried the motion: her new acquaintance was definitively, catastrophically high.
She faced forward, tapped the gas, and popped loose the mic. “Base, this is Unit One. I’ve got a woman in custody, found her walking north from the area of the lumberyard on Ball’s Hill. She’s got a lot of blood on her, so we need the kit to take some samples. She also needs a Tyvek suit. And call for an ambulance to meet us. She’s on something.”
“Roger that,” said Linny. “Terry says it’s a real mess at that trailer.”
“Roger that.” Evie laughed cheerily. “A real mess. Bring extra towels. Not the good ones, though, ha-ha-ha. Roger that.”
“One, out.” Lila racked the mic. She glanced at Evie in the mirror. “You should sit quiet, ma’am. I’m arresting you on suspicion of murder. This is serious.”
They were approaching the town line. Lila rolled the cruiser to a pause at the stop sign that brokered the Ball’s Hill–West Lavin intersection. West Lavin led to the prison. Visible on the opposite side of the road was a sign that warned against stopping for hitchhikers.
“Are you injured, ma’am?”
“Not yet,” said Evie. “But, hey! Triple-double. Pretty good.”
Something flickered in Lila’s mind, the mental equivalent of a glittering fleck in the sand, quickly washed over by a frothing wave.
She looked in the rearview again. Evie had shut her eyes and settled back. Was she coming down?
“Ma’am, are you going to be sick?”
“You better kiss your man before you go to sleep. You better kiss him goodbye while you still have the chance.”
“Sure thi—” Lila began, but then the woman bolted forward, headfirst into the dividing mesh. Lila flinched away instinctively as the impact of Evie’s head caused the barrier to rattle and vibrate.
“Stop that!” she cried, just before Evie smashed against the mesh a second time. Lila caught the flash of a grin on her face, fresh blood on her teeth, and then she battered against the mesh a third time.
Hand on the door, Lila was about to get out and go around to the rear, tase the woman for her own safety, settle her down, but the third strike was the last. Evie had crumpled down to the seat, gasping in a happy way, a runner who had just ripped through the finish line. There was blood around her mouth and nose, and a gash on her forehead.
“Triple-double! All right!” Evie cried out. “Triple-double! Busy day!”
Lila unracked the mic and radioed Linny: change of plans. The public defender needed to meet them at the station just as soon-as. And Judge Silver, too, if the old fellow could be persuaded to come down and do them a favor.
2
Belly-deep in a clutch of sweet-fern, a fox watched Essie unpack her cart.
He did not think of her as Essie, of course, did not have a name for her at all. She was just another human. The fox had in any case been observing her for a long while—moons and suns—and recognized clearly her ramshackle lean-to of plastic sheeting and canvas draping for the foxhole that it was. The fox also understood that the four chunks of green glass that she organized in a semi-circle and referred to as “The Girls” held great meaning to her. At times when Essie was not present, the fox had smelled them—no life there—and sifted through her possessions, which were negligible, except for a few discarded cans of soup that he had licked clean.
He believed that she represented no threat, but he was an old fox, and one did not become an old fox by proceeding too confidently on any matter. One became an old fox by being careful and opportunistic, by mating as frequently as possible while avoiding entanglements, by never crossing roads in daylight, and by digging deeply in good soft loam.
This morning, his prudence appeared to be unnecessary. Essie’s behavior was entirely in character. After she removed the bags and sundry mysterious items from her cart, she informed the glass fragments that mother needed a snooze. “No tomfoolery, you girls,” Essie said, and entered the lean-to to lie on the pile of mover’s quilts she used as a mattress. Though the lean-to covered her body, her head poked out into the light.
While Essie was settling into her sleep, the fox silently bared his teeth at the male mannequin top that she had set in the leaves beside the lean-to, but the mannequin did nothing. It was probably dead like the green glass. The fox chewed his paw and waited.
Soon the old woman’s breath settled into a sleeping rhythm, each deep intake followed by a shallow whistle of exhalation. The fox stretched slowly up from the bed of sweet-fern and slunk a few steps toward the lean-to, wanting to be absolutely sure about the mannequin’s intent or lack thereof. He bared his teeth more widely. The mannequin did not move. Yes, definitely dead.
He trotted to within a few lengths of the lean-to, and stopped. A whitish fluttering was appearing over the sleeping woman’s head—white strands, like cobwebs, lifting from her cheeks, unfurling breezily and settling on her skin, coating it. New strands spun out from the laid strands and they quickly covered her face, forming a mask that would soon extend all the way around her head. Moths circled in the dimness of the lean-to.
The fox retreated a few steps, sniffing. He didn’t like the white stuff—the white stuff was definitely alive, and it was definitely a different creature altogether from those he was familiar with. Even at a distance, the scent of the white stuff was strong, and disturbingly mingled: there was blood and tissue in the scent, and intelligence and hunger, and an element of the deep, deep earth, of the Foxhole of Foxholes. And what slept in that great bed? Not a fox, he was certain.
His sniffs became whines, and he turned and began to trot away west. A sound of movement—someone else coming—carried through the woods behind him, and the fox’s trot became a run.
3
After helping Oscar Silver inter Cocoa the cat—wrapped in a threadbare terrycloth bath towel—Frank drove the two short blocks to the house at 51 Smith Lane that he paid the mortgage on, but where, since he and Elaine had separated, only she and their twelve-year-old daughter still resided.
Elaine had been a social worker until two state budgets ago, but now she worked part-time at the Goodwill and volunteered at a couple of food pantries and at the Planned Parenthood in Maylock. The upside of this was that they didn’t have to find money for childcare. When the school day ended no one minded if Nana hung around at the Goodwill with her mother. The downside was that they were going to lose the house.
This bothered Frank more than Elaine. In fact, it didn’t seem to bother her at all. Despite her denials, he suspected that she planned to use the sale as an excuse to depart the area altogether, maybe take off for Pennsylvania where her sister lived. If that happened, Frank’s every other weekend would become a weekend every other month, at best.
Except for visiting days, he made a concerted effort to avoid the place. Even then, if he could arrange for Elaine to bring Nana to him, that was his preference. The memories that went with the house—the sense of unfairness and failure, the patched hole in the kitchen wall—were too raw. Frank felt as though he had been tricked out of his entire life and the best part of that life had been lived at 51 Smith Lane, the neat, plain ranch house with the duck on the mailbox, painted by his daughter.
The matter of the green Mercedes, however, made a stop-in imperative.
As he jerked over to the curb, he spied Nana drawing with chalk in the driveway. It was an activity you’d normally associate with a much younger child, but his daughter had a talent for illustration. The previous school year she had won second prize in a bookmark-designing contest held by the local library. Nana’s had shown a bunch of books flying like birds across a cloudbank. Frank had framed it and hung it in his office. He looked at it all the time. It was a beautiful thing, imagining books flying around inside his little girl’s head.
She sat cross-legged in the sunshine, butt planted in an inner tube and her rainbow of implements arrayed around her in a fan. Along with her drawing ability, or maybe in accordance with it, Nana had a gift for making herself comfortable. She was a slow-moving, dreamy child, taking more after Frank than her vibrant mother, who never messed around about anything, was always straight-to-the-point.
He leaned over, popped the door of his truck. “Hey, Brighteyes. Come here.”
She squinted up at him. “Daddy?”
“Last I heard,” he said, working hard to keep the corners of his mouth turned up. “Come here, okay?”
“Right now?” She had already glanced down to her picture.
“Yes. Right now.” Frank took a deep breath.
He hadn’t started to get what Elaine called “that way” until he was leaving the judge. By which El meant losing his temper. Which he rarely did, no matter what she thought. And today? At first he had been fine. Then, about five steps across Oscar Silver’s grass, it was as if he had tripped some invisible trigger. Sometimes that just happened. Like when Elaine had kept after him about yelling at the PTA meeting and he’d punched that hole in the wall and Nana had run upstairs, crying, not understanding that sometimes you punched a thing so you wouldn’t punch a person. Or that business with Fritz Meshaum, where he had been a little out of control, granted, but Meshaum deserved it. Anyone who would do a thing like that to an animal deserved it.
That cat could have been my kid was what he had been thinking as he crossed the grass. And then, boom! Like time was a shoelace and the length of it, between him walking and getting into the truck, had been knotted off. Because suddenly he was in his truck, he was driving for the house on Smith, and he couldn’t recall getting in the truck at all. His hands were sweaty on the wheel and his cheeks hot, and he was still thinking about how the cat could have been his kid, except it wasn’t a thought. More like an urgent flashing message on an LED screen:
e r r o r e r r o r e r r o r
m y k i d m y k i d m y k i d
Nana carefully placed a stub of purple chalk in the empty spot between an orange and a green. She pushed up from her inner tube and stood for a couple of seconds, dusting off the rear end of her flowered yellow shorts and rubbing her chalky fingertips contemplatively.
“Honey,” said Frank, fighting not to scream. Because, look, she had been right there, in the driveway, where some drunk asshole in a fancy car could drive right over her!
m y k i d m y k i d m y k i d
Nana took a step, stopped, studied her fingers again, apparently with dissatisfaction.
“Nana!” Frank, still twisted into a lean across the console. He slapped the passenger seat. Slapped it hard. “Get over here!”
The girl’s head yanked up, her expression startled, as if she had just been awakened from sleep by a thunderclap. She shuffled forward, and when she reached the open door, Frank grabbed the front of her tee-shirt and tugged her up close.
“Hey! You’re stretching my shirt,” Nana said.
“Never mind that,” Frank said. “Your shirt’s not the big deal here. I’ll tell you what the big deal is, so listen to me. Who drives the green Mercedes? Which house does it go with?”
“What?” Nana pressed at his grip on the front of her shirt. “What are you talking about? You’re going to ruin my shirt.”
“Didn’t you hear me? Forget the fucking shirt!” The words were out and he hated them, but he was also satisfied to see her eyes jump from her shirt to him. He finally had her attention. Nana blinked and inhaled.
“Okay, now that your head’s out of the clouds, let’s get together on this. You told me about some guy on your paper route who drove a green Mercedes. What’s his name? Which house does he live in?”
“Can’t remember his name. I’m sorry, Daddy.” Nana bit her lower lip. “It’s the house beside the one with the big flag, though. It’s got a wall. On Briar. Top of the hill.”
“Okay.” Frank let go of the shirt.
Nana didn’t move. “Are you done being mad?”
“Honey, I wasn’t mad.” And when she said nothing: “Okay, I was. A little. But not at you.”
She wouldn’t look at him, just kept rubbing her goddam fingers together. He loved her, she was the most important thing in his life, but sometimes it was hard to believe she had all four wheels on the road.
“Thank you.” Some of the heat was draining from his face, some of the sweat cooling on his skin. “Thank you, Brighteyes.”
“Sure,” said Nana. The girl retreated a small step, the sound of her sneaker sole against the pavement impossibly loud in Frank’s ear.
Frank straightened up in his seat. “One more thing. Do me a favor and stay out of the driveway. For the rest of the morning, anyway, till I can sort something out. There’s a man driving around crazy. Draw inside with your paper, all right?”
She was biting at her lower lip. “All right, Daddy.”
“You’re not going to cry, are you?”
“No, Daddy.”
“All right. That’s my girl. I’ll see you next weekend, okay?”
He realized his lips were incredibly dry. He asked himself what else he was supposed to have done, and a voice inside him replied, “Well, gee, what else could you have done? Maybe you could have, I don’t know, this will probably sound totally wild, Frank, but hey, maybe you could have not freaked the fuck out?” The voice was like an amused version of Frank’s own voice, the voice of a man who was kicked back in a lawn chair and wearing sunglasses and maybe sipping on an iced tea.
“Okay.” The nod she gave him was robotic.
Behind her, on the pavement, she had drawn an elaborate tree, its canopy spreading up one side of the driveway, its gnarled trunk cutting across. Moss hung from the branches and flowers bearded the base. Roots trailed down to the outline of an underground lake.
“I like what you got there,” he said and smiled.
“Thank you, Daddy,” Nana said.
“I just don’t want you to get hurt.” The smile on his face felt like it was nailed on.
His daughter sniffed and gave him another robotic nod. He knew she was sucking back tears.
“Hey, Nana . . .” He started, but the words he wanted dispersed as the interior voice piped up again, telling him she’d had enough. To just leave it the hell alone.
“Bye, Daddy.”
She reached out and pushed his truck door gently shut. Spun and jogged up the driveway, scattering her chalks, striding across her tree, smudging the greens and blacks of the treetop. Head down. Shoulders shaking.
Kids, he told himself, can’t always appreciate when you’re trying to do the right thing.
4
There were three overnight filings on Clint’s desk.
The first was predictable, but concerning: one of the officers on staff the previous night speculated that Angel Fitzroy seemed to be ramping up to something. At lights-out Angel had attempted to engage the officer over an issue of semantics. The authorities at Dooling were all strictly to be referred to as “Officer.” Synonyms such as “guard,” or “screw,” let alone—obviously!—slurs like “asshole” or “motherfucker,” were unacceptable. Angel had asked Officer Wettermore if he understood English. Of course they were guards, Angel said. They could be officers, too, that was fine, but they couldn’t not be guards, because they guarded. Weren’t they guarding the prisoners? If you baked a cake, weren’t you a baker? If you dug a hole, weren’t you a digger?
Warned the inmate that she had arrived at the end of reasonable discussion and could expect consequences if she didn’t lock it down immediately, Wettermore wrote. Inmate relented and entered her cell, but further asked, How could we expect prisoners to follow the rules when the words of the rules did not make any sense? Inmate’s tone was threatening.
Angel Fitzroy was one of the few women in the prison whom Clint regarded as genuinely dangerous. Based on his interactions with her, he believed she might be a sociopath. He had never glimpsed any empathy in her, and her record inside was fat with infractions: drugs, fighting, threatening behavior.
“How do you suppose you’d have felt if the man you attacked had died from his injuries, Angel?” he had asked her during a group session.
“Aw,” Angel had said, sunken down in the chair, her eyes roaming his office walls. “I’d have felt, oh, pretty bad—I guess.” Then, she’d smacked her lips, gaze fastening on the Hockney print. “Looka that picture, girls. Wouldn’t you like to visit where it is?”
While her assault conviction was bad enough—a man in a truck stop had said something to Angel that she hadn’t liked and she’d broken his nose with a ketchup bottle—there were indications that she’d gotten away with much worse.
A detective from Charleston had driven to Dooling to solicit Clint’s help with a case relating to Fitzroy. What the detective wanted was information concerning the death of a former landlord of Angel’s. This had happened a couple of years before her current incarceration. Angel had been the only suspect, but there was nothing except vicinity to tie her to the crime, and no apparent motive. The thing was (as Clint himself knew), Angel had a history of not needing much of a motive. Twenty cents off in her change could be enough to blow her up. The Charleston detective had been nearly gleeful in his description of the landlord’s corpse: “Looked like the old boy just fell down the stairs, got his neck broke. But the coroner said someone had been to work on his package premortem. Balls was—I forget how the coroner put it, exactly, if he said fractured or whatever. But, layman’s terms, he said, ‘They were basically squished.’ ”
Clint wasn’t in the business of flipping on his patients and told the detective so, but he had mentioned the inquiry to Angel later.
With an expression of glassy wonderment she responded, “Balls can fracture?”
Now he made a note to himself to drop in on Angel that day, take a seismology reading.
The second filing was about an inmate on janitorial duty who claimed that there was an infestation of moths in the prison kitchen. A check by Officer Murphy found no moths. Inmate willingly submitted to a urine drop—clean for drugs and alcohol.
That one seemed to translate as a case of an inmate working hard to drive an officer crazy and an officer working hard to return the favor. Clint had no interest in continuing the circle by following up. He filed it.
Kitty McDavid was the last incident.
Officer Wettermore had jotted some of her ranting: The Black Angel came up from the roots and down from the branches. Her fingers are death and her hair is full of cobwebs and dream is her kingdom. After the administration of a dose of Haldol, she had been moved to A Wing.
Clint left his office and passed through admin toward the east section of the prison, which contained the cell wings. The prison was shaped roughly like a lowercase “t,” with the long central line of the corridor known as Broadway parallel to Route 17/West Lavin Road outside. The administration offices, the communications center, the officers’ room, the staff lounge, and the classrooms were all situated at the west end of Broadway. The other corridor, Main Street, ran perpendicular to West Lavin. Main Street went from the prison’s front door straight ahead to the craft shop, the utility room, the laundry, and the gymnasium. On the other side of Main Street, Broadway continued eastward, passing the library, the mess hall, the visitors’ room, the infirmary, and intake, before arriving at the three cell wings.
A security door separated the cells from Broadway. Clint stopped here and pressed the button that notified the Booth that he wanted to enter. A buzzer sounded and the bolts of the security door retracted with a clunk. Clint pushed through.
These wings, A, B, and C, were arranged in a pincer shape. In the center of the pincer was the Booth, a shed-like structure armored in bulletproof glass. It contained the officers’ monitors and communication board.
Although most of the prison population mixed in the yard and elsewhere, the wings were organized according to the theoretical danger presented by each inmate. There were sixty-four cells in the prison; twelve in A Wing, twelve in C Wing, and forty in B Wing. A and C were set entirely on ground level; B Wing was stacked with a second level of cells.
A Wing was medical, although some inmates considered “tranquil” were also housed there, at the far end of the corridor. Inmates not necessarily tranquil but “settled,” such as Kitty McDavid, were housed in B Wing. C Wing was for the troublemakers.
C was the least populous residence, with half of the twelve cells currently empty. When there was a breakdown or a severe disciplinary issue, it was official procedure to remove the inmate from her cell and place her in one of the “Eye” cells in C Wing. Inmates called these the Jerk-Off Cells, because ceiling cameras allowed the officers to observe what the inmate was doing at all times. The implication was that male officers got their jollies by spying on them. The cameras were essential, though. If an inmate might attempt to harm or even kill herself, you needed to be able to see it to prevent it.
The officer in the Booth today was Captain Vanessa Lampley. She leaned over from the board to open the door for him. Clint sat beside her and asked if she could bring up Unit 12 on the monitor so he could check on McDavid. “Let’s go to the videotape!” he yelled cheerily.
Lampley gave him a look.
“Let’s go to the videotape! You know, it’s what Warner Wolf always says.”
She shrugged and opened Unit 12 for visual inspection.
“The sportscaster?” Clint said.
Vanessa shrugged again. “Sorry. Must be before my time.”
Clint thought that was bizarre, Warner Wolf was a legend, but he dropped it so he could study the screen. Kitty was in a fetal position, face twisted down into her arms. “Seen anything out of line?”
Lampley shook her head. She’d come in at seven and McDavid had been snoozing the entire time.
That didn’t surprise Clint. Haldol was powerful stuff. He was worried about Kitty, though, a mother of two who had been convicted of forging prescriptions. In an ideal world, Kitty would never have been put in a correctional facility in the first place. She was a bipolar drug addict with a junior high school education.
The surprise was how her bipolarity had manifested on this occasion. In the past, she had withdrawn. Last night’s outburst of violent raving was unprecedented in her history. Clint had been fairly confident that the course of lithium he had prescribed for her was working. For over half a year Kitty had been levelheaded, generally upbeat—no sizable peaks or valleys. And she’d made the decision to testify for the prosecution in the Griner brothers case, which was not only courageous, but had a strong potential for advancing her own cause. There was every reason to believe that she could be paroled soon after the trial. The two of them had started to discuss the halfway house environment, what Kitty would do the first time that she became aware that someone was holding, how she would reintroduce herself to her children. Had it all started to look too rosy for her?
Lampley must have read his concern. “She’ll be all right, Doc. It was a one-off, that’s what I think. The full moon, probably. Everything else is screwy, you know.”
The stocky veteran was pragmatic but conscientious, exactly what you wanted in a head officer. It also didn’t hurt that Van Lampley was a competitive arm wrestler of some renown. Her biceps swelled the gray sleeves of her uniform.
“Oh, yeah,” Clint said, remembering the highway smash-up that Lila had mentioned. A couple of times he had attended Van’s birthday party; she lived on the back of the mountain. “You must have had to come to work the long way. Lila told me about the truck that crashed. Had to bulldoze the whole heap, she said.”
“Huh,” Van said. “I didn’t see any of that. Must’ve got it cleaned up before I left. I meant West and Ryckman.” Jodi West and Claire Ryckman were the regular day PAs. Like Clint they were nine-to-fivers. “They never showed. So we got no one on medical. Coates is pissed. Says she’s going to—”
“You didn’t see anything on Mountain?” Hadn’t Lila said that it was Mountain Rest Road? Clint was sure—almost sure, anyhow—she had.
Van shook her head. “Wouldn’t be the first time, though.” She grinned, displaying a big set of yellowing choppers. “There was a truck that flipped on that road last fall. What a disaster. It was from PetSmart, you know? Cat litter and dog food all over the road.”
5
The trailer belonging to the late Truman Mayweather had not looked good the last time Terry Coombs was out here (to cool down a domestic disturbance involving one of Truman’s many “sisters,” who had vacated the residence shortly thereafter), but this morning it looked like high tea in hell. Mayweather was sprawled beneath the eating table with some of his brains on his bare chest. The furniture (mostly purchased at roadside rummage sales, Dollar Discount, or Chapter 11, Terry guessed) was scattered everywhere. The television was upside down in the rust-scaled shower stall. In the sink a toaster was making friends with a Converse sneaker mended with friction tape. Blood was splashed all over the walls. Plus, of course, there was a hunched-over body with his head sticking out through the side of the trailer and his plumber’s crack showing above his beltless jeans. A wallet on the floor of the trailer contained an ID for Mr. Jacob Pyle, of Little Rock, Arkansas.
How much strength did it take to pound a man’s head through a wall like that? Terry wondered. The trailer walls were thin, granted, but still.
He duly photographed everything, then did a three-sixty panning shot with one of the department’s iPads. He stood just inside the door long enough to send the photographic evidence to Linny Mars at the station. She would print off a set of pics for Lila and start two files, one digital and one hard copy. To Lila, Terry texted a brief message.
Know you’re tired, but you better get out here.
Faint but approaching came the recognizable sound of St. Theresa’s one and only fully equipped ambulance, not a full-throated WHOOP-WHOOP-WHOOP, but a somehow prissy whink-whink-whink.
Roger Elway was stringing yellow CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS tape with a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. Terry called to him from the trailer’s steps.
“If Lila finds out you’ve been smoking at a crime scene, she’ll tear you a new one.”
Roger removed the cigarette from his mouth, examined it as if he’d never seen such a thing before, put it out on the sole of his shoe, and tucked the butt into his shirt pocket. “Where is Lila, anyway? Assistant DA’s on his way, he’ll expect her.”
The ambo pulled up, the doors sprang open, and Dick Bartlett and Andy Emerson, two EMTs that Terry had worked with before, got out fast, already gloving up. One carried a backboard, the other toted the portable hospital they called First In Bag.
Terry grunted. “Only the Assistant Duck’s Ass, huh? Two dead and we still don’t rate the top guy.”
Roger shrugged. Bartlett and Emerson, meanwhile, after the initial hustle, had come to a halt beside the trailer, where the head stuck out of the wall.
Emerson said, “I don’t think that gentleman is going to benefit too much from our services.”
Bartlett was pointing a rubber-gloved finger at the place where the neck protruded. “I believe he’s got Mr. Hankey tattooed on his neck.”
“The talking turd from South Park? Seriously?” Emerson came around to look. “Oh, yeah. So he does.”
“Howdy-ho!” Bartlett sang.
“Hey,” Terry said. “That’s great, guys. Someday you should put your routine on YouTube. Right now we got another corpse inside, and there’s a woman in our cruiser who could use a little help.”
Roger said, “You sure you want to wake her up?” He jerked his head at Unit Four. A swatch of lank, dirty hair was plastered against the rear window. “Girlfriend be crashing. Christ knows what she’s been on.”
Bartlett and Emerson came across the junked-out yard to the cruiser, and Bartlett knocked on the window. “Ma’am? Miss?” Nothing. He knocked harder. “Come on, wakey-wakey.” Still nothing. He tried the doorhandle, and looked back at Terry and Roger when it didn’t give. “I need you to unlock it.”
“Oh,” Roger said. “Right.” He thumbed the unlock button on his key fob. Dick Bartlett opened the back door, and Tiffany Jones spilled out like a load of dirty laundry. Bartlett grabbed her just in time to keep the top half of her body from hitting the weedy gravel.
Emerson sprang forward to help. Roger stayed put, looking vaguely irked. “If she eighty-sixed on us, Lila’s gonna be pissed like a bear. She’s the only wit—”
“Where’s her face?” Emerson asked. His voice was shocked. “Where’s her goddam face?”
That got Terry moving. He moved next to the cruiser as the two EMTs eased Tiffany gently to the ground. Terry grabbed her hanging hair—why, he wasn’t sure—but let go in a hurry when something greasy squelched between his fingers. He wiped his hand on his shirt. Her hair was shot through with white, membranous stuff. Her face was also covered, her features now just dimly visible, as if seen through the kind of veil some older ladies still wore on their hats when they went to church out here in thank-you-Jesus country.
“What is that stuff?” Terry was still rubbing his hand. The stuff felt nasty, slippery, a little tingly. “Spiderwebs?”
Roger was looking over his shoulder, eyes wide with a mixture of fascination and revulsion. “It’s coming out of her nose, Ter! And her eyes! What the fuck?”
EMT Bartlett pulled a swatch of the goo away from Tiffany’s jawline and wiped it on his own shirt, but before he did, Terry saw that it appeared to be melting as soon as it was off her face. He looked at his own hand. The skin was dry and clear. Nothing on his shirt, either, although there had been a moment ago.
Emerson had his fingers on the side of Tiffany’s throat. “I have a pulse. Nice and steady. And she’s breathing fine. I can see that crap billowing out and then sucking in. Let’s get the MABIS.”
Bartlett hauled the orange MABIS all-in-one kit out of the First In Bag, hesitated, then went back into the bag for disposable glove packs. He gave one set to Emerson and took another for himself. Terry watched, wishing mightily he hadn’t touched the webby stuff on Tiffany’s skin. What if it was poisonous?
They got a blood pressure that Emerson said was normal. The EMTs went back and forth about whether or not to clear her eyes and check her pupils and, although they didn’t know it then, made the best decision of their lives when they decided not to.
While they talked, Terry saw something he didn’t like: Tiffany’s web-encrusted mouth slowly opening and closing, as if she were chewing on air. Her tongue had gone white. Filaments rose from it, wavering like plankton.
Bartlett rose. “We should get her to St. Theresa’s, stat, unless you have a problem with that. Say so if you do, because she seems stable . . .” He looked at Emerson, who nodded.
“Look at her eyes,” Roger said. “All white. Gag me with a spoon.”
“Go on, take her,” Terry said. “It’s not like we can question her.”
“The two decedents,” Bartlett said. “Is this stuff growing on them?”
“No,” Terry said, and pointed to the protruding head. “On that one you can see for yourselves. Not Truman, the guy inside, either.”
“Any in the sink?” Bartlett asked. “The toilet? The shower? I’m talking about wet places.”
“The TV is in the shower stall,” Terry said, which wasn’t an answer, was in fact a total non sequitur, but all he could think of to say at first. Another non sequitur: Was the Squeak open yet? It was early, but you were allowed a beer or two on mornings like this; there was a special dispensation for gruesome corpses and creepy shit on people’s faces. He kept looking at Tiffany Jones, who was slowly but steadily being buried alive under a diaphanous white fog of . . . something. He forced himself to speak to the question. “Just on her.”
Roger Elway now said what they were all thinking. “Fellas, what if it’s contagious?”
No one replied.
Terry caught movement in the corner of his eye and swung back to look at the trailer. At first he thought the flock lifting off from its roof was butterflies, but butterflies were colorful, and these were plain brown and gray. Not butterflies but moths. Hundreds of them.
6
A dozen years before, on a muggy day in later summer, a call came in to animal control about a raccoon under the floor of the converted barn that the local Episcopalian church used as a “pastoral center.” The concern was possible rabies. Frank had driven right over. He put on his facemask and elbow-length gloves, crawled under the barn, shone a flashlight on the animal, and it had darted, just the way a healthy raccoon should. That would have been that—rabid raccoons were serious, trespassing raccoons not so much—except that the pretty twenty-something woman who had shown him the hole under the barn had offered him a glass of blue Kool-Aid from the bake sale going on in the parking lot. It had been pretty nasty—watered down, not enough sugar—but Frank drank three dollars’ worth in order to stay there in the yellowing churchyard grass talking to the woman, who had a wonderful big laugh and a way of standing with her hands on her hips that made him feel tingly.
“Well, are you going to do your duty, Mr. Geary?” Elaine finally asked in her patented way, abruptly chopping the head off the small talk, and getting to the point. “I’d be happy to let you take me out if you put a lid on that critter that keeps killing things under the church floor. That’s my offer. Your lips have turned blue.”
He had come back after work and nailed a piece of scrap over the hole under the barn—sorry, raccoon, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do—and then he had taken his future wife to the movies.
Twelve years ago.
So what had happened? Was it him, or did marriage simply have a shelf-life?
For a long time, Frank had thought they were doing all right. They had the kid, the house, their health. Not everything was hunky-dunky, of course. Money was touch-and-go. Nana wasn’t the most engaged student. Sometimes Frank got . . . well . . . things wore him down, and when he was worn down, a certain edge emerged. But everyone had failings, and over the course of twelve years, you were bound to spring an occasional leak. Only his wife didn’t see it that way. Eight months ago she’d told him exactly how she saw it.
She had shared her insight after the famous kitchen wall punch. Shortly before the famous kitchen wall punch, she told him she’d given eight hundred dollars to her church, part of a fund drive to feed starving kids in some abysmally fucked-up part of Africa. Frank wasn’t heartless; he grasped the suffering. But you didn’t give away money you couldn’t afford to give away. You didn’t risk your own child’s situation to help someone else’s kids. Crazy as that had been—an entire mortgage payment zooming its way across the ocean—it hadn’t prompted the famous wall punch. That was prompted by what she had said next, and the look on Elaine’s face when she’d said it, simultaneously insolent and closed off: It was my decision because it was my money. As if her marriage vows meant nothing to her eleven years on, as if she could do anything she wanted without putting him in the loop. So he had punched the wall (not her, the wall), and Nana had run upstairs, wailing, and Elaine had made her declaration:
“You’re going to snap on us, baby. One of these days it won’t be the wall.”
Nothing Frank said or did could change her mind. It was either a trial separation or divorce, and Frank chose the former. And her prediction had been wrong. He hadn’t snapped. Never would. He was strong. He was a protector.
Which left a fairly important question: What was she trying to prove? What benefit was she getting by putting him through this? Was it some unresolved childhood issue? Was it plain old sadism?
Whatever it was, it was fucking unreal. And fucking senseless. You did not, as an African-American man in the Tri-Counties (or any county in the United States), arrive at the age of thirty-eight without encountering far more than your fair share of senselessness—racism was the epitome of senselessness, after all. He recalled a miner’s kid back in first or second grade, her front teeth fanned out like a poker hand, her hair in pigtails so short they looked like finger stubs. She had pressed a finger against his wrist and observed, “You are the color of rottened, Frank. Like under my poppa’s nails has.”
The girl’s expression had been half-amused, half-impressed, and cataclysmically dumb. Even as a child Frank had recognized that black hole of incurable stupid. It amazed him and left him flabbergasted. Later, when he saw it in other faces, it would come to scare him, and anger him, but he was awestruck then. Stupid like that had its own gravitational field. It pulled at you.
Only Elaine wasn’t dumb. You couldn’t get farther from dumb than Elaine.
Elaine knew what it was like to be followed around a department store by some white kid who didn’t even have a GED, playing like he’s Batman and is going to catch her shoplifting a jar of peanuts. Elaine had been cursed by protestors outside Planned Parenthood, consigned to hell by people who didn’t even know her name.
So what did she want? Why inflict this pain on him?
One nagging possibility: she was right to be worried.
As he went after the green Mercedes, Frank kept seeing Nana moving away from him, kicking her neatly arranged pieces of chalk and tracking through her drawing.
Frank knew he wasn’t perfect, but he also knew that he was basically good. He helped people, he helped animals; he loved his daughter and he would do anything to protect her; and he had never put an abusive hand on his wife. Had he made mistakes? Was the famous wall punch one of them? Frank admitted as much. He would have stated it in a court of law. But he had never hurt anyone who didn’t deserve to be hurt and he was just going to talk to the Mercedes guy, right?
Frank pulled his truck through a fancy wrought iron gate and parked behind the green Mercedes. The front fender on the left side was road-dusty, but the right side was sparkling clean. You could see where the sonofabitch had taken a rag to it.
Frank walked up the slate path connecting the driveway to the door of the big white house. Garden berms planted with sassafras lined the path, and the canopies created a corridor. Birds twittered in the branches above him. At the end of the path, by the foot of the steps, was a young lilac tree in a stone planter, near full bloom. Frank resisted the urge to uproot it. He climbed to the porch. On the face of the solid oak door was a brass knocker in the shape of a caduceus.
He told himself to turn around and drive straight home. Then he grabbed the knocker and banged it over and over against the plate.
7
It took awhile for Garth Flickinger to extricate himself from the couch. “Hold on, hold on,” he said—pointlessly: the door was too thick and his voice too raspy. He had been smoking dope non-stop since he returned home from his visit to Truman Mayweather’s stately pleasure trailer.
If anyone had asked him about the drugs, Garth would have made it a point to impress upon the questioner that he was merely an occasional, recreational user, but this morning had been an exception. An emergency, in fact. It wasn’t every day that you were taking a whiz in your drug dealer’s trailer and World War III broke out on the other side of the flimsy shithouse door. Something had happened—crashing, shooting, screaming—and, in a moment of incomprehensible idiocy, Garth had actually opened the door to check out what was going on. What he saw would be hard to forget. Perhaps impossible. At the far end of the trailer was a black-haired woman, naked from the waist down. She had hoisted up Truman’s Arkansas buddy by his hair and the belt of his jeans, and was pounding him face-first into the wall—whomp! whomp! whomp!
Picture a siege engine, slamming a massive tree against castle gates. The man’s head was awash in blood and his arms were ragdoll-flopping around at his sides.
Meanwhile, there was Truman, slumped on the floor with a bullet hole in his forehead. And the strange woman? Her expression was horrifyingly placid. It was as if she were just going about her business with no particular concern, except that her business was using a man’s head as a battering ram. Garth had gently closed the door, hopped on the toilet lid, and climbed out the window. He had then sprinted for his car and driven home at the speed of light.
The experience had shaken his nerves a bit, and that was not a common occurrence. Garth Flickinger, Board Certified Plastic Surgeon, member in good standing of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, was usually a pretty steady-handed fellow.
He was feeling better now, the rock that he’d smoked had helped with that; but the banging on the door was unwelcome.
Garth navigated his way around the couch and through the living room, crunching through a small sea of fast food boxes on the way.
On the flatscreen, an extremely sexy reporter was being extremely serious about a bunch of comatose old ladies at a nursing home in DC. Her seriousness only enhanced her sexiness. She was an A-cup, Garth thought, but her frame begged for a B.
“Why only women?” the reporter on the flatscreen wondered aloud. “At first we thought just the very elderly and the very young were vulnerable, but now it appears that women across age groups—”
Garth rested his forehead against the door and slapped it. “Stop! Quit it!”
“Open up!”
The voice was deep and pissed off. He tapped some reserve strength and lifted his head to peer through the spyhole. An African-American man stood outside, mid-thirties, broad shoulders, face with terrific bone structure. The man’s beige uniform momentarily caused Garth’s pulse to accelerate—cop!—but then he noticed the patch read ANIMAL CONTROL.
Ah, you are a dogcatcher—a handsome dog of a dogcatcher to be sure, but a dogcatcher nonetheless. No fugitive canines here, sir, so no problem.
Or was there? Hard to be completely sure. Could this fellow be a friend of the half-naked harpy from the trailer? Better to be her friend than her enemy, Garth supposed, but far, far better to avoid her altogether.
“Did she send you?” Garth asked. “I didn’t see anything. Tell her that, okay?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about! I came here on my own! Now open up!” the man yelled again.
“Why?” Garth asked, adding “No way” for good measure.
“Sir! I just want to talk to you.” The dogcatcher had made an effort to lower his voice, but Garth could see him twisting his mouth around, fighting the need—yes, a need—to continue yelling.
“Not right now,” Garth said.
“Someone ran over a cat. The person was driving a green Mercedes. You have a green Mercedes.”
“That’s unfortunate.” Meaning the cat, not the Mercedes. Garth liked cats. He had liked his Flamin’ Groovies tee-shirt, as well, which was balled up on the floor by the stairs. Garth had used it to clean some blood off the fender of his car. Tough times all around. “But I don’t know anything about that, and I’m having a difficult morning, and so you’ll have to leave. Sorry.”
A thud and the door shook in its frame. Garth backed up. The guy had kicked it.
Through the spyhole, Garth could see that the cords on the dogcatcher’s neck were taut. “My kid lives down the hill, you dumbfuck! What if that had been her? What if you drove over my kid instead of that cat?”
“I’m calling the cops,” Garth said. He hoped he sounded more convincing to the guy than he did to himself.
He retreated to the living room, sank into the couch, and picked up his pipe. The bag of dope was on the coffee table. Glass began to shatter outside. There was a metallic crunch. Was Señor Dogcatcher molesting his Mercedes? Garth didn’t care, not today. (It was insured anyway.) That poor junkie girl. Tiffany was her name and she was so ruined and so sweet. Was she dead? Had the people who’d attacked the trailer (he assumed the strange woman was part of a gang) killed her? He told himself that Tiff, sweet as she was, wasn’t his problem. Better not to fixate on what couldn’t be changed.
The bag was blue plastic so the rocks appeared blue until you removed them. This was probably Tru Mayweather’s half-assed tribute to Breaking Bad. There would be no more tributes from Truman Mayweather, half-assed or otherwise, not after this morning. Garth picked a rock, dropped it in the cup of his pipe. Whatever Señor Dogcatcher was doing to the Mercedes now caused the car alarm to go off: beep, beep, beep.
The television showed footage of a bright hospital room. Two female shapes lay under hospital sheets. Wispy cocoons covered the women’s heads. It looked like they wore beehives that started at their chins. Garth fired up, sucked down a lungful, held it.
Beep, beep, beep.
Garth had a daughter, Cathy. She was eight, hydrocephalic, lived in a facility, a very nice one, near the coast of North Carolina, close enough to catch salt on the breeze. He paid for it all, which he could do. It was better for the girl if her mother looked after the details. Poor Cathy. What had he told himself about the junkie girl? Oh, right: better not to fixate on what couldn’t be changed. Easier said than done. Poor Garth. Poor old ladies with their heads stuck in beehives. Poor cat.
The beautiful reporter was standing on a sidewalk in front of a gathering crowd. Honestly, she was fine with the A-cup. The B was just a thought. Had she had a nose job? Wow, if she had—and Garth wasn’t quite certain, he’d need to see up close—it was a superb one, really natural with a pretty little button tip.
“The CDC has put out a bulletin,” she announced. “ ‘Do not under any circumstances attempt to remove the growth.’ ”
“Call me crazy,” Garth said, “but that just makes me want to.”
Tired of the news, tired of the animal control guy, tired of the car alarm (although he supposed he would shut it off once the animal control guy decided to take his bad temper somewhere else), tired of fixating on what couldn’t be changed, Garth channel surfed until he found an infomercial about building yourself an abdominal six-pack in just six days. He attempted to take down the 800 number, but the only pen he could find didn’t work on the skin of his palm.