“Chief,” he says, “this’ll keep. The L.T. took his shot and came up with nothing.”
“And prints? You did print him before cutting him loose, right?”
“Beats me. Take it up with the man first thing in the morning.”
Back inside, Green looks at me expectantly and then not at all, catching from my body language all she needs to know. She gives the wall clock a reflexive glance.
“That Denzel-looking man just struck out,” I say.
“There’s something up with him, March. And it’s not just you.”
When she starts the Y-incision, I tune her out. The rest is merely confirmation of what we already know. Still, organs must be removed and weighed, the results spoken aloud for the benefit of the recording. My wave of excitement crests under the wet monotony of it all, my eyes growing heavy. I prop my back against the wall for support.
“I’ve had people cry in here, and I’ve had them throw up. I’ve had them run out in disgust. But I’ve never had anybody fall asleep, March, and it better not happen today.”
“Don’t worry. I’ve got plenty to keep my mind occupied.”
“Here’s something else.” She wipes a gloved hand on her apron and takes a step toward me. “I don’t see any signs of sexual assault. If you were thinking along lust murder lines, I’ve got nothing for you. This is about the strangest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“That’s saying something.”
“Not the most horrific, maybe. But the strangest.”
I can’t argue with that.
Outside, I strip my scrubs off and retreat to the back door where the cracked slab and sand-filled ashtrays serve as a smoker’s lounge. This is where Bridger always comes to decompress, but now I have it all to myself.
Simone Walker didn’t have much in life, as far as I can tell, and what she did have she might not have valued. What she’d endured as a child, maybe that had made it impossible for her to ever find what she really wanted, or keep wanting it once she did. But the people in her life, they all used her. Her mother used her silence, and then her very existence, for her own validation. Her husband rewrote the rules on her, and finally just used her for sex. Her landlord, Dr. Hill, who’d admitted after all that self-absorbed chatter that Simone was “sweet,” was just using that sweet girl to keep up with the bills.
And the man who killed her-maybe it was Young, maybe it wasn’t-what he did to her was worst of all. He used her, too. As nothing more than a backstop. A convenient surface. A warm body inserted into the nightmare he’d been nurturing for his own excitement. So it’s only right that when I find him, when I can prove his guilt conclusively, at least to myself if no one else, that I make sure of one thing: that he too suffers the indignity of being used.
Call this revenge if you want.
But to me, it’s only a question of balancing the scales.
CHAPTER 5
MONDAY, DECEMBER 7–5:58 A.M.
I know this place. I’ve been here. With a few changes I might have grown up on this street. The sidewalk breaks under my feet, new fissures pushing toward the storm drains on one side and the sun-browned grass on the other. I stretch my hands and no matter how far they reach, the rolling chain-link fence is a little bit farther, barely restraining the Aranda dog as it jumps and barks at me, making no sound.
I remember when that dog was run over, the summer of the bicentennial.
Strange that I can’t hear it, strange that the roiling ground makes no noise and neither do the trees swaying in the empty park across the road.
The one thing I can hear, coming from somewhere behind me that remains invisible when I turn to look, is the clicking of a bicycle chain, the hum of tires coasting over concrete. But the bike isn’t here, I know that. It’s somewhere safe, wedged in the gap between two corrugated storage sheds, blocks and blocks away, out past the school.
It’s the car making that sound, a gleaming green Ford circling the block. I follow the flash of sunlight on the glass, the heads silhouetted inside, three or four of them. Only the driver’s window is down, a brown and thin-wristed forearm jutting out with a hand-rolled cigarette clutched in the fingers. The sidewalk moves under my feet, but I get no farther. It’s like a swaying, fragmented treadmill keeping pace with my every move.
— You can go here and you can go there, but you can’t go away.
There’s another sound, a metallic pop, and slowly the fact dawns on me that it’s the thumb break on my old duty rig. My old pistol slides up into my hand, the one I carried as a rookie and only fired once in anger. I look at my arm and it’s blue. All of me is. My old uniform fits again, like a suit of polyester-blend armor.
The ground settles and up through my legs a sense of calm takes hold, the rootedness of an ancient tree. More heads appear in the car, too many to count, all pressing against the glass as the Ford bears down. Chrome glistens and blinds me, then my pistol answers it-one, two, three. Four, five, six. The air moves, and my rounds carve tracer arcs around the fast-approaching green car. The misses baffle me.
— Come to me, kid. Don’t be scared.
Brass tumbles at my feet while the Aranda dog silently wails. One, two, three. A cigarette bursts on the curb. Four, five, six. The brown hand tapping on the Ford’s green door. The car sails past me, gliding over air, the driver’s eyes behind gold-rimmed sunglasses. Under the long trunk, a thumping sound. And the metal quivers in circuits like rippling water.
“Roland, stop.”
A cold touch sinks through my forehead.
“You’re burning up.”
I find her wrist in the dark and pull the hand away. “It’s nothing.”
“You were kicking me.”
“Sorry.” I throw the covers back, swing my legs onto the hardwood floor. “Just another bad dream.”
Her laughter is soft and kind. “You and your dreams. You should see somebody.”
“Go back to sleep.”
A minute or two under the shower and I can’t remember the details anymore. Just a handful of surreal and disconnected puzzle pieces from a moviemaker’s idea of an acid trip. I run my uncle’s old double-edged safety razor under the tap, shaving in the usual sleepy, imprecise way, then go to the closet. From bed, Charlotte’s voice echoes.
“Wear one of your new outfits.”
They’re not new and I hate that word outfits. But I pick through the zippered bags anyway, still reluctant to admit that my father-in-law of all people had more style in his little finger than I’ll ever possess. Or care to. I don’t come from a world where clothes are chosen for how they look. Though we have a few peacocks in Homicide, a jacket’s main function is to keep your side arm from showing.
My old partner Stephen Wilcox saw it differently, always dressing like a cut-rate English gentleman to the extent the weather allowed. If he knew, he’d burn with envy over this hand-tailored wardrobe and have no qualms about wearing a dead man’s clothes. He doesn’t know, however, because despite our recent truce we are not really on speaking terms.
“I like the brown checks,” Charlotte calls.
The most old-geezer-looking option of the bunch, a tweedy sort of jacket with brown horn buttons. I put it on over a blue shirt and a pair of khakis, checking in the mirror to make sure the grip of my SIG Sauer doesn’t poke out through the side vent.
It’s just past six when I head down the stairs, leaving Charlotte to sleep awhile longer. The stairs out back leading up to the apartment over the garage are wet with dew, and the window next to the door glows gold, meaning our tenants are already up. Unlike Dr. Hill, we don’t rent the apartment out from necessity. The original idea was that we’d live there while having the house updated, only that project never quite came to fruition. Once the apartment existed, Charlotte wouldn’t let it go to waste.
As I gaze toward the door, Gina Robb comes out. She teaches at a private school out in Spring, commuting back and forth every day against the flow of traffic, while her husband, Carter, works at something called an outreach center in the Montrose area, where people hang out over coffee to talk about books and watch movies and have old-time religion subtly forced on them. Carter was a youth pastor at a suburban megachurch last year, a standard-bearer for the fanatics Sheila Green mentioned yesterday. Now he’s in a kind of free fall, a feeling I can easily relate to.