Now he lies in a hospital bed. Fated, perhaps, to be his deathbed. For all the strings he managed to pull on the outside, life behind bars outmaneuvered him. And now everything is out of his control, just as it’s out of mine.
The fan revolves in lazy circuits overhead, and I toss back and forth on the empty mattress, warm despite the air on my skin. On the nightstand, glowing red from the digital clock, my SIG Sauer lies on its side, a round in the chamber, in case of a repeat visit from Dave Bayard. I don’t know for a fact it was him who broke into the house. I don’t know for a fact he kicked the bathroom door into splinters and would have sunk Knife #29 into my wife’s soft flesh. But in my sleep-addled mind, I’ve attached his name to the menacing silhouette.
I wish he would come back. I wish he would make my job that simple.
He could at least open up Simone Walker’s laptop and send me a message. I’m getting lonely here, and nothing would please me more than a candid photo of my unsuspecting suspect. If he’s back in the States-I’m sure he is-and holed up in the family home, then our early morning search warrant execution must have spooked him. He sent an email and we showed up on his doorstep or thereabouts. Too close for comfort. He couldn’t resist sending the second one, but he took the precaution of doing so from a public Wi-Fi network. Now even that must strike him as too risky.
My laptop rests at the foot of the bed. After sitting up for an hour, checking email every few minutes on the off chance he’d overcome his shyness, I gave up and decided to get some sleep.
But now I can’t sleep. The fan turns, my skin grows uncomfortably warm, sticky to the point of feverishness, and I turn the case over in my mind. And when I do sleep, when I slip into a restless, slit-eyed state that could pass for sleep, something Jack Hill said comes back to me, how Bayard’s son claimed he’d killed before. I see a machete-wielding shadow cutting its way through African jungles, and racing ahead, just out of the blade’s reach, the alternating faces of Wayne Bourgeois, the man I chased through the cemetery, and of my cousin Moody. The knifing shadow is sometimes Bayard and sometimes myself.
Wake up. No more of this. Give me sleep, dreamless sleep.
I close my eyes. When I open them, someone’s on top of me, pinning my arms under the weight of her legs. Tammy and her pillow, torturing and laughing, laughing and torturing. When I really awaken, there’s a pillow against my face. But it’s Charlotte’s and my only attacker is me.
I crawl out of bed sometime around three and pad down the stairs, taking a bottle of water from the fridge. I sit in an armchair in front of the glowing TV, holding the bottle against my temple and then taking another swig.
I’m alone.
Alone in the house and alone on the case. In the past, even at my low points, there was always someone I could rely on. Once it was Wilcox. After that, for a short time, it was Theresa Cavallo. But they’re not with me now. If anything, they’re on the other side. And while Aguilar is as good a cop as any to take a statement or run through a checklist, he’s unimaginative, and as partners we keep pretty much to ourselves.
When you’re alone, there’s no one else to tell you the things you don’t want to hear.
So I tell myself.
I’m not satisfied with Templeton’s version of events, and I know I’ll get nothing better out of Lauterbach. But according to the writer, someone else was there. Asking all the right questions. Overjoyed to be part of the process. She may have tried to suffocate me as a child, and the way she’s turned my cousin into a self-serving cause célèbre might disgust me, but the fact is, Tammy was there. And if I want the full story, she’s the only one to ask.
I switch the television off and return the water to the fridge. Upstairs, I fall onto the bed, pushing my face into the pillow, and fall asleep.
CHAPTER 24
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 16–10:00 A.M.
In my black funeral suit I could pass for a reject from Reservoir Dogs. All I need are the shades. After wearing my father-in-law’s wardrobe for so long-not my own yet, not in my mind-the fabric feels stiff, the squared shoulders like a set of football pads. In his dark jeans and windbreaker, Aguilar blends better with the other mourners, a small group of no more than a dozen, most of whom are dressed down despite the occasion. The morning fog has burned off, promising light gray skies. I get a few looks from other people as we slip inside the funeral home. They’re probably mistaking me for an undertaker.
Beneath a wash of artificial light, the white casket gleams, half open in a foam of colorless flowers, the distant face of Simone Walker pale as the rest. The monochromatic tableau lends an inappropriate beauty to the scene. Her mother, Candace, sits between two larger women, co-workers judging by their single-minded devotion to her grief, which doesn’t touch them personally. A few rows behind, Joy Hill maintains her icy composure, eyes fixed on the coffin as if she’s afraid to look away.
A prerecorded organ dirge fills what would otherwise be an awkward silence, harmonizing the whispers of a few young women near the back with the occasional sob from Candace Walker’s direction. Aguilar slips into the rear pew, unzipping his jacket. I advance down the center aisle to pay my respects. The jigsaw of stained glass in the arrow-slit windows casts colored rays across the empty seats.
I nod at Dr. Hill. She takes no notice.
Each of the women beside Candace grips one of her hands tight. Her lip trembles and a line of fresh tears travels over the swell of her cheekbone into the depression of her cheek. She looses a hand to wipe it away, then presses her wet fingers into mine.
“Thank you for coming,” she says. “I know it means so much to her.”
No stranger to grieving mothers, I whisper a few words of sympathy and pull away.
At the casket, I gaze on Simone’s face. Its startling placidity and all the layers of makeup leave me with the uncomfortable feeling that regardless of my tireless efforts, I’ve never really seen her before now, and wouldn’t recognize her if she walked up to me on the street.
I know her as symboclass="underline" the Victim. When we die, if there’s to be any recompense, it’s left to strangers to make. I know her only as a corpse, a medium for her killer to communicate through, a repository of evidence.
As I return down the aisle, the back door opens and Sean Epps slips through. He hides a shiner behind his sunglasses and looks like someone stuffed his right cheek with cotton. He files down a pew toward the front, settling himself with a creak that draws every eye. None of the women seem to recognize him. Dr. Hill would, but again she doesn’t glance over.
“Did you get a look at him?” Aguilar whispers. “I wonder what the other guy looks like.”
“Yeah,” I say, thinking of Jason Young.
The minister emerges from a door up front. He keeps a brief vigil at the casket, says a few hushed words to Candace. He takes his place behind the lectern and opens in prayer. The eulogy that follows is so full of platitudes and borrowed anecdotes that it’s soon clear he knew Simone no better than I did.
Aguilar leans over. “Catholic funerals are better than this.”
“I don’t think she minds.”
The man tells a story of Simone’s childhood, a time she’d found her mommy upset about something and told her not to cry. He sentimentalizes the tale, making it sound like something that transpired between June Cleaver and a baroque cherub, and ends by gazing misty-eyed in Candace’s direction, saying, “Even as a little girl, she brought so much joy to her mother. She dried so many tears.”
Candace sobs, prompting her minders to close in.
The double doors open again, this time to reveal a tentative-looking man in his mid-to-late twenties, unkempt, with thick black eyebrows and a dense twist of hair. He looks around, keeping his hands buried in the pockets of his knit pullover. Seeing me and Aguilar, he creeps across the carpeted aisle and slides into the pew in front of us.