I make myself a quick breakfast before going to work. No need to walk around hungry just because of bad premonitions. I’m running late so have to run for the bus. Mr. Stanley sees me coming and waits. “Almost missed you this morning, Joe,” he says, and this time he punches my ticket-perhaps as punishment for putting him thirty seconds off schedule. Despite that, I still like him. He’s an okay guy.
Now, Mr. Stanley lives my nightmare. He’s married with two kids, one of them in a wheelchair. I know all this because I followed him home one day. Not as a potential victim (though everybody has potential, so I learned in school), but just out of curiosity. It’s amazing that a guy with a useless kid and an ugly wife and a crappy job can be so friendly every day. Perhaps more suspicious than amazing. I want to ask him what his secret is.
I walk down the aisle. Find a seat behind a couple of businessmen. The two of them are talking loudly about money, mergers, and acquisitions. I wonder who they are trying to impress on this bus. Maybe each other.
Mr. Stanley stops the bus directly outside work for me. The doors open. I climb out. It’s another hot summer day. It will get somewhere around eighty-five or ninety degrees, I’m guessing. I lower the zip on my overalls from my neck down to my waist, revealing my white T-shirt, and I roll up my sleeves. There haven’t been any scratches on my arms for nearly two months.
The air shimmers. The day is still. It’s classic global warming weather. I wait for two cars to run the red light before I cross the road. Outside the police station the drunks from the night’s holding tanks are being let out, their faces scrunched up in the bright autumn sun.
The air in the police station is cool. Sally is waiting outside the elevator. She spots me before I can make a dash for the stairs, so I have to head over. I push the button, then keep pushing it because it’s what’s expected of somebody with no clue how things in this world work.
“Morning, Joe,” she says in the carefully structured, drawn-out way of a woman struggling with the concept of speech. I have to offer my own version of it, because retarded or not, everybody around here expects me to talk like an imbecile.
“Hi morning, Sally,” I say, and then I smile the big-kid smile with all the teeth, the one that suggests I’m proud to have strung three words together to make a sentence, even if I did fuck it up.
“What a beautiful day. Do you like this weather, Joe?”
Actually it’s a bit hot for my taste. “I like the warm sun. I like summer.” I’m talking like an idiot so Slow Sally can understand me. “I like Christmas even more.”
“You should join me for lunch by the river,” she says, hitting on me and almost making me gag. I can just imagine how much fun that’d be. How much fun I’d have as the other people walk by looking at one person pretending to be retarded while the other pretends to be normal. We could throw bread at the ducks and tell each other which clouds look like pirate ships and which look like the bloated corpses of drowning victims. Damn, does Sally even know she isn’t normal? Do their kind know that about themselves?
The elevator arrives. I’m confused as to whether I should do the gentlemanly thing and let her step in first, or do the retarded thing and push ahead of her? I do the gentlemanly thing, because the retarded thing means I’d have to scream as the elevator goes up a few stories and then pretend to be in awe at how the scenery has changed when the doors open.
“Fourth floor, Joe?”
“Sure.”
The doors close.
“So. .” she says, then doesn’t finish.
“So?”
“So what’ll it be? You want to join me for lunch?”
“I like my office, Sally. I like sitting there and looking out the window.”
“I know you do, Joe. But outside is good for you.”
“Not always.”
She seems to think about this, then slowly nods, but her gaze is distant and it looks like she’s agreeing to something I haven’t said. Then her eyes snap back into focus and she smiles at me. “Well, I made you some lunch again. I’ll drop it by.”
“Thanks.”
“Do you enjoy catching the bus home?”
“Huh? Sure,” I say, and the rate the elevator is moving at makes me think the fourth floor has been raised a few levels. “I guess so.”
“I can give you a lift sometimes, if you’d like.”
“I like the bus.”
She shrugs, gives up on our conversation. “I’ll drop off those sandwiches for you soon.”
“Thanks, Sally. That’ll be nice.”
And it would be nice. Sally may be a dimwit, she may have a crush on me, but she’s always been good to me. Always friendly. Nobody else has ever offered me food, or offered me a lift home (though surely she can’t drive-she must mean a lift with her mom or something), and I could do a lot worse. Even though I don’t like her, I don’t not like her as much as I don’t like everybody else. In a way that makes her the closest thing I have to a friend. Outside of my goldfish.
The doors close, and the smile I offer Sally as they do isn’t forced, it’s natural, and I realize this too late to change it to my big-boy grin. She stares at me with a blank look on her face, then the doors close and Sally is gone, and a moment later she is gone from my thoughts. I head straight to the conference room.
“Hi there, Joe.”
“Morning, Detective Schroder.”
I start looking at him as a suspect, trying to picture him killing Walker. It’s easy to do. Of course it’s easy to picture any of these people killing her, from the photographer to the pathologist. The first thing I need to do is get a list of these people, then begin eliminating them. As suspects, that is.
“How’s the in. . inv. . invest. .” I stop. Just long enough for him to think I’m in that small percentile of the population with an extra chromosome. “How’s the case going, Detective Schroder? Found the killer yet?”
He shakes his head slowly, as if he’s trying to line up a few thoughts in there, but not too hard in case some of them get broken.
“Not yet, Joe. Getting there.”
“Any suspects, Detective Schroder?”
“A few. And Joe, you can call me Carl.”
I’m not going to call him Carl. He’s asked me before. Anyway, I’ve already shortened detective inspector to just detective. And as for there being a few suspects-he’s lying.
He stares at the photographs, grimacing, like he does every morning now. Almost as though he’s expecting to come in and find one of the victims has reached out from her portrait and written an answer up there for him. In reality he has nothing. He knows it. I know it. Everybody knows it. Especially the media.
“Are you sure they’ve all been killed by the same person, Detective Schroder?”
He turns and stares at me, and I regret my question. “Why’s that, Joe? Have you been listening in on our conversations?”
I shake my head. “No, never,” I say. “I would never do that.”
He doesn’t look convinced.
“I just thought that maybe seven different people killed them because nobody can be that mean, can they?” I ask.
His expression softens, and slowly he shakes his head. “People can be that mean, Joe, and it’s probably best you stop trying to think like Sherlock Holmes.”
I look down. “Umm. . I was just, you know, curious.”
“Life is curious, Joe, and to answer your question, all of these murders all related.”
I lift my head up fast and look over at him, widening my eyes in what hopefully looks like surprise. “They’re all sisters, Detective Schroder?”
I ought to get a Goddamn Emmy for this performance.
“Not related that way, Joe,” he sighs, and after a pause of a few seconds he carries on. “I mean they were all killed by the same person.”
“Oh. But that’s good, right? Better to have one killer out there than seven?”
He nods. “It doesn’t make any difference to them,” he says, pointing at the photographs. “But in this case,” he says, then pauses, “you’re not going to repeat any of this to anybody, are you, Joe? You don’t have friends in the media?”