Said passenger arrives at the stall door, woman is startled and slips on the wet floor, falls, is unlucky in the way some people are.
Probably.
Shepherd swore quietly and left the stall. As he walked quickly through the rain to the trunk of his car, he was already making lists in his head.
Dispose of phone fragments. Wipe stall for prints, ditto restroom floor and interior walls of restroom. Wipe all public-phone handsets, remove one she’s likely to have used. Search/wipe interior surfaces of victim’s car. Wipe area around exterior handle of door. Remove body from stall and stow in trunk of car. Relocate vehicle.
This was not good, Shepherd knew. As he unloaded cleaning materials from the back of the car, he calmly appraised just how bad it was. Assume victim didn’t get as far as a connection to the police, since the place isn’t crawling with cops. But someone, somewhere, might have seen the woman agree to give someone a ride. Seen them together at a gas station, the McDonald’s. Just enough to point the people looking for her in the right direction.
Shepherd pulled out an extra couple of tools and a folded bag made of thick gray plastic.
Messy work ahead.
Afterward he searched the perimeter of the parking area, in vain. Somehow the girl had found a way of leaving this place. It was hard to believe that some other traveler would have just taken her into his or her vehicle, been convinced of whatever explanation she might have concocted for her whereabouts. But Shepherd knew she could probably be convincing. Somehow she’d left here, just as somehow she’d gotten the dead woman to drive her this far, and she’d found a place or places to spend the day and the previous night, after somehow getting to Portland.
When he drove away, he left a car burning, flames flaring silently within it. There would be a few minutes before it exploded. This was not the rental car but the vehicle he himself had arrived in. The rental would have been too easy to trace, even if left in ruins, and that would have led investigators straight to the dead woman’s identity. Her name had been Karen Reid. Her driver’s license, credit cards, and purse had already been located and destroyed. The other potential sources of identification lay in the plastic bag in the back of his new vehicle, alongside a suitcase of the kind he’d lived out of for all his adult life. Fingerprints had been removed from the woman’s hands, using her own cigarette lighter. Her head had been emptied of its distinguishing features. Her body, minus these telltale parts, lay in the trunk of the burning car. Somewhere between here and where he was going, all the remaining components would be dispersed. It wasn’t perfect, but the only perfection is death. You can be perfectly dead, maybe. With everything else you just have to make do with what you can get.
It was after midnight now, and the interstate was almost empty. Shepherd got up to the speed limit and turned on cruise control. He barely noticed he was driving a different car. He had driven very many vehicles in his life and had not been attached to the old one. He was not attached to anything. It was easier to be in charge that way, and for the moment, he felt closer to being back in charge. It was clear what city he needed to be in, at least. It was also becoming apparent that the time was approaching to get some other eyes on the job. He was going to need to talk to some of the others, and soon, and that required coming up with a plausible history for this chain of events, just in case one of them got to her before he did.
But for now all he had to do was drive.
Five miles up the road, he opened the window and threw out the first of Karen Reid’s teeth.
Part II
Unconsciously we envy the integrity of the dead: they are through with the preliminary stage, their characters are clearly drawn.
—Andrei Sinyavsky
Unguarded Thoughts
chapter
SEVENTEEN
On Sunday we had breakfast in Birch Crossing. Afterward we went for coffee, sitting outside so I could have a cigarette. Amy was nice about this, withstanding the cold and denying herself even a pro forma reminder that I was supposed to be giving up. I flicked vaguely through the paper, remaining unchallenged by anything exciting in local news. Amy watched the mother and young daughters at the next table, but after a while her eyes drifted away.
We’d been there a half hour when someone said, “Hi,” and I looked up to see Ben Zimmerman on his way into the coffee shop. He had newspapers under his arm and was wearing battered combat khakis, as usual, along with the kind of sweater you wear to go fishing after your wife has banned its use within civilized company. It struck me, however, that I’d be pretty happy to look the way he did at his age, and being greeted in passing made me feel like we actually lived there.
I nodded. “How’s your friend?”
Ben shrugged, with a half smile. I wasn’t sure whether this meant the friend was as well as could be expected or had died as expected, so I just nodded again, and he went inside.
Amy and I dawdled around the stores for a spell, surrounded by New Age and Mozart. I stood outside watching through a window as Amy fingered a blouse in a color I’d have to call pink. I was surprised. Men of my age and type remain barely aware of pink’s existence, seeing it at close quarters only if they have a baby girl. Wives won’t tolerate it in interior decor, wouldn’t be seen dead wearing it either. It becomes like purple in the Middle Ages—exotic and unknown, and thus intriguing in its suggestion of otherness, among the earth tones and teals and ubiquitous blacks.
When Amy emerged, she raised an eyebrow at me. “What are you grinning at, monkeyface?”
“Never saw you as a pretty-in-pink kind of girl,” I said. “But it’s, like, totally rad. You want to make out at the movies later on? Or go hang at the mall?”
She flushed, slapped me on the arm, and embarked upon a series of unrealistic suggestions as to where I could stick a mall, complete with parking lot. We walked in companionable silence back to the house, wreathed in the smell of firs and pine. It was about as unlike living in L.A. as I could imagine, and in the best ways.
Back home, Amy hit the couch with work and I went into my own study. I didn’t open the laptop right away but sat at the table looking out the big window. I had an idea, and I wanted to make sure it wasn’t dumb. And also that it did not merely indicate how hard I was finding it to forget the life I’d left behind.
Being a cop is a strange existence, far more prosaic than the entertainment industry likes to make out. Basically you’re a hall monitor with a gun, dealing with the venal, dishonest, and borderline crazy—and that’s before you leave the precinct, ba-da-boom. You’re the social janitor, patching and mending, trying to keep the place neat and in working order, once in a while joining the endless bar fight of the people who’ve been done wrong versus the people who’ve done it—or who might look like they did, except they were visiting their sister in the hospital at the time, they don’t even have a car and certainly not that type, and why are you hassling me, pig motherfucker, ain’t you got no real criminals to beat up?
The first thing you learn is that we never needed Esperanto. We already had a universal language: untruth. Everybody lies, about everything, all the time. You quickly stop believing what anyone tells you, and you come to realize that the victims will give you worse headaches than the perps will. Either they’re the same people as the criminals but just happen to be on the receiving end this time (and are by Christ going to make the most of it), or they’re middle-class assholes who regard the police as a private security force and who assume that their difficulties can be obviated through confidence and a hundred bucks, proffered discreetly or otherwise.