As I look out at the long grass and trees, the soil and scrub, it seems obvious it takes only a couple of shovelfuls of dirt to form a shallow grave. There could be a dozen people out there in the ground-lost loves, lost lives, just lost. The trees at the far end look nowhere near as imposing as they did in the early hours of the morning. The killing hour is over, that’s why. In the dying sunlight, during the day, these trees are a strip of nature in the city, they’re a place that hasn’t been bulldozed and developed, but at night those trees are dark and foreboding, the kind of trees that in a fairy tale would come alive and rip children limb from limb. There are no police cars, no tape cordoning off the scene, no clatter and squawking of radios. There are only ghosts. I can’t see them, but I know they’re there.
The Real World isn’t about destiny and it certainly isn’t about luck. If it is, Luciana and Kathy ran out of theirs around the same time I ran out of mine. I push my foot down, not caring about the speed limit. Before I can escape I have one more thing I need to take care of-one more woman I need to see.
CHAPTER TWO
Detective Inspector Bill Landry is an angry man. He’s been angry for the last five days, angry at the life-changing news. Though thinking about it, it was more life ending than it was life changing. Too many cigarettes. That’s what it was. The doctor had warned him years ago. He told him it was like putting a gun to your head with a single bullet in it and pulling the trigger over and over. Eventually it was going to go off.
Five days ago he got the news that that gun would be going off within the next six months.
He’s trying hard not to think about it, but it’s always there, if not in the forefront of his thoughts, then at least lurking around the sidelines. Right now he’s standing in the bedroom of a dead woman, having just come from a different house across town that had an equally gruesome scene. It’s all he should be thinking about, but those cancer thoughts keep creeping in.
He looks at his watch, then at the red numerals on the alarm clock, then back at his watch. The two are disagreeing by two minutes. Either that, or there’s a slight rift in the bedroom and he’s two minutes into the future. He figures that would be a better superpower than the one seeming to dog the police everywhere they go-which is to be two minutes in the past. You can’t save people in the past. He watches the last number change from an eight to a nine on his watch. The woman he’s come to see has now been dead a minute longer than she should have been, and he’s one minute closer to his grave. For that matter, everybody is.
He’s struggling to stay focused. He’s hungry and tired and it’s been a long day in what is no doubt going to be a very long week. He badly wants a cigarette. Life isn’t the same unless you’re slowly ending it. He follows the shape of the dead woman’s face and locks his gaze on her milky eyes. She would agree. She would agree he needed coffee too.
There is a jingle caught in his head. Music from somewhere and he can’t figure out from where. It’s been stuck with him for the last few hours and he can’t shake it free. The kind of music you’d hear in an elevator or on a child’s toy, only he hasn’t been in any elevators today or hanging around any kids. Even if he could identify it, it wouldn’t help the music disappear. Probably he’d just get more of it stuck in there. He looks down at the woman’s hands, at her fingernails, wondering if any skin from her killer is trapped under them, wondering what she would have done differently the last time she had a manicure if she’d known how many people would be looking at them. He wonders just how much that manicure would have cost, whether she often had them, whether she was into small talk or whether she’d have held a magazine in the hand not being worked on. Life and death and the details in between all have price tags. The cost of death starts out small. Like a fifty-dollar visit to the doctor. You begin throwing good money after bad. You try to chase away the cancer or one of a hundred other diseases that riddle your body and ride it down. Sometimes it isn’t even fifty dollars. Sometimes it’s only five. Or ten. A ten-dollar investment. A knife, for example. Or a pair of garden shears. They slice through skin and flesh quicker than any disease. There are expenses no matter what savages you. New clothes to replace the bloody ones. Smaller clothes to replace the ones that no longer fit your wasting body. Booze to calm the nerves. The family of the victim shops through glossy catalogs for coffins, choosing color and craftsmanship and style, what’s in at the moment, what was so last year. The graveyard plot, prime real estate these days, adds to the bill, along with a new suit or a dress for the corpse. New clothes for the mourners. When the bad news comes from a cop rather than a doctor the expenses add up faster. One murder and the cash is flying around. Man hours. Court cases. Lawyers. News stories. People charging and making money from evil. People. . people. .
He holds a hand up to his face and pinches the bridge of his nose and closes his eyes for a few seconds. He needs to get ahold of himself. He has to get ahold of these dark thoughts. Has to rein them in. But on the grief scale, he never made it through to acceptance. He’s stuck on anger. He doesn’t see that changing anytime soon.
The day is cooling off. It certainly needs to. The air inside the house is thick-it tastes and smells like aging fruit. He can’t turn on the air-conditioning, can’t open any windows-not allowed to do anything that will alter the temperature. The medical examiner and the forensic guys would all have fits. He moves over to the window, looks out at the slowly ebbing day and wonders if it will ever actually end. The neat backyard with its golden pebbles and expensive plants has been surrounded by yellow plastic evidence markers. With their black numbers they’re larger versions of the order disks he’s been given at pizza restaurants. He wonders if the same people make them or if they’re made to order, then that thought leads him back to an earlier one about being hungry. A pizza would be good. And a beer. And since he’s in the wishing mood, he’d like to sit on a beach somewhere and watch the sun dip into the horizon, have a few women in bikinis taking up his field of vision too.
Best he can settle for is to watch the sun as it bounces off the roof of the neighboring house. The roof is made from blue steel and the reflecting light makes the lemons on the nearby tree look purple. The people in the townhouse are standing by their windows. They’re staring at him, their eyes wide and their mouths open as they watch in awe. They’re probably thinking this is the next best thing since reality TV. Seeing them isn’t helping with the anger. He wishes he could arrest them. Wishes he could fire the guy who hasn’t got around to hanging large tarpaulins to block their view. He turns away in disgust.
The music is still stuck in his brain. He picks his way across the room, stepping carefully over and around the dried patches of blood, of which there are many, once again trying to identify where he heard that theme, and at the same time wishing he could forget it. The furniture and layout may be different, but aside from that it all looks very much the same as the crime scene he came from a little over an hour ago. Similar views, similar furniture, similar dead woman covered in blood. The room has a definite woman’s touch-two vases of flowers, dreary paintings of romantic scenes, candles on the dressing table. It’s the sort of mishmash of trinkets his own wife had lying around when she used to be his wife. His second wife was the same. The good thing about wives when they become ex-wives is they take all that crap with them. The sad thing about when they become ex-wives is when you find something under the bed or hidden in a drawer they missed packing, and it reminds you that being married was made up of good times too.