“Yeah,” he said, “they call in investigators when they get stuck and then stand around on the other side of the squad room mumbling about voodoo. Don’t listen to the beat cops, Hazel.”
But she was thinking that the searchers and prognosticators were too much like what bothered her about Glynnis. Never before had she worried that her work entailed any kind of blind faith, and yet it did. To her mind, spiritual investigation drew on the loosest of the goosiest presuppositions, beliefs that were, in fact, wishes. She’d always thought policework was not like that. And yet, this case was becoming more and more like an act of fortune-telling, an extended tea-reading. The risk, as it was in interpreting the unseen world, was that you’d pay attention to the wrong things.
“What about the backyard?” she said.
“At the house?”
“Doesn’t it make sense we should be digging back there? Why don’t we ask them if we should dig? See what they say.”
“I see where you’re going. Nick Wise has buried her in his backyard.” They both fell silent, working it through. “We need to know if Eldwin ever lived in that house, Hazel.”
“I agree.” She looked across the top of the keyboard for the button that would unmute the microphone. The laptop made a popping sound to indicate the connection had been reopened. Hazel leaned down toward it. “How do we save her if she’s already dead?” she asked, and although it was difficult to make out at first, they could both see the camera already pulling away from its black field.
22
The darkness resolved into a texture and then a field of cloth appeared and they recognized the weft of a black peacoat seen from the back. The scratching sound continued as the picture widened and shoulders appeared at the top of the screen. A chairback swam into the frame at the bottom. The figure was seated at a table, its head lowered. One of the shoulders juddered in time to the scratching sound: an arm moving like a mechanical toy. The figure was writing.
The surface of the table broadened and when its farthest edge drifted down they saw beyond it, into the gloom of the basement, to the wall with its dark message scrawled. When the camera had completed its zoom-out, Eldwin appeared in his chair, at the distant right edge of the screen, his back to the camera as well, his head also lowered. He was motionless. The image of the compulsively writing arm in the foreground and the still, slumped figure in the background made for a contrast that gave Hazel a cold feeling on the back of her neck.
The figure continued to work and paused to lift a scribbled sheet off the table, holding it up to read it, and then placing it face down to the right. “I’m wondering how this story is going to end,” said a woman’s voice. They waited silently. “I know you can hear me.”
“It’s going to end with you in handcuffs.”
The voice laughed softly. “Oh, I have no doubt about that. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, aren’t we, Hazel?”
“Show us your face.”
“Soon,” said the voice. “But for now, let’s talk.”
“You talk,” said Hazel. “I’ll listen.”
The figure lifted its head slightly. “Who’s there with you right now?”
“I’m alone,” she said.
“That’s not true.”
“You going to cut off my hand?”
“Let’s deal plainly with each other, DI Micallef. We’ll get along better. Who is with you?”
Wingate spoke into the microphone. “This is DC James Wingate.”
“Hello, Detective Constable,” said the voice.
“Ma’am,” he said.
“Tell me, DC Wingate. Were you a part of the decision to cancel my appearance in the Record on Thursday? I was rather upset to see I’d been bumped from the paper.”
He gave Hazel a searching look, not sure how to answer. She said, “We don’t discuss procedure with the target of an investigation.”
“I think what you mean is you can’t discuss an investigation you’re not leading.”
“Oh I’m -”
“- just a second,” said the voice. She leaned down to write. “Had another idea. They come so fast and furious. Everything connecting.”
“Why don’t you tell us your ideas?” said Hazel.
The head rose again and seemed to be searching in the middle distance. There was a sharp inhalation of breath. “In every pause in a story, something enters. Like a radiowave full of invisible news. Most people can’t hear those pauses. Can you, Hazel?”
“I’m reading between your lines.”
“Yes, yes you are,” said the voice. “I’ve been very pleased. I think we’re doing very well together. Maybe the story will have a different ending than the one I’ve been planning.”
Wingate spoke. “What ending have you planned?”
“Now, now, Detective Constable. Do you read the end of a book before its beginning?” She began to write again. “I knew someone who used to do that. Couldn’t stand the suspense of not-knowing. Let’s just say the trajectory of a story has a natural end-point. We’re wired for it, did you know that? The shape of our lives imposes itself on the way we tell stories: a welter of possibilities at the beginning narrows and narrows and inevitabilities appear that obligate us to take certain turns. And then the end is a foregone conclusion. However, twists are possible in such stories as the one we’re telling. Unexpected outcomes. In my experience, it happens only rarely. But we can see.”
“We’ve read chapters four and five -” he began.
“I know,” the voice said.
“How do you know?”
“You were at the house, weren’t you? How would you have known to go if not for those chapters? Excellent reading, by the way.”
Hazel felt her cheeks heat up. Where had this woman been this morning? Had she been in the house? “Is this Gail Caro?” she asked.
The figure put the pen down with a clack. “Oh, don’t be stupid now,” she said. “I’m counting on you to know a red herring when you see one.” She shook her head and muttered Gail Caro under her voice. “If I can find you through a computer screen, don’t you think I can see you out in the open?”
“Fine,” said Hazel. “How do we find you?”
“I’m not hiding,” she said. “Not exactly. You’ll have me when it’s time. But for now, forget about Anonymice, forget about tracing signals, forget about driving up and down the highways and byways of this great province looking for electronic signatures… you’ll just be wasting your time, and you know it.”
“Then why are we talking right now? What is it you have to say to us? Because I don’t feel like wasting any more of my time gabbing with a sick fuck like you. And I will find you, on my own time, not yours.”
The figure sighed and came to stillness. Then she turned in the chair and faced the camera. “You already found me,” said Gil Paritas, “and you let me go. What makes you think you can find me again, or keep me if you do?”
“Goddamnit,” said Hazel.
Paritas stared into the camera. “Great Scott, she thinks, I had her in my clutches. And I let her go. But of course you did. I’m presiding over more than one story at a time, Hazel. The one in the paper, the one you’re starring in, and the one that’s already been written.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Why didn’t you ask me for ID? That would have been a fine twist. Those two nice constables this morning thought to ask for yours. In fact, it was the first thing they settled: that you were who you claimed to be.”
“What would your ID have said?”
“Something that told you I was Gil Paritas. Fake ID’s easy to get, DI Micallef. But the point is, you didn’t question what you were being told. You took what you saw in front of you at face value, and that’s not going to work. Not for what we’re doing.”