Seeing a pattern, fitting the pieces of the puzzle together-it was a process that normally elated him, but that afternoon in the car it didn’t feel as good as it usually did. Perhaps it was the lingering perception of his inadequacies, his missteps. The thought was acid in his chest.
He concentrated loosely on the road, the hood of his car, his hands on the wheel. Strange. His own hands-he didn’t recognize them. They looked surprisingly old-like his father’s hands. The little splotches had grown in number and size. If just a minute earlier he’d been shown photographs of a dozen hands, he wouldn’t have been able to identify his own among them.
He wondered why. Perhaps changes, if they occur gradually enough, are not regularly noted by the brain until the discrepancy reaches some critical magnitude. Perhaps it even went further than that.
Would it mean that we always see familiar things to some extent the way they used to be? Are we stuck in the past not out of simple nostalgia or wishful thinking but by a data-processing shortcut in our neural wiring? If what one “saw” was supplied partly from the optic nerves and partly from memory-if what one “perceived” at any given moment was actually a composite of current impressions and stored impressions-it gave new meaning to “living in the past.” The past would thus exercise a peculiar tyranny over the present by supplying us with obsolete data in the guise of sensory experience. Might that not relate to the situation of a serial killer driven by a long-ago trauma? How distorted might his vision be?
The theory momentarily excited him. Turning over a new idea, testing its solidity, always made him feel a little more in control, a little more alive, but today those feelings were hard to sustain. His GPS alerted him that it was two-tenths of a mile to the Wycherly exit.
At the end of the exit ramp, he turned right. The area was a hodgepodge of farm fields, tract houses, strip malls, and ghosts of another era’s summer pleasures: a dilapidated drive-in movie, a sign for a lake with an Iroquois name.
It brought to mind another lake with another Indian-sounding name-a lake with an encircling trail that he and Madeleine had hiked one weekend when they were searching for their perfect place in the Catskills. He could picture her animated face as they stood atop a modest cliff, holding hands, smiling, looking out over the breeze-crinkled water. The memory came with a stab of guilt.
He hadn’t called her yet to let her know what he was doing, where he was going, the likely delay in his homecoming. He still wasn’t sure how much he should tell her. Should he even mention the postmark? He decided to call her now, play it by ear. God help me say the right thing.
Considering the level of stress he was already feeling, he thought it wise to pull over to make the call. The first place he could find was a scruffy, gravelly parking area in front of a farm stand shuttered for the winter. The word for his home number in the voice-activated dialing system was, efficiently but unimaginatively, home.
Madeleine answered on the second ring with that optimistic, welcoming voice phone calls always elicited from her.
“It’s me,” he said, his own voice reflecting only a fraction of the light in hers.
There was a one-beat pause. “Where are you?”
“That’s what I’m calling to tell you. I’m in Connecticut, near a town called Wycherly.”
The obvious question would have been, “Why?” But Madeleine didn’t ask obvious questions. She waited.
“There’s been a development in the case,” he said. “Things may be coming to a head.”
“I see.”
He heard a slow, controlled breath.
“Are you going to tell me anything more than that?” she asked.
He gazed out the car window at the lifeless vegetable stand. More than closed for the season, it looked abandoned. “The man we’re after is getting reckless,” he said. “There may be an opportunity to stop him.”
“The man we’re after?” Now her voice was thin ice, fissuring.
He said nothing, jarred by her response.
She went on, openly angry. “Don’t you mean the bloody murderer, the serial killer, the man who never misses-who shoots people in their neck arteries and cuts their throats? Isn’t that who you’re talking about?”
“That’s… the man we’re after, yes.”
“There aren’t enough cops in Connecticut to handle this?”
“He seems to be focused on me.”
“What?”
“He seems to have identified me as someone working on the case, and he may try to do something stupid-which will give us the opportunity we need. It’s our chance to take the fight to him rather than just mopping up one murder after another.”
“What?” This time the word was less a question than a pained exclamation.
“It’s going to be all right,” he said unconvincingly. “He’s starting to fall apart. He’s going to self-destruct. We just have to be there when it happens.”
“When it was your job, you had to be there. You don’t have to be there now.”
“Madeleine, for Chrissake, I’m a cop!” The words exploded from him like an obstructed object blown loose. “Why the hell can’t you understand that?”
“No, David,” she responded evenly. “You were a cop. You’re not a cop now. You don’t have to be there.”
“I’m already here.” In the ensuing silence, his temper subsided like a retreating wave. “It’s all right. I know what I’m doing. Nothing bad is going to happen.”
“David, what is the matter with you? Do you just keep running at the bullets? Running at the bullets? Until one goes through your head? Is that it? Is that the pathetic plan for the rest of our lives together? I just wait, and wait, and wait for you to get killed?” Her voice cracked with such raw emotion on the word killed that he found himself speechless.
It was Madeleine who eventually spoke-so softly he could just make out the words. “What is this really about?”
“What’s it about?” The question hit him from an odd angle. He felt off balance. “I don’t understand the question.”
Her intense silence from a hundred miles away seemed to surround him, press in against him.
“What do you mean?” he asked. He could feel his heart rate rising.
He thought he heard her swallow. He sensed, somehow knew, she was trying to make a decision. When she did answer him, it was with another question, again spoken so softly he barely heard it.
“Is this about Danny?”
He could feel the pounding of his heart in his neck, his head, his hands.
“What? What would it have to do with Danny?” He didn’t want an answer, not now, not when he had so much to do.
“Oh, David,” she said. He could picture her, shaking her head sadly, determined to pursue this most difficult of all subjects. Once Madeleine opened a door, she invariably walked through it.
She took a shaky breath and pressed on. “Before Danny was killed, your job was the biggest part of your life. Afterward, it was the only part. The only part. You’ve done nothing but work for the past fifteen years. Sometimes I feel like you’re trying to make up for something, forget something… solve something.” Her strained inflection made the word sound like the symptom of a disease.