Filt became Billingsley. He surfaces in Georgia on another domestic violence report, now married to a woman named Lydia Holland. Lydia—she’s the woman Timothy told me about, the woman he’d cheated on, his wife during the end. They lived in Pittsburgh but must have moved there from Georgia—Timothy told me he and his wife were traveling through the South when Pittsburgh ended. I request a search for the name “Lydia Billingsley.” Only one hit—as a volunteer at a Rotary pancake breakfast in Greensburg, PA. Timothy told me that he and his wife had divorced, so I search for her maiden name, “Lydia Holland”—the name appears in the Times-Picayune in the February issue, four months after the end of Pittsburgh. Her body was found bound and gagged, submerged in the Honey Island Swamp. A fisherman found her, didn’t know what he’d found at first. Her face was cut up and bloated in the water, a slash across the neck so deep she was nearly decapitated. Her hands had been removed.
A message hits my in-box and the chime in Simka’s silent guest room startles me from bed. I sit up, my account glowing in the darkness. From someone named Vivian Knightley, with the subject line: Aubade. I open it—You wanted to read my poetry, so here’s something. I hope you aren’t full of shit that you’re interested because I don’t show these to everyone. Love, Twigs—
She’s sent me a manuscript, the length of a chapbook—thirty pages or so. The aubade that starts the collection is just one line:
I reached for you this morning but you were gone.
I can’t stay here. I schedule a cab and spend the next fifteen minutes leaning over the guest room toilet, staring at my reflection in the water, concentrating to hold down the vomit my nerves are sputtering up. Did Timothy kill Hannah, I wonder, or did he just know where she was discarded? The house is silent—Simka must have finally gone to sleep. I move out to Simka’s front stoop in the numbing early morning chill, watching my breath billow out, shaking my legs to keep warm. When the cab pulls up, I hurry over so the driver won’t honk and pierce the predawn skin of silence. I tell the driver Kucenic’s address. I think of Hannah’s body filthy from silt. I think of Albion—but thinking of Albion is like staring at something for so long that it begins to disappear.
2, 4—
Kucenic lives on G, just off Barracks Row on 8th, in a Federalist row house that cost him a couple million, easy, despite the street parking and the odd stone-paved patch that serves as his front lawn. Dawn’s breaking, but the streetlights are still on.
I press the doorbell and chimes ring through the quiet house. “Kucenic?” I pound on the door. “It’s Dominic—”
His Explorer’s parked out front, one tire on the curb. Although the curtains are drawn, I look through a slit and find his usual living room mess from the night before: Chinese takeout boxes, half-finished two liters of Mountain Dew—Kucenic’s typical cuisine for late nights of coding.
“Kucenic, open up. It’s Dominic. Kucenic—”
The whispering hum of accumulating traffic circulates on nearby, busier streets.
“Kucenic, open up the goddamn door—”
I hear him shuffling around inside, now. The dead bolts fall away and Kucenic opens up. He’s wearing what he must have worn since yesterday, blue jeans and wrinkled flannel, his cigarette-ash hair a wild puff of bed head. His thumb and forefinger smooth his beard from his lips—a nervous tic he has when he’s thinking, when he’s not quite sure how to respond to a pointed question.
“Dominic,” he says.
“I’ve turned off my connection—”
“Come in. Come on in. I’ll make us some coffee—”
The Kucenic Group operates from this house—meetings in the living room, staffers lounging on the couches or recliners, eating cheese curls and Coke while Kucenic writes on the whiteboard. I’ve actually never been here without the rest of the group—the place is strangely empty, the only real sound the click and hum of servers lining the front hallway, caged in cherry-red storage lockers. Kucenic leads to the kitchen, struggling with a pronounced limp.
“Coffee,” he says, and the coffeepot purrs to life. “Do you want any of this pecan roll?”
“Tell me about #14502,” I tell him. “Hannah Massey, that State Farm insurance dispute I was working on when you let me go. Who’s working it now?”
“No one’s working it,” says Kucenic. “That case doesn’t exist anymore—”
“Bullshit,” I tell him.
“Check with State Farm if you have to,” he says. “Their bid skips from 14501 to 503—”
“You can’t just fucking ignore this,” I tell him. “That girl was murdered, you son of a bitch. When you fired me, I trusted you to follow through with her. I fucking trusted you. She deserves better than this—”
“Dominic, I have a lot to lose,” he says, diminished, cowed, his usually elfin eyes now like a coward’s pleading eyes. He turns from me, cuts a slice of the pecan roll, heats it in the microwave.
“You tell me what the fuck’s going on,” I tell him.
We eat at the meeting table, the paperwork of open cases spread haphazardly around the room, notes in red marker on the whiteboard—historical notes about Pittsburgh, timelines. Working on the Union Trust building collapse, it looks like, framed animated printouts of the building on sheets of e-paper are spread across the table.
“What did Waverly tell you when he first asked about me?”
“You mentioned that name earlier. You pinged me, said you’d met with a man named Waverly. You said there was a hard sell. I never met with anyone by that name—”
“Theodore Waverly—”
“Jesus, Dominic, do you know who that is?”
“He said he talked with you, interviewed you as a reference check. He said you told him about my drug habits, my work habits. He said he was checking background to hire me for a freelance job—”
“Dominic, I never met him—”
“Tell me what you know about Hannah Massey—”
“Only what you’d presented to me. When you found her body in the Archive, I reported the case to State Farm and the FBI. An agent from the field office contacted me, said they’d been in touch with State Farm—I’ve worked with this agent before, many times. I explained we were still researching the case as part of a claim, but that we’d present any relevant information to them. This is all strictly paperwork for the FBI, low priority—a bot actually does the work for them, it’s just a formality. No one expects the FBI to follow up or bring charges to anyone over something in the Pittsburgh City-Archive. This kind of interaction is just a checklist we go through—”
“So what’s different about her case?”
“This was shortly after your—incident,” he says. “You had that meltdown in Dupont Circle and I had to let you go. You were a repeat offender and this was a felony, I had to. I reported your termination to the Employee Assistance Program and was told that you would be taken care of, that your case would be handled by the Correctional Health Board—”