“What’s up?” He asked.
I shook my head to clear it, if only temporarily, of silly ideas. I cleared my throat and moved papers from one end of my desk to another.
“Nothing,” I said. “But isn’t it a little… I don’t know… strange? I mean, he tried to stab me. And he’s never pulled anything before?”
“It’s not that strange,” Craig said. “Maybe he was just good at not getting caught. If you don’t get in trouble, the cops probably won’t know who you are. That’s generally a good thing. A bit of a pain in the ass for somebody trying to identify you, but still a plus in the grand scheme of things.”
“How can you degenerate to the point where you’re robbing random people in parking lots and not have a police record?”
“Beats me. Could be he’s on the radar somewhere else. They’re passing his picture around to every police department in the state. ‘Do You Know This Shitbag? Call Burlington P.D.’ That kind of thing. Oh, and all major stations are going to put out his description and ask for information. They’ll probably figure it out by the end of the week.”
Or maybe not, I thought. Maybe they won’t ever figure it out, because the man I stabbed last night isn’t a man at all, but a creature fabricated from dirt and air. Molded from clay by the hands of a faceless demon who kissed him and gave him life and sent him out into the world. Suddenly, I pictured a room with heavy curtains of dark red fabric that gave off its own peculiar light; a head, bald but misshapen, bent over the creature laying on its back on a table like Frankenstein’s monster. I heard a hiss, the passage of breath from one body to another, and a voice that sounded exactly like the one on my telephone.
Go, it said. Find him. Show him who he is.
I shuddered.
“Craig,” I asked, looking out the window at the parking lot where I had stabbed someone—or something—to death last night. “Did you ever find anything out about Pinnix and Ramseur?”
He smiled uncomfortably and shifted in his seat. “Well… kind of. That’s weird, too.”
“How so?”
He bit his lower lip and took a deep breath. He pulled a thin manila folder from the files he had carried in, leaned forward and placed it on my desk.
“Nobody knows who they are, either,” he said. “That’s your police file.”
“It’s thin.”
“That’s because there are no mysteries and you’re the only witness,” he said. His shoulders slumped, he spoke somberly, like he was sad about something. “And I had to move heaven and high water to get that, so don’t knock it.”
I could tell he wanted to see me read it, so I sat back in my chair and opened the folder. The first few pages contained a police report listing the names and addresses of everyone involved. The first responding deputy’s narrative; the detective’s narrative. Neither contained anything I didn’t already know. But my eyes hovered for several moments on one particular statement the deputy made.
Mr. Swanson allowed me into the residence, whereupon I observed the bodies of two males lying in the hallway.
My statement; Allie’s statement; Abby’s statement. The detective’s summation of the evidence. A memorandum from the District Attorney’s Office concurring with the detective’s opinion that I had acted in defense of home, self and immediate family and shouldn’t be prosecuted for murder. My criminal background history, blank except for the single speeding ticket I incurred my sophomore year at Carolina.
The criminal backgrounds of both Pinnix and Ramseur: blank.
I frowned. I flipped from Pinnix to Ramseur, Ramseur to Pinnix. The implications of what I was seeing loomed above me like an approaching iceberg. My throat began to tighten in fear. “What the fuck is this?”
“What the fuck is what?”
“This!” I poked my finger at Pinnix’s empty criminal background history. “Their records! They’re squeaky clean! These guys broke into my fucking house with a knife and handcuffs and I’ve got a longer rap sheet than they do! Craig, they’re thirty and thirty-one years old! Thirty and thirty-one years without so much as a parking ticket and the first crime they decide to pull off is a B&E and rape-murder? How does something like that happen?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
I flipped past the records and saw photographs. The first one showed a reprint of my driver’s license, but in the next picture my haggard face stared back at me from its position above the collar of the tee shirt I’d worn the night of the shooting. Another shot showed my hands, another the bloody back of my head. The AK-47 leaning against the wall in the foyer. Various shots of the hallway and the bodies lying there.
Pinnix and Ramseur. Their faces bloody and shattered, their features unrecognizable. Their DMV records offered no pictures of what they looked like before I got a hold of them, because they’d never bothered getting driver’s licenses in North Carolina or anywhere else. I flipped through the rest of the photos—shell casings on the floor, various shots of my basement man-cave, two cards to a video store in Durham—and shut the file.
“There’s not a single picture of what these guys looked like before,” I said. “Not so much as a yearbook photo. No records, no pictures. Is this the real file? Did somebody monkey with this before they gave it to you?”
“It’s all there,” he said.
I rocked in my seat. I bit my lower lip. I said, “It’s like they just walked in out of nowhere. It’s like they didn’t even exist before that night. How can not one but two guys like this make it into their thirties without getting pinched for anything? Without a driver’s license?”
Something else occurred to me, and I froze. When my gears unstuck, I snatched the file off my desk and flipped through it frantically.
“Where’s the car?” I asked.
“What car?”
“Exactly! What car? My house is way out in bumfuck, but when you read through this thing it’s like they want you to believe they fucking walked there. Why is there no information about the car in here?”
Craig shook his head again. He didn’t have any answers for me. Because there weren’t any.
“If you take this at face value,” I said, “then these two guys appeared out of nowhere.”
Like ghosts, I thought. Or demons.
Or creatures conjured from dust and dirt.
“I agree,” he said, “that there are a couple things that bother me about all this.”
He reached forward and tapped the top corner of the file. “Know what else is missing?”
“What’s that?”
“Go through that file and tell me how the cops figured out their names.”
I flipped through the pitifully small collection of papers. I focused on the photocopies of the membership cards to Ryan’s News and Video. “Video store cards, I guess.”
“Negative. That’s an adult video store, a porn store. They don’t use names or credit cards. You get a membership number and post a fifty-dollar deposit; you fail to return a video, they keep your fifty bucks and you keep the video. They have no record of names. They don’t know who their customers are. So the question is, how do the police know?”
“How do they?” I asked.
“I don’t know. And they don’t know, either. I’ve talked to every cop in Burlington and nobody can answer that question for me. Everybody thinks somebody else told them, and you go talk to that somebody else and they’re like no, Joe told me. You talk to Joe, and Joe says Steve told me. But Steve’s the one who told you to go talk to Joe in the first place. It’s all fucked up.”
He chuckled then at something in his head and shifted uncomfortably in the chair. He touched a finger to his lips, supporting his chin in the can opener created by his thumb and index finger. His dark brow wrinkled.