Over Tumbled Graves (17 page)

Caroline felt sluggish, as if she’d been boxing with Blanton rather than interviewing him. “I don’t…sure, twenty times.”

“That’s right,” he said, tilting his glass toward her as if he’d just proven some point. “So the fifth victim is twenty times as important as the first. Now imagine how important the fifteenth victim is, or the nineteenth. And housewives are twenty times as important as hookers, right? Now what about a fifteen-year-old girl? Huh? Do y’all see what I’m saying, Ms. Mabry? Do y’all understand the concept of triage?”

Again, he’d slipped into a Louisiana drawl. “Yes,” Caroline said.

“Because if y’all can’t even get past the triage, then the surgery itself…” He didn’t finish. He picked up the candle between them and swirled the melted wax in the glass so that the light flickered and almost went out. Then he set the candle down and again he was the professor. “How do we catch a murderer, Ms. Mabry? A run-of-the-mill killed-my-wife-over-an-argument murderer. Where do we start?”

Caroline thought about it. “Motive.”

“Right,” he said. “So when we get a serial murder, we assign our best homicide detective—for the sake of argument, let’s say your man Dupree—and he launches into it the way he does all his other simple little cases, looking for motive. But that won’t work. It’s different with these guys. Motive is only the surface.
Sex. Control. Every one of these cases, the motive is sex and control. So you have to go deeper, to inhabit these guys, to find the thing that lives beneath the motive.”

“Beneath the motive?”

“The fantasy. With these guys, it all goes back to fantasy. You piece the fantasy together, you start to piece your guy together. Everything—location, weapon, staging, appearance of the victims—fits into the fantasy.” He leaned forward across the table, engaging Caroline’s eyes. “You go to the crime scene and you imagine what he’s thinking—why the bite marks on the shoulder, why the body is facedown. What is the fantasy? By the third or fourth body, you look for the pattern. By the tenth, you look for the aberration. Because in the end, that’s where you’ll catch him. In the aberration. In the one that’s different. That’s where he’ll reveal himself.”

Blanton stared at the table for a long moment, then began speaking without looking up. “We found her forty-eight hours after he finished with her. The others, it was as much as a year later, because they were whores or crack addicts and no one noticed they were gone. We needed forensic dentists to tell us who they were. But this girl was fifteen and when she went missing, people noticed. We broke out da hounds and went out into the swamp and found her. I’d been here three weeks…

“He only had sex with this victim once. The rest was the same, the beating, the tire iron, dragging her by the hair, the posing. But only one sexual assault. And only while she was alive. Why? What’s different?”

Again, Blanton seemed to lose his concentration. “We tested the contents of her stomach. You know what we found?”

Caroline shook her head no.

“One of them cinnamon rolls from the mall. You got them up in Spokane, them cinnamon roll shops?” He pronounced it Spok-UN this time. She thought he did it without thinking, as if screwing around with people was a habit, like chewing his nails. He waved his empty glass at the bartender again, and when the bartender brought another drink he handed over a credit card. “That’s it for me.” He raised his eyebrows to Caroline, but she still hadn’t finished her Gibson, and she shook her head no.

“So tell me about my guy,” he said.

Her throat was hoarse. “Your guy?”

“Yeah. Why did he only have sex with this victim once? What was the difference? The aberration? What went wrong with the fantasy?”

Caroline searched her mind for details from his book, trying to come to the kind of conclusions about the guy’s psychology that Blanton seemed to draw so effortlessly from the evidence. But she felt so tired, so overwhelmed all of a sudden, so weary from trying to stand up to it, that she couldn’t picture anything from his book, just a cloud of assumption and bad science. All she could think about was movements, patterns, currents of flow, where people had been and where they were going.

“I guess,” she began, “I think…he bought her a cinnamon roll.”

Blanton looked surprised. “Why do you say that?”

“You said he raped her when she was alive. For the cinnamon roll to be in her system still, she must’ve eaten it just before…” She tailed off. “So I’d say it’s his mall, not hers.”

“Yeah,” Blanton said. “That’s right. The mall wasn’t close to her house and I can’t imagine a girl running off to a frat party stopping for a cinnamon roll.”

“So I guess,” Caroline continued, “the first thing I would do is see if there’s a photography shop at that mall.”

Blanton cocked his head.

“You said he poses the bodies more than usual. Maybe he takes pictures,” Caroline said. “Well, he can’t take those to One-Hour Photo, so he must run his own darkroom. And he must buy equipment somewhere. I mean, it’s a longshot, but…”

Blanton stared blankly.

“Then,” she continued, “I’d go to the camera shops around that area and check their credit card receipts to see which customers have a history of sex crimes.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“Should we do my guy now?” Caroline asked. “What did you say? Twenty-four to forty-eight. American sedan. Never married. Middle class. Some trauma involving the mother, maybe big, maybe small. Late through puberty. Classic insider/outsider.”

Blanton stared at her, emotionless.

Caroline continued. “But then, that describes every one of these guys, doesn’t it, Mr. Blanton? That’s the standard profile. Boilerplate four out of five times. No, I’ll be more curious to see what you think
after
you’ve read our files.”

For the first time, he smiled. “All right, Ms. Mabry. I’ll read your files tonight. I have to meet with the medical examiner tomorrow morning. They fished a young woman out of Lake Pontchartrain and I need to make sure it’s not related to the killer down here. You-all wanna come?”

He signed the bill and she caught a glimpse of the number he wrote, sixty-eight dollars. A lot of booze.

He noticed her watching him. “I had some friends here, earlier,” he said. He stood and stared down at her. “Do you want to know my theory of why women don’t like baseball as much as men?”

She found herself smiling at the word “theory” and thinking of Dupree. “Sure.”

“Well, of course, women can be baseball fans, but they don’t inhabit the game the way men do. They don’t worship the numbers. We talked about it before, the importance of the numbers. Five, nineteen, forty-nine, fifty-six. The numbers mean nothing if the fantasy isn’t there. If you can’t imagine yourself as the baseball player. Men do that. They’re trained to do it, and even if they weren’t trained, it’s…natural. They can picture themselves playing the game. Do you understand? Even those of us who never played baseball…we understand the fantasy. The fantasy is all that matters. Do you see?”

“Yes.”

His eyes drifted from hers to the floor. “I apologize if I made you uneasy, Ms. Mabry. At Quantico, we always had one woman in the Investigative Support Unit, but to be totally frank, I’ve never met a woman who contributed much to these kinds of cases. Fortunately for them, they don’t have the capacity for understanding this type of killer, for understanding the fantasy.”

“And you think that’s essential.”

He thought about it. “Yes. I do. Of course, there is a need for…cinnamon rolls. But in the end, you can’t catch these guys if you can’t conjure them up, if you can’t see them in your mind.”
He looked up at her with the same expectant stare he’d had when she came in, and she had the feeling that every word was a test, a cruel game. “So, can you conjure him up, Detective Mabry?” His voice dropped to a hoarse whisper. “Can y’all see your man?”

She stood, exhausted, and looked around a bar that strived so hard to remain dark. In the darkness she saw that Lenny Ryan would forever push Burn into the river while she watched helplessly, that he would turn ever so slowly to stare at her, waiting for her to do something. “Yes,” she said, “I see him.”

It wasn’t long after the drunk girls joined their table that Joel felt things getting out of hand. The waif—he would have carded her in his own place—had settled onto his knee and was pretending there was nothing strange about using a guy’s leg for a chair in a crowded bar. Across the table, the girl angling to be Derek’s was telling one of those long, anecdotal jokes, a string of implausible coincidences about a woman whose boyfriend drives them into a muddy ditch and must use her clothes as traction to get the car out of the mud. Derek was laughing like it was the funniest story he’d ever heard, his arm around the booth behind her. Jay, too, was listening to Derek’s girl’s story, turning every few seconds to laugh with the girl who had been assigned him. As her story built to its improbable climax, Derek’s girl slid out of the booth, stood, and removed her shoes. “So she walks up to the farmhouse and knocks on the door, buck naked.” The girl held her shoes over her crotch. “‘My boyfriend’s stuck. Can you help get him out?’”

Joel laughed politely while the girl on his knee laughed harder, shifting her weight, catching his eye and smiling.

“God, Sandy. That is disgusting,” said Jay’s girl, the only one of the three with dark hair. Jay put his hand on her leg.

“That is so funny,” Derek said. “That is really funny.”

“Hilarious,” Jay said. “Really hilarious.”

They were crowded in this booth at the tail end of McCool’s, a long, narrow pub with predictable Irish decor—green walls and clovers and Irish flags and maps of the island and Notre Dame banners and the rest.

“Really funny,” Derek said again.

“Great,” said Jay.
“My boyfriend’s stuck.”

The laughter trailed into hums and smiles and then, like a football huddle that breaks to reveal the formation, the three girls turned separately to the guys they were sitting near and engaged in single conversations.

“What do you do?” asked the girl on Joel’s knee.

“Bartender.”

“Really?”

“No, I just say it to impress people.”

“That’s cool.” She nodded at the leg she sat on. “You’re not married?”

“No, but I’m seeing someone.”

“Where’s she?”

“Out of town.” Joel wondered why he’d told her that. Why not
She’s at home
, or,
We’re meeting her later
? He felt transparent. Why did there have to be this gap between who you are and who you want to be? He finished his drink and moved the girl off his leg so he could stand. “I’m gonna get a drink,” he said. “You want something?”

“A Manhattan?”

Of course. These days, everyone drank martinis and martini derivations. Three years ago, Joel’s job had consisted of jerking beer taps, but now every college student wanted to drink like a salesman. Booze had come back because things just naturally come back, and so now you had frat boys lecturing you on what kind of gin they wanted and clear-eyed twenty-one-year-old girls ordering Manhattans. It was funny. That had been the thing about Caroline that first caught his attention, when she ordered a Gibson, one of the few booze drinks that hadn’t come back.
When Joel mixed her a vodka Gibson, she spoke to him like he was a ten-year-old, instructing him on the proper mix of a Gibson, right down to the number of cocktail onions. So, when she asked for a refill, he brought a pint of gin in a beer pitcher with fifteen cocktail onions strung in a necklace, looped around the rim of the pitcher, like booze-soaked pearls.

At the bar, Joel pulled his money roll from his pocket and peeled off a couple of bills. He watched the bartender, a bald guy with decent concentration, if not the best technique, fill a row of glasses with ice. He could tell from the moment the ice went in that this place short-poured, filled the glasses mostly with ice and mixer and went light on whatever booze they were serving up. He looked up at the better bottles, stacked along the bar like guys in bleacher seats. Usually if a place short-poured, it practiced other kinds of cheapness, too—watering down the booze or mixing the cheap brands with the good bottles, blending the plastic-bottled gin with the Bombay or the cheap whiskey with the Glenfiddich. Hell, some twenty-two-year-old kid ordering eighteen-year-old scotch isn’t going to know the difference. Maybe people get what they deserve.

“What can I get you?”

“A Manhattan, a shot of Knob Creek, and a glass of ice on the side.” Joel was going to make sure he got his entire shot of whiskey. “That
is
Knob Creek in that bottle, right? Or should I order something else?”

The bartender considered him briefly. “No, that’s a good choice.”

The drinks ordered, Joel turned his back and surveyed the bar, the same thing every other guy in the world did when he ordered a drink. More disappointment. As he turned to the left he saw a man at a small table staring at him and it took a minute to recognize Caroline’s friend Alan Dupree sitting by himself with a drink in front of him. Dupree raised his drink in a short salute.

“Hey.” Joel walked over. Dupree likely had seen that girl sitting on his lap and Joel felt a moment of panic. “How’s it goin’?”

“Good,” Dupree said. “How about you?”

“You know. Buddies are gettin’ a little wild.”

He looked back at the bar, but the bartender was still fussing
with the limes in a couple of G-and-Ts. “I don’t know if you saw, you know, that girl, I mean…”

“Yeah, I saw her. She’s cute.”

“I didn’t do anything, she just sat on my knee.”

Dupree nodded and Joel detected in the movement a kind of disappointment, as if he wished he’d seen Joel hitting on the girl. “Heard anything from Caroline?”

“She’s not big on calling.” Joel looked over at the table, then back at Dupree. “Hey, do you want to join us?”

Dupree looked over at the girls, and Joel thought he saw the older man sigh. “That’s nice. But I have kind of an important meeting in the morning. Thanks anyway. But if you talk to Caroline…” He stared at the empty drink in front of him. “Go on back to your friends. I’ll talk to her when she gets back.”

Joel began to edge away. “Okay,” he said. “Well…take it easy.”

Joel got his drinks and left a buck tip on the bar. On his way back to the table, he snagged a chair, disappointing the waif, who fanned a couple of singles in his direction. He shook her off and sat down on the new chair at the end of the table.

When he looked back down the length of the bar, Joel saw Dupree edging through a crowd of people. The wiry detective reached the door, went outside, and stood beneath the streetlight, staring at the sidewalk. And in that moment, Joel pictured himself on that sidewalk, at forty-five, balding and losing his form. Suddenly the very struggle of Joel’s life seemed both predetermined and petty, like a lab mouse in blind pursuit of one of two paths, solitude or settlement. As he watched, Joel couldn’t imagine a way out and felt a chill inevitability, the claustrophobia of age.

The door swung closed and Dupree was gone. Joel drank his shot of whiskey and turned back to the table, where Derek’s girl was starting another joke: “There was this girl who had fish for tits…”