Over Tumbled Graves (24 page)

But over the years they dented and chipped away at too many things that would turn out to be important. That included Dupree’s appreciation of a well-read wife, and so they rarely talked about the books that Debbie read anymore. It seemed to him now that it had begun to get away from them at the Christmas party eight years ago—before Caroline had shot the wife beater, before they’d spent the night together, before he’d transferred off patrol—when Debbie insisted on having his entire shift over for a holiday drink. But you can’t have one drink with a cop, and so late in the evening Caroline and Debbie had found themselves standing next to each other in one of those awkward conversational circles, the two of them standing across from Dupree and Caroline’s date, some dope she’d
known in high school. The dope brought up the full bookshelves all over the house, Debbie’s bookshelves, and Caroline—slopping beer on the carpet—drunkenly admitted to studying poetry in college. “Poetry…and criminal justice! Can you beat that? It’s like studying taxidermy and veterinary medicine.” She’d laughed. “My adviser just looked at me like I was nuts.” And Debbie had caught him staring at this young woman, and maybe that was the first time she had been jealous of Caroline, or at least his first awareness of it. Poetry and criminal justice. When Dupree had looked away from the young and vibrant and drunk and well-read Caroline, his wife was staring at him with eyes that showed both accusation and admission. And Dupree had just looked down at the wet carpet.

It was funny. For twelve years Dupree had fantasized about being single and being with Caroline. And now that he’d finally left his wife, he hadn’t said a thing to Caroline. In his mind he felt like he was waiting for something, but what? Maybe it was Joel. Maybe seeing him at the bar that night had gotten to him, watching Joel struggle the way Dupree struggled to be a good person, to be a faithful, stand-up guy. Maybe he wanted to give Joel every chance to succeed where he failed. Or maybe he didn’t feel worthy of her, since he’d been removed from the task force and Caroline remained on it. Or maybe it was just simple guilt over hurting his kids and Debbie. Or maybe or maybe or maybe…

He stared at the big picture window in the living room and noticed that the curtains were open. That was strange. Debbie always closed those curtains at night. Well, almost always. Dupree could think of only a handful of occasions when he’d come home late and found those curtains still open, Debbie having fallen asleep with a book or with the TV on. So maybe she’d just fallen asleep again. He looked around the neighborhood. This was a quiet, safe place, no halfway houses nearby, no homes ornate enough to draw burglars of any repute, no taverns down the street spitting out drunks. He couldn’t think of a neighborhood in the city in which he would feel better having his children live.

Still, those open curtains bothered him. There had been a petty burglar he’d arrested once, a guy named Turner, who would case houses by looking for open curtains. The thought of Turner or some other degenerate standing in front of his family’s ground-level
window, checking out his family’s TV and stereo, just about made him sick. He unbuckled his belt and leaned back in the seat and fantasized sitting there all night in his patrol car, every night, guarding the house, protecting the people inside without having to deal with them. He imagined sitting in his car forever, the kids passing by every morning, avoiding his eyes as he started the car and drove slowly behind them, maybe running the lights without the siren, just to make sure they got to the bus safely. After a while they’d get used to it, and their friends, too, having a police car tail them every time they went for a ride on their bikes. He tried to remember the last time Marc had met his eyes. He felt irrelevant to the boy, as if he’d stopped existing once he’d moved out of the house. He thought again just how nice it would be to live in his car outside the house, to be able to see his children grow up without having to face how he’d hurt them.

Caroline was flipping through the channels when she saw footage of a swamp on CNN. Three or four channels later, she realized what she’d seen and flipped back. A perky news anchor was saying that a suspect had been arrested in the murders of as many as nineteen women in New Orleans, in the deadliest serial murder case in the last three years. The suspect was the custodian at a high school in the Lakeshore neighborhood. He had been caught on a security camera stealing photography supplies from a high school yearbook class. The high school principal sat the custodian down to question him about the darkroom supplies and the man had shocked the principal by suddenly confessing to being a serial murderer. Just like that.

Curled up on the couch, Caroline marveled at the ironic sense it made. For all Blanton’s efforts and expertise, a high school principal accidentally catches the guy. She opened her briefcase and found Blanton’s office number, grabbed the phone and punched in the number. Her call went straight to his voice mail. She considered paging him. She checked her watch. It was almost eleven; it’d be closing on one in the morning there. While she amused herself
thinking about what Blanton might make of a 1
A.M
. page, the recorded message ended and his voice mail beeped.

“Oh,” she said, “hey, Mr. Blanton. This is Caroline Mabry with the Spokane Police Department. I just wanted to”—she started to say “congratulate,” but thought better of it—“I just called to say I was just glad you caught your guy. I guess that’s all.”

She set the phone down and a minute later, it rang.

“Am I crazy or did you just call to congratulate me?” Blanton sounded deadened or drunk, like the first night they’d spoken. Caroline was sorry she’d called.

“I didn’t know what else to say. Are you in the office?”

“Yeah.”

“What are you doing there?”

“Sitting.”

“At one in the morning?”

“Is it? Well, I guess that explains why the office is so empty.”

“Why didn’t you answer my call if you’re just sitting there by yourself?”

“I didn’t feel like talking.”

“But you called me back?”

“I wanted to know what I was being congratulated for.”

“I thought you might be happy that he got caught.”

“I had some drinks with some of the detectives earlier. They certainly seem happy. Perhaps you’d like to talk to one of them?”

Caroline noticed there was no more trace of New Orleans twang, as if now that the crime had been solved, he could put that tool away for next time. His voice was flat and hollow and its bitterness made her feel cold, like the first time they’d met.

After a short silence, he sighed. “So, aren’t you going to ask how my profile stacked up against the real thing?”

“How did your profile stack up against the real thing?”

“Fair in most respects. But I overestimated intelligence again. I had this guy as a college graduate. He’s an imbecile, a fuckin’ janitor. It’s a wonder he didn’t kill himself.”

She didn’t know what to say, and again there was silence on her end.

“So, aren’t you going to ask me if I’m troubled by that fact?” he asked.

“Are you troubled by that fact?”

“Good question. Yes, I am. It troubles me that this guy could be so much more interesting in the abstract than in reality. Makes me wonder what I’m looking for. I seem to need these guys to be formidable and, I don’t know…evil. This one’s just broken.”

“You interviewed him?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s he like?” Caroline was surprised at how quiet her voice was.

Blanton answered as quietly. “Like every one of these sick fucks. Unremarkable. Just over forty. White. Short, dark hair. Just…forgettable, you know? Forgettable.” He sighed, and she heard him take a drink. “What about you, Ms. Mabry? Do we need to send this high school administrator to
Spow-kaine
to solve your crime?”

“It couldn’t hurt,” Caroline said. “Although we did get a profiler finally.”

“Who’d you get?”

“McDaniel.”

“You didn’t.”

“
I
didn’t. The lead investigator brought him in.”

“McDaniel?” Blanton sounded engaged, the way he’d been the afternoon they saw the drowning victim and Blanton had clued her in about how Lenny Ryan’s fantasy involved her. “Christ, Jeff McDaniel couldn’t profile himself!”

“What is it with you two?”

Blanton was quiet for a moment. “What do you mean?”

“He practically leaves the room when your name comes up.”

For the first time Caroline could remember, Blanton seemed unsure of what to say. “I retired first and got all the good TV gigs.” He paused and seemed suddenly concerned. “Why? What has he told you?”

“Nothing. I’m just wondering if he is going to be any help to us.”

“McDaniel? Nah. He’s completely Freudian. Guy will spend the next six months figuring out that your guy had a fucked-up childhood.”

Caroline smiled to herself. “He does talk a lot about the offender’s parents moving and being an outsider in school. Torturing pets, stuff like that.”

“I always thought McDaniel would be a great help if the killer was nine.”

They were both quiet for a moment.

“I asked my guy here about the fifteen-year-old girl,” Blanton said finally.

Caroline didn’t say anything.

“Says he doesn’t remember picking the girl up.”

“Is he just screwing with you?”

“I don’t know. He volunteered to take a lie detector test on it. And he confessed to everything else. But not her. Not the girl.”

“Copycat?”

“No. It’s him. Same DNA, prints. Same everything. I think he can justify the others in his simple mind, the crack whores and speed freaks. But I don’t know, maybe even he can’t imagine what kind of person would do that to a fifteen-year-old girl.”

And then, quietly, Blanton added, “So how come I can imagine it?”

Caroline didn’t answer and he filled the quiet with a deep breath.

“We weren’t quite right about the mall, by the way,” Blanton said. “The mall with the cinnamon roll shop wasn’t near his house. It was near the school. The girl went to the school where he worked. That’s probably why she got in his car.”

“You were right about the girl being different,” Caroline said. “You said the way to catch him was in the aberration.”

“Yeah?” Blanton sighed. “I say a lot of things.”

“You should get some sleep,” Caroline said.

After a moment, he said, “You too, Ms. Mabry.”

The phone went dead and Caroline stared at it. She checked her watch. It was a little after eleven. She switched the TV over to a local news channel, which was doing a story about Burn’s body being found. The reporter stood on the roadside above Long Lake, gesturing down the hill. Caroline turned up the volume.

“…a body that investigators believe is that of convicted drug dealer Kevin Hatch, who was pushed to his death in April by Leonard Ryan, a man police now want to question about the deaths of…”

So how come I can imagine it?
Blanton’s words barged into her mind. At the moment he’d said it she’d thought about Burn resur
facing, and about that day in the park. Why didn’t she tell Blanton that Burn’s body had been found? If anyone might understand her ambivalence, her difficulty comprehending Burn’s return and the sequence of events on the bridge that day, it was Blanton. He would appreciate her effort to find some meaningful distinction between—what had Blanton called it,
broken and evil
—some distinction between the Kevin Hatches and the Lenny Ryans of the world. Some elemental difference between them and her.

So how come I can imagine it?

Caroline closed her eyes and saw Lenny Ryan on the bridge again, reaching over, pushing Burn. Then what? The look. Ryan had looked at her with…what? The look haunted her. She’d always figured Ryan pushed Burn over the bridge as a way to escape, to force her into choosing to save one or arrest the other. But was that the look? There were easier ways for Ryan to get away. And if he was trying to create a diversion, why didn’t Ryan run after pushing Burn? Why just stand there? Looking at her?

There was another choice she could have made, of course. She could have shot Lenny Ryan. Certainly, part of her had wanted to do that. And maybe that was the look in his eyes: some combination of anger and challenge and resignation.

In her mind, Lenny Ryan’s eyes became the eyes of the drunk wife beater six years earlier, the man she killed. In that instant on the bridge, the idea of shooting Ryan had passed through her head, just as it had with the wife beater. Sometimes, as she played it in her head, Caroline allowed hindsight to create enough time to shoot Ryan just as he reached for Burn, before he pushed him over the edge. But that wasn’t what happened. Ryan pushed Burn and she decided to go after Burn rather than face Ryan. Did she really choose to save Burn? She was filled with so much self-doubt lately, she’d even begun to wonder if she went after Burn as a way of ignoring Lenny Ryan, her fear, the fact that she might have to shoot a man to death again. Or be killed by him.

She stood, walked to the kitchen, and got a glass of tap water. She stared out the dark window into her backyard, seeing the day in the park and all the things that seemed wrong with it, a string of impossible coincidences and well-meaning slapstick, a string of overreactions.

There was a notebook on the kitchen table. Caroline opened it and drew a small map of the center of the park, where they had set up the surveillance of Burn. She drew X’s to mark herself and the other detectives and the letters B for Burn and R for Ryan. She stared at the page as if she could imagine the letters into action.

From the moment Ryan approached (she could see him even now, loose khaki pants and black T-shirt, bushy hair) they had figured him for a drug customer. He had the look. But no drugs changed hands. She wrote on the page: “Why didn’t Burn hand over any drugs? Maybe there was no drug deal.”

Burn and Ryan had run away and hidden. Together. That made no sense. It was easier to be caught that way. She remembered Ryan holding Burn’s arm as they ran, dragging him along. She wrote in her notebook: “Why not split up? Why run away together? Why would Ryan need to keep Burn close by?”

Then the bridge. She flipped back to her simple drawings, the X’s, the B and R. Now she drew another map, of the bridge, herself, Burn, and Ryan. And then Burn went over the edge. She remembered the look in Ryan’s eyes after he pushed Burn. Stubbornness. Resignation. He was not going to be arrested. She would have to shoot him. But she couldn’t. She thought about Jacqueline, as she often did now. No sign of her since the night her friend Risa disappeared. Were they both dead? Were they dead because Caroline hadn’t been able to deal with Ryan, either by arresting him or by shooting him? She wrote on the page: “What the hell’s the matter with me?”

She threw the notebook across the room and it hit the wall and slid down to the small table where she kept her telephone, teetered on the edge, and fell.

So, how come I can imagine it?

She tried to think like Blanton, by applying the test of aberration, looking for the pattern that was revealed in the breaking of the pattern. The New Orleans janitor might’ve gone around forever picking up and killing prostitutes and drug addicts that he didn’t know. But the fifteen-year-old girl? He worked at her school.

Caroline imagined Lenny Ryan’s patterns: He kills hookers
because he blames his girlfriend for betraying him, for being a hooker and getting herself killed. He killed his uncle and the pawnshop owner during robberies. So why kill Burn? They’d always assumed he killed Burn to create a distraction. Could there be some other reason?

This whole time she’d been focusing on Ryan. They all had. But what about the young drug dealer? It shocked her, how little she knew about Burn. She’d read his file and had never found any connection to Lenny Ryan, other than the one they heard from the pawnshop owner, that he occasionally pimped some girls. They had gone over his files and talked to his friends and associates, but none of the dead prostitutes’ names had come up. She tried to compose Burn’s file from memory, but she couldn’t, and realized she wouldn’t sleep until she went down to the office and read the whole stupid file. She went to her bedroom, slipped into a pair of sweatpants, socks, and tennis shoes. She pulled her hair back in a short ponytail. In the living room, she turned off a light and caught a sliver of headlight through the drawn curtains of her window as a car pulled up to the curb across the street.

Dupree. She had been expecting him for weeks. Wanting him to come some nights. Dreading it other nights. Tonight, she didn’t know how she felt. She turned the deadbolt, opened the door, and stepped out onto the porch. And then she froze. It wasn’t Dupree idling across the street from Caroline’s house. It was a man in a small, red sedan, and from her porch she could see his baseball cap and beard.