Over Tumbled Graves (32 page)

Dupree flipped to the back of the contract. Appendix A had further definitions and explanations of words like “property values” and “elimination.”

“Jesus,” Teague said from the doorway. “I leave you alone for a minute and you go all Waco on the poor guy’s office.”

Dupree set the contract back in the file marked “Security.” “Any luck?” he asked.

“No. The task force office was empty so I called Spivey’s cell. They’re down at the river with a TV crew. I told him you thought this burglary might relate to their case and he said to tell you to go to hell.”

“Guy really holds a grudge.”

“I told him it was urgent. He said to lock the place up and get hold of the owners and he’d send someone over when they were done. Or else tomorrow morning.”

“Got your phone?”

Teague handed it over and Dupree hit redial. Spivey answered on the first ring.

“This is Spivey.” There were voices in the background.

“Hey, it’s Dupree. I really think—”

“I heard. We’ll clear here in an hour and I’ll send someone.” And then the phone went dead. Dupree tried the number again and this time it went straight to Spivey’s voice mail. Fuck him. Dupree wasn’t going to do the guy’s job for him. He tossed the phone back to Teague, who caught it with two hands.

“Told you,” Teague said.

Tomorrow. He’d just be Alan Dupree, private citizen and eligible bachelor. It was funny. He’d dreamed so long of being an easygoing bachelor again, letting go of his twenty-five-year sulk, and the only person he could imagine being impressed by the new, old Dupree was Debbie, who had fallen in love with the
easygoing bachelor. He wished she could see who he wanted to be, how carefree he planned to become, how the edges would be smooth again and his jokes would only be funny.

“So,” Teague asked, “what do we do now?”

“Now?” Dupree shrugged and looked back at the open files. “Now I go down to the office and file a report. You put some tape up around the house and then you sit here until someone comes by to dust it.”

Teague nodded. “Okay. Then what?”

“Then? Then we get a pizza.”

Teague just stared at him.

“Hey, Spivey says it isn’t urgent. I guess it isn’t urgent.”

“Please, get up,” Caroline said, looking down the long hall outside the task force office and the other detectives’ offices, hoping that no one was seeing this.

From his knee, Joel looked up at her, pleading. “It doesn’t mean anything,” he said, “that I love you?”

“It doesn’t mean what you think it means,” Caroline said. “Does it strike you at all strange that you didn’t realize you loved me until after you slept with someone else?”

“I told you, that was a mistake.”

“You thought it was me?”

On his knee before her, Joel bowed his head forward, as if he were waiting to be knighted. “I know. I was an asshole. But I’m willing to do whatever I can to keep you.”

“Please. Get up.” After a moment, he stood. She took his hand. “You can’t keep me, Joel. You never had me. Both of us, we were just…there.”

“How can you say that?” he said. “Is that all it meant to you?”

“I don’t really know what it meant to me,” she said quietly. “But I know what it meant the night you went home with someone else.”

He rubbed his jaw. “Caroline, this might sound idiotic, but before that night I didn’t touch another woman the whole time we were together.”

“You know that doesn’t matter,” she said. “We were just holding a place for each other, like bookmarks. And the truth?” She looked over his shoulder and, thankfully, the long hallway was still empty. “I’ve been waiting for someone else, anyway.” Caroline felt as if she were confessing to herself.

“I mean, it’s nice that you didn’t sleep with anyone while we were together,” she said. “But you’ve wanted to. And you should.”

“No, I don’t want to—” he started.

“Sure you do,” she interrupted. “I know you’re trying to be a good guy, Joel. But you’re really not. Not yet.”

“What if I look back five years from now and realize what a big mistake I made letting you go?” he asked.

She just smiled. “In five years, I’ll be seventy-six.”

They were still holding hands, her left in his right. With the other hand, Caroline handed him the small engagement ring, nestled in its box.

She heard footsteps over her shoulder. “Caroline! There you are!” She turned to see Dupree at the other end of the long hall; as he realized who she was talking to, his eyes went from Caroline to Joel and then back. Caroline dropped Joel’s hand.

“Oh,” Dupree said, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, Alan,” she said over her shoulder. “Just give me a second.”

“No, it can wait,” Dupree said. “I’ll…uh…I’ll call you later.” He stood for moment as if unsure which way to go, then turned and walked toward the front entrance of the cop shop.

When she turned back Joel had pulled away and was slumped against the wall, staring at the engagement ring in his hand. “I suppose this is the part where you tell me I’m going to make some woman very happy someday.”

She smiled. “Maybe when you can afford a bigger ring.” She grabbed his hand and pulled him away from the wall.

“I think I did love you,” he said.

She hugged him. “I hope so.”

He squeezed tight in the middle of her back and she felt her eyes clench as she fought the familiar comfort of his arms.

“You know,” he whispered in her ear, “maybe for old times’ sake, we could…”

“That’s my old Joel,” she said and pulled away from him. She kissed him. “Take care.” As she walked down the hall, Caroline had to fight the urge to turn back, because she knew he would be leaning against the wall watching her, the white T-shirt stretched across the ridge of his chest, hands in the pockets of his faded jeans, looking as good as a guy could, perfect in his way, but in no way real or permanent—like a vacation in Mexico, like the test-drive of a car you can’t afford.

The task force office was empty, all the detectives home for the night except Spivey and the profilers, who were on the south bank of the river with the
Dateline
crew. She checked her watch. Seven-thirty. She plopped down at her desk and hit the button for her voice mail. Four messages. The first was from Blanton, calling on his cell phone from the river. Caroline put the message on speakerphone as she looked through an old stack of interview cards.

“Ms. Mabry,” Blanton said, “are you familiar with the megalithic statues of Easter Island? Their most striking feature, other than their size, is the fact that the statues have no eyes. Just two cruel, open sockets. It’s such a chilling sight—particularly on an island of cannibals—that the first European sailors to encounter the massive heads saw them as figures of great dread, the blind, implacable cruelty of the sea. The statues seem to be crying out that to seek to understand the sea—which, to the Oceanic people, was God—was the same as gouging out one’s own eyes. The entire mythology of the statues’ meaning and origin focused on that one fact:
The Easter Island statues have no eyes.
”

The voice mail ran out and Blanton was forced to resume his story on the next message.

“I’m telling you about the statues of Easter Island, Ms. Mabry, as I sit alongside your beautiful river, watching McDaniel explain the peculiar psychosis of your man Lenny Ryan to this walking mound of hair spray that the crew of this television program mockingly refers to as
the talent.
Mr. McDaniel has just informed
the talent
, as well as the people out there in TV land, that Lenny Ryan must have surely moved out of the area; otherwise, we would have heard from him by now. We would have found another body. Listening to Mr. McDaniel, who I have begun to think of as
our
talent, I’m disheartened. I’m also reminded that, as with the mysteries of Easter Island, sometimes the most obvious detail is the most obvious because it is wrong.”

The voice mail cut Blanton off again and Caroline hit a button to hear him on the third message.

“After a hard century in which the natives of Easter Island were all but wiped out by disease and oppression, a sailor finally asked a holy man why his people built the statues without eyes. There being no past tense in Polynesian dialects, the old islander answered yes, the statues have no eyes. Finally though, he understood and patiently explained that an earlier people had built the statues, and that many grandfathers past, his people arrived by dugout canoe and destroyed the statue people. Then, to the sailor’s astonishment, the old holy man reached into a basket and produced a beautifully polished, round piece of dark obsidian with a tiny white shell at its center, a stunning artifact, a single Easter Island eye. The old toothless man smiled. ‘
We
took the eyes,’ he said. The sailor remembered that these islanders were ritualistic cannibals and asked if they took the eyes as a final defeat of the earlier people of Easter Island.”

Again, the voice mail cut Blanton off. Caroline listened to the fourth message.

“The tribesman laughed. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We took the eyes out because we were afraid you would steal them.’”

Caroline sat at her desk, staring at Spivey’s timeline, which curled around half the office. Finally she smiled and tapped out Blanton’s number.

When he picked up she asked, “Was that story true?”

“No idea,” he said. “I get drunk and watch
Nova
and the next day I never know.”

“How’s it going there?” she asked.

“They put makeup on me. It’s like putting cologne on a hog. Please come down here and shoot me between the eyes.”

“I’m on my way.”

“Anyways,” he said, and she started a bit at his acquired Spokane
colloquialism, “this would almost be bearable if you were here. I have no one to roll my eyes to when McDaniel speaks. The cameraman thinks I’m epileptic.”

Caroline rubbed her brow. “Will you tell Spivey I’m on my way down there?”

“If I can extricate him from
the talent’s
sculpted ass.” She could hear Blanton talking to someone and then he got back on the phone. “He wants to talk to you.”

Spivey got on the phone. “Caroline. Where have you been? You’re part of this investigation too.”

“I got tied up,” she said. “But I’m about to come down there.”

“Great,” he said. “One thing. Do you think you could swing by a grocery store and get some snacks? It looks like this could take a while still.”

After a moment, Caroline heard herself say, “Sure.”

“Some chips and something baked—maybe a Danish or two, if they’re fresh.”

“If they’re fresh,” Caroline repeated. Then she hung up.

The phone rang almost as soon as she’d turned it off. She slapped at the speaker button again and spoke with her head still in her hands. “You want bagels too?”

“What?” Dupree asked from the other end of the phone.

“Huh?” Caroline asked.

“What did you say?”

Caroline picked up the receiver. “Alan? Is that you?”

“Yeah. Hey, Caroline.”

“Hey,” she said.

“What did you ask me?” he asked after a moment.

Caroline stammered. “I guess…I asked if you wanted a bagel.”

“Oh,” he said. “Not really.”

She felt numb having Dupree on the other end of this phone call. It hadn’t been as easy as it should have been to tell Joel that she wouldn’t marry him. There was some kind of every-girl fantasy in marrying the best-looking guy you knew, a line of thinking that went something like this:
He would look great in a tux.
But for any temptation that his idiotic proposal might have presented, Caroline had known from the beginning exactly what she
should
tell Joel. She knew the right answer. But she felt incapable of speaking to Dupree right now, and if he asked her to be with him tonight she had no idea what her answer should be. For the first time, the only thing keeping them apart was them.

“I’m sorry about earlier,” he said. “I don’t have great timing. Did you and Joel get everything”—he paused—“resolved?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I think so.”

“That’s nice. That’s good.” He cleared his throat. “Well, this is probably nothing, but I just wanted to ask if you were going to see Spivey any time soon.”

“I was just about to go see him,” Caroline said.

“Well, the little dickhead keeps blowing me off. There was a break-in on the South Hill today. A guy named John Landers.”

“The boat guy,” Caroline said.

“Yeah, right,” Dupree said. “Well, it’s probably unrelated, but the burglar was clearly looking for something.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. There were a bunch of files thrown open and there was a model of the neighborhood down there, and it got me to thinking about Lenny Ryan and the pawnshop guy and his uncle and…let me ask you something. Did you ever happen to run into the old security guard at that boat place?”

“Security guard?” Caroline was having trouble following.

Dupree laughed at himself. “You know what?” he said. “It’s nothing.”

“No,” she said, “keep going.”

“I’m not even clear about what I’m saying.” He laughed again. “Could you just mention to Spivey that someone really needs to dust this house before the owners get home? Just in case.”

“Sure,” Caroline said. “I’ll tell him.”

“Thanks.” He laughed at himself. “Jesus.”

They said at the same time, “How have you been?”

Dupree laughed. “I want to apologize again for what I did the other day. I really had no right to drop it in your lap like that…to expect anything from you.”

“Alan…”

“I could forgive myself for a lot of things, but if I made you think you were a bad cop…well, I couldn’t live with that.”

She squeezed her eyes shut, willing herself not to say anything else, anything that might open her up for a question she wasn’t prepared to answer.

“Well,” Dupree said, “I’ve got to meet this guy for pizza. You’ll tell Spivey?”

“Yeah.”

They were both quiet for a moment and Caroline pictured him six years ago, clinging to her on the couch, her legs wrapped around his, their hands gripping each other’s backs, knowing that if they let go they would make love and everything would change. A week before that, she had turned thirty. How could six years go by like that?

“I’ll call you after I talk to Spivey,” Caroline said.

“If you want,” Dupree said.

She replaced the receiver and put her head back in her hands. When she was a little girl, maybe eight or nine, before the divorce, her mother would put her head in her hands like this for seemingly no reason, and Caroline would grow sick with worry. Once, when she was playing with dolls, her mother had come into her room, tears streaking down her face. “Caroline,” her mother said, “whatever you do, don’t let someone else decide what
you
want.” In her eight-year-old mind, the phrase
what you want
took on a kind of sanctity, as if happiness could be guaranteed by gathering around herself some items from a checklist—like a doll’s accessories: town-house, convertible, handsome boyfriend. Her life the past five years seemed like a catalogue of plastic objects, and when she thought about what she really wanted, all she saw was Alan Dupree.

She was reaching for the phone to call him back when she caught a glimpse of a map on her desk. She spun it so that she could see it better. She thought about what Dupree had said. John Landers’s house had been broken into by someone looking for files. She tried to picture what that meant. She saw the boat dealership, smack in the middle of what McDaniel called “Lenny Ryan’s hunting ground.”

She stared off into the distance again, then got up to look for the hard copies of the forensics reports. She found them on the conference table in the middle of the room. She leafed through them until she reached the report on fibers and particles from the first victim,
Rebecca Bennett. She ran her finger down the column listing trace particles, and came to a carpet fiber that had baffled them for a while—a fiber they finally realized had come from a waterproof boat carpet. They knew that prostitutes sometimes took their dates into the boats in the Landers’ Cove lot. Caroline went through the other forensics reports, but none of the other bodies carried that particular fiber. Laird was in charge of forensics, and she doubted he would’ve missed something so obvious as a carpet fiber on more than one of the bodies. Caroline started for her phone, but again she stopped.