The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 (10 page)

“I can’t tell you how many times Margaret has played next to that grave,” Parveen said. “I would ask her to stay there, where I could keep an eye on her. Endless hour after endless hour. With something so hideous just beneath her.” She looked at Derek.

“When we moved in,” she whispered. “When we moved in, there was a big red smear on the basement floor.”

Derek put his arm around her and pulled her tight. “I tiled the basement floor,” he said. “Tiled right over it. Didn’t try to remove it.”

“Show us where it is, but I doubt if it’s anything,” Howard said. “I don’t think Collins was ever in this place. He wouldn’t have hid his trophies at a murder scene. He knew we’d be searching all along his tracks, so he had to come up with something creative, something without a trail. He made the marker somewhere else and was probably here only long enough to dig the hole.”

“Even if it’s red paint, it will always be blood to me,” Parveen said. “Why didn’t you tell us what you were doing after you saw him come here?”

“Would have changed your behavior. Couldn’t risk that. Collins might have noticed. He’s a student of normal people.”

“The epitaph he carved,” Derek said after a while. “Beautifully poetic. Terrible thing to have such words inside an animal like that.”

Howard shrugged. “Words will do somersaults for anybody.”

“What will happen now?” Parveen asked.

“Oh, we have him now,” Howard said with satisfaction. “The suitcase is the mother of all connect-the-dots, a goddamn brass ring. With my testimony and yours, he’ll probably get two or three first-degree-murder convictions. Worst-case scenario, recommitted to a hospital for life. Either way, he’s off the streets for good.”

Siren off, a black-and-white prowler pulled into the driveway, followed closely by two unmarked cars.

Howard touched Derek Lane’s arm. “Look, counselor, you’re right, I was a little over the top with Collins. I’d appreciate a pass, though. I clipped him for a friend of mine who died last Tuesday. Name of Charlie Post. Stayed on Collins for years. His daughter’s boyfriend, kid named Billy Ferguson, was one of Collins’s victims. He went missing and we damn well knew it was Collins. I mean, you stir things up, it won’t bother me much. I know how to finesse a charge of excessive force. But it could screw up our case. Give some lawyer a foot in the door. We sure as hell don’t want that.”

“There was a scuffle,” Parveen said quickly. “We really didn’t see anything.” Derek gave her a sideways glance.

“That works,” Howard said. He looked at Derek. “Okay, counselor?”

Derek Lane looked thoughtfully at Howard. “Was my family ever in danger?”

Howard’s eyes widened. He looked away for a moment. He looked back at Lane. “Just so we’re clear, counselor, are you asking me if your family was ever in danger from a homicidal maniac who kills randomly and who has buried his trophy case next to your house?”

Derek Lane flushed. “There was a scuffle. We didn’t see anything.”

“Good. Thanks. I’ll take it from there if anything comes up.”

Derek looked over at the Escalade. “Nice ride. He must have money.”

“Loaded,” Howard said. “Furniture family up in the Wisconsin Dells. Had enough for dream-team doctors and lawyers. They took our cases apart. They were all circumstantial, no bodies. Sometimes there was blood, signs of a struggle, that’s about it. The only real pattern, the only thread, was location and this joker here. He was always around and he was memorable because he acted so weird. He was finally put away not because he was a murdering son of a bitch but because he was nuts.”

Howard went over to the approaching group of uniformed and plainclothes officers and spoke to them briefly. Two uniforms helped Collins up, put him in the back seat of the prowler, and drove off. Howard returned to the Lanes.

“Look, for all practical purposes your house and this whole area are going to be ours for a while. Crime-scene tape, CSI teams, holes dug, the whole nine yards. Maybe you and your daughter could take a vacation or something.” The Lanes stared at him. “Yeah, well, just a thought. I really don’t know what to tell you except that I’m sorry for all this.” He shook their hands.

The Lanes watched as Howard went through the wooden gate Derek had made and began walking down the side of the gravel road back to where his Jeep was parked at the church some 2 miles away. Someone gave a shout: Did he want a ride? He waved them off.

Howard shoved his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders, movements he made when he was thinking. It made him look smaller. It was ninety degrees and he was sweating hard, camo fatigues soaked black. After so many long years of half-assed monitoring, it had been a very near thing with Collins. What if he hadn’t been there to take the handoff from Charlie Post? What if Charlie Post had died before Collins was released? Would his contact have sought out anyone else? If Collins had left Indiana and set up shop in Wisconsin, hell, he’d have died of old age before he was caught. Officially there wasn’t enough on him to make him a person of interest. The interest in him lived in the memories of guys like Charlie Post and his contact at Eddystone.

Howard liked the crunch of gravel under his Airborne boots. Made him feel military again. He thought maybe he should have stayed in the Marines, where buddies are around you all the time and teams were really teams and the order of battle always started out clear. It never stayed clear, but at least it always started out that way, and you didn’t have to worry about brilliant defense attorneys and genius doctors and goofy judges and rose-colored cloistered couples from la-la land. “Was my family ever in danger?”

He stopped and looked back. Derek and Parveen were talking with two plainclothes, but both were still looking down the road at him, as if he was carrying off something that they wanted back. He wasn’t. The something they wanted back was gone forever. They just hadn’t realized it yet. From this day forward, spilled red paint would never be just spilled red paint. He figured the Lanes would move away within the year.

He began walking again. He had not told the Lanes about Princess Anne. What was the point? He could not remember her epitaph, but he remembered she had one. She was buried about 150 miles away on the back lawn of a dilapidated factory on the outskirts of Ann Arbor. Back in the day, his tracking of Collins had taken him through and around the idle manufacturing buildings. When he noticed the grave, he thought what the Lanes had thought about Princess Jenny. Final resting place of a beloved pet. In this instance, the cherished company mascot. He remembered that the company name, whatever it was, was in the epitaph. He remembered something about Princess Anne being a companion to each and every worker on each and every shift. Collins would have buried his collection that was Princess Anne long after the gates were chained and all those jobs were long gone to China. Hide in plain sight. Howard shook his head wonderingly. It was becoming almost a “normal” thing—ordinary people leading ordinary lives randomly cut down by some nut job playing Angel of Death.

His chin sank lower into his chest. He stared at the gravel just a foot or two ahead of his next step. Princess Anne had not been anyone’s happy fantasy. Her grave had not been embraced by a loving couple and a sweet little girl. This grave was what it really was: a solitary obscenity. When moonlight shone upon the grave of Princess Anne, it was moonlight devoid of dreams. The chilly wind did not rustle over a bedtime story. It rustled over remnants of murdered lives.
It will always be blood to me
, Parveen had said. It was like that for Howard. Every day. In the morning he would call the Ann Arbor police and give them directions.

FROM
One Story

T
HERE WAS A GROUP
of guys I knew from school gathered in a garage out back of Billy’s house, and Billy had hung a bed sheet up on the wall and propped the projector on a milk crate stacked on a folding chair. He told us he’d gotten the movie from somebody’s brother’s best friend’s cousin, and we all stood there and watched the film from start to finish, no credits, no title, no names, no sound. When the last jumpy frames of 8mm finally spun through the reels, everybody started talking at once, and Mike Toth said,
No fucking way
, and Lenny Richter leaned into me and whispered,
Nothing but corn syrup and food coloring
.

I was sweating even though the sun was long set, and I couldn’t seem to get my mouth around anything to say, so I checked my watch and saw that I was close enough to curfew and decided it was best to leave. Without a word, I slipped out to the main road to chance hitching home. I lasted fifteen minutes walking with my thumb out on the empty asphalt before I bent and broke and went to the pay phone at a two-pump gas station, the only lit building as far as I could see in either direction, and I called home, hoping my sister Charlotte would pick up fast. She answered on the first ring.

Charlotte was seventeen and had always been pretty, but not beautiful. That summer she had discovered Fleetwood Mac and changed. My dad started making rules, more rules than ever before, asking things like
Where have you been?
Everything was a privilege, and bedroom doors had to be left open, phone calls were monitored, and, as Charlotte liked to say,
Privacy was part of the old regime
. I sensed there was a battle brewing and it was going to get ugly fast. My dad may have had more power than Charlotte, but she was smart and quiet as a sniper, and sneaking out had become her specialty.

“Why the hell are you way out there in the country?” she said on the phone. “Can’t you get into trouble closer to home?”

I cradled the receiver between my shoulder and ear and dug my hands deeper into my pockets. “It’s not that far,” I said. When I left Billy’s, talk had been loud, and there had been a lot of clapping and shouts, and by the time I started walking down the driveway the decision had been made by everyone else to watch the film again. I had seen all kinds of trouble that night, and for once I hadn’t been the one in it, but I didn’t say that to Charlotte.

I was six months away from a driver’s license, and had a whole lot of nothing going on ever since I’d quit football. My dad said I had to have a job if I thought I was going to get a car, but jobs were hard to get, so I was mostly bored and looking for something to do. When we’d hitched out to Billy’s together earlier that night, Lenny had said this was going to be the best kind of something.

“I can’t get a ride, Charlotte. Please.”

“Dad’s home,” she said. “But he’s been talking with Johnnie,” and I knew she meant Walker, but she didn’t need to say it; it was our code for drunk.

I relaxed the phone into my ear and felt its warmth and could see my dad in his armchair, the footrest kicked up, the TV on, the glass empty. Around me the wind took less than a minute to become more than a gust, and I felt the edge under it and knew the August night was false, and even though the summer had mauled us, it was now packing to go. “I’ll pay you,” I said. “Twenty bucks.”

“Stay where you are,” she said. “I’m coming.”

The girl in the movie had dirty blond hair, and she was thin and was standing and bent forward onto the bed. I could see her spine rising up, bony and knobbed, and her skin was pulled tight, her head away from the camera, with just her shoulder blades looking out like hollow eyes. I had stared at her back, at the blankness of her skin, and it was so smooth that it looked fake, except for the raised red marks that could have been a handprint, and I flexed my own fingers and wondered if they were big enough to fill that space.

In the parking lot the only other sound besides the wind was the bugs beating themselves blind against the single overhead fluorescent. It was a sickly sodium light, too bright and artificial, and the cloud of insects swarming made strange shadows on the cracked cement below. I could smell wet grass, irrigation, farmland, and creosote seeping from the railroad ties that served as the borders between asphalt, fields, and road. In the distance a dog barked and barked, over and over again, a tired and monotonous sound, and there was no shout to
quiet down
, no hassled owner opening up a door and forcing the animal to come in, and I wondered what purpose a dog like that served if there was nobody to pay attention. There could have been a thousand things to bark at and nobody to teach it about real threats. Above me a bat circled, clumsy and big, and I watched until its path took it out of the arc of light. I tied my shoelaces, retied them, sat on the curb and chucked rocks, counted moths, listened for a car to come from the distance, and finally it did. The first and only car to come down the road, my father’s Dodge Royal Monaco two-door hardtop that I recognized from the engine whine when my sister drove, the 400 Lean Burn V8 held in full restraint under the hood, and the left hideaway headlight door stuttering like the engine to open up.

Charlotte had the heater on and the music loud, and I wondered how she had crept the car out of the driveway, but the very fact that she was there confirmed she had gotten away with it, and I was happy to slide in and pull the door shut and fold myself toward the warm vents in the dash.

“Stab and steer,” I said.

Charlotte looked at me without blinking. “What?” she said.

“You never get anything. Just punch it and drive. I’m cold.”

There were no cars on the road, no headlights in either direction, just house lights, and they were scattered few and far between, set back in the distance, as sparse and dim as city stars absorbed by the night. Charlotte signaled as she left the parking lot, though there wasn’t reason to, and then we were swallowed by the fields on both sides of the road, the staggered fence posts. Even though I had been walking in the dark, I did not realize the immensity of it until it had become a throat hold around us, and the broken yellow line was lost beyond the one good headlight.

After the accident I would wonder if I had seen it coming, the shift in shadows, the sudden definition of a shape, a thickening in the air like a premonition, because when something goes terribly wrong there is always a before and always an after, but the moment itself is vague and hard to gather, and time jumps like a skip in a record, and so I tried to remember the before, tried to trace what happened during, but in the end it all came down to after and we were spun hood up into a dry drainage ditch, the broken headlight suddenly finding its too little too late and pointing straight and strong at nothing more than wide-open sky, the windshield shattered and fracturing the night into a thousand webbed pieces, and Charlotte bleeding from her nose and me with my mouth open to say something, but instead everything just hung quiet and still.