Thick Jay was in his underwear and a once-white T-shirt, bent over the coffee table, inflating himself with smoke from the glass bong, his back arching as he inhaled. When the hit had gone on a few seconds, he pulled the webbed filter from the end of the bong and sucked the rest of the smoke from the glass tube into his lungs. He set the bowl in the bong and fell back against the couch, letting loose a cloud of smoke. “Up at noon, stoned by one. Nothin’ like a little wake-and-bake, my friend.”
Chase looked up from his cereal. “Why you still use that thing, man?”
“I don’t know,” said Thick Jay. “Nostalgia.” He pushed a pizza box onto the trash-strewn floor to give himself more room.
Katrina came around the corner then, her hair already coming out of the braids she’d been building. “Jesus, Jay, you gonna take care of him or what?”
Jay cocked his head at the raspy whimpering from the back bedroom. “Yeah, I’m a little busy right now. You think you could…”
“No way, Jay. It’s your responsibility. I’m gonna get some ciga
rettes.” She went outside. Jay watched her go, then rolled his eyes at Chase.
Through the open front door another man leaned in, a guy in his thirties with long, scraggly hair, faded jeans, a black tank top, a backpack, and new running shoes. He gave a short wave. “Hey, man. What’s the special today?”
Thick Jay and Chase looked up together. Jay smiled. “You back already?”
“Yeah,” the guy said. “Whatcha got for me?”
“You smoke all that rock you got yesterday? What are you, fuckin’ iron lung?”
“Hey, I had a party.”
Thick Jay and Chase exchanged glances. “You get your invitation, Chase?”
Chase shook his head solemnly.
“Maybe we oughta go check,” Thick Jay said.
“Yeah,” Chase said. “I better go home and check my mail for an invitation.”
“Aw, man.” The guy with the backpack threw his arms up.
“Don’t get all shitty with me, man,” Thick Jay said. “You’re the one had a party with my rock and didn’t invite me. That’s fucked, my friend.”
In the surveillance van, Caroline rechecked the clip in her handgun as she listened to Gerraghty on the wire:
“I got so fucked up I thought you were there.”
Sergeant Lane winced and looked over at Caroline and the other four detectives. Caroline shrugged. It was a good line. There was a brief pause on the other end of the wire and then the two suspects burst into laughter. Usually the wire was closed, with just one officer listening, but it drove Lane crazy wondering when to go in, so he began opening it up, having them all listen.
“No shit?”
asked the older suspect, whom Gerraghty’s confidential informant had identified as “Thick Jay” Pringle, a Portland biker who dealt crack and methamphetamine from the house. The meth wasn’t a surprise; bikers had been dealing it in some form for forty years. Spokane was a meth town. But the rock cocaine was a bit surprising. Gerraghty was convinced that Thick Jay had been Burn’s source, and they had hoped to squeeze Burn to get to Jay,
then squeeze again to get Jay’s source. With everyone dealing meth, crack was still pretty easy to trace, and Thick Jay seemed to be the only person with any sort of quantity.
“No shit, huh?”
Jay’s voice came over the radio,
“I told you, that’s primo stuff, man. Fuck you up, yeah?”
In the background, Caroline heard the hoarse whimpering of a dog. Crouched on the floor of the van, she shifted her weight, wishing this would go faster, so they could get in the house and cuff these idiots, and she could get back to the hospital to see her mother. What had the nurse said? A body has a way of shutting down.
“So you got anything else?”
Listening to wires drove Sergeant Lane almost as crazy as not listening. Caroline wished, for his sake, that this would go faster. After each exchange Lane looked around the van, trying to gauge their reaction, to figure out how it was going.
“Damn, man! You a fuckin’ smokestack!”
The other suspect, for whom Gerraghty had only gotten a first name, Chase, laughed appreciatively and repeated the line.
“…fuckin’ smokestack.”
In the van, they waited impatiently, every scrape and cough that came over the wire putting them more on edge, punctuated by the faint, rhythmic whimpering.
“Christ,” said Solaita, who sat in the front seat of the van with binoculars, watching the house, “would someone let the fuckin’ dog out.”
They heard the screen door open. From the front seat, Solaita held up one finger and touched his chest, the sign that the woman who’d left earlier had returned.
“What’s goin’ on, Jay?”
the woman asked.
“What do you think is goin’ on? A little commerce.”
It was quiet in the house for a moment and then the woman laughed nervously.
“So can I talk to you a minute, Jay?”
Inside the van, they recognized the tone, and Sergeant Lane ran his eyes across the other SIU detectives, dressed all in black and body armor. Four cars of patrol officers were on standby, and Lane spoke quietly into his headset to move them into place.
“I wish you could talk for only a minute,”
Jay was saying.
The girl was losing her temper. “
You’re so fuckin’ stupid, Jay. He’s a cop.”
“Shit!” Sergeant Lane stood in a crouch and pointed at the driver, who shifted into gear and ripped across the parking lot.
Going by the book, Gerraghty tried incredulity.
“You think I’m a fuckin’ cop?”
The girl laughed.
“You arrested me six months ago. What, you quit since then?”
“Get down!”
Gerraghty yelled.
“Get on the ground!”
The van veered down an alley, turned, and jumped onto the dead grass in front of the house, a house that Caroline saw and knew immediately with a precision drawn from so many other busts: They would find a couch on the porch, bedsheets on the windows, chipped-paint and primer-shake walls, gray roof shingles dissolving into dirt.
The back door of the van flew open and the detectives burst out, spreading across the lawn and up the porch. Caroline took the porch steps two at a time and was the third cop in the house, Gerraghty already having wrestled Jay to his substantial stomach, a knee in his back, screaming at him—“Hands out at your sides! Hands at your sides!”—as Solaita began the same process with Chase, who had the dumbest look Caroline had ever seen, as if he were contemplating his first tool.
A veteran of this kind of raid, the woman was on the floor with her hands on the back of her head, so Caroline passed her on to one of the other detectives and kept moving through the disgusting house, stepping around garbage into a hallway and then a bathroom in which the water apparently had been turned off. Caroline had seen bathrooms like this before, the occupants taking to shitting in the bathtub when the toilet was full. She covered her mouth and backed out of the room. “Bathroom’s clear,” she said into her microphone and kept moving through the house.
Beneath the yelling and wrestling from the living room, Caroline could hear the whimpering more clearly. The dog was in a back bedroom.
Caroline moved through the kitchen, a pan of cold macaroni and cheese on the table along with parts of countless other meals, sandwiches and bags of potato chips and beer cans. A diaper. “Kitchen’s clear,” Caroline said into the radio.
The back bedroom was off the kitchen and had been at one time a back porch or eating nook. Even before she turned the loose door handle, Caroline had a terrible feeling. The crying was clearer here, the smell precise, and before she stepped through the door, Caroline knew what she would find.
He was maybe six months old, lying on his side, running his fingers over the bars of his crib, his voice nearly gone from crying. He was naked, and Caroline could smell before she could see that he had been lying in his own waste for some time now. Someone had taped a pacifier onto his mouth but he had gotten it partway off and it hung from his cheek by a square of duct tape. His crying was steady and throbbing, like a record that’s finished playing, but keeps spinning under the needle. Caroline doubted the cry was for attention anymore. This baby didn’t know what other sound to make.
She grabbed a flannel shirt off a chair in the kitchen and returned to the crib, wrapped it around the boy, and lifted him from the soaked and soiled bed. He weighed as much as her purse. He didn’t seem to notice that he was in someone’s arms.
Caroline carefully took the taped pacifier off his cheek.
She held him beneath her chin and rocked back and forth, but he just kept crying. Through the kitchen and down the hallway, she could see the Kevlar-vested detectives wrestling with Thick Jay, Chase, and the woman. She opened her mouth to let someone know what she’d found, but nothing came. The baby lay limp against her shoulder, not hugging or resisting, just lying there. Caroline could hear her own breath in her head.
Sergeant Lane stepped through the kitchen, covering his mouth because of the stench. It took a moment for the flannel lump on Caroline’s shoulder to register, but when it did, the sergeant removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Her hand shaking, Caroline held out the tape and the pacifier. “I’ll call CPS,” he whispered.
While Sergeant Lane called Child Protective Services, Caroline looked for a bottle. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the cupboards—half-eaten chips and two black bananas in this one, a box of rice and a photo album in that one. No baby supplies anywhere. She finally found a bottle in the refrigerator, but it was empty, just stained with old milk, the rubber on the nipple old and flaking.
The whimpering hadn’t changed and so Caroline stuck her pinkie in the boy’s mouth, the way she’d seen her sister-in-law do when Chelsea was crying. He began suckling her finger, pausing every few seconds to rest, then starting in again on her finger. After a few tugs at this he stopped crying, and after a few more was asleep.
She walked gingerly through the house, trying not to wake the baby. The other detectives slumped when they saw what she held, when they recalled the whimpering dog. Caroline moved into the living room, where the suspects were laid out on their stomachs, being questioned. She pushed the clothes and garbage aside and set the baby down on the couch, taking the ratty flannel shirt away and replacing it with a T-shirt that would be softer on his little body. But without the feel of her, the baby began crying, more softly this time, reaching out with clawed fingers for her.
On the floor across the room, Thick Jay lifted his head at the sound. “Hey, what are you doing with my kid?”
Caroline didn’t even realize she had crossed the room. She grabbed one handcuffed arm, and with her other hand grabbed Thick Jay’s hair. She pulled equally on them and he screamed as he was lifted by the shoulder and the hair to a standing position. Detectives and uniformed cops came into the room and saw Thick Jay balanced on the balls of his feet, his face wrenched in pain. Caroline cranked on his arm and hair. She slammed his face into the fireplace. Jay’s knees buckled and he fell away from her. Caroline stood above him, still holding a patch of his curly brown hair.
Sergeant Lane and a uniformed officer grabbed Caroline and pulled her away, then shoved her in the direction of the front door. She lurched to a stop and stared at the clump of hair in her hand. The baby was whimpering again on the couch, as loudly as he had in the back bedroom. Finally, she dropped the hair and looked at Jay, whose nose was bleeding, but who otherwise appeared fine.
Another pair of hands pushed her in the back again, out the door, and Caroline found herself on the porch steps. She slumped down against the side of the house and listened to the rusty squeak of the baby inside the house.
Dupree’s first thought when he was called to the river that afternoon was that a fishing boat had finally bumped into the bloated body of Kevin Hatch. But as he drove downstream from the dam into Peaceful Valley, listening to Lieutenant Branch explain the situation over the cell phone, he realized this was something else, a thing he had theorized but never encountered before, a rare, natural phenomenon—the criminal equivalent of a black hole, a thing that at once proved and dwarfed his roundabout conclusion that violence was contained in self-sustaining streaks, in seasons of dark and light.
“In my professional opinion?” Lieutenant Branch was saying on the other end of the phone, “I think we got us a bad guy.”
The new body had been found in the same wash where Rebecca Bennett’s body was discovered the day before. The evidence technicians had spent most of the night processing that crime scene and had gone away after midnight, leaving the area marked by police tape stretched around the trees and guarded only by the routine patrols of uniformed officers. But when the lead detective on the
case, Chris Laird, returned the next afternoon, he found another woman’s body in the same position, in the same clearing, under the same cover of branches where Rebecca Bennett had been found. It was as if her killer had been angry that the police had disturbed the grave and had restocked it. The man’s brazenness struck Dupree dumb. This was a killer so cocky, so adept at killing, that he returned to an active crime scene to dump a second body.
“I just don’t know about this week—” Dupree began.
“—amazing,” Lieutenant Branch finished his thought. “We’ve racked up so much comp time, I ain’t gonna have anyone to work, come fall.”
But Dupree had been contemplating something else, the unfathomable four homicides in two days—five if the pawnshop owner died. Dupree was thinking of critical mass, of black holes, areas with so much density and gravity they cave in on themselves, warp time and space, alter physical laws, create their own energy. People tend to look at violence as an aberration, as something wrong, unnatural. But what could be more natural than violence? And like any law of nature, couldn’t violence be factored out to its extreme, a state in which it was capable of sustaining itself, increasing in weight and density and speed, spinning off into itself?
Dupree had left Spivey at the cop shop, ostensibly to work on a teletype describing Lenny Ryan. But the other reason was that the kid was driving him crazy. Dupree knew some dense cops, but he’d never met one with less understanding of irony and complexity. As he parked his car above the riverbank, next to Laird’s car, Dupree thought about talking to Branch about his black hole theory, but it would be pointless.
“All right,” Dupree said into his phone. “I’m here. What do you want me to do?”
“I need you to run this thing.”
As he spoke into the phone, Dupree rubbed Vicks VapoRub on his upper lip to prepare for the smell. “I thought this was Laird’s case.”
Dupree could hear Branch search for a delicate way to talk about Laird’s generally acknowledged incompetence. “This might end up being everyone’s case,” he finally said.
“Okay.” Dupree hung up and walked over the roadside into the
thick brush, branches and twigs cracking beneath his feet, until he reached the clearing where the Explorer had found Rebecca Bennett’s body yesterday.
Today was even hotter, almost eighty, ridiculous for the Pacific Northwest in April. Bloated spring runoff bulged the riverbank and flushed the channel behind him, the current tugging at trees that had been fooled into believing they were safely on shore.
More police tape marked the perimeter of the clearing, inside which detectives and evidence techs pored over every stick and piece of bark, taking photographs from every angle, sifting through sand and dirt. The clearing had been gridded with string, laid out like a checkerboard so that each piece of evidence could be graphed and traced to the exact place where it had been found. Since it was a transient camp, there was garbage everywhere, empty bottles and food containers. Each piece was photographed, catalogued, and then lifted with gloved hands into separate bags, sealed and stapled with a brief explanation and location. The garbage would prove to be a logistic tangle of its own, Dupree knew. Each piece would be fingerprinted and traced and they’d come up with seeming leads on all kinds of bums, none of whom had the courage or resources to replace a body after the police took one away. No, this was someone else, someone with a car and access to hookers, someone who’d seen the discovery on the TV news and had simply gotten another victim, killed her, and dumped her.
The killer had access to hookers. He had mobility and knew that the police were no longer guarding the crime scene. Could be a resident of Peaceful Valley, just upstream, who saw the police leave. Could be a cabdriver. Could be a cop.
Laird loped across the clearing, angular and unsteady, weighted to his hips, a six-foot bowling pin. He stepped carefully over the stringed gridwork toward Dupree.
“How many times have I told you,” Dupree said, “you don’t get the roots, these damn bodies just grow back.”
Dupree slid under the police tape into the edge of the grid, the strings laid three feet apart at knee level across the clearing, the entire crime scene photographed from above, each quadrant photographed, each square yard dissected, garbage removed, twigs and branches checked for fresh breaks, ground cover checked for
impressions and footprints, the very dirt itself sifted. The local FBI guys, a couple of former military types whom Dupree called Gomer and Pyle, were arrogantly and casually offering lasers and computer databases, like rich cousins at a family reunion.
Laird pulled Dupree away from the FBI agents. “This is bad,” he said. For the first time, Dupree looked at the body. She was blond; the other girl had been dark-haired. And it was clear by the clusters of maggots that she’d been killed more recently. Other than that, it was eerily similar to Rebecca Bennett’s murder. The body was nestled in the same dugout, covered by the same branches. Dupree felt a twitch along his right arm and turned to the river, pretending to look for the direction the killer might have come. He let his breath out in little skips, then cleared his throat and felt the familiar urge to sweep up Debbie and the kids, protect and hide them in the same motion.
His voice came out raspy and light. “Where was patrol?”
“A car came by once an hour,” Laird said. “He must’ve snuck her in.”
Dupree nodded and looked around the clearing again, trying to avoid eye contact with the FBI assholes, who were walking around giving orders to the evidence techs and looking every bit like guys trying to take over an investigation. But there was something else going on with the federales, something even more irritating than usual.
“FeeBIes giving you any trouble?” Dupree asked.
“Nah, they’re just a little keyed up. I guess there’s a profiler coming.”
“Oh, good. A hindsight expert.” Still avoiding the body, Dupree turned back toward the road. “You check for tire tracks along the roadside?”
Laird squeezed his eyes shut. “Goddamn it. I forgot.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Dupree said, catching his breath and taking a moment to look around the perimeter. “I’ll go back up.”
Laird turned again toward the body. “You think it might be a copycat?”
Dupree steeled himself and turned to face the young woman’s corpse, which lay curled against the bank. Only the top of her head and her bare feet were visible, the rest of her partly covered by sticks
and brush. He pulled a glove onto his right hand, bent down, and began to pull some branches away.
“Alan, maybe you should wait for the techs to clear this—”
Dupree carefully pulled one twig at a time, revealing the right arm and wrist and, finally, what he was looking for, the hand. He stood and backed away. Two twenty-dollar bills had been pressed into the girl’s palm, curled in her hand like paper flowers. Just like Rebecca Bennett. Dupree and Laird stood quietly, as if in a museum, turning their heads this way and that, viewing the work, the simplicity and the daring. Dupree made a noise between a peep and a sigh, and Laird nodded. “Goddamn,” he said.
The local FBI agents came up, stepped gingerly over the string grid, and took their places next to Laird and Dupree, barely able to contain themselves.
“We got a guy coming in from Quantico, happened to be in the area,” said the taller agent, whom Dupree called Pyle. “A profiler.”
“And you think this guy did it?”
He ignored Dupree. “Your lieutenant asked us to run it through the database.” The FBI operated a database at its Behavioral Science Unit in Quantico that kept track of serial killings all over the country and could be searched for similarities in motive or evidence. For a moment, none of the men looked away from the body, just stared at it as if they were waiting for the woman to do something.
Finally, the agent Dupree called Gomer turned away. “Unreal. City’s goin’ nuts.”
Dupree thought about the last two days, imagining a thing that traveled like a wave or a current, invisible until it rolled across your path, when it raised the hair on your neck or made you shiver, its wind pooling with other winds, drawing into streams into branches into rivers that bulged and ran over their banks. He imagined the thing picking up momentum and curling back on itself, doubling and tripling its density and gravity as it spun faster and faster around itself. A whirlpool. A black hole. Fly into a black hole, the theory went, and you emerged on the other side of the universe. Dupree imagined he was standing at the point of a great funnel that could spew dead people forever.
He walked away to search beyond the clearing for more evidence,
spreading out away from the river and exploring every dugout, depression, and stand of pines. Despite being just a couple of miles downstream from Riverfront Park and downtown, this stretch of riverbank remained lightly traveled. A natural floodplain, it had escaped development after the dam went in and had become the place high school kids went for keggers, where transients went to camp, where aging hippies went to sunbathe. Garbage was the only sign that Dupree was actually in the city, and it was garbage he investigated, bottles, boxes, and cigarette butts, carefully sealing bits of promising refuse into sandwich bags.
Back in the clearing the FBI guys positively beamed as they waited for their expert to arrive. This was so much more glamorous than the usual fare of speed-whacked bank robbers and jughead neo-Nazis. They leaned over their field computer and high-tech evidence kits and used lasers to grid off the fields that earlier the Spokane police, like some Neanderthal investigatory agency, had covered with string. Gomer and Pyle took turns narrating into cell phones, their faces betraying the rush that sickened Dupree because he understood it so well—the humiliating excitement of a murder investigation.
In contrast to the buzzing FBI agents, Dupree faded as the day went on. He supervised the K-9 officers with their dogs as they searched the riverbank for more evidence. Or more bodies. It stood to reason that if the killer was so attached to this place, he might have dumped other bodies here too.
Still, Dupree felt unprepared when he rounded a bend in the river, three hundred yards from the first clearing, and was hit with that familiar sweet, rotting smell. One of the cadaver dogs was sniffing at a mound of brush and dirt, so much like the other mound that Dupree heard himself groan. The officer holding the dog was a decent, dull guy named Farley, who scratched the dog’s ears but wouldn’t meet Dupree’s eyes, both of them sharing the horrible and exhilarating flash of guilt at having discovered this.
Dupree came closer, pulled away a few branches and some of the dirt, and saw just enough dried, darkened skin to know. He stepped back and called the lieutenant on his cell phone to tell him what he’d found and to get an evidence team down there. When Dupree turned back, Farley was staring off into space, the
dog still scratching at the mound. Dupree was surprised by the sharpness of his own voice.
“Get the goddamn dog out of here!”
Farley pulled the dog toward the river without a word, the dog’s head jittering from side to side as he sniffed for more bodies. Farley looked over his shoulder to make one last eye contact with Dupree, who shrugged a kind of apology.
Dupree stood in front of the mound, which didn’t so much hide the body as mark it. This was someone who needed a marker to help him return to the body, to see it again. Suddenly, he wished he knew more, and he envied the FBI agents. This was a discipline unto itself, the search for serial killers, separate from routine detective work. Dupree had attended countless evidence and investigative conferences and seminars, though he had chosen to ignore the FBI agents talking about profiling and signatures and sex-offender models and the other aspects of serial murder investigation. It seemed too much like voodoo, like something completely removed from the intuitive common sense he relied on as a police officer. Now he found himself wishing he’d paid more attention.
The sun was dipping behind the hillside and patrol officers were carrying in floodlights and a generator to keep the riverbank lit. Evidence techs and other detectives drifted into the second clearing and Dupree helped them put tape around the perimeter. When the mound had been photographed and measured, Dupree knelt and began pulling branches, one at a time, away from the girl’s right side. Finally, Dupree stepped back and nodded to the corporal with the video camera to come closer. Two twenties lay flat in the girl’s decomposing hand, held in place this time by a rubber band.
Dupree backed up and dropped to a crouch. The girl was tiny. He thought immediately of his daughter. Dupree felt his stomach curl and he turned away, put his head between his knees, and stared at the ground, a carpet of stinkweed and field grass.
Spivey put a hand on Dupree’s back. “You okay?”
Dupree was relieved when the hand was removed. He took another deep breath, nodded, and stood. “Allergies.”
Spivey headed back upstream. Still lightheaded, Dupree felt a tightness like claustrophobia as he pushed through the thick bushes toward the roadside. He got into deep cover, the branches
poking him, tugging at his clothes, his discomfort bleeding into desperation and panic, until finally he burst into the open along the road. Downstream, patrol was setting up a perimeter that would reach two miles of riverfront.