The Killing Lessons (8 page)

At her apartment in the small hours, Valerie sat in front of her desktop going through the new San Francisco Zoo CCTV footage. Or rather, she sat with the footage running without being able to focus on any of it. She was halfway through a bottle of Smirnoff and there were too many Marlboro butts in the ashtray. Someone had said to her a long time back: Once you’ve agreed to let them kill you, cigarettes will stick with you through thick and thin. Cigarettes will
be
there for you. The apathetic snow had given up. Now rain purred against the windows. Her eyes itched and her body ached.

Blasko.

Nick.

She’d only ever called him Nick in bed. In bed they’d belonged only to each other. Everywhere else they were Police. Everywhere else they belonged to the City, the raped, the beaten, the abducted, the abused, the dead. Bed had been their refuge, the one bit of reality that made the rest of reality bearable.

Until the rest of reality had got greedy and decided to drive Valerie mad, by murdering Suzie Fallon.

Watch out for the One Case, her grandfather had told her, when she’d joined Homicide. There’s always one that gets to you. There’s no explanation for it but every cop gets one, eventually. Every homicide cop. You won’t see it coming. All you can do is recognise it when it hits and hold on. Listen to me. I know. By the time he’d told her this he had an upstanding thatch of white hair and fractured green eyes and deep lines in the thin dough of his face. He’d been Homicide himself, for twenty years. Valerie had asked, of course, what
his
One Case had been. I don’t talk about it, he’d said. And it wouldn’t help you if I did. Valerie knew it was the case that changed his Catholicism: it did away with belief in God, but left his belief in the Devil stronger than ever.

You won’t see it coming
. She hadn’t. She knew Suzie Fallon’s dead body was the worst thing she’d ever seen, but initially she took it the way she took every other corpse, as another conundrum in flesh and blood, another challenge. If you were Homicide the world presented you with horror after horror and asked the same two questions:

Valerie’s answers were always the same:

Seventeen-year-old Suzie Fallon had been abducted on her way home from a Saturday night party in Presidio. Or rather not on her way home. She and two friends, Nina Madden and Aiden Delaney, a couple, had taken LSD, and at some point in the evening wandered out into the streets. According to Nina and Aiden, the plan was to go into the park, but Suzie had become paranoid and run back to the party. Aside from her murderer, Nina and Aiden were the last people to see her alive. Her body was discovered two weeks later, dumped between the 580 and the Brushy Peak Reserve. It was barely recognisable as a body. The autopsy revealed that she couldn’t have been dead for more than four days. She’d spent ten days captive, during which time she was repeatedly raped and tortured, with everything from an acetylene torch to sulphuric acid. They needed dental records to confirm her identity.

The investigation lasted six months. Valerie couldn’t say at what point it shifted for her from professional rigour to personal obsession. She couldn’t say at what point she stopped being able to shut out the images from Suzie’s last ten days. She couldn’t say at what point she was
living
in the room of terrible things. She couldn’t say at what point she started hating herself. She couldn’t say at what point she started trying to ruin love. Only that she did, and that she knew she was doing it, and that she couldn’t stop.

The more she screamed at Blasko the more he absorbed it. It became her mission, to see how far he would stretch. She began to hate him for loving her. Love became an obscenity. An obscenity next to the obscene things that had been done to Suzie Fallon. It was the only thing that gave Valerie ease, the knowledge that she was, day by day, torturing and murdering what was between them. It seemed the most natural and inevitable thing in the world.

In the end, in despair at his tolerance, she took the FBI agent working with them – Carter, a complete asshole – home to her apartment and fucked him over and over, until, as she’d known he would, Blasko came home and walked in on them.

Two days later, as if the world had agreed that she was finally entitled to a release, she arrested the man who’d murdered Suzie Fallon.

But by that time the world had exacted its price. Nick Blaskovitch transferred out of San Francisco, and she didn’t see him again.

Until today.

Just in time for it to all happen again.

He’d gone before she’d realised she was pregnant.

You don’t have to decide anything right now. You’ve got time. You can wait
.

But she’d woken in pain bleeding heavily one night in her eighth week. Put a towel on the car seat and driven herself, in agony (you deserve this), to the ER, where, midway through her explanation of what was wrong, the pain had doubled her and she’d dropped to her knees. She’d spent what had seemed a long time on a gurney in a brightly lit room, waiting to be seen. The attending doctor was a young woman with a tired face and a long froth of dark curly hair, pulled back into a ponytail. There was a large round lamp above Valerie from which she could feel soft heat on her exposed belly and legs and which reminded her of the time she and Nick had gone on vacation to Brazil and sunbathed nude on an utterly isolated beach, the feeling of shocking licence, the sense that Adam and Eve would’ve felt like this, before the Fall. After a little while the doctor said: Yes, it’s come away. That’s the whole thing. I’m sorry. Do you want to see it? Valerie had wondered what there could possibly be to see at eight weeks, but she looked anyway. And added what she saw to the many things she had already seen. The tiny head webbed in blood vessels. The putative eye like a precise blot of ink. The snub beginning of a nose.

They’d kept her in overnight. In the morning she’d driven home. A bright, blue-skied day. Traffic. People. Life.

There was a baby, Nick. But I didn’t know if it was yours. I lost it, anyway
.

Valerie finished the half glass of vodka in a gulp, lit another Marlboro and forced herself to look at the new footage.
You will have to think about him. You will have to tell him. But not yet. Not yet.

The zoo’s CCTV material had only ever been a long shot: the hope the cameras would’ve caught Katrina talking to someone they hadn’t interviewed, something odd in the interaction, something slightly off that police eyes would spot. Myskow, Carla York’s predecessor, had put the killer into the ‘organised’ category, which would mean prep, planning, stalking, familiarising himself with the victim’s routine (although along with all the other profile points it was best-guess stuff; and there was no saying an organised predator wouldn’t start losing his shit as the victims piled up) but how much footage could you look at? The week before the incident? The month? The year? Only Valerie
was
still looking. And right now she was looking mainly to take her mind off Nick Blaskovitch.

Valerie thought of any case as a series of concentric circles, like an archery target. You started from the centre, the bullseye. Finding what you needed in the bullseye – via hard evidence, interviews, detection while the whole thing was
fresh
– meant the case took hours, days, maybe two or three weeks to solve. But if you didn’t find what you needed there you moved out to the next circle – less-likely suspects, broader interviews, circumstantial evidence. Weeks turned into months. Each circle you moved out into was less likely to give you what you needed. But there was nothing to do but move through them. And the circles went on for ever.

The circle she was now operating in – the new zoo footage – was a long way from the bullseye. The new material was six months’ worth from
the whole zoo
, not just, as the previous stuff had been, camera angles featuring Katrina. Nor was it really new. Valerie had had it for four weeks now, and every night she spent hours trawling through it. It had become a ritual. It was what she did to maintain the sense – in the wretched time between getting home and falling asleep – that she was doing
some
thing, however desperate.

She’d restricted herself to the zoo’s entrance footage, excluding (in the first instance) women, family groups, the elderly. She was looking for a man on his own, or two men together. (
Two men together?
her inner sceptic had scoffed.
This is San Francisco, for Christ’s sake.
) It wasn’t (the gay male couples problem excepted) such a crazy idea. It didn’t take much footage to establish that lone male visitors to a zoo were a minority. Of course there was the possibility such men were meeting someone inside but short of going through all the extant footage from the entire zoo there was no way of checking that. That would be, she thought, the
next
fucking circle of desperation. It wasn’t a
crazy
idea, no. But it was pitifully remote. Her method was simple: each time a single male in the age range entered the zoo, she froze the frame, screen-grabbed a time-coded still of the guy and filed it. Which left her with a growing gallery of – the phrase was laughable – ‘potential suspects’. All this based on the optimistic assumption that if someone wanted to stalk Katrina, the zoo was the place to do it.

She worked through the images. Two hours went by. She lost focus. Told herself she was wasting her time. Got so sick of the process that she went back to the Katrina footage, dipping in at random. But there was nothing there. She’d seen it all before. Too many times before, the crowds milling around the concession stands, families deep in their own lives, kids laughing in the monkey house, the visible collective thrill in front of the big cats.

But the dead women throbbed silently around her.

She forced herself back to the CCTV from the zoo’s entrance. Spent another hour zooming and pulling back, rewinding, pausing, screen-grabbing, filing, her mind a surrealist mess of moments with Blasko and yawning lions and
among the Filthy, filthy too
and the exhausting catalogue of Katrina’s wounds and another drink and another cigarette and The Case
Kansas mid-point goose fork balloon acceleration we don’t even know job or maybe none Dale won’t make it timecode 15.36.14… 15… 16… 17…

She leaned forward in her chair, rested her head on her arms on the desk.
Don’t fall asleep here. If you’re ready for sleep, go to bed.
Not sleeping in your bed when you could was like not drinking from a waterhole when you were lost in a desert.

Her eyes closed. It was sweet, the surrender, the yielding of the wiser part of herself. It was like childhood.

She woke with a start from a dream of falling.

Goddammit.

The timecode now said
37.11.06… 07… 08…

She’d lost twenty-two minutes.

Her intention, stretching, feeling her vertebrae tick, was to just rewind to the point at which she’d fallen asleep, shut down, then pick it up again tomorrow.

But for no reason she could identify – beyond guilt for having fallen asleep in the first place, a perverse or superstitious feeling of having been cheated of twenty-two minutes – she went back to where she’d nodded off, hit play, let the tape run.

15.36.14… 15… 16… 17… 18… 19…

She stopped the tape.

Had she seen this guy before?

The hundreds of faces shuffled in her head.

These were the intervals in which the God who wasn’t there operated. The two seconds after your eyes closed.

Her scalp tingled. The dead women gathered their sad energy around her.

White male, approximately six foot and one eighty, dark brown hair, dark eyes, possibly early thirties. Khaki combat pants, navy blue Raiders T-shirt, no wristwatch, no visible jewellery.

Her head was a station crowd of lone men. It was like straining to find a familiar face in the throng. It was like looking for a loved one. The fear you’d miss them in the confusion…

The Raiders shirt tantalised her.

She’d seen him before.
Surely
she’d seen him before? A different day. A different timecode. A different visit to the zoo. The same clothes. The fact of the same clothes was that kind of fact.

Calm down.

She pulled up the filed stills as thumbnails. There were more than three hundred, but her mind burned through its mess of dream and booze into unnatural awakeness.

Faces. Faces. Faces.

Half an hour in she stopped.

Same guy. Same clothes.

Three days earlier.

Alone. Definitely alone at the entrance on both occasions. The dark eyes simultaneously intense and remote.

Valerie stubbed out her cigarette. Kept the two stills open, then raced back into the footage of Katrina that corresponded to the two dates of the guy’s visits. If she had to she’d go frame by frame. But right now she went at double speed. The Raiders shirt would jump out at her, she believed. Her eyes itched. The pixels had a fizzing life of their own. She was balanced between certainty and hopelessness. Everyone else had given up on the zoo footage. She’d given up on it herself, except as a form of self-help, a form of hypnosis, a sop to her inexhaustibly dissatisfied conscience.

All the while she scanned she told herself not to get excited. There was no law against a lone white male visiting a zoo – every day of the week if he wanted to.

But it wasn’t nothing. She’d been doing the job long enough.

Five minutes. Ten. Twenty.

Stop.

Jesus.

Raiders.

She replayed what she’d just been watching. Katrina was with a mixed group (adults and children) by the Sumatran tiger enclosure. It was a day of flaring and subsiding sunlight. She was wearing one of the zoo’s black, yellow-logoed T-shirts, canvas hiking shorts (she’d outgrown hating the crescent birthmark, Adele had said), white ankle socks and white Nike sneakers. She was, as always, talking with bright animation, the ordinary happiness of a person who liked her job. Every member of the group was transfixed by the tigers.