12

Mama never accepted that I’d inherited my father’s insomnia. “You’re not going to spend your life creaking around at night,” she’d said. One of many things she was wrong about. For three hours I combed through my father’s photos and the serial killer sites. The Preying Hands’ work was everywhere, but I didn’t find an image of a lone beer can.

I slumped on our nubby couch in the dark, the pistol in my lap. Every car light beam stabbed through the blinds. Every shift and tick in the house made me flinch. At three o’clock in the morning, I resorted to a dose of bourbon and some puffs of marijuana.

The next morning, I tried to rouse myself with a giant mug of coffee. My stomach ached from adrenaline, yet my mind crawled. I wanted to call in sick. But Lawrence Massy had asked me to discuss a deal at his house, a deal that might make Vanessa back off. I followed Jill’s car to school and watched as she parked next to the empty space assigned to Elizabeth Morton. I sat alone in my Camry. The building’s glass door opened and closed.

Soon I was driving up the hills surrounding La Jolla. I took in the big palms and pine trees and the high walls and hedges that insulated these homes from the rest of the world. Up here even the air felt professionally cooled. The owners kept their lawns emerald green and only planted sage brush and cacti for decoration. Some of these houses could see the ocean swell all the way to Mexico, where the gardeners, nannies, and tradespeople came from.

Dr. Massy’s white English Tudor stood behind a vine-covered wall. When I turned into the entrance, the electronic gate swung open. I followed the unistone driveway past the carport where he’d parked his black Maserati. The last time I’d visited him was more than a year earlier, when I’d still toiled at my other bank. In the interim he’d sculpted the yard to match his neighbors’ estates. A terra cotta brick walkway bisected purple lilacs and white flowering pear trees.

Massy waited outside a beveled glass and mahogany door. In his early fifties, he was always fastidiously groomed. Today he wore a custom-tailored shirt with ruby cuff links that matched the cherry-colored frames of his glasses. He grinned and slapped me on the back, the cuff link digging into my shoulder. “William, it has been too damn long.”

He led me inside in short, careful steps, as if balancing on a ledge. In the living room, an acrylic painting took up most of a cream-
colored wall. The painting’s yellow letters proclaimed Peace = Mind. Massy abhorred violence—even football. As I followed him, I remembered Harvey Dean Kogan telling a reporter when he’d reached his own blissful state of mind: photographing his victims.

Massy pushed open French doors at the back of the house and stepped under the archway to the patio. Flowers draped the herringbone-patterned brick walls beside a saltwater pool. It was the kind of expensive landscaping that a thriving ophthalmology practice could pay for.

He leaned into me and said, “Do you want to know the secret to a beautiful yard?” He put his finger to his lips. “A landscape designer.”

We sat at a teak table under a yellow awning on chair pads that would never get old enough for the sun to fade. He glanced down and drew his head back.

“My, you really must do something about those shoes. You might as well tramp around in a couple of boxes.” Massy always wore handcrafted Italian loafers.

“I’m a banker,” I said. “It’s part of the uniform.”

“That car doesn’t help either. It looks like something a college student would drive.”

“It’s practical. I don’t like to waste money.”

Massy slipped a pink handkerchief from his shirt pocket and polished the lenses of his glasses. “Are you trying to give me a message? That you’ll also be careful about my money?”

I smiled as if he’d seen through my subtlety.

Massy slid a folder across the table. On top of piles of tax statements, a diagram showed a trust in the Bahamas owning a corporation and a labyrinth of interlocking limited liability companies. Without even looking at the details, my body deflated. Chad would only draw one conclusion from that diagram: Massy’s ownership structure was a warren of lawyer tricks to shield him from creditors. At my other mega-bank, Massy hadn’t needed any offshore entities. Something had gone wrong.

“Let’s not make the obvious complicated, shall we?” he said. “Malpractice liability.”

I looked up and tried to appear enthused. “Excuse me?”

“In my profession, one slip means that some swindler will try to grab every stick I have. So I own everything in the Bahamas.”

Malpractice insurance was just an hors d’oeuvre for the ambulance chasers who’d go after Massy. But if his assets were domiciled in the Bahamas, they’d have to sue him there. An almost impossible process.

“It’s a shame, but when you see so many colleagues brought down, you have to give up believing in karma.”

“Or at least hire an attorney to protect you from it,” I said.

Massy chuckled and slipped his glasses back on. “Monique really would love that bit of humor. I’m getting married, you know.”

I hadn’t known. In the living room, I’d seen pictures of a striking redhead filling a mahogany hutch. The new fiancée. I’d soon have to restrain myself from wincing at the alliteration of Monique Massy. Hopefully he’d close on the loan before the wedding. That way I wouldn’t have to get her to guarantee the loan. “That’s wonderful news,” I said.

He gave me a thin smile and passed over the second folder. The pages inside detailed the deal he wanted me to finance. One of his competitors was selling his practice after a lawsuit came perilously close to destroying him. Massy would use the loan proceeds to buy the doctor’s customer list.

“I don’t think he’ll have time to spend it all playing golf,” he said. “He’s another cream-filled and glazed Midwesterner. The man must weigh over three hundred pounds.”

He passed me a folder with pictures and financial figures for the collateral, a storage facility in Julian, a tourist town in the mountains northeast of San Diego. Massy’s balance sheet was a jewel: little debt and lots of liquidity, progressively more equity in each of the three periods shown. He earned more in a year than I made in ten. In my head, I calculated a few liquidity, debt, and cash flow ratios. The numbers were beautiful. Who cared how much he overpaid for the client list? Even Chad the Impaler was going to like this.

The Impaler. I almost shivered.

Massy gazed at the blue water lapping softly in the pool. “I hope you’ll excuse me for saying this, but I wouldn’t want to take a deep dive in your colleague Bob’s pool.”

“Bob is a very aggressive marketer,” I said. “He brings in a lot of business.”

“Do you know what he said? Your competitors would poke out their own mothers’ eyes for a deal.”

Had Bob forgotten that he was talking to an ophthalmologist? “Sometimes his humor gets carried away,” I said.

“When I asked him about his protege, you know what he said? ‘At least Ambrose is pretty.’”

I’d warned Bob about the dangers of his loose, sexist talk. There hadn’t been a complaint for months.

“Thank God Monique wasn’t there,” Massy said.

Yes, thank God. Then it hit me. Lawrence Massy was finally getting married. I had a strange thought: What would a father like Massy have been like?

I followed him back through the house and out the front door. After all that effort at my prior bank, then a year of solicitation at this one, I was finally winning Massy’s business.

Nothing compared with driving back to the office with a deal. All was possible. I could smash my bank targets, win big bonuses, and beat out Bullshit Bob for the annual sales award—even buy a new house. I reached the tenth floor and was strolling under the cupola toward banking when my phone rang. Jill’s number.

“There’s a camera in Garth’s book bag,” she yelled. “Pictures.”

I couldn’t breathe. I stepped inside the large conference room. Collapsed hard on a chair. “Were the pictures …”

“She’s alive, William. Some model with a goddamn dog collar around her neck. A dog collar.”

Somehow I managed to keep my voice calm. “Stay at school until I get there,” I said and hung up.

I pushed through the French doors to banking and lurched to my office. My arm shook so much I could barely punch in the number to Officer Mortimer. The call went to voicemail. All I could do was yell a message into the phone.

The name came to me after I disconnected. Winnie Dover. Harvey Dean Kogan had followed her home because she blew up at a child in a mall. Dover lived with a German shepherd in a building on the south side of Chicago. The next afternoon Kogan walked through the unlocked stairwell entrance and up to the third floor. The dog snuffled on the other side of her apartment door, but Kogan was prepared. He slipped meat laced with sleeping pills underneath. A bump key opened the lock.

The picture is infamous. Winnie Dover’s severed head rests on top of the dog collar as if she’s wearing it. Each of two dog dishes contain one of her feet. The dead animal itself is lying down and intact. One paw grasps the loop of the leash attached to Winnie Dover’s collar. A blown-up, pink bubble of gum protrudes from its mouth. When Kogan sent the photo to the Chicago Tribune, the accompanying note said, “Sorry about the dog.”

And now his disciple was hunting my son.