49

By the time Lund and Hempel arrived, I sat huddled against the wall near the front door. They gently shook my shoulder and I came back from someplace far away. Then I was outside and sitting under the orange tree, my whole body limp. Three police cars, lights flashing, were angled on the street. Voices chattered like ghosts through the dry night air. A spotlight cast our shadows onto the grass. The crickets trilled in the darkness just beyond our yard.

Lund picked an orange from the tree and turned it in his hand. That melodious voice said, “Whoever did this shut off your house alarm.”

I tried to speak. My throat constricted the words. “I just … changed the code.”

Hempel clumped over to the entrance to stare at the redwood door and the glass transom above it. Turning back to me, he said, “The alarm is just on the other side of the door, right?”

“On the wall.”

Hempel and Lund gave each other a glance. Lund retrieved the ladder from the side of the garage and set it up, rattling, beside me against the orange tree. Hempel slipped off his sports jacket and handed it to Lund. He pulled on latex gloves, turned on a flashlight, and clanked up the aluminum rungs. The light beam slowly swept the rustling branches. I imagined it illuminating Vanessa’s pearl earrings and pale face. Her bulging eyes, as big as the oranges, stared at me.

Hempel’s ragged voice rose over the crickets and scraped against the night. “It’s here.”

Lund carried Hempel’s jacket to the front entrance and into our house. He closed the door. After a minute, he returned to the tree.

Hempel banged down the ladder. “I could see every stripe on the suit,” he said.

“Unbelievable,” Lund said. “We searched the whole yard.”

Hempel kneeled beside me, his big face inches from my own. “William, there’s a video camera in that tree. I’m pretty sure it has some kind of telephoto lens. You can’t see the keypad from the walk outside the door. The glass transom is too high. But from up in the branches, and with magnification … I could make out someone punching in every number.”

Two hours later, Marta and I huddled with Hempel and Lund in a police interview room. Hempel wedged a square of gum into his mouth. He held out the pack to me. “It helps you deal with this shit. Distracts your mind from the stuff you can’t stop thinking about.”

His voice reached me like soft static on a radio. Chewing gum wouldn’t get Vanessa’s puffed-up blue eyes out of my head—and the sex doll wearing Jill’s necklace.

Lund said, “Remember, he didn’t attack you or your family.”

My whole body stiffened. I wanted to jump across the table. I wanted to punch that undertaker’s voice out of him. “How the hell is this not an attack?”

Marta put her hand on my arm. “Easy,” she said.

I said, “Vanessa’s head was in our bed. He left a fucking picture of a child’s grave in Frieda’s room.”

Lund turned to Hempel. “What picture?”

“It’s the only damn thing in the bookcase!”

Beside me, Marta squeezed my arm. “Maybe we should put this off.”

Hempel picked up a bottle of water. “Have a sip,” he said. His thick hand twisted off the cap.

I grabbed the water. What would it be like to heave the bottle against the wall?

I drank. I closed my eyes and willed the anger and panic to slide into the floor.

“What do you think happened?” Marta said.

My eyes sprang open. How the hell should I know? But she was talking to Hempel and Lund.

Lund said, “All we’ve got is what her husband says. You know how reliable that is. He thinks the killer must have grabbed her at home as she left for work.”

I imagined him sticking her with a needle, carrying her to his car. Gently he sets her in the backseat, drives her somewhere, and … and … he carries her head to our bed like a cat gifting a kill.

They were talking to me. “Your colleagues at work say she was trying to fire you,” Lund said. “She was an enemy.”

“‘Enemy’ is not the way William would characterize his relationship with her,” Marta said.

Lund leaned over the table and set his hand on my wrist. He wore the same gold-filigreed ring, but today his shirt had buttoned sleeves. There was actually a food stain.

“This guy thinks you’re his brother,” Lund said. “He was protecting you from her.”

Killing and dismembering Vanessa to protect me. While threatening Jill and Frieda.

Hempel transferred his gum to a Kleenex and tossed it in the trash can. He popped a new piece in his mouth and opened a manila folder. How could a man with so little hair sprout such huge eyebrows? He looked as if he’d rubbed Rogaine over the wrong places.

“The Union-Tribune got photos again this morning,” Hempel said. “Brace yourself.”

I liked the chafe and scrape of his voice today. It fit everything that had happened.

He set down a black-and-white photo in front of us. Marta started to protest, but it was too late. In the photo, Vanessa’s head lay sideways on a counter. Her skin was as sickly pale as milk, her eyes dull stones. Next to the head, her severed hand, encircled by a pearl bracelet, held one shoe. The pointed toe was turned up. The shoe looked like one of the red heels she’d worn when she tried to fire me. It seemed more like her than that face.

“Our techs think they know what he’s copying,” Lund said. “We thought you could confirm it.”

That assumption, delivered in his creamy voice, just made me tired. I set my head in my hand and closed my eyes. More than thirty years before, the Preying Hands had placed a woman’s head on its side on a kitchen counter. Next to her face, her hand clutched one of her shined black heels. When he sent it to the Chicago Tribune, he called it Black and White after the famous Man Ray photograph. In that one, the woman was alive and held a mask.

Marta touched my shoulder. Her eyes asked if I was all right.

“Susanna Lopez,” I said.

“Your dad made a second photo of her,” Hempel said. “Why do you think he didn’t copy that one?”

The second photograph was the Preying Hands’ own creation: a long line of shoes in a huge closet with her severed bare feet neatly placed at the end of the row.

“I have no idea,” I said.

The skin around Lund’s eye sockets crinkled and the lines softened his brown irises. I couldn’t see any hint of the usual vigilance. He said, “You’re doing well, William. Let’s move on. Is Jim Poderovsky your client?”

He knew he was.

Hempel scratched his buzz cut. “Poderovsky won’t tell us shit without his lawyer.”

So Jim had refused to give me up.

“Poderovsky’s wife and kid haven’t been seen for weeks,” Hempel said. His raspy voice conveyed his suspicion as much as his words.

“They’re in Hawaii,” I said.

“No reservation on any of the islands,” Hempel said.

The haze cleared from my brain. I knew where their questions and comments were leading. “Do you actually think he did something to his wife and daughter?”

“We’re trying to confirm that he didn’t,” Hempel said.

They wanted me to arrange a meeting with Jim and bring them along. “I’m not going to ambush him,” I said.

Disbelief broke out over Lund’s lined face. He raked his hair with those manicured nails. The man had a God-given talent for faking any emotion.

“This isn’t an ambush,” Lund said. “We just want to talk.” When I shook my head, he said, “You know, a patrol car guarding your family is a real exception. The chief was dead set against it.”

That syrupy voice belied the threat. But they weren’t taking away that car. “No,” I said.

“Be smart about this, William,” Marta said. “It’s your family. You know what Poderovsky’s father and brother are into.”

“So he’s presumed guilty because of his father?” I drove my palm into the table. I had to control something, anything from this horrible day.

Silence. No one had to say what the parallel was.

“Look, I’ve studied his financials. It’s not Jim, goddamn it.”

“His financials?” Hempel said. His mutated eyebrows shot up as if I were speaking in tongues.

“It’s simple cash flow. The killer knows we’re closing in and has to have money to fund his escape. That means a balance sheet with a lot of liquidity. Just the opposite of Jim’s balance sheet.”

This time Lund’s disbelief looked real. But Hempel stopped chewing his gum. He sat back in his chair and nodded.