The tires bounded once off the curb and then Dupree stood on the brakes, squealed the car to a stop, and was out. Lights from patrol cars rolled across the brick facades of buildings on East Sprague and along the expectant faces of people who stood shoulder-to-shoulder behind the police tape. The lights and activity had a flow to them, a current that pulled Dupree, or that he followed instinctively, until he arrived at the mouth of the alley where the latest body had been found.
He’d been on his way to a beer with Pollard when Caroline’s phone call came. In the scramble to get to the scene Dupree wasn’t sure whether he was more angry at Lane for leaving her behind after the sting or at Caroline for traipsing through alleys after Lenny Ryan. The drive from the Public Safety Building to East Sprague had been filled with imaginary lectures for both.
In the alley the first evidence tech was waiting for the rest of the crew so they could begin processing and videotaping and photographing, once the detectives had made their first run through the crime scene. Patrol officers were hanging around too, waiting for instructions on traffic flow and interviews of potential witnesses. They all looked at Dupree, and something—the late hour or the impotent sameness of the process—left a bitterness in his mouth. They all knew what to do. What did they want from him? He’d been at work eighteen straight hours. There was no telling when he might go home now. Five? Six? Would he make it home before Debbie got up with the kids at seven? Would he go home at all? Hell, why not just work around the clock, cataloguing bodies forever?
A portable electric lantern lit the alley until the light stands arrived with the crime scene van. But even with the lantern the alley was dark, and Dupree fumed at Caroline for venturing down this strip of pavement by herself, with Ryan hiding in the shadows.
He walked to the refrigerator, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, and carefully opened the latch, touching as little of the surface as he could manage. He propped the refrigerator door with his elbow and used the handkerchief to cover his mouth and nose. When he saw the body, Dupree felt the tug through his chest again, as if a cord connected his toes to his balls to his throat. A flashlight beam lit the body from over his shoulder.
“Victim is female,” he heard Spivey say from somewhere behind the flashlight. “GSW. Strangulation. Ligature marks. Apparent homicidal violence.”
Dupree lowered the handkerchief from his face. “So you’re ruling out accident?”
Spivey ignored Dupree and continued speaking into his microcassette recorder. “Evidence of environmental activity.” He was talking about bugs into his tape recorder. Maggots. “Memo to bring in an entomologist to pinpoint microbial and insect activity.”
Dupree was too tired to fight with Spivey now, so he put on his gloves and turned back to the body as the young detective continued to narrate. “Entrance wound in left upper quadrant of victim’s torso. Body’s position is covering possible exit wound. Apparent ligature on the neck. Body is decomposing.”
She was curled up on her right side in the refrigerator, so Dupree reached in and eased her back slightly. He shined his flashlight beneath her and saw what he expected to see, two twenties attached by a rubber band stretched around her clutched right hand. “Ah, Jesus,” Dupree said quietly.
“Victim displays signature twenty-dollar bills banded to right hand,” Spivey continued. “Two fingernails appear to have been removed…”
Dupree eased the refrigerator door closed and turned to Spivey. “You wanna get the techs in here? Then talk to the people in the building supply place; find out who’s been poking around the alley.” When he realized Spivey was recording the instructions, Dupree grabbed the microcassette recorder and spoke into it. “Memo to self: Tell chief he has sweet ass.”
Spivey swiped his recorder back and trudged off. Dupree watched him walk to the end of the alley, where Sergeant Lane was talking to the sneaky Special Investigations detective, Gerraghty. Dupree walked over and addressed the sergeant. “So the whole time you’re running this sting, Lenny Ryan’s watching Caroline? Is that what you got?”
“Yeah,” Lane said, not meeting his eyes. “Seems like that, huh?”
On Sprague, Lane pointed out the blocks that Caroline had paced, the motel down the street where Gerraghty and Solaita had been, and the warehouse where he and the other officers had been waiting to arrest the guys and confiscate their cars. Dupree looked across the street and then back, trying to imagine the thing—Caroline cruising back and forth under the harsh streetlights, Ryan somewhere nearby. But where? One of the bars?
“Do me a favor,” Dupree said. “Before the bars close, take a picture of Ryan and just ask around, find out if anyone’s seen him.”
“Actually”—Lane shuffled his feet—“Caroline’s doing that.”
“She didn’t go home?” Dupree was incredulous. “She’s out there by herself?”
“I’ll send Gerraghty to help her.”
Dupree waved him off angrily. “Don’t bother. I’ll do it.”
Lane shifted his weight and made eye contact finally with Dupree. “I don’t get this, Alan. This guy Ryan is killing these women? Then why does he lead Caroline into the alley and not…Why didn’t he…”
Gerraghty followed Lane’s gaze back toward the alley. “Once he got her in there,” Gerraghty said, “why didn’t he…I mean, it would have been easy to…”
Dupree nodded to get him to stop talking. “I don’t know.” He walked off toward the closest tavern, not wanting to think about what it would have been easy for Ryan to do with Caroline in the fenced-off alley.
Dupree pulled his cell phone and called her. When Caroline didn’t answer right away, he hung up and hit redial; this time she picked up but continued what she was doing, interviewing someone above the tinny music of a country jukebox and the scattering of pool balls.
“You’ve never heard of a girl named Jacqueline?” Dupree heard faintly over his phone. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I see. How about this guy?” Dupree walked down the block as he listened to her conduct the interview, feeling strangely close to her, this shared intimacy, listening to her use the skills and style he’d taught her a decade earlier. “And you’re sure he wasn’t in here tonight?”
The phone shuffled and she was on the line. “Mabry,” she said simply.
“What do you get for a game of headboard Yahtzee these days?”
“Guy was gonna give me seventy-five.”
He dropped the casual air. “Jesus, Caroline. You chased this guy into a fuckin’ alley? By yourself? What are you doing?”
But she was ready for the lecture. “If I go for backup, I lose him.”
“You didn’t have your phone?”
“I had my gun. What would you do?”
Dupree sighed. “Where are you?”
“On a beach in the south of France, tanning my stomach.” He saw her then, straight down the row of businesses, two blocks away, emerging into a streetlight. She must’ve stepped out of a bar, but from his angle it was as if she’d materialized out of the wall, from the darkness. She had the tiny phone to her ear; she was wearing sweatpants that seemed to exaggerate her long legs and narrow waist. She looked good. They locked eyes and walked toward each other, continuing their phone conversation.
“What do you think he wanted?” Dupree asked. “Why’d he let you follow him?”
“I don’t know…he wanted to show off the body?”
They were two blocks apart now, staring at each other as they spoke into their phones. “You think he killed her?” Dupree asked.
“I don’t know,” Caroline said. “What about you? What do you think?”
“His girlfriend was a hooker who got killed here a couple months ago. While he was in prison. For what it’s worth.”
“What is that worth?”
Dupree crossed at the corner and they were speaking from opposite ends of the same block now, still staring at each other. They slowly lowered their phones as they met in the middle of the block.
“So you’re all right?” Dupree asked.
“Tired.” She reached down and flipped his tie. “Things have gotten pretty formal around the Dupree estate.”
“Actually, I haven’t made it home yet. I was putting in a late night.”
“You should go home.”
He knew that. He was thinking of another theory, how if you paired a young man and a young woman on patrol duty, they would end up sleeping together. Other cops attributed that to adrenaline or the huge amount of trust required for the job, but Dupree had a better explanation: The attraction between two people was directly proportional to their proximity to death. For cops, male and female officers were most susceptible to affairs during times of stress and danger—this case, for instance. Or six years ago, when Caroline shot the drunk during the domestic violence call. She was right; he should definitely go home.
But he didn’t answer and they walked slowly back toward the body, Caroline telling him about the girl who’d given her name as Jacqueline and everything that had happened that night, Dupree updating her on what he’d found out about Lenny Ryan from the pawnshop owner and Shelly Nordling’s foster father.
“So we think his girlfriend’s death made Ryan decide to kill hookers,” Dupree said. “Some kind of displaced rage or…I don’t know.”
“So he’s your suspect?”
“For now? He’s a person of interest, I guess.”
“What’d you call it? Displaced rage?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know, Caroline. Until we find a better theory. Hell, he’s responsible for every other crime in this town.”
“Is the psychology good?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “In the morning, I’ll run it past the FeeBIes.” The local FBI agent Jerry Castle—Pyle—had become the task force’s contact with the Bureau’s Behavioral Science Unit in Virginia and would likely contact the muscle-bound Bureau profiler, Jeff McDaniel.
Caroline stopped walking near the adult bookstore where she’d begun her chase of Lenny Ryan. She looked up at the dirty curtained windows, heavy wood door, and yellow neon sign. Suddenly the fatigue seemed to hit her. “He ran through here,” she said. “I chased him through here.”
Dupree looked up and saw what it was—the peep shows and sex toys, the dirty magazines. He felt strangely embarrassed. “Why don’t I have Spivey take care of it?”
“That’ll be fine,” Caroline said. “I’m gonna hit a couple more bars down the other way, see if I can find this girl. She said her name was Jacqueline,” she said quietly, an afterthought, and Dupree saw how Caroline hoped that a name, even an obviously fake name, would somehow give this girl an identity, a place in the world.
“I’ll go with you,” Dupree said.
She didn’t bother objecting and they walked down Sprague together, the flashing lights at their backs, past rubberneckers who stood at the police tape like people waiting in line for tickets. Dupree and Caroline walked next to each other without saying anything until Caroline glanced over.
“Are you gonna tell Debbie that we worked together on this?”
He didn’t answer right away. Six years earlier it probably had saved Dupree’s marriage, the promise that he would no longer work with young Caroline. They spent only that one night together, hadn’t even made love, but Dupree convinced himself that it would be best to tell Debbie straight out. And so he had. That continued to be his only betrayal of his wife, and his deepest temptation, the night Caroline shot the drunk wife beater—after the mess at the crime scene, talking quietly in her apartment, her shaking, Dupree holding and then kissing her, the two of them tossing and rolling and then stopping suddenly, but holding each other tightly so that they couldn’t go any further, couldn’t undress anymore, until finally they just fell asleep. Afterward, when they had pulled apart and he’d driven around for a couple of hours, Dupree marched into his own house and told Debbie flat out, and the next day announced to Caroline that he was requesting a transfer out of patrol. He told her that he was happy with his wife, that it wasn’t his Debbie he didn’t like, but his life.
On East Sprague, the neon lent a crass, peripheral glow to his memories. “I don’t talk to Debbie much anymore,” he said.
“Don’t be like that, Alan,” Caroline said quietly.
“I’m trying,” he said. “But…I’m losing something.”
“You’re fine,” Caroline said. “You’ve always been fine.” She kept walking until they reached a dark, smoky bar with a sign that simply said “Drinks.” Dupree followed, and it took a minute for his bleary eyes to adjust. A dingy blue carpet ran the length of the floor and a foot up the walls. Four stools leaned against a chipped bar, which was manned by a sickly bartender wearing a back brace. Three round wobbly cocktail tables and a pool table with torn felt—the whole bar was home to just two broken old guys and a drunk woman whose filthy jeans gaped where her zipper was broken.
The bartender recognized them as cops and began hovering around his drunk customers. The bar must’ve been cited for overserving recently, the way the bartender suddenly nurtured these people who likely hadn’t shared a sober day in a year.
“Looks like last call,” the bartender said, smiling to Caroline. “Finish ’em up, guys. Bill…time to go.”
Dupree sat at the bar next to Caroline, who was standing and who reached in her pocket for Lenny Ryan’s mug shot. She waited patiently as the bartender moved down the row away from her, toward his paying customers at the other end of the bar. He stood over one of the old guys, who held his beer close to his chest, between his two hands. The bartender was overly polite, smiling back at Caroline and then speaking gently to the old man. “Hurry up, please. It’s time.” The old man looked up at the bartender. “Bill,” the bartender said quietly, and Bill drained his beer and gingerly offered it to the bartender, who took it and moved down the row to the woman and the other man. “May, are you ready? Lou?” He held out his hands for their beer glasses. “Hurry up, please. It’s time.” He had gotten all three glasses now, but none of the old people budged and the bartender could apparently think of nothing else to do, so he put the glasses in the sink and turned to face Caroline.
“I’m looking for a young white hooker who might go by the name Jacqueline. I don’t know her real name.”
“What’s she look like?”
“Twenty. Mousy brown hair. Short. Eyebrow ring. Buggy eyes. Thin, kind of sickly.”
He smiled. “That’s half the girls out there.” He gestured down the street. “That ain’t the girl they found…”
“No,” Caroline said. She slid the photograph across the bar. “How about this guy? Only with shorter hair. You seen him?”
The bartender shook his head. “Boy, I don’t think so.”
“Look again,” she said. “I want you to be sure.”
He lifted the picture and stared hard at it. “No. I’ve never seen him.”
“Is there a pimp or a dealer who runs a lot of girls around here?”
“There are a couple of guys. Kids, mostly. Whoever has the dope.”
“What about names?”
“There’s a guy named Michael.”
“At last!” Caroline turned to Dupree. “The break we’ve been looking for!”
Even the bartender laughed. “I’m sorry. I don’t know his last name. I just seen him in here a couple of times. It’s Michael…something.”
“And where does Michael something live?”
“No idea. I just seen him around, you know? Guys come in, ask about women or dope, and people, they say, ‘Talk to Michael.’ You know, something like that.”
“Who says that?”
“Hmm?”
“You said people say to talk to Michael. So what people?”
“I don’t know—guys.”
She held up the picture of Ryan again. “This guy?”
The bartender laughed again. “I told you, I don’t know that guy.”
Caroline smiled back and Dupree marveled at the way she charmed people. “Just testing you.”
“I’m not saying that guy never came in here. We get guys all the time coming in, waiting for whores to pass by on the street. I don’t pay too much attention.”
“I’ll make you a deal. You start paying attention and maybe I won’t talk to the liquor control board about you serving these people into a coma, okay?”
The bartender nodded.
Dupree looked away from the bartender and his eyes fell on Caroline’s waist, which was at eye level at the bar next to him. All of her weight was on one foot, her arms spread on the bar, this perfect picture of balance. It was strangely erotic, watching her interview this bartender—one of the most mundane functions of their job. Dupree reached out with his hand and held it over her waist and her hip, inches away from where her shirt was tucked into the elastic band of her sweatpants. But he didn’t touch her. When he looked up the bartender was eyeing him strangely, and Dupree let his hand fall.
Caroline turned to face him then and he felt himself blushing. “Can you think of anything else I should ask this guy, Sergeant Dupree?”
He shook his head no.
“You all right?” she asked.
“Fine.”
“Okay,” she said. She gave the bartender her business card and gave him one more look at the photograph of Ryan. “If you see this guy around, or if Michael comes in or if you see a young woman like I described, you call me. Deal?”
“Yeah, sure.” The bartender shrugged and chewed his thumbnail and looked back at Dupree, as if he knew what the detective had been thinking and sympathized with him.
“Hey, can I get a beer?” Dupree surprised himself by asking.
“Yeah,” the bartender said. “You bet.” He raised his eyebrows at Caroline, but she shook her head and sat on the bar stool next to Dupree.
“You sure you’re all right?” she asked.
“Just thirsty.”
She looked outside and then back at Dupree. “You think it’s a good idea to drink before you go out there and investigate a homicide?”
“I can’t imagine a better time.” When the glass arrived he held it up and drained the first half. He tried to sound casual. “So, are you goin’ home?”
“I think I’ll try to find this girl Jacqueline, at least see if I can figure out her real name. I mean, if I’m not in the way.”
He felt a surge of relief and an attraction to her that was something like nostalgia. “No,” he said. “You’re not in the way.” Holding her that night six years earlier, Dupree had told her about his theory that life ought to include mulligans, just like in golf. So that you could make one mistake a round that doesn’t cost you, that doesn’t hurt anyone. It’s not that I want to leave my wife, he’d said that night. I just want a mulligan.
Dupree finished his beer and they stood. Caroline walked out and Dupree began to follow, but first he turned to the other end of the bar, where the old drunks were waiting for the cops to leave so the bartender could continue overserving them. He wanted to ask them if their lives slipped away or if there was a moment of epiphany, like someone throwing a switch and bang, you realize that the best life has to offer is a bottle of fortified wine. The old people looked nervously at him and Dupree bowed and dropped a ten-dollar bill on the bar.
“This one’s on me,” he said. And he was happy that he remembered their names. “G’night, Bill. G’night, Lou. G’night, May.”