4

Most of the women around here are of a type —wild for a while and trashy and then buried in children and married for good.  The ones with any pluck to them get the hell out as soon as they’re able, and you can’t really blame them.  It’s a boneheaded part of the world.  The women tend the babies while the men drink and hunt.  If it’s not in a grocery store magazine or on syndicated TV, nobody around here knows a thing about it.

East toward Charlottesville is just as bad but in a different way.  More money and the sorts of estates with livestock in the pastures for looks.  Long-eared goats and thoroughbred horses and banded Belgian cattle.  Retired hedge fund managers planting vineyards while their wives fundraise for historical societies and private schools.  I blame Thomas Jefferson and that damn house of his.  It sits up on its manicured knob like some sort of asshole beacon. 

I never planned on staying.  I’m still thinking of leaving.  I’ve got feelers out in better spots, but the budgets are all tight.  Even so, my lease runs month to month, and I still live out of boxes, can’t see how a man could expect to find happiness in a house down in a groove.  I’ll have been here four years come July, and I thought I was passing through.

I arrived home to find a dozen ears of sweet corn on my doormat.  That’s what I get for listening to my neighbor’s complaints at night.  I’d come by way of Rita’s where I’d dropped off her two buckets.  She’d expected them sooner and pressed me to tell her what had taken me so damn long.

I put the corn in the refrigerator.  I felt sure I’d mean to cook it, but it would sit there and go to starch and probably rot a little as well.  Before I knew it it’d be too late to even give it to anybody.  Ronnie liked sweet corn.  Ronnie liked most anything that would fit in his mouth.  But I’d just end up throwing it out, and one day as I was leaving for work, I’d shout over to Everett and tell him how much I’d enjoyed it.  He’d start in on the strain of corn it was and everything he’d put in the soil, but I’d be in the car before he could truly get going.

This night Everett was watching the news at his usual full volume.  Richmond news from the sound of it, so there was nothing about our guy.  There wasn’t a local paper, and the radio had all gone Christian, so I figured there were few people in these parts who knew what we had found.  They still thought the local terrain benign and all their neighbors decent, except for the ones they’d long since singled out for casual contempt.  It was different for me, even only twenty-four hours later.  I thought about hats and madras slacks and hot-dipped gutter spikes, went to the bother of trying to figure out what it all might mean.

I knew better, of course.  I’d worked on a case a little like this before, by which I mean we ended up with a guy who’d killed a lot of people.  He did it with a knife but no art to speak of.  It was down around Spartanburg.  And he’d leave behind a sheet of royal blue construction paper.  There were all sorts of theories about him afoot.  I even harbored a few myself, and my chief at the time brought in a shrink to help us understand him.  That’s where we went wrong, since it turned out there wasn’t much to understand.

We caught him at a doctor’s office.  The receptionist called us in.  He’d been stabbing a man when his hand slipped, and he’d cut himself on his blade.  It was a deep gash, and he knew he’d better come straight in for stitches.  At the medical park, he’d gone into the first door he’d arrived at, and we found him sitting in a pediatrician’s waiting room.  In a tiny chair, at a tiny table with puzzle pieces all around him.  He had blood all over his shirtfront, and some of it was even his.

It turned out he liked blue construction paper, and it turned out that his victims were people who didn’t, in his view, like blue construction paper quite enough.  He told us he used a knife because the gun he owned was broken.  He’d been meaning to take it in to get it fixed but never had. He lived with his mother.  She had emphysema and spent all day in bed.  He even seemed to tend and feed her every now and then.

“You know why you’re here?” I asked him, once we’d booked him and locked him up.

He picked at his bandage and didn’t say anything back.

“You killed a bunch of people.  Stuck them with your knife.”

He nodded slightly, I remember.  He only told me, “Oh.”

Our guy up here was more evolved, more tuned in, thinking it through, but I knew there’d still be a fair chance that everything we decided about him would turn out to be beside the point and skewed.  The hats and the nails and the clothes and the people killed all over the country, that would all mean something to him that it could never mean to us.  So it was hardly worth the trouble to try to think like he was thinking since he was wrenched and fevered in ways a sane man simply couldn’t be.

Instead I wondered how we’d pick him out, what a guy like him would look like, how he’d manage to fit and function even in a place like this.  We already had more “characters” than we knew what to do with, assorted uncommittable strains of nut.  I imagined him emotionally constipated and pretty profoundly pinched in.  Married maybe to a mousy woman or, more likely, going it alone.  Self-employed, I had to think.  Working at something he could do all over.  Civil but not much beyond it, hardly the chatty dark genius type.  I had to think that narrowed it down to maybe half the county.  He was back in a hollow somewhere.  That much I felt certain of.

I finished off the vodka in the freezer since I’d already had my Friday beer.  That and the egg rolls together that I let serve as my dinner kept me awake and tossing most of the night.  I did sleep a little there near dawn and dreamed about my special agent.  She was chasing me through a hayfield driving gutter nails into my head.

***

The sheriff handed me a note from her when I showed up at the station. 

“Something’s wrong with her car,” he told me.  “She wants you to pick her up.”

“All right.”

“Richmond?” he asked me.

I nodded.  “Want to call the morgue and tell them we’re coming?”

He said he would and suggested beyond it, “Keep her from smoking if you can.”

I couldn’t.  She had one going as she climbed into the car.  She’d moved motor hotels.  She was at the one called Piney Manor where they’d cut down all the trees to build a pool.

“Other asshole threw me out,” she said.

“I heard you made him uneasy.”

“He might want to get used to that.  He’s running a damn motel.”

“What’s wrong with your car?”

“Won’t start sometimes. It usually fixes itself.”

“Breakfast?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“Just drive.”  The “Shut the fuck up” was implied.

We hit Charlottesville morning traffic, mostly panel trucks and students.  She didn’t like the way I drove and told me as much.  She kept rolling down her window and rolling it back up, adjusting the air conditioner.  She had me stop out by the Shadwell exit so she could get out of the car and throw up.

I didn’t ask her if she was all right or needed me to hold her hair.  I didn’t say a thing to her, just let her climb back in and get all situated.  Then I didn’t offer to pull into traffic long enough to make her talk.

“Too much wine,” she told me.

“Happens.  Food might help.”

She gave me a hard look by way of reply, so I drove and shut the fuck up.

She waited until we were nearly to Short Pump, just outside of Richmond, before she said, “I’m hungry,” which was far enough from Shadwell so it didn’t seem like my idea.

There didn’t appear to be any houses in Short Pump, only malls and shopping plazas and a dozen variations on Applebee’s.  We stopped at the one she pointed to.  I don’t know what it was, but they were nearly criminally cheerful, and our waitress was named Dawn. 

Dawn was pushing the waffles like her life depended on it.  She told us how she preferred them (and she ate them nearly every day) because you could get them with eggs or sausage or bacon or even two kinds of gravy. 

Dawn took her waffles with Canadian bacon, which was just like ham (she told us), and she put honey on everything because Dawn found honey wholesome.

Kate held up a finger to interrupt Dawn.

“Yes ma’m,” Dawn said.

“Coffee.  OJ. Water.  Big fucking pile of toast. Dry.”

Dawn gave every indication of hoping to interrogate Kate about her order, but lucky for her, Kate had to rush to the ladies’ room and throw up.

“Waffles your way, Dawn,” I told her and pointed at Kate’s empty seat. “Four slices of white bread.  Toast it. Don’t put anything on it.”

“Is that what she meant?”

I nodded.

Dawn laughed in a bubbly sort of way. 

When Kate came back, I asked her, “White or red?” and she left again.  She got back in time to see Dawn bring her pile of toast, her coffee and OJ, and she just looked at all of it for a while before she put anything in her mouth.

She was looking a little less aquamarine by the time we made Richmond proper.  It was probably an elegant city once before the Confederacy fell, but it’s half boarded up anymore with a wealth of troubled and seedy quarters.  You can dodge a few if you work at it, but you can hardly skirt them all. 

I’ll confess, I don’t know Richmond that well and usually end up on Monument Avenue whether I mean to end up there or not.

“Where are we?  Left?”

“Stonewall fucking Jackson,” Kate said and pointed at a statue.  “Get on Broad and go over, but stop here first.” 

She left the general some regurgitated toast.

Broad Street was more like it.  Boarded up storefronts and hollowed out buildings until we closed on the capitol where the city made of show of being fine.  The state police morgue was tucked away behind a phalanx of magnolias, and it took Kate’s Bureau credentials to get the guard to let us in their lot to park.

“County badge,” he’d told me and laughed, like I’d shown him a wooden nickel.

She knew where she was going, had a good idea of where the ladies’ room might be.  I waited for her in the hallway.  She was in there a while and finally came out looking put together and whole.

“Enjoying this?” she said to me.   I was just standing there doing nothing.  As best I could tell, I wasn’t close to enjoying anything.

I followed her into an anteroom where a woman with too much lipstick had her tube and a mirror out and was applying another coat.

Kate produced her Bureau credentials and let them dangle in front of the creature.  “Nelson County,” she told her.  “Dead guy in a tree.”

The woman said, “Hmm,” like she couldn’t recall that flavor of dead guy exactly.  She finished with her lipstick and then rubbed her lips together while Kate stood there looking tempted to shoot some soggy toast her way.

“Dr. Gaylord,” I said.  “He knows we’re coming.”

When the woman went for her pocketbook in search of a blotting tissue, Kate muttered, “Fuck it,” and headed for the double doors that led into the morgue.

I followed her on in and was tempted to throw up myself.  How Kate kept her wine and toast tamped down I’ll never know.  I counted eight bodies, seven of them fresh and one of them exhumed.  So the place was awash in the usual chemical preservative stink that was blended this day with the aroma of the tomb, a marriage of musty cracker funk and what smelled like possum den.

“Dr. Gaylord?” she said as she closed on a guy in a smock and a mask with a bone saw.  “Kate LeComte, FBI.”

The doctor cocked up his mask and set down his saw.

“I’m helping out on a county case.  Guy in a tree.”

“Right.”  He pointed.  “Him.”

I’d walked right by our guy, hadn’t recognized him without his clothes.  They’d laid him out so he didn’t look so pulverized and busted up.  I could see where the doctor had opened him up, but there was another incision as well.  He’d been cut and sewn shut on the left side of his ribcage.

“They took out his spleen,” the doctor told us.  “He bled out.”  Then he pointed out the fractures, compound and otherwise.  “Postmortem,” he said. “Landed in that tree with force.”

“Catapult,” I told Dr. Gaylord.  “Traveled about a hundred yards in the air.”

“No shit?”  It wasn’t very doctorly, but it seemed the right response.

Kate lit a cigarette.  Dr. Gaylord swung around to admonish her, but the sight of Kate smoking triggered another response in him instead.  He smiled and snapped his fingers. 

“I remember you now,” he told her.

It turned out he’d been laboring to place her ever since she walked in the morgue.

“You cut your hair.”

She nodded.

“Hell of a thing, that case.  All those boys.  What was it?  Five?”

“Six,” she said.

“You got him, though.”

“Before my time, I guess,” I said.

“Norfolk,” Dr. Gaylord told me.  “He’d leave them in the marshes.”

I looked at Kate. 

“An ensign,” she told me, “retired.  He’d get them with the dress whites, looked all official and safe.  Lock them up for a day or two, do what he’d do, strangle them, dump them.”

“How did you catch him?”

“Nosy neighbor.  Partial plate. That kind of thing.”

“He shot you or something, didn’t he?” Dr. Gaylord asked her.

She nodded.  “So what about him?” Kate said and pointed at our dead guy on his gurney.

“Ether,” the doctor told us, “and lots of it.  He didn’t feel a thing.”  Dr. Gaylord ran his finger along the lone incision he hadn’t made.  “Some kind of knife or a razor blade.  Broke the ribs with something.  Pliers maybe, limb cutters.”  He pointed at the stitching. “Funny looking knot.”

“Time of death?” I asked him.

“I’d say twelve to sixteen hours before he got to us.”

“So sometime Monday night,” I said, calculating backwards.

Dr. Gaylord nodded as he stepped to a counter along the far wall and came back with our gutter nail in a sealed plastic bag.  “Standard eight inch galvanized,” he said.  “Postmortem, fortunately.”

“I.D.?” Kate asked him.

“We got lucky on that.  He had a liquor license in New Jersey.  Watchung. Full match on the prints.”  He plucked up a clipboard dangling from the gurney and scanned with his finger.  “Reginald Barry Ward,” he told us.

“Doesn’t sound Jewish,” I ventured.

“Not even circumcised.” 

“What else?” Kate asked him.

The doctor stepped back to the counter along the wall and came away with the slacks and the shirt and shoes all sealed in separate bags.  “Here’s the report from upstairs,” he said and gave the file to Kate. “The clothes were very lightly worn but not new.  Laced with naptha.”

“Mothballs?” Kate said.

He nodded.  “Like they’d been packed away somewhere.”

“The shoes?” I asked.

“A bit of wear.  Not straight off the rack.  Gucci.  Python.  Pricey as hell.  All of it was a size or two too large.  Clearly not his stuff.”

“Was he bathed?” Kate asked.

“Cleaned up,” was the best the doctor could do.  “Wiped down, I’d call it.  No soap, no cleanser.  Probably just to get the blood off from the . . . surgery,” he managed.

“Is that it?” Kate said.

“Nothing from the phone.  A few hairs on him.  Goat, maybe.” The doctor shrugged. “Look for a farmer with an extra spleen.”

***

She had me stop at a Gap near the interstate, and she went in and bought a sackful of clothes.  It took her maybe all of seven minutes. 

“My shit’s worn out,” she told me and pitched the bag in the back seat. 

She read the various state police reports while I negotiated Richmond traffic and then headed west out of the flatlands on the interstate.

“Anything?”

She shrugged.  “If he locked him up, that’s new.”

She pulled out her big brown envelope, spilled the contents on her lap, and went sifting through the various forensic reports beneath the photos.

“What about the clothes?  What did he call it . . . unworn but not new?”

That sent her to the photographs of the previous eleven victims.  She started with the most recent one, a gentleman in Florida, and slowly worked her way backward toward Idaho. 

“Nothing really seems to fit, but look how people dress.  This skirt,” she told me and held up the photo of the settee woman in Texas, “is shorter than this woman ought to wear.  Does that mean it isn’t hers or she just didn’t know the difference?”

Back at the station, Kate went straight upstairs and evicted Ronnie. 

“What’s with her anyway?” he wanted to know.  “And how come she gets to smoke?”

It turned out, I didn’t have to respond.  The sheriff stepped out his office long enough to tell his wife’s sister’s second husband’s middle boy, “Shut up.”

Kate had produced a box of pushpins and was sticking stuff to the wall.  All of the victims, side by side in chronological order.  The forensic reports and lab analysis of every little thing.  Photographs of the meager evidence.  Statements of friends and relations and neighbors.  Even the worn, smudged map she’d marked by hand when she’d been driving around.

“Who made notification in Watchung?” she asked me just as I cleared the doorway.

“Troopers, I guess.  I’ll find out.”  So back downstairs I went where I made a couple of calls to New Jersey and then got waved into the sheriff’s office.

“What do we know?”

I gave him the edited version of our day to that point.

“How’s she?”  He glanced at the ceiling.

“All over it,” I told him.  I was probably armed with a good half hour of amateur psychological insight into what made Special Agent LeComte behave the way she did, think like she seemed to, be who she was, but I decided to let “All over it” do.

“So?” she asked me when I came back up.

“Wife and son at home. Daughter at Penn State.  He left Sunday morning on his way to his brother’s in Hickory, North Carolina.”

“Did they hear from him since then?”

“One call from the road.  Sunday afternoon around three.”

“The wife reported him missing?”

I nodded.  “Sunday night.  I found him Tuesday, early afternoon.”

“What was he driving?”

I checked my notes.  “A 1996 Buick Roadmaster Wagon. Maroon.”

“Are we on the way to Hickory?”

We both looked at her well-thumbed map. 

“Kind of.  I guess,” I told her.  I traced the route I’d take from Watchung down.  “Might have been cutting between interstates.”

We were just standing there shoulder to shoulder looking at the map, at the photos Dr. Gaylord had taken of our guy on his table, at all the other people who’d gotten dead by the same hand, when Ronnie shouted up the stairs, “Cue Ball!” and went running.  I could hear him and the sheriff and the new boy, Doug, racing out the door.

“I’ve got to do this,” I told Kate.

“Do what?”

But I charged on out the door and down the stairs and bolted across the squad room, which struck me as a better option than trying to explain.

We had one bar in town, just the one, and it was chiefly a pool hall.  It had six tables, and four of them were level enough for play.  The Cue Ball was a decent enterprise as southern pool halls go.  They served a good pork shoulder sandwich, and their burger wasn’t bad. The patrons were loud and rough as a rule, but they were nowhere near regular trouble like the county roadhouse sort.

About every other month, though, they’d all get in a fight.  It didn’t help that the guy who owned the place was a prime jackass and would sit at the end of the bar drinking Old Forester all day and mouthing off in a regular sort of way.  He didn’t start the fights, but he would surely fuel them when he could. 

The last one I helped break up was a carburetion spat.  It had kicked off between a boy who was a four barrel enthusiast and a guy who’d guessed two barrels would do for anybody who wasn’t a faggot, and that’s pretty much where the battle lines got drawn.

Johnny, who owned The Cue Ball, didn’t even own a car.  He lived upstairs and just moved from his bed to his seat at the bar and back, but that didn’t keep him from throwing in that fuel injection was for pussies, so everybody with a stake in internal combustion was part of that fight soon enough. 

Everybody but for Johnny, that is, who only sat and sipped his bourbon and called us once the cues were breaking and things got out of hand.

This was a Thursday afternoon melee, and by the time I got to the place, Ronnie had waded in amongst them and was busting up the patrons.  It was like Christmas for him.  Ronnie loved to throw a punch.  The sheriff had gotten his hat knocked off and some fool had stepped right on it, so he was standing there holding the thing in his hands in the throes of Stetson grief, while the new guy, Doug, who’d come from some shit hole in Pennsylvania, just stood there marveling at what the Old Dominion calls a fight.

In truth it was more of a scrum with pool cues.  Everybody but Ronnie was drunk, so standing tall and swinging hard wasn’t a priority.  Kicking and biting were commonplace along with colorful imprecations.  A couple of guys were bleeding.  One fellow looked asleep.  And the whole thing was kind of winding down—those boys weren’t in fighting condition—when one of the buried fellows at the bottom of the heap said a hard, indelicate thing about Dale Earnhardt.  It worked on the pile of patrons like a quart of pure adrenalin.

The elbows churned.  The punches flew.  The sheriff said, “All right now,” but he never took his eyes off of his hat. 

Doug was asking me what I wanted from him, and I was about to hand him my sidearm and jump on in to help Ronnie straighten things out when I was stopped by the sound of a gunshot right beside my ear.

It drew us all up and shut us all down.  The patrons left off what they were doing to look around and see who’d shot a gun in Johnny’s place. Kate had fired her Glock straight into the ceiling, and the drywall was still snowing down.  She’d left her suit coat up in the conference room and her blouse was half untucked.  Her hair was a little wild and uncombed and sticking up all over the place.  She didn’t look like the sort of creature who ought to have a pistol in hand.

She sized up the combatants.  They were a sorry looking pile by now.  All of them huffing and sweating, a few of them bleeding outright.  I never learned exactly what they were fighting about this time.

“Fuckers,” Kate said and holstered her gun. 

She stepped over to the bar.  Somebody had left a shot of something.  Tequila it looked like to me.  She picked it up and knocked it down.  Then she turned and left.  All of us, even the sheriff, watched her go.

“Who we taking in?” Ronnie wanted to know.  Next to “Well shit” that was the thing he said most often.

“Son-of-a-bitch who stepped on my damn hat.”

It wasn’t like she didn’t act as if nothing had happened.  It was more like she didn’t give a shit it had.  Kate was standing before her pushpin wall studying the photos when I finally got back to the conference room.  She couldn’t be bothered to turn around.

“Let’s put a bulletin out on the car,” she told me.  “Can’t be too many Roadmasters here.”

“The sheriff wants to know if you’ll have to file a report?”

“For what?” She finally looked at me.

“You fired your service piece.”

She went back to the map.  “Let’s canvas gas stations here and maybe here.”

And that was that. I drove her back to Piney Manor at the end of the day.  She tried her car, and it fired right up like it had never been balky. 

“Want to get something to eat?” I asked her.

She shook her head and told me, “No.”

I drove over the mountain to the liquor store, had a sudden taste for tequila, and I arrived home in my groove to find Everett telling Kate about his shoulder.  She was sitting on the hood of her car with half a six-pack of Red Stripe left.  Everett chatters so he almost makes you drink in self-defense. 

“Here he is,” Everett pointed my way.  “I was just saying you’d be home.”

“Got hung up.”

Kate swung around.  “Tatum,” was all she said by way of greeting.

“Wasn’t expecting you,” I told her.

“I said I didn’t want to eat.”