Capture (37 page)

She lifts her from the tub and dries her, the child drooping, eyes closed. Dawn carries her through to the spare room and puts her to bed. Brittany clutches the dusty Mr. Brown close and falls asleep.

Dawn isn’t normally on speaking terms with God but she does her best now to thank him. Then she slips from the room and walks back into the nightmare downstairs.

The studio door slides open and Exley swivels in his chair as Dawn enters. Her T-shirt is dark with water and her hair hangs in lank tendrils.

“She’s okay,” Dawn says. “That piece of filth must have passed out before he could do anything.”

“You’re sure?” Exley says.

“Believe me, I know about this stuff, Nick.” She shakes her head. “Fuck, when I think of what could have happened.”

He stands and takes her in his arms and she rests her head on his shoulder.

“Is she sleeping?”

“Out like a light.”

“Jesus.”

“Ja.”

The gate buzzer rips the silence and Dawn jerks away from him. “Who’s that now?”

“Wait here,” Exley says, heading for the stairs, checking his watch. Ten-thirty.

The buzzer sounds again as Exley reaches the darkened passageway outside the bedrooms, stopping at a window that frames the street. A red Sniper truck is parked under the street light by the gate, and a brown man in body armor—a Vernon-clone—presses the buzzer.

Exley lifts the intercom phone from its cradle. “Yes?” he says, feigning sleepiness.

“Sorry to disturb you, sir. I was wondering if you’ve maybe seen Patrolman Saul?”

This is the moment where Exley could risk everything and lie. Say he hadn’t seen Vernon. Gamble that nobody spotted the pimped Honda outside the house.

But he says, “Yes, he was here earlier. For a short while.”

“Ja, another patrolman saw his car,” the man says, and Exley closes his eyes, breathes. “Any idea, maybe, where he went afterward?”

“No. Look, it’s late. You woke me.”

“I’m sorry, sir. My apologies.”

The rent-a-cop steps away from the gate and crosses to his truck. He reaches in through the open driver’s window and brings a microphone to his face, the spiraling black cord catching the street light. After a short conversation he holsters the mike and fires up a cigarette, leaning against the vehicle, his eyes on the house.

Exley watches from the shadows, waiting for a cavalcade of cops to roar down from Hout Bay. But the man finishes his smoke, grinds the butt dead under his boot, lowers himself into the truck and drives away, his red taillights swallowed by the bush.

Exley goes downstairs to where Dawn hovers near Vernon’s body, the pistol in her hand.

“It’s okay. It was a Sniper guy, asking if we’d seen Vernon. He’s gone,” Exley says. ‘What were you going to do, shoot it out?”

Dawn drags the side of her mouth down in a smile, uses her T-shirt to wipe the weapon clean of prints and clips it into Vernon’s holster. She stands and takes in the carnage. “Okay. So, where do we start?”

Exley puts his hand on her arm. “Dawn, let me take you and Brittany back to your place. There’s no need for you to get caught up in this.”

She shakes her head. “No. This is as much my mess as yours. What are we gonna do with him?”

“Get him to the boat. I’ll row out to sea and dump him.”

She nods. “Let’s do it.”

Exley grabs hold of one boot and Dawn grabs the other and they drag the body through the living room and onto the deck—Vernon’s partly severed head beating a jaunty little tattoo on the wooden slats.

Halfway across, the motion detectors kick in and hard white light floods the deck and the sand. Exley knows the surveillance cameras will have woken with the lights, capturing the clumsy dance he and Dawn do with the dead man, sending the information to the hard drive near the gate. They tumble Vernon’s thick frame down onto the beach and both stand gulping air.

“Jesus, he’s heavy,” Dawn says, resting her hands on her knees like a sprinter after a race. A storm is blowing in and the wind whips her hair. She pushes it away from her eyes. “Come, we better hurry.”

Getting Vernon to the boat is hard work, their feet sinking to the ankles in the soft sand. Heaving him into the rowboat is beyond them. After three failed attempts—Vernon thudding back down onto the beach before they can get him over the lip of the wooden hull—Exley tips the boat so that one brass oarlock touches the ground. He uses rocks to wedge the rowboat in position and he and Dawn roll Vernon aboard.

Exley removes the rocks and the boat rights itself, Vernon’s withered leg dangling over the gunwale like shark chum. Exley is nearly out on his feet and the thought of still having to row out beyond the breakers, into the teeth of the wind, seems inconceivable.

While Exley finds the oars stowed between the rocks and places them beside Vernon in the rowboat, Dawn gathers fist-sized stones and fills the pockets of the dead man’s uniform, wedging some between his body and the Kevlar vest.

They free the boat from the sand, pushing it out into the waves, sinking to their waists in the icy water. Exley hauls himself aboard and sits with his feet on either side of the corpse, hooking the oars in the locks, bracing his legs against the thwart, every muscle straining, battling to gain enough momentum to fight the swell and the wind. Eventually the boat moves and he finds a rhythm with the oars, pulling farther and farther away from the beach, Dawn lost in the darkness.

Exley, teeth chattering, drenched by waves that smash the rowboat, passes the guano-covered rocks, the seagulls like a scatter of shrapnel against the night sky. Then he is beyond the breakers and the ocean is calmer and he makes better progress, the glitter of Llandudno’s lights softened by the spray hurled toward the land by the gale.

When he is far enough out, Exley ships the oars and sits for a minute, gathering his strength, staring down at the dead man, the boat rocking and creaking.

Does he feel any satisfaction, knowing this man who allowed his daughter to die is dead himself? Not enough to salve the pain of Sunny’s death or to erase his own guilt. And there is little solace in the knowledge that all the people who can speak of Exley’s guilt are now gone.

Rousing himself, he checks for the lights of any nearby craft. When he sees none he grabs hold of Vernon’s legs and pitches them over the side. Then Exley gets behind the corpse and, bracing himself against the gunwale, uses his feet to drive the rest of Vernon’s body into the water.

Slack mouthed, gasping, drinking salty air, he drags himself to the side of the boat. In the moonlight Exley sees Vernon Saul floating face down, arms spread, before he sinks into the ocean, and then there’s nothing but the expanse of black water stretching down to Antarctica.

Chapter 56

Thank Christ this is a rich person’s house. Dawn scrubs the blood-splattered living-room walls, and the white paint—thick and velvety—washes easily. If this was out on the Flats she’d be down to raw brick before she got the blood off. Still, she’s covered in sweat by the time the walls are free of Vernon’s mess.

And waiting for her is the expanse of gore-encrusted white tiles. Looks like an ice rink after a very nasty hockey game.

She dumps the bloody rags and paper towels into a garbage bag, rolls off the orange gloves she found by the kitchen sink—making a rubbery snap as she frees her hands—and walks up the stairs.

Dawn goes into the spare room and kneels beside the bed. She panics for a moment when she can’t hear Brittany breathing over the raucous howl of the wind and lays her palm lightly on her daughter’s chest, feeling her lungs expand.

The child moans and her little hand scuttles across the bedding like a crab and grabs hold of Dawn’s thumb, gripping hard. Dawn kisses Brittany on the forehead, smelling soap and shampoo, and waits until her fingers loosen before she withdraws her hand and stands, wiping away a couple of tears that have sneaked their way down her cheeks.

No time for this now, Dawn.

She heads downstairs and opens the sliding door onto the deck, the wind pulling at her hair like she’s in a girl fight. She thuds the door closed after her and crosses to the railing, drifts of wet foam coming in on the squall, checking if her smokes and lighter are still where she left them earlier. There they are, snug against the wooden upright, where the gale can’t get to them.

She turns her back on the blast, shields the lighter and gets a cigarette going. Sucks nicotine and lets out a mouthful, all thoughts of her earlier resolution to quit gone with the smoke. She’s halfway through the cigarette when she sees the little rowboat coming in out of the dark, the storm driving it toward the beach. Nick jumps into the water and pulls the boat onto the sand and comes across to her panting, wet, teeth chattering, the spotlights hammering him.

Dawn flicks the butt of the cigarette out into the wind and follows him into the living room, sliding the door shut. Nick takes a liter of Scotch from the drinks cabinet and has a hit straight from the bottle. He holds the Scotch out to her and she shakes her head.

“You okay?” she asks.

“Yes. He’s gone,” he says, taking another drink.

“What now?”

“Now I’ve got to bring the bastard back.”

Trying to avoid Vernon Saul’s dead eyes staring at him from the computer monitor, Exley knows to a bone certainty that his days as some bargain-basement god, breathing faux-life into tangles of inanimate polygons, are over. If he pulls this off, uses this digital deceit to allow him and Dawn to fly to freedom, he has no idea what he will do with the rest of his days. But it will not be this.

He tries to detach himself from the process and work on autopilot like he’s done so many times before, but he can’t—Vernon Saul is with him, his presence filling the cramped room.

Exley Photoshops a close-up of Vernon’s face, eliminates the telltale flashbulb glare in the pupils, paints away the dried blood that stains the mouth cranberry red and invisibly mends the raw gash in the neck.

He exports the retouched portrait into an el cheapo face-modeling application, the kind of thing he would never normally bring himself to use. The gizmo was sent to him in the hope of an endorsement (that he never gave) by a cabal of code bandits and hackers who chopped and stole from other programs and threw together a mess called, with megalomanic lack of irony, SixthDay, using the creation myth as their inspiration: on day six God created man in his own image.

Moving quickly, with none of the attention to detail that is the hallmark of his work, he wraps Vernon’s face around a ready-made mesh of a male head, a crude thing, poorly built and riddled with imperfections. This is down and dirty and on the fly. All that time allows.

After he returned from the burial at sea Exley grabbed his laptop and Vernon’s keys and went out to the little door recessed in the wall beside his front gate. He used the stubby, tubular key on Vernon’s chain to open the tumbler lock and jacked his laptop into the hard drive of the recorder that stored the data from the security cameras dotted around his house.

Feeling like a target in the glare of streetlight, shivering in the wind, Exley pulled a multiple-viewpoint display up onto his laptop and saw all eight cameras. Three on the ocean side of the house captured Vernon arriving that evening, crossing the beach and humping up onto the deck, disappearing into the living room. Speeded up, his gimpy walk was manically comical.

Exley shuttled through the footage, saw him and Dawn reversing out of the garage in the Audi, Vernon’s Civic beyond camera range.

Shuttled deeper and saw them coming home, the garage door closing after them. They next appeared dragging Vernon’s body across the beach, the high-speed video lending a Keystone Kops quality to their movements, Dawn’s hair flapping like a lunatic bird roosting on her head. Exley saw himself coming back up onto the deck after the burial at sea, a wild and disjointed marionette.

Fingers flying on the keyboard and touchpad, Exley erased the incriminating footage from the Sniper hard drive’s memory. Instant, seamless amnesia.

Then came the crucial moment. He’d seen that the recess housing the recording unit was hidden from the lenses, a small blind spot in the view of the surveillance cameras. Reckoned that if he headed away in a straight line—walking an imaginary tightrope—he would avoid the cameras and be able to hang a right, get beyond their reach and cross to the open ground beside his garage and clamber through the window he left open. Crucial to him being able to return later and feed his created images of Vernon into the hard drive, undetected.

Exley moved, waiting for the spotlights to kick in, exposing him and exposing the flaw in his plan. But they remained inert and he made it around the side of the house, skinny enough to wriggle through the narrow garage window.

The software chimes like a microwave oven, signaling that the render is done and a bald-headed Vernon smirks at Exley from the screen.

Rotating the head, viewing it from all angles, Exley tweaks a slider that thickens the jaw and squares the face, alphas Vernon up. Using another slider, he brings the eyes closer to the nose and works on the brow-to-chin ratio to compress the face and add even more heft to the lantern jaw.

Delving into the cheesy accessories Exley finds a hairstyle that’s a close enough match to Vernon’s gelled spiky do and drops it onto the bald head. Looks like it’s made of shellac—none of the shine and bounce and believability of the one he created for Sunny’s model—but it’s all he can bring himself to do.

However misguided and obsessive, his modeling of his daughter was an act of love, using his artistry as a way of expressing his grief, but by evoking Vernon Saul, Exley knows he’s messing with something occult to save his own skin and he wants to be done with it. Wants to be free of this room and the memory of the mad thing crouched on this chair, smearing himself with his child’s ashes, gabbling incoherent prayers.

Dawn, on her hands and knees, takes a small white scrubbing brush to the cement between the tiles. The expanse of floor is clean. The leather furniture is spotless. But, Jesus, this tacky blood sticks stubbornly to the grid of grouting.