Capture (39 page)
She drags her gaze away from the cop’s feet up to his eyes. He’s giving her a flat, empty stare, like he can see right into her head, and Dawn knows al the luck she had was used up on Brittany and she’s going down, down, down, for what she did last night with that broken bottle.
“Dawn,” the cop says, getting all familiar now, giving her a little smile. “Vernon Saul was a bouncer at your strip club, right?”
“Ja,” she says, forcing herself to stare into his eyes, which are yellowish and bloodshot. Don’t look down, Dawn. Don’t look at that fucken blood.
“Did he introduce you to Mr. Exley?”
“Ja, he did. Why?”
The cop shrugs and rocks a little on his heels, shaking some change in his pocket, swallowing a yawn, sinking his chin to his chest, eyes—honest to God—on the floor.
Okay, Dawn, here it comes. She sneaks a look at Nick, who stands the other side of the sofa, expressionless. Dawn’s eyes are back on the cop, who’s head is still lowered, and she can’t stop herself from looking down at his left shoe, which jiggles a bit, the toe of the loafer lifting, leaving the tile, sliding to the side, hovering over Vernon’s blood, which has dried almost brown at the edges, but is still thick and red and tacky in the middle of the stain.
“Captain?” It’s the nerdy white guy, in the kitchen with his laptop.
“Yes?” the cop says, swiveling to his right, planting his foot millimeters from the wet lick.
“I have the surveillance camera data on screen.”
The cop nods and walks toward the kitchen, his shoes tick-ticking on the tiles. Dawn gets behind the sofa, rests her ass on the back and gives it a little shove and it rolls easily on its metal castors. Far enough to cover that blood.
Dawn’s heart is climbing its way out of her chest and into her mouth and she’s hanging for a smoke. But she doesn’t move, trying to chill, forcing her hands to stop throttling the cool, creased leather of the sofa, looking over at Nick, who stares at the cop and the technician standing by the computer. He’s pale under his tan and she knows this isn’t over yet.
The cop joins the technician at the laptop. Exley edges forward and watches over their shoulders as Vernon hobbles his way across the beach and into the house.
“He arrived at 20:25,” Don says.
The captain holds up a hand and the geek pauses the playback. Turning to Exley, the cop says, “Was it common for Vernon Saul to enter your property this way?”
Exley shrugs. “He told us he was doing a routine patrol on the other side of the rocks and decided to drop by.”
The captain nods and waves the technician on and Don finds the footage of the fake Vernon leaving the house. This is it. The money shot. The cop observes, expressionless, as Vernon jerks his way across the driveway and out the gate.
“He left at 20:55,” Don says.
The men watch Exley and Dawn reversing out in the Audi. The time code jumps forward by two hours as they return home with the child. Then the screen goes to black.
“That’s it,” Don says, shuttling back to Vernon’s departure from the house. The tech-head freezes the sequence as Exley’s counterfeit Vernon walks out the front door. He zooms in, advancing the video frame by frame, his index finger punching the space-bar.
“Something wrong?” the captain says.
“No, just an interesting moiré pattern over here,” Don says, wagging a finger at the animated Vernon. “Banding and artifacting.”
Exley feels a single bead of cold sweat detach itself from the hair at the nape of his neck and run down his spine, tracing the contours of his vertebra.
“In English,” the captain says.
“Uh, well, it’s just to do with the way the lenses of the cameras deal with light. There’s an element of distortion. I think we can enhance the quality of our surveillance footage by recalibrating the cameras.”
“But there is nothing suspicious here?”
“No, no. I was just making a technical note.”
“So this is of no relevance to this investigation?”
“Uh, no.”
The cop exhales. “Then you can leave.”
The technician reluctantly stops his analysis, shuts down the laptop and scuffs out of the house without a word.
The captain wanders back into the living room and Exley tails him. “Okay, the video footage seems to agree with you.”
“What’s going on, Captain?” Exley asks again. More forcefully, now that part of the battle seems won.
“Vernon Saul has disappeared. His car was found abandoned up near the Scout Hall. Where Detective Erasmus was murdered.” The man stares at Exley, who waits for an accusation. But the cop just clears his throat and carries on, “Seems you and your friend were the last people to see him. A bit of a mystery, you could say.”
“Well, I hope he’s okay.”
“Yes. To make things worse, when we sent officers to check on his house out on the Cape Flats they found his mother had passed away. Apparently a diabetes-related heart attack.”
“That’s horrible,” Dawn says.
“Yes, yes.” Nodding at Dawn, then his eyes are back on Exley. “Why was he here last night?”
“Vernon has become a friend, Captain,” Exley says. “He drops by quite regularly.”
“He didn’t say anything about where he was heading?”
“No, nothing. We assumed he was on duty.”
“Well, he never clocked in for his shift down at Sniper.” The cop looks at the suitcases. “You’re leaving?”
“Yes. Later today.”
“Well, I imagine you won’t be taking many happy memories with you.” He wanders across to the glass doors and stares out at the morning. The wind has died but the beach is littered with debris: kelp, driftwood and ocean-bleached trash from container ships.
“Quite a storm last night,” the captain says. Exley stays mute, willing the man to go. “Ms. Cupido, are you leaving with Mr. Exley?”
Dawn looks at Exley, who answers for her. “Dawn and her daughter are joining me on a short vacation.”
“Nice.” The cop nods, looking out the window, hands in pockets. Something attracts his attention. “Now what the hell is that?” he asks, freeing a hand and pointing out at the beach.
Exley comes up beside him and follows his finger to where the waves fizz against the low rocks near the beached rowboat. Something dark juts out from behind the rocks. A brown uniform leg ending in a boot.
Chapter 58
The policeman unlocks the door, slides it open and steps out onto the deck. Exley, staring at Dawn, feels that all his blood has drained into his shoes. Fighting the urge to flee, he joins the cop outside.
The captain walks down the steps and onto the sand, making his way toward the rocks. “Well, will you look at that?”
Exley follows, each step taking him closer to the boot and the brown leg. Knows that when he reaches the rocks he’ll see Vernon Saul with his torn throat gaping at the sky. Hears the shrieking laughter of the seagulls circling above him, as if they’re in on this nasty little cosmic joke.
The cop stops, hands on hips. “Looks like you’ve got yourself a problem here, Mr. Exley.”
Exley knows that he is damned. That karmic balance will be restored and there’s nothing to be done about it. This understanding brings a fatalistic acceptance and his anxiety evaporates. The time has come to tell the truth. To unburden himself. He’s about to invite this dark man inside to hear his confession when the captain kicks his loafer against the sand-encrusted boot.
“Hell, but this big boy stinks.”
The air is thick with a foul odor of decomposition, but Exley, even in his disassociated state, is taken aback by the lawman’s cavalier attitude.
“Never mind,” the cop says, “I’ll call the trash removal people. They can deal with this.” The captain has his cell phone in his hand, dialing, stepping away from the rocks.
When Exley gets closer he understands that what he believed to be Vernon Saul’s boot is really a muck-encrusted flipper, and as he steps around the boulder he sees the bloated carcass of huge brown bull seal washed up by last night’s storm.
Exley has to turn his back on the policeman as hysterical laughter spills from him, mirth that he just can’t contain. Mirth of such magnitude that when he staggers into the house, incapable of speech, Dawn is certain that he is crying.
Chapter 59
Flying into night, leaving the bodies and the blood far behind, Exley feels a sense of stillness for the first time in weeks, even though the screen in front of him says he’s traveling at 935 kilometers per hour.
He spent the day looking over his shoulder waiting for the cops to arrest him, and at Cape Town International passport control there was a moment’s anxiety as a uniformed Xhosa woman looked repeatedly from Sunny’s photograph to Brittany, before she stamped the document.
Now, sitting on the plane, feeling the thrum of the jet engines beneath his stockinged feet, Exley’s starting to relax, but the horrors of the last week still run like his own in-flight movie when he tries to sleep. So he sits with his eyes open, watching the little airplane inching eastward on the monitor.
The day was taken up with unloading his dead family’s belongings at a homeless shelter, returning the Audi to the rental company and signing the last papers authorizing the shipping of Caroline’s body. By some quirk of synchronicity she’s in the air now, too, on her way to England.
Exley and Dawn barely had time to speak after the cop left, and she fell asleep as soon as the plane took off. The child, covered by a blanket, dozes in the seat between them. She’s restless and her fingers twitch and grab at her mother’s shirt. Without waking, Dawn puts an arm around her, muttering something. Exley reaches out and touches the girl’s hand. Her skin is soft but somehow thicker, more durable, than Sunny’s.
At sunset Exley went into what had been his studio, the room empty except for an orphaned ADSL cable snaking across the dented carpet, and the silver urn standing in the corner. His work station now lived in the Waterfront loft of a rich young geek, the memory scoured of any evidence of chaos and mayhem.
Exley lifted the urn and went through the living room, toward the deck. Dawn and Brittany sat on the sofa eating chips and drinking Coke, surrounded by suitcases and child-sized Hello Kitty backpacks, evidence of a shopping spree earlier that day.
“What’s that, Uncle Nick?” Brittany asked, her eyes drawn to the shiny object in Exley’s hand.
“Come, baby, let’s go up and make ourselves pretty,” Dawn said, standing. As Exley passed her she touched him on the elbow, mouthing, “You gonna be okay?”
He nodded and waited until they were on the stairs, the child jabbering about Bali and airplanes, then he crossed the deck and went out onto the beach, the sand warm beneath his feet. The evening was still and the ocean barely moved, reflecting the oranges and purples of the sky.
Exley waded into the water, the skin of his legs stinging from the cold. He lifted the urn and stared at it, trying to see Sunny, but seeing only his reflection. Searching for something profound to say, Exley came up empty, so he kissed the urn and twisted off the lid and upended it, the last of his daughter’s ashes floating downward, lying like a veil of dust on the gently rolling surface of the ocean that killed her. Exley closed his eyes, saying goodbye, feeling the soft current tugging at his legs.
“Uncle Nick. Uncle Nick!” Brittany twists in her seat and has hold of the fine blond hairs on his arm.
“Yes?” he says
“I wanna pee-pee.”
Trying not to wake Dawn, he unbuckles Brittany’s seatbelt and walks her down the darkened tube of the Airbus, holding her hand. The toilets are occupied and a middle-aged woman, joining them in line, reaches down and strokes the girl’s hair, saying, “You have a beautiful daughter.”
“Thank you,” Exley says.
Back in his seat, mother and child asleep at his side, Exley slips a creased photograph of Sunny from the inner pocket of his jacket, holding it under the beam of the reading light. A picture he took a few weeks before she died as she stood in the living room showing off a new outfit, smiling at him.
Yesterday in Dawn’s apartment, when this photo came tumbling out of the pile of clothes she threw at Exley to pack, he’d been about to hand it to her, thinking it was a snapshot of Brittany, before he realized it was his daughter and pocketed it.
He’s been unable to confront Dawn with the photograph and knows he never will. He accepts there was calculation in all of this. Knows it was by design that her child appeared that morning dressed just as Sunny used to dress, her hair worn the way Sunny wore hers.
Exley, understanding there are no accidents, remembers the night in his studio, when, covered in his daughter’s remains, bent out of shape by chemicals and madness, he gabbled those incoherent prayers, and he wonders if those prayers have been answered, after all.
Not exactly in the manner he begged for, of course, but that is the way of these things. And if they have been answered, then the inescapable truth is that he has entered into a covenant with something, somewhere.
But he has no idea who to thank.
Or who to fear.
THE END
Also by Roger Smith
“Smith’s take-no-prisoners tours through the underworld just keep getting stronger - like Dutch Leonard on the far end of a crank binge.”
Barnes & Noble Favorite Novels 2011
“A master class in how to create a novel that speaks to the reader on multiple levels. Truly powerful writing.”
Florida Times-Union
“One secret to good noir is keeping the beauty and the dread in perfect tension so the reader is attracted and repelled at the same time. Smith does it.”
Detectives Beyond Borders
“If you’re looking for hardcore, gazing-into-the-abyss literature, Smith’s the man you want to read.”
Dead End Follies