Over Tumbled Graves (7 page)

Looking upstream, Dupree could see the command post; the assistant chief would be there with Branch, who’d been getting regular briefings from Dupree. He began making his way back, his breath evening out, nerves settling. He wiped the perspiration from his upper lip but it returned immediately. Behind the command post, TV news satellite trucks were lined up, their dishes pointed back toward the heart of the city.

The command post was a blur, the awkward grab and grapple of competing jurisdictions—the FBI and Spokane police both “volunteering” to handle certain aspects of the case, while the county sheriff stood by, pointing out sections of riverbank that were outside the city limits. With the discovery of the third body, new cops arrived all the time, both uniforms and detectives. Dupree looked for Caroline and felt a mixed sense of relief and disappointment that he didn’t see her—relief because this was the last thing she needed. There was no denying it, though; he wanted to see her.

With the sun down, a chill seeped from the ground, as if April’s warmth had been merely a taunt. In the cordoned-off command post, detectives grabbed for slices of pizza and clutched Styrofoam cups of coffee beneath floodlights that lent a surreal cast to the cars and vans parked alongside the road. Dupree met beneath the tarp of the command post with Lieutenant Branch and Assistant Chief Tucker. They huddled over a map and pointed out the areas where evidence had been processed. They had just decided to keep a presence at the crime scene all night when a tall, muscular white man in a tight, ribbed sweater marched into the command post, his FeeBIe credentials swinging from his neck like bells. Dupree recognized him from somewhere. TV, maybe.

Tucker lunged forward and shook the man’s hand. “Jeff. Thanks for coming.” Then he turned to Dupree. “Alan. This is FBI Special Supervisory Agent Jeffrey McDaniel…with the Investigative Support Unit.”

McDaniel was older than Dupree’s first impression of him, hair graying at the temples, stomach held in. He champed on a piece of
gum and stared hard at Dupree without actually meeting his eyes. When Dupree didn’t say anything, McDaniel extended a hand and offered a choking handshake. “From Quantico,” he said.

“Right,” Dupree said, “the Australian airline.”

McDaniel didn’t even flinch. “Quantico, Virginia. The Behavioral Science Unit.”

“Well, that makes more sense.”

McDaniel dropped Dupree’s hand and strode off toward the first body. After a moment, the cops fell in behind, like junior officers at a battlefield inspection.

“We lucked out,” the assistant chief whispered over his shoulder to Dupree. “Jeff was working on a Portland case and agreed to fly in and give us a quick consultation at the crime scene. This is very rare.”

“Lucky us,” Dupree said.

McDaniel stood over the body, running his eyes from one end to the other, as if he were measuring a deck. He asked a series of one-word questions—“Time?” “ID?”—but gave back no information, pacing around the body, staring at it from different angles, then turning toward the vacant fields and blocking with his hands, moving them in shadowy patterns like he was re-creating movements. The effect was of an actor preparing to speak, and everyone, including Dupree, stopped to watch him, to listen.

“This victim was killed elsewhere,” McDaniel said. “Dragged down here. Gunshots are secondary, overkill. Fingernails broken off, through struggle maybe, but more likely to conceal evidence.” The FBI agent finished speaking and crouched on a hillside. He chewed a piece of grass.

Dupree looked from Laird to the lieutenant. Was that it? Was that what they’d been waiting for all day? Broken fingernails? After a moment, Spivey came up to McDaniel sheepishly. It looked like he might ask for an autograph. “You think the money is to let us know these are hookers?”

McDaniel nodded without looking up. “He’s telling us they deserved to die.”

“Right, right,” Spivey said. “That’s what I think too. Wow. That’s great.” Spivey kicked at the ground with his feet and continued. “I have to tell you, I read your book, like, ten times.”

This, finally, caught McDaniel’s attention, and he looked up.

“That case in Detroit—”

“The Kitchen Killer,” McDaniel said, and Dupree thought he detected a smile on the man’s face.

“That was amazing. His fascination with handcuffs and everything. Oh, and the guy in Fort Worth. And the Pacific Coast Killer. Oh, man!”

McDaniel stood and shot Spivey a glare. “That’s Blanton’s book.”

Spivey looked sick. “What?”

“The Pacific Coast Killer. That was from Curtis Blanton’s book. Asshole leaves the bureau and makes a fortune talking about
our
old cases, consulting on every goddamn cop show in Hollywood.” Then McDaniel turned to the river. “And I get to come here.” Spivey stood with his hands at his sides crestfallen.

It was too much for Dupree, who climbed the riverbank and walked east toward Peaceful Valley. Here the houses ran along three streets parallel to the river and residents had come outside to lean across backyard fences, meeting in the strips alongside their clapboard houses, exchanging rumor for fear, finding new significance in strange cars that had trolled past and the “retard” who used to deliver papers, recalling the recent backfire of cars and the old guy who’d enticed the neighborhood kids into his house with promises of candy.

The more aggressive gawkers made their way to the edge of the police tape on tiptoes, like the gallery at a golf tournament. Dupree found himself listening to detached voices as the crowd compared other crimes they’d seen, relayed TV shows that made them experts on serial murder, and spun dramatic tales of hearing the sirens.

“At least he’s just killing hookers,” Dupree heard one woman say. He spun to face the crowd, arms shaking with anger. He couldn’t find the woman who’d said it, and he wondered if he’d heard right; perhaps the sentence was a product of his own fatigue and edginess. Or perhaps it was his opinion. Staring at the expectant faces made him feel exposed and alone, this occasional feeling that the general population was made up entirely of criminals and that it was him against all of
them
.

Dupree scanned the faces on the other side of the barrier, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. Still, he found Corporal Galatta and instructed him to get some photographs of the crowd, just in case the killer had come down to watch.

Dupree was starting to feel wasted, too tired to concentrate. He checked his watch. Just before midnight. He didn’t want to go back and watch the arrogant FBI profiler anymore. He called Lieutenant Branch on his cell phone and said he was going to take his first break of the day, head home for a quick shower and change of clothes.

He fought sleep as he drove up the hill south of the river, and sat for a moment in his driveway before climbing out of the car. He lingered on the T-ball set in the front yard, picked up Marc’s glove, and opened the unlocked door. He wondered if Debbie did that on purpose, leaving the door unlocked when he wasn’t home, just to piss him off.

He came in and found her sitting at a bar stool in the dining room, reading a magazine. She removed her glasses and gave him a sad smile that he returned. Her long black hair was ponytailed, draped over her shoulder, and he still could see the girl behind her widened and lined face.

“You left the door unlocked,” he said.

She nodded. “You missed the session.” They’d begun going to a marriage counselor two months earlier. She’d been in therapy herself for two years, hoping to avoid the depression that had swallowed her mother, and decided they needed to do something about the creeping discontent in their marriage. But Dupree had missed two of the three sessions, and if there was one thing he felt from her right now, it was discontent.

“It was a crazy day,” he said.

She shrugged. “I saw the news. Nothing you could do.”

Somehow that made it worse. “Whatcha reading?” he asked. He didn’t like reading himself, but he loved hearing about what she read.

She flopped the magazine over so he could see the title—something about Victorian houses. She’d always wanted one, instead of this rancher. “You all right?”

“Tired.” He slumped against the wall. “Debbie, I’m really sorry—”

“It’s fine, Alan.” The way she said his name, it felt like a low, flat kick.

He walked toward the bedroom, undressing. “How was Staci’s conference?”

“There’s some stuff on the table.”

Dupree peeked in first on eleven-year-old Marc, balled up in his NFL covers, his hair a tumble of straw. Staci, who was six, slept with her mouth open, a flowered jumper and white sandals carefully laid out at the foot of the bed for tomorrow. Dupree stood in the doorway for some time before moving toward the bathroom.

He leaned against the shower wall and let cool water cascade down his back. He closed his eyes and saw the bodies, hands and feet, the darkening of flesh, the branches spread over most of the corpse but not all, as if whoever killed those girls
wanted
to leave a little bit of them showing,
wanted
him to see the money in their hands.

The riverbank was etched into his eyelids. He opened his mouth in the shower to try to get rid of the taste and the smell—of choke-weed and transient camps, of rotting flesh. He leaned against the wall, letting the water roll over him, and woke with a jolt, like snapping awake behind the wheel or at his desk, every muscle tensing after a disconcerting split second of sleep. He shook the water from his head like a dog and turned the shower off. When he left the bathroom a few minutes later, he wasn’t surprised to find Debbie gone from her bar stool, the light out in their bedroom.

Caroline expected more from death. Whether it came from some soaring movie soundtrack or the reverie of some childhood funeral Mass or just the tangled anxieties of her own subconscious, she had always imagined dying would at least offer some substance, some tangible feeling she could share with others who witnessed a long, slow death—“Ah, sure, I remember death.” The sense of a spirit passing on, perhaps, a lightening, a change in the atmosphere of the room, a kick to the head—however it came, she expected it to feel like
something
.

She had been in Sergeant Lane’s office, enduring a lecture and suspension about bashing Thick Jay’s head into the fireplace, when she was paged by the hospital. She called on the lieutenant’s phone and reached her mother’s doctor, who began explaining the same thing that the nurse already had explained. Caroline’s mother’s body had had enough and was shutting down.

The sergeant was grim and understanding; he had no idea her mother’s condition was so serious. He told her he’d talk to the chief, explain her behavior in the context of her mother’s illness. Caroline
just nodded. When Sergeant Lane offered to have someone drive her to the hospital, she surprised herself by accepting.

In her mother’s hospital room the doctor spoke into his fist, concentrating on a spot a few feet from Caroline and choosing his words as if they might pick locks. “I talked with your mother about…what sort of…measures she wanted…employed…at this stage…”

“I know,” Caroline said. “She didn’t want you to do anything.”

The doctor nodded and continued speaking with great care. “If you would like…we could still try…moving her home…and have hospice…attend.”

“Is there time for that?”

“She’s made a…drastic decline the last two days…” For the first time, he met her eyes. “I don’t think so…no.” She looked back over at her still mother. The doctor patted her on the hand and left the room.

Caroline leaned back in the chair and took in the sterile sanctity of her mother’s hospital room, lights dimmed, door closed. The nurses had put Caroline’s mother on her back again, no longer worrying about the bedsores they’d battled for the last month. They’d unhooked the oxygen machine as well, and even the morphine IV drip. For the first time that spring it was just Caroline’s mother lying there, her breathing irregular and raspy, as if she were drowning in dust. Caroline leaned across the bed and held her mother’s face in her hands, pressed their foreheads together and felt her mother’s weak breath on her own face. When she had drifted out of consciousness four days before—for the last time, it was clear now—Caroline had been flooded with all the things she wanted to say. Now all the words seemed dried up, and all she wanted to do was lean across the woman’s bed and hold her, feel the mix of things that made up her mother—bone and flesh, humor and cunning, the warmth of her mother’s lap. During the last part of the illness Caroline hadn’t had time to feel sorry for herself, only empathy for her mother, the desire to somehow lessen her mother’s pain. But now she imagined life without this person; for the first time Caroline felt worse for herself than for her mother.

Maybe her mother was gone already, leaving behind only reflexive breath and smoldering synapse. Or maybe she was still in there,
dreaming her front porch, a cup of coffee, a romance book, Caroline stretched out on the porch steps beneath her, scolding her about this bit of gossip, that bit of cattiness, even as she covered her own half smile.

Caroline whispered, “I love you, Mom,” her voice quavering, and then let go of her mother’s face and fell back in the chair next to her bed. She supposed all the other things had been said. What good are faded compliments and moments of understanding, the things between people? Did they have some weight? Or were they gone the moment they were uttered, lost in the moment of conception, the finale of seem?

The doctor had told her it might be twenty-four hours, even thirty-six. Habit could prop up even the frailest human body. Fifty-eight years of breathing and circulating and thinking didn’t turn off like a toggle switch. She could last days, her body recollecting itself and taking one more charge up the hill. Or it could be hours. No matter; Caroline had decided she wasn’t going to leave the hospital until it was over. She curled up in the hospital chair, holding her mother’s hand and rocking slowly.

Caroline was shocked when she realized that she was asleep, in a dreamy haze somewhere, unsure if her eyes were open now or closed, wondering if the awareness of sleep meant she was awake. She couldn’t hear or see anything, but maybe there was nothing to hear or see. She felt for her mother’s hand and that’s when her eyes snapped open, when she saw her mother’s fingers drooped, wrist curled over the edge of the bed, and knew that her mother was gone.

She felt cheated by the moment; no rising, no change in the atmosphere of the room, no brush with transparency. Her mother was just gone. Caroline walked into the hall. She checked her watch. Two-thirty in the morning. Exhausted, Caroline had slept six hours. The nurse wasn’t at her station so Caroline picked up the phone and tapped in a long-distance number.

A woman answered sleepily. “Mmm. Hello.” Caroline’s stepmother.

“Ramona? Is my dad there?”

“Caroline?”

“Is my dad there? I told him I’d call.”

“Sure. Just a minute.”

She heard whispering, the shuffle of covers, her father clearing his throat. “Caroline?”

“She’s gone, Daddy.” And with that the tears burst forth in gasping sobs that shook her violently, that echoed up and down the carpeted hallways and brought a nurse from another room.

“Caroline?” Her father’s voice was small on the dangling phone. “Caroline, are you there?” Caroline handed the phone to the nurse and slumped to the floor of the nurses’ station, her arms over her head, eyes closed, rocking with every sob. The nurse talked to her father for a moment and then hung up the phone, helping Caroline to her feet. They walked to the end of the hall and to a patio overlooking the city. They stood until Caroline felt the control returning, stopped crying and took a breath.

“I need to call my brother,” Caroline said.

“Not now. There’ll be time.”

Caroline nodded.

“I’m going to go in and have the doctor look at your mother,” the nurse said.

“Can I stay out here?” The nurse said yes and when she was gone Caroline walked to the edge of the balcony and leaned out over the railing into the blackness, feeling the cool wind on her face, stinging where her tears were left to dry in the creases of her eyes. A few cars trickled along the freeway and the streets of downtown, people going home from bars, trudging off with strangers, going to bay at the windows of old flames. Traffic at two-thirty in the morning is the flow of desperation.

Beyond the freeway was the river, a seam through the city, coming straight into downtown, then splitting and curling around Canada Island and Riverfront Park, through the falls and the dam, then beginning its slow meander west. Caroline thought about Burn, still out there somewhere, and remembered the way their hands had connected in the split second before he died. She opened and closed her hand, stared at it. She felt more connected to the young drug dealer, and wondered if she’d done as much to save her mother. The tears came again, silently this time, curling over her cheeks and falling.

And then Caroline understood that death did have a specific feeling and why she hadn’t recognized it before. It was actually familiar, something revealed every day in glimpses of strangers, in solitary walks along the river, in moments of quiet, the realization that, for all the people we surround ourselves with, in the end, we go over alone.