The Scarecrow (20 page)

Rachel pulled in and drove down the driveway to the rear of the property. She parked but left the car’s lights on. They shone brightly on the closed garage door. We got out and approached slowly, like bomb techs moving toward a man in a dynamite vest.

“I never lock it,” I said. “I never keep anything in it worth stealing except for the car itself.”

“Then, do you lock the car?”

“No. Most of the time I forget.”

“What about this time?”

“I think I forgot.”

It was a pull-up garage door. I reached down and raised it and we stepped in. An automatic light went on above and we stared at the trunk of my BMW. I already had the key ready. I pushed the button and we heard the
fump
of the trunk lock releasing.

Rachel stepped forward without hesitation and raised the trunk lid.

Except for a bag of clothes I’d been meaning to drop at the Salvation Army, the trunk was empty.

Rachel had been holding her breath. I heard her slowly releasing it.

“Yeah,” I said. “I thought for sure…”

She slammed the trunk closed angrily.

“What, you’re upset that she’s not in there?” I asked.

“No, Jack, I’m upset because I’m being manipulated. He had me thinking in a certain way and that was my mistake. It won’t happen again. Come on, let’s check the house to be sure.”

Rachel went back and turned her lights off and then we went through the back door and into the kitchen. The house smelled musty but it always did when it was closed up. It didn’t help that there were overly ripe bananas in the fruit bowl on the counter. I led the way through, turning lights on as we went. The place looked unchanged from the way I had left it. Reasonably neat but with too many stacks of newspapers on tables and the floor next to the living room couch.

“Nice place,” Rachel said.

We checked the guest room, which I used as an office, and found nothing unusual. While Rachel moved on to the master bedroom I swung behind the desk and booted up my desktop computer. I had Internet access but still couldn’t get into my
Times
e-mail account. My password was rejected. I angrily shut down the computer and left the office, catching up to Rachel in my bedroom. The bed had been left unmade because I wasn’t expecting visitors. It was stuffy and I went to open a window while Rachel checked the closet.

“Why don’t you have this on a wall somewhere, Jack?” she asked.

I turned. She had discovered the framed print of the full-page ad that had run for my book in the
New York Times
. It had been in the closet for two years.

“It used to be in the office, but after ten years with nothing else to follow, it sort of started mocking me. So I put it in there.”

She nodded and stepped into the bathroom. I held my breath, not knowing what kind of sanitary condition it was in. I heard the shower curtain being slid open, then Rachel stepped back out into the bedroom.

“You ought to clean your bathtub, Jack. Who are all the women?”

“What?”

She pointed to the bureau, where there was a row of framed photos on little easels. I pointed as I went down the line.

“Niece, sister-in-law, mother, ex-wife.”

Rachel raised her eyebrows.

“ Ex-wife? You were able to get over me, then.”

She smiled and I smiled back.

“It didn’t last long. She was a reporter. When I first came to the
Times
we shared the cop beat. One thing led to another and we got married. Then it sort of went away. It had been a mistake. She works in the Washington bureau now and we’re still friends.”

I wanted to say more but something made me resist. Rachel turned and headed back to the hallway. I followed her into the living room. We stood there, looking at each other.

“What now?” I asked.

“I’m not sure. I’ll have to think on it. I should probably let you get some sleep. Are you going to be all right here?”

“Sure, why not? Besides, I’ve got a gun.”

“You have a gun? Jack, what are you doing with a gun?”

“How come the people with guns always question why citizens have guns? I got it after the Poet, you know?”

She nodded. She understood.

“Well, then, if you’re okay, I’ll leave you here with your gun and call you in the morning. Maybe one of us will have a new idea about Angela by then.”

I nodded and knew that, Angela aside, it was one of those moments. I could reach out for what I wanted or I could let it go like I had a long time before.

“What if I don’t want you to leave?” I asked.

She looked at me without speaking.

“What if I’ve never gotten over you?” I asked.

Her eyes dropped to the floor.

“Jack… ten years is a lifetime. We’re different people now.”

“Are we?”

She looked back at me and we held each other’s eyes for a long moment. I then stepped in close, put my hand on the back of her neck and pulled her into a long, hard kiss that she did not fight or push away from.

Her phone dropped out of her hand and clunked to the floor. We grabbed at each other in some sort of emotional desperation. There was nothing gentle about it. It was about wanting, craving. Nothing loving, yet it was all about love and the reckless willingness to cross the line for the sake of intimacy with another human being.

“Let’s go back to the bedroom,” I whispered against her cheek.

She smiled into my next kiss, then we somehow managed to get to my bedroom without taking our hands off one another. We urgently pulled our clothes off and made love on the bed. It was over before I could think about what we were doing and what it might mean. We then lay side by side on our backs, the knuckles of my left hand gently caressing her breast. Both of us breathing in long, deep strides.

“Uh-oh,” she finally said.

I smiled.

“You are so fired,” I said.

And she smiled, too.

“What about you? The
Times
has to have some kind of rule about sleeping with the enemy, doesn’t it?”

“What are you talking about, ‘the enemy’? Besides, they laid me off last week. I’ve got one more week there and then I’m history.”

She suddenly was up on her side and looking down at me with concerned eyes.

“What?”

“Yeah, I’m a victim of the Internet. I got downsized and they gave me two weeks to train Angela and clear out.”

“Oh, my God, that’s awful. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I don’t know. It just didn’t come up.”

“Why you?”

“Because I have a big salary and Angela doesn’t.”

“That’s so stupid.”

“You don’t have to convince me. But that’s how the newspaper business is run these days. It’s the same everywhere.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know, probably sit in that office and write the novel I’ve been talking about for fifteen years. I think the bigger question is what are we going to do now, Rachel?”

She averted her eyes and started rubbing my chest.

“I hope this wasn’t a one-time thing,” I said. “I don’t want it to be.”

She didn’t respond for a long time.

“Me, neither,” she finally said.

But that was all.

“What are you thinking?” I asked. “You always seem to go off to dwell on something.”

She looked at me with a half smile.

“What, you’re the profiler now?”

“No, I just want to know what you’re thinking about.”

“To be honest, I was thinking about something a man I was with a couple years ago said. We’d, uh, had a relationship and it wasn’t going to… work. I had my own hang-ups and I knew he was still holding out for his ex-wife, even though she was ten thousand miles away. When we talked about it, he told me about the ‘ single-bullet theory.’ You know what that is?”

“You mean like with the assassination of Kennedy?”

She mock-punched me in the chest with a fist.

“No, I mean like with the love of your life. Everybody’s got one person out there. One bullet. And if you’re lucky in life, you get to meet that person. And once you do, once you’re shot through the heart, then there’s nobody else. No matter what happens—death, divorce, infidelity, whatever—nobody else can ever come close. That’s the single-bullet theory.”

She nodded. She believed it.

“What are you saying, that he was your bullet?”

She shook her head.

“No, I’m saying he wasn’t. He was too late. You see, I’d already been shot by someone else. Someone before him.”

I looked at her for a long moment, then pulled her down into a kiss. After a few moments she pulled back.

“But I should go. We should think about this and everything else.”

“Just stay here. Sleep with me. We’ll get up early tomorrow and both get to work on time.”

“No, I have to go home now or my husband will worry.”

I sat up like a bolt. She started laughing and slipped off the bed. She began getting dressed.

“That wasn’t funny,” I said.

“I think it was,” she insisted.

I climbed off the bed and started getting dressed, too. She kept laughing in a punch-drunk sort of way. Eventually, I was laughing too. I pulled my pants and shirt on first and then started hunting around the bed for my shoes and socks. I found them all except for one sock. I finally got down on my knees and looked for it under the end of the bed.

And that was when the laughter stopped.

A
ngela Cook’s dead eyes stared at me from under the bed. I involuntarily propelled myself back on the carpet, smashing my back into the bureau and making the lamp on it wobble and then fall to the floor with a crash.

“Jack?” Rachel yelled.

I pointed.

“Angela’s under the bed!”

Rachel came quickly around to me. She was only wearing her black panties and white blouse. She got down to look.

“Oh, my God!”

“I thought you checked under the bed!” I said excitedly. “When I came in the room I thought you’d already looked.”

“I thought you did while I was checking out the closet.”

She got on her hands and knees and looked up and down the under-side of the bed for a long moment before turning to look back at me.

“She looks like she’s been dead about a day. Suffocation with a plastic bag. She’s naked and completely wrapped in a clear plastic sheet. Like she’s ready to be transported. Or maybe it was to contain the smell of decay. The scene is quite diff—”

“Rachel, please, I knew her. Can you please not analyze everything right now?”

I leaned my head back against the bureau and looked up at the ceiling.

“I’m sorry, Jack. For her and you.”

“Can you tell, did he torture her or just… ?”

“I can’t tell. But we need to call the LAPD.”

“I know.”

“This is what we’ll say. We’ll say I brought you home, we searched the place and we found her. The rest we leave out. Okay?”

“Fine. Okay. Whatever you say.”

“I have to get dressed.”

She stood up and I realized the woman I had just made love to had completely disappeared. She was all bureau now. She finished getting dressed, then bent over to study the top of the bed at a side angle. I watched her start to pick hairs off the pillows so they couldn’t be collected by the crime scene team that would soon descend on my house. The whole time I didn’t move. I could still see Angela’s face from where I sat and I had to adjust myself to the reality of the situation.

I barely knew Angela and probably didn’t even like her too much but she was far too young and had far too much life ahead to suddenly be dead. I had seen a lot of dead bodies in my time and I had written about a lot of murders, including the killing of my own brother. But I don’t think anything I had ever seen or written about before affected me like seeing Angela Cook’s face behind that plastic bag. Her head was tilted back, so that if she’d been standing she would’ve been looking upward at me. Her eyes were open and frightened, almost glowing at me from the darkness under the bed. It seemed as though she were disappearing into that darkness, being pulled down into it and looking up at the last light. And it was then that she had made one last desperate push for life. Her mouth was open in a final, terrible scream.

I felt like I was somehow intruding on something sacred by even looking at her.

“This isn’t going to work,” Rachel said. “We have to get rid of the sheets and pillows.”

I looked up at her. She started pulling the sheets off the bed and gathering them into a ball.

“Can’t we just tell them what happened? That we didn’t find her until after we—”

“Think, Jack. I admit something like that and I am the butt of every joke in the squad room for the next ten years. Not only that, I lose my job. I’m sorry but I don’t want that. We do it this way and they’ll just think the killer took the sheets.”

She balled everything up together.

“Well, maybe there’s evidence from the guy on the sheets.”

“That’s unlikely. He’s too careful and he’s never left anything before. If there was any evidence on these sheets he would have taken them himself. I doubt she was even killed on this bed. She was just wrapped up and hidden underneath it—for you to find.”

She said it so matter-of-factly. There was probably nothing in this world that surprised her or horrified her any longer.

“Come on, Jack. We have to move.”

She left the room, carrying the bedsheets and the pillows. I slowly got up then, found my missing sock behind a chair and carried my socks and shoes out to the living room. I was putting them on when I heard the back door close. Rachel came in empty-handed and I assumed she had stashed the pillows and sheets in the trunk of her car.

She picked her phone up off the floor. But instead of making a call she started pacing, head down and deep in thought.

“What are you doing?” I finally said. “Are you going to call?”

“Yes, I’m going to call. But before it turns crazy, I’m trying to figure out what he was doing. What was this guy’s plan here?”

“It’s obvious. He was going to pin Angela’s murder on me, but it was a stupid plan because it wasn’t going to work. I went to Vegas and I can prove it. The time of death will show I couldn’t have done this to Angela and that I was set up.”