He had found Grace in church, as he liked to joke in his slow drawl. He had started going to church again when he began to feel it was time to somehow “get serious” about his life. His own ideas about God were a bit more amorphous than anything he read in scripture, but he’d always found church a suitable place to go think good thoughts for an hour, if you didn’t take any of it too literally. First day there, and out she came to collect the four- and five-year-olds for the Sunday school. He took, as they say, one look at her. . . . Practically brimming over with tenderness for her little charges. And the eager way they clustered around her. And the spilling ringlets of her honey hair, her sweet face so kindly, her figure sturdy and full.
She was then, and remained now, a mystery to him. He was not a sentimental man. He knew she could not be the perfect Proverbs 31 wife he thought she was, or the cornball angel-of-the-house he thought she was either. But damned if he could catch her with her angel mask off or her Proverbs guard down. She was religious in the same beat-by-beat scriptural way his own mama had been, the way he assumed a good woman was supposed to be. And, also like his mama, she gave herself to being a housewife and mother with what seemed to him an almost feral ferocity. She gave herself to him that way too, devoted herself to him, attached herself to his life and submitted herself to his authority so completely that it simply baffled him. He did not have such a high opinion of himself that he could ever imagine he deserved such devotion, so what the hell was she thinking exactly? Day to day, he was never really sure.
But never mind. He loved his wife. This was no mere matter of emotion to him. It was a profound fact of his existence. He might feel any which way about her at any particular moment, sure. But as long as creation endured and ever after, Grace’s good was his good, her suffering his. Even his love for his children was somehow an extension of his love for her. Even his love of his own life. When the psycho kidnapper of Emily Watson had fired that 500 at him in the farmhouse, his primary emotion—aside from the adrenaline rush—had been righteous indignation on his wife’s behalf. How evil could Ray Mima be that he would risk causing Grace to grieve? That was how much he thought of her.
At that first lunch with Margo Heatherton—this was maybe eight months ago—Margo had interviewed him as “research” for her “novel.” She had been flattering him, he realized now, but it was subtle and at the time he hadn’t noticed it. She had simply let him do the talking and occasionally admired his expertise. Then, after a while, she had told him about the troubles of her young life—her desire to go her own way rather than succumb to pressure from her father. Which allowed him to dispense a bit of easy wisdom to her, which also flattered him. Which, again, he didn’t realize until much later.
After that—for the next month or two—she did little more than e-mail him from time to time. She’d ask him some new interview question or send him an article she thought might interest him. Every e-mail had her photograph attached. That was just a feature of her e-mail program. But he found himself searching for other pictures of her online. He found two. One in particular showed her at a fancy New York debutante ball, wearing a gown that made her look like a princess. It fascinated him.
Once, after about six weeks, she arranged to bump into him on the street outside the NYPD’s 16th precinct, where Extraordinary Crimes was housed. He bought her a cup of coffee at a nearby diner. She somehow ended up telling him about her problems with her on-again, off-again boyfriend, a medical student. He felt jealous, though he didn’t quite recognize that that’s what it was. She invited him to a party later that night. “Bring your wife!” she said. “I’d love to meet her.” But he knew Grace wouldn’t be able to get away, and wouldn’t like it much if she did. He refused Margo’s invitation to go on his own. He liked the look of disappointment in her eyes. All of this, he had now come to believe, had been calculated on her part, a well-planned campaign to draw him in.
It worked, too. She got into his mind. He began to think about her. There were things that she said and ways that she looked when she said them that kept coming back to him during the day. By this time, Grace had started to rebound from her mild depression. She still missed Houston, but she’d found a church she liked in Queens and the kids were pretty well settled in their red-brick home. She was almost back to her cheerful and generous self. As for him, his work on the Task Force was still slow and frustrating, but traces of the BLK were starting to emerge—they were making progress.
None of this mattered. The only thing that mattered was that she, Margo, was in his mind. Otherwise, he would not have been so vulnerable to the final phase of her seduction.
She invited him up to Westchester, where she lived. To a café where she said she was going to give a reading of some of her novel. He did not go there to have sex with her. He went, though he didn’t realize it then . . . he went on the chance of feeling flattered again. Maybe he’d hear portions of their research interview underpinning her prose, or maybe he’d find that her book contained a character like himself, or a better version of himself. Maybe he’d just get the chance to give her some criticism on her writing while she listened to him, all serious and sophisticated and doe-eyed the way she was.
He did not go to have sex with her, but he didn’t tell his wife he was going to see her either. So later, he understood that Margo had played him expertly and that he had been a country fool, two acres dumber than dirt.
Of course, there had been no reading. There was no novel, as he later came to believe. He was the novel. He was the story she was telling herself. Margo—as he now understood her—was a fantasist and a manipulator. The emotionally disturbed daughter of a wealthy businessman, she was spoiled, unemployable, and idle, nothing but time on her hands. Most of that time she spent on the Internet. She had been taken with him, charmed by his famous picture, and had conceived this romantic drama for them to play out.
The café was closed when he got there. She was waiting for him on the sidewalk outside. She had some long excuse about why the reading had been canceled at the last minute. This included a story about why she needed a ride home. Which, of course, he gave her.
By then, he should have been suspicious about who she was and what she was—even more so after he saw the house she lived in. It was nearly a mansion to his eyes, with acres of landscaped garden in front of it and a local forest preserve stretching down into a gorge behind. But she asked him to come in with her until she got the lights turned on, and then she pretended to be upset about the canceled reading so he stayed for a drink. Until the moment he felt the shocking satin of her skin beneath his hand and the shocking sweetness of her kiss against his lips, he had imagined he was a man more or less in control of himself.
Tonight, after he read his son a story and sang his daughter a song, he sat at the kitchen counter with a beer. He watched his wife finish cleaning the kitchen, and he told her about his day. She had advised him to do this—to tell her—from the start of their marriage. She had warned him not to become one of those cops who keeps the horrors of the job to himself—either out of some misguided sense of chivalry, or out of the conviction that no civilian could possibly understand—and so ultimately becomes more intimate with his partner than his spouse. He didn’t give her all the gory details, but he told her about the murder house and about the child in the hidey-hole and about the nearly unbelievable possibility that Dominic Abend had at last made a fatal error.
“Y’all aren’t thinking he was there himself, are you?” she asked. “At the murder? Himself?”
Grace was standing at the sink polishing the spots off a glass with a dish towel. Her hair was shorter now than when they’d met, but there was still a spill of honeyed ringlets over her round cheeks. Her eyes were still a church girl’s eyes, bright and full of faith in heaven and earth and, yes, in him, her husband. Zach knew full well that no one was innocent, no one was pure, but he couldn’t stop feeling that she was, she was. This willingness of hers to take an interest in his world of unholy bloodshe
d and wickedness—it was so touching to him that he wanted to . . . to more than make love to her, to meld her with himself, to protect her by making her part of his own strength and indestructibility. He wished he had died—died—before he had ever laid eyes on Margo Heatherton.
“Now why would he go and do that?” Grace wondered, still shining the glass absently. “Why wouldn’t he just send his henchmen?”
His henchmen. God, he loved her. As if Abend were a villain in one of the old black-and-white movies she watched on TV. These, along with religious and homemaking websites, were almost the only media she looked at.
“It does seem kinda unlikely,” Zach murmured into his beer bottle—which was pretty much what he’d said to Goulart too. Only now that he’d had the time and quiet to think it over, Grace’s question struck him as a good one. If Dominic Abend was personally on hand while Marco Paz and his family and his crew were being hacked to pieces—why was he? Why would he expose himself like that after living out of sight for so long?
“The little boy said the killers were looking for something,” he told her. “They kept asking ‘Where is it?’ That’s what he told April.”
“Did he say what it was?”
“He did not. But it wasn’t money. There was plenty of cash lying around, and Paz would have given it up if they’d asked.”
“Then what?”
“Well—it could make sense, you know, if you think about it. If these killings had just been about money or revenge or punishment or some kind of territory or power play, Abend could’ve sent his crew to do the job. But if he was looking for something else, something important . . .”
“. . . maybe it was important enough, he wanted to make sure he found it himself,” said Grace.
“That’s right. Maybe he wanted to make sure none of his crew got there ahead of him.”
“There you go, then,” she said. “This could be your big break.”
Big break. Like in one of her old movies.
“You’re my big break,” he told her.
“Oh, yeah?”
She gave him that look she gave him, and he was achingly aware just then that she had never given it to any other man, that it had not even been in her look repertoire until after their wedding night.
Upstairs, in bed with her, he was able to forget for minutes at a time about the threat hanging over him. And afterward, with her head on his chest and that scent or atmosphere or whatever it was coming off her and into him with every yearning breath he drew, he was even able to doze off for a while. But an hour later, he was awake again, wide awake and in a cold sweat of anxiety and remorse.
We need to talk.
The remorse had begun at once, the very instant he was finished with Margo. It was terrible, way beyond any sorrow he had ever felt before, even his grief at his mama dying. Margo’s hips were still hoisted in his hands, her arms around his neck, her back against her living-room wall. Her blouse was dangling down from the waistband of her hiked skirt, her bra gone, her body still desirable even as the desire drained out of him—and all Zach wanted to do was detach from his solid self and reel back from his own flesh in revulsion. How many times in how many places had this idiot scene played out in the history of men and women through the ages? How small and stupid a little incident it was, when you considered it that way. Yet, now that it had happened to him—to him who had never so much as broken his word before this, not even the word he’d given to some murderous bad man who had fallen into the clutches of his justice—now that it had happened to him against all his principles and expectations, it seemed to undermine the very foundations of his self-image and self-respect. Adultery! What had he been thinking of, for Christ’s sake? What had he not been thinking of? Grace. Tom. Little Ann. An unwanted pregnancy. Disease. Divorce. The children’s faces when he told them he was moving out. . . . Ten seconds after the climax of what had seemed his need for Margo, he couldn’t even remember what it felt like to want her, what it felt like not to be repelled by the very sight of her.
He let her slide slowly, slowly down until both of her delicate feet were on the floor. He leaned forward to put his forehead against the wall, as his hands fumbled to arrange his clothing.
“We should not have done that,” he said.
“Don’t say that, darling,” said Margo Heatherton, with her fingers feathery on the back of his neck. “It was meant to be.”
In his sudden, depressing clarity of mind, those words—the triteness of them, the written-ness of them, their mawkish melodrama—revealed everything to him. Don’t say that, darling. It was meant to be. Meant to be! Was she kidding him? As if this were some sort of sweeping romance with background music, and bubbling hearts and morning-after flowers—instead of a nauseating, sordid betrayal of all his promises to the only woman he loved, the triumph of dick over soul.
“Meant to be,” he said, turning away from her, buckling his belt.
She clung to him, hugged herself to his back. “We were meant for each other. I knew it the minute we met.”
He made a noise of derision, turned his face so she could see his sneer. “What are you talking about, Margo? I have a family. A wife, children, a life. This was a mistake.”
He pulled gently away from her, but her fingertips kept contact with his shoulders, with his arms, as she said, “We don’t have to tell them right away. We’ll make sure they’re taken care of. But, darling, this isn’t something we can just forget about. It’s too powerful. You know it is.”
It was like waking from a nightmare into another nightmare. The e-mails and phone calls that followed. The urgency, anger, and pathetic pleading of Margo’s make-believe love. And he—even he heard the naïve stupidity of his replies. Trying to reason with her, trying to explain, as if she didn’t already understand, as if this hadn’t been her script from the beginning, as if she weren’t simply playing out the scenes she had already written in her own mind. As awful as his remorse was, he could not even experience it because he was too steeped in the fear that she would expose him, the woeful woe of having this crazy woman slither her way into the most intimate reaches of his life.
Then, about a month ago, a little over a month ago, maybe six weeks, it stopped. The e-mails. The phone calls. All of it. Over. Suddenly, completely. On her last call, she had even said to him, “All right, darling. All right. I won’t ever bother you again. This is good-bye forever.”
Good-bye forever! More trite melodrama. Maybe he should not have allowed himself to hope. But when he heard those words, and the silence after she disconnected, he clutched the dead phone in his sweating hand, shut his eyes, and thought, Thank you, Lord.
Margo had, in fact, let him be. Day after day went by without word from her. It was as if a deluge had ended. The floodwaters of fear and self-pity slowly drained from inside him until there, revealed beneath, was the underlying moonscape of remorse. What now? Should he tell Grace? Hell, no. He might just as well beat her, might just as well beat one of the children into the hospital before her eyes—it would have been that devastating to her sense of the world, to the underpinnings of her joy in life. And what purpose would it serve? Confession might relieve his torment of guilt, but why should his torment of guilt be relieved? It was his guilt, after all, it ought to be his torment: that’s how he saw it. He just had to live with it, that’s all. Take the medicine. Go to church. Never mind if the ceremony and scripture and Jesus Christ of it all is a little out of your spiritual line at this point. Just go, Cowboy. Get down on your cheating knees. Pray for solace and forgiveness. Swear to become a better man, the man you used to think you were. These were the only answers he could come up with.
And somehow, after a while, he began to find his way across the interior desert. Oases of relief appeared. Whole hour-long gaps in his self-flagellating misery. Occasional minutes in his wife’s arms when Margo didn’t curse and witchify his imagination.
Then, just as he thought he might have crossed the Shame Sahara, might have spied the L
and of the Living at the far horizon (well, of course; because this was her original calculation, the timing of her mind-novel)—just as he was beginning to think he might recover from his mistake, her text came this afternoon:
We need to talk.
Grace was breathing rhythmically against his body now. He slipped out from under her, slid from her embrace. He wasn’t going back to sleep, that was for sure—not for hours, anyway. The doze he’d had after their love-making had only made things worse. It had given him just enough rest to keep him awake. Might as well get something done tonight, take his mind off things, maybe catch a nap tomorrow.
He went downstairs. He set his laptop up on the living-room coffee table. He perched on the edge of the sofa cushion in his Jockeys, bending over the keyboard. He called up the video of April Gomez interviewing the boy, Mickey Paz.
What were the men looking for, Mickey? What were they trying to find? Did they say?
Stu . . . stu . . . stupe bassard . . . stum . . . they said a word I don’t know. Stoomp bassard. Bassard.
Bastard? Stupid bastard?
Bastard. Yes. Stupid bastard.
Only not, thought Zach. Because he did know that word—“bastard.” Zach could tell by the way the boy seized on it when April made the mistake of suggesting it to him. He would know that word, young as he was, hanging out in that den of thieves. He’d know that word and plenty worse.
Stu . . . stu . . . stupe bassard . . . stum . . . they said a word I don’t know. Stoomp bassard. Bassard.
He called up his search engine. It would spell-check and make substitutions, which might make some sense out of what the boy had said. Zach searched stupe bassard.
Did you mean stupid bastard? the search engine asked.
He searched stump bassard.
Did you mean stump busters?