“Did you tell him you were coming to see me?”
“Nope.” She was proud of herself. “I told him I had to bring some school stuff home. Anyway, I got the key, went down into the parking garage, and got his car. There was nobody around when I left.”
He watched her as she talked, and when she finished, he nodded. “All right. I’ve been having some trouble with the cops.”
“I know,” she said. And she popped it out, a surprise: “They were here, too.”
“Here?” Now he was worried.
“A cop pulled in just after I got here—they’re checking all the farmhouses. I don’t think he was too interested after I told him I was your wife, and we lived here together.”
Mail looked at her for a moment, and then said, “You did.”
“I did,” she said. “And he left.”
“All right,” he said, his voice flat.
She caught the hems of her dress and did a mock curtsey, oddly crowlike in its bobbing dip. “You took the Manette lady and her kids.”
He was dumbstruck by the baldness of it. He tried to recover: “What?”
“Come on, John,” she said. “This is Gloria. You can’t lie to me. Where’ve you got them?”
“Gloria…”
But she was shaking her head. “We took down fifteen thousand, remember?”
“Yeah.”
“That was sweet,” she said. “I’d like to help you collect on Manette…if you’ll let me.”
“Jesus.” He looked at her and scratched his head.
“Can I see them? I mean, you know, put a stocking over my head or something? I assume they haven’t seen your face or anything.”
“Gloria, this isn’t about money,” Mail said. “This is about what she did to me in the old days.”
That stopped her. She said, “Oh.” Then: “What’re you doing to her?”
Mail thought about it for ten seconds, then said, “Whatever I want.”
“God,” Gloria said. “That’s so”—she wiggled in the chair—“neat.”
Mail smiled now and said, “C’mon. I’ll show you.”
ON THE WAY out the back, Gloria said, “You told me you’d stopped thinking about her.”
“I started again,” Mail said.
“How come?”
Mail thought about not answering, but Gloria had been inside with him. As dreary and unlikable as she was, she was one of the few people who really might know how his mind worked, how he felt.
“A woman started calling me,” he said. “Somebody who doesn’t like Andi Manette. I don’t know who—just that it’s a woman. She said Manette still talks about me, about what I was like. She said Manette said I was interested in her sexually, and that she could feel the sex coming out of me. She must have called fifteen times.”
“God, that’s a little weird,” Gloria said.
“Yeah.” Mail scratched his chin, thinking about it. “The really strange thing is, she called me here. She knows who I am, but she won’t tell me who she is. I can’t figure that out. But she doesn’t like Andi, that’s for sure. She kept pushing, and I kept thinking, and pretty soon…you know how it gets. It’s like you can’t get a song out of your head.”
“Yeah. Like when I was counting to a thousand.” Gloria had once spent a year counting to one thousand, over and over. Then, one day, the counting stopped. She didn’t feel like she’d had much to do with it, either starting or stopping it, but she was grateful for the silence in her brain.
Mail grinned: “Drives you nuts…”
On the way down the stairs, into the musty basement, Gloria realized who the woman was—who was calling John Mail. She opened her mouth to tell him, but then decided, Later. That would be something to tease him with, not something simply to blurt out. John had to be controlled, to some extent; you had to fight to maintain your equality.
“I built a room,” Mail said, gesturing at a steel door in the basement wall. “Used to be a root cellar. Damn near killed me, working in that hole. I’d have to stop every ten minutes and run outside.”
Gloria nodded: she knew about his claustrophobia. “Open it,” she said.
ANDI AND GRACE had used the snap tab from Grace’s bra to work on the nail in the overhead joist but could work only a half-hour or so before the skin on their fingers grew too painful to continue. They were making progress—a half-inch of the nail was in the clear—but Andi thought it might take another week to extract it.
She didn’t think they had a week: Mail was becoming more animated, and darker, at the same time. She could feel the devils driving him, she could see them in his eyes. He was losing control.
“Never get it out,” Grace said. She was standing on the Porta-Potti. “Mom, we’re never gonna get it.” She dropped the snap tab and sat down on the Potti cover and put her face in her hands. She didn’t cry: both of them had gone dry-eyed, as though they’d run out of tears.
Andi squatted next to her, took her daughter’s hand, and rolled it: the skin where she’d been holding the too-small tab was pinched and scarlet, overlying a deeper, dark-blue bruise. “You’ll have to stop. Don’t do any more until the red goes away.” She looked up at the joist, rubbing her thumb against the shredded skin of her own forefinger. “I’ll try to do a little more.”
“No good anyway,” Grace said. “He’s too big for us. He’s a monster.”
“We’ve got to try,” Andi said. “If we can only get a weapon, we can…”
They heard the thumps of feet overhead. “He’s coming,” Grace said. She shrank back to the mattress, to the corner.
Andi closed her eyes for a moment, opened them, said, “Remember: no eye contact.”
She spit into her hand, dabbed a finger into a dusty corner, reached up and rubbed the combination of dirt and saliva on the raw wood where Grace had been digging around the nail. The moisture darkened the wood and made the rawness less noticeable. When she was satisfied—when the footsteps were on the stairs, and she could wait no longer—she stepped down, pushed the Porta-Potti against a wall, and sat on it.
“Don’t talk unless he talks to you, and keep your head down. I’ll start talking as soon as he comes in. Okay? Grace, okay?”
“Okay.” Grace rolled onto the mattress, facing the wall, pulled her tattered dress around her legs.
Mail was at the door.
“John,” Andi said, her voice dull, her face slack. She was desperately trying to project an image of weariness, of lifelessness. She wanted to do nothing that would provoke him.
“Come on, up, we’ve got a visitor.” Andi’s head snapped up despite herself, and from the corner of her eye, she saw Grace roll over. Mail stepped down into the cell, and as Andi got to her feet, he took her arm, and she shuffled to the door.
“Can I come?” Grace squeaked. Andi’s heart sank.
“No,” Mail said. He never looked at the girl, and Andi said, quickly, so he wouldn’t have a chance to think of her, “Who is it, John?”
“An old nuthouse friend of mine,” Mail said. He thrust her through the door, stepped out behind her, and closed the door and bolted it. A woman, all dressed in black, was standing at the bottom of the dusty basement stairs. She had a long, thin stick in her hand; a tree branch. In her other hand, she held a bottle of beer by the neck.
Witch, Andi thought. And then, Executioner.
“God, John,” the woman breathed. She came closer and walked around Andi, looking her up and down, as though she were a mannequin. “Do you hit her a lot?”
“Not a lot; I mostly fuck her.”
“Does she let you, or do you make her?” The woman was only inches away, and Andi could smell her breath, the sourness of the beer.
“Mostly, I just go ahead and do it,” Mail said. “When she gives me any trouble, I pound her a little.” Andi stood dumbly, not knowing what to do. And Mail said, “I try not to break anything. Mostly I just use my open hand. Like this.”
He swatted Andi’s face, hard, and she went down,
but her head was clear. Mail hit her almost every time he took her out of the room, and she had learned to anticipate the motion. By moving with it, just a bit, the blow was softened. By falling, she assuaged whatever it was that made him hit her.
Sometimes he helped her pick herself up. Not this time. This time he stood over her, with the woman in black.
“Brought some rope,” he said to Andi. He showed her several four-foot lengths of yellow plastic water-ski rope. “Put your hands up—no, don’t stand up. Just put your hands up.”
Andi did what he told her, and he tied her hands at the wrist. The rope was stiff and cut into her skin.
“John, don’t hurt me,” she said as calmly as she could.
“I’m not going to,” Mail said.
He tied a second length of the rope to the bindings at her wrist, led it over a joist-mounted rack in the ceiling, and pulled on the end until Andi’s hands and arms were above her head, then tied it off.
“There you go,” Mail said to Gloria. “Just the way you wanted her.”
“God,” Gloria said. She walked around Andi, and Andi turned with her, watching. “Don’t turn, or you’ll really get it,” Gloria snapped.
Andi stopped, closed her eyes. A second later, she heard a thin, quick whistle and then the tree branch hit her in the back. Most of the impact was soaked up by her dress, but it hurt, and she screeched, “Ahhhh,” and arced away from the other woman.
Gloria’s voice was hot, excited. “God. Can we get her dress off? I want to hit her on the tits.”
“Go ahead,” Mail said. “She can’t do anything to you.”
Gloria walked straight up to Andi, and, as she reached for her blouse, said, “You should have taken her clothes away from her, anyway. We oughta cut them off with a knife. Same with the kid, we oughta…”
Mail had come up directly behind her, a third length of the rope held between his hands. He flipped it over Gloria’s neck and twisted: the rope cut into the woman’s throat, and she tried to turn, tried to grab the rope. Her face, eyes bulging, was inches from Andi’s. Andi tried to swing away, to turn, but Mail shouted, “No, watch this. Watch.”
She turned back. The woman’s tongue was out now, and she did a little dance, her feet tapping on the floor, her arms windmilling for a moment, then her fingers would pluck at the rope, then she’d windmill again.
The muscles stood out in Mail’s arms and face as he twisted the rope and controlled the woman at the same time; eventually, he held her slack body like a puppet, held her, held her, until her bladder relaxed and the smell of urine floated through the room. He held her for another ten seconds, but now he was watching Andi’s face.
Andi was watching, but without much feeling: her capacity for horror had dried out as thoroughly as her tears. She’d imagined John Mail killing herself, or Grace, much in this way. And she’d dreamed of Genevieve, not at home, but in a grave somewhere, in her first-day-of-school dress. The murder of Gloria seemed almost insignificant.
Mail let go of the rope, and Gloria fell face-first to the floor, wide-eyed, and never flinched when it came up to meet her. Mail put a knee in her back, tightened the rope again, held it for another minute, threw a quick sailor’s knot into it, then stood up and made a hand-dusting gesture.
“She was a pain in the ass,” he said, looking down at the body. Then he smiled at Andi. “You see? I take care of you. She would’ve beat the shit out of you.”
Andi’s hands were still over her head, and she said, “This is hurting my shoulders…”
“Really? Tough shit.” He walked behind her, put his hands around her waist, pressed his teeth against the back of her shoulder, and looked down at the body. “This is kind of”—he looked for a word and remembered Gloria’s—“kind of neat,” he said.
19
LUCAS’S CELLULAR PHONE buzzed, and he looked down at his pocket. “I told all my friends to stay off, unless it was an emergency,” he said. Lester picked up another phone and dialed, and Lucas let the phone ring once more before he snapped it open and said, “Yeah?”
“Ah, Lucas.” Mail’s voice. Traffic was busy in the background. “Is your ass getting tired of chasing me? I’m thinking of going on vacation, tell you the truth.”
“Are you driving around?” Lucas asked. He flapped his hand at Lester, nodding, and Lester whispered urgently into his phone, then dropped it and sprinted out of the room. “Feel pretty safe?”
“Yeah, I’m driving,” Mail said. “Are you trying to track me?”
“I don’t know. Probably,” Lucas said. “I need to talk to you and I need to finish what I’ve got to say, with no bullshit.”
“Well, spit it out, man. But don’t take too long. I’ve got a clue for you. And this is a good one.”
“Why don’t you give me that first?” Lucas said. “Just in case I piss you off.”
Mail laughed, and then said, “You’re a funny guy. But listen, this is a real clue. Not sort of remote, like the first one.”
“Tell me about the first one?”
“Fuck no.” Mail was amused. “But I’ll tell you—if you figure this one out, you’ll get me fair and square. You ever watch Monty Python? It’d be like”—he lapsed into a bad British accent—“a fair cop.”
“So what is it?”
“Just a minute, I got it written down. I’ve got to read it to you, to get it right. Okay, here it is…” He paused, then said, in a reading voice: “A little blank verse, one-twelve-ten, four-four, one-forty-seven-nine, and a long line; twenty-three-two, thirty-two-nine, sixty-nine-twenty-two.”
“That’s it?” Lucas asked.
“That’s it. This is a very simple code, but I don’t think you’ll crack it. If you do, I’m done. Mrs. Manette bet me that you’d break it. And I’ll tell you, I have to be honest about this, you sure don’t want her to lose the bet, Lucas. Hey, did you say it was all right for me to call you Lucas?”
Lucas said, “Mrs. Manette’s still okay? Can I talk to her?”
“After the stunt she pulled last time? Bullshit. We had a hard little talk about that. What do you cops call it? Tough love?”
“She’s still alive?”
“Yeah. But I’m gonna have to go. I feel like a whole cloud of cops are closing in on me.”
“No, no—listen to me,” Lucas said urgently. “You don’t feel it, but you’re ill. I mean, you’re gonna die from it. If you come in, I swear to God nothing will happen to you, except we’ll try to fix things…”
Mail’s voice turned to a growl. “Hey, I’ve been fixed. Best and the brightest tried to fix me, Davenport. They used to strap me to a table and fix the shit out of me. Sometimes I remember whole months that I’d forgotten because they fixed me so good. So don’t give me any of that fixed shit. I been fixed. I’m what you get, when they fix somebody.” His voice changed again, went Hollywood. “But, hey, dude, I gotta run. Got a little pussy lined up after dinner, know what I mean? Catch you later.”
And he was gone.
Lucas ran down the hall and through the security doors on the 911 center. Lester was already there, with a man Lucas recognized as an FBI agent. They were looking over the shoulder of one of the operators, who was speaking into a microphone: “Dark Econoline van or like that, probably no farther west than Rice Street…”
Lester said to Lucas, “Probably 694, east to west. We’re flooding it right now. We’re taking every van off the road.”
THEY HUNG AROUND Dispatch for fifteen minutes, listening as vans were pulled off the highway wholesale. After a while, they walked back to the Homicide office together and found Sloan with his feet on his desk, looking at a printout.
“Da clue,” he said, waving the printout at them.
“Already?” Lucas said. “What do you think?”
“Could be Bible verses,” Sloan said. “They got that kind of numbers and he used the Bible last time.”
“Unless he’s cooked up something clever and he’s fucking with us,” Lester said. “Maybe it?
??s got something to do with the numbers.”
“Maybe it’s his address,” Sloan said. “And his driver’s license number.”
“And maybe it’s the Bible,” Lucas said. “I’ve got somebody who can look into that possibility.”
“Elle,” Sloan said, looking up from the list of clues. “Does a nunnery got a fax machine?”
“Yeah,” Lucas said, vaguely. He read through a transcript of the tape. “Shit.”
“What?”
“Don’t go away,” Lucas said. “Let me fax this to Elle.”
WHEN HE CAME back, five minutes later, he glanced around the Homicide Office. A half-dozen detectives were sitting at desks, talking, looking at maps, eating. Two of them had found a Bible and were paging through it with some perplexity.
Lucas stepped close to Sloan’s desk and crooked a finger at Lester. Lester stepped over and Lucas said, in a low voice, “There were two things he said. He was fixed—so our guy has been in a state hospital. We’ve gotta be sure that every state hospital employee and every long-term resident has seen the composite.”
Lester nodded. “Why are we whispering?”
“’Cause of the other thing,” Lucas said. “Remember how he knew that we’d spotted his gamer’s shirt? Now he knows that Andi Manette tried to send a message to us. He knows. He’s gotta be getting information. He’s gotta.”
“From here?” Lester breathed, looking around.
“Probably not, but I don’t know. I’d bet it comes out of the family briefings. Somebody out there has a motive to get rid of Manette. Whoever it is, is talking to this guy.”
Lester scratched his nose, nervous, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. “The chief is gonna be delighted,” he said.
“Maybe we shouldn’t tell her,” Lucas said. “I mean, for her own good.”
“What’re you thinking about?” Lester said.
“I’m thinking that we ought to come up with a bunch of little nuggets, different nuggets, bullshit, that we feed through all the different family members—and then we wait to see if anything comes out the other side. Stuff that our guy would react to. If we can find who’s feeding him, we can crack him. Or her.”