The Intruders Page 14

  An hour and a half after leaving Portland, he saw the turn. He pulled off the highway and onto a curving exit ramp, turning off his headlamps. Rain was hammering down now, and between the squeaking slashes of the wiper blades he saw a low, flat building sparsely surrounded with trees, a large parking area behind. Dim light shone from two small windows in the building, making it look even more abandoned.

  A sign on the side said SCATTER CREEK SAFETY REST AREA.

  The lot was empty but for a single car. He swung his vehicle in an arc to come to rest twenty yards away and killed the engine. The other vehicle was a Ford Taurus of the type favored by rental companies. It was dark inside. He gave it two minutes and then got out into the rain.

  He walked slowly, his gun held low down by his side. The car looked empty, but methodical meant making sure. He checked through the rear window and found the backseats vacant but for a jacket, then came carefully around the side and bent down to look. There was no one inside. He straightened, reached down to open the driver’s-side door. The interior of the car was cold. Either the driver hadn’t used the heater or it had been sitting here for some time. The keys were missing from the ignition.

  Broken down, abandoned, the driver safely spirited away by roadside rescue? Possibly. But then it would have been locked, and it was likely that the jacket would be gone, too. Maps lay in the space between the seats, flimsy and thin, again characteristic of rental vehicles.

  A half-empty pack of cigarettes was wedged in the door on the driver’s side, along with a disposable lighter. Lying on the floor in front of the passenger seat was a discarded Pop Rocks container, next to a wrapper for Chicken McNuggets.

  Shepherd closed the door. He had never been a smoker, ironically, but he knew that people who need nicotine enough to ignore the DON’T FUCKING SMOKE signs in a rental car are not likely to leave the scene without their cancer sticks.

  Somebody was here, somewhere.

  He turned and walked toward the building. At the left end was a tiled privacy wall covering the entrance to the men’s restroom. A foot-square window provided one of the two points of sallow light. Stone pillars supported the rest of the structure, enclosing a covered space. Racks of leaflets on local attractions. A hatch from which complimentary coffee would be available during the day, now closed behind a metal shutter. A bank of three pay phones. A couple of battered drinking fountains. Everything dark, cold.

  But when he looked closer, he saw that one of the phones was hanging down off its cord.

  He walked back out and into the restroom. It was tiled in cream and tan. Two basins, two urinals, two stalls. Surprisingly clean. The walls to the latter stopped two feet from the floor. Nobody inside either. The sound of rain was heavy on the metal roof above.

  He came back out and headed through the covered area to the women’s restroom. Three stalls, same deal. Except that a pipe was leaking, and the floor throughout was slick and wet. And except for the fact you could see feet at the bottom of the last stall.

  Blue jeans, white sneakers. Wearer apparently in a kneeling position.

  “Ma’am?”

  Something else lay on the floor. Small, shiny plastic, purple.

  He pushed the door open. A woman was curled into the corner of the stall. She could almost have looked like she was crouched, hiding in a game of hide-and-seek.

  Shepherd bent down to pick the purple plastic off the floor. It was the battery compartment from a cell phone. He pulled on his gloves and took the woman’s shoulders carefully in his hands. Pulled the torso back. She had died from an oblique head trauma, most likely her head striking the toilet bowl. The remainder of the phone lay underneath this, the screen cracked. Shepherd let the body slump forward and picked up its right hand.

  Faint yellow discoloration along the inside of the index finger.

  Smoker.

  Probable renter of car in parking lot.

  Possible provider of a ride to a Pop Rocks/Chicken McNuggets consumer, who had caught her during an attempt to make a telephone call in the restroom, her passenger having said something just a little out of place while they were on the road, something that didn’t fit right.

  Said passenger arrives at the stall door, woman is startled and slips on the wet floor, falls, is unlucky in the way some people are.

  Probably.

  Shepherd swore quietly and left the stall. As he walked quickly through the rain to the trunk of his car, he was already making lists in his head.

  Dispose of phone fragments. Wipe stall for prints, ditto restroom floor and interior walls of restroom. Wipe all public-phone handsets, remove one she’s likely to have used. Search/wipe interior surfaces of victim’s car. Wipe area around exterior handle of door. Remove body from stall and stow in trunk of car. Relocate vehicle.

  This was not good, Shepherd knew. As he unloaded cleaning materials from the back of the car, he calmly appraised just how bad it was. Assume victim didn’t get as far as a connection to the police, since the place isn’t crawling with cops. But someone, somewhere, might have seen the woman agree to give someone a ride. Seen them together at a gas station, the McDonald’s. Just enough to point the people looking for her in the right direction.

  Shepherd pulled out an extra couple of tools and a folded bag made of thick gray plastic.

  Messy work ahead.

  Afterward he searched the perimeter of the parking area, in vain. Somehow the girl had found a way of leaving this place. It was hard to believe that some other traveler would have just taken her into his or her vehicle, been convinced of whatever explanation she might have concocted for her whereabouts. But Shepherd knew she could probably be convincing. Somehow she’d left here, just as somehow she’d gotten the dead woman to drive her this far, and she’d found a place or places to spend the day and the previous night, after somehow getting to Portland.

  When he drove away, he left a car burning, flames flaring silently within it. There would be a few minutes before it exploded. This was not the rental car but the vehicle he himself had arrived in. The rental would have been too easy to trace, even if left in ruins, and that would have led investigators straight to the dead woman’s identity. Her name had been Karen Reid. Her driver’s license, credit cards, and purse had already been located and destroyed. The other potential sources of identification lay in the plastic bag in the back of his new vehicle, alongside a suitcase of the kind he’d lived out of for all his adult life. Fingerprints had been removed from the woman’s hands, using her own cigarette lighter. Her head had been emptied of its distinguishing features. Her body, minus these telltale parts, lay in the trunk of the burning car. Somewhere between here and where he was going, all the remaining components would be dispersed. It wasn’t perfect, but the only perfection is death. You can be perfectly dead, maybe. With everything else you just have to make do with what you can get.

  It was after midnight now, and the interstate was almost empty. Shepherd got up to the speed limit and turned on cruise control. He barely noticed he was driving a different car. He had driven very many vehicles in his life and had not been attached to the old one. He was not attached to anything. It was easier to be in charge that way, and for the moment, he felt closer to being back in charge. It was clear what city he needed to be in, at least. It was also becoming apparent that the time was approaching to get some other eyes on the job. He was going to need to talk to some of the others, and soon, and that required coming up with a plausible history for this chain of events, just in case one of them got to her before he did.

  But for now all he had to do was drive.

  Five miles up the road, he opened the window and threw out the first of Karen Reid’s teeth.

  Part II

  Unconsciously we envy the integrity of the dead: they are through with the preliminary stage, their characters are clearly drawn.

  —Andrei Sinyavsky

  Unguarded Thoughts

  chapter

  SEVENTEEN

  On Sunday we ha
d breakfast in Birch Crossing. Afterward we went for coffee, sitting outside so I could have a cigarette. Amy was nice about this, withstanding the cold and denying herself even a pro forma reminder that I was supposed to be giving up. I flicked vaguely through the paper, remaining unchallenged by anything exciting in local news. Amy watched the mother and young daughters at the next table, but after a while her eyes drifted away.

  We’d been there a half hour when someone said, “Hi,” and I looked up to see Ben Zimmerman on his way into the coffee shop. He had newspapers under his arm and was wearing battered combat khakis, as usual, along with the kind of sweater you wear to go fishing after your wife has banned its use within civilized company. It struck me, however, that I’d be pretty happy to look the way he did at his age, and being greeted in passing made me feel like we actually lived there.

  I nodded. “How’s your friend?”

  Ben shrugged, with a half smile. I wasn’t sure whether this meant the friend was as well as could be expected or had died as expected, so I just nodded again, and he went inside.

  Amy and I dawdled around the stores for a spell, surrounded by New Age and Mozart. I stood outside watching through a window as Amy fingered a blouse in a color I’d have to call pink. I was surprised. Men of my age and type remain barely aware of pink’s existence, seeing it at close quarters only if they have a baby girl. Wives won’t tolerate it in interior decor, wouldn’t be seen dead wearing it either. It becomes like purple in the Middle Ages—exotic and unknown, and thus intriguing in its suggestion of otherness, among the earth tones and teals and ubiquitous blacks.

  When Amy emerged, she raised an eyebrow at me. “What are you grinning at, monkeyface?”

  “Never saw you as a pretty-in-pink kind of girl,” I said. “But it’s, like, totally rad. You want to make out at the movies later on? Or go hang at the mall?”

  She flushed, slapped me on the arm, and embarked upon a series of unrealistic suggestions as to where I could stick a mall, complete with parking lot. We walked in companionable silence back to the house, wreathed in the smell of firs and pine. It was about as unlike living in L.A. as I could imagine, and in the best ways.

  Back home, Amy hit the couch with work and I went into my own study. I didn’t open the laptop right away but sat at the table looking out the big window. I had an idea, and I wanted to make sure it wasn’t dumb. And also that it did not merely indicate how hard I was finding it to forget the life I’d left behind.

  Being a cop is a strange existence, far more prosaic than the entertainment industry likes to make out. Basically you’re a hall monitor with a gun, dealing with the venal, dishonest, and borderline crazy—and that’s before you leave the precinct, ba-da-boom. You’re the social janitor, patching and mending, trying to keep the place neat and in working order, once in a while joining the endless bar fight of the people who’ve been done wrong versus the people who’ve done it—or who might look like they did, except they were visiting their sister in the hospital at the time, they don’t even have a car and certainly not that type, and why are you hassling me, pig motherfucker, ain’t you got no real criminals to beat up?

  The first thing you learn is that we never needed Esperanto. We already had a universal language: untruth. Everybody lies, about everything, all the time. You quickly stop believing what anyone tells you, and you come to realize that the victims will give you worse headaches than the perps will. Either they’re the same people as the criminals but just happen to be on the receiving end this time (and are by Christ going to make the most of it), or they’re middle-class assholes who regard the police as a private security force and who assume that their difficulties can be obviated through confidence and a hundred bucks, proffered discreetly or otherwise.

  So you play a role. When you put on your uniform, you become another person. Someone able to block out the fact that this might be the day when the innocuous-looking guy you pull over is pissed at his wife or friend or because he still hasn’t won the lottery and may boil over and reach under his seat for a gun that on any other day would have remained a secret. You try to forget how many weapons surround us: paring knives in kitchen drawers, bottles in bars where fights materialize like junk mail on the doormat, a rusty razor blade hidden deep in the filthy layers around the bum pushing his cart of mysterious trash along the highway—a known local wack job not doing anyone any harm but whom you have to spend an hour moving along because somebody complained and anyway it’s the law— and who surfaces out of fizzy meditations on microwave beams and terrorists who’ve been stealing his pubic hair for long enough to perceive you as a threat compelling enough to defend himself to the death against.

  A human being is rarely more than a yard from something he or she can use to damage someone else, and people I know got hurt in all those situations, one stabbed in the throat with a bottle opener by a woman whose mouth was pouring blood but who believed that her life would make no sense if her common-law husband got arrested. The cop got full honors; the woman got a long spell in jail; the guy who’d punched out her teeth in front of her kids is now living in some other woman’s house. Sitting in her chair, fingers drumming on its shabby, ash-dusted arms, unable to understand why her kids are going out of their way to enrage him and why the stupid bitch won’t do anything about it or bring him another beer, and what is it about her face sometimes that makes him want to smash her nose completely flat? Sooner or later one of his scumbag neighbors will run off with his television or his car battery or his shoes, and you’ll turn up and have to treat this guy with the respect he now commands as a victim.

  That’s police work. It’s hot sidewalks at twilight. It’s banging on flimsy doors. It’s telling big-eyed children everything’s okay when it’s clearly not. It’s drunken girlfriends who swear that their guy never fucking did nothing—until they realize that their own position is precarious, at which point they’ll volunteer yes, Officer, he might be a Nazi war criminal. And it’s married couples shouting at each other in their yards, hoarse and inexplicable grievances grown so old that even the protagonists don’t recall how they started, and thus it comes down this afternoon to someone forgetting to bring coffee back from the store and so you stand around talking about this for forty minutes, and then you leave, with handshakes all around, and a month later you or someone else will be back to stop them from killing each other over whose turn it was to take out the garbage.

  I was on the job for ten years. I turned up and did what I was paid to do, entering people’s lives only when they’d begun to go wrong, after the God of Bad Things had decided to pay a call. In the end my own life started to veer off course, as policemen’s lives do. The problem with being a cop is, you wander into the field of play of the God of Bad Things so often that you wind up permanently on his radar—as a meddler, a spoiler, someone who has tried to mitigate his attempts to stir disappointment and pain into the lives of humankind. The God of Bad Things is a shitty little god, but he has a great memory and a long attention span. Once you’ve caught his eye, you’re there for good. He becomes your own personal imp, perching on your shoulder and shitting down your back.

  Or so I believed, every now and then. I know it’s a heap of crap. But still it came to feel that way.

  Being a writer actually made sense after this, and not just because I had long ago been an English major in college. Patrol Division is an intensely verbal profession. You spend every day judging what to say and how to say it; learning to get what you want via sentences even the drunk, drugged, or clinically stupid can understand; then interpreting and sifting the replies of people for whom the truth is a third language at best. If it comes to violence, they may have more experience at it than you do, and certainly fewer boundaries. Sure, you can have backup on site within minutes, but it takes only seconds to end your life, and if you had to call in the helicopters last time, then your next walk down that street will be long and hard. Your ability to choose the right words, to judge tone and stance—that’s what t
he job boils down to 90 percent of the time, not least of all through the truly endless paperwork, in which you learn to express yourself in a clear, concise fashion, with just a touch of fiction here and there.

  Certain terms take on an iconic role in your life. “Sir” or “ma’am” is how you reassure victims they’re being taken seriously—but you employ these words with the perpetrators, too. “Sir, would you step out of the car?” “Ma’am, your husband says you have a knife.” “Sir, I’m going to ask you one more time to put down the gun and get on the fucking floor.” It signals theoretical deference, a withdrawable politeness, recalling the way mothers refer to their children by first and last name only when they’re trying not to say “you little fuckhead.” “Perpetrator” is a key term, one through which you reduce the infinity of difference all individuals represent to their being merely the punishable committers of an (alleged) crime, thus setting them in clear opposition to the victim/s, to yourself, to the universe at large. It’s a big, weighty concept, often concentrated to “perp,” and from it everything else follows.

  A “weapon” is an object someone can carry that makes it likely he or she is or may become a perp. An “MO” is the characteristic way in which a perp perpetrates. A “victim” is a role created by the act/s of perpetrator/s. An “intruder” is a specialized form of perpetration, enshrining within its eight letters everything that needs to be said about the inviolability of private space (as defined through property law) and the wrongness of someone who puts himself inside the walls we erect against the chaos of other people. Even a murderer is just another kind of perpetrator, nothing more.