She was so absorbed in replaying the conversation in the diner that she never noticed the headlights in her mirror that followed her all the way home and pulled to the side of the road when she turned into her driveway. She did not see the man she knew as Lyle watching her go into her house.
Luv whistled softly as he noted the pattern of lights going on and off in Denise's house. Her bedroom was on the second story, her daughter's room just across a hallway. That made the use of her house unlikely. Not impossible, surely, for he liked a challenge, but not probable. Which meant another motel. Not the same one as with Inge, not so soon, but there were others, many others. There was a drop of several feet into a flower bed from her window, but since she was not married there was no need for an emergency escape route. Still, it was always good to be prepared. It was one thing to take risks, quite another to work in unnecessary ignorance. The one was exciting, the other stupid, and he was already skirting too close to danger at the moment. Inge's body was still in the trash bag in the trunk of his car.
He had to find a new burial site and he was waiting until it was a good deal later to start his search. Luv should have taken care of it earlier, he knew, but life had intervened, he had gotten busy with other responsibilities. He could not be Captain Luv all the time, much as he might be inclined to be so.
He had another hour or two to kill before it was safe to drive the back roads and search the woods, so Captain Luv went looking for a bar. He might find another victim and he could squirrel her away for future use.
They were everywhere, all of them waiting for him. "Luvvv is where you find it," he sang. "Don't be blind, it's all around you, everywhere."
11
Tee's wife, Marge, walked in and out of the kitchen and through the living room, carrying soiled laundry one way, clean laundry the other, back and forth over the course of the evening while the washing machine pulsed and throbbed in its cubicle off the kitchen and the clothes dryer, which was out of alignment and badly in need of shims under its base-a chore that Tee had been promising to tend to for the better part of five years-sent shock waves vibrating through the floorboards and into Tee's feet. Tee sat in his armchair, long since past noting the hyper agitations of the dryer, and contemplated his wife as she made her periodic passages. In her late forties, she still did not look old to him. Not young, either, but in that limbo of indeterminate age when the wrinkles still added character to the face and not just years, when the skin tone still responded to exercise, but with diminishing resilience, when life itself seemed to be attenuated in a sort of declining crawl that lasted a decade or two before the long free-fall of true age began.
Tee knew that he was in the same stretch of life himself, that he was in fact several years older than his wife, and yet he felt there remained in him a vital flame of youth that he no longer saw in Marge. Middle age might last an age, but it would not last forever, and to Tee's mind his wife was nearin the end of it while he had just begun.
Her hair was dyed an unnatural blonde and cut boyishly short and her neck shaved nearly to the bump at the back of her skull in a fashion that was common to many women of her age. Tee hated it and looked upon it as a signal of defeat. Women who cut their hair that way were giving up, he thought.
He watched her, her thickening body moving heavily and purposefully past him, and thought of Mrs. Leigh's graceful run, her slender, muscled limbs-and hated himself.
The phone rang but neither Tee nor Marge moved to answer it. They knew it would be for their daughter. For the hours from three in the afternoon until midnight it always seemed to be for Ginny. The ringing stopped after the second tone-Ginny never answered on the first ring, it would seem too eager. But this time Tee heard her call out, "Dad!" from her upstairs bedroom.
"Don't answer her," Marge said. "Make her come to you and speak in a normal tone of voice."
"Dad!" I "I can't hear you. You'll have to come here and speak to me," Tee said softly. "Phone!"
Tee reached for the extension by his chair but let his hand drop when he saw Marge shake her head in disgust.
"How is she ever going to learn if you give in to her all the time?"
Tee lifted his hands as if at gunpoint. "I didn't pick up!"
Ginny called out, "Dad!" one more time and then, after a lengthy pause, she walked into the living room. She was dressed, as usual, as if prepared to slide under a car and change the oil. Her jeans and T-shirt were several sizes too large, her shoes were a designer's profitable take on work boots. She was, to Tee, inexpressibly beautiful.
"Phone," she said. With the door to her room left open, the sound of tortured guitars and electronic instruments filled the house. "Thank you, darling," he said, lifting the receiver. The slurred and half-swallowed accents of the inner city assaulted his ear. "Chief Terhune?"
"Yes?"
"You a hard man to find. Had to do some work to get your number."
"I'm easy to reach at work in the daytime," said Tee. "Don't want to talk to you there, Chief," said the voice. "Too many people listening at work."
"Who is this?"
"Jus' say I be a friend."
"How about just saying your name, friend?"
"Sumpin' you ought to know, Chief. Sumpin' about McNeil."
"Officer McNeil?"
"Yeah, Officer McNeil. Dickhead McNeil, ol' Pussy hisself You know who I talkin' about."
"What about him?"
"Look in his garage."
"What do I want to look in his garage for?"
"Jus' take a look around there, Chief. See what you see. Maybe you find sumpin' innerestin'."
"What am I looking for?"
"Depend what you want. Man got a garage like a warehouse, you find whatever you looking for in there. You looking for a man be doing your hos?"
"Who is this?"
"Don't be tellin' McNeil you got a call though, Chief. You want to hear from me again, don't tell ol' Pussy. I can help you out, I can tell you lots of things-if you don't tell McNeil. But first you take a look in that garage. It be worth your trouble, I promise you."
The line went dead in Tee's ear.
"Is something wrong, Dad?" To his surprise, Ginny was still standing in the archway leading from the living room.
"No, honey."
"You look worried."
"It's just business," Tee said. "I just hate getting calls at home, that's all."
She nodded. "Good." Ginny smiled at him, the radiant, soul-lifting smile of youth, and Tee felt weak with love.
"How's the homework?" he asked.
"Just about done," she said, and left as if his question had banished her. Tee wanted to call out to her not to go, that he had not meant it that way. Their moments of communion had become less and less frequent as she made her way deeper into adolescence. He missed her and longed for the close relationship they had once had, even as he saw it receding further and further from him. Marge had less of a problem with it, she tended to be sterner and harder on the girl than Tee, and yet he knew that her mother was the one she turned to in crisis, it was her advice she sought, her comfort she needed more than Tee's. They kept secrets from him, he realized. Sometimes inconsequential feminine things, perhaps larger issues, he didn't know. But he did sense that in the past few years there had grown up a kind of conspiracy against him, a "Don't tell Dad" and "We won't bother your father with this" cabal that excluded him and bruised his feelings.