I sniffed around the can and again probed it with the knife. I worked the point between the two pages and jiggled them apart. The words still and whisp stood out on the unburned fragment, the two words arranged one over the other, at a slight angle, with the paper charred close around them. The lettering was striking and quaint: the typeface lovely. Here was the Raven , I thought. It might not make sense, but it looked as if Pruitt had it all along, lost his mind, whacked Willie Carmichael, and burned the damn thing. It didn’t make sense, I thought again. I parted the ashes and went deeper. There was only one other scrap with unburned letters: ange , it said. I took this piece, to have a sample of the typeface, and left the other segment for the cops.
I nudged off the light with my elbow and left the room as I’d found it. I stood for a moment in the hall, listening. But the record had numbed my senses, and now I had to concentrate just to hear the song.
I moved through the hall to the stairs. Looked down into the drawing room.
Something was different. I waited and listened and waited some more, but I saw and heard nothing.
It was my life that had changed. My dilemma. The universe.
I took a solid grip on the gun and went down quickly. Everything was turned around, like a house of mirrors at a carnival. There were two doors: I looked through the other rooms with that same sense of dread and found nothing: then went back through the hall the way I had come. I didn’t know what was eating me until I got to the kitchen. There’s more, I thought: I’ve missed something, I haven’t seen it all yet. I nudged open the swinging door, groped for a light, found it, flipped it, and saw what it was that I had missed.
The woman was sprawled in a lake of blood by the table. I had walked past her in the dark, so close I might’ve stepped on her hand. Like Fat Willie Carmi-chael, she had died by the knife—throat cut, body ripped and torn. I moved closer and looked at her platinum blond hair. I didn’t want to look at her face, but I did. It was Pruitt’s girlfriend, Olga.
Then I saw the footprints, my own, and, oh, Christ, I had walked through her blood coming in. It was like looking down and seeing your crotch covered with leeches: your skin shimmies up your tailbone and your gut knots up and you just want them gone. I didn’t even stop to think about it—the whole fifteen years I’d spent with DPD was so much jackshit, and I went to the roll of paper towels near the range and ripped some off, wet them in hot water at the tap, and washed out the prints. And in that moment, while I played footsie with the killer, I became part of his crime.
Call the cops, I thought: call them now, before you’re in this any deeper.
I rolled the bloody wet towels into a tight ball, wrapped it in two fresh ones, and stuffed it in my pocket. Everything till then had been blind reflex. Again I thought about the cops, but even then I was smearing the water tap with my handkerchief, where I’d touched it wetting the towels.
Stupid, stupid…
I left the record playing: give the cops that much, I owed it to Eleanor, even if I had to pay the price.
I was lucky on one count—the heavy underbrush made it unlikely that neighbors would see me coming or going. Almost too late, I remembered that I had gone through Fat Willie’s wallet: I went back to his car and smeared it with my handkerchief. I walked around the block and sat in Eleanor’s car with my feet dangling in the rain. I took off my shoes, knowing that human blood can linger in cracks longer than most killers could imagine, and I turned them bottoms-up on the floor.
I drifted downtown, my conscience heavy and troubled.
I was at least five miles away when I called them. I stood in a doorless phone booth outside an all-night gas station and talked to a dispatcher through my handkerchief. Told her there were two dead people, gave her the address.
I knew I was being taped, that police calls today can be traced almost instantly. When the dispatcher asked my name, I hung up.
I stopped at Denny’s, put on my shoes, and went inside for a shot of coffee. It was 3:05 a.m. I sat at the fountain and had a second cup. I thought of Eleanor and that record blaring, of Slater and Pruitt, of Crystal and Rigby and the Gray son boys. I wished for two things—a shot of bourbon and the wisdom to have done it differently. But I was in the wrong place for the one and it was too late for the other.
BOOK II
TRISH
20
I found what I needed over my third coffee. It always happens, I don’t know how. When life goes in the tank, I bottom out in the ruins and come up with purpose, direction, strength.
I knew what I had to do. It was too late now to do it the right way, so the same thing had to happen from a different starting point.
I sat at the counter looking at her card.
I made the call.
She caught it on the first ring, as if she’d been sitting there all night waiting for me.
“Hello.”
“Trish?”
“Yup.”
“Janeway.”
“Hi.”
She didn’t sound surprised: she didn’t sound thrilled. She sounded wide-awake at four o’clock in the morning.
“You said if I’d like to talk…well, I’d like to talk.”
“When and where?”
“As soon as possible. You say where.”
“My office, half an hour. Do you know where the Seattle Times is?”
“I’ll find it.”
“I’ll tell you, it’ll save time. Go to the corner of Fairview and John. You’ll see a big square building that looks like all newspaper buildings everywhere. You’ll know you’re there by the clock on the Fairview side—the time on it’s always wrong. Turn into John, park in the fenced lot on the left, come across the street and in through the John Street door. The guard will call me and I’ll come down and get you.”
The clock on the building said 11:23, but it was an hour before dawn when I got there. The rain was coming down in sheets. I parked in a visitor’s slot and made the sixty-yard dash in eight seconds, still not fast enough to keep from getting soaked again. I pushed into the little vestibule and faced a middle-aged man in a guard’s uniform. I asked for Miss Aandahclass="underline" he didn’t think Miss Aandahl was in. He made a call, shook his head, and I sat on a bench to wait. Water trickled down my crotch and I felt the first raw tingle of what would probably be a raging case of red-ass. I squirmed in my wet pants and thought, I hate this goddamn town.
She came in about ten minutes later. She was wearing a red raincoat and hood. She was brisk, getting me quickly past the formalities with the guard. He looked at me suspiciously as I disappeared with her into the building. We went past a receptionist’s booth, empty now, then through a door to the right and up a set of stairs. We came out on the second floor, in a corridor that led past a string of offices. There was a bookcase filled with review copies, overflow from the book editor, with a sign to the effect that the staff could buy them (the money to go to charity) at $3 a copy. In a quick flyby, I saw some hot young authors—David Brin, Dan Simmons, Sharyn McCrumb—whose newest books, with author photos and publicity pap laid in, could already command cover price plus 50 percent in a catalog. That’s the trouble with review books; they tend to be wasted on book editors. I wanted to clear out the case, buy them all.
She was standing about thirty feet away, waiting. I joined her at the edge of the newsroom, a huge chamber quiet in the off-hours. It gave the impression that news happened on its timetable, at its command. Let there be news , the keeper of the key would shout at eight o’clock, and fifty reporters would materialize at their computers, clicking furiously. On the far wall was a full-length mural of the world, with clocks showing times in various places. The world looked as peaceful as the newsroom, which only proved how little the world knew.