In Virginia, he thought.
In Ray.
In whoever last touched her, took her life and left his seed, arranged the roses for her final journey into the unredemptive waters of the Back Bay.
A shiver rocked through Jim’s body, all the way to his feet. His eyes were filled with heartbeats. The sound of Raymond’s voice penetrated the reverie.
“... I said, what the hell is this?”
“Huh?”
“You all right?”
“I’m all right.”
“You don’t look all right.”
Weir took a moment to bring it all together and try to make sense of it: this car smudged with fingerprint dust and festooned with impound tags, this smell of perfume, this absent woman who was his sister, this blood of hers — and his — spilled so generously on a ground that neither deserved nor wanted. “It comes out of nowhere,” he said.
Raymond was quiet for a moment.
“I hate it, Ray,” he said, staring through the windshield, through the poisoned atmosphere of inland Orange County. The air looked like smoke. The car parked across from them was a red Porsche with bullet holes in the windshield and headrest. “I hate what he did to her.”
“I do, too, but there’s no time to hate, Jim. We have to find him. And when we find him, we kill him — like I said.”
“You know, that’s actually starting to make sense.”
“Of course it does. You’re not a treasure hunter. You’re not a brother. I’m not a cop, or a husband, or a law student. Look down on us like God does, and what you see is just two men who have to kill someone. Because he deserves it, and because he’s asked us to. It’s simple.”
Weir regarded Raymond’s calm face. He could almost believe him. He had tried his best to keep away from this kind of thinking, tried to keep his head clear, tried to act in a way that would lead him to the truth about Ann. But the grief would hit him without warning and he would realize how present it was, how small was the distance at which he managed to keep it. And the grief was married to the anger.
Raymond looked down at his hands. “I sat in my study the other night and looked at all those beautiful law books. I love the law. I love the way it defines and clarifies. I love the way it’s always ready to be more defined, more clear, more fair. But I realized what a gap there was between that law and what happened. You see, those are just ideas. Ann was real. Our baby was real. When I looked at Ann lying on the ground down there, it changed everything I believed. The law, and what I’ve stood for? It’s an illusion. These ideas — that we’re a nation of laws, that God in heaven watches over us like he does the sparrows — they’re illusions. The only things that aren’t are flesh and blood, and what we can feel and touch and see. What I’m going to do is take vengeance. You can hold vengeance in your hand. It’s real. They could strap me into the chamber for it, and I wouldn’t blink. I promise you, Jim, I wouldn’t blink, not once. And don’t tell me what Ann would have wanted me to do, how Ann would have wanted me to carry on and forget someday. That’s the biggest illusion of all.”
Weir leaned back and stared at the torn headliner above him. “I know.”
“I know you do. So what we have to do, right this second, is figure out why I’m holding this thing in my hand. I don’t want to be holding it, because it’s telling me something I don’t want to believe. Jim, what is this?”
Weir looked down. “That, Raymond, is the control for an automatic garage-door opener.”
“That’s right. And we don’t have an automatic garage-door opener at home.”
Jim took the unit. It was a standard brown plastic box with a clip for the sun visor and the words DOOR GENIE on it.
Raymond was quiet for a long moment. In the periphery of his vision, Jim could see him looking through the window at Horton Goins’s Chevrolet.
Jim turned the thing over in his hand. It seemed inordinately light. Strange, he thought, how something so insubstantial, so mass-produced and impersonal, can land on a man’s life with such tonnage. There was no way he could explain its presence, other than as a posthumous confession that Ann had been going somewhere she didn’t want Ray to know about, sliding right into a waiting garage, leaving her approved world behind, making the leap into the invisible, the illicit, the secret.
Raymond glanced at him now, an expression of denial so feeble, it turned to confirmation before he could look away again. “I thought at first she was dressed up that night because she was coming to meet me at the station. She used to do that — come down and meet me when I got off. She’d put on a sexy dress and makeup, do her hair. You wouldn’t believe what a sight she was, done up that way, waiting for me. One time, we did it right in the Toyota, alongside Coast Highway. One time, we got a motel room because we couldn’t wait. Just like kids.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I don’t, either.”
“The roses, the clothes she was wearing, the street clothes that Ruff saw, the diamond tie tack, a garage-door opener that doesn’t work at your house.”
Jim idly flipped open the battery compartment and found it empty.
Raymond gazed out the window again and Weir followed his line of vision out past Goins’s car, through the chain link, over the Health Department building and into the unemphatic sunshine of a cool spring day. “She had enough opportunity. She could have done it easy enough, with me gone all the time.”
Raymond said nothing for a long while. Weir understood that for Ray to confront Ann’s loyalty was to shake one of the foundations on which he had built his life. “I don’t think she’d play the field. I think if, uh, if Annie was really going to see someone, he’d have to... mean something to her.”
The last words were so faint, Weir could hardly hear them.
“Any ideas, Ray?”
Raymond drew a deep breath. Jim never heard it come back out. “No.”
Weir thought of Kearns’s description, the capacity to go through with things, Ann the Ulterior. He told Raymond what Kearns had said.
Raymond looked at him again, layers of betrayal visible in his face. “If he thinks what Annie really wanted was to get her ashes hauled, I guess that’s no surprise. That’s about how deep Phil Kearns goes.”
“Did you see anything between him and Ann?”
Raymond shook his head.
“What about Dale Blodgett?”
“Come on.”
The fundamental question still hovered in the air, furtive, unanswered. “Say Ann had a lover. Did he kill her?”
“No one who knew Ann could have killed her,” Raymond said quietly. “That’s my opinion.”