“Is it genuine?” asked Dennison.
“It’s a genuine letter from a genuine nut,” said Robbins. “The rest is up to you.”
In the Fingerprint Lab, Robbins aimed the others to some stools beneath the counter. A window overlooked the parking lot. Weir sat down next to a cabinet filled with vials of chemicals, fingerprint powders, and sprays. A helium-cadmium laser setup dominated one corner, bedded for the night beneath a blue plastic cover. In a far corner stood the light oven for boosting chemicals.
Robbins threw off the laser cover and turned on the machine. “We hardly ever get friction-ridge impressions from paper,” he said. “Unless they use a messy ink pen, or have something pretty obvious on their hands — blood, food — I got one from engine lube once. We’ll use the laser, try to fluoresce the sodium and potassium chloride — body oil.”
He worked the envelope first, adjusting the eyepiece to read the scan. “Smudges, boys. The kind your mailman would leave. No... nothing clear at all.”
Three sheets of paper later, nothing gave. “He was careful, used a tissue or something to keep his fingers off the paper. Careful son of a bitch, but not as careful as I am. We’ll atomize with ninhydrin-acetone, which will bring up things pretty fast on this paper. Heat boost will help.”
He mixed the solution fresh, drew it into the atomizer, then hung the sheets again and misted both sides. “Kalb, who usually does latents, soaks her things. Too much spray and you drown the ridges. The oils manifest as purple and pink after the heat boost.” The sheets went into the oven one at a time, then the envelope. “Bloom, my little violets, bloom in the spring.”
Weir could see the purple smudges developing, like Polaroid film, in the upper-right corner of the first page and the top-left of the last, backside.
Robbins pointed and looked at Ray. “Yours?”
“I’d guess so.”
Robbins picked up the phone, ordered from Index a full set of prints for Raymond Cruz and Horton Goins. “ASAP will do it,” he said, “I need them five minutes ago.”
He worked the camera into place and shot the developing blossoms. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to read this thing before the Index people get here.”
Robbins read out loud and slowly, grunting at certain lines every few seconds, wiping the sheen of sweat off his brow with a paper towel.
Dear Lt. Cruz:
It is with a heavy heart that I write to you in this time of our great, shared grief. Mygenuine sympathy is with you, because I know now what it is like to lose someone you love very dearly. And I know that for you, as an officer of the law, this death of your beloved must lie like a tumor in your very soul. because of the fury you feel with the loss, and the impossibility of finding, or even naming me.
This letter is an apology to you, but it is more than that. It is my explanation. Over this last week, as I have recovered from my own shock and fear of self, I have thought about surrendering to you many times. But I couldn’t do it. I am a brave man, yes. But I couldn’t bring myself to you because I will not hurt those around me. I am greatly loved, surrounded by those who appreciate my talents and energy. I have them to consider, not only myself.
But to you, Lt. Cruz, I must confess, and do what little I can to put your soul at ease. I know you are tormented by guilt and shame. Did you know that we — Ann and I — drove past two patrol cars that night? I’m sure that in retracing Ann’s steps you have guessed that might have happened. I tell you this not to further your anguish and helplessness — and you are truly helpless against me — but to establish my empathy for you. If I were you, what a hell my life would be.
First, so you are sure that I’m not offering a false confession for unstable reasons, let me tell you some of what I did that night. I made love to your wife, Ann Cruz, in a lovely room overlooking the sea. It was satisfying to me in almost every way. Because it was not satisfying in all the ways I require, I struck her twenty-seven times with a Kentucky Homestead kitchen knife (freshly sharpened six-inch blade). She suffered very little because I am strong. I placed one long-stemmed purple rose into her sexual opening as a gesture of affection, and ten others I put into the waistband of her skirt, which was red and short (she had worn it to please me). The other, I now possess. I moved her into the Back Bay approximately two hundred yards north of Galaxy Park, then I walked back to my car and drove away. Now you know that what I tell you is true.
I knew Ann very well — far better than she knew me, and far better than you knew her yourself. Don’t be surprised. Ann was not an easy person to get to know. She had a large secret area inside her, which was not available to most people — even you. But I recognized that place in her because I have one of my own, and our two great privacies were drawn to each other. She revealed all to me, in the end. She opened herself in every way. I was her mentor, her confessor. She was my angel, and finally, my anguish.
Why did I do it? Two reasons. The first is that I had to protect her from you. You were her falsehood, the one that had brought Ann to the brink of madness. I knew that she was in our influence, and that she needed me to guard her from you. She begged me to protect her from you. You tried to own her, but you could not.
Have you ever known complete possession of a woman? For many years of my life, I did not. There was always that distance in them, always that place I couldn’t go to. You can imagine the anguish it caused me to see Ann’s private world — what a temptation it was, what a challenge! Always between man and woman there is the distance, the difference, the apartness. The woman is, to us, Raymond, the eternal other. And how can true passion adjust to that? What I require is simple devotion, submission, and complete surrender. For years I wondered how that could be accomplished. It cannot be done with money. It cannot be done with love or affection — women make careers of exploiting those very weaknesses in us. It can’t be done with sex, however vigorous, because for the woman there is her pleasure, her self, her other. Do you understand my need? Do you know what it is? I think you can, if you forget what you have been taught by a cowardly society and remember only what you are.
Robbins looked up from the letter to Raymond, who sat staring without apparent focus through the window at the receeding evening. He looked, to Weir, so alone and so exposed. Robbins turned back to the document.
Yes, I made love to her that night, in a comfortable place beside the sea. I made total love to her. I begged with my body for her complete surrender. I pleaded with my entire being for her devotion. I aspired to possession.
And yet, she resisted.
Can you begin to imagine the crush of this?
You can’t, because you could never fathom the depth of Ann. you never knew through all those years what great treasures in her went undetected. And in my darkest hour I had a vision of Ann as my own, as a complete possession. If my own love and seed could not convince her, then I saw my only alternative.
You understand. Raymond Cruz, that Ann was with child. My child. She convinced you that it was yours, but I know the truth, and so did Ann. And I will admit that the very heart of my anger and frustration was this lie that she offered to you, rather than offer that great gift of life — my gift to her! — back to me. When she told me that night that she was going to bear my child as if it were yours, and retreat from me forever in order to establish her cheap charade, well... I saw no choice but to become her God.