Rumors, Guy thought, rubbing his eyes again.
What had Gregory Cordova said to him that morning? I know as much as anybody does. More, maybe. The old man struck him as a deliberate sort. If he’d been talking about mere rumors, he’d’ve said “I’ve heard.”
Tomorrow he’d find out what Cordova meant by “more.”
Chrystaclass="underline" Before
Friday, October 6
12:02 P.M.
There’s Bernhard’s lab. Door’s open and the whole thing’s leaning funny. Jesus, these rocks’re wet and slippery. Why’s there so much water...?
Oh yeah, stream’s changed course, flooded out this end of the canyon. I don’t want to wade through it. What did I expect to see, anyway? Bloodstains, bullet holes, chalk marks like on TV shows? Nah, I hate that shit. I guess I was just curious because I never came here before.
Never?
Of course not. Bernhard wouldn’t let nobody—
Oh God! Once...
I remember it all so clear now. Me and Heath daring each other to sneak up the canyon. Then going together ’cause neither of us had the guts to go alone. Was September, hot. I could smell dry grass and pine needles. The air was dusty. We were sweaty.
The lab’s door was open, like now. There was a bunch of stuff on a table, I don’t know what, but I suppose it looked like the kind of stuff an inventor would have. Me and Heath, we squatted down behind the bushes. We could hear Bernhard talking inside, and that was funny because he must’ve been talking to himself. We couldn’t tell what he was saying, and after a few minutes Heath gave me a come-on sign and we snuck around to the side where there was a little window. The grass rustled and I started to sneeze. Pinched my nose hard. After a few seconds the sneeze went away.
Bernhard’s voice, real clear now: “You know where it is, honey. Tell me.”
Somebody said something, real low.
“Oh, sure you do. Tell Uncle Bernhard.”
Uncle? Heath looked at me and I looked at him. None of us kids were allowed here, so who was Bernhard talking to?
“Please, honey. If you can’t tell me, show me.”
Bernhard’s voice was funny. I’d heard Leo talk to Jude like that late at night when they thought I was asleep in my curtained-off corner of the cabin. I didn’t know what it meant exactly, but now I didn’t like it. I tugged on Heath’s arm, wanting to run away from there. He snuck closer to the window.
I went after him, tugged again. He was going to look inside and I knew if he did, things would change in some awful way.
Heath slapped at my hand and went up on his tiptoes. Looked through the window.
Bernhard said, “Please, honey. Show me. Uncle Bernhard’ll be real good to you if you do.”
Heath dropped down on all fours. His face was scrunched and red, and he looked so silly that for a second I almost forgot I was scared and started laughing. But then he grabbed my hand and we ran, not even caring if we made noise, all the way down to Bernhard’s shack and past the kid boxes and through the woods to the well house.
We flopped on the ground, leaning against the holding tank and panting. I asked, “What did you see?”
“Uncle Bernhard and Oriana.”
“What were they doing?”
He didn’t answer.
“Heath!”
“Look, Chryssie, we can’t ever tell anybody what we did today.”
“Uncle Bernhard and Oriana know. We made a lot of noise getting outta there.”
“They won’t tell.”
“Why not? He’s gonna be mad at us—”
“Chryssie, shut up and listen to me!”
Heath was older — nine. I did what he said.
“They won’t tell, and nobody’ll know if we don’t. But from now on you’ve gotta stay away from Uncle Bernhard. You understand?”
“No.”
“Okay, you’re too young to understand. Please just do what I tell you.”
“Why?”
“Chryssie, please! Promise!”
Of course I didn’t understand any of what was going on then — or maybe I did, sort of like animals do — but the way Heath yelled at me, I promised. And after I promised, he did too.
I’ve kept that promise to this day. Yeah, and so has Heath. That was in September, and two weeks later he was dead.
Monday, October 9
Morning — Afternoon
Rho wasn’t scheduled to work Monday morning, but she didn’t intend to run her usual errands or clean house. Things went on hold when she assisted on an investigation. She put in a quick call to Detective Grossman to inform him of what she would be doing, then phoned the Clark County detective who had visited Chrystal Ackerman’s apartment building. He confirmed the facts in his message and added that he was waiting on a court order that would allow him to enter the apartment and search for information on the victim’s next of kin.
Rho said, “If you run across anything linking her with anyone in my jurisdiction, will you let me know?”
“Sure thing. By the way, this morning I spoke with the woman who owns the service Ackerman worked for. She called in on the weekend, said she was taking a few days off. Woman thinks the mother may be in a nursing home, but she doesn’t know where.”
“Ackerman operated out of a service?”
“Yeah, Dial-a-Pal.”
“How does that work, exactly?”
“Service has a nine-hundred phone number, and calls’re switched to individual lines in the employees’ homes. Charges — two-fifty to three bucks a minute — go on the customers’ phone bills. Service collects from the phone company, then pays the worker her cut, which isn’t much more than minimum wage. The idea is for the worker to keep the client on the line as long as possible; they say an average hold time of eleven minutes makes it profitable.”
“This stuff must be regulated. Are there restrictions as to what the workers can say or do?”
Stevens laughed. “I hear they use a lot of euphemisms. Things like ‘melons’ for ‘breasts,’ ‘globes’ for ‘buttocks.’ You ask me, there’s not much difference.”
“What about soliciting?”
“Service prohibits it, but that doesn’t stop them. There’s nothing to keep a worker from giving her private number to a client, like Ackerman did to Sean Bartlow.”
“You have any idea what kind of women do this work?”
“They seem to be all across the board. A lot of housewives stuck at home with small kids. People with few skills. Anybody who has a good telephone voice and isn’t squeamish. It’s a good deal for people like that — as bona fide employers, the services’re required to pay into Social Security, issue IRS forms. Some of the better ones even offer benefits.”
You learn something every day, Rho thought. “Did the owner of Ackerman’s service tell you anything about her?”
“Yeah, and it’s kind of interesting. Ackerman was an artist, drew while she talked on the phone.”
“While she was having sex?”
“For these workers, it’s not sex. Most of them have been at it so long that the fantasies’re scripted, they can just reel them off the tops of their heads. So Ackerman drew — charcoal sketches. She gave one to the owner of the service, who thinks it’s very good.”
After Rho ended the call, she sat at her desk for a while, staring into the dregs in her coffee cup and contemplating the contradictions that could exist side by side within an individual. Chrystal, crafting her drawings while titillating men on the phone. Rho, controlling herself rigidly while entertaining her demons. On the surface, their lives would have seemed to be polar opposites, but hadn’t they really been sisters under the skin?