And then he seemed to be getting weaker. He wondered, vaguely, if he were dying; it seemed only logical. Then awareness left him.
This was tradition, too; to hold each other afterward, then finally to lie apart and talk. It was as though they’d crossed a bridge to some kind of safety, recognized each other at last in a crowd of masked strangers.
Lilith’s hair lay like a rainfall over the pillow. Her expression was one of relief — like his own, he suspected. “So tell me what you’ve been doing in the last ten months,” she said, and the prosaic nature of her tone was a comfort.
He decided to go for the danger. “Oh, like you don’t know,” he said, raising an eyebrow. He sat up on one elbow so they could see each other’s faces clearly.
“How would I know, Bailey? All I have are your e-mail addresses. I don’t keep tabs on you.”
He made a sound in his throat that could have been disagreement, should anyone wish to take it that way.
Lilith sighed and said, “It would be against the rules.”
“Yeah, well, the rules are a little more binding on me than they are on you.”
She looked at him speculatively, a gaze heavy as a touch. “You say that the way women talk about birth control.”
He burst out laughing. She smiled. After a minute he said, “It’s a good analogy. So this is what it’s like to get the prudent end of the biological stick.”
“I don’t know how you spend your time, Bailey, you have my word. So tell me. What about that hotel address in Boise? You weren’t there long.”
“It was an easy case.” She was still looking at him. He hesitated, then lay down again, so he couldn’t see those eyes. “Parents in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Wanted me to find their kid.”
Her body made an exasperated movement. “You don’t do children, Bailey.”
“Yeah, well, he was borderline — seventeen.”
“When parents are involved, it’s never borderline. You told me this.”
He pursed his lips, tilted his head slightly, and made half a shrug. She burst out laughing; rolling, affectionate laughter, and he turned to stare at her.
She said, “God, I’ve missed that.”
“What?”
“That thing you do, that gesture. That ‘So, I was a schmuck.’ ”
He felt his own lips curve. “ ‘He was armed, he was dangerous. He was an agent for the forces of good—’ ”
“He was a schmuck,” she said, agreeing. “Tell me about the kid.”
His smile disappeared. “I went through his room. Eight by ten, Ralph Lauren wallpaper — I think his mother picked it out. Desk with a spare kitchen chair. Bed by the window.”
Her hand began stroking his forehead, and he took a minute to get his thoughts together again. “I opened the Venetian blinds. You could lie on the bed, look out and see a hill, where a patch of woods started. People like to commit suicide in high places. I knew he was unhappy—”
“How did you know?”
“Christ, talk to his parents for ten minutes. So I hiked up to the hill and searched around in the woods. I found what was left of him.” He ran his hand along her arm, cool and reassuring. “Less than an hour and a half. I told you it was an easy case.”
“Yeah. And you told me you found ‘what was left of him.’ How long were the cops searching, before you showed up?”
“Three months.” He shook his head impatiently. “But that means nothing. They were doing all the cop things, like showing his picture and talking to his friends. They did that, so I didn’t have to.”
“Bailey.” She rolled over suddenly and was on top of him, brown and gold eyes a foot away. “One day you must accept the fact you’re some kind of perverse genius.”
Perverse genius? He was about to make a remark about mad scientists, when she brought down those smooth lips over his, and he lost interest in discussing word choices. When she lifted her head he was thinking: sweet and cool, sweet and cool, like … “Watermelon,” he said.
She sighed. “This is where the ‘perverse’ comes in.”
His lips felt as though they belonged to someone else, and he was starting to get that dizziness around the edges again. He looked into eyes of warm amber, skin of deadly snow. “I thought I was a schmuck,” he heard himself say, distantly.
He felt the laughter against his chest.
It had been an easy case. There were plenty that weren’t; plenty that never did reach any kind of resolution, enough to keep him away from children’s cases. But he had to acknowledge there were a lot of others where an educated leap could do wonders. Not that they ever felt like wonders; there was always a simple reason behind each one, so it was more like stage magic — the explanation, once heard, was almost a disappointment. How did you do that? Well, son, there was a trapdoor over here … Is that all?
His very first case, when Jonathan was showing him the ropes … They were looking for an ex-mercenary, recently returned from a lucrative tour of South America; he must have known something was up, for he’d never shown at his New York apartment, leaving one tiny bank account at Chemical and no money trace at all.
No money trace. Fake papers. A three-month head start. “This one’s gonna take a while,” Jonathan had said. He went out and brought them back two coldcut sandwiches from the deli, and while they ate, Bailey had asked if he could try something.
Jonathan looked at him through those thick, black nerd-glasses and grinned. “Knock yourself out. I’m not paying you for lunch.”
Bailey had reasoned that a man can change his identity, but not his self; at least, not without years of effort. And why bother to try? You can’t trace a missing person’s self. But in a world based on birth certificates and social security numbers, he thought that the sorcerers of primitive tribes had it right: You didn’t send sickness to confound an enemy by way of his zip code. You focused your power on a person, a soul, an inner core.
He’d walked through their target’s apartment. He’d talked to their target’s ex-wife. She met him at the address, letting him in with her spare set of keys — that surprised him, but she merely said, bitterly, that her husband never kept anything important in the apartment. She took him through each room, keeping up a continuous stream of information about her ex as they went. She thought he had some kind of shady friends in Arizona. Or was it Wyoming? One of those western places. He’d talked about retiring to a cabin there …
In the den, above the PC, there was a framed poster of Edward Hopper’s “Gas.” A lonely road in Cape Cod, shivery in the gathering darkness. In the foreground a man stood beside the lit pumps of a Shell station; in the background, the road wove into the dark trees and waving grass. A moment from the Fifties, frozen in its disquietude.
“I wouldn’t let him keep it in the living room,” said their target’s wife. “I was sick of looking at it. He had it in the bedroom in our old place — I couldn’t get away from it. I wanted Impressionists, you know? Was that too much to ask? I’m telling you—” she paused.
“Bailey.”
“Bailey. The man never learned how to compromise. That’s his problem, in a nutshell.”
She said a number of other things, but that day at lunch, Bailey called the fine arts department at Columbia University. Then he called the Museum of Modern Art, identifying himself as an officer with the fifth precinct. He’d thought it would be more difficult than that, but the person he spoke with at the museum simply went away, came back, and told him that yes, they had shipped a copy of “Gas” to Morant, Wyoming, three weeks ago. They had the address waiting to go into the database for future delivery of sale catalogues. No, only two other copies of that print had been shipped outside the New York area in the last three months — and the man named a woman in California and one in Texas.