His alibi aside, despite his brutish, bullying behavior and the fact I didn’t like him, he hadn’t struck me as the kind of person who would go to the lengths that were taken to perform Carole’s murder.
If she’d been merely beaten to death, that would be one thing, but she was intentionally boiled alive, the act of a careful sadist or a psychotic, neither characterization consistent with the impression I had of Dorin.
By the time I’d reached Ashford, that realization turned my thoughts toward Dirty Hairy and the evidence I had of a connection between him and Carole that the police didn’t know existed. As I turned down the lane to my cabin, I decided to call Stender as soon as I got inside.
But just as I came to a stop in the open area in front of my cabin, I saw a dark figure sprinting away from the screened porch and my headlights picked up the startled face of Dirty Hairy.
Getting out my cell phone and pressing 911, I used the searchlight on the side of the Bronco to follow him as he darted across the footbridge, then headed north on the paved road on the other side. I reversed my truck, spun out of the drive and with the phone to my ear — listening to a tape giving me options — I drove south very fast to the bridge half a mile away.
Pressing 2 on the phone to report a police emergency, I sped over the bridge, squealed a right-hand turn, and fishtailed the Bronco, heading north.
Getting the speed up to seventy, my eyes scanning left and right, looking for Dirty Hairy’s dark shape among all the others in the woods on either side, I listened to another taped voice tell me that my call would be answered in the order received and to please hold...
Which is when I spotted him, high up along a ridge to my left — just as a logging truck pulled out in front of me from the right, causing me to curse, brake, skid, and swerve off the road, then backwards, down an embankment, where I heard a loud thump, before I came to a stop in a muddy ditch.
My heart pounding in my chest, cold sweat forming inside my clothes, I was looking at a dark prostrate form lying in the gully a few feet ahead of me — the thump I’d heard. I got out a flashlight, finally, and stepped out of the truck into the dark on weak legs, and walked back to see what I’d hit.
I was so afraid of what I would find, I actually cried a little when I saw it. A large raccoon — dead as dead gets.
The driver of the logging truck appeared shortly. Because my cell phone was smashed and because I wanted to follow Dirty Hairy, I told him to get the state police, explained who I was and what I was doing, then I left him.
I got into my raincoat and started up the side of the steep hill, my flashlight sweeping the woods ahead.
At the top of the ridge was a thicket of black hawthorn — the point where I’d last seen him. I went down along the other side, slip-sliding over a carpet of dead, wet leaves, stopping every hundred feet or so to scan the area as far as the beam of my flashlight could illuminate, then going on.
Up and down over another ridge, into thicker woods of pine skirted by dense alder — thinking I’d lost him and starting to think of heading back to the highway — when I saw him.
He was high in the woods to my left, staring down at me until my flash picked him up, then he scampered away. I went on, coming to where I’d seen him at the base of a cliff, a dead-end triangle of rock where there was no place to go but up.
So I did. I stepped up easily at first over a natural stairway of rock, until it became steeper and I started having second thoughts. Although I couldn’t see in the dark, I had to be a hundred feet or so above the base, and I really had a problem with heights.
But I went on, using my hands now, to haul myself upward over the rock face of the cliff, until I came to a narrow ledge that was just wide enough to sit on.
I rested for a moment, scanning with my flash along the ledge, seeing nothing. Then, standing on nervous knees, I started sidling along the ledge, watching carefully now and thinking I’d accidentally cornered him, which might make him suddenly brave — until I came to the cave.
It was actually more of a deep indenture under a broad overhang of rock. Stooping down from the side, I let my flashlight explore first, picking up in the light a variety of trash, bedding, clothing, boxes, et cetera, but not Dirty Hairy, as far as I could see. But this was his home.
So I went in, carefully, bent over low, watching the shadows for movement, but seeing none, coming, finally, to the deepest point, where he’d built a semi-permanent campsite. There was a stone fireplace, a large, mostly rotten mattress, various cooking items, canned food, plastic bottles of water, trash bags filled with clothing, assorted books and magazines piled here and there.
And photographs.
Spilling mostly from old yellowed envelopes onto a large, flat stone that he used as a table, on which there was also a small kerosene lamp, which I lit, then looked the photographs over.
Most of them were of people I didn’t know, but in one newer envelope were a dozen or so banded together, all of Carole while she still lived — some nude, some not.
One of the photos was taken as she sat on a rock by the full flowing creek by her cabin.
Which caused me, finally, to realize something that I’d known already, and gave me a chill that had nothing to do with the fact that I was cold and wet.
Which is when Dirty Hairy came home.
The kind of anger I felt then, and for the rest of that night, was a rage so cold that its memory now causes a kind of nausea — as if it were a virus my body, once infected, remembers and recoils from.
A rage that was quiet, but hard as ice. A rage I held onto for nearly twelve hours, till the next morning.
When I knocked on the door to Jess Collier’s apartment — on floor forty of a newish Bellevue condo — she came to the door after only a second or so, as if she’d been just on the other side expecting me, but she seemed surprised to see me.
“Mr. Virginiak?”
“Ms. Collier,” I said. “I’m sorry for coming so early, but I needed to speak with you.”
“You look terrible,” she told me opening the door wider. “Please come in.”
I stepped inside saying, “I’ve been up all night.”
“It looks like it,” she told me. “Would you like some coffee?”
“No thank you.”
She turned and led me into a large, spare, expensively furnished living room, which opened onto a large wrap-around balcony. “I was just about to get ready for work,” she said, waving me to a gray leather loveseat. “Please sit down.”
Which I did, looking the room over.
I’d expected artworks on her walls, but like her office there was only glass — huge sliding-glass doors, bracketed by floor-to-ceiling mirrors. With the doors open the effect was of being outside.
“Are you sure I can’t get you coffee?”
I told her no.
Wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, lighting a long thin cigar, she still was a handsome woman, but she didn’t look as good to me then as she had when I first met her.
I said, “I found Dirty Hairy last night.”
“You did?” She perched herself on the arm of the sofa and waved a hand toward the Times on the coffee table between us. “There’s nothing in the paper about it.” She frowned at me. “Has he admitted to killing Carole?”
“No,” I told her. “He didn’t kill anyone.”
“I see.”
“He doesn’t exactly play life with a full deck, but he told me that he and Carole were friends — and I believe him.”
“Really?”
“He’s not a bad guy, actually. He’d stolen some pictures from the cabin. Pictures of Carole, mostly nudes. He’d taken them because he’d been embarrassed for her and didn’t want them to be seen by others.”
“Really.”
“He’s a Gulf War vet and saw a little more than he could handle, and he’s taking a vacation from the world, he told me.”