She craned her neck slightly. From where she sat she could see him reflected in the mirror on the wall of the reception area. He had hair like damp straw, and soft brown eyes. His lips settled naturally into a pout that was saved from effeminacy by a small scar that broke the left side of his upper lip. He was clean-shaven, with a strong chin. It lent his features an authority that they would otherwise have lacked.
There were magazines on the table before him, and the day’s newspapers, but he did not read them. Instead he sat perfectly still, with his hands flat upon his thighs. He barely blinked, so lost was he in his thoughts. He must have expected himself to be forgotten; after all, he had traveled so far, and changed so much. He had a new identity, and a history that had been carefully manufactured and maintained. None of it was illegaclass="underline" It was gifted to him by the court, and he had built upon it in the years that followed. The boy, barely remembered, was not father to this man, and yet he dwelled within him, frozen at the moment in which he became a killer.
Aimee wondered how often he thought back on what he had done. She suspected, from her own experience of such matters (and not only of dealing with the crimes of others, but of negotiating the wreckage of her own mistakes and regrets) that whole days might sometimes go by when he forgot his sins, or even who he truly was, for otherwise life would be intolerable and he would buckle under the strain of his deception. The only way that he could go on was by denying to himself that he was engaged in any such imposture. He was what he had become, and he had shed the remembrance of what had been just as the moth emerging from its pupal shell has left behind its caterpillar form. Yet something of that early stage must surely linger: an insect dream, a memory of a time when it could not fly, when it was other than it was now.
Your sins followed you. She knew this, and she believed that he knew it too. If he did not, if he had tried to deny the reality of them, then the one who was coming would disabuse him of such notions. The man who would soon be with them – the detective, the hunter – knew all about sin and shadow. Her only concern was that his own pain would cause him to turn his back on her, and on the man outside who had asked for her help. The detective had lost a child. He had touched his hand to the torn form of his first daughter. There was a chance that such a man would not look mercifully on one who had taken the life of a female child, no matter how old he was when he did so.
All this she would tell the detective later. For now, her attention returned to the man outside. Child killer, in both senses of the term: killer of a child, and child himself when he took her life.
She had not known the truth about him, not until today, even though she had acted on his behalf in the past: a disputed DUI, followed by a border dispute with a neighbor that had threatened to descend into active hostility. There had been no reason for him to inform her of his past, although his anxiety about the property dispute had seemed excessive to her at the time. That afternoon’s revelations had clarified the situation. Here was a man who shirked attention of any kind. Even his job was guaranteed to turn any conversation about occupations in another direction. He was a tax accountant, dealing with individuals and small local businesses. He worked from home for the most part. Contact with his clients was minimal, and then limited largely to financial matters. Even when he had needed legal help, he had chosen a lawyer with a practice relatively distant from his own location. There were attorneys closer to home that he could have used, but he elected not to do so. She had thought it a little odd at the time, but not anymore. He had been afraid of word getting out, afraid of a secret shared on a pillow, or over a drink, afraid of the single indiscreet moment that might sink him.
You’re always afraid, she thought. Even though you’ve changed so much since the crime was committed, you fear the second glance in the bar, the unfortunate crossing of paths, the moment when a guard, or a former inmate, or a prison visitor to whom you were once pointed out joins the dots and connects your face to your history. Yes, they might shake their heads and pass on, believing that they were mistaken, and you could absent yourself from their presence quickly if you felt the heat of their gaze upon you. But if they did not simply move on or, worse, if through some dreadful accident they came upon you in your new home, where nobody knew of your past, what then? Would you brazen it out? Would you accept your fate? Or would you run? Would you gather your possessions, climb into your car, and disappear? Would you try to start again?
Or would the little boy inside you, now gifted with the strength of a man, suggest another way out? After all, you’ve killed once. How hard would it be to kill again?
She looked at her watch. The detective had told her that he would be there within the hour, and he was rarely late.
A shape passed across the window, and a shadow briefly entered the room, moving across her body before departing. She heard the beating of its wings, and could almost feel the touch of its feathers against her. She watched as the raven settled on the branch of the birch tree that overhung the small parking lot. Ravens unsettled her. It was the darkness of them, and their intelligence, the way in which they could lead wolves and dogs to prey. They were apostate birds: It was their instinct to betray to the pack the presence of the vulnerable.
But this one was not alone: There was another perched above it. She had missed it set against the tangled branches of the tree. Now came a third. It landed on a fence post, stretched its wings momentarily, then subsided into stillness. They were all so statuesque, and they all faced the road. Strange.
And then the ravens were forgotten for now. A car appeared, an old Mustang. She had never been very interested in cars, and could not tell one vintage from another, but the sight of the automobile brought a little smile to her face for the first time that afternoon.
The detective and his toy.
He stepped from the car. As always, she watched him with a deep curiosity. He was as unsettling, in his way, as the black birds that had gathered nearby, his intelligence and instincts as strange to her as theirs. He wore a dark suit with a slim black tie. It was unusual for him, for typically he preferred a more casual wardrobe, but he looked good in it. It was single-breasted, and slim-fitting, the pants very narrow at the hem. With his pale features, and his dark hair tinged slightly with gray, he was a monochrome vision, as though he had been dropped into the autumnal landscape from an old photograph, an older time.
In the years that she had known him, she had often thought about why he was so troubling to her. In part, it was his predilection for violence. No, that was unfair; instead, it was better defined as his willingness to use violence, and his apparent comfort with it. He had killed, and she knew that he would kill again. Circumstances would dictate that he had to do so, for wicked men and women were drawn to him, and he dispatched them when there was no other option.
And sometimes, she suspected, even when there was.
Why they were called to him she did not know, but she found random phrases drifting through her consciousness when she considered the matter: stalking horse, Judas goat. Bait. There was an otherworldliness to him at times, the same feeling that might be inspired by a figure glimpsed in a churchyard at the closing of the day, slowly fading into the dusk as it walked away, so that one was uncertain whether one had merely come across another mourner in the process of departing or a presence less corporeal. Perhaps it was impossible to look at as much pain and death as this man had and not have something of the next world make an impact upon you, assuming that you believed in a world beyond this one. She did, and nothing in her encounters with the detective had made her doubt her faith. He wore aftershave that smelled of incense, and she thought that this was apt.