I decide to begin with the first name on my list.
Detective Wilson Hutton has been a detective far, far longer than I’ve been cleaning, and he has been overeating far, far longer than he’s been a detective. He, like the others, likes me. I move down the aisle, glancing at the cubicles to my left and right, double-checking that I’m alone. Most of the ceiling lights have been turned off. Only every fifth one is going, so it’s pretty dim, like being outside under a quarter moon. This gives the place a slight look of life, while also saving power. It also enables staff to come here and not knock themselves out on furniture. I can hear the slight humming of the lights. The ticking of the air-conditioning. But I can’t hear a single person. The floor has the feeling of an empty house. Like a tomb. No glowing desk lamps, no squeaking office chairs, no shifting of weight, or a cough, or a yawn. Things look tidier in this light. Cleaner. That’s because an hour and a half after I leave, a team of cleaners comes in and spends two hours doing all the things they think I’m too stupid to manage. Nobody has ever mentioned it to me. Maybe they think I think a team of magic trash fairies comes in and makes things sparkly and clean.
I find Hutton’s cubicle and sit down. He’s a big guy, and the ass groove in his reinforced office chair reflects this as I try to get comfortable. At forty-eight years old, he’s a candidate for a heart attack, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he has already had several minor ones. The only exercise I’ve ever seen him do is chew junk food. I feel nauseous just sitting in his chair. I also feel like I’m putting on weight.
I turn on his lamp. Staring at me is a name plaque sitting on his desk, probably a gift from his wife. It says Detective Inspector Wilson Q. Hutton. I don’t know what the Q stands for. Probably queer. I look at the photographs of his family that he’s pinned to the inside wall. His wife has similar weight issues, but her problems don’t end there. The hair on her arms and legs, and the small splashes on her face, look like wool. The couple looks happy together. I cross his name off the list and flick off the lamp. Mr. Doughnut didn’t do this. It isn’t possible. He would have come close to dying just chasing the victim up those stairs, and I doubt his ability to gain an erection-something the killer repeatedly used. Though he must have used one at least twice: there are two overweight children in the photographs.
Nine people left.
I push the chair back into the position it had been in, which isn’t hard to find. The carpet is nearly worn through where the casters normally sit. So is the floor beneath it. I move into the opposite cubicle.
Detective Anthony Watts has been with the police department for twenty-five years, a detective for the last twelve. I’m considering him as my next suspect as I sit down and flick on his lamp. There’s a photograph here. Watts and his wife sharing a happy moment together. Jesus, these people get happy and some prick has to take a picture as proof.
Once again I begin to see things for what they are. Watts has that wrinkled look that comes with being sixty. He has gray hair, but not a lot of it left. I’m trying to imagine him having the strength to fight Daniela, let alone strangle her, but I can’t do it. So I try to imagine him raping her in the way she’d been raped. Can’t see him doing that either. Watts just doesn’t have it in him. Daniela didn’t have him in her.
I cross him off the list. Turn off his lamp. Push his chair back into place.
Eight suspects. I’m beginning to enjoy myself.
The center aisle, once it reaches the end of this floor, branches into a T formation. I go left, directly to Detective Shane O’Connell’s cubicle.
Here I don’t even bother sitting down. O’Connell, a forty-one-year-old detective with the ability to solve cases that involve signed confessions and not much more, broke his arm three weeks before the murder. His arm had been in a cast when Walker was killed. Even if he did have the strength to do this, there were no suggestions of plaster fibers found on the body or on the bed.
Seven suspects.
The next stop and two cubicles along for me is Detective Brian Travers. I slip in and flick on his desk lamp. No photographs of family here-all I’m seeing are swimsuit calendars. This year’s, last year’s, and the year’s before that. I can well understand his hesitancy in throwing away the old calendars.
I flick back through last year’s calendar. Look at the date Walker was murdered. He hasn’t marked anything on it. I flick through an old desk calendar and see the same thing. There isn’t any note saying “Kill bitch tonight. Buy milk.”
I open the desk drawers and rummage around. Look through files, folders, any scrap piece of paper, but there is nothing here relevant to the case. I find nothing to suggest his guilt. Or his innocence. I listen to his phone messages with the volume turned down low. I tip back the trash can under his desk, but it’s empty.
Travers is in his midthirties. He has a lean and strong body. Just under six feet, he has the type of casual good looks that easily attract women and could get him off on a rape charge with the He’s so clean cut he could have any woman he wanted defense, which juries still fall for. He doesn’t have a wife, and if he has a girlfriend, unless she’s Miss January, he hasn’t put up any pictures of her.
I put a question mark next to his name.
Still seven suspects.
I continue on my merry way and sit down behind the desk of Detective Lance McCoy. I start out with the same procedure I used in Travers’s cubicle. McCoy is in his early forties, married, with two kids. The photograph telling me all this sits in a small frame on his desk, center stage. Other pictures hang on the walls of his cubicle. His wife looks ten years younger than him. His daughter is quite attractive, but his son looks like a moron. McCoy is a dedicated family man, I can tell just by sitting here in his extremely tidy cubicle. Small mottoes are pasted around the place, on coffee cups and notepads and plaques: Work to live not live to work, and Sloppiness leads to a path of depression. I look for but can’t find one that says The only good bitch is a dead bitch, so I can’t have him as my lead suspect. I can’t find any notes that he’s made on the case. I put a small question mark next to his name.
Seven suspects. Isn’t this supposed to be getting easier? I check my watch. It’s nine thirty-five, but my internal clock tells me it is only eight thirty, so something must be out of whack. When I enter Detective Bill Landry’s office-yes, an office, not a cubicle-I confirm that my watch spoke the truth. Like Schroder and many of the other detectives, Landry is involved with trying to solve other crimes and finding other killers. A few months ago bodies were found in a lake in a cemetery, making me not the only serial killer in town-which, I have to say, is actually pretty annoying. It would have been great to have been the only one, just as it would have been great to have been the first. Before recently, the country had only ever seen one serial killer, and that was a guy who had a thing for killing prostitutes, and that was twenty years ago, a guy by the name of Jack Hunter who the media called “Jack the Hunter,” a cute allusion to Jack the Ripper.
Of course being the optimist, I can also see the positive side of there being another serial killer on the loose. It keeps the police busy.
Landry has been helpful by making a list of notes that point out how different the Walker scene is from the others. He wouldn’t do that if he were the killer. In fact his notes have the word copycat at the top of the first page, with a ring around it and a question mark next to it.