Chapter 1 #3
5
Holly pulls the last of the Global Insurance forms in front of her, sighs, grabs her pen—these forms have to be filled out by hand if she wants a chance at finding the missing trinkets, God knows why—and then puts it down. She picks up her phone and looks at the letter from Bill Wilson, whoever he might really be. It’s not her case and she’d never poach it from Isabelle, but Holly can feel her lights turning on, nevertheless. Her job is often boring, there’s too much paperwork, and right now cases—good ones, engaging ones—are thin on the ground, so she’s interested. There’s something else, too, even more important. When her interior lights come on… she loves that. Adores it.
“This is not my business. Shoemaker, stick to thy last.”
One of her father’s sayings. Her late mother, Charlotte, had a thousand pithy aphorisms, her father only a few… but she remembers every one of them. What is a shoemaker’s last, anyway? She has no idea and quashes the urge to google it. She does know what her last is: filling out this last form, then checking pawnshops and fences for a bunch of jewelry stolen from a rich widow in Sugar Heights. If she can find that stuff, she’ll get a bonus from Buster the Talking Donkey. Which he’ll probably poop out of his butt , she thinks. Very reluctantly.
She sighs, picks up her pen again, puts it down, and writes an email instead.
Iz—You’ll know this already, it’s pretty obvious, but the guy you are looking for is smart. He talks about the Blackstone Rule, which isn’t in an uneducated man’s vocabulary. I believe the innocent should be punished for the needless death of an innocent might be a cuckoo sentiment, but you have to admit it’s a nicely turned phrase. Balanced. All his punctuation is perfect. Note the use of colons in the heading and how he uses Cc in reference to Chief Patmore. In the old days, when I was doing office correspondence, that stood for “carbon copy.” Now it just means “also sent to,” and is commonly used in business. Suggests to me your Bill Wilson may be a white-collar guy.
Now as to that name, Bill Wilson. I don’t think he picked it out of a hat. (Assuming he is male.) It’s not impossible that he met the murdered man, Alan Duffrey, in AA or NA. (Also assuming it’s Duffrey the letter-writer is on about.) You might be able to reach out to someone who goes to those meetings. If not, I have a source who’s in NA and quite open about it. He’s a bartender (of all things), six years clean and sober. He, or someone you can tap, might be able to spot someone clean-cut and well-spoken. Someone who might even have said something in a meeting about Duffrey, or “That guy who got stabbed in prison.” The anonymity aspect of AA and NA makes this a long shot, but it might be possible to locate the guy this way. Slim chance, I know, but it’s a line of investigation.
Holly
She puts her cursor on the send button, then adds a few more lines.
PS! Did you notice he misspelled Lewis Warwick’s first name? If you catch someone you think might be your man, don’t ask him to write his name. I repeat, this guy isn’t stupid. Ask him to write something like, “I have never liked Lewis Black.” See if he spells it Louis. You probably know all this, but I’m sitting here with nothing to do.
H
She reads this over, then adds PPS! Lewis Black is a comedian . She considers this and decides Izzy might think that Holly thinks Izzy is stupid, or a cultural illiterate. She deletes it, then thinks, She really might not know who Lewis Black is , and puts the line back in. These sorts of things torture her.
Bill Hodges, who founded Finders Keepers, once told Holly that she over-empathized with people, and when Holly replied, You say that like it’s a bad thing , Bill said, In this business, it can be .
She sends the email, and tells herself to get off her buttinsky (that one’s all Charlotte Gibney) and start looking for the missing jewelry. But she sits where she is a little longer, because something Izzy said is troubling her.
“No, not Izzy. Barbara .”
Holly is computer savvy—it’s how she and Jerome bonded—but she’s old-school about appointments and keeps a datebook in her purse. She hunts it out now and pages through it until she gets to the end of May. There she has written Kate McKay, MA 8 PM. Maybe? MA standing for Mingo Auditorium.
Holly goes to the movies fairly often since Covid abated (always wearing her mask if the theater is even half-full), but she rarely goes to lectures and concerts. She thought she might go to the McKay lecture, though. If, that is, she didn’t have to wait in line too long, and assuming she could get in at all. Holly doesn’t agree with everything McKay espouses, but when she talks about the sexual abuse of women, Holly Gibney is right there with her. She herself was sexually abused as a young woman and knows few women—including Izzy Jaynes—who were not, in one way or another. Also, Kate McKay has what Holly thinks of as strut . Never having been much of a strutter herself, Holly approves of that. She supposes she had some strut when it came to the Harrises, but that was mostly a matter of survival. Also luck.
She decides she’ll sort out the double-booking mystery later. Because she still has a tendency to blame herself for things, she supposes she might have written down the wrong date. Either way, it seems to be her fate to be in the Mingo Auditorium on the night of Saturday, May 31st, and as much as she admires Kate McKay’s strut, on the whole she’d rather be with Barbara.
“Jewelry,” she says, getting up. “Must find jewelry.” The Global Insurance forms can wait until later.
6
Izzy has an idea how the First Lake City Bank chief loan officer should look, maybe from a brochure she got in the mail, or a TV show. Slightly pudgy but well-groomed, nice suit, cologne (not too much), pleasant smile, all ready to say, How much do you need?
Cary Tolliver is not that man.
She and Tom find him snoozing in the fourth-floor lounge with a copy of a detective novel called Toxic Prey open on his chest. Instead of a natty three-piece suit, he’s wearing a tired hospital robe over wrinkled pajamas with Hello Kitty faces on them. His hollow cheeks sport a salt-and-pepper beard scruff. His hair is half-long and half-bald. Plates of yellowish eczema shingle the bald spots. The skin of his face not covered with the patchy beard is so white it’s almost green. His body is skeletal except for the bulge of his belly, which is huge. Like a mushroom ready to sporulate , Izzy thinks. There’s a wheelchair on one side of him, an IV pole on the other. As they draw closer, Izzy realizes that Tolliver doesn’t smell very good. Actually, that’s not exactly true. Actually, he stinks.
They split apart without talking about it, Tom standing by the wheelchair and Izzy next to the IV pole, which is drip-drip-dripping some clear liquid into the back of Tolliver’s hand.
“Wake up, Cary,” Tom says. “Wake up, sleeping beauty.”
Tolliver opens his eyes, which are red and rheumy. He looks from Tom Atta to Izzy and back to Tom again.
“Cops,” he says. “I told that County Attorney everything I know. Wrote him a letter. Fucker sat on it. I’m sorry Duffrey got killed. That wasn’t supposed to happen. I have nothing else to say.”
“Well, maybe a little more,” Tom says. “Show him the letter, Iz.”
She takes out her phone and tries to hand it to him. Tolliver shakes his head. “I can’t take it. Too weak. Why can’t you let me die in peace?”
“If you can hold that book, you can hold this,” Izzy says. “Read it.”
Tolliver takes the phone and holds it close to his nose. He reads the Bill Wilson letter and then hands it back. “So? You think this guy believes I’m the guilty one? Fine. Even though I tried to take it back, fine. Let him come and kill me. He’d be doing me a favor.”
Izzy hasn’t thought that “Bill Wilson” might consider Tolliver the one guilty person… although she’s betting Holly already has. She says, “We want your help. Bill Wilson is almost certainly an alias. Can you tell us who might have written this? Who was close enough to Alan Duffrey to make such a threat?”
Tom says, “The letter might be bullshit, but if it isn’t, you could be saving some lives.”
“I’m no kiddie freak,” Tolliver says, and Izzy realizes he’s stoned to the gills. “I told the other cops that. And the DA guy, that fuck. The stuff they found on my computer, I only saved it so they’d believe me. Dumped it, then brought it back when I got sick. Duplicates of most of the stuff I sent to the Duff.” When he says the Duff , he raises his upper lip in a doglike snarl, and Izzy sees some of his teeth are gone. Those remaining are turning black. He really does stink: eau de piss, eau de merde, and eau de mort . She can’t wait to get away and breathe some clean air.
“He had mags as well as the crap on his computer,” Tom says. “I’ve talked to Allen and read the file on the way over here. One of them was called Uncle Bill’s Pride and Joy . How’s that for disgusting?”
“If you did it—” Izzy begins.
“I did, and that fuck ADA Allen knows I did. Sent him a letter in February, after I got my diagnosis. Explained everything. Told him stuff that wasn’t in the papers. He sat on it. Duffrey should be out. Allen’s the guilty one.”
“ If you did it,” Izzy repeats, “we don’t care how you did it. We care about who might have written this letter.”
Tolliver doesn’t look at her. He keeps his eyes on Tom. Izzy isn’t surprised; when she works with a male partner, male subjects usually discount her. Women do, too.
“I bought the magazines on the dark web,” Tolliver says. “Snuck into his house—the basement bulkhead was unlocked—and stashed them behind his furnace.”
“Tell us who was close to Duffrey,” Izzy says. “Who might have been pissed off enough to—”
Tolliver goes on ignoring her. It’s Tom Atta he’s talking to, and gathering steam. “You want to know how I got the stuff onto his computer? I explained it all to Allen, but that fuck paid no attention. So once I made my peace with dying—sort of, I guess as much as anyone does—I told it to Buckeye Brandon. That guy listened. I sent Duffrey a notice that purported to be from the USPS. Misdirected package. Anybody knows that’s phishing, grandmas know it’s phishing, but this dumbbell—supposedly smart enough to be chief loan officer, but about as smart as a busted light switch—this dumbbell went ahead and clicked on the link. Then I had him. I sent him a zip file tucked in halfway through his tax file. But I never meant for him to die. That’s why I came forward.”
“Not because you found out you were dying?” Even though this isn’t why they’re here, Iz can’t help herself.
“Well… sure. That had something to do with it.” He looks at her briefly, then switches his attention back to Tom. “Some of the blame has to go on the guy who stabbed him, right? All I wanted was for him to be on the Register when he got out. That promotion should have been mine. It should have been mine and he stole it.” Incredibly, Tolliver begins to cry.
“KAs,” Izzy says. She thinks of tapping Tolliver on one thin shoulder to redirect his attention but can’t quite bring herself to do it. The stink of him has got her stomach sudsing. “Known associates. Help us out and we’ll leave you alone.”
“Talk to Pete Young in the loan department. Claire Rademacher, the chief cashier. He was buddy-buddy with both of them. Or Kendall Dingley, he’s the branch manager.” That doglike lift of the upper lip. “Kendall’s dumb as dirt, only got the manager job because his grandfather founded the bank and his uncle runs the Fire Department. There’s a park named after old Hiram Dingley, you know. I should have sent Kendall some kiddie stuff, too, everyone would have thought the Duff and the Dingbat were in it together, but I didn’t because I’m a good guy. I know you don’t believe that, but at heart I’m a good guy. The Duff used to suck up to the Dingbat like crazy. That’s why he got my promotion.”
Izzy is writing down the names. “Anyone else?”
“Maybe he had friends in his neighborhood, but I wouldn’t know about th—” He grimaces and lifts his pregnant midsection. He lets out a trumpet blast of flatulence, and when the smell reaches Izzy, she thinks it’s strong enough to blister paint.
“Christ, that hurts. I need to go back to my room. The morphine pump will have re-set by now. Roll my chair, will you?”
Tom leans forward into the stink and speaks low. “I wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire, Cary. If you’re telling the truth, you got an innocent man sent to prison and he got stabbed and it took him a day to die. You think you’re in pain? He was in pain and didn’t deserve it. I’d punch you in that grotesque gut of yours, but you’d fart some more.”
“My wife left me,” Tolliver says. He’s still crying. “She took my kids and left me. I did it for her as well as me, she was always bitching about we can’t afford this and we can’t afford that, and who’ll bury me? Huh? Who’ll bury me? My brother? My sister? They won’t answer my emails. My mother said—”
“I don’t care what she said.”
“—she said, ‘You made your bed, now lie in it.’ How shitty is that?”
He lifts his hips and produces another trumpet blast. Izzy says, “Let’s get out of here. We’ve got all he can give us.”
“I made a clean breast,” Tolliver is saying as they leave. “ Twice . First to that ADA fuck, then to Buckeye Brandon. I didn’t have to do that. And now look at me. Just look.”
Izzy and Tom go back to the nurses’ station. The old vet in the white rayon uniform is filling out forms. Izzy says, “He wants to go back to his room. He says by now his morphine pump will have re-set.”
Without looking up, the old vet says, “He can wait.”
7
May, and the weather is beautiful.
Not far from the city is a woodsy suburban township called Upriver. At its northern edge is a little pocket park where a few people are doing meditation poses that might (or might not) be called asanas. Trig doesn’t care what they’re called. They are looking toward the horizon, not at him. That’s fine. He got a burger at a drive-thru but tossed it on the passenger seat after a couple of bites. He’s too nervous to eat. The letter he sent to the police was a warning. This is the real deal.
There’s a question of whether he can do it. Of course there is. He thinks he can but understands he won’t know for sure until the deed is done. He killed squirrels and birds with a pellet gun as a boy, and that was all right. Good, in fact. The one time his father took him deer hunting, Trig wasn’t allowed to carry a real gun. His father said, Knowing you, you’d fall in a hole and blow your foot off. Daddy said if they saw a deer, he would let Trig shoot, but they never saw one, and he was pretty sure his father wouldn’t have allowed him the gun even if they had. Daddy would have hogged the shot to himself.
And to break his cherry by killing a man? Trig understands that once he’s stepped over that line, he can never go back.
The street running past the pocket park has an amusing name: Anyhow Lane. It’s a dead-ender. Trig has been here three times before and knows that the Buckeye Trail passes near the end of the street. The Trail is eighteen miles long. It used to be a railroad line, but the tracks were taken up thirty years ago and replaced by a wide, county-financed asphalt path that winds through trees and bushes, finally emerging beside the turnpike and ending on the outskirts of the city proper.
There’s a little beaten earth square at the end of Anyhow Lane with a sign reading NO PARKING AFTER 7 PM. On each of his previous reconnaissance visits, a dusty Komatsu bucket-loader has been parked there in defiance of the sign, and it’s still there this afternoon. For all Trig knows, it’s been there for years and may be there for years to come. It will give him cover for his car, and that’s all he cares about. Beyond it is a copse of woods marked by signs reading BUCKEYE TRAIL and DO NOT LITTER and WALK/BIKE AT YOUR OWN RISK.
“Hey Daddy, hey Daddy.”
His father is long gone, but Trig sometimes talks to him anyway. It’s not comforting, exactly, but it feels lucky.
Trig parks behind the bucket-loader and takes a backpack and a trail map from the rear seat of his Toyota. He shrugs into the pack and puts the map in his back pocket. From the center console he takes a snub-nosed Taurus .22 revolver. He slips it into his right front pocket. In his left pocket is a slim leather folder containing thirteen slips of paper. He passes picnic benches, a litter basket full of beer cans, and a painted post with a laminated map of the Trail. He has seen plenty of walkers and bicyclists on the Trail on his previous scouts, sometimes in pairs or trios—no good for his purpose today—but sometimes alone.
Today I may not see anyone by himself , he thinks. If I don’t, that will be a sign. “Stop while there’s still time to stop, before you step over the line. Once you’re over the line, you can never come back.”
This makes him think of an AA mantra: One drink is too many and a thousand are never enough .
He’s wearing a brown sweater and a plain brown gimme cap pulled down almost to the brow-line. There’s no logo on the cap for a passerby to remember. He walks east rather than west, so the sun won’t illuminate the part of his face that shows. An elderly couple on bikes passes him headed west. The man says hello. Trig raises a hand but doesn’t speak. He keeps on. About a mile ahead the woods thin, and there the Trail skirts a housing development where kids will be playing in backyards and women will be hanging up clothes. If he gets that far without seeing someone walking alone, he’ll pack it in. Maybe just for today, maybe for good.
Sure , Daddy says. Go on and flinch, you fucking flincher.
Trig ambles along, one hand on the butt of the revolver. He’d whistle, but his mouth is too dry. And now, from around the next curve in the trail, comes the solo walker he was hoping for (also dreading). Well, not completely solo; there’s a Standard Poodle on a red leash. He always imagined his first would be a man, but this is a middle-aged woman wearing jeans and a hoodie.
I won’t do it , he thinks. I’ll wait for a man, one without a dog. Come another day . Only, if he means to carry through with his mission—all the way through—he must include four women.
He’s closing the distance. Soon she and her dog will be past him. She will go on with her life. Make dinner. Watch TV. Call a friend on the phone and say, Oh, my day was fine, how was yours?
Now or never , he thinks, and takes the map from his back pocket with his left hand. His right is still clutching the revolver. Don’t blow your foot off , he thinks.
“Hello,” the woman says. “Lovely afternoon, isn’t it?”
“It sure is.” Does he sound hoarse, or is it just his imagination? Must be the latter, because the woman doesn’t look alarmed. “Can you show me exactly where I am?”
He holds the map out. His hand is shaking a little, but the woman doesn’t seem to notice. She steps closer, looking down. The Standard Poodle sniffs at Trig’s pantleg. He takes the revolver out of his pocket. For a moment the hammer catches on the pocket’s lining, but then it comes free. The woman doesn’t see it. She’s looking at the map. Trig puts an arm around her shoulders and she looks up. He thinks, Don’t flinch .
Before she can pull away, he places the short muzzle of the Taurus against her temple and pulls the trigger. He’s test-fired the gun and knows what to expect, not a loud report but more of a snap, like breaking a dry stick of kindling over a knee. The woman’s eyes roll up to whites and the tip of her tongue pokes out of her mouth. That’s the only horrible part. She sags in his encircling arm.
Blood is trickling from the hole in her temple. He puts the muzzle of the Taurus over the powder-blackened hole and shoots her again. The first bullet didn’t come out, it stayed in her darkening brain, but this one does. He sees her hair flip, as if lifted by a playful finger. He looks around, sure someone is watching, must be watching, but there’s no one. At least not yet.
The poodle is looking up at its mistress, whining. The red leash is puddled at its front feet. The poodle looks at Trig, its eyes seeming to ask if everything is all right. Trig slaps its curly rump with his free hand and says, “Go!”
The poodle jumps and runs twenty or thirty feet down the path, out of slapping distance, then stops and looks back. The leash is a red ribbon trailing behind it.
Trig drags the woman through the bushes edging the trail and into the thin woods, looking both ways until he’s under cover. Cars are passing nearby, but he can’t see them.
The dog , he thinks. Someone will wonder why it’s out with its leash trailing. Or it will come back. I should have let it go .
Too late now.
He takes the leather folder from his pocket. His hands are trembling a lot now, and he almost drops it. There’s a dead woman at his feet. Everything she was is now gone. He fumbles through the slips of paper. Andrew Groves… no… Philip Jacoby… no… Steven Furst… no. Where are the women? Where are the goddam women ? At last he comes upon Letitia Overton. A Black woman, and the woman he’s killed is white, but it doesn’t matter. He may not be able to leave a name with all his targets, but with this one he can. He puts it between two fingers of her open hand, then turns and makes his way back to the Trail. He pauses, still in the bushes, looking for hikers or bikers, but there are none. He steps out and heads west, toward the parking area and his car.
The poodle is still standing there at the end of its trailing leash. As he approaches, Trig waves both hands at it. The dog cringes, then skitters away. When Trig comes around the next curve, he sees the dog standing with its forepaws on the asphalt and its rear paws in the bushes. It backs away at the sight of him, waits until Trig goes by, then dashes back the way it came, its leash trailing. It will find its mistress and like as not begin barking: Wake up, Mistress, wake up! Someone will come along and wonder what that fool dog is barking about.
Because the Trail is still deserted, Trig breaks into a jog, then an all-out run. He reaches the parking area without being seen, slings his pack into the backseat, then sits behind the wheel, gasping for breath.
You need to get out of here. His thought, Daddy’s voice. Right now.
He turns the key and a chime bings, but nothing else happens. His car is dead. God is punishing him. He doesn’t believe in God, but God is punishing him nevertheless. He looks down at the console and sees he left the shifter in Drive when he shut off the engine. He shifts into Park and the car starts. He reverses out from behind the bucket-loader and drives back down Anyhow Lane, resisting the urge to speed. Slow and steady , he tells himself. Slow and steady wins the race .
The asanas, or sun salutes, or whatever they are, seem to be done. Men and women are chatting or returning to their cars. None of them look at the man in the brown cap as he drives by in his utterly forgettable Toyota Corolla.
I did it , he thinks. I killed that woman. Her life is over .
There’s no guilt, only a dull regret that makes him think of his last year drinking, when every first sip tasted like death. That woman was in the wrong place at the wrong time (although the right place and time for him). There’s a book she’ll never finish, emails and texts she’ll never respond to, a vacation she’ll never take. The Standard Poodle may get fed tonight, but not by her. She was looking at his map, and then… she wasn’t.
He did it, though. When the time came, he didn’t blow his foot off and he didn’t flinch. He’s sorry the woman in the jeans and hoodie had to be a part of his atonement, but he’s sure if there is a heaven, that woman is already being introduced around. Why not?
She is one of the innocent.