Chapter 15 Somebody Here Knows Fuses — Ii
I have a rule. When a scene tells you two things that can’t both be true about the same person, you don’t get to pick the one you like.
You have to hold both until the scene breaks one of them.
And I had a person in this town who was two things that could not both be true.
The woman who backed a whole sidewalk to the exact safe distance before the trucks came at Larch and Delaney and then went to pieces on cue when they arrived.
The woman a hundred people would swear can’t reach into a drawer without narrating her own death.
The woman whose witness statement I’d taken, ninety seconds of the most useless nervous babble I have ever transcribed, with one observation buried in it so precise that a trained investigator would have been proud to make it and she made it by accident, apparently, between apologizing to my clipboard and apologizing for apologizing.
“Don’t laugh,” I said.
“I’m not going to laugh.”
“Birdie Vance.”
Pike laughed. She laughed the good clean laugh of a woman who has watched Birdie Vance flee a moth across a parking lot, and I stood there and let her, because it was, genuinely, the funniest sentence I have ever said out loud with a straight face.
The hardware clerk. The one who put up the community-board flyer last spring reminding everyone that she is “very sorry” but she “cannot” get anything down off the high shelves anymore because of her “nerves.” The jumpiest woman in the county. My render-safe ghost.
“You want me,” Pike said, wiping her eyes, “to write in a report that a woman who I have personally seen ask a teenager to walk her to her car because there was a raccoon two blocks away is our secret ordnance expert.”
“I don’t want you to write anything. I’m not there.
I’m nowhere near there.” That was true. One precise observation, one careful backing-up of a crowd, that is not a case, that is a coincidence with good manners, and I know the difference.
“I’m telling you the scene has two experts in it and I can only find one candidate for the second one, and I hate the candidate, and I can’t get rid of him. ”
“Her.”
“Her.” I looked down the alley one more time, at where the tidy line of harmless parts still sat waiting for the tech, and I thought about hands.
Whoever did that had steady hands. Not brave hands, not showy hands.
Steady, in the specific way that only comes from being terrified in the right place enough times to build a callus over it.
You can’t fake that. You especially can’t fake it while also being the town’s most reliable comedy act about being afraid of literally everything.
Unless.
Unless the being-afraid-of-everything is the fake, and the steady hands are the real thing, and somebody in my town has spent I-don’t-know-how-long making very sure the two never get seen in the same place at the same time.
I didn’t say that to Pike. It was too big and too thin at once, a suspicion with the wingspan of a fact and the weight of nothing.
I drove back to the office and I pulled every scene report from the last month and I laid them out on my desk like the tidy little line of parts in the alley, and I looked for the shape of a person who is always just close enough to help and never once caught helping.
She was in three of them. Present, unremarkable, accounted for, adorable. The witness who saw nothing. The bystander who backed up the crowd. The neighbor two doors down who called nothing in.
I ran the reasonable objections, because that’s the discipline, you argue against your own theory harder than anybody else will.
Coincidence: three fires in one small neighborhood, of course a local keeps turning up, the whole point of a neighborhood is that the same faces are always in it.
Fair. Except the same face wasn’t just present, it was always positioned.
At Larch and Delaney she’d been on the far curb before the trucks, which is a choice, not a coincidence.
At the second fire a responding guy remembered a “little scared lady” who’d been standing exactly where you’d stand to keep the wind at your back.
Coincidence doesn’t stand upwind on purpose.
Coincidence doesn’t have a preferred distance.
Second objection, the one I liked less: maybe she really is just a jittery woman with good survival instincts, and I’m a man three years into a small town with a case I can’t crack, reaching for the strangest person in it because strange is easier to arrest than beloved.
That one had teeth. I’ve watched investigators fall in love with a suspect for no better reason than that the suspect was interesting, and I did not want to be that man, and I made myself sit with the possibility that Birdie Vance was exactly what a hundred people said she was and I was inventing a bomb tech because I needed one to exist.
But the box in the alley wasn’t invented.
Somebody with real training had knelt on that concrete and taken a live thing apart in the dark and left no trace but the doing of it.
That person existed. The only question was whether I’d found her or was about to embarrass myself, and there is a specific dread in not being able to tell those two apart.
I am not a man who wants things. I decided a while ago that my life was the work and that this was a fine and honest arrangement and I have kept to it.
But I sat there past dark with the reports going gray in the last of the window light, and I noticed that I wanted, badly, unprofessionally, to know who had really opened that box, and I noticed it was not entirely the investigator doing the wanting, and I turned off the lamp before I could think about that part any harder.