CHAPTER TWELVE
For five days, the apartment learned the shape of Kate’s silence.
It learned the ritual of the blinds staying sealed to their teeth; of light refusing her by day, and her refusing it back.
It learned a new layout: the coffee table’s slow eclipse beneath paper plates and curling pizza lids; the drawer she opened and closed and opened again; the space on the sofa where her body wore a shallow into the cushion like a river.
Kate’s phone learned, too. It learned to shut up. It learned that battery-saver could stretch three days if you only touched it to clear a notification and then thought better of it. It learned the shape of ‘Do Not Disturb’ against the morning.
She tried, in those first couple of days, to make sense of her feelings.
To understand what it meant, to have learned after all these years that her father’s killer had a name, a face, a story of sorts.
To know that he was locked up, and would die behind bars.
And that the thing she’d most feared — feared to the point of only dimly being able to think it —was not true. Cox was not her father’s killer.
Which didn’t mean he wasn’t involved, of course.
She tried, on more than one occasion, to pick up the phone and talk to her mother. But she couldn’t do it.
It was partly because she didn’t want to upset her, had no desire to interrupt the quiet and tidy rhythms of the life her mom had built. Her mother had accommodated herself to the raw facts of her widowhood, made peace with the unknowns and the absence of answers.
What good would it do, to rake it all up, to tell her that things were not like this, but like that? She was a resilient woman, but would that be enough? Did Kate have a duty to tell her mother, or did she, in fact, have a stronger and more binding duty to protect her?
At other times, she told herself that she was acting out of cowardice. She couldn’t face the conversation, so she dressed it up as concern. But in between those two extremes, another truth proclaimed itself clear and loud. She just didn’t know what she felt.
She suspected, in fact, that she felt nothing. And it wasn’t the numbness of grief, or shock, masking something raw and red underneath. Kate felt nothing, because it changed nothing. Her father was gone. No revelation could change that.
And ultimately, when she picked up Gadd’s journal, it was not to find something out, but to see if it actually made a difference to her.
On Tuesday night, she had stuffed it into an already overfilled drawer, where it bothered her.
On Wednesday she walked past the semi-open drawer many times, ignoring it, or trying to.
On Thursday she sat down on the floor and pulled the drawer open with both hands and saw it there like a threat.
It was a nothing-looking thing. No name stamped on the spine, no gilt, none of the trappings of the sacred text it kept pretending to be.
The cover was faded black, the corners gone soft.
When she opened it, the first page rasped.
The handwriting was small and neat and tyrannical, like something an angry nun had written in the margins of a convent school exercise book.
She took one look, then put it back.
On Friday, she surrendered.
After that, time became a long hallway with no doors.
And she did feel things; the first was anger.
Not at him — not yet; not at the man who had written this, whose name she now did not want to think, as if names could summon.
Anger at the thing itself, at how it had been allowed to exist. If this belonged to Evidence — and in some perfect world, everything did — it would be bagged, logged, indexed, guarded; it would be treated like a bomb with a very slow fuse.
Topju had given it to her like contraband. No receipt. No form. Pushed it over the table in the diner, his voice low and urgent and careful as if he was passing contraband.
She wished she’d refused it, like the bullet.
She’d said, more or less, the phrase her training had taught her to say when an asset offered something outside protocol.
But she’d gone ahead and taken the thing, anyway.
She wished she could have protected herself, wrapped caution around her like a Kevlar cloak and just walked away.
Instead, she had felt the weight of the book and not put it down.
Now she put her glasses on and read.
It began innocently enough.
The first page was taken up with the Ten Commandments, written in a careful hand as if for a copying exercise.
She turned the page.
The second was the Commandments again. The writing was tight and exact. It read like the work of a child just like her: praised for neatness, diligence, the kid whose notes everyone wanted to borrow before the quiz.
Turn. This time, he’d only made it as far as the Fifth Commandment. Honor thy father and mother. Under it, a list of names: St. Augustine, St. Jerome, Maimonides, Luther, Calvin. No commentary beside the names. It was like an invitation list, an agenda for a weekly meeting of theologians. Weird.
It wasn’t until page twelve that the texture changed. The neatness loosened — just a fraction, at first, but enough to make her squint as she read onwards. The content changed more sharply: a sentence that didn’t stop, it became a rope whose end had been cut and whose strands had frayed:
far and away I wish them that have eyes to see was not does not I AM WHO I AM the killer suffer AM thy helpmeet right handed sail for truly you laud a golden dish fatted calf.
That was how it began. And it continued in much the same vein. She blinked. She re-read the page, line by line, as if it was one of those trick pictures that contains a sailboat.
“Okay,” she said aloud, to her own walls, because silence needed breaking. “Good.”
She said that, because she felt relief, leafing through the next dozen or so pages. Relief that it was all rubbish, gibberish, the waste-product of a diseased mind. She didn’t have to worry about any of it. There were no secrets here, no awful truths to behold or flee from.
On a couple of pages, the margins had a drawing. A little cow, well-executed in ballpoint pen. The spots were not dots; they were small finger-stabs of ink like wounds.
She made tea. She drank it cold. She ate a slice of hard pizza. She washed both hands in the kitchen sink and looked at the dirty water and had the thought she always had: if only there was a way to wash a mind.
She returned to the book, because she might as well. Flipped on, one page, two, three…
Isaiah: ‘and he laid the fire upon my mouth.’
She stopped.
The sensation was not memory exactly but something nearer to it, like a dream you have had so many times you can recite it.
She knew that phrase like she knew her slippers.
She went to her shelf and pulled down the file-topped box that was the first Commandments case, the one that had begun in flames in a church, with a man she saw in the corner of her eye when she woke sometimes and refused to turn her head for fear that the corner might be real.
She flipped through until the page fell open in her hands. Isaiah. Margin note: burned mouth = purified speech.
Except — and here was the problem — those words had never been public.
Despite there being unhelpful leaks, the encrypted quotes left with the bodies had never made it into the press.
They were not in the op-eds that asked if America had fallen in love with religion again as long as it had a knife in its hand.
Those were inside phrases. The kind you only knew if you were part of the investigation. Or… Or what?
She returned to the journal.
Joshua: ‘and it may be a witness between us.’
Malachi: ‘and I will come to you in judgement.’
Then purpled margins, where at some point water had spilled onto the paper and dried into a map of an archipelago, and again, under the stain, the phrase that turned her body colder than the room:
Spotted calf.
This is nothing though, she told herself.
This is a man playing cut-up with language, like William Burroughs, like a freshman with a crush on Kerouac.
This is a phrase that exists in the Bible because of Jacob, because of goats, because of early animal husbandry, because a man made a deal with a crooked uncle and won.
Coincidence is not conspiracy. If you want a word badly enough, you can find it in the dictionary.
Like those Ten Commandments, Jacob pops up here and there, two, maybe three thousand years later: him and his fabulous coat and his jealous brothers.
Except Robert Denton, Cox’s pupil had called Kate that, kneeling on her chest in a house that smelled of detergent and rot, when the knife nicked her collarbone and left a white scar like chalk.
Spotted calf. Because of her freckles. He had said it with a sort of admiration that was worse than hate.
She had known, even as the blood ran warm down to her waistline, that the nickname would be the thing.
Not the wound. Not the fear. The word. It would follow her, lay down beside her when she slept. Something she’d never forget.
But still… the Ten Commandments, a few, often quoted biblical quotes, a chance coincidence… It was possible. It was not the time to overreact. No need to assume some line of continuity from Cox to Gadd, or vice versa, or both ways.
“Okay,” she said again, because that seemed to help.
She turned the page.
The first series of murders had cleaved to the First Commandment — jealousy of gods, worship of the wrong.
The second series had moved to the next — idol worship in the art world.
The third had been a perversion of reverence, making God into a brand on dead skin.
In each case, the crime scenes had been furnished with quotations: heavily encrypted, the first time around, she remembered that cracking them had been a case all of its own.