Jasper
The park looks completely different at eight in the morning. I left Delilah at the café once Sammie had arrived, knowing that Sammie will have a lot of questions around why I was there before opening.
The grin on her face said she had already figured it out, but I didn’t want to hang around for the conversation and I have work to do.
Mist still sits low over the water, a woman in a red coat is throwing a ball for a spaniel down by the bandstand, and the path past the boat sheds is clear and visible. My car is the only vehicle in the gravel lot, exactly where I left it, the windows gone opaque with dew.
I walk the park before I drive anywhere.
Eleven yards between the last lamp and the one that picks up after the bend.
Daylight doesn't improve it. The tarmac curves left and drops half a foot, and the hedge on the water side has thickened over the winter until a man could stand beside it and stay invisible from both ends of the path at once.
Men like the creep from last night have routines. Ironic really. It’s routines that help them target their victims, so you’d think they’d know now to have a routine themselves.
The corner of the lot under the oak holds a dark patch where his engine sat long enough to drip.
He parked nose out, facing the exit, in the one space the lamp doesn't reach.
I photograph the oil, the tire impression in the softer ground at the edge, and the tree where I put him, where a strip of bark the size of my palm has come away.
The bottle and the syringes rest against my ribs the whole drive back over the bridge, wrapped in a napkin from her counter.
Demyan answers on the second ring without saying hello. I give him the plate, the make, the scrape down the driver's side deep enough to be showing primer. He asks whether I want it fast or quiet. Both, I tell him, and he makes a sound that means he'll manage one of them by lunch.
The scrape is the part that will finish this.
A car like that is a man's only car, and a man who parks nose out under a tree at the dark end of a lot is a man who worries about being able to get away quickly.
He'll need the panel done before the rust sets in, and he'll want it done cheaply, which means the two yards on the eastern road out of the city rather than a dealership.
Mechislav has a friend has been painting cars on that road since before I could drive.
By eleven I'm parked outside the second of them with a cooling coffee in the cup holder, which is when Delilah's message arrives.
A photograph of a Victoria sponge, taken at an angle that suggests she was holding the phone in one hand and something hot in the other.
The top is perfect. Underneath it, sent eleven seconds later, a second photograph of the same cake from the side, where the bottom inch has gone the color of a burnt match.
Beneath that: three attempts. THREE.
My thumb flies over the phone’s keyboard, deletes, starts again, and eventually manages: save me the burnt end.
The reply comes back before I've locked the screen. Kimmie’s already claimed it, but, you can have the previous two.
The next photo makes me laugh out loud, surprising me. I can’t remember the last time I actually laughed.
Her underwear is still in my jeans pocket, which I noticed when I dressed in her bedroom this morning with her humming in the shower on the other side of a thin wall.
My hand slips in every few minutes, rubs the fabric between my finger and thumb, then pulls out again when I scold myself for being distracted.
I head in to ask my questions.
The smell of spray paint hangs thick in the air all around the building and I shake my head. Their ventilation must be crap, I can’t imagine the headaches they’ll be dealing with all the time working here.
Gio recognizes me as Mechislav’s cousin immediately, walking over to me with a smile and his hand outstretched.
"Federov," he says, pumping my hand. "How can I help?"
I ask about the gray car, the dent, the owner. Gio nods once and leads me over to a desk covered in papers and rags. He pushes a few items around before revealing a diary.
"Yes," he says, stabbing the column under Tuesday next week. "I remember him. He argued about the estimate but paid in cash anyway. John Smith."
John Smith. Paid in cash.
I don’t bother holding in the sigh.
I thank him, hand him a fifty for his assistance, and sit in the car with my hands on the wheel until my pulse comes back down to something usable.
I find my hand is back in my jeans pocket, fondling the milky cloth, thinking about the way she tastes.
Then I start the car and move on to the next part of my day.
The library on Foster Street keeps the regional papers going back two years.
The woman at the desk is happy enough to let me sit with them because I ask about the local history section first and mean it enough to sound convincing.
Three assaults in five weeks, Bill said, and Bill reads every page of the daily paper the way other men read scripture.
Only I know that sometimes, cases like these don’t get linked together as quickly as they get reported on.
The first one didn't make the regional paper at all, only the city edition, four lines under a story about a school funding vote.
A woman on the canal towpath in February, walking home from a late shift.
The second in March, a park in Bellingfell on the near side of the bridge.
The third and fourth both here, three weeks apart, both on the north path of Community Park between eight and half past nine in the evening.
He is moving outward from the city in a widening arc and coming back to the places that worked. Every one of the victims was a woman alone, on foot, after dark, on a route she used often enough that somebody could learn it.
I sit in the quiet of that room with my hands flat on the table and let myself understand it properly.
He came back to Community Park a third time. He parked in the space without a lamp. He waited with a syringe already prepared, and he got out of his car when Delilah came down onto the path at the same time she comes down onto it every night.
She was next. It’s not even a vague possibility. She was the next one, and the only thing between her and that hedge was a man who happened to arrive early because he'd wanted the extra minutes.
The librarian asks if I'm all right. Apparently I've been sitting without moving for some time. I tell her the print is small and she laughs and offers me a magnifier. I take it and read four more pages I don't need to, so she has something ordinary to remember about the man at the table.
Eduard's kitchen at four o'clock smells like toast and washing powder.
There's a padded mat on the floor by the doors. Lilah is on her back on it under a plastic arch with birds hanging from it, working extremely hard at getting one foot into her mouth, and Eduard is standing at the counter shoveling cold leftovers into his mouth.
"Gotta eat when I can," he says around a mouthful of noodles.
I have no words. He is the head of the Federov family and I’ve never seen him more…normal…in my life.
Becoming a dad changed him. He is still formidable when he needs to be. But when it’s just him and the baby…I don’t know, it’s like he is elevated or something. More than what he was before and a thousand times better for it.
He puts a cup of coffee in front of me and doesn't ask what I want to talk about, which is his way of telling me he already knows.
So I give him the park first. The syringes, the bottle, the towpath in February, the widening arc, the bodyshop on the eastern road and the confirmed booking for the car. He listens without interrupting once, and when I finish he sets the fork down and looks out at the garden for a while.
"How close," he says.
"Eleven yards."
He nods slowly. "And you let him drive away."
"I didn’t have everything then." I had the syringes…the bottle of whatever drug he prefers to use, but I also had Delilah not all that far behind me, watching.
"That wasn't a criticism." He picks up the fork again. "My father would have taken him in the park and we would have learned nothing. Handle it however you need to. Tell Natan what you need."
Lilah has lost hold of her foot and is making a sound of pure complaint about it. Eduard crosses, hooks her up off the mat one handed, and she settles against his chest immediately.
"There's something else," I say.
"I know."
"You don't."
"Jasper." He turns around with his daughter chewing on her fist. "You have been driving to that park most evenings since November.
Dmitri picked your car up from the eastern gate in December when the alternator went and you told me you'd been at the yard, which is in the opposite direction, and you have never once in your life been careless with a lie.
So either say it out loud or drink your coffee. "
There's no good way in, so I go straight through the middle.
"I'm with Delilah. As of last night. I'm not looking for permission and I'm not asking whether it's convenient for the family."
"Fine," he says. "Good."
"I'm telling you because I intend to marry her."
That stops him. Not for long. The fork of noodles stays where it is and his eyes come up to mine. Whatever moves across his face is the closest thing to open surprise I've seen on it since the delivery room.
"She knows this?"
"She knows I'm serious. She doesn't know the rest." I take a sip of coffee just to have something to do. "It's been one night. Saying it out loud to her would frighten her. She'd smile at me to spare my feelings, and then she'd go and bake something at two in the morning about it."
The corner of his mouth goes. "She would."
"I want children with her. I want the house and the school run and the whole ordinary catastrophe of it.
I've wanted it since a wedding last June where she spent forty minutes explaining cake temperatures to me and I forgot to be bored.
" I stop, because that's more than I've said about myself in a year.
"And the reason I never went near her is this. " I gesture around with my free hand.
Eduard shifts Lilah to his shoulder and rubs a slow circle on her back with his thumb.
"You think you'd bring the dark side of what we do to her."
"I know I would. It's already there. The biggest reason I didn’t finish him last night," I say, shaking my head, "is because I didn’t know if he was there because he is the sick fuck from the papers or because she is close to Sammie, and therefore a way to you. To the family."
"You're not wrong to think it." He says it without any softening at all, which is the only reason I can stand to hear it.
"I sat in a room and told Vladislav Popov exactly what Sammie was worth to me.
Every man in that room understood that hurting her would end them, and every man in that room also understood that hurting her would hurt me.
I gave them the map on purpose. I have never once regretted it. "
"That's a strange kind of comfort."
"It isn't a comfort. It's an arrangement.
" He looks down at the top of his daughter's head.
"This life doesn't get gentler for her because you keep her at arm's length.
It only means she's alone when the shit arrives.
Delilah was in that park last night whether you love her or not.
The difference last night was that you were there when she needed you most, whether she knows it or not. "
He moves to the large fridge and plucks out a small bottle of milk, setting it into a jug of warm water.
"I always knew she'd be family," Eduard says. "Sammie knew before I did. Valeria has been making jokes right in front of you. The only person in this town who didn't know was you, and I assumed you were being slow on purpose because it was the only part of your life you could take slowly."
"That's approximately accurate."
"Then stop." He holds Lilah out to me without warning, and I take her awkwardly into my arms. She reaches her little chubby hand up to my face and looks up at me with her father's gray eyes. "Marry her. Have this. It's the only thing we do that's worth anything in the end."
Lilah puts her hand flat on my mouth.
"She agrees," Eduard says.
My phone goes at twenty past five, on the drive back along the water with the light coming off it low and hard.
Demyan, five words. Ray Mosby. Address to follow.
It arrives thirty seconds later, a street in the eastern quarter I know well enough to picture, four floors of flats above a shuttered carpet showroom with a service road behind it and no cameras on either end.
I pull into the lay-by past the boat sheds and sit with the engine running, reading the name until it stops meaning anything.
I put the car in gear.