Capture (19 page)

“Good, Nick. Just one more thing, this Rasta, he don’t say not even one word to you. Like he’s dumb. You understand?”

Exley nods and Vernon heads for the door. “Vernon?”

“Ja?”

“Why are you helping me?”

Turning to face him, Vernon says, “Because, Nick, you don’t deserve this shit. Simple as that. You one of the good guys.”

Exley crumples at last, like he’s made of bits of straw that the wind’s got hold of, and sinks down onto the sofa, holding his head in his hands.

As Vernon goes out to lock the bag in his truck he has to stop himself from whistling a happy tune. The perfection of the moment almost makes him believe that there is a God up there somewhere.

“I could have stopped it,” Exley says, sitting forward on the sofa.

The very black police captain, his skin shining with sweat, leans in close and says, “Stopped what, sir?”

Exley stares at him, shaking his head. Good question. Could have stopped his daughter drowning if only he’d paid attention? Could have stopped the fall of the blade and spared Caroline’s life?

Exley understands that he’s experiencing a form of psychic bleed-through, that his memories of Sunny drowning are cross-talking to the events of tonight. As the procession of uniformed men move around him, as they did three nights before, the deaths of his child and his wife blur and merge and rip the boundaries of his increasingly fragile sense of reality.

It is only when he looks past the black man and sees the cops in the kitchen standing over Caroline’s body that he knows hers is the death
du jour
.

“The stabbing,” Exley says, remembering that endless moment when he had the time to lower the blade, walk away and leave his unfaithful wife alive. “I could have stopped the stabbing.”

“How, sir?”

Exley, catching the eye of Vernon Saul who lumbers toward the deck, realizes that he has stepped out of character. That he is about to damn himself, so he lurches back into the role of the innocent man and tells the cop that if he’d come home five minutes earlier he could have stopped it. Tells him how he walked into the kitchen, his wife’s lifeblood leaking onto the tiled floor. How he confronted the intruder and sent him fleeing, but too late to save Caroline.

Just as he was too late to save his daughter. The gospel according to Vernon Saul lending these two tragedies the elegance of symmetry.

Leaving Exley a victim.

Free of blame.

Free of guilt.

The captain’s tired eyes grant Exley absolution and then the black man is gone and time ramps: the house goes from empty to full in a nanosecond. More cops. More medics.

A sallow man with a shaven head, standing alone on the deck, his outline warped by the glass door, turns to stare in at Exley. Then he too is gone, the medic who pronounced Sunny dead, and as a camera flash detonates, Exley sees him in the kitchen, hovering over Caroline, rolling off a pair of bloodstained latex gloves, the fingers stretching and snapping as he lets the gloves fall into his emergency bag.

Exley holds up his left hand. It is bandaged, his palm strapped tight, and he has a vague memory of this man attending to him, the smell of ammonia rising from his white coat.

A sound like frenzied bees startles Exley. The zipper of a body bag.

He sees Sunny’s white face swallowed by shiny black plastic, but the bag carried out past him is too big to hold a child, so it must be Caroline, bloody and cold, who lies inside.

Exley’s gaze is drawn to the darkness of the beach where his wife, sodden, hugging herself, circles Sunny’s body, and then she is in an embrace with Exley, a gush of blood spewing from her mouth, soaking his linen shirt, warm on the skin of his chest.

Exley shuts down, the sofa enveloping him like an Oldenburg soft sculpture, sensory overload tripping his circuits, leaving him close to comatose, oblivious to the men observing the post-death rituals around him. 

He goes so far away, so deep into himself, that he doesn’t hear the gunfire or the screams of the startled seagulls.

Chapter 27

It has been Vernon Saul’s night. If he’d written a script it couldn’t have gone better. The darkie captain—dressed in casual clothes like he’s come straight from home—is calling the shots, assembling his men on the deck. A bureaucrat not a cop, all he’s interested in is making himself look good, and a high-profile murder going unsolved will slow this monkey’s climb up the ladder, so he’ll be focused on closing this case fast as possible. It’s not about justice, it’s about statistics.

A numbers game.

Vernon, losing himself among the crime techs, listened as the darkie questioned Exley, who, with his bandaged hand and bloody shirt, seemed close to breaking. Fumbling for words. Rambling. Talking one minute about his dead daughter, the next about his dead wife.

But he gave the version they agreed on. Garbled, yes, but that made him all the more believable. A man in shock. A man living through a week of hell. But not a killer.

The captain instructs the uniformed cops to search the rocks on the right side of the beach, where Exley said the attacker fled, and Vernon watches as they slide and curse, battling over the slick rocks, flashlights bobbing. One man goes down, his holstered sidearm clanking against the stone.

Vernon walks out into the street, past the knot of cop vans and emergency vehicles, some of the medics sharing a smoke, one of them laughing softly. He starts his truck and drives down into the dead end, into the darkness. He cuts his headlights and checks that he isn’t being observed. Before leaving the truck he kills the dome light and steps out into the lace of mist that floats in off the ocean, feeling it damp on the skin of his face, making him even more alert.

He carries the plastic bag and finds the pathway down to the ocean by the faint light of the moon. It doesn’t enter his head for a moment that the mad Rasta may not be in his hideaway down by the sea. Just knows he’ll be there.

And he is.

Vernon smells the weed, ripe and rich, overlaying the odor of kelp.

He reaches the bottom of the path, his boots hammering on rock, and he sees the glow of the spliff. He unclips his flashlight and sends the beam at the Rasta, who squats in the bush, shielding his eyes, bobbing his dreadlocks.

“It’s me, my friend,” Vernon says, and the man shows his teeth in recognition.

Vernon stands over the lunatic and opens the plastic bag, tipping it so that Caroline Exley’s cell phone falls at the Rasta’s feet. The man stares at the phone and then up at Vernon.

Vernon mimes making a call. “Pick it up.”

Obediently, the Rasta picks up the phone and holds it out to Vernon, who ignores it, using the bag to grip the bloodstained blade of the knife, offering the handle to the crazy man.

The idiot is confused now. He puts the phone down on the rock, very carefully, protecting it from the lapping waves, and gazes up at Vernon, who stands holding the knife out to him.

“Take it,” Vernon says.

The Rasta jiggles and hops, comes halfway to his feet, but he grabs the handle firmly, pulling the knife from the bag, leaving a nice set of prints. Vernon wraps the plastic bag around his right hand and takes the knife back from the Rasta, holding it by the blade.

He lifts the flashlight to his mouth and grips it with his teeth, directing the beam toward his bare left forearm, his shirtsleeve rolled up to his bicep. Gripping the knife low on the handle so he doesn’t disturb the prints, the plastic rustling beneath his fingers, Vernon holds the tip of the blade above his left arm. He shakes the arm, loosening it, relaxing the muscles and the tendons, inhales deeply, exhales, then he brings the steel down hard and feels it bite into his flesh just below his elbow, dragging the knife toward his wrist, opening up a deep gash. Blood spurts and runs down his fingers and spatters onto the rock.

The Rasta watches Vernon, agitated, hair dancing. Vernon drops the knife at the man’s feet and the lunatic jumps back and comes into a low crouch. Vernon takes the flashlight from his mouth, holding it in the bloody fingers of his left hand, directing the beam toward the agitated man, unclipping his Glock with his right hand. The Rasta cowers, covering his face, shaking his matted hair.

Vernon shoots him twice. Head and heart. Dead before he slumps to the rock.

Vernon turns and walks back up to the road, his left arm throbbing, dripping blood. But he feels no pain, only elation, as he limps toward the shouting cops, their flashlight beams raking the night.

Chapter 28

A uniformed man shakes Exley awake and he sits up on the sofa, looking around the living room that is now empty of police and medics. He has no idea how long he slept.

“You have to come with me, sir,” the cop says.

So, Exley thinks, this is it. Already offering his wrists for cuffing.

But the cop is solicitous, apologizing in his brutal accent for waking Exley as he walks him outside and through the gate, down to where the road runs dead into the rocks. The area is crammed with police vehicles.

Exley’s escort leads him down a narrow path that carves through the dense bush, showing the way with a flashlight. Something scratches at Exley’s face, dislodging his glasses, and he holds out an arm to fend off the undergrowth.

He sees a glow through the foliage and then he steps into a scene straight out of a movie: searingly bright arc lights illuminate the flat rocks that rise from the ocean. A cold breeze blows off the water and ribbons of mist swirl in the beams.

A group of cops is gathered around a form that lies on a rock. Exley searches for Vernon Saul, but can’t find him.

The captain steps forward. “Mr. Exley, we believe we have the man who attacked you and your wife. Please come this way.”

He ushers Exley through the cops and Exley looks down at the body of a black man, shirtless, emaciated, dressed only in a pair of torn sweatpants, feet bare, toenails curling like talons. The dead man lies on his side, his arms flung out, the ocean tugging at his dreadlocks, setting them afloat and then releasing them back onto the rock.

Where the man’s left eye should be is a messy crater and something soft and pulpy oozes from the back of his skull, matting his hair, trails of pinkish blood mixing with the spume from the ocean. There is another wound in his chest, over his heart. Small and neat, just one dark trickle weeping from it.

Exley looks at the man’s face, lips drawn back from crooked, rotten teeth, the fringe of beard around his mouth matted with blood. Exley has never seen him before.

“Is this him, sir? The man who came into your house?” the captain asks.

Vernon Saul’s face swims out of the dark. He has a cigarette in his hand, exhaling a plume of smoke that hangs in the lights. Staring at Exley. Unblinking.

As Exley understands what Vernon has done, he feels his knees going and he wobbles. The captain grabs his arm and the cop who escorted him steps in and they lower Exley to the rock, setting him down beside the dead man. He stares up at the ring of faceless figures silhouetted by the arc lights.

The captain crouches. “Are you okay, Mr. Exley? Do you need medical attention?”

He shakes his head. “No, I’m fine. Sorry. Just a shock, seeing this man. Realizing what has happened.”

The captain says, “So, sir, you’re positively identifying him as the attacker?”

Exley looks past the cop, into Vernon’s eyes, and says, “Yes. Yes, it’s him,” knowing he is damned now, as surely as if he put the bullets into this man himself.

Chapter 29

Dawn gets as far as starting to pack for her and Brittany, grabbing their clothes from the closet and throwing them into a suitcase. She’s not gonna let them take her child away again. No ways.

Then she stops and it’s like all her strength—her fucken
spirit
—just drains out the soles of her bare feet and she sits her ass on the carpet, resting her elbows on her knees, staring down at the burn marks and the years of filth spotlit by the morning sun, the room already overheating.

She sits there crying, listening to the growl of the traffic and the horns of the taxis, one of the co-drivers yelling “
Caaaaaape Toooownnnnn
” as he passes by beneath.

Dawn wipes snot on the back of her hand and muffles her sobs, not wanting to wake Brittany, who lies sleeping on the bed, clutching the Barbie doll Vernon Saul gave her. Fucken Vernon, she blew all her airtime on him, leaving messages all through the night, each one more frantic than the last. Heard nothing from him.

Dawn dries her eyes on her T-shirt and lights a smoke, the match nearly dying on her she’s shaking so bad, sucks in nicotine—wishing, just for a moment, that it was
tik
—and sits and looks at her daughter, sees how totally and completely gorgeous she is with her tangled blonde hair and light skin.

Dawn pulls the clothes from the suitcase and packs them back in the closet. What the fuck was she thinking, anyway? She’s got no money.

Even if she did have the cash, where the hell did she think she and Brittany were going to go? Her family is poison, no ways she’s letting her kid near none of them. Got no friends to speak of—never learned to trust people enough to let them in close. They always want something from you, sometime, and that’s the God’s honest truth.

Her only lifeline was that psycho Vernon and it looks like she can forget about him. So, fucked is what she is. She don’t even have a job no more. Just took her kid and split last night after the thing with the social worker, still hours of her shift left. Got a voice message from Costa saying he’s had enough of her crap and she shouldn’t bother coming back and he means it this time.

As Dawn shuts the closet door one of its hinges screams and wakes Brittany, who sits up and rubs her eyes. “Am I going to work with you again, Mommy? Tonight?”