Mania (2 page)

“Whoa there,” the policeman said. “What’s the rush, buddy?”

Several other policemen turned to look, their faces impassive. The plainclothes policeman in front of Nick—a tall, young man with a slightly pudgy face, dressed in a rumpled jacket and tie—alone appeared concerned. He held Nick by the shoulders, cataloging the cuts and bruises on his face.

“My name is Detective Adam Stolie,” he said. “Hey—don’t I know you?”

Nick shook his head. His throat was thick, and he couldn’t seem to find his voice.

“Slow down there,” the detective said. “You’re Nick Wilder, aren’t you? The photographer from the
Telegraph
. You’re so beaten up, I almost didn’t recognize you.” The detective glanced behind him at one of the other policemen. “Hey, Brady,” he said. “You want to come over here, give me a hand?”

A patrolman, shorter and thinner, broke free from the group of incongruously chatty policemen. Detective Stolie was studying Nick. “You want to tell me what you’re doing here?”

Nick looked over at the long black bag on the stretcher. The orderlies were strapping it down with wide blue polyester straps, latching them closed with steel buckles. His eyes filled with tears.

“That’s my brother,” he heard himself say. “That’s Sam.”

He twisted to one side, trying to free himself. Stolie released his grip and let him go, and Nick fell to his knees next to the stretcher. The orderlies stopped what they were doing and took a small step backward.

“Open it up,” Stolie said. Hesitating, one of the orderlies reached across Nick and unzipped the top of the bag.

Sam’s eyes were open, unseeing. Nick couldn’t make sense of his brother’s face. It had been badly slashed. His cheek was hanging in a flap off the bone. His mouth was a bloody pulp, nearly unrecognizable. His teeth had been kicked into his throat. His hair was plastered to his forehead with a dark black, bloody scab. A gelatinous goop was oozing from his ears.

Nick hardly noticed. He was staring into Sam’s open, lifeless eyes, crying uncontrollably. “What the hell are you doing?” Nick heard the wild shout. He didn’t understand, though, that the voice belonged to him. “Why’d you put him in this bag?” His hands were ripping at the heavy black polyester, trying to pull his brother out from the body bag. “Can’t you see? You’re going to suffocate him.” He turned on the orderlies, then, holding his bloody hands up toward the officers in supplication, found Detective Stolie with his eyes. “He can’t breathe. Damn it, help me!” His voice rose into a scream. “You’re going to kill him. Please, help me get him out of here!”

One month earlier, at the beginning of November, Nick had been woken up just before dawn by the buzzing of his cell phone. Despite how wintry it was outside, the building’s heat was set too high, and Nick’s cramped studio was hot and stuffy. He woke up disoriented, not certain what was happening. When the phone buzzed again, the dim light from its LCD screen gave shape to the dark room. Nick shielded his eyes and, raising himself onto an elbow, picked up the phone, becoming vaguely aware at the same time of the staccato rattle of the wind against the thin window panes. Recognizing the number, he settled back into bed and closed his eyes, then at last brought the phone to his ear.

“Officer Tyler.”

“My man, Nicholas.” The policeman sounded wide awake. No doubt he had been at the station through the night. “Sorry to wake you.”

Nick ignored the apology. He was used to these calls.

“I thought you’d want to know. I’m just about to dispatch a couple of units out to Kent. You know the Peck Bridge?”

“Sure.”

“There’s a body there. They say it’s a pretty bad sight. Something to see.”

Nick was pushing himself up onto the side of his bed. “Has it gone out on the radio yet?”

“You know I always call you first, my man.”

“What time is it?”

The police dispatcher didn’t answer. He was laughing without mirth as he hung up the phone.

The sky was beginning to lighten into a white blanket of mist twenty-five minutes later as Nick’s old white Toyota sputtered and choked to a stop near the Peck Bridge, on the outskirts of Seattle. The engine died when Nick stepped on the brake. Rather than try to restart it, he let the car roll silently to the shoulder of the two-lane road, then yanked on the emergency brake.

Outside, it was crisp and cold. There weren’t any buildings along this stretch of the road. The landscape was barren and gray. The trees that lined the bank of the river had lost their leaves, and their branches looked naked and sharp. Nick walked the rest of the way to the flat, nondescript bridge. Down beneath him by the river, a team of policemen were sealing off the area, running police tape from stakes they had planted in the wet soil. Even though their light was no longer necessary, a few of them were still carrying flashlights, the lamps burning yellow holes into the thin fog. As Nick watched them, a white Channel 11 news van pulled to a stop on the bridge. The passenger window rolled down, and a heavily made-up woman leaned her head out, holding her coiffed hair carefully in place. “Sometimes I think you must drive in with the cops,” she said to Nick.

Nick glanced back at her over his shoulder. On camera, the makeup made the woman look older. In person, Nick thought, she looked like a young woman with too much cream on her face. He noticed a smear of rouge in one of her eyebrows. He didn’t bother saying hello. “I don’t have the equipment to carry around that you do, Sheila.”

“So what’s it like down there? They letting the media in?”

Nick was noticing the hostile way the driver of the van was eyeing him. “I just got here. I don’t know.”

“Well, we’ll see you down there, Nick.” The window closed, and the TV van pulled forward, searching for a place to park and set up. Nick felt the woman’s eyes on his back as he crossed the street.

Looking for a path down to the riverbank, he walked to the edge of the bridge, then took a step into the thick brush. The soil was muddy, and his feet sank with every step. He felt the mud seep into his shoes, then through his socks. These were his newest running shoes, his orange and black Nikes. He would have to clean them when he got back home.

The highest-ranking cop on scene was a beat officer Nick hadn’t met before. They were still waiting for the homicide detectives to arrive from headquarters downtown. “What do you have?” Nick asked the cop.

The officer pointed toward the body. Nick could smell the coffee the man had been drinking a few minutes before. “As far as we can tell, she was murdered somewhere else. Her body’s cold. The killer must have brought her out here to dump the body.”

“Who was she?”

The cop sized him up. “You’re with the
Telegraph
, right?”

Nick showed him his press card.

The cop read it and, satisfied, handed it back. “A hooker—a streetwalker from downtown. First and Second Avenue.”

“Who found her?”

The cop shrugged. “A couple of kids on their way to pick up papers. You know, for their paper route.”

“They still around?”

“We got ’em in a van up on the street.”

“Can I ask them a few questions?”

Again, the cop shrugged. “It’s a free country.”

“You got a name for her yet?”

“Claire Scott, we think. She was reported missing a few days ago. Someone’s on their way out to ID her now.”

“You mind if I take a look?”

“Be careful not to trample anything until Homicide gets here,” the cop said. “But one or two pictures won’t hurt, I guess.”

“Thanks.”

“Just tell Benson I sent you over.”

Nick was aware of the tracks his footsteps left in the muddy ground as he walked toward the body. No one stopped him as he approached. Maybe because the victim was a prostitute, Nick thought. No one cared. Aware of the damage he was causing to the crime scene, though, Nick himself stopped about fifteen feet from the body. When he could smell it. He stared at the pattern of ugly blue and purple bite marks the killer had left in the whore’s yellowing skin. He raised his camera to his eye, using his telephoto lens to bring the naked corpse closer to him. The apparatus made a satisfying click as he noticed the blood matting the tuft of hairs at the woman’s vagina. Nick found himself blinking as he took the camera away from his face, swallowing to keep himself from becoming sick. The killer had entered the woman with a blade.

Turning away, trying to forget the small cloud of flies buzzing above the rotting flesh, laying their larvae in the prostitute’s wounds, he caught sight of another set of tracks in the muddy soil. He let his eyes follow them until they disappeared into the tall grass and nettles feeding off the river. Noticing something unusual about the footsteps, he looked back at the tracks he himself had left, deliberately comparing them. He raised his camera again and snapped a few pictures of the muddy footprints. Then he backtracked, retracing his steps away from the body.

The cop who had let him pass was busy turning Sheila back from the crime scene. Nick waited for him to explain that her crew would compromise the evidence.
But you let him through
, Sheila said, pointing toward Nick. The officer’s face remained impassive.
Maybe I shouldn’t have
, he said. Up at the bridge, a convoy of five or six cruisers was pulling to a stop, lights flashing, splashing the river valley with waves of electric color.
That’s Homicide now
, the cop said to the TV crew.
You talk to them. As of now, the crime scene’s sealed, and I’m going to have to ask you to step back. Come on now, you, too,
he said to Nick.
Step back up to the road.

“Let me ask you something,” Nick said as he approached the officer again.

The officer didn’t respond directly. “Just keep walking.”

“You take a look at the set of footsteps leading up to the body?”

“Yeah, sure,” the officer said, irritated.

“You notice anything odd about them?”

“Like what?”

“Go take a look at them again,” Nick said. “You’ll see. Whoever left them wasn’t wearing shoes.”

“How do you know?”

“Go take a look at them again,” Nick repeated.

He passed Detective Adam Stolie without saying hello. The detective had his hands full. He glanced at Nick without noticing him. A teenage boy was walking in front of him, threatening to break away from the group of policemen and to run down the embankment toward the body half hidden in the grass. Stolie grabbed him by the shoulder to restrain him.

“Yo, Daniel,” the detective said. “Slow it down, would you? We don’t even know it’s your mom yet, okay?”

Nick stopped at the edge of the bridge. He propped his camera on the low concrete barrier to steady it, then zoomed in on the body. Ten minutes later, he was able to snap a few good pictures of the boy identifying his mother, his face drawn, destroyed.

It began to rain as Nick left the crime scene. Sheila was helping the Channel 11 crew stow the camera equipment into the back of the van. As he walked past in the direction of his car, he smiled at her, but he didn’t slow down.

“You know,” she said, finding her voice, “I saw you the other day. At the press conference at City Hall.”

Nick was already past her. He recognized that she was just trying to keep him there, but he stopped anyway. “Did you?” He had no recollection of her being there.

“Yeah. I was—well, I was going to ask you if you wanted to get lunch sometime—or whatever.”

Nick realized that he had never really looked at her. Her makeup was so thick that it was beginning to crack like the floor of a desert. Instead, though, Nick became aware of the blush of her skin underneath. “Sure,” he said. “That would be nice. Hey—I’d better get going now—I’ve got to get these pictures uploaded if I want them to hit the afternoon edition.”

“Yeah. Sure.” Sheila smiled beneath her oily mask.

Walking on, Nick flinched a little, trying to erase the image of Sheila’s awkward approach from his mind.

Back at his car, he looked up at the sky as he kicked off some of the mud caked to the soles of his shoes. In the last week, the weather had turned. It had gone from late summer to autumn. The rains would get heavier soon, the nights would get longer and colder. Without the sun, the chill would never fully leave the air.

The sight of the mutilated corpse had shaken him. Unlocking his car, Nick decided to stop at the Starbucks he frequented near his apartment for a coffee before heading in to the paper. He wanted time to settle himself, and he could just as easily upload his photographs onto his laptop and send them into the office from there, using the café’s wireless link. He twisted the key in the ignition and flicked on the windshield wipers, unconsciously squeezing his arms against his ribs, tightening his fingers around the plastic steering wheel as he pulled away from the curb.

Lost in his thoughts, haunted by the vision of the corpse lying butchered in the wet grass, Nick had no way of knowing that just a few minutes later Sara Garland would fall into his life, unexpectedly, with the certain grace of a diver swooping without a splash into a deep pool of water.

Beyond the plate-glass windows of the Starbucks, the sky was so low and gray that street lamps were still burning at ten in the morning. A fierce wind was blowing, whipping brown and yellow leaves down the broad street, tossing heavy drops of freezing rain in handfuls against the thick window panes. The café was packed with students from the University of Washington. The line stretched nearly to the door. Nick had been lucky to snag the table in front of the gas-burning fireplace. Unsteady still, he was staring at the screen of his small computer, oblivious to the voices rising and falling around him.

When a green-eyed girl with Nordic blond hair stood in front of his table and spoke to him, Nick hardly noticed her. She was only one more of the rumpled, tired-looking students milling around the room, waiting for an empty table. The blond-haired girl put her slender ivory hand down next to his laptop and leaned closer to him.

“Is anyone sitting here?” she repeated.

His interest piqued by the smooth texture of her skin and her long, delicate fingers, Nick looked up at her. The first thought that crossed his mind was that he had never seen a more beautiful woman. The tall, svelte girl smiled at him, and Nick found himself smiling back at her, stunned by the radiance of her eyes. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “No one.”

“May I?” She rested a hand on the back of the chair opposite Nick, but politely waited for him to respond.

Nick shrugged.

“It’s a good place to sit,” she said, slipping into the chair. “Right in front of the fire.”

As Nick pulled his laptop back to clear a space for her on the table, he realized that she wasn’t carrying a coffee.

“I just came inside to get out of the rain,” she said, reading his gaze. “I left my house this morning without my coat. It’s cold out there.”

“Yeah. Miserable.”

Drops of water glistened in the girl’s hair like tiny diamonds. She was wearing a thin white blouse, and her shoulders were wet with rain. Nick’s eyes were drawn despite himself to the lace straps of her bra, visible through the sheer material.

“When I saw this place by the fire, I thought I’d grab it.” She glanced out the slick window at the dark, windblown street. “I hope you don’t mind.”

Nick shook his head.

“Will you hold this chair for me, then?” She twisted around in her seat and checked the line in front of the counter, just as one of the servers raised his voice and announced,
Keith, your non-fat cap’ is ready. Keith.
“I think I’ll get a cup of coffee.”

Nick was unable to take his eyes off her as she walked to the counter. A number of other heads turned as well as she walked past. She was an extraordinarily beautiful woman. Assured and elegant, flawless. Nick wondered who she was and what she did. He imagined that she was at least twenty-five—too old to be an undergraduate at the university. She had distracted him from his computer, and he was still watching her a few minutes later when the server behind the counter called her name:
Sara. Your tall low-fat latte is ready
. She smiled at him on the way back to the table, and Nick felt his face flush. Once again, he was aware of the people watching her as she walked. She moved gracefully, and she seemed nearly to be glowing in her white blouse and tight jeans.

“So your name’s Sara,” he said as she sat back down across from him.

She was holding her coffee up to her lips, blowing on it. “Good job, Detective. Sara Garland,” she said. “And you’re Nick, I take it?”

Nick felt his eyebrows rise in surprise.

“It’s on your cup,” Sara said, smiling lightly. Nick followed her eyes down to the cup of coffee on the table between them, where indeed the server had scrawled his name with a thick black marker.

“Yeah. Nick Wilder.”

“I hope I’m not interrupting you. It looks like you’re pretty busy.”

Nick glanced at his laptop. The screen had long since gone black. “No. I’m glad for the break.”

She looked at him critically, trying to gauge his age as he had judged hers. “You’re not a student. A graduate student, maybe. Or a teacher?”

“I’m a reporter,” Nick said. “With the
Seattle Telegraph
.”

“That sounds glamorous.”

Nick shrugged. “Not really. It’s a lot of hours, and it doesn’t pay much. The truth is you’ve got to be a little insane to work a job like this.”

“What are you working on now? Are you writing an article?”

Nick shook his head. Sara’s question had brought the image of Claire Scott’s corpse back into his mind. The contrast with the woman sitting in front of him was unsettling. He closed his eyes and brought his hands to his face, running his fingers through his hair, becoming aware at the same time how disheveled he was. He had left his apartment a few hours before without showering or shaving.

“Are you all right?”

Nick noted the concern in Sara’s eyes. “Is it that obvious?”

“You look upset, that’s all.”

“I have to admit,” Nick said, “I am a bit. I’m sorry. I’ve been with the paper for a couple of years now. I should be used to it.” He was surprised by his own candor. “I’ve been working as a photographer. I see things sometimes. It still gets to me.”

Sara was peering at him.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

Sara dismissed his apology. “No—don’t be sorry.” She hesitated. “It was a body. A murder. Wasn’t it?”

“Yes.” Nick was taken aback. “How did you know?”

“I have a confession to make, too.”

Nick waited.

“I didn’t sit down here because of the fire. I was standing behind you for about two minutes before I approached the table. You were pretty absorbed in your computer.”

“You saw the pictures.”

Sara nodded. “I have to tell you,” she said, smiling wryly. “I was pretty relieved just now when you told me you were a reporter.”

Nick took a fresh look at the beautiful woman in front of him, intrigued that she would sit down with him after seeing the images on the screen of his laptop.

“You took those pictures today?”

Nick lowered his eyes.

“So you were there. Standing right there, I mean. Almost on top of her.”

“Yes.”
Close enough to smell her
.

“No wonder you’re freaked out.”

From the corner of his eye, Nick noticed Sara’s gaze traveling down his legs, taking in the mud drying on his shoes.

“It scares
me
”—Sara said, shivering slightly—“and I wasn’t even there. To see a body like that, it must be pretty frightening—no matter how many times you’ve been around crimes like that before.”

“It is,” Nick admitted.

“I didn’t really get a good look at the pictures. But I could see how violent the crime was. The guy who did it must have been crazy.”

“That’s not what scares me.”

Sara was silent, waiting for Nick to meet her stare, waiting for him to continue.

“It scares me more how sane he was.”

Again, Sara shivered. “What do you mean?”

Nick regretted that he had let them dwell so long on the murder.

“Tell me,” Sara said, prodding him.

“How the same person can be one thing at night,” Nick said at last, “and then something else during the day.”

Nick read Sara’s confusion.

“The guy stabbed this woman so many times—so brutally—she was nearly unrecognizable,” he explained. “This same guy, though, takes the time to gather her up and sneak her out to the bank of this river to dispose of the body. That’s what scares me. That the same person can somehow reconcile the two realities.”

“Because you think maybe we’re all capable of doing the same thing.” Sara’s eyes hadn’t left his face. “That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”

“To some degree—yeah, maybe.”

“Sane during the day. Killers at night.”

Once again, Nick looked down at the table.

“You think you’re capable of it?”

Nick turned Sara’s words over in his mind. He found himself wondering whether she was asking him a question.
The truth is you’ve got to be a little insane to work a job like this
. His own voice seemed to resonate in his head, and he felt his face flush.

“It still sounds pretty amazing,” Sara said into the awkward silence. “Your job, I mean.”

“And what about you?” Nick asked her, determined to change the subject. “What do you do? You’re not a student either, are you?”

A slight darkness clouded Sara’s expression. There was something overwhelmingly
light
about Sara, he realized in contrast. Her hair was silvery blond. Her eyes were translucently green. Her teeth were dazzlingly white. Her skin was ivory. Still, as radiant as she was, there was something mysterious about this woman in front of him, too, something elusive he couldn’t define. “No,” she said, “I’m not a student, either. Is it so obvious that I’m too old?”

Loosening up a little, Nick looked up and down her body, from the top of her head to her toes. After all, she had invited him to. “Not exactly,” he said. “It’s not that you look too old to be a student. You seem too focused.”

“That’s the last thing I am.” Sara’s laugh was genuine, and Nick felt himself relax even more. “Just say it, I look too old to be a student.”

He refused the bait and pushed the compliment another way. “Too polished anyway.”

“I’m an actress,” Sara said. “Well, off and on, anyway. Off right now. That’s why I’m back here in Seattle.”

“You’re from Seattle originally?”

“My parents live in Bellevue.”

“You’re staying with them?”

Sara shrugged. “For a while. Maybe I’ll get my own place one of these days. Or maybe I’ll just head back down to LA.”

“You’ve got something to head down there for? A project, I mean—a movie?”

Sara shook her head. “I’ve been lucky enough, I guess. But I haven’t pursued it as much as I should. I’m thinking maybe I’ll do something else entirely. Get into business, I don’t know.”

Nick’s cell phone vibrated, and he glanced down at its screen. Recognizing Laura Daly’s personal line from the
Telegraph
building, he remembered the staff meeting this morning, the first one for the month of October, when assignments would be handed out by the editors. The senior editor would no doubt be wondering where he was. “Excuse me,” Nick said. “I’ve got to take this.” He pressed a button on his phone and raised it to his ear. “Laura?”

“Were you planning to grace us with your presence, Nick?”

“I know. I’m sorry.” Nick threw a quick, embarrassed smile at Sara.

“Don’t sweat it. We’ll talk when you come in. Listen, you somewhere close? There’s something I’d like you to do now. A couple of blocks from here. It can’t wait. You got a pen?”

Nick cradled the phone against his shoulder and searched through his bag for pen and paper. After scrawling down an address, he snapped the phone shut and looked apologetically at Sara. “I’ve got to go.”

“Oh, really? That’s too bad.” When Sara glanced down at her watch, Nick noticed a gold and platinum Rolex loose on her wrist, its face set with diamonds. Not exactly the watch of a struggling actress.

“I wish I didn’t have to. It’s work.” He closed the lid of his laptop and gathered his belongings from the table, scooping them into the soft leather shoulder bag he carried as he pushed his chair back from the table.

“Well, I enjoyed meeting you, Nick.”

“It was good to meet you, too,” Nick said, in a hurry.

“You’re not forgetting something?”

Nick stopped to make certain he had grabbed all his things from the tabletop, then looked up at Sara, meeting her friendly gaze. He wasn’t certain what she was referring to, and his expression reflected his puzzlement.

“I thought maybe you were going to ask me out.” Sara’s tone was playful, but she dropped her eyes, bashful.

Nick ran his fingers across his unshaven cheeks as he tried to assess her sincerity. He hadn’t been expecting the approach.

“I have a weakness for shy guys,” Sara said, as if she were answering an unspoken question.

“I thought the pictures might have frightened you off.”

Sara laughed sweetly. “The pictures are why I’m here.”

Nick measured her for a few more seconds, once again intrigued by this woman. There was more to her than her pretty face, he thought. Her appearance camouflaged it at first, but then, as much as her beauty validated her, the juxtaposition served too to heighten the observation.
She was dangerous
. At last, Nick relaxed into a smile. “I suppose I could ask you out for a coffee. But we’ve done that already, haven’t we?”

Sara met his eyes. “It’ll have to be something more, then.”

Repeating the innocent words in his mind, Nick felt a sudden thrill pass through him, taking his breath away. “That sounds promising.”

“Give him an inch and he takes a yard. I meant dinner.”

“Really?”

“You sound tentative. You don’t want me to see who you are after dark?”

“Now you’re just mocking me. I’m shy, that’s all. You said it yourself. That’s what makes me so irresistible.”

“You go to work now,” Sara said. “Here’s my number.” She reached across the table and took Nick’s phone from him, tapping a few numbers onto the display and then saving the number under her name. “Give me a call. I’m free tonight, if that’s not too soon.”

“No,” Nick said, wondering how he would be able to wait that long. “It’s not too soon. I’m free tonight, too.”

Sara watched him as Nick found his way through the crowded coffee shop to the exit. It was an unguarded moment for her, and her face reflected what she felt inside. Had he turned back around, her wistful expression would have confused him. Standing behind him as she had worked up her nerve to approach him, looking over his shoulder at the photographs this self-possessed man had taken that morning at the crime scene, Sara hadn’t expected to like him. Not like this. Not this much.