The Killing Lessons (16 page)

Valerie gathered enough consciousness to read the incoming on her phone’s screen:
Liza Terrill calling.

‘Liza?’ she croaked. ‘What’s up?’

‘Hey, Val,’ Liza said. ‘You still sleeping?’

Valerie looked at her watch. Six thirty. She should’ve been up half an hour ago. She’d forgotten to set the radio alarm. No poetry.

‘No, I’m good,’ she lied. ‘Anything wrong?’

Liza worked Homicide in Santa Cruz. She and Valerie had been friends since the Academy. These days they were lucky if they saw each other three times in a year, but whenever they did it was just picking up the conversation wherever they’d left off.

‘I’m fine. I might have something for you. Since you said you’re happy to clutch at straws.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Missing girl. Well, a
probably
missing girl. It’s only been twenty-four hours, and the guy who called it in is barely even a boyfriend. You told me you wanted anything like this as soon as it came in, so here I am, doing as I’m told.’

‘You think it’s more than a straw or you wouldn’t be calling,’ Valerie said.

There was a pause. ‘Yeah,’ Liza said. ‘I know. I wish I didn’t. But the fucking Machine’s been working since I picked it up.’

Valerie understood. The Machine. Cop sense. The inexplicable certainty. It was both a dread and a thrill. And it was coming from Liza even down the phone.

‘Let me grab a pen,’ she said. She was already halfway to the desk, her circuits rushing into life. ‘OK,’ she said, when she was seated, legal pad open in front of her. ‘Give me everything you’ve got.’

Claudia Grey. British national. Twenty-six years old. Living and working illegally in Santa Cruz.

Two photographs. The first from her passport taken when she was just eighteen. The second run off her roommate’s phone, taken only a couple of weeks ago: Claudia holding a glass of wine and looking straight into camera with a slightly exasperated expression. Dark hair cut in a soft, jaw-length bob. A look of warmth, humour and potentially cruel intelligence.

Valerie’s own Machine moved up a gear as soon as she saw it.

The afternoon in Santa Cruz was spent in four straightforward interviews. Carlos Diaz (the employer), Wayne Bauer (the bus driver), Ryan Wells (the boyfriend), and Stephanie Argyle (the roommate). Carlos confirmed that Claudia had left the Whole Food Feast at eight p.m. Wayne Bauer (plus the city bus CCTV) confirmed that she’d boarded at 8.17 p.m. and got off at the Graham Hill Road stop at 8.38 p.m. Ryan confirmed that she hadn’t made it to the party. Stephanie confirmed that she hadn’t come home. Somewhere between the bus stop and Ryan Wells’s, she’d disappeared.

Valerie showed all four interviewees, plus the staff at the restaurant, the image of the zoo footage suspect. No recognition. If the killer or killers had been shadowing Claudia they’d done it without being noticed by any of the victim’s people. She sent the Whole Food Feast’s CCTV material to Liza at the SCPD, who would pass it on to Valerie’s team in San Francisco. Valerie had hoped, too, for a camera angle on the parking lot, but the shot was only partial; at least a third of the bays were out of frame. None of the Feast’s staff recalled seeing an RV, but that didn’t mean there hadn’t been an RV there.

She worked her way through the guests who’d been at the barbecue, all of whom had driven there, with the exception of Ryan Wells’s brother and sister-in-law, who were staying with him on vacation. On the phone with guest number eight of fourteen, she caught a break.

Damien Court had arrived at the party on his Harley.

‘Yeah,’ he said, when she asked if he’d seen an RV en route. ‘Actually there was one parked on the hill. In a bad spot, too, just before the bend.’

‘I need you to show me where it was,’ Valerie said. ‘How soon can we meet?’

‘I just ordered short ribs,’ Damien said. ‘Like… in a couple of hours?’

‘No,’ Valerie said. ‘Like right now. Give me the name of the restaurant. I’ll come get you.’

Damien Court, Ryan Wells’s chief digital editor, was early thirties, tall, with soft brown eyes, a short dark ponytail and a goatee. He was also, by the time Valerie picked him up, in the heightened state people entered when they found themselves witnesses, when ‘crime’ stopped being something on a crime show and started being something in their lives. Valerie could feel the thrill coming off him in the car. The dark eyes a little wider than they’d normally be. The current of fear that ran through the innocent when dealing with the police, because the world was crazy and innocence was no guarantee against anything and after all they weren’t as innocent as they wanted to be. One of the first and most quickly wearying things you discovered if you were a cop was that everyone –
everyone
– reacted to you as if they had something to hide. Because everyone
does
have something to hide, her grandfather had told her. It might only be a sugar habit or kinky fantasy – but a cop shows up and it’s like the eye of God turned on them. It’s depressing.

‘I’d say about a hundred yards from here,’ Damien told her. They were slightly more than halfway up Graham Hill Road. ‘But that’s a rough guess.’

‘It’ll do,’ Valerie said. She didn’t want to drive over the site and fuck up any tracks. She’d called Liza and told her she might need a CSI team.

‘Are you even going to be able to see anything?’ Damien Court asked. It was almost dusk, and under the cedars almost dark. Valerie didn’t answer. Just pulled over and took the flashlight from the Taurus’s trunk. Gloves, evidence packets, tweezers, two sets of over-shoe plastics. ‘Put these on,’ she told him. ‘Walk behind me.’

She was excited. There was no other honest way to describe it. Racing up through her body’s exhaustion was the knowledge that this was – please God – a live case. Not a corpse. Not a too-late. Not another reiteration that they’d
got away with it
. Claudia Grey was – please, please,
please
, God – still alive. Which meant her life was in Valerie’s hands. A beating heart and a ticking clock. Valerie felt The Case stirring, the mountain of details and reports, the interview transcripts, the forensics data, the murder map, the wretched gallery of signature objects and most of all the dead women. And under the excitement her own nearness to collapse. The dregs of her fuel that would somehow have to be enough. That would have to be
made
to be enough.

‘I’d say about another twenty paces,’ Damien said.

‘OK. Stop. Stay there.’

She needed the flashlight. She went slowly, moved the beam back and forth across the asphalt and grass shoulder section by section. No substitute for CSI’s micro-scrupulousness, but the rhythm of the beating heart and the ticking clock were already embedded in her pulse. Every second was a second that moved Claudia Grey closer to death. It was as if she could hear the girl breathing.

She halted in the middle of the flashlight’s arc.

Tracks.

Clear in even the battery light. The finest film of dirt between the grass and the road, maybe only six inches in width – but a vehicle had definitely stopped here. Goodyear G647RSS
.
The dry-cast had become one of Valerie’s neural pathways. She’d let SCPD forensics confirm it, but her own mind was already made up. Besides the gap between front and rear wheels fitting RV length, it was as if the dark air here was still raw from where Claudia Grey had been torn into her nightmare, as if the atmosphere was still in shock from what it had seen.

Valerie mentally taped off the scene and moved through it, methodically. On her second pass (she was peripherally aware of Damien Court standing, tense and still exactly where she’d told him to stand; the casually exercised power of police authority – if she’d told him to stand on his head he would have tried) something glinted in the flashlight’s beam.

She bent to the ground. Steadied the light.

A sequin.

Two more lying within a few inches.

Silver sequins.

From Claudia’s purse.

‘How do you want to handle it?’ Liza Terrill asked Valerie. They were back at the Santa Cruz station, drinking too-strong coffee. Calling Claudia Grey’s family couldn’t be put off any longer. Technically to idiot-check that Claudia hadn’t upped sticks and flown back to England on a whim. But neither Valerie nor Liza regarded that as remotely likely.

‘It’s a missing person,’ Valerie said. ‘That’s nightmare enough. Who’ve you got on it?’

‘Larson. He’s fine. He gets it.’

‘OK. Plug it in to NCIS and get a rush on forensics. Hit everyone you can with Zoo Guy. Looks like they’re still using the RV but we can’t rule out vehicle swaps unless they’re complete morons.’

Valerie’s phone rang. It was Carla.

‘I gather you’re down in Santa Cruz?’ she said.

‘I’m heading back shortly. We’ve got another one.’

Pause. Loud with Carla controlling what Valerie imagined was irritation.

‘I got the call early this morning,’ Valerie said, caught between guilt and annoyance herself. ‘Had to leave at short notice.’

‘I’m supposed to be with you on this,’ Carla said. She sounded wounded. Or rather, she sounded as if she’d spent the pause crafting a tone of woundedness.

‘Together as in surgically attached?’ Valerie said. Regretted saying it.

Another pause.

‘I just want to be as useful as I can be,’ Carla said. ‘I don’t know why you wouldn’t call me.’

‘It was four in the morning,’ Valerie lied. ‘It didn’t need both of us.’ It was as if she could
hear
Carla architecting her responses in the silences. The next was preceded by an audible sigh.

‘OK,’ Carla said. ‘What’ve we got?’

It took Valerie a few minutes to bring her up to speed, and a tremendous effort not to tell her to back off and let her get on with doing her job. Liza observed Valerie’s facial expression with obvious understanding.

‘It’s not going to help that our girl’s illegal,’ Liza said, when Valerie had hung up the call.

‘I know,’ Valerie said. ‘We’ll just have to push. This is the first live one in three years. And if we don’t get this right she’s going to end up dead regardless of when her visa ran out.’

‘No joy on the press release?’

‘Too much. Reports from a dozen states. The agencies are doing what they’re supposed to, but we don’t have a name or a licence plate, and the one thing we know for sure about these guys is they’re super-mobile. See me in Nebraska? Good for you. Next day I’m in fucking Texas.’

‘You don’t think they’re still here?’

‘They could be. If there’s no HQ they’re driving around in an abattoir on wheels. And this is the third California victim so there’s an argument for assuming an in-state base. But the spread so far makes it look like the victim’s displacement is part of the process. They grab her then break the geographical connection. Makes whatever they leave behind go cold fast. I don’t know. Gut says they’re on the road, far from here already. But there’s
some
West Coast factor. I think the alpha grew up here. Lived here. He keeps coming back.’

*

Driving back to San Francisco in heavy rain, Valerie had to fight the absurd temptation to just start cruising the off-freeway roads,
looking for them
. It was what the families of the missing often did. To fight the impotence. To fight the guilt that quickly attached to doing anything that
wasn’t
driving around, looking for them. In the early stages of a loved one’s disappearance the families (their minds naturally assuming the worst) lost any claim on their own lives. The simple act of making a cup of coffee or taking out the trash – anything that testified to normal life going on – had the power to fill them with shame and disgust.

The
families
, she reminded herself.
Not you. Not the police.

You’ve done this because you don’t feel entitled to happiness
, Blasko had said, three years ago, when Suzie Fallon had been missing and missing and missing, and the ticking clock and the beating heart and the unknown life in her hands had driven Valerie mad.
You think shitting on love is going to bring her back? It won’t bring any of them back.
And of course he’d been right. It hadn’t brought her back. Not until there was nothing left of her anyone would recognise.

Now it was as if Blasko were in the passenger seat next to her, silent, looking at her, calmly and sadly seeing the same madness ready to blossom again. She wouldn’t let it.

But it was hard. She liked the Claudia in the picture. The humour around the mouth and in the warm dark eyes, the look of being able to laugh at herself, the hint of not suffering fools. She’s like, really smart, the blonde roommate had said, with nervy amazement. I mean… I mean like you need a
dictionary
.

It hit her: You like her because you’re seeing her as a person. And why are you doing that?

Because of Nick. Because in spite of everything that’s happened and everything you’ve become, when love comes back it has the power to reverse everything. You think you’ve changed? You haven’t changed. You’ve just been
waiting
.

Valerie wondered if Claudia had been following the story of the murders in the press, if she’d recognised Zoo Guy from the pictures they’d released to the media, if she’d been left in no doubt about what was going to happen to her. But the fact was it didn’t make any difference: a man had abducted her. Whether she recognised him or not she’d assume he was going to do all of it to her, all the terrible things, all the worst things, all the final things. They’d probably already started. Claudia had probably already been changed, for ever.

The moral impulse, thinking this, was to fire up, make an inner vow built of rage:
I’ll find her. I swear by all the… If it takes… by God I will not let this one die…

But the impulse failed. If you were anything other than a rookie it had to. Oaths didn’t catch murderers, nor promises save the lives of their victims. Only the Machine did. The endless work, the stubborn instincts, the refusal to stop.

I can promise you that
, Valerie thought.
I can promise you I won’t fucking
stop.

But even as she thought it she had an image of a heavy pair of household scissors closing around Claudia’s breast, razor wire tugged between her legs, a fish knife hammer fork machete axe—

Stop. Stop that.

The Taurus had crept up to ninety-five. The rain was coming down harder. Wipers on what looked like self-destructive speed and she still had to lean forward and peer through the windshield. Her head ached. She hadn’t seen her mother for a while, but she knew that when she did her mother would ask what she always asked: Are you taking care of yourself, sweetheart?

She pulled it back down to eighty. Lit a Marlboro and took a swallow of the station’s now cold coffee. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten hot food off a plate, with cutlery. She could barely remember the last time she’d eaten. It mattered. Not because she was hungry (her appetite was dead) but because she understood that she had to put food in her stomach to avoid collapse. She had to eat to carry on working.

Eat when you get home. (And there’s a bottle of Smirnoff in the freezer.)

You’re becoming an alcoholic.

(I know.) No, I’m not.

No, that’s right, you’re not. You
are
an alcoholic. You’ve got
that
to offer him, along with all the other things that should make you leave him alone.

She switched lanes to pass a pickup truck loaded with rubble. Picturing, as she did so, the dead women travelling with her, hovering just above the roof of the Taurus in a sad, trailing constellation.

Then everything went black.

Or rather, something happened that ended in total blackness. Her peripheral vision went rainbow-edged, as if light were passing through a prism, then collapsed in on her like the walls of a bevelled glass tunnel.

She thought, quite calmly:
I’m dying.
The colours darkened. Blackness around a narrowing aperture, her view of the windshield, the road, the world reduced to a shrinking dot. Then blackness.

Light.

Brake light, singular.

BRAKE!

The light exploded the world back fully into view. She was aware of her foot down hard on the brake, calf muscle straining. She thought, calmly:
There’s not enough time. I’m going to hit it.

She didn’t hit it.

Nor, courtesy of ABS, did she go into a skid.

But there was a yawning, suspended moment in which the single red brake light of the van that had stopped in front of her rushed through the windshield’s skin of rain towards her like an unblinking demonic eye, thrilled at the prospect of introducing her to her death.

Horns blared. The pickup rushed past her. Her back, neck, shoulders screamed their reflex preparation for impact from behind.

But nothing hit her. Nothing hit her because the driver behind was going under the speed limit, at a rain-safe distance. Unlike her.

If ignored, extreme stress can cause severe reactions, including blackouts
.

She imagined describing what had just happened to her doctor, Rachel Miller. Rachel, a calm, competent woman only five years older than Valerie, would listen in unjudgemental silence, making notes in her illegible freehand, then tell Valerie that she’d need to take at least two weeks off work.

People always know what the right thing to do is
, her grandfather had told her.
They just pretend they don’t.
The right thing to do. Accept that she was falling apart. Accept that her efficiency was compromised. Stop working The Case. Stop.

The reasoning terrified her. Because it was sound. Underneath it was her trying and failing to convince herself that what had just happened hadn’t happened. Like trying to stop yourself from shivering in the cold just by telling yourself you were warm.

All right, it had happened.

It had happened but it was a one-off. Not enough food, not enough sleep. It wouldn’t happen again. Because she wouldn’t let it.

And if it did?

If it did… If it did she’d do something about it.

She pictured Blasko shaking his head, smiling, sadly, knowing her.

She pictured Carla York sitting next to her, saying: OK. Enough. That’s all I need to see.

Valerie sat with her hands on the wheel, letting the rush subside. The cigarette, incredibly, was still between her fingers. She rolled down the window and tossed it out. The damp air refreshed her hot face. She ought, she knew, to hit the siren and pull the van with the busted tail-light over.

But as the snarl-up ahead unpacked and the lane started to flow, she also knew (driving too fast, too close, and with a bloodstream still presided over by last night’s vodka) that she wasn’t going to.

And she was supposed to be Claudia Grey’s best hope.