The Killing Lessons (18 page)

‘Where’s enlarge?’ Valerie said. The software was unfamiliar. The dropdowns didn’t mean anything.

‘Here. Double size?’

‘Do it.’

The image expanded.

Valerie stared.

Felt all the exhaustion burned away in a second.

The child’s body with the tortured flesh. The brutally carved letters. The scars. A… R… Q…

But it wasn’t the written-on body she needed to decode. It was the environment in which the body had been photographed. It was the
background
.

A child’s room. The corner of an unmade bed. A window looking down onto a lawn with an out of focus solitary tree. A wall with the corner of an alphabet chart, each letter illustrated with a brightly coloured image.

A is for APPLE

B is for BALLOON

C is for CLOCK

D is for DINOSAUR

E is for ELEPHANT

F is for FORK

G is for GOOSE

H is for HAMMER

*

All her sane instincts said:
Calm down. Wait. Let it settle. Hundreds of thousands of homes and kindergartens probably have the exact same chart.

‘Reduce it again,’ she said. ‘Get the window view in focus.’

Blasko moved the mouse again. Clicked. The image returned to its original size.

Valerie bent closer to the screen.

But she didn’t need to. She already knew.

The tree on the lawn outside had a double trunk. An inverted Y.

The tree in front of which Katrina Mulvaney, a little more than half her short lifetime ago, had been photographed.

‘Get me everything you have on this image,’ Valerie said, over her shoulder. She was half out of Blasko’s office. ‘Where it came from. Who uploaded it. When it was taken.’

‘There’s only—’ Blasko began, but Valerie was already racing down the corridor.

Back at her own desk she Googled ‘weird-shaped trees’. Five million results. She typed in: ‘weird shaped tree Hoppercreek Camp’. Hit ‘Images’.

It was the first result.

Our resident freak-tree
, the caption said.
Redding, CA
.

Redding. Maybe two hundred miles north of San Francisco.

Her internal phone rang.

‘Valerie, listen to me,’ Blasko said. ‘We already have the distributors. They’re serving time. This case was one of—’

‘It’s not the distributors I’m interested in. It’s the kid in the picture.’

Silence. Cop computation.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Blasko said. ‘It’s your guy?’

‘Do you know who took it?’

‘No. It’s a Polaroid. Scanned five years ago. No original. But I can talk to someone who might be able to give you a best guess circa.’

‘Do it. Call me. I have to go.’

Her body livened. The dead women bristled around her. When it happened, it was always like this: the kaleidoscope confusion of case details at a single twist starting to rearrange themselves into a picture. You couldn’t see it fast enough. You had to force yourself not to let the thrill blur your focus, not to miss the
one
detail that could still cost you the seconds or minutes or hours that would leave someone dead.

Valerie collected herself and called Katrina’s parents.
Please don’t let it be Dale who answers.

‘Hello?’ Dale Mulvaney said.

‘Mr Mulvaney, it’s Valerie Hart.’ They’d been on first name terms through the investigation but the memory of their last encounter made her formal. There was a pause before Dale replied. Valerie could feel what was happening in him, the atomised despair regathering in an instant.

‘What is it?’ Dale said. He didn’t sound drunk. Just hoarse. Just fraught. Just a step away from blowing his brains out.

‘I need to know exactly when Katrina attended summer camp at Hoppercreek.’

‘When she… What?’

‘When Katrina was around eleven or twelve she went to summer camp at a place called Hoppercreek, upstate in Redding. I’m just trying to pin down a date.’

Another pause.

‘Someone from… You think…’

Adele’s voice in the background. ‘Dale? Is it something? What is it?’

‘When did Kat go to this place Hoppercreek?’ Dale said.

Valerie pictured Adele’s confusion, the groping through grief for facts. Dale’s brewing impatience.

‘I don’t… It was… She was eleven, I guess. She was eleven.’

Valerie did the maths: 1990.

‘What is it?’ Dale said to Valerie. ‘You got something?’

Valerie knew what would happen: she would tell them, and their anger and loss would refocus. They’d been drifting through bereavement. This would wake them up again, give them something to hold onto. But it would be a betrayal, even if Valerie caught the killers. Beyond the token resolution their daughter would still have been raped and murdered. Their daughter would still be dead. Victims’ loved ones said they wanted justice. And they did. But all justice proved was that justice wasn’t enough. How could it be? The only thing that could possibly be enough was the victim brought back, whole and alive. The only thing that could possibly be enough was for none of it to have happened.

‘It’s very remote,’ Valerie lied. ‘You know we’ve felt all along that Katrina must have known the person responsible for her death. It’s hard to abduct someone in broad daylight in a city like San Francisco. But none of the interviews we conducted gave us a viable suspect. It’s just possible that Katrina knew her killer from a
long
time ago. And it’s possible that he was the person who took the photograph of her Adele gave me at our last meeting. Please don’t raise your hopes too high. It really is very remote.’

It took her desperate minutes to get off the phone (Claudia Grey minutes; all time now was Claudia-time). Dale and Adele wanted to go through it, the reasoning, the probability, the wretched chain of cause and effect. Tough for Valerie to do whilst leaving out the alphabet chart and the mutilated child’s body. But she wasn’t going into that. It would bring back the objects. Katrina’s object. The candy apple forced into her vagina. Valerie wanted to spare Dale and Adele hearing about that again. A is for APPLE.

‘I’ll call you as soon as I have more,’ she said. ‘But right now I have to get going. I don’t want to lose a moment.’

That worked. Guilt. Tell them they’re slowing the process down. Make them understand that the longer they kept her talking the longer their daughter’s killers were out there enjoying their lives.

And the nearer Claudia Grey got to death.

‘Right, right, OK,’ Dale said. ‘Understood. You’ll let us know as soon as—’

‘You’ll be the first,’ Valerie said. ‘I promise.’

The best case scenario was that the kid in the picture was now a grown man (and serial killer) still living in the house he’d been tortured in as a child. Valerie barely admitted it as even a theoretical possibility. Because the best case scenario made it its business never to be the
actual
case scenario.

The novelty tree was hardly a secret. On the contrary. It was a quirky attraction people with too much time on their hands drove out to see. A call to Redding’s Visitors’ Bureau got her the address. Current residents since 2008 were listed as Warren and Corrine Talbot. A second call to the County Recorder’s Office at the local city hall got her – eventually – the name of the owner in 1990: Jean Ghast. According to the records Jean bought the place in 1974.

On the surface it didn’t fit: a woman. But there would have been a lover, Valerie supposed, a man to whom she was in thrall. There would have been someone. It was a refinement of male cruelty: to manipulate women into surrendering their own children to abuse.

Valerie hit keys and opened windows, scrolled, selected, entered. That pause waiting for information to load that made you acutely conscious of your existence. She thought of her grandfather’s time on the force. Manila files, indexes, carbon sheets, paperclips. The fragility of physical records, the smell of ink and the heavy insect natter of typewriters. How much harder the job would have been then. How much easier for killers to go uncaught. And here she was without the excuse of antiquated equipment, with all the help technology could give – and eight women were still dead.

With a ninth woman waiting on her.

She forced herself to slow down, repeat what she knew. What she knew was that in the summer of 1990 someone had photographed Katrina in front of the two-legged tree. The house to which the tree belonged contained an alphabet chart depicting objects that corresponded to the ones found in the bodies of the victims. A brutalised child – a male child – had been photographed in that house. There was no logical necessity that the juvenile in the photograph had grown up to be Katrina’s killer. There was no
logical
necessity. (Valerie wondered, briefly, if the photographer of
both
kids – the abused boy and Katrina – was the person she was looking for.) But there was something about the figure in the photograph. A hopelessness spreading from his scarred shoulders like invisible wings. Cop sense insisted. The Machine insisted.

In the midst of her rush was a small deflation: that grotesque mistreatment had produced a grotesque person. That there was mitigation. That there was partial cause, partial explanation. The world didn’t want it that way, of course. The tabloids liked their monsters simple:
pure evil
. No excuses. No history. No comprehension.

And in his own weak person, if he can, Must suffer dully all the wrongs of Man
.

The poem, she realised, might have been about a cop. In his own weak person. In
her
own weak person. Christ. Weakness she had in spades.

None of which altered the facts. That the child had grown up. That he had killed at least eight women. That he could be killing Claudia this very minute. That there were eighteen letters of the alphabet still to go.

It took longer than it should have.

It took more Claudia-time than it should have.

But mid-trawl through Vital Records she got a call back from the Redding local newspaper.

‘Valerie Hart,’ she said.

‘Detective Hart,’ a woman’s voice replied. ‘This is Joy Wallace at the Redding
Record Searchlight
. You were enquiring about the death of Jean Ghast?’

‘Yes?’

‘Oh, boy.’ Pause. ‘This is the serial case, right?’

Valerie tensed. Journalism’s quid pro quo reflex. Not many in the world knew she was the Lead on the case. But everyone in the media did. The cop who couldn’t stop those women getting butchered. Famous National Failure.

‘It’s off the record,’ she said.

‘Relax, Detective,’ Joy Wallace said. ‘I’m not angling. Listen, I’ll send you a link to the story, but I can give you the basics right now.’

‘Go ahead,’ Valerie said, pen poised over her legal pad.

She knew. She knew the information was
the
information. The information like a single string sticking out of an impossibly knotted ball which, when pulled, unravelled the whole mess. The moment just before you got the information fired up your certainty, as if you weren’t discovering something new, but remembering something you’d always, deep down, known. The moment before the information was a moment of recognition.

In the early summer of 1992, Joy Wallace told her, fifty-eight-year-old Jean Ghast was found dead at the bottom of the stairs in her Redding home. The coroner’s verdict was an equivocal combo of natural causes and accidental death: Jean, with a known coronary condition, had had a heart attack. Either she’d had the attack at the top of the stairs and fallen, or she’d fallen first and the shock had precipitated the attack. There was no sign of a break-in. Nothing was missing from the house. She’d had a reputation as a woman who kept herself to herself, but no known enemies. She’d lived alone ever since her troubled daughter, Amy, had moved away (
run
away, gossip said) in 1979, at the age of sixteen. There was no Mr Ghast. Jean had raised Amy on her own.

Some six years after leaving home, Amy had reappeared for a few days, with a man and a five-year-old son. They didn’t stick around, but thereafter the boy sometimes spent weekends with his grandmother. He never went beyond the house’s front or rear yard, and Jean Ghast rarely brought him into town. The kid was, gossip also insisted, ‘not all there’. He barely spoke, in fact.

Two days after Jean’s body was discovered, hikers in the Lassen Volcanic Natural Park found a twelve-year-old boy, wandering, ‘disoriented’, all alone. When they could get sense out of him, he gave his name as Leon Ghast.

It took another two days (twenty-four hours with the Redding PD, twenty-four hours with CPS) to establish that the kid was the grandson of Jean Ghast. Five years earlier, Amy (now a heroin-addicted prostitute of fluid abode) had got pregnant by Lewis Crowe, a bipolar Las Vegas pimp and drug-peddler who’d been killed in a narcotics deal gone wrong a month before his son was born.

‘But that wasn’t the half of it,’ Joy Wallace told Valerie.

Leon Ghast had not been ‘visiting’ his grandmother on the weekends. He’d been living with her for seven years.

‘The house is on the edge of town.’ Joy said. ‘Bordered by Hoppercreek Camp on one side and the woods on the other. It was only when it all came out that people conceded that they’d never actually seen Amy dropping the kid off there or picking him up.’

‘It all’, when it did come out, was still a talking point in Redding.

‘The kid had been
ravaged
,’ Joy said, with the twenty-first century mixture of horror and boredom. ‘She’d kept the signs of damage off his arms and legs, but the rest of him was a mess.’

Amy Ghast had died of an overdose in 1989. There were no living relatives either willing or in a position to take care of Leon.

‘So he went back through CPS,’ Joy said. ‘You can imagine the story. Four years of foster homes, bounced in and out of care… To say he had behavioural and learning difficulties is an understatement. Acute word-blindness plus seven years of brutal alphabet aversion therapy. He hadn’t been to school in years. Seriously? It was a miracle the kid could
talk
.’

Then, in 1997, Leon caught a break. He was fostered by Lloyd and Teresa Conway, wealthy, childless born-again Christians, residents of Fresno. Lloyd had built a highly successful thermal engineering company – CoolServ – and started training Leon at the nuts and bolts end of the business, which specialised in custom freezers.

‘For all I know,’ Joy said, ‘he still works out of the plant there.’

Valerie’s palms were hot. Around her, the office was vivified. Claudia-time passed in a deafening hiss. ‘Do you have contact details for the foster parents?’ she said.

‘Yeah, but they’re from way back. Don’t know if they’re still good. We did a follow-up story a year after they took him in.’

Valerie took down the information. ‘You did a follow-up story. Photograph of Leon?’

Pause. Joy giving her room to appreciate the points she was racking up.

‘Fax or email?’

‘Both.’

‘Give me five minutes to dig it out.’

‘Will the Conways remember you?’ Valerie said. ‘Was it you who did the follow-up story?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then call them. I need a current workplace and address for Leon. Do it right now.’

Pause.

‘Please,’ Valerie added.

‘OK, Detective.’

‘I have to repeat,’ Valerie said. ‘This is off the record.’

‘Is it him?’ Joy said.

‘I don’t know,’ Valerie lied. ‘But we can’t afford for any of this to get out prematurely. I mean it. Office gossip lockdown.’

‘I’ll do what I can,’ Joy replied. ‘But you should’ve pretended to be someone else when you called. I’m safe, but this is a newspaper. I guess the clock’s ticking.’

The clock’s ticking.

The email came first. Valerie opened the attached image.

It was a sunny outdoor shot of Lloyd and Teresa Conway on a green lawn, a sprightly couple in pastel casuals, smiling shyly into camera. Between them was a dark-haired boy of (the caption said) sixteen years, broad-boned and taller than both his foster parents, with a smile that didn’t quite disguise its reluctance.

Valerie brought the zoo suspect image up alongside it.

Two pictures separated by thirteen years.

But unless her system of resemblances was completely awry, it was the same person.

Leon Ghast.