The Killing Lessons (4 page)

Thirty-eight-year-old San Francisco homicide detective Valerie Hart knew she’d made a mistake. The latest in a sequence of mistakes that had started with her smiling at the guy – Callum – in the softly lit cocktail bar less than two hours earlier. He’d smiled back, but with a look of self-congratulatory entitlement she’d known wouldn’t go anywhere good.

Things hadn’t improved during their brief conversation. He worked ‘in banking, but let’s not talk about that, it’s a turn-off’, nor in the cab, when he’d ignored a call from what they both knew was another woman, nor when he’d closed the apartment door behind them, watched her take a few paces into the room, then said: ‘Jesus, your ass is an argument-winner.’ Valerie knew he’d said it countless times before. And in her case didn’t mean it. She knew exactly what she was in his eyes: a one-night downgrade. An older woman who wouldn’t object to whatever he wanted to do in the sack because she was just grateful to
be
in the sack.

The apartment only confirmed the mistake. It was in the Ashton complex by Candlestick Park with a floor-to-ceiling view of the Bay. Valerie knew the place. Two bedrooms would cost you the better part of four million dollars. Unsurprisingly, the decor – some hired designer’s idea of minimalism (glass and steel) plus fun (cowhide rug) – said: rich asshole lives here.

And here she was. With only herself to blame.

‘Stop,’ she said, when he took his tongue out of her mouth for a breath.

They were on the bed and he was lying on top of her. Her blouse was open, and he’d pulled her bra cups down awkwardly below her breasts. He lowered his head, took her left nipple in his mouth, flicked his tongue over it. Nipped it.

‘Stop,’ Valerie said.

He ignored her.

And this is one of the ways this happens
, Valerie thought.
One of the countless ways.

‘Stop,’ she said a third time, louder.

‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘What? What is it?’ No disguising the impatience. Which would become annoyance. Which would become anger.

His left hand was behind her head, gripping her neck. His right was in the open V of her unzipped pants, fingers exploring her through her panties. Jesus Christ, your Honour, she was
wet
. I mean, come
on
.

She
was
wet. Residually. There had been enough of her that had wanted this when they’d started. Not because she’d had any illusions about him. In fact precisely because she hadn’t had any illusions about him. These days – since Blasko – if she went to bed with a man it had to be one in whom she had no interest beyond physical desire. These days – since she’d killed love – it had to be someone she didn’t like.

But there wasn’t enough of her that wanted it now. Now the bulk of her just felt sad. Although she knew very well that sadness wasn’t going to be any use here.

She put her hand on his chest and pushed, not hard, just a civilised statement. ‘You need to get off me,’ she said.

‘Well you’re half right,’ he said. ‘I need to get
off
.’ His hand pressed harder between her legs. ‘It’s OK if you want to play,’ he said, tightening his hold on the back of her neck. ‘Just don’t draw blood.’

‘That’s not what this is,’ she said, pushing a second time. ‘Get off me.’

‘That’s not what your pussy’s telling me,’ he said.

Guile or force. Those were her options. Certainly not
argument
. He weighed, she guessed, around 170, and vanity sent him to the gym three or four times a week. It was a long,
long
time since Academy training, and she’d been slack on the workouts for months, but the thought of trying to trick her way out from under him exhausted her. Hey, I’ve got some coke in my purse. Let’s do a couple of lines. He wouldn’t believe her. He was alert to her change of heart. In the Academy, every session of ‘Practical Police Skills’ was conducted to the sound of the instructor’s mantra: You will survive. You will survive. You
will
survive
.

Leah’s eye out fork balloon the mess between Shyla’s legs Yun-seo’s body flecks of soil he started alone but shallow grave river stop
—

Stop.
Stop
.

Her purse was fifteen feet away, where she’d left it on the arm of the bedroom’s cream leather couch.

Third option: guile
and
force.

She softened underneath him. She’d had a cold for two weeks. She was aware of her sinuses, throbbing.

‘That’s better,’ he said, pushing himself up on his left hand to get a look at her, while his right hand snuck into the top of her panties. ‘That’s a good girl.’

She eased her right knee under his, got a purchase with her heel (she still had her shoes on) – then punched him as hard as she could in the side of his throat.

He was so shocked by the pain she barely needed the full force of her right leg to flip him, but she was past such calculations. She was off the bed and at her purse in three seconds.

Be careful, the drill instructor had told them all. A punch to the throat can
kill
a scumbag.

This scumbag wasn’t dead. He was on his knees on the bed, swallowing, swallowing, swallowing, holding his throat.

‘What the fuck?’ he gasped, looking at the Glock in her hand. ‘What the
fuck
?’

Valerie was a mix of adrenalin and emptiness. She zipped up her pants and resettled her bra.

‘Christ are you…’ swallow, ‘are you a
cop
?’

Valerie buttoned her blouse. Her coat was on the floor next to the couch. ‘Just shut up and stay there,’ she said, quietly. Her face was hot. She could feel the days’ and weeks’ and months’ exhaustion pressing hard on the adrenalin, waiting for it to give, when it would come crashing in like the ocean through a plate glass window.

‘Listen,’ he said, one hand raised, palm outward, his whole body trying to reinvent itself as the personification of innocence, ‘we were just…’ gulp, ‘I mean I wasn’t…’

‘It’s better for you if you don’t speak,’ Valerie said, getting into her coat. The sound of her own voice disgusted her. Proof that this wasn’t a dream but a real situation she’d put herself in.

When she was ready, she moved a couple of paces nearer the bed, with the gun pointed directly at him.

‘Hey,’ he said, trembling. ‘Hey, Jesus, come on.’ Swallow. ‘I’m sorry. Don’t do anything crazy. I didn’t do anything to you. I didn’t
do
anything to you!’

‘Then what are you sorry for?’

He was shaking his head. Disbelief. How had this happened to him? How could this be happening to him?

There were a lot of things she could say. Laura Flynn, one of her colleagues, had said not long ago: Give every woman a gun and a badge and watch the rape stats fall. What Valerie most wanted to say to the man on the bed was: And this is how
this
happens.

But somehow everything died in her mouth. She just wanted to go home.

Keeping the gun trained on him, she backed out of the bedroom, then turned and walked out of the apartment, closing the door behind her.

She woke at four thirty a.m., after an hour and thirty-five minutes’ dream-infested sleep, to the sound of poetry. By design: some time back she’d started setting the radio alarm to a digital station that read poetry through the night. Poetry didn’t make sense. But it gave you things. That was one of a small number of truths she’d discovered. A pitifully small number. Like a bum’s last nickels and dimes in a world that required a thousand dollars a day to make it bearable.

‘He must become the whole of boredom,’ the soft male voice on the radio said. ‘Subject to vulgar complaints, like love, among the Just be just, among the Filthy, filthy too. And in his own weak person, if he can, Must suffer dully all the wrongs of Man.’

Valerie switched it off.
All the wrongs of Man. In his own weak person. Filthy. Among the Just. Be just
. The words shuffled in her head, gave her a few precious seconds before The Case took over:
Refrigeration RV candy apple stuffs objects guts cut out with fish knife what kind of fish knife limited number maybe fisherman too much traffic enforcement footage fork jammed in vagina he knew Katrina had to had to had to otherwise why’d she go with him them not one guy two guys but it started with one guy I don’t know how I know this Kansas the mid-point have to call Cartwright again they’re not taking it seriously have to have to…

Unlike the radio, this couldn’t be switched off. The Case was there at her sleeping and there at her waking and there with her through the day. X-rated tinnitus. Tinnitus designed by the Devil. When she was a child her grandfather (the last practising Roman Catholic of the family) had said to her: First the Devil lets you know there are terrible things. Then he tells you which room they’re in. Then he invites you in to look. And before you know it you can’t find the door to get out. Before you know it you’re
one
of the terrible things.

She got up and went to the bathroom.

A positive result is indicated by a blue line
. That morning three years ago was with her every morning. As if the bathroom’s humble features couldn’t forget it.
She
certainly couldn’t. That morning she’d sat on the floor wrapped in a soft white bath towel. Waiting.

A pregnancy test detects the presence of a hormone called human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) in your blood or in your urine. hCG is produced in the placenta shortly after the embryo attaches to the uterine lining and builds up rapidly in your body in the first few days of pregnancy
.

The idiom of impersonal biology.
Chorionic gonadotrophin. Placenta. Uterine lining. Embryo
.

As opposed to the personal idiom: Baby. Child. Mother.

Father.

Blasko had said to her, once, in the heart of their life together, before the Suzie Fallon case had driven her to wreck it: The best and worst thing about being a cop is that it makes it easier to tell the truth. They’d been in bed at the time, subsiding in the warm wake of a small-hours fuck that had started half-asleep then woken them with dreamily escalating dirty-sweetness. They had these encounters, took them as an entitlement. Afterwards, Valerie liked to drift back into sleep to the sound of his voice. It makes it easier, he’d said, because every day you’re surrounded by the pointlessness of lying.

She’d remembered it that morning three years ago, sitting wrapped in the giant towel on her bathroom floor, waiting for the line on the test to turn blue.

Pregnant. 5–6 weeks
.

She’d wondered, knees hunched up to her middle, bare shoulders tender, why they didn’t make two kinds of home test kit: one for women who were trying to conceive, in which a positive result flashed-up:
Congratulations! You’re PREGNANT
;
and one for women who were dreading it, in which the same result came with:
Fuck. Sorry. You’re PREGNANT
.

But of course she knew the manufacturers had done their research. Neutrality. No expectation. No judgement. Just the facts.
Pregnant. 5–6 weeks
.

The impulse had been to phone Deerholt and tell him she was sick. But the thought of spending the day alone in her apartment had terrified her. Because by that time, only weeks after the Suzie Fallon case and the death of love, she
was
alone.

Instead she’d forced herself up off the floor. Got dressed. Gone to work. Spent the day behaving normally while inside she churned loss and panic and all the damage she’d already done.

That night, lying in a foamless bath up to her throat, she’d told herself: You don’t have to decide anything yet. You have some time. You can wait.

So she’d waited. Spent days going through the same wretched circles, dropping off into the same unknowns. Multiple futures shuddered in her, fighting each other. And still she’d waited.

Until the decision had been taken out of her hands.

She ought to have had a nervous breakdown, but she hadn’t. Instead, after the Suzie Fallon case, after the death of love, after what had been taken out of her hands, she simply carried on. She wasn’t the same. She brought a new seared clarity to her work, a relentless, mechanical energy. She became a better cop. Everyone noticed. No one said anything.

Three years had gone by, granted. But in imaginal time that morning in the bathroom was only a moment ago. Would always be only a moment ago. Imaginal time had no respect for chronology. Especially the past.

Her cold was worse. Her nostrils were raw and her body ached. The booze had crept up, these weeks, these months, these three years. Her recycling sack yesterday had been half Smirnoff empties. She could do with a drink right now, when the rest of the world was drinking coffee. It was a line of thinking she’d got used to ignoring.

When she was a little girl, she’d hated going to school. In the mornings, her mother used to say: I know you feel like killing yourself, honey, but brush your teeth and you’ll feel a little better. And she was right. Washed and dressed, Valerie was always forced to admit, grudgingly, sheepishly, that life was, after all, bearable.

She went to the washbasin and reached for her toothbrush. Her hands were shaking.

Blasko’s message was still by the medicine cabinet mirror, where he’d tacked it to the wall three years ago, written in black permanent marker on a clean sheet of legal:
NOT TODAY
.

As in, you can quit being a cop anytime you like. Just not today. It was the only trace of him still in her apartment. Not even a lone sock or a toothbrush or a department issue pencil. And whose fault was that—

Leah’s eye was out and she’d swallowed four of her teeth the tyres are Goodyear G647RSS too many too many Lisbeth unicorn crystal lacerations to anus and vagina I can’t do this YES TODAY YES TODAY YES TODAY…

Brush your teeth, for Christ’s sake. You’ll feel better.

Halfway through brushing, she threw up in the washbasin.

Eighty minutes later (eighty minutes divided between standing under the near-scalding jets of her shower, then staring out her apartment window at the Mission’s pre-dawn start-up – delivery trucks, joggers, dog-walkers and people still drunk from the night’s revels) Valerie sat in the incident room at the station, thinking the thought that had been part of her for so long now she couldn’t remember what life had been like without it: that they were no nearer to catching the man, or most likely
men
, who did this than they had been at the discovery of the first body three years ago.

Katrina Mulvaney, thirty-one years old. Educational outreach officer at the San Francisco zoo. First reported missing June 3rd, 2010. Her body had been found three weeks later in a shallow grave a mile east of Route 1, halfway between San Francisco and Santa Cruz. She’d lived in a fifth-floor walk-up in the Castro. Without knowing each other, she and Valerie had practically been neighbours.

Among the photographs Katrina’s boyfriend had supplied – the ‘before’ photographs – there was one Valerie had gone back to, repeatedly. In it, Katrina had obviously not been expecting to be photographed. The boyfriend had probably just gone ‘Hey,’ and she’d turned. It was what Valerie thought of as an ‘outlook’ shot. As in, outlook on life. You could see it in people caught like that, unprepared. Katrina’s outlook was one of cautious hope. The look said she wasn’t stupid, she knew the world could fuck you up without warning. But it also said she knew she’d been loved as a child, and that she was still moved by beauty, and that she knew her faults and weaknesses but knew too that she wasn’t a bad person. The look said she had not long before realised that she was in love. That was part of the fear still left in her outlook: that the love, somehow, might go wrong.

Love hadn’t gone wrong.

What had gone wrong was that someone had abducted, raped, mutilated and murdered her.

Then that person – per
sons
– had abducted, raped, mutilated and murdered Sarah Keller, twenty-four years old. Then Angelica Martinez, then Shyla Lee-Johnson, then Yun-seo Hahn, then Leah Halberstam, then Lisbeth Cole. Seven women between the ages of twenty-four and forty. And it had taken the better part of three years for the authorities to realise that what all these women had in common was that the same man – or men – had killed them.

Valerie imagined the millions of astonished TV crime show addicts. Three
years
? Are these
retarded
cops?

If she thought of trying to answer that question she came up against fatigue like a wall of raw earth. The way the shows’ crime scenes exploded with evidence. The way the leads always led somewhere. The way the investigative net tightened in a whisk of phone calls and snappy deduction. The way detectives tossed out requests like ‘
Get me a list of every place that sells roll asphalt and transaction records for the last four years
’ – and got what they wanted in a matter of minutes. Crime show TV was an industry devoted to peddling the necessary fairy tale: you can’t do terrible things and get away with it. You do a terrible thing, sooner or later
you will have to pay
.

Whereas…

She imagined taking the complaint to her grandfather’s God, that sinners were supposed to get punished. And God smiling and raising his Santa Claus eyebrows and saying: Whereas…

‘Cappuccino?’ Will asked. ‘I’m going.’ There were three other detectives in the low-ceilinged and strip-lit room. Will Fraser (Valerie’s partner), Laura Flynn and Ed Perez. Along with Valerie, the insomniacs. The spooked. The obsessed. The burning-out. Over the next couple of hours the rest of the team would assemble and the incident room would fill with the collective vibe of irritation and effort and frustration and exhaustion and boredom. In spite of which, Valerie knew, she’d have to gather herself to brief the new FBI liaison. She thought of Callum last night saying: Your ass is an argument-winner. She thought of the distance she’d travelled from her body since Blasko. Since love. Blasko had said to her, in the first few weeks of their relationship: You’re prettier than a seahorse. His compliments were delivered like dispassionate scientific conclusions. They’d filled her with shy pride. Some men, he’d said, will be scanning the room for the icy blondes with pneumatic tits. For other men – a minority, I’ll grant you – you’ll be the only woman
in
the room. I’m one of those men. Just remember that when you start thinking about dumping me.

‘Yeah, thanks,’ she said to Will, without looking up from her desktop screen. There was a time when she would have answered more creatively. Something like: ‘Two sugars. And stir it anticlockwise, dickhead.’ She’d lost the impulse to joke. Will still had it. He was the kind of good human being whose goodness derived from knowing the precise degree to which he was a shitty human being but not letting it cancel out the degree to which he wasn’t.

‘Today’s rating?’ he asked.

Valerie looked up at him. He was forty-two, tall and leanly built, skin the colour of faded mahogany, long eyelashes and an expression of languid mischief.

‘Five,’ Valerie lied. ‘You?’

The ‘rating’ was on a scale of one to ten. One being certainty that what you were doing was going to solve the case and be a victory over the Powers of Darkness, ten being a terminal admission of failure, walking out the door and never being a cop again. And possibly
joining
the Powers of Darkness.

NOT TODAY.

‘Eight,’ Will said. ‘But Marion told me this morning she’s not sure she desires
me any more. Also, I’ve got a huge boil on my ass. It’s possible the two facts are connected.’

When he’d gone for the coffees Valerie sat listening to Laura Flynn’s superhumanly fast fingers at work on her laptop. She knew that very soon she’d have to get up, walk across the room and stand in front of the murder map. She’d have to stand in front of the murder map and try for the ten-thousandth time to make it talk. The murder map didn’t want to talk. The murder map’s line was that it had nothing new to say. But the murder map was a liar. You had to believe the whole case was a liar. You had to believe the whole case was trying desperately to keep something from you. You had to believe that eventually you’d catch The Case out. And you had to do it before The Case killed you. Or before it made you break your lover’s heart.