Very Bad Men (18 page)

The other guests had departed and the caterers were cleaning up, under the direction of Ruth Spencer. I climbed the stairs to the studio and found Elizabeth talking with Callie Spencer. Jay Casterbridge sat beside his wife, and Harlan Spencer looked on from his wheelchair. Alan Beckett lounged in a club chair nearby. I stopped just inside the room, leaning against the door frame.

Elizabeth had her long hair braided and pinned up. She wore a string of beads around her neck: black glass smooth as pearls. One of Sarah's creations. Her black dress was cut modestly in the front, but deeper in the back to reveal her shoulder blades.

She had brought along sketches of the man in plaid and a copy of his manuscript. Callie Spencer examined the sketches and passed them to her husband.

“I don't recognize him,” she said to Elizabeth. “I've read the news stories, and my father told me about your theory. You think this man may feel some connection with me.”

“That's right,” said Elizabeth. “He may have tried to contact you. Have you received any unusual correspondence lately? A letter or an e-mail that didn't sound quite right?”

“People send me odd letters fairly often,” said Callie. “The really strange ones go in a special file, along with the ones that are angry or threatening. Alan can get you those, if you like.” She turned to Beckett and he nodded his agreement.

“Yes, I'll want to see them,” Elizabeth said. “But if this man has written to you, I don't think the letters would be threatening—at least they wouldn't threaten you. They might express anger over what happened to your father years ago—anger directed at Terry Dawtrey or Henry Kormoran or Sutton Bell.”

“I don't recall any like that.”

“It's possible that if this man wrote to you, his letters might not contain threats at all. They might sound ordinary. He's killed two people, and tried to kill two more, but he spoke to Sutton Bell before attacking him, and Bell thought he seemed rational. If you got a letter from him, it might look like any other letter from a constituent. He might write to you about some issue that's important to him.”

Callie's brow furrowed. “I've served two terms in the state legislature. I've received hundreds of letters from constituents. Thousands. I don't see how they could help you.”

“But you keep them, right? You file them away.”

“Yes. But I can't have you going through those files. And even if I could, what good would it do? You've just said his letter might look ordinary.”

Elizabeth picked up the manuscript from her lap. “Not exactly.”

“What does that mean?”

“Look, what I'm going to tell you is confidential,” Elizabeth said. “It hasn't been reported in the press. I have to ask you not to repeat it.”

“All right,” said Callie.

Elizabeth looked around to Jay Casterbridge and the others, and they all nodded.

“This is a communication we've received from the killer,” she said, holding up the manuscript. “It's his own account of his crimes. It's unsigned, and he's careful not to give anything away about himself—”

Callie interrupted. “But you think there's something in there that could lead you to him.”

“It's not what's in here,” Elizabeth said. “It's what's missing.”

“What do you mean? What's missing?”

“Adverbs.”

 

 

I'D READ THROUGH the man in plaid's manifesto five or six times, but it was Sarah who made the discovery about the adverbs. Elizabeth and I heard about it that morning.

Sunday morning at the Waishkey house means sleeping late. It means an excessively large breakfast. Sarah does most of the cooking, but once in a while I manage something simple. Scrambled eggs or French toast. Or, in this case, pancakes.

I had butter melting in a skillet, and sausage links in a separate pan. Sarah sat at the table, slicing bits of apple into the pancake batter. Elizabeth was telling us about the man in plaid, who had robbed a pharmacy with a rifle the night before.

“That doesn't sound right,” Sarah said.

“That's what happened,” said Elizabeth.

“It's a violation of the basic principles.”

“Basic principles?”

“The basic principles for robbing a store,” Sarah said. “We talked about this once. You don't use a rifle, you use a handgun, because you can hide it until you need it. You keep the element of surprise. When you're ready, you pull out the gun and wave it in the cashier's face.”

“I don't remember this conversation,” Elizabeth said.

“You want him frightened, and you don't want to give him time to think. You use simple commands:
Open the register. Give me the cash.
You want an edge in your voice. If you sound calm, he might not take you seriously.”

Elizabeth tilted her head. “When did we talk about this, exactly?”

“Middle school,” Sarah said. “You were helping me write an essay. It was supposed to be ‘How to Make a Pie,' but we strayed a little from the topic.” She finished slicing the apple and passed me the bowl of batter. “When he gives you the money, you need a free hand to take it. That's another reason to use a handgun instead of a rifle.”

“Middle school?”

“Seventh-grade English class. I got a B. I could have had an A, if only you knew how to make a pie. So why would this guy use a rifle? Is it because he's crazy?”

I poured some batter into the skillet. Elizabeth was leaning against the counter beside me.

“I'm not sure it makes sense to call him crazy,” she said. “There's a logic to what he does. He used a rifle at Whiteleaf Cemetery because it was the only thing that would serve if he wanted to kill Terry Dawtrey from a distance. When he needed to hold up a pharmacy, he used the rifle again, because he already had it. Maybe a handgun would have been better, but the rifle worked well enough.”

The sausage sizzled in the pan and I turned down the heat. Elizabeth continued. “Holding up a pharmacy isn't the same as holding up a convenience store. You can't expect to get in and out as fast. Yelling at a pharmacist, waving a gun in her face—that's not going to help. You want to attract as little attention as possible.

“The man in plaid put his rifle in a shopping cart and rolled it through the store without anyone noticing. He asked for two things: an antibiotic called Keflex and a painkiller called Imitrex, which is used to treat headaches. The pharmacist gave him both and he put the rifle back in the cart and rolled it out again. No one got a look at his car. There were video cameras in the store, but they shot him from above, and the baseball cap he wore concealed his face.

“If he's crazy, it doesn't seem to be doing him any harm. It's not going to help me catch him. I don't know what will.”

“You'll catch him,” Sarah said. “He'll give himself away. He already has. It's in his manuscript.”

“When did you read his manuscript?” Elizabeth asked, frowning.

Sarah shrugged. “The other day. You must have left a copy lying around.”

“No, I didn't,” Elizabeth said, looking at me. I focused on the work at hand, flipping the pancake in the skillet.

“Does it matter?” asked Sarah.

“Technically, it does,” Elizabeth said. “But we'll let that pass. I didn't find anything in his manuscript that hints at his identity. What did you see that gives him away?”

“It's not what I saw. It's what I didn't see.”

 

 

“ADVERBS,” ELIZABETH SAID to Callie Spencer. “He doesn't use them. There's not one in the entire manuscript.”

Callie gave her a wry look. “Are you serious? You want to search my files for letters from constituents that don't have any adverbs?”

“I know it's unusual.”

“It's absurd. Even if I could set aside the privacy issues—and I can't—a lot of people keep things brief when they're writing to their representatives. If they only write a few lines, they're probably not going to use any adverbs.”

“The man we're looking for goes out of his way not to use them,” Elizabeth said. “He writes ‘in a rough manner' instead of ‘roughly.' ‘Without much sound' instead of ‘quietly.' If you got a letter from him, it would stand out.”

From the doorway I thought I could see a change in Callie Spencer's expression—she seemed to waver. Harlan Spencer must have seen it too.

“You'd have to be very discreet,” he said to Elizabeth.

“Naturally,” she said.

“Maybe you should consider it,” Spencer said to his daughter.

Callie glanced at Jay Casterbridge, who tapped an empty glass on his knee.

“Do what you think is right,” he said.

She looked around at Alan Beckett. He slouched in his club chair with his chin resting on the knuckles of one hand.

“It would have to be done just so,” he said. “If word got out, it could look awful.”

Callie turned to face Elizabeth again. Spine straight, chin raised. It was a transformation I had seen before. She put away her doubts, locked them down.

“No,” she said. “Never mind how it looks. The people who write to me have to be able to trust that I'm not going to turn their letters over to the police without cause. I can't have you knocking on people's doors and questioning them because they wrote a letter with an odd turn of phrase.”

She got to her feet. Elizabeth did the same, gathering the manuscript and the sketches of the man in plaid.

“I'm sorry,” Callie Spencer said. “I wish I could be of more help. I'll make sure you have access to our threat file. But that's the best I can do. There have to be limits.”

S
ome nights I have the kind of dreams that make you sit up suddenly awake, casting around to get your bearings in the dark. The kind that make you wonder if that window you're seeing has always been there, in precisely that place, if it was open when you went to sleep, if that patch of grainy black is a doorway, and if there's someone waiting in the hallway outside it.

They're not nightmares, not exactly. Though I have those too. Every few months I have one where I'm running through an old house full of stairs and twisted corridors. There are men with guns chasing me—though I've never once in real life been chased by a man with a gun. Sometimes in the dream I have a gun myself, but when I pull the trigger nothing happens. And sometimes the gun fires and the bullets find their marks, but the men keep coming.

But I'm not talking about nightmares. The dreams I have most often are what I call clearing dreams: I'm in a clearing in the woods at night, stars and moon suspended over the bare branches of the encircling trees. Usually I have a friend with me, and we're digging a grave.

Something I have done in real life.

The friend has dark hair and pale skin. He and I trade off with the shovel. When he's working I stay close to him, sitting on the edge of the grave with my feet dangling. When I'm working he rests nearby with his back against the smooth bark of a beech tree. I try to keep my eyes on him, but as we dig, the wall of the grave obscures my line of sight. As the grave grows deep, I see something pale at the bottom and I set the shovel aside. I crouch down and brush the earth away with my fingertips to reveal my friend's face: brow smooth, eyes closed, mouth in a peaceful line.

When I climb out and look to the beech tree he's always gone.

I had a clearing dream that night after the party at the Spencer house. I came awake in the dark, and the doorway of Elizabeth's bedroom was a black rectangle like the mouth of a grave. I sat up and let my heart settle into a slow rhythm and let the black shape resolve itself into a doorway again.

I tried to go back to sleep, but twenty minutes later I found myself dressing in a polo shirt and jeans, gathering my wallet, cell phone, and keys. I knelt beside the bed and put my palm against Elizabeth's back to feel the rise and fall. Her eyes opened.

“Where are you going?”

“Office,” I said. “Can't sleep.”

“Dream?”

“Yes.”

“Come back.”

As if I might not. “Okay.”

Our shorthand conversation done, she closed her eyes again.

On my way down I passed Sarah's room, and through the half-open door glimpsed dusky sheets and raven hair in the light that came up from a streetlamp. Downstairs I tried to close the front door as quietly as I could.

I walked out to my car and drove off, east toward downtown. Came at last to a stoplight flashing red and went north on Main. Not much traffic on the streets, but even now there were students on the sidewalks. Somewhere a bar had let out. A group of frat boys crossed Main in the middle of a block, loud and careless. One of them tripped and set the others laughing. I slowed to let them pass.

Café Felix was dark. I drove around behind the
Gray Streets
building and parked near the service entrance: a steel door beneath a yellow bulb in a metal cage. Often as not, someone leaves the door propped open with a brick. I found it that way now.

The elevator took me to the sixth floor. A chime sounded my arrival and the doors rumbled open. Under the lights of the hallway I walked past an accounting office and a documentary production company and came to
Gray Streets
. I had my key in the lock before I noticed anything amiss.

Someone had cut a neat square from the pebbled glass of the door.

Thoughts occurred to me. The square was big enough to reach through and turn the dead bolt. Whoever cut it could still be inside. The sound of the elevator would have given them warning.