Over Tumbled Graves (9 page)

“For my security business. That is why you’re calling, right?”

That’s when it hit him.

Kevin Verloc was a state patrol trooper who’d been shot in the back, what, eight or nine years earlier during a routine traffic stop. A real inspirational story. He’d gone on to start this security business, providing security guards to patrol neighborhoods where rich and elderly people lived, and also for concerts, schools, and businesses. Dupree felt sick. Kevin Verloc had been a good cop and he’d hired a lot of former badges to be security guards. But that wasn’t why he couldn’t be the killer.

“Hello?”

“Yeah. Sorry. I just got a note from the receptionist here.”

Verloc sounded confused. “So what’s this about?”

“I’m terribly sorry…” Dupree rubbed his head.

On the other end Kevin Verloc burst into laughter. “Jesus. I’ll bet Mrs. Amend called you. She thinks I’m a serial killer? That’s hilarious. The woman is insane. I can’t even get the newspaper without her running away from me. That is so funny.”

“Look, I’m sorry. When I saw your name, it looked familiar, but I didn’t put it together.” Dupree slowly placed the phone tip into the out box. “I just…I’m sorry.”

“No, you got me. I should’ve known I would get caught.” Kevin Verloc laughed. “I confess. I run over these women with my wheelchair.”

Since being shot, Kevin Verloc was a paraplegic.

Dupree’s head fell against his desk as Verloc laughed on the other end.

“My accomplice is an old blind guy. But he just drives. I do the heavy lifting.”

Dupree took the ribbing—almost unbearable coming from another cop who’d know how sloppy he had been on this tip. When Verloc finally finished laughing Dupree retreated as gracefully as possible.

He stared at the stack of remaining tips. Was this how things were going to be? Messages about creepy taxicab drivers and guys in prison and ex-cops in wheelchairs? He swung with the back of his hand and the box fell over, spilling pink message slips across the floor. And the beauty part was, none of the other detectives even looked up.

She couldn’t be twenty, even though that’s what she claimed. Thin and pale, with short greasy hair, dull eyes, and a ring in her eyebrow, the girl lost her breath wolfing the soup that Caroline had bought her, and when her sourdough roll was gone she reached over and grabbed Caroline’s whole wheat.

“I told you about the guy who likes to bite?”

“Yeah.”

“And the guy who burned me with the lighter?”

“You thought his name might be Dave or Mike.”

“Sup’m regular like that, yeah.” Finished with the soup, the young prostitute tore into a package of crackers. “There’s another guy likes to pull hair an’ shit. Whole handfuls. You interested in that?”

Caroline said yes and pushed her own soup across the table to the girl. After several deep breaths and some pondering outside, she’d finally come up with the name Jacqueline as if she were trying on a hat. Caroline didn’t want to alienate the girl so she let it slide.

“You don’t want your soup?” Jacqueline asked.

“I’m not very hungry.”

Two spoonfuls disappeared into her mouth before she continued. “Yeah, I been with this guy, I don’t know, we’ve had three, four dates. Always wants a lay and a blow job and then yanks the shit out of your hair while you’re doin’ it. I’m like, hey, I’m tryin’ to work here. I oughta charge him extra for the hair.”

“You know his name?”

“It’s something regular.”

Caroline paused over her notebook. “Mike or Dave?”

“Somethin’ like that.”

“He have a last name?”

“I’m sure he does.” Jacqueline sopped up Caroline’s soup with Caroline’s roll.

“What’s he drive?”

“A truck.”

So far, every bad date seemed to be a white guy in a truck named Dave or Mike. “American truck?” Caroline asked.

“Guess so.”

“What year?”

She shrugged.

“New? Old?”

“I don’t really know.”

“What color?”

“It was dark. I didn’t really see.”

“Can you give me a description? Is he tall?”

“Average, I guess.”

“How old would you say he is?”

“Oh, he’s old. Thirty or forty or something.”

“Thirty or forty? Is he bald? Does he wear glasses? Does he wear a suit? Long hair? One leg? Parrot on his shoulder?”

“No. Nothing like that. He’s just…you know, regular.”

“Mmm-hmm. How about guys who don’t wanna pay. You ever have dates try to rape you, force themselves onto you?”

Jacqueline laughed, then stared down at her soup and became serious. “How many pages you got in that notebook?”

Thirty minutes later, when they were finished, Caroline paid the bill and bought a sandwich for Jacqueline to take with her. She tried to get her real name, but Jacqueline insisted that was her name and said she didn’t have any ID. Caroline pressed a
business card into the girl’s hand and told her to be careful, to work with other women and to call if she thought of anything else or was approached by a guy who gave her a bad feeling.

“What do you mean?”

“You know,” Caroline said. “If a guy gives you the creeps, makes you feel unsafe or scared in some way.”

Jacqueline looked down at Caroline’s business card and gave a small laugh. “Ma’am, they all give me the creeps.”

In the car, Caroline leafed through notes from the six interviews she’d done with hookers that day. Words leaped from the pages: “bit” and “punched” and “knifed” and “choked” and “bruised,” stories of gang rape at knifepoint, of violations with beer bottles and guns, of molestations by uncles and teachers and probation officers. Words stuck in her throat, names and details ran together, descriptions, regular guys all—Mikes and Daves—and Caroline wondered if they weren’t going at it the wrong way, looking for the guys with the scary perversions. It might be easier to eliminate the white men in pickup trucks who didn’t scare these hookers.
Ma’am, they all give me the creeps.

Caroline could always recognize a street hooker. The police unit that she was in had grown out of the old Vice Squad, which had been in charge of prostitution, gambling, and drugs—a funny collection of crimes once known as vices. After the proliferation of drugs in the seventies Vice became Special Investigations and began focusing on drug dealing, although they still coordinated an occasional prostitution sting, dragging a woman from patrol to dress up and stand on a street corner looking skanky. Caroline did it herself when they couldn’t convince a patrol officer or some girl from the academy to demean herself for an evening. The other cops joked that she was too healthy and good-looking to be a hooker. Hookers in movies looked like Julia Roberts and Jamie Lee Curtis, but most of the ones who worked the street were ugly or fat or sickly or strung out. And even the decent-looking ones who worked mostly hotels and escort services, even those women were usually in need of a shower.

It was her least favorite duty, but when the task force investigating the serial murders had asked the Special Investigations Unit for help, Caroline knew she would volunteer, just like she’d
volunteered to interview hookers, which was hard enough since these women did their best every day to avoid cops. The interviews would be followed tonight by a fishing trip—a john sting with Caroline getting all dolled up and walking the strip in front of adult bookstores and topless bars. Whore duty.

All day she’d been dreading the cheap clothes, the lie of it, the wire beneath her shirt, standing under a street lamp, trying to keep the lipstick off her teeth, sticking her ass out so far that the next morning her back always hurt. Maybe that’s what she should’ve asked Jacqueline—how you stand like that without hurting your back.

It was odd now, to be investigating something they usually ignored. Most of the time prostitution was just a given, not even worth mentioning. Many drug dealers had a hand in the business; Burn, for example, pimped a couple of crackheads out of his apartment. But it was nothing more than a fact of their lives, a detail on a rap sheet, like their age or hometown or place of employment. She doubted if most cops even thought of prostitution as a crime anymore, but more as a symptom.

Caroline glanced over the list of bad dates the women had given her. She wasn’t surprised that the men who paid cash for straight sex seemed all right to these women. After all, they had some control in that transaction, the lies of power, position, and commerce, the hooker as sales representative, billing agent, and service department rolled into one. And, of course, product.

That’s why she wasn’t surprised that they had so few names to go on. This was a business set up to give the client anonymity, in which all customers were known by the brand name of saints and Baptists, Waynes and Kennedys, the most Christian, most American of names. Johns. Or “dates,” which the women simply called the men, or, if you preferred magic, “tricks.” Anyway, through anonymity or deceptive casualness or magical disappearance, the men remained hard to find, and the women…well, to Caroline, they were all dead or dying.

She flipped the notebook to the first page of her interview with Jacqueline. After the girl made up her name, Caroline had begun the interview by asking for a date of birth and the girl had just shrugged. Jacqueline said she was from a small town near Spokane
(“rather not give the name”), had a baby (“eight months old, foster care”), was a regular drug user (“heroin, meth, pot”), had never been arrested (“says she’s too smart”), and might be HIV-positive (“refuses to be tested”).

Caroline tossed the notebook on the seat next to her and started the car. She would go back and type up the results of her interviews for the task force and then change into her hooker outfit. Joel had seen her setting the clothes out that morning—the short vinyl skirt and tiny T-shirt—and hadn’t said anything. That was the kind of thing that kept her from being able to trust him completely. It wasn’t anything he did or said, but what he didn’t do, what he didn’t say. She sets out trampy clothing and he just goes off to lift weights without raising an eyebrow?

Caroline also hadn’t told Joel about tomorrow, that her father was coming to begin going through her mother’s belongings. She supposed she didn’t talk about it because she didn’t want to think about it. It seemed too soon, just three weeks after her mother’s death. She’d tried to get her brother to come too, but Peter said he couldn’t handle it. Caroline would like to have spoken to Dr. Ewing about the next twenty-four hours, about dressing as a hooker, what to do with the embarrassment and guilt she felt sticking her ass out to trap these guys. And she wished she could talk to Dr. Ewing about her father and Peter. She supposed her father couldn’t have been expected to be there to see his ex-wife die, but she was disappointed in Peter, who had come for the funeral but hadn’t been back. When she asked him, he dodged the question, saying that his kids had soccer games. But then he cleared his throat and said, “I can’t face it, Caroline. I’m just not like you.”

And what was she like? Someone who stared into rivers, who held the hands of dying mothers and drug dealers, who bought sandwiches for dying hookers during the day and dressed up like one at night, who could pose as a hooker but couldn’t handle posing as a mother in a park, who loses her own mother but obsesses over a drowned drug dealer? She shifted the car and turned back toward downtown, past the tavern where Jacqueline hung out. The young prostitute was leaning against a light pole, already eating the sandwich Caroline had bought for her. From the car Caroline could see a guy in the doorway of a tavern behind Jacqueline, watching
her. The guy wore sunglasses and a ball cap. As Caroline passed the tavern the man stepped forward, probably to begin the long, slow dance of negotiation with Jacqueline. That was another movie misconception—the deal itself. The movie john drives up, rolls his car window down, and asks, “How much?” In fact, the deal was more often a sad, empty flirtation, the man maybe trying to convince himself that she really likes him, the woman convincing herself she isn’t what she is, the money sometimes an afterthought, other deals made in dope or booze or a ride somewhere or the offer of a roof to sleep under. This barter was another form of denial, the lie that the intimacy of this transaction was no different than the transactions of straight lives, the trading of years for a ring, sex for stability, the factoring into the deal of babies and houses and comfort and meals and entire lives. Caroline felt a kind of mocking dare from these women during these interviews, an accusation from them that a deal was inherent in any relationship, whether the woman charged forty bucks for a blow job or got forty years for a lifetime of them. What is a marriage but a contract, the recording of a deal? Is eliminating loneliness a better motivation than greed?

As she drove, Caroline wondered if Jacqueline saw the world that way, or if she had her own fairy-tale fantasies. Maybe that dark view of male-female relationships was something Caroline was beginning to believe herself. That got her to thinking about the man in the sweats, putting the picture she’d just seen back together in her mind: Jacqueline leaning against that light pole, the man coming from behind her…

The man.

Something familiar…He’d been shaded by the ball cap and sunglasses and was partially shielded by cars along the curb and the light pole, but something about the way he stood or the tilt of his head reminded her of someone else, and when she realized who, the shock pulled her to the side of the road.

It had to be her mind playing tricks. No way the man she’d seen talking to young Jacqueline was Lenny Ryan. It was an understandable mistake. He hadn’t been far from her thoughts since he pushed Burn over the bridge railing. Of course she would imagine the quick glimpse of a man to be him, transposing the flatness and evil
of what he’d done onto this guy killing prostitutes, and then transposing some innocent guy talking to Jacqueline into a serial killer.

But the idea was rooted now, and so she turned the car around and sped down Sprague, past weedy car lots and motels with hourly rates, taverns with blackened windows, adult bookstores. She parked in front of the Eight Ball Tavern, Jacqueline’s hangout, but saw no sign of the young hooker or the man in the cap. She went into the bar and asked if anyone had seen her talking to the man in sweats, if Jacqueline had gotten into any cars, but the bartender and the four men drinking flat drafts at 4
P.M
. shrugged and said they didn’t know Jacqueline and hadn’t seen her.

“The guy was just standing in the doorway ten seconds ago.”

The bartender shrugged.

“Out front,” Caroline said, losing patience. “You didn’t see a girl out front?”

They didn’t say no, didn’t shake their heads, just stared at her.

In front of the bar, she put her hand on the light pole and tried to piece the image together again. It seemed less and less likely. The conventional wisdom held that Lenny Ryan was long gone—back to California, most likely. His uncle’s car had been found at a truck stop, leading detectives to believe he’d hitched a ride out of state with a trucker.

She hadn’t even seen the guy’s face. The more she thought about it, the less likely it became that the man she’d seen was Lenny Ryan, and the more embarrassed Caroline became over her recent obsessions. What would Dupree say? That she was taking it all too personally. And Dr. Ewing, what would she say at their next session? That she was suffering anxiety over her mother, over what happened at the falls, that she was still horrified by the choice that Lenny Ryan had given her, that she was still replaying what she’d done, that she couldn’t live with her inability to save the young drug dealer. Or even her mother. She didn’t know why exactly, but it galled Caroline that Burn’s body had never been found. Of course, for that matter, neither had Lenny Ryan.

They were both out there, waiting for her next move, drifting in the undertow, their movements guided by cold, black currents.