Jess Walter: Land Of The Blind

The patrol officers became progressively friendlier with the Loon, offering to take him back to his group home or his parents' house or his drug treatment center or his pirate ship, to whatever institution he had escaped from. But to every question he responded by sitting quietly, as if he were not even in the same room.

The patrol officers were more perturbed than anything. They could lock the Loon up for breaking and entering, but he had stolen nothing from the old hotel and hadn't even cracked a window getting in. Assuming he had no warrants, they'd just as soon let him go back to raiding Dumpsters. One of the cops decided to level with him. Look here, Patch, he said, if you don't tell us what's going on, we're gonna have to charge you with breaking and entering, or trespassing. Or mayhem.

Murder, joked his partner.

This caught the Loon's attention. He made eye contact.

What we're trying to tell you is that you need to cooperate or you're going to jail, the patrol officer said.

Okay, said the Loon, his first word.

The cop asked who the guy was and what meds he skipped, what he was doing in the hotel and if they could take him home.

The Loon didn't acknowledge the questions. Instead, he took a deep breath and said: I'd like to confess.

The cop laughed. I don't think that's necessary, he said. We caught you in the building. You might be a foot or two past the confession point.

But the Loon had latched onto the idea and wouldn't let it go. Do I talk to you, or to a detective? To whom do I confess?

The patrol cop made eye contact with his partner. To whom? This over-educated crazy pirate motherfucker was going to make them create paper. All he had to do was tell them where he lived and he'd be home free. They could do this easy, but he was just obstinate enough to make them create a bunch of unnecessary paper.

Look, said the cop, I'm not sure what kind of detective you think is going to want to hear about you breaking into an empty building-

The Loon interrupted the cop. Homicide, he said.

She likes snow. At least that's what Caroline has begun telling people who ask why she stays in Spokane instead of going west to Seattle or south to California. The very fact that people continue to ask why she stays in Spokane must mean something, although she doesn't know exactly what. Foolishly or vainly, or both, she had imagined that the question implied she had so much on the ball – that she was so tall and attractive and ambitious – that Spokane was too small and slow a city for someone of her talents. For years she talked about going to law school or trying to get a job with the FBI, but the timing never seemed right; she got caught up in being a police officer, in the romantic idea of it, and briefly in the romantic idea of her old, married patrol sergeant.

But now, at thirty-seven, the question of why she stays has taken on other meanings. Caroline has never married, and she feels the accelerated pace of female aging and worries that features that were once sharp have begun to look severe. She has noticed that older women have one of two kinds of necks: big, bullfrog jowls or tent poles under stretched skin. And while she still draws looks from men, she's not sure whether that proves something good about her or something bad about men. And each morning she stands in front of the mirror to see which neck she is growing. She's just finished her fifteenth and hardest year as a police officer, a year in which her mother passed away from cancer. Her two-year relationship with her bartender boyfriend died of less natural causes, and she found herself buried in a long and painful and personal case – the murders of several prostitutes. Now, the old question carries with it an unbearable weight – and an unspoken still: Why are you (still) in Spokane? Then, standing in line one morning at a coffee shop, she heard a couple of telemark skiers defend Spokane, and soon she was giving the answer she heard one of them give: I like the snow. And it says something about her life and her lack of friendships and meaningful relationships that no one has ever said, "But Caroline, you hate snow."

It's snowing now, light flakes coming in at an angle and temperature of thirty-three degrees, hitting the ground and dissolving right away. Standing in line for a coffee, Caroline watches the windblown flakes and thinks of their precariousness, the conspiracy of temperature and airspeed that created them, and their frailty, making it all the way to earth only to disappear. She pays for her tea and a black coffee for the Loon and walks across the small courtyard to the empty Public Safety Building. She checks her watch: 9:00 P.M. The Loon has been stewing twenty minutes. Her old married mentor, Alan Dupree, used to say that bad guys are meat: the tougher they are, the longer you cook 'em. This guy is soft, loose at the bone. Twenty minutes ought to be plenty of time for the Loon to give up whatever he's got to give.

She opens the door and steps inside, removes her jacket and sets it on the chair behind her. The good-looking Loon looks up, reaches for his eye patch, and smooths it absentmindedly, the way a person might pat down a cowlick.

Well, she thinks, here we go. "I'm Caroline Mabry," she says. "Sergeant Burroughs said you want to talk to a detective."

Up close he is jittery, and his cheeks are hard and sunken beneath a week's growth of whiskers. But he doesn't stink like a derelict. His features are less sharp than she first thought, and he is more familiar. "Are you-?" he begins.

"A detective?" Caroline nods. "I am."

"Good," he says. "Okay. Right. Okay. Before we start, is it possible to… can we… is there any sort of o ff-the-record? I mean… can we set some ground rules?"

"Sure." Caroline smiles and lies with a practiced nonchalance that worries her. "We go off the record all the time."

"Okay." He closes his eye and nods. "Well, then… I want to confess."

"That's what I hear. And this has something to do with a homicide?" She makes a wager with herself. Robert Kennedy. No, John Lennon. No, wait. He's the Son of Sam.

The Loon nods. "Yes," he says. "A homicide."

"A recent case?"

"I don't want to talk specifically."

"Oh, sure," Caroline says. "Let's talk generally about homicide. Generally I'm against it. How about you, Mr.-"

He ignores her attempt to get his name. "Please. This is hard enough. I don't quite know how to start."

"Well," she says, "it is customary with this sort of thing to start with a body."

"No," he says. "I can't. It's not… it's not like that."

"No body?" Of course, she thinks. He's committed his crime on some astral plane. He's murdered someone's soul.

"No, I mean… it just… this isn't an unsolved case from the newspaper or something. It's nothing that you know about." And he adds, "Yet."

"Okay. You tell me. Where should we start?"

"I don't think you understand what I'm trying to do here," he says.

"I'm trying to understand, Mr.-"

He catches her gaze. His one eye goes back and forth between hers, as if trying to choose the friendlier of the two. "Are you religious, Caroline?"

She is surprised he has remembered her first name, but she lets it go and thinks about the question, the angle. If she says yes, she is religious, does the Loon experience a moment of epiphany and give up the whole thing? Or does he shy away, thinking she'll be judgmental? If she says no, does he close up because she is a heathen? Or does he feel liberated, able to talk freely? She decides to go with God.

"I have my faith," she says, and has to look away because that's an even bigger lie than the one about going off the record.

"I wish I did," says the Loon, and rubs his face.