Лоуренс Блок - Catch and Release

After her parents died, she didn’t sleep with anyone until she’d graduated and left home for good. Then she got a waitress job, and the manager took her out drinking after work one night, got her drunk, and performed something that might have been date rape; she didn’t remember it that clearly, so it was hard to say.

When she saw him at work the next night he gave her a wink and a pat on the behind, and something came into her mind, and that night she got him to take her for a ride and park on the golf course, where she took him by surprise and beat his brains out with a tire iron.

There, she’d thought. Now it was as if the rape — if that’s what it was, and did it really matter what it was? Whatever it was, it was as if it had never happened.

A week or so later, in another city, she quite deliberately picked up a man in a bar, went home with him, had sex with him, killed him, robbed him, and left him there. And that set the pattern.

Four times the pattern had been broken, and those four men had joined Doug Pratter on her list. Two of them, Sid from Philadelphia and Peter from Wall Street, had escaped because she drank too much. Sid was gone when she woke up. Peter was there, and in the mood for morning sex, after which she’d laced his bottle of vodka with the little crystals she’d meant to put in his drink the night before.

She’d gone away from there wondering how it would play out, figuring she’d know when she read about it in the papers. But if there’d been a story it escaped her attention, so she didn’t really know whether Peter deserved a place on her list.

It wouldn’t be hard to find out, and if he was still on the list, well, she could deal with it. It would be a lot harder to find Sid, because all she knew about him was his first name, and that might well have been improvised for the occasion. And she’d met him in Philadelphia, but he was already registered at a hotel, so that meant he was probably from someplace other than Philadelphia, and that meant the only place she knew to look was the one place where she could be fairly certain he didn’t live.

She knew the first and last names of the two other men on her list. Graham Weider was a Chicagoan she’d met in New York; he’d taken her to lunch and to bed, then jumped up and hurried her out of there, claiming an urgent appointment and arranging to meet her later. But he’d never turned up, and the desk at his hotel told her he’d checked out.

So he was lucky, and Alvin Kirkaby was lucky in another way. He was an infantry corporal on leave before they shipped him off to Iraq, and if she’d realized that she wouldn’t have picked him up in the first place, and she wasn’t sure what kept her from doing to him as she did to the other men who entered her life. Pity? Patriotism? Both seemed unlikely, and when she thought about it later she decided it was simply because he was a soldier. That gave them something in common, because weren’t they both military types? Wasn’t she her father’s little soldier?

Maybe he’d been killed over there. She supposed she could find out. And then she could decide what she wanted to do about it.

Graham Weider, though, couldn’t claim combatant status, unless you considered him a corporate warrior. And while his name might not be unique, neither was it by any means common. And it was almost certainly his real name, too, because they’d known it at the front desk. Graham Weider, from Chicago. It would be easy enough to find him, when she got around to it.

Of them all, Sid would be the real challenge. She sat there going over what little she knew about him and how she might go about playing detective. Then she treated herself to another half-glass of Brown Palace water and flavored it with a miniature of Johnnie Walker from the minibar. She sat down with the drink and shook her head, amused by her own behavior. She was dawdling, postponing her shower, as if she couldn’t bear to wash away the traces of Doug’s lovemaking.

But she was tired, and she certainly didn’t want to wake up the next morning with his smell still on her. She undressed and stood for a long time in the shower, and when she got out of it she stood for a moment alongside the tub and watched the water go down the drain.

Four, she thought. Why, before you knew it, she’d be a virgin all over again.

“Mrs. Saugerties?”

A nod.

“That would be Dorothy Saugerties? And did I pronounce that correctly? Like the Hudson River town?”

Another nod.

“Well, Mrs. Saugerties, I’m Baird Lewis, and this is my colleague, Rita Raschman. We’re with Child Protective Services.”

No response.

“One of your neighbors called to express concern over the living conditions here, and how they might impact upon your children.”

“Haven’t got any.”

“I beg your pardon? According to our records, you have four children, three girls and a boy, and—”

“Haven’t got neighbors. This here’s mine, from the road back to the creek. Then there’s state land on that side. Nearest neighbors would be a quarter mile from here.”

“Well, one of them—”

“Might be more like a half mile. If it matters.”

“Baird, may I? Mrs. Saugerties, you do have four children, don’t you?”

“Did.”

“They’re not living here now?”

“Not anymore. Tricia, Calder, Maxine, and Little Debby. Moved away and left me here.”

“When was this, Mrs. Saugerties?”

“Hard for me to keep track of time.”

“I see.”

“He moved out, see, and—”

“That would be your son, Calder?”

“My husband. It got so he couldn’t take it, you know, so he moved out.”

“Does he live nearby?”

“Don’t know where he took himself off to. But he left, and then the children.”

“They just left?”

“Here one day and gone the next.”

“But how could—”

“Rita, if I may? Mrs. Saugerties, let me make sure I have the names right. Patricia, Calder, Maxine, and Deborah, is that right?”

“Tricia.”

“That’s her actual name? Good, Tricia.”

“And not Deborah. Little Debby.”

“Debby.”

“ Little Debby. Like the cakes.”

“Like—?”

“The cakes.”

“It’s a brand of cupcake, Baird. You can find them next to the Twinkies.”

“My life is ever the richer for knowing that, Rita. They just left, Mrs. Saugerties?”

“Might be they went with their father.”

“I was wondering if that might be a possibility.”

“Because, see, they just hated it here, same as he did. On account of there’s no room in the house anymore. On account of my stuff.”

“Your stuff. I can’t help noticing there’s a pile of trash on either side of the porch glider. Is that the sort of stuff you mean?”

“Ain’t trash. ’Smy stuff.”

“I see.”

“I like to have things, and then I like to keep ’em. Other people, they don’t care for it.”

“Like your husband.”

“And the children. Their rooms filled up, along with everything else, and there was no place for them to play. But you know, there’s the whole yard. It’s our property clear back to the creek.”

“Yes. Do you suppose I could use your bathroom, Mrs. Saugerties?”

“Don’t work.”

“I see. Well, let me just go in and get myself a glass of water.”

“That don’t work either. Oh, I guess he didn’t hear me. He wasn’t really supposed to go into the house.”

“I’m sure Baird won’t disturb anything, Mrs. Saugerties.”

“It’s just such a mess, you know. No room for a body to get around. And the animals mess in the house. I don’t know why I can’t keep up with their messes.”