Джордж Пелеканос: The Double

“Snakeheads,” said the man, grabbing one firmly with one hand and opening its mouth with a set of pliers he had removed from a hip sheath. Lucas saw rows of sharp teeth.

“What the hell?” said Lucas.

“Don’t know how they got introduced to these waters, but they’re here to stay. They’re predators, but nothin preys on them. And the females carry hundreds of eggs in their sacs, so it ain’t like they’re going away. Know what else? They got legs.” The man smiled at Lucas’s wide-eyed expression. “That’s right. They can walk on land.”

“What are you gonna do with them?”

“Oh, I’ll grill ’em up. I don’t take nothin from out the water that I don’t eat.” The man looked at Lucas’s kayak and grinned. “Don’t fall in. These suckers bite.”

Lucas paddled out into the creek, going left, away from the Potomac, deep into the freshwater marsh, along bottomland forest, wetlands, and acres of American lotus. He powered through wet grass, his stroke even and sure, the sun hot on his shoulders and back. He saw bald eagles in their distinctive gliding flight, and many egrets, and turtles, and a water snake swimming in an S-curve across his bow. After forty-five minutes the veins had popped out on his forearms and biceps, and his back had a pleasant ache. He pulled in to a sand berm at the end of a small island and beached his boat. From a collapsible cooler in the stern bulkhead he retrieved a spicy salami sandwich and a cold bottle of beer. He sat on a blanket, which he’d spread over shells and goose poop, and ate and drank under the spotted shade of a sparsely leafed tree, looking out at the sun mirroring off the creek and the deep green forest of oak and pine on a nearby shore.

On the paddle back to the launch, Lucas saw three more snakes cutting through the water. This was unusual and disturbing. Once, when he was a kid, he had awakened from a nightmare to find his father sitting on his bed. He told his dad that, in his bad dream, he had been chased by a snake, and he could not seem to get away.

“Only one snake?” said Van Lucas.

“Yes,” said Spero.

“Then you got nothin to worry about, boy. The Greeks say that when you dream of one snake, it’s your friend. More than one, it means something else.”

“What does it mean when you see more than one snake, Baba? ”

“Something bad’s about to happen,” said his father. “But not to you. Now, you go back to sleep.”

“Don’t leave me, okay? Stay here.”

“I’m not goin anywhere, son.”

Twenty years later, while in the desert in Iraq, Spero saw two horned vipers sidewinding up a dune at dusk, and felt a melancholy drop in his stomach. Van Lucas died the next day, in Washington, of the cancer that had slowly eaten his brain.

By the time he had loaded his boat and gear, and taken a bike ride on a railroad trail, it was late afternoon. Lucas drove back up the Indian Head Highway and, with the help of his GPS system, found the wooded area where Edwina Christian had been discovered. The forest was set back from acres of farmland, currently yielding a crop of soybean. The road that led into the woods was not a road exactly, but a cut-through in the field, worn down to dirt by years of use.

Lucas put his Jeep in 4WD and drove onto the road. Using the photographs he had brought with him, he found the approximate spot where Calvin Bates had allegedly left tracks from his Cherokee. Lucas parked his own Cherokee there. He got out and used his iPhone to take photographs of his vehicle in position. He studied the blown-up photographs of the Bates tracks, and compared them to the images on his phone. He then retrieved a twenty-five-foot Craftsman tape measure from his vehicle and took the width of the road, and the distance-width between his tires. He entered the numbers into the Notes app of his phone.

He had something now.

When Lucas got back to his place, he did some research on his laptop, then called Petersen and told him what he’d found.

“You’re talking about the wheelbase,” said Petersen.

“No,” said Lucas. “The wheelbase is the distance between the center of the front wheel and the center of the rear wheel. I’m talking about the axle track: the distance between the centerline of two tires on the same axle.”

“The width.”

“Basically. Just from eyeballing the photos of the tracks, and putting my truck in the same spot, it looks to me that the tracks laid down on that road were wider than a Jeep Cherokee would leave.”

“It looks to you.”

“Go to the discovery and check it out. The police report will have the recorded distance between the tracks. Compare that distance to the axle-track specs on a 200 °Cherokee. I can damn near guarantee that the two measurements will differ. We’re talking about a bigger vehicle, a heavy-duty truck or one of those oversized SUVs that nobody actually needs.”

“You’re saying what?”

“I don’t know that Calvin Bates didn’t kill that woman. Maybe he did, and maybe he took her down to those woods in his truck. But the tracks they found were not consistent with tracks from a Jeep of that year and model.”

“What about the tire tread?”

“Any specific tire can be mounted on thousands, tens of thousands of different cars. Right? If you bring that up to a jury...”

“Thank you, Jack McCoy.”

“Just sayin.”

“It’s something,” said Petersen.

“I’m not done,” said Lucas. “I’ll talk to Edwina Christian’s mother next. The transcripts of her interviews were a little off. You notice that?”

“She’s had problems. She was once a police officer in PG County, but she left the force under a cloud. Something to do with a credit card scam.”

“I’ll get on it.”

“Tonight?”

“No, not tonight. I’ve got an appointment with a woman.”

“I should have known.”

“Not like that. Business.”

“One of your side jobs?”

“I’ll talk to you soon.”

Lucas ended the call and sat down in his favorite chair, set next to a side table holding books. He watched the dim light of dusk outside his windows, and felt a familiar stirring inside him. He looked again at his phone, scrolled through his contacts, and found the name and number he had entered the night before. He touched the number on the screen and waited.

“Charlotte Rivers,” said the voice on the other end of the line.

“It’s Spero Lucas. The guy at the bar of Boundary Road. White T-shirt, black shorts. You know, GQ ’s Man of the Year?”

“I remember you.”

“And I you.”

“Hold on.” He waited, and soon after that he heard the closing of a door.

“Hello?” said Lucas.

“I’m here.”

“Thank you for, you know, being so nice last night. Giving me a chance, I mean. I should have come over and introduced myself.”

“You tried to buy me a drink instead.”

“I admit, that was clumsy. I was a little intimidated, to tell you the truth.”

“By me?”

“You’re a beautiful woman. I was sweaty from a bike ride, not properly dressed. I wasn’t exactly at my best.”

“But I left you my phone number anyway.”

“I know. Why?”

“I’m not sure myself.”

“Listen...”

“What?”

“Can I meet you sometime, for coffee, or whatever you’d like? I promise I’ll come correct.”

“I have some time tomorrow evening,” she said. No hesitation. She suggested a time and place. Lucas wrote it down and they ended the call.

He stared stupidly at his cell. He thought of her walking past the bar, black tank top, black jeans, brown motorcycle boots, exquisitely built, those brilliant blue eyes, that upturned mouth with the hint of a smile. Lucas had swelled and he felt flushed. The last time he’d gotten an erection while talking to a girl on the phone, he’d been a teenager. But this was a full-blown woman, not a girl. There was something about Charlotte Rivers that heated him. Maybe she was just another challenge, and he was hot with the thrill of the new.