J. Bertrand - Pattern of Wounds

“Cut the motor,” I say. “Step back out here.”

“I’m sorry, man. I really gotta get going.” He keeps his jaw tight, speaking through clenched teeth.

“I already asked you nicely, Mr. Epps. Don’t escalate the situation.”

He kills the engine but leaves the keys dangling. I step back so he can climb out of the car.

“Remove your glasses, please.”

He complies.

“You know what you look like?” I ask. “A man who got in a scrap with a jealous husband. You wanna tell me what happened to you?”

He shakes his head.

“Is that your final answer?”

He thinks. He nods.

“Because I saw a guy not too long ago that looks just like this. Beat up pretty bad. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

He shakes his head. He waits. “No,” he says.

“Tell you what. I’m gonna have you do something for me.” I pat my pockets down, removing some plastic gloves. I peel them apart and shake one out until the palm opens up a bit. “I want you to take this glove and breathe into it. Go ahead.”

“What?”

“Take it.”

He pinches the edge between two fingers, holding the glove away from him.

“Breathe in it,” I say. “Like this.” I take a deep breath and blow.

“What for?”

“For a man in a hurry, you sure do drag your feet. Now go ahead and blow. Keep blowing until the fingers inflate.”

He exhales into the limp glove, then hands it back. I cinch the opening with my thumb and forefinger.

“Now, is there anything you want to tell me about Jason Young?” I ask. “Once I bring this to lab and run the tests, it’ll be too late for you to tell your side of the story.”

He looks at the glove. He looks at me. He leans against the car and makes a moaning sound, covering his mouth with his hands.

“Tell me what happened,” I say.

“I don’t know how he found me.” He touches his swollen cheek. “The phone bills, I guess. He must have gone back through her calls and figured it out. All I know is, this guy wants me to show him a property, this house on Bissonnet that’s been on the market forever.”

“You get there and what? He’s waiting?”

Epps nods. “I let him through the gate, and as soon as I close it, he’s on me.”

“He punched you with his fists?”

He slides down the car, resting on his haunches, his hands half covering his mouth, like he wants to keep the words from coming out. “There were some bricks. Some loose bricks stacked inside the fence. I grabbed one. I had to defend myself.”

“So you hit him?”

“We struggled for a while, and then he just stopped fighting. He stopped fighting and let me beat him. And I couldn’t stop beating him.”

“And afterward?”

“I dragged him out to the curb.” His face convulses in a series of dry sobs. Then a preternatural calmness overtakes him. “I ruined everything, didn’t I? I ruined my whole life.”

“Stand up, Mr. Epps.”

He gets to his feet, bracing himself with one hand against the car.

“When you leave here, I want you to call the police. Understand? I want you to call and make a statement. Ask to speak to whoever’s in charge of the investigation, and then tell him everything you told me. If you do that voluntarily, it’ll work in your favor. If you don’t-if I check back and you haven’t done it-then I’ll drag you in myself and frog-march you in front of the judge, and so help me he’ll dig a deep hole and bury you somewhere forever.”

“No,” he says. “I’ll do it.”

“This is a favor I’m doing you. You owe me for this.”

He covers his dazed expression with the sunglasses, then slides clumsily behind the wheel, bumping his head on the doorframe.

“Hand me your phone,” I say.

He goes through his pockets, producing the plastic brick of a smartphone he’d brought to the interview room. I punch the numbers in myself, then hand it back to him.

“As soon as my back is turned, you call.”

“I will,” he says.

I head back across the parking lot, not giving him a second glance. My stride is long, my muscles tingling with the old excitement.

I noticed the injuries. I made the connection. I got the confession.

Like a beat cop of old, operating on nothing but ego and sleight of hand. I was a wave of moral authority sweeping away everything in my path.

At my approach, Aguilar perks up, sensing the change in mood. He glances over my shoulder and back at me.

“What’s he doing?” I ask.

“He’s on the phone.”

I ball the glove in my fist, then toss it away. Aguilar looks at the glove, then back at me. Baffled. I choose not to explain myself.

“You’ve finished the semester?” I ask David.

He looks down at the pavement and shrugs. “My last final was yesterday.”

“What are you studying?”

“I’m supposed to be working on a dissertation.” He smiles. “But it keeps getting away from me.”

Aguilar steps away for another phone call, still eyeing Sean Epps from across the lot. He exchanges a few words, then snaps the phone shut and gives me a look. Enough of the small talk. Time to get down to business.

“Your father returned to the United States on Thursday, the tenth of December. Is that right?” I have the response from ICE in my briefcase, so I already know the answer. “He leaves the country on Sunday the sixth, the day after Simone Walker was murdered, and he comes back four days later. That’s four hours from here to New York and another sixteen hours to Nigeria with a stop-off at Heathrow, so let’s say twenty hours total one way. Then he turns around and comes right back. Does that seem strange to you?”

“I don’t know,” he says with a shrug. “I don’t keep track of him.”

“But you know he’s back?”

“I saw him this morning at breakfast. He said it was going to be a tight Christmas this year. He got fired from his job.”

“Did he say anything about Simone? Or Agnieszka?”

He shakes his head. “He didn’t say a word to me. My father kind of talks to the room, if you know what I mean. He went into his office for some kind of conference call. He’s trying to get a new company to hire him.”

“But you’ve talked to him about Agnieszka before, right?”

He cocks his head. “She told me he was looking at her, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“What did you do when she told you?”

“What did I do?” He blinks. “I didn’t do anything. I told her to be careful of him. I told her he’s a bad person. She wanted to complain, to call the police. I didn’t think that would be a good idea.” He pauses. “He’s killed people, you know?”

He says it with a doubtful lilt in his voice, like he’s not sure we’ll believe him.

“You told her that?”

“ He told me. It happened over there. In Africa. He said some guys tried to force him into the back of a car, and he stabbed them.” He stops. Wipes his hand over his mouth. “I know it sounds crazy, but I didn’t doubt him for a minute. He has all these knives. He has a stone to sharpen them, and he’ll sit upstairs and you can hear the scraping sound. If it sounds crazy, well. . he’s crazy. He likes to hurt people.”

“Did he ever threaten to hurt you?”

“He did hurt me. He did this to me.”

David draws his left hand from his pocket and holds it up, fingers splayed. The ring finger juts crookedly, with a fat notch of skin missing near the knuckle, the surface covered in shiny scar tissue. A similar scar runs down the side of his middle finger, like someone flayed the skin with a sharp blade. I take him gently by the wrist, pulling the hand closer. He trembles at the touch.