Lisa Unger - Sliver Of Truth

There was so much sorrow in his voice that I almost stopped but kept going instead. I thought I could hitch a ride, go to the police and get myself arrested or deported or murdered or whatever. It didn’t matter.

When I felt his hand on my arm, I spun around and started pummeling him pathetically with my fists. I was so weak, so messed up, that instead of warding me off, he just pulled me into him, effectively pinning me against him. Eventually I stopped struggling. His body was shaking slightly, from cold or emotion, I didn’t know. I could hear the beating of his heart fast and strong in his chest. I let myself sob, standing there on the highway in the pouring rain.

“I’m so sorry,” he said into my ear. “I’m so sorry. You were right. I am an asshole. You didn’t deserve that.” He tightened his arms around me and I wrapped mine around his waist. “You didn’t deserve any of this.”

I looked up at him and saw all the pain in the world in the gray of his eyes.

“Neither did you,” I said. There was a flash of something on his face. I think it was gratitude. And then his mouth was on mine. In his hunger and his passion, I tasted his honesty. I opened myself to it and took it all in-this man, his truth, and his kiss. In that moment, I knew one thing for sure. That Dylan Grace had been right all along. He was the only friend I had.

I FOUND THAT I had about two thousand pounds sterling in my bag, close to four thousand dollars. How it got there, I had no idea. We parked the Peugot in a public lot and then checked into a run-down hotel near Charing Cross Road. The room was ugly but clean and comfortable enough, and Dylan insisted we chill there for a while, wait for the sun to go down. He washed and rebandaged my wound with great tenderness. I let him, though I could have done it myself. Since our kiss on the road, there’d been a charged silence between us. We spoke to each other politely or not at all.

I was eager to get to an Internet café but saw the wisdom in waiting for dark. Plus, I was feeling worse and weaker by the minute. I lay down on the queen-size bed, which smelled vaguely of cigarettes. Dylan took the chair beside me and turned on the “telly.” After an hour of watching the news, we still hadn’t seen anything about ourselves. A check of the morning papers in the lobby on the way in showed that we hadn’t made the print media, either.

“It’s weird,” said Dylan, looking at me from the chair. “I’d have thought our pictures would be all over the place after a mess like that.”

“Maybe they want to keep it quiet.”

“No way. Two cops and a nurse dead? Whoever I killed lying on the hospital room floor? You missing? No way to keep that quiet. They should be using every resource at their disposal to find us.”

“But they did keep it quiet. Obviously.”

He had his head in his hand and rubbed his temples.

“You can lie down if you want,” I said. I thought he must be tired, every muscle in his body aching from driving and sitting up all night.

He looked up at me. “Yeah?”

I nodded. He rose from his chair and lay down beside me. The bed squealed beneath his weight. I moved into him and let him fold his arms around me. I heard him release a long, slow breath, felt the muscles in his chest and shoulders relax. I just wanted to feel safe for a minute. And I did. I drifted off like that. When I woke again, the sky outside our window was darkening.

He was sleeping soundly, his breathing deep and even. My head was on his shoulder and he had one arm curled around me, one flung over his head. I flashed on how his face had looked in the car when he talked about Max, about the things he’d said. How the pain of it had brought tears to his eyes. I hated what he had told me. I felt as if the knowledge was a cancer growing inside me, something black and deadly that would eventually take over and shut all my systems down. I would die from it; I was sure of that.

I remembered Max’s parade of call girls, women I had always naively thought were his girlfriends. A man like that, so damaged inside, my mother had said once of him, can’t really love. At least he was smart enough to know it. Did she know how much worse it really was? She couldn’t have. She couldn’t.

In the file there’d been a list-a kind of time line. I’d quickly passed it over because I didn’t understand it. I realized now with horror what it was. I slipped myself away from Dylan and went over to the pile of our things on the chair. The file was there beneath my bag. I sat cross-legged on the floor and opened it in my lap, flipped through its leaves until I found what I was looking for. It was a time line, apparently compiled by the FBI’s Serial Crimes Division in cooperation with Interpol, of a list of women found murdered, perpetrator unknown, organized by date and geographic location. It started in Michigan in the ghettos surrounding Michigan State, where Max went to college. Four women, streetwalkers, were found over the four-year period Max resided in that area. One: Emily Watson, seventeen, found in an alleyway beneath some bags of trash behind a Chinese restaurant. Two: Paris Cole, twenty-one, found beneath a bridge over the Detroit River. Three: Marcia Twinning, sixteen, found in a drug den in downtown Detroit. Four: Elsie Lowell, twenty-three, found in an empty lot, her body partially burned. The list went on. Women in New York, New Jersey, London, Paris, Cairo, Milan-around the country and around the world-with two things in common: the brutality of a beating death and the fact that Max was in the area around the time of their murders. Young women, lost women, walking the streets, fallen upon by a predator and left like trash. I noticed that the list ended the year Max died.

I felt my stomach churn, even as my mind clouded with a thousand questions. What did it mean precisely that these deaths corresponded with Max’s passage through the world? Surely you could compile a list like this for almost anyone. People were murdered every day in a thousand different ways all over the globe. And if, in fact, there was any real evidence that he’d murdered these women or that he’d been involved in criminal enterprise with any of the people in the photographs, why wasn’t he ever arrested? Why wasn’t he ever charged? They didn’t seem to have any difficulty finding and following him.

“You want to talk about some of that?” Dylan asked from the bed, startling me.

“No,” I said. “I’m tired of talking.” I felt as if we’d been talking for days.

There was so much I didn’t know and didn’t understand, so many things that didn’t make sense with the information I had. And I always had Jake in the back of my mind. Where was he? What had happened to him? How much of our life together was a lie, a fabrication on his part to be close enough to me to know if Max was still alive? How much of what was in this file did Jake already know? I thought of his own file he’d shown me, the one that had disappeared after the last time we made love. I wished I had paid more attention to what was in there.

I heard Dylan sit up and crack his back. He issued a low groan and I turned to look at him; he was clearly in pain. Looking at him made me think of Jake again. They were such different men but driven by the same desire to find my father. It was weird, karmic in a way. I knew there was a lesson for me to learn here, but I was miles away from understanding. He rested his gaze on me and I felt an odd wash of attraction and guilt. I looked away.

“What do you want to do?” he said softly.

“I need some clothes. I can’t go clubbing like this,” I said, looking down at my pilled blue sweater and ugly, too-tight jeans. I’d unzipped them to spare my injury any additional discomfort, but I couldn’t very well go running around London with my pants open.