Jan Burke - Nine

“I’d like to fax this copy to my office, and get a copy of the file, too.”

“No problem.”

The tech arrived. He dusted for prints and gathered the pencils and a few other materials from the desk that he thought might be promising for identification evidence. Before he left, he told Alex that he thought he had picked up some good latent prints from areas of the desk that had probably been touched only by the suspect.

Alex began questioning Nola again. She had a good memory for details, but he doubted much of what the pretender had told her was true. Still, sometimes liars gave away more of the truth than they intended.

The story of the Eric she had known was surprisingly similar to the one Ciara had told him of the real Eric. He thought the pretender must have known Eric Grady, or at least talked to him at length. Alex would have to learn more about the crowd Grady had been in contact with in Topanga.

She said, “He dyed his hair.”

“What?”

“It wasn’t the same color all the time. But a lot of guys do that, you know.”

“Always dark?”

“Yes. But sometimes too dark. And his roots were lighter than his hair. I think his natural color is lighter.”

“Any sports, hobbies?”

“None that he ever talked about. I didn’t like him much.”

She burned a copy of the photo files onto a CD and handed it to him.

She stared for a long time at the photo they had faxed, her head bent over it. He saw a tear slide down her nose, saw her brush it away. She took off her glasses and covered her face with her hands.

“Nola-” He put an arm around her shoulders. She took a great hiccuping breath, turned her face into his shoulder, and wept in earnest.

“Harmless! I told you he was harmless. Jesus Christ, he probably killed the real Eric. A killer, and I worked with him on a show about killers. God, I saw him almost every day. A fucking murderer. And I told you I thought he was harmless.”

He waited until she had calmed down. She stepped away, pulled four tissues from a box on her desk, and blew her nose noisily. He almost smiled.

“I can’t stay here,” she said. “I’m going home.”

“You okay to drive?”

She nodded and gave him a watery smile. “Thanks. I don’t cry much, but when I do, I guess I really go for broke.”

This time, he did smile.

In the parking lot, she suddenly turned and gave him a brief hug, then hurried to her car without looking back. She wouldn’t touch him again, he knew. It was a liability of the job.

He had come to such moments many times, when he stopped being the person with the interesting job, the curious occupation. No one really wanted murder to come close to them. It had come close to Nola now. She would no sooner reach for him than she would reach to touch a corpse.

He told himself it was just as well.

Denver, Colorado

Tuesday, May 20, 4:41n A.M.

In the memory-dream, the digging dream, he was a child again.

The boy Kit sat in a corner, reading A Tale of Two Cities, turning the pages as quietly as possible. He was much quieter, much more studious than most eleven-year-old boys, a fact remarked upon by his teachers in every school in which he had ever been enrolled. He had long ago lost track of how many schools he had attended.

He had also, long ago, learned the art of establishing his place at a new school. He could spot the reigning bully within minutes of entering a schoolroom. Rarely did he actually have to fight now. Kit was lean and strong, and tall for his age, but this was, he knew, not what kept challenges from being issued. He found that he could somehow communicate in one long stare that a fight would be a bad idea. If it came to that, he would win. He had tested himself against larger, adult opponents, and if he seldom won those encounters, he learned method from them. Usually, only another child who had faced the same at home had enough anger in him to try anyway.

The invariable pattern at any school would be that soon the bully would learn that Kit wanted nothing more than to be left alone, and would comply with this wish rather than face this strange, cold newcomer’s fists. If any other student sought his protection, Kit would give it, but always with the warning that he would be gone from the school within weeks. Despite the hero-worship this earned him here and there, the protection was never given with any real offer of friendship. He had learned few lessons as thoroughly as how to make his inevitable leaving-taking as painless as possible.

Like all of the homes Jerome chose, this one was isolated from its neighbors. There were no streetlights this far out of the city. Eventually, the room grew dark, but Kit didn’t want to turn on a light. A light would attract attention. The last thing he wanted right now was to distract his mother and his stepfather.

Serenity and Jerome were excited about something. He wished they were both drunk or high or even having sex. Usually, at any of those times, they ignored him. When they shared this hard, mean-spirited laughter, any number of things might go wrong. They might fight. They might cause the sort of trouble that would then require another move. They might turn on him in one way or another.

His mother, in all his experience of her, was a weak woman, more inclined to aggravate any attack on him than to intercede on his behalf. He could hear the slurring of her words now, between the moments of laughter.

By the time he was eight, Kit had known that Serenity had chosen to give birth to him in order to ward off loneliness. He was certain that she wished she loved him but knew that his guaranteed attachment to her helped her to survive between relationships. She scorned the only other source of stability in her life-a family that would have welcomed her home at any time. But Serenity, most misnamed child, had been a runaway, a drug addict whose wealthy family had not been able to buy any cure that would bring her back to them.

Kit, throughout any part of his childhood he could remember, did whatever he could to take care of her. She would be most tender toward him when he was most needed. He liked being useful, looking out after her, protecting her to whatever extent he could. He was not always successful.

That night, his mind strayed from the French Revolution as Dickens portrayed it. The laughter pierced through his enjoyment of the book. He kept it open only to avoid eye contact with the two at the table.

Kit thought that Serenity already understood that as charming as Jerome could be when he felt it would do him some good, he did not marry her for love. He married her because he needed to master someone, and in her moments of sobriety-always filled with self-recrimination-she seemed to believe his mastery a penance. Kit sensed that somehow this time she had met a man who was worse than all the other men who had dated, slept, lived with her before now. Some had matched his heat. None had matched his ice. There was something in Jerome that enjoyed cruelty in the way her most hotheaded lovers had not.

A temper had its expression and its end. The building toward its release was nearly worse than the release itself. But with Jerome, there was seldom release in a blow. The tension in the household built, and built, and built. Then this brittle laughter would start.

When Jerome and Serenity were first married, Kit had not been living with his mother. Serenity had frequently left him in the care of his grandmother, usually because of an arrest, or a boyfriend who objected to feeding another man’s son. In these months, he would be transported into a world so different from the one he usually lived in, the return was twice as cruel. Eventually, he began to shield himself from these disappointments in much the same way he shielded himself from the pain of parting with school friends-he resisted any deepening of the attachment. Elizabeth bore it patiently, making him both ashamed and unable to resist hoping he could live with her.