Karin Slaughter - Triptych

“Ehn,” Ken said when he saw her, his mouth curved up on one side as he tried to smile. He had lost about sixty pounds sitting in his wheelchair, and she wondered how he managed to wake up every morning knowing this was the life he had to look forward to.

“Remember me?” Angie asked.

He gave a deep, knowing laugh, as if to say, “How could I forget?”

Angie pulled a chair over and sat across from him. Ken fumbled with the remote in his lap, trying to mute the television. She hated nursing homes almost as much as she hated hospitals, and here she was visiting both in the same day. The chemical stench of disinfectant, the white sheets and flickering lights, reminded her of the first time she had seen her mother after the overdose. Deidre had been lying in bed, her body completely still, her mouth hanging open as if she had been surprised to find herself here. Irreversible coma. Angie was only a kid, but between General Hospital and Days of Our Lives, she knew exactly what that meant: baby, you are fucked.

“Deh,” Ken said. He had finally managed to mute the television.

Angie tried to sound cheerful. “How you been?”

One shoulder went up. He’d certainly been better.

“Stupid question, huh?”

Ken allowed a smile on the side of his face that he could control.

“You can’t talk well?”

“S’bad,” he admitted.

“I’m here about Michael Ormewood.”

He looked at the silent television for a couple of minutes. Finally, he blew out a puff of air.

Angie cut to the chase. “I know he’s an asshole, so you don’t have to bother telling me that.”

Ken nodded.

“Did you know he beats his wife?”

Shock flickered in his eyes.

“Guess not,” Angie said. “I saw her this morning. She looks like he took a bat to her.”

His jaw set and his good hand clenched in his lap. Still a cop, even though he probably couldn’t go to the toilet without someone there to wipe his ass.

Angie leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. “I know you didn’t like him. Why? What was it about him that you didn’t like?”

He blew out a noisy stream of air in answer.

Angie shook her head. “I’m not following.”

He blew out some more air.

“Oh,” she said, finally getting it. “Hot air. He’s full of hot air.”

Ken nodded, excited, and she felt like she was playing a painful game of charades.

Still, she couldn’t stop now. “When Michael worked Vice,” she confided, “he was taking advantage of the girls.”

Ken shrugged.

“Is that a ‘what do you expect’ shrug or an ‘I’m not surprised’ shrug?”

He looked at his hand in his lap, the index and middle finger slowly pointing up to show it was the second choice. I’m not surprised.

“I told him to leave or I’d report him, so he left.”

“An ah ga…” His mouth closed. She could see he hated trying to talk. “Ah gah hih.”

“Yeah,” she said. Michael had been assigned as Ken’s partner. “You got him.”

They both sat there, Ken’s mouth working but no noises coming out. Angie tried to keep her face blank, tried not to let on how hard it was seeing him like this.

Finally, he said, “You,” clear enough for anyone to understand him.

“You what?”

He just stared, and Angie realized he was looking straight down her shirt. She straightened up, laughing. “Jesus, Wozniak. You old poon hound.”

“Nah.” He waved her off with his hand. “Nah dah.” He glanced around the room as if he needed a prop. Finally, he looked back at his hands. She watched as he forced his right index finger straight out, then made a circle with his left thumb and index finger. He slid the circle up and down the finger.

Angie crossed her arms. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“Nah,” he insisted. No .

“Yeah,” she snapped, duplicating the fucking gesture with her own hands. “I got you, Ken. I know exactly what you’re saying and I gotta say I’m impressed you still got it, but no way in hell is it gonna happen.”

“You!” he yelled back, jabbing an angry finger at her. “Ma-ahl.” He made the sign again.

“Ohhhh.” She drew out the word, his meaning finally sinking in. You and Michael.

She asked, “You knew about that?”

Ken raised his eyebrows. Who doesn’t ?

“Yeah,” she admitted. “I fucked him.”

“He… old… me.”

“I bet he did.” Jesus, they all knew.

“Eh,” Ken said. Hey .

She looked up. He held out his hand in an open shrug, asking her what else.

“One of my girls was killed.”

He pointed to the television. “Home.” He had obviously seen the story on the news.

“Yeah, she lived at Grady Homes,” Angie told him. “Her tongue was bitten off. She choked to death on her own blood.”

“Ma-ahl?”

For a minute, Angie thought he was asking if Michael had killed her. Then, she realized what he was asking.

“I don’t know if Aleesha was one of the girls who went with him to get out of a bust,” Angie admitted. “I stopped working the Homes about the same time he partnered up with you. My cover was blown.”

“Who?”

Angie laughed at herself. She’d never even considered the question, just assumed that there was only a certain number of times you could take a John out and not come back with him before people started realizing you were a cop.

“I guess Michael could have outted me,” she allowed. “He might have thought he was getting me in trouble, but they just moved me to a different strip. New girls. New Johns.” She thought about one John in particular. “Michael came to my new drag a few months ago,” she told Ken. “I thought he was just being an asshole, but he told us to look out for this guy who’d just been paroled, said he was a bad motherfucker.”

Ken snorted. He had obviously had the pleasure of being on the receiving end of Michael’s trash-talking.

“Yeah, I didn’t think anything about it, either,” she admitted. “Then I ran into the guy he’d warned us about. His name is John Shelley.”

Ken shrugged. Never heard of him .

“Anyway,” Angie said, knowing she was talking in circles. “The day after Aleesha Monroe died, Michael’s next-door neighbor was found dead in her backyard.”

“Huhn?”

“Yeah,” Angie agreed. She told him the things he wouldn’t have heard on the news. Angie herself would not have known the details but for Will. “The neighbor’s tongue was cut out. Monroe’s was bitten off, but still…”

Ken sat there. Angie felt bad. The old fucker was confused enough without her pouring her heart out to him.

“I shouldn’t be bugging you with this.”

“Mo.” Ken made a circling motion with his hand. He wanted to hear more.

“Michael’s neighbor was just fifteen.” Angie stopped. Hadn’t Gina Ormewood said she was fifteen when Michael met her?

She asked, “When was the Gulf War? Ninety? Ninety-one?”

Ken held up one finger.

“How old do you think Michael is? He’s forty, right? They had some kind of party for him last year. I remember there were black balloons everywhere.”

Ken nodded.

Angie sucked at math. Will would have figured all of this in his head, but she needed something to write on. She found a scrap of paper in her purse and scribbled the numbers down with her eyeliner pencil, muttering, “Michael was born in sixty-six, minus two thousand six.” She checked the numbers, making sure she had it right. Slowly, she looked up at Ken. “Gina was fifteen when she met him. She said at first he was interested in her cousin, who was a year younger.”

She held up the sheet for Ken to see. “He was twenty-five. What’s a twenty-five-year-old man doing with a fifteen-year-old girl?”