I saw Shelly step down from the van, knew by his face he’d seen nothing. He started toward the apartment and I stepped in beside him. We went back inside, where Folger was in a corner with one of the ME’s people.
“I put on my running clothes, left the station, got home ready to fix real food for the first time in days. Now I may never eat again.” She saw me. “Yeeee-hah, there he is. My favorite reverse carpetbagger. I’ll bet the ME is going to find the woman’s equipment got yanked out through the cut in the belly. He looked like he used a chainsaw on her. Ridgecliff’s ramping up, Ryder. I probably don’t need to tell you that.”
I felt a flash of guilt that I hadn’t yet read my brother’s files. I knew him, did I need to read about his crimes?
Cluff stepped up, snapping through pages on his notepad. “Angela Bernal. New arrival on the block, a couple months maybe, no one knows much about her. Everyone says she was cheerful, pleasant. Christ, if I had a dime for every cheerful, pleasant corpse I’d –”
“Check for personal papers, find what she does,” Folger commanded. “This looks like the home of someone with a decent job. Stable. Any indication of a man around?”
One of the other dicks shuffled up. “I only saw women’s clothes in the closet and drawers.”
Folger shot a glance inside the house. The Forensics people were darkening the walls and furniture with fingerprint powder. The television had been left as found: on, but muted. It was one of the 24-hour news channels. Folger started to turn away, but something on the TV caught her eye and she stared at the screen with a frown. All I saw was an insert of a weather pattern in the Caribbean, a satellite shot, timelapse, white clouds spinning over blue water. When the insert disappeared, she turned to me.
“You’re the one supposed to know about the crazies, Ryder. At least that’s how the late Dr Prowse had you pegged. What have you figured out to put us in front of this bastard?”
“I … don’t have anything yet.”
She crossed her arms, tapped her foot. Studied my face.
“Gee. Maybe I’m expecting too much here, but isn’t it about time you started earning your keep?”
I turned to leave, feeling the heat rise to my face.
I bypassed returning to the station and went to the hotel, ashamed at allowing personal issues to freeze me into investigational impotence; stung by my inability to find the courage to read the reports on my brother’s past crimes.
I opened the files and spread them on the table and phoned room service for the opening salvo of coffee. A cold shower blasted me awake. I pulled the drapes to blot the visual distraction of the city and sky.
Me and my brother’s murders, alone at last.
I took a deep breath, opened the files, and read for four hours. It was a wrenching journey, a surfeit of grief. Twice during the reading I broke down, weeping like a child. For my brother’s victims. For my brother. For my sick and broken family. For me.
I closed the last report at three a.m., retreating to the bathroom to wash numbness from my face, brush coffee from my teeth, a sonic montage of my brother’s words banging through my head.
“How did you lure the woman to you, Mr Ridgecliff?” the interrogator asked, the transcript describing Jeremy’s encounter with a victim taken from the river park in Memphis.
“For that particular lady I used the Dear John Letter concept,” Jeremy replied. “Dejection is best displayed in the shoulders, so mine were slumped. I never overdid the tears angle – a crying adult frightens people – so I’d dab at my nose with a tissue. I liked blue tissues because they enhanced my eyes.”
And later, when the woman had been shown a knife and coerced to a secure and deadly location.
The interrogator: “How did you kill her?”
“She needed the knife. It needed her as well, aching for her supple, coral skin. Jeremy watched her. She needed to display her love of the gleaming blade and had to talk to it before it talked to her …”
I read another case in my head.
“I wrapped my hand in a handkerchief spattered with red paint, fumbling with the handkerchief, like I couldn’t get it wrapped. I said I’d cut myself on the fender of my bicycle. I’d picked up a battered old cruiser in a Goodwill store. The bike was so goofy it made her trust me even more: dangerous men don’t ride purple bicycles. My props were always very well considered.
“Pardon, sir? Was it difficult to lure her? It was easy to lure them all. I simply became the archetypal Sad Child or Hurt Child or Lost Child.”
And later:
“Jeremy saw her crying, crying was natural, a purifying act. Then the knife entered the room and started looking for company …”
Jeremy spoke in first person when describing the baiting of his targets. When it came to the killing, he jumped to third person, a detached voice. No more I, but Jeremy.
Odd. Or was it?
I thought back to my many prison interviews, both in college and as a detective. I’d heard point of view shifts before, especially in schizophrenics. But the shifts seemed random, dependent on whatever the mental voices or pictures were saying at that moment, lacking the defining line I heard with Jeremy. Luring, first person. Killing, third.
In every case, the separation.
I sat and pulled the reports close again, separating out the interviews with my brother. At places in the reading, I had skimmed the uglier parts, as if jumping over greasy puddles. There had been a rote sameness to the events: the luring mechanisms, the trip to the killing ground, the kill. Read one, you basically read them all.
“I saw her pause and move in my direction, her interest in my feigned sadness clearly piqued …
“I saw no one near and dark was falling. I showed the knife and told her to follow me …
“She stepped clumsily into the garage. The woman was terrified, but it was the price of her betrayal. Jeremy saw the knife watching her …”
In each instance, the shift in point of view was clearly demarked. The luring mechanism, first person. The trip to the killing ground, first person. For the kill, Jeremy always shifted to third. It was as if he’d walked through a door and changed at the threshold.
Plus there was the sudden personification of the knife. It seemed a tool in the luring phase, but in the kill phase seemed to assume a strange conjoined personality.
Was Jeremy so subconsciously ashamed of his murders he had generated the distinction? Or was it something other than a linguistic quirk: Had he given birth to a secondary persona to handle the killing … an avatar of death?
It made a cold and perfect sense.
I yanked open the curtains and stared into the waning night, letting my thoughts roam between the buildings, across the light traffic rolling in the street below. What changed within Jeremy’s internal structure to make him shift his descriptions during the interrogations? And if he was generating a secondary persona to handle the horror of his killing scenes, what was the persona like?
Where inside him did it hide?
“More cognac, sir?” the waiter asked, bottle in hand.
“Satisfaça sim,” Ridgecliff-Caldiera replied.