Chapter

17

I finished my breakfast before I spoke again. French toast, maple syrup, coffee. Protein, fiber, carbohydrates. And caffeine. All the essential food groups, except nicotine, but I had already quit by then. I put my silverware down and said, “There’s really only one obvious way to cut a woman’s throat. You stand behind her and use one hand in her hair to pull her head back. Or you hook your fingers in her eye sockets, or if you’re sure your hands are steady you could use your palm under her chin. But whichever, you expose her throat and you put some tension in the ligaments and the blood vessels. Then you get busy with the blade. You’re taught to expect major resistance to the cut, because there’s some pretty tough stuff in there. And you’re taught to start an inch earlier and finish an inch later than you think is really necessary. Just to be absolutely sure.”

Deveraux said, “I’m assuming that’s exactly what happened in the alley. But suddenly, I hope. So it was over before she realized it was happening at all.”

I said, “It didn’t happen in the alley. It can’t have.”

“Why not?”

“One of the side benefits of doing it from behind is you don’t get covered in blood. And there’s a lot of blood. You’re talking about carotids and jugulars, and a young healthy person suddenly agitated and struggling, maybe even fighting. Her blood pressure must have been spiking sky high.”

“I know there’s a lot of blood. I saw it. There was a huge pool of it. She was all bled out. As white as a sheet. I assume you saw the sand. That’s how big the pool was. It looked like a gallon or more.”

“You ever cut a throat?”

“No.”

“You ever seen it done?”

She shook her head.

“No,” she said.

“The blood doesn’t just seep out like you slit your wrists in the bathtub. It comes out like a fire hose. It sprays everywhere, ten feet or more, great gouts of it, splattering all over the place. I’ve seen it on ceilings, even. Crazy patterns, like someone took a paint can and threw it around. Like that guy, Jackson Pollock. The painter.”

Deveraux said nothing.

I said, “There would have been blood all over the alley. On the loan office’s wall, for sure. And on the bar’s wall, and maybe on the pharmacy’s wall. On the floor, too, yards away. Crazy thin patterns. Not a neat pool right underneath her. That’s just not possible. She wasn’t killed there.”

Deveraux linked her hands on the table and bowed her head over them. She was doing something I had never seen a person do before. Not literally. She was hanging her head. She breathed in, breathed out, and five seconds later she looked up again and said, “I’m an idiot. I suppose I must have known all that, but I didn’t remember it. I just didn’t see it.”

“Don’t feel bad,” I said. “You never saw it happen, so you don’t have anything to remember.”

“No, it’s basic,” she said. “I’m an idiot. I’ve wasted days.”

“It gets worse,” I said. “There’s more.”

She didn’t want to hear about how it got worse. She didn’t want more. Not immediately. Not right then. She was still beating herself up for missing the thing with the blood. I had seen that kind of reaction many times. I had had that kind of reaction many times. Smart, conscientious people hate making mistakes. Not just because of ego. Because mistakes of a certain type have the kind of consequences that people with consciences don’t like to live with.

She frowned and ground her teeth and growled at herself for a minute, and then she shook her head and stopped and came up with a brave smile, tighter and grimmer than her normal sunny radiance. She said, “OK, tell me more. Tell me how it gets worse. But not in here. I have to eat here three times a day. I don’t want the associations.”

So we paid for our breakfasts and stepped out to the sidewalk. We stood there for a long moment, near her car, saying nothing. I could tell by her body language she wasn’t going to invite me to her office. She didn’t want me near the Sheriff’s Department. This wasn’t a democracy. In the end she said, “Let’s go back to the hotel. We can use the lounge. We’re guaranteed privacy there, after all. Since we’re the only two guests.”

We walked back down the street, and up the shaky steps, and across the old veranda. We went in and used the door on the left of the lobby. I smelled the same damp and dust and mildew as the night before. In the daylight the humped shapes I had seen in the dark turned out to be armchairs, as I had thought. There were twelve of them, grouped in various combinations, twos and fours. We took a matched pair, either side of a cold fireplace.

I asked her, “Why do you live here?”

“Good question,” she said. “I thought it would be a month or two. But it extended.”

“What about your old man’s house?”

“Rented,” she said. “The lease died with him.”

“You could rent another one. Or buy one. Isn’t that what people do?”

She nodded. “I looked at some. Couldn’t pull the trigger. Have you seen the houses around here?”

I said, “Some of them look OK.”

“Not to me,” she said. “I wasn’t ready, anyway. I hadn’t decided how long I was going to stay. Still haven’t, really. No doubt it will turn out to be the rest of my life, but I guess I don’t want to admit that to myself. I’d rather let it creep up on me day by day, I suppose.”

I thought about my pal Stan Lowrey, and his want ads. There was a lot more to leaving the service than getting a job. There were houses, and cars, and clothes. There were a hundred strange, unknown details, like the customs of a remote foreign tribe, glimpsed only in passing, and never fully understood.

Deveraux said, “So let’s hear it.”

I said, “Her throat was cut, right? We’re clear on that?”

“Definitely. Unmistakably.”

“And that was the only wound?”

“The doctor says so.”

“So somewhere there’s blood all over the place. Wherever it was actually done. In a room, maybe, or out in the woods. It’s impossible to clean up properly. Literally impossible. So there’s evidence out there, just waiting for you.”

“I can’t search the base. They won’t let me. It’s a jurisdiction thing.”

“You don’t know for sure it happened on the base.”

“She was raped on the base.”

“It’s not impossible she was raped on the base. That’s not quite the same thing.”

“I can’t search five hundred square miles of Mississippi, either.”

“So zoom in on the perpetrator. Narrow it down.”

“How?”

“No woman can bleed out twice,” I said. “Her throat was cut in some unknown location, blood sprayed everywhere, she died, and that’s all she wrote. Then she was dumped in the alley. But whose blood was she lying in? Not her own, because she’d left it all back in the unknown location.”

“Oh, God,” Deveraux said. “Don’t tell me the guy collected it and brought it with him.”

“Possible,” I said. “But a little unlikely. It would be tricky to cut someone’s throat while simultaneously dancing around with a bucket, trying to catch the spray.”

“There could have been two guys.”

“Possible,” I said again. “But still unlikely. It’s like a fire hose, flipping all around. Here, there, and everywhere. The second guy would be lucky to gather a pint.”

“So what are you saying? Whose blood was it?”

“An animal’s, possibly. Maybe a deer. Freshly slaughtered, but not quite fresh enough. There was some time lag. That blood was already congealing. A gallon of liquid blood would have spread much farther than that pile of sand. A little goes a long way, where blood is concerned.”

“A hunter?”

“That’s my guess.”

“Based on not very much. You didn’t see the blood. You didn’t test it. It could have been fake blood from a joke store. Or it could have been hers. Someone might have figured out a way to collect it. Just because you can’t see a way doesn’t mean a way doesn’t exist. Or they could have bled her out first and then cut her throat afterward.”

“Still a hunter,” I said.

“Why?”

“There’s more,” I said. “It continues to get worse.”