Jane followed him into the large bathroom, which was entirely clad in honey-colored marble: ceiling, walls, floor, shower stall. The tub and sink were carved from blocks of the same material, and all the fixtures were gold-plated. Anabel had quarters in the main house; but when she wanted a bathroom here, it must be exquisitely appointed. The color of honey. For the queen bee.
Hendrickson pressed on the fluted, gilded frame of the mirror above the sink, releasing a touch latch, and the mirror swung like a door. Within were the four shelves of a medicine cabinet, stocked with the usual items. When he pulled on the second and third shelves simultaneously, the interior of the cabinet came forward on rails, revealing a space beyond. From that hidden compartment, he withdrew a rectangular plastic box and handed it to her.
As Hendrickson rolled the interior of the cabinet back into place and closed the mirrored door, Jane flipped up the lid on the plastic box. Within were sixteen DVDs in cardboard sleeves. On each sleeve, a first name had been printed with a black felt-tip pen.
She said, “Your father’s name was—”
“Stafford. Stafford Eugene Hendrickson.”
In the study again, she found the DVD marked STAFFORD. She put the box on the desk. She hesitated to give the disc to Hendrickson. “You’ve really seen this?”
His face was slack and his voice without color, as though he had traveled into some gray kingdom of the soul, where he could no longer feel anything strongly. “Of course. Many times. We watched it together many times, Mother. Back then, it was on videotape. We didn’t have DVDs then, did we? You had to transfer them to DVD.”
She needed to be sure these discs contained what he’d said they did. She gave the DVD of his father to him. “Play this for me.”
“Yes. All right.”
He took it to the entertainment center.
In the years during which Jane had worked with the Bureau’s Behavioral Analysis Units 3 and 4, she had been assigned to cases involving serial killers. When she had tracked their squamous kind to the snake holes they called home, as always she did, she had seen things that could never be purged from memory, that returned to her on sleepless nights. A firm faith in the rightness of this made world and in the promise of the human heart was required to look upon the works of those supremely evil individuals without losing hope for humanity in its entirety. That faith had sometimes been bruised, but never broken.
Yet she steeled herself for what would appear on this large-screen television. She intended to watch only enough of it to confirm that Hendrickson’s description of it was accurate.
10
When Jergen follows Dubose and the wheezing Fennel Martin into the house trailer, he discovers why their host prefers to sit at the table in the yard to answer questions. The girl might be thirty, an ash-blond cutie.
Their explosive entrance surprises her. She thrusts up from the sofa, hastily buttoning her open blouse, though not hastily enough that Jergen has no chance to admire the fullness of her figure.
Approaching her, smiling in a friendly sort of way, he says, “What’s your name, dear?”
“Who are you? What’re you doing to him? You’ve hurt him.”
Jergen flashes his Bureau ID, but the girl doesn’t appear to be reassured by it.
Still smiling, he says, “He’ll be okay. That’s nothing. Things happen, that’s all. Tell me your name, dear.”
“Ginger.”
“Ginger, can you show me where the bathroom is, please?”
“Why?”
“I want you to stay in the bathroom while we’re having a chat with Mr. Martin. But I need to be sure there’s no window big enough for you to climb out.”
“There isn’t.”
“It’s not that I don’t believe you, Ginger. I do believe you. But I need to see for myself. It’s the way I was trained. We go through a lot of training in the FBI. I’m just following protocol. You understand?”
“No. I guess. Yeah.”
“So let’s go see the bathroom.”
The window is very small and near the ceiling. He puts down the lid of the toilet and gestures for her to sit there.
“Where is your phone, Ginger?”
“In my purse. On the table by the sofa.”
“Good. You wouldn’t want to be calling anyone. Just wait here, and we’ll be gone in no time.”
She is trembling. “I’ll wait. I’m okay with waiting.”
Jergen steps into the hallway, looks back at her. “Fennel’s not going to be ready for sex, after all. But when we’re gone, you can play cards or something.”
Jergen closes the door and returns to the living room, where the fan of the Smashing Pumpkins is sitting in an armchair.
Fennel’s tan now has a gray undertone. Sweat slicks his face, jewels his eyebrows. With his right hand, he gently cups his crotch.
Dubose has moved a side chair to sit in front of their host.
Jergen perches on the edge of the sofa.
Dubose says, “Fennel, we need some truth, and we need it fast.”
Fennel sounds thirteen when he says, “You aren’t FBI.”
“What I don’t need,” Dubose explains, “is your stupid opinions and commentary. I’ll ask questions, you’ll answer them, and we’ll be on our way. Earlier, you said, ‘I’m all about cars.’ Which means?”
“I’m a mechanic. I have a place in town. It’s not much, but I stay busy.”
“You take cash to fake smog checks so dirty cars can pass inspection?”
“What? Shit, no. I have a business license to protect.”
“You build secret compartments in the bodywork, so some asshole can run fifty kilos of heroin in from Mexico?”
Fennel glances at Jergen. “I think maybe I need an attorney.”
“Don’t answer my questions,” Dubose explains, “and what you’ll need is a testicle transplant. Before you bullshit me, consider maybe I already know the truth.”
The mechanic is too frightened to lie, but afraid that honesty will not avail him. “I run a clean business, man. I swear.”
Dubose frowns and bites his lower lip as if he’s disappointed in Fennel. “You once owned a green Honda. What happened to it?”
Fennel is surprised it’s about this. And maybe alarmed. “I sold her. She was cheap, ran good, but she was the opposite of sexy.”
“When was that?”
“I don’t know exactly. Like maybe six years ago.”
“Who’d you sell it to?”
“This guy. Some guy.”
“Don’t remember his name?”
“No. Not after so long.”
“What did he look like?”
“He was Asian.”
“What Asian—Chinese, Japanese, Korean?”
“I don’t know. How would I know?”
“You put an ad in the paper, on some Internet site?”
“No. Just a sign outside my shop.”
“What’s your bank?”
“Bank? Wells Fargo. What’s my bank matter?”
“I’ll need the account number. And the amount of the check.”
Fennel is sweating anew. “His bank wasn’t the same as mine.”
“You remember that, do you? Doesn’t matter. We can track it from bank to bank. What was the amount of the check?”
Fennel looks around as if he’s lost, as if he doesn’t recognize his own living room. “After six years it comes back to bite me? Six years? This totally sucks.”
11
They stood before the large LED television screen. Hendrickson pushed PLAY and handed the remote to Jane.
In silence, the camera moved past torches standing tall in oil drums filled with sand, serpentine coils of dark smoke rising toward vent holes in the ceiling. Past the corrugated walls of the Quonset hut, firelight rippling with the contours of the metal, illuminating goggle-eyed lizards in vertical pursuit of cockroaches that could not outrun the spooling tongues. Racks of candles, hundreds of thick candles, mostly black and red, but here a cluster of canary yellow, the fluttering flames patterning everything around them with faux butterflies and causing the very air to glow as in a furnace. Voodoo veves on the concrete floor, intricate patterns drawn with wheat flour and corn meal and ashes and redbrick dust, representing astral forces here attendant.