Rage Against the Dying

Six





Max turned off on Golder Ranch Road to drop me off while the other two cars continued south on Oracle back into the city. As we pulled up to the house I thought of the man and two dogs who awaited me inside. While it had been great to see Sigmund again, and despite the pain of seeing Jessica’s body, maybe even because of the stress of coming face-to-face with that part of the past, as I walked back up the driveway I imagined myself pounding on the door and yelling, “Sanctuary!” That’s how good it felt when Carlo opened the front door and gave me his grin.

For a second his look faded into what I imagined was my own before he said, “Couch time,” and we all moved to the living room where the Pugs could more easily get at my face. I was doubly glad then that Sigmund was not here to see the reunion of the pack.

After an early dinner (pasta with pesto, spinach salad) and before it was time for the Pugs’ evening walk, I took the rest of my wine into the extra bedroom that had been Jane’s quilting and scrapbooking room and that Carlo had agreed could be my office when I told him I needed a space of my own the way men have their garage. I didn’t tell him it was because I couldn’t quite let go of that particular woman, Special Agent Brigid Quinn. Plus, one of these days after I learned how to be a better wife than Jane ever was, I planned to set up a little private-investigating business.

I had my desk that I brought from my old apartment, cluttered with mostly magazines I meant to read and housewares catalogs with cooking utensils that mystified me, and my laptop. A swivel desk chair. Some banker’s boxes with old tax returns and other nonoffensive files. A metal cabinet with a lock, purchased after Paul left me, for the rest.

There were a few pictures on the walls to remind me of my successes in foiling evildoers, like the one of President Reagan congratulating me for preventing a terrorist attack that no one will ever know about. Another frame held the award I got for bringing down the Thai slavery ring. Another for infiltrating the Palo Mayombe cult and in the nick of time saving a boy from being boiled alive in a cauldron. I had mixed emotions about that award because there was already another kid dead in the cauldron when we showed up; it was also the time I shot the unarmed perp.

Jane’s quilting materials were in a box in the closet along with her sewing machine.

I sat down in the desk chair, put my feet up on a nearby banker’s box, and stared at the cell phone I’d left on the desk. I thought about my outburst on the road to Mount Lemmon. If it was just a matter of dealing with Jessica, I probably would have been able to keep a better grip on my feelings. After all, she was dead and feeling no pain. But there was her father Zach Robertson to keep me ever mindful of that event.

Zachariah Robertson had been a decent dentist in Santa Fe with a wife who loved him enough, a son who didn’t give him any trouble, and a daughter who had just joined the FBI. I never told him how much I regretted recommending Jessica for fieldwork too soon because I was eager to get her trained as my replacement. How I regretted I was a little too old to pose as a convincing teenage hitchhiker. As with all of my victims’ loved ones, I just told him to call anytime of the day or night.

He did. After Jessica’s disappearance that night on Route 66, seventy-nine miles west of Tucumcari, New Mexico, his calls went from hopeful shortly after zero hour to despairing after six months. He started showing up at his dental practice still too drunk from the night before to keep his hands from rattling around in his patients’ mouths.

Even after two years went by, he kept calling me. That’s how I found out Elena and his son Peter had left him, about three years sooner than it usually takes for the family of a murder victim to break apart. Then Elena got cancer and died without seeking treatment. Zach didn’t stay in touch with Peter much after her funeral.

Last time I talked to him he was mostly a drunk hermit who seldom bathed in a cabin in the upper peninsula of Lake Michigan.

I tossed off the remaining wine, took a deep breath, and called him.

He answered on the first ring, just the way he had when all this first started. “You always wait for me to call you,” he said straight off, and then with a wobble in his voice, “You must have found her.”

“We did.” I didn’t tell him everything right away, wanted first to gauge how much of it he’d remember in the morning.

“What, what about who did it? Do you know?”

“We do. We know everything now, Zach.” He sounded only moderately soused so I told him everything I knew, everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours, and in the time before that what I knew of it. I didn’t pull any punches, hadn’t in years. And he didn’t need to ask any questions because I anticipated all of them.

When I finished speaking, I heard what I thought at first were ice cubes sloshing in his glass, but then realized he was typing on his computer while he listened to me.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Damn, you can’t get to Tucson direct from anywhere,” he said, after the typing finally went quiet. “American Airlines Flight 734 arriving at two P.M.”

“No, Zach.”

“If you’re not there I’ll take a taxi to the medical examiner’s office.”

“Zach, listen.”

“I won’t be any trouble. I never once, once blamed the Bureau, even right at the start, did I?”

He had told me so many times how he never blamed the Bureau, by which he meant me. “No, Zach. You never did.”

“Even that night, that night you spent with me.”

It was more like forty-eight straight hours I spent talking him up from suicide when he called from halfway across the country and told me his sweating palms were stained white by the fistful of sleeping pills he was holding.

“No, not even then. But you don’t want to see her, Zach. Not this way.”

“Oh yes I do.” His courage failed him, finally, and he started to cry. I don’t have much respect for whiskey remorse, except when it comes to someone in Zach’s shoes, so I waited patiently until he was finished.

Then, wiping my own nose on the palm of my hand, I said, “I swear to you, when this comes to trial you’ll get your day in court. You can read that statement you wrote such a long time ago. Remember that statement? Keep thinking about that. You still have it, don’t you?”

He hung up.

And that’s what happens to many victims’ loved ones, the part you never see after the media gets bored, or after the movie when the credits roll. When the bad guy is caught, the actors playing the family have Closure, knowing justice has been served. The actors playing the detectives turn their back and walk triumphantly off camera. People watching the show throw out their popcorn, wipe off their greasy fingers, and go home, maybe at the most feel a little tremble of fear imagining there’s someone hiding behind the other car when they pull into the garage after dark, but of course there isn’t and life goes on as before, tra la.

When it’s real life they, some families of some victims, spend the rest of their lives waiting to die. The end.

Only suckers believe in Closure.