The Shining Girls A Novel

Dan

2 MARCH 1992

What Dan should be doing is packing for Arizona. Spring training starts tomorrow and he’s on the early flight because it’s cheapest, but honestly, the thought of packing his single guy’s carry-on suitcase is too depressing.

He’s just settled in to watch the highlights from the Winter Olympics on replay when his doorbell makes that sickly electronic wheeze it’s been reduced to. Another thing to fix. Not like he doesn’t already have to swap out the batteries from the VCR remote for the TV remote. He hauls himself out of the couch and opens up to find Kirby standing on the other side of the screen, holding a trio of beer bottles.

‘Hey, Dan, can I come in?’

‘Oh, I gotta choice now?’

‘Please? It’s f*cking freezing out here. I brought beer.’

‘I don’t drink, remember?’

‘It’s non-alcoholic. Unless you’d prefer me to run down to the store for some carrot sticks instead.’

‘Nah, you’re good,’ he says, even though calling Miller Sharp’s alcohol-free brew ‘beer’ is optimistic. He shoves open the screen door. ‘As long as you don’t expect me to tidy up.’

‘I would never,’ she says, darting under his arm. ‘Hey, nice place.’

Dan snorts.

‘Well, nice to have a place then.’

‘You living with your mom?’ He’s done his homework, looked up her news story and his notes to reacquaint himself with the salient details. On the typed-up transcript of the interview with the mother, Rachel, he’d written: Beautiful woman! Distracted. (distracting). Kept asking about the dog. Ways of dealing with grief?

His favorite quote from the interview with her was: ‘We do this to ourselves. Society is a poisonous hamster wheel.’ Of course the subeditor slashed it on the first pass.

‘I have an apartment in Wicker Park,’ Kirby says. ‘Gets noisy between the bands and the crack addicts, but I like it. Having people around.’

‘Safety in numbers, sure. So why’d you say that? “Nice to have a place”?’

‘Making conversation, I guess. Because some people don’t.’

‘You stay alone?’

‘I don’t really play well with others. And I get nightmares.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘You can’t.’

Dan shrugs agreeably. No denying that. ‘So what did you get from our friends at the library?’

‘A boatload of stuff.’ She takes a beer for herself before she hands off the other two. She sits down, tucking the bottle under her armpit so she can lever off her big black boots. She folds herself into the couch in her socks, which somehow seems terribly forward to Dan.

She shoves aside the clutter on his coffee table – bills, more bills, a Reader’s Digest sweepstake announcement with the gold foil scratch-off sticker (You’re already a winner!) and, cringingly, a Hustler he bought on a whim, feeling lonely and horny, which seemed like the least embarrassing choice then. But she doesn’t seem to notice. Or is too polite to comment. Or she’s sorry for him. God.

She pulls a folder out of her bag and starts laying out the clippings on the table. Originals, Dan notices, and he wonders how the hell she sneaked that past Harrison. He puts on his glasses to have a better look. Gruesome stabbing deaths aplenty. All the kind of uniformly depressing stuff he used to write about. It makes him feel tired.

‘So what do you think?’ Kirby challenges.

‘Ay bendito, kiddo’ he says, picking out a few of the clippings. ‘Look at your victim profile. It’s all over the place. You got a black prostitute dumped in a playground through to a housewife stabbed in her driveway, which is obviously a carjacking. And this one, 1957? Seriously? It’s not even the same MO. Her head was found in a barrel. Besides, your statement said your guy was in his early thirties. You got nothing here.’

‘Not yet.’ She shrugs, unmoved. ‘Start wide, narrow it down. Serial killers have a type. I’m trying to figure out what his was. Bundy liked college girls. Long hair, middle parting, wearing pants.’

‘I think we can eliminate Bundy,’ Dan says, without thinking about how crass that sounds until it’s out of his mouth.

‘Bzzzt,’ Kirby says in imitation of an electric chair, absolutely dead-pan, which makes it more inappropriately funny. It rocks him. How easily they’re able to talk about this, make stupid jokes. Not like he and the cops didn’t crack wise with the gallows humor when he was reporting on equally horrible crimes every other week. Frogs in boiling water. You can get used to anything. But that wasn’t personal.

‘Okay, okay, hilarious. Let’s assume your guy is not going for the usual easy targets of prostitutes, junkies, runaways and homeless men. Who else has traits in common with you?’

‘Julia Madrigal. Same age range, early twenties. College student. Secluded forested area.’

‘Solved. Her killers are rotting in Cook County. Next?’

‘Oh please, you don’t buy that.’

‘Are you sure you don’t want to believe it because Julia’s killers are black and the guy who hurt you was white?’ Dan asks.

‘What? No. It’s because the cops are incompetent and under pressure. She’s from a nice middle-class family. It was an excuse to wrap it up.’

‘What about the MO? If this was the same killer, how come he didn’t use your insides to re-decorate the forest, huh? Don’t these guys get more violent as they go? Like that cannibal freak they just caught in Milwaukee?’

‘Dahmer? Sure. It’s all about the escalation. They get more elaborate because the rush wears off. You have to keep upping the game.’ She gets up and paces, waving her bottle, eight and a half steps across his living room and back again. ‘And he would have, Dan, with me. I’m sure he would, if he hadn’t been interrupted. He’s a classic mix of disorganized, organized and delusional.’

‘You’ve been reading up on this.’

‘I kinda had to. I couldn’t scrape the money together to hire a PI. And I figure I’m more motivated anyway. So: disorganized killers are impetuous. Kill ’em when you can. It means they get caught quicker. The organized guys come prepared. They have a plan. They carry restraints. They take more care to dispose of the bodies, but they like to play head-games. They’re the ones that’ll write to the newspapers to brag, like the Zodiac with his cryptograms. Then you get the lost-the-plot freaks who think they’re possessed or whatever, like BTK – who is still on the loose, by the way. His letters are all over the place. He swings from bragging about his crimes to terrible regret and blaming the demon in his head who makes him do it.’

‘All right, Miss FBI. Here’s a hard question. Do you know for sure it’s a serial killer? I mean, the guy who did …’ he falters and waves his beer in her direction, unconsciously echoing the motion of an attempted disembowelment, until he realizes what he’s doing and shoves the bottle against his lips instead, wishing the f*cking thing was alcoholic, even two per cent. ‘…He was a sick f*ck, no mistake. But it could have been random opportunistic violence. Isn’t that the prevailing theory? Hopped up on PCP?’

In his practically illegible shorthand, his interview with Detective Diggs states it more baldly: ‘Most likely drug-related.’ ‘Victim shouldn’t have been alone.’ As if that was an invitation to be gutted, for Chrissake.

‘You interviewing me now, Dan?’ She raises her beer and takes a long slow sip. He notices that unlike the pale imitation he’s drinking, hers is the real deal. ‘Because you didn’t before.’

‘Hey, you were in the hospital. Practically comatose. They wouldn’t let me near you.’ This is only partly true. He could have Prince Charminged his way in, the way he’d done a hundred times before. Nurse Williams at the front desk could have been persuaded to turn a blind eye if he’d flirted with her enough, because people need to feel wanted. But he was so over all of it – already burned out, even if it took another year to hit for real.

He found the whole thing depressing. Detective Digg’s insinuations, the mother who snapped out of her initial numbness and started phoning him in the middle of the night because the cops couldn’t find the guy and she thought maybe he might have the answers, and then started screaming at him when he didn’t. She thought it was personal for him, like it was for her. But it was just another f*cked-up story of the f*cked-up shit that people do to each other, and he didn’t have any other explanation for her. And he couldn’t tell her that the only reason he’d given her his number was because he thought she was hot.

So that by the time Kirby was out of critical care, he was sick of the whole affair, and didn’t want to do a follow-up. And he appreciated that there was a dog, thank you, Mr Matthew Harrison, and that was a nice angle because everyone loves dogs, especially brave ones who die trying to save their mistresses, making this story Lassie meets The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but it wasn’t like there was any new information or leads or any f*cking movement from the cops on finding, let alone catching the twisted bastard who had done this to her, and who was still out there waiting to do it to someone else. So f*ck the dog and f*ck the f*cking story.

Which meant that Harrison sent Richie to do the follow-up, but by then the mom had decided all journalists were a*sholes, and refused to talk to anyone. Dan was made to do penance by covering a series of shootings in K-Town, which was textbook thug-life stupid.

And this year, the murder rate is even worse. Which makes him even happier he’s not stuck doing homicide. Sports is theoretically more stressful, with all the travel. But it gives him an excuse to get away and not to have to think about being stuck in a lonely apartment. Sucking up to managers is much the same as sucking up to cops, and baseball isn’t as tediously repetitive as murder.

‘That’s such an easy scapegoat,’ Kirby complains, dragging him back to the present. ‘Drugs. He wasn’t on drugs. Or not any I’m familiar with.’

‘Expert, huh?’

‘Have you met my mom? You would have taken drugs too. Although I was never terribly good at it.’

‘It doesn’t work, what you’re doing, Deflecting with humor. Just tells me that there’s something you need to deflect from.’

‘Years on the homicide beat had made him a keen-eyed observer of humanity, a philosopher of life,’ she intones in a movie-trailer voice, two octaves down.

‘Still doing it,’ says Dan. His cheeks are hot. She gets to him in a way that’s infuriating. Like when he started out as a kid fresh out of college, working the society pages with that old bat Lois, who was so annoyed by him being in her department that she only ever referred to him in the third person. As in: ‘Gemma, tell that boy that’s not how we write wedding announcements.’

‘I had a rough patch as a teenager. I started going to church, Methodist, which drove my mom nuts because at least it should have been Shul, right? I’d come home overflowing with piety and forgiveness and I’d flush her weed down the toilet, and then we’d have a screaming match for three hours and she’d storm out and only come back the next day. It got so bad that I moved in with Pastor Todd and his wife. They were trying to start a halfway house for troubled youth.’

‘Let me guess, he tried to put his hand in your pants?’

‘Jeez, dude.’ She shakes her head. ‘Not every church leader has to be a kiddie fiddler. They were sweet people. They just weren’t my kind of people. Too f*cking earnest. It was fine that they wanted to change the world, but I didn’t want to be their pet project. And you know, daddy issues, whatever.’

‘Sure.’

‘Which is what religion is based on, really. Trying to live up to the expectations of Big Sky Dad.’

‘Now who’s the amateur philosopher?’

‘Theologist, please. My point is that it didn’t work out. I thought I craved stability, but it turned out it was boring as hell. So I swung one-eighty.’

‘Started hanging with the wrong crowd.’

‘I was the wrong crowd.’ She grins.

‘Punk music will do that.’ He toasts her with the almost-empty bottle.

‘No doubt. I’ve seen a lot of drugged-up people. This guy wasn’t one of them.’ She stops. But Dan knows this species of pause. It’s the glass teetering on the edge of the desk, fighting against gravity. The thing about gravity is that it wins every single time.

‘There’s something else. It’s in the police report, but not in the papers.’

Bingo, Dan thinks. ‘They often do that. Leave out important details so they can flush out the crazies phoning in from any real tips.’ He downs the last dregs of the bottle, unable to meet her eyes, afraid of what she’s going to say, feeling a churning of guilt that he never read the follow-up articles.

‘He threw something at me. After he’d … A cigarette lighter, black and silver, sort of vintage art nouveau. It was engraved. “WR”.’

‘That mean anything to you?’

‘No. The cops cross-referenced it with possible suspects, and victims too.’

‘Fingerprints?’

‘Sure, but too smudged to be any use. F*cking typical.

‘Or some decrepit fence, if they had his prints on record.’

‘They couldn’t track him down. And before you ask, I’ve already gone through the phonebook. And called every “WR” in the greater Chicagoland area.’

‘And that’s all they know about it?’

‘I described it to a collector at a roadshow, and he said it’s probably a Ronson Princess De-Light. Not the rarest lighter out there, but maybe worth a couple of hundred bucks. He had a similar one he showed me, from around the same time, 1930s, 1940s. Offered to sell it to me for two hundred and fifty dollars.’

‘Two hundred and fifty bucks? I’m in the wrong business.’

‘The Boston Strangler tied his girls up with nylon stockings. The Night Stalker left pentagrams on the scene.’

‘You know way too much about this stuff. It’s not good for you to spend so much time in these people’s heads.’

‘Only way to get him out of mine. Ask me anything. Typical starting age is twenty-four to thirty, although they’ll keep killing long as they can get away with it. They’re usually white, male. Lack of empathy, which can manifest as antisocial behavior or extremely egotistical charm. History of violence, breaking and entering, torturing animals, messed-up childhoods, sexual hang-ups. Which doesn’t mean they’re not functioning members of society. There have been some fine upstanding community leaders, married with kids even.’

‘Where the neighbors are just so shocked, even though they smiled and waved over the picket fence while the nice guy next door was digging a hole for his torture dungeon.’ Dan has a special place of loathing reserved for the none-of-my-business types. Comes with seeing one too many domestic violence cases. Which number, for the record, is one.

She stops pacing and sits down on the couch next to him, causing the springs to groan in complaint. She half-reaches for the last beer until she remembers that it’s non-alcoholic. Then she takes it anyway.

‘Split?’ she offers.

‘I’m good.’

‘He said it was to remember him by. He didn’t mean me, obviously. The dead don’t remember shit. He meant the families or the cops or society in general. It’s his signature f*ck-you to the world. Because he thinks we’ll never catch him.’

For the first time there is a splinter in the way she says it, which makes Dan tread extra carefully with his next words. He tries not to think about how weird it is talking about this with ski-jumpers flying off the end of the ramp on the muted television.

‘I’m just going to say this, okay?’ he tries, because he feels like he has to. ‘It’s not your job, kiddo, to go around catching killers.’

‘I’m supposed to let this go?’ She tugs down the black-and-white spotty kerchief she’s tied round her neck to reveal the scar across her throat. ‘Really, Dan?’

‘No.’ He says it simply. Because how could you? How could anyone? Put it behind you. Move on, people say. But there’s been enough f*cking coming to terms with this kind of shit in the world already every single f*cking day, and it is time they called f*cking bullshit.

He tries to get back on track. ‘All right, so that’s one of the things you’re looking for when you’re digging through the clippings. Antique lighters.’

‘Actually,’ she says, tucking her scarf back in place, ‘it’s not technically antique because it’s less than a hundred years old. It’s vintage.’

‘Don’t be a smart-ass,’ Dan grumbles, relieved to be back on safe ground.

‘Tell me it’s not a good headline.’

‘“The Vintage Killer”? It’s f*cking brilliant.’

‘Right?’

‘Oh no. Just because I’m helping you doesn’t mean I’m going to open that can of worms. I cover sports.’

‘I’ve always thought that was an interesting expression. Worms being bait and all.’

‘Yeah, well, I’m not biting. In nine hours I am flying to Arizona for a few weeks to watch men swat at balls. But here’s what you’re going to do. Keep going through old stories. Try to give the librarians more specific stuff to search for. Unusual items on the bodies, things that seem out of place – sounds like a plan. They find anything similar on Madrigal?’

‘Not in any of the stories I read. I tried to get hold of the parents, but they’ve moved, changed their phone number.’

‘All right. The case is closed, so the files will be a matter of public record. You should go down to the courthouse and check them out. Try and talk to her friends, witnesses, maybe track down the prosecutor.’

‘Okay.’

‘And you’re going to put an ad in the paper.’

‘“Single White Male serial killer wanted for good times and life sentence?” I’m sure he’ll respond to that.’

‘You’re being obstreperous.’

‘Word of the day!’ she teases.

‘The ad is for victims’ loved ones. If the cops aren’t paying attention, the families will be.’

‘That’s all great, Dan. Thank you.’

‘Don’t think that gets you off the hook on actual intern stuff. I expect updated player stats faxed to my hotel room. And I expect you to get up to speed on how baseball actually works.’

‘Easy. Ball. Bats. Goals.’

‘Oof.’

‘I’m kidding. Anyway, it can’t be stranger than this.’

They sit in companionable silence watching a man in a shiny blue jumpsuit and a helmet hurtling down a near-vertical slope crouched on carbon planks, straightening out as the curve tips him up to shoot into the air.

‘Who comes up with this stuff?’ Kirby says. She’s right, Dan thinks. The grace and absurdity of human endeavor.