His assumption on seeing the empty driveway is that Gene is in the holding tank again. Gene has not yet learned to avoid the radar. Records show no sign of his having been booked last night, of course, but Officer Quinn, Detective Haeny’s partner, is new to the job, and eager to do everything according to procedure. Twin miracles of youth and naivete, usually unsought-for graces in this job, allow him to lead Ronnie through the process of filling out a missing persons report over the phone.
Quinn brings the form to Haeny, who looks it over. Even for a sleepy town like this, it feels like a stretch. “You’ve got to be kidding,” says Haeny.
“Sorry,” says Quinn.
“It’s all right,” Haeny says, scratching the back of his head, ready to get to work. “Get me the number of the—what was it? Taco Bell.”
* * *
AS THE LINES CRACKLE between substations and stucco apartment complexes and cramped fast-food managers’ quarters, you swim upstream against a tide of panic. It ought to have ebbed by now, you think, but its approach feels endless: each wave feels new, and you don’t seem to be building up any resistance. You’ve managed to keep your body working while your mind revolts by thinking of the two as separate, only coincidentally related entities; and so, when fear and revulsion rise in your throat, you’re able to brook them without stinting from your labor. The work feels needed, compulsory. Your mind meets any complications that arise automatically, instinctively: Tools? There’s a garden shed at the edge of the property. Waste disposal? There’s a wheelbarrow with a garden hose in it by the pool, you can dump the hose against the building and no one will know, it’s the weekend. Cleanup?
Cleanup will be last, because it will take longest. It is a pattern with you: save the hard work for last. Just last spring, through a friend inside the DA’s office, I got my hands on the last stack of papers you graded before the disaster. Your habit of signing and dating your remarks at the end of each one suggests, to me, that you took your work seriously: that you envisioned real futures for these students who fumbled their way through essays about the rise of mercantilism or the Second Great Awakening. You addressed them by name in your comments, as a college professor might have done, and afforded them more dignity than any other person in your position might have felt obligated to do.
But there are few virtues that can’t be turned against a person who’s been charged with murder. “MOREOVER, that DEFENDANT did willfully and maliciously cultivate trust between herself and victims CUPP and JENKINS, in spoken and in written communications [Exhibit L], with a view toward gaining their confidence and allaying suspicion about her motives in grooming them to seek her approval,” reads part of the text pleading for special circumstances. I felt visceral anger the first time I read through it: it didn’t square with what I already knew about you by then, and I couldn’t imagine the charge being made in earnest. It seemed to come from another world.
Once the suggestion had been placed in the mind of the jury, though, it established residency, and never once wanted for décor. Even the testimony of your students about your mild, almost passive classroom manner could be cast in an ominous light; your lovers hinting discreetly but insistently about your appetites could be made to seem part of a larger tapestry whose secondary shades were all threat and menace. It only took the initial read-through of the charges to plant the seed of suspicion. After that, vines sprouted and grew wild, and proved hardy against attempts at pruning by your competent but outmatched defense.
And, in fairness, the cleansing of the bodies would be hard to cast in a flattering light even under the most favorable circumstances. It was necessary for you to do it, because you had to dispose of them somehow: that’s clear to anyone. But a jury of your peers will find this work hard to stomach. The details have a way of obscuring their context in cases like these. Your multiple trips to the gardener’s shed as the need for specialized tools became clearer. The haphazard spreading-out of the garbage bags around your living room, intended to prevent further spillage: needless, as it turned out; blood thickens when it’s stopped circulating through a body, and doesn’t gush so much as ooze—you can catch it before it hits the carpet, but you can’t put the garbage bags back into their boxes. They’re new evidence now. You reuse the ones you haven’t nicked with knife or saw, stuffing them half full of lean muscle shorn from bone like steaks from the carcass of a steer: your thought had been to make the flayed remains collapsible, portable, and as inconspicuous as the primitive conditions of your labor would allow.
It’s a mess. It takes all night, a night during which panic causes you to black out several times: you’ll wake up to find yourself still sawing through cartilage, breathing through flared nostrils oblivious to the stench. There’s so much cartilage in a body, and it’s all so slippery: your kitchen gloves are useless; you have to work bare-handed or you can’t get a grip on anything, and it makes you sick to have to keep plunging your hands into everything; and the sickness doesn’t ever seem to lift, except when the effort you have to put into pushing the saw forward and drawing it back is enough to require all your focus. In those moments, which are plentiful across the span of two nearly grown bodies, the force of the work engages you sufficiently to allow the nausea to abate for a moment, and it’s nice, until it dawns on you how this process is working: how your body and your mind have joined their strength to help you complete this task. How there was something already inside you whose purpose was to help you through a time like this if such a time ever came. You apprehend it at once, mid-cut, and then the sickness returns. This process repeats itself, again and again; after the first time, you don’t make it to the bathroom. The garbage bags you load into the wheelbarrow at day’s end contain skin, and sinew, and bone, floating in a broth of blood, and fat, and sweat, and the vomit you’ve repeatedly emptied onto the bodies of Jesse Jenkins and Gene Cupp as you worked, on and off, all day until the sun went down.
* * *
JANA LARSON is standing by the wall phone in her kitchen, cupping the mouthpiece with her hand, trying to make herself heard over the outbursts in the background that occasionally make it hard for the operator at the substation to understand her. Some beef stew from a can is bubbling in a copper-bottomed pan on the stove; she holds a wooden spatula in one hand, stirring while she speaks to keep the gravy from burning. It’s too early in the day for beef stew, but Michael is always content when he has a bowl of it in front of him. She would like to distract Michael for a few minutes while she gets her bearings.
“Ma’am?” says the operator. “Do I understand you, that this is for missing persons?”
“My son didn’t come home last night,” she says. She is trying without success to keep her voice down. “Please find him, please find him, you have to find him.”
“I’m going to put a stop to this shit,” yells Michael from his recliner in front of the television. He turns his head toward Jana, to make sure the dispatcher hears. “Tell him this shit is going to stop right now.”
“Please,” says Jana Larson, who went by Jana Jenkins until just a few years ago, when she’d succeeded, for the first time, in getting away from the man she’d married as soon as she turned eighteen. He’s four years her senior; he’d been nineteen when they first met in the parking lot of the A&W. Two years later she’d given him a son; they’d named him Jesse, after nobody in particular. They both just liked the sound of it. In the years since then, which feel long and hard, she has fled from Michael Jenkins several times; a few years ago, she even succeeded in completing divorce proceedings. But nothing is ever really over, she thinks sometimes.
“Right now,” Michael repeats, at or near the top of his lungs, who knows why.
“Can you tell me where you last saw him?” asks the operator; her low voice has a steady, calming resonance.