She hasn’t seen anything, no movement other than a rain-soaked concert announcement torn by the wind from the plywood barrier. And then a dog—that’s what she thought it was anyway, though it appeared too big, too pale—trotting across the street in the near distance. She promised herself half an hour, so she’ll wait another five minutes before pulling on a rain jacket and creeping close.
Then a police car careens around the corner and sends up a wave of water. No siren but its cherries are flashing. They color the rain and the puddles and the windows all around. It blasts past the Rue and stops at a building down the block. She sits up in her seat and wipes the condensation off the windshield. “What’s this?” she says.
She can barely make out the two officers hurrying their way inside. They’re soon joined by another squad car, and then another, and then another, all with their racks throwing light, spinning the street with color.
She spends so much time alone, with only her dog to keep her company, that she’s gotten in the habit of talking to herself. “More trouble,” she says. Because in journalism, only trouble is interesting.
?
Her name was Carrie Wunderlich. She worked as a receptionist and massage therapist at a chiropractor. No way she could afford a place in the Pearl on that salary, so she must be a rich kid leeching off her parents. The cops know that and not much else. Pretty, nice, mostly kept to herself. That’s what her neighbor said, the one who called 911 in a panic, freaked by the screaming heard through the wall. “The kind of screaming you hear in a horror movie,” he says, “when someone’s being torn to pieces by a monster.”
An accurate description of what they find inside the one-bedroom apartment. The door is splintered in its hinges. The lights are on. The blood hasn’t yet dried, still glistening, obscenely red. The forensics team wears booties over their shoes and the carpet sucks and gurgles beneath them. Their camera flashes match the lightning outside. The couch cushions are shredded from errant knife slashes, the foam soaked through. At first they aren’t sure whether they are dealing with one body or two or three. Then someone starts counting limbs. Then someone finds the head of the boyfriend—that’s what they’re calling him anyway—in the fridge.
They can’t understand how this much carnage amounted in so little time. And the security cameras tell them nothing, the system overloaded by the power surge, but soon they contact other businesses in the area and ask them to review their tapes. The storm had chased everyone inside, so it’s no trouble spotting the heavyset figure who marched down the sidewalk, not hurried, but driven, staring straight ahead, oblivious to the rain. He had longish, almost orange hair parted in the middle. He wore sunglasses. No rain jacket. His white polo was splattered with blood so that it appeared almost tie-dyed. The only trouble is, they can’t get a clear shot of his face, every image blurred, as though he were half-erased.
Flies buzz the air. Dozens of black fat-bodied flies. Too many for this season, too many for a modern apartment with its windows fastened shut. The flies taste the gore and batter themselves against the windows and orbit the lights. The detectives swat at them and breathe through their mouths and say, “Where in the hell did they come from?”
Everyone stares at the framed print hanging over the gas fireplace. Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. Stamped in the center of it, the bloody print of a hand—a red right hand—with thick and thin lines oozing from its bottom.
Lela doesn’t see any of this, not firsthand, but a patrol officer fills her in after she slips him a twenty and she eavesdrops on the tenants clustered nervously in the foyer. The red right hand is what bothers her most of all, though at first she isn’t sure why. The red right hand, the red right hand, like some face in a movie she recognizes but can’t place, making her chew on her pen and wonder, Where else have I seen you before?
Her pen cracks beneath her teeth. And just like that, she’s broken through and found the memory she’s looking for. When she visited Tusk’s apartment, so many years ago, to write the retrospective on Portland’s most notorious serial killer, the walls and ceiling and even the floors were busy with designs, some chalked and some painted. Many were of a red right hand.
The same red right hand—she now recalls—that marked the plywood wall surrounding the construction site. She hadn’t paid much attention to it at the time, but it’s clung to her like the afterimage of a slap.
Then she spots someone outside. Across the street. Watching. Lump, the street preacher. He’s cloaked with garbage bags, so that he appears like part of the night, but she’s certain it’s him. The rain has paused, but lightning still webs the sky. He’s pacing and the storm’s strobe-light effect makes him appear to leap from one part of the sidewalk to another.
She knows how people treat Lump. As if he weren’t there. She’s seen them—in Pioneer Courthouse Square and along the Willamette River—staring at their phones or turning their heads away as if they’d prefer to forget his existence altogether. But he was there. Watching the city. Watching them all. He roams Portland day and night and knows it better than any beat cop or security camera.
She pushes through the entry, into the cool night, arrowing toward him. At that moment a crow flutters down from some high sill of the building and lands on his shoulder. She can hear it kak-kak-kaking from across the street. He pets its feathers and whispers to it.
“Hey!” she says, and starts across the road. “Lump! Can I buy you a coffee? Can we talk?” She sees him there one moment, frozen in a blue blast of lightning, but when darkness comes again, he has rushed into the shadows, merging with the night.
Chapter 5
TWENTY YEARS AT The Weary Traveler have taught Mike Juniper patience. He has encouraged people to take their meds, to sit down with counselors, to change and wash their clothes, to submit to delousing. He has talked a woman out of stabbing her ex-boyfriend with a pair of garden shears, and he has talked a man out of leaping off a ledge. Juniper’s voice is calm, his words slowly uttered, as gentle and convincing as his hands, which take his clients by the elbow, the shoulder, leading them in what he hopes is the right direction.
But tonight his patience is thin. Old men tend to take their time—reading the newspaper, puttering along country highways, gathering change from their pocket at the cash register—but Sammy and Mitch are more than old. On any evening, he’d need to encourage them upstairs, to brush their teeth and find their bunks and call it quits, but tonight they’re confused and they’re scared and they’re not able to walk more than a few steps before turning back the way they came. They keep asking questions. What hideous breed of dog was that thing? Shouldn’t they call the cops or animal control? Why deposit the dog in the freezer among the pork chops and chicken breasts and ice cream?