What The Dead Know Part 1

WHAT THE DEAD KNOW.

By LAURA LIPPMAN.

For Sally Fellows and Doris Ann Norris.

The living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no more reward, and even the memory of them is lost.

Their love and their hate and their envy have already perished; never again will they have any share in all that happens under the sun.

-ECCLESIASTES 9:56.

CHAPTER 1.

Her stomach clutched at the sight of the water tower hovering above the still, bare trees, a s.p.a.ceship come to earth. The water tower had been a key landmark in the old family game, although not the landmark. Once you spotted the white disk on its spindly legs, you knew it was time to prepare, like a runner crouched in blocks. On your mark, get set, I see- It hadn't started as a game. Spotting the department store nestled in this bend of the Beltway had been a private contest with herself, a way to relieve the tedium of the two-day drive home from Florida. As far back as she could remember, they had made the trip every winter break, although no one in the family enjoyed this visit to Grandmother's house. Her Orlando apartment was cramped and smelly, her dogs mean, her meals inedible. Everyone was miserable, even their father, especially their father, although he pretended not to be and took great offense if anyone suggested that his mother was any of the things that she undeniably was-stingy, strange, unkind. Still, even he couldn't hide his relief as home drew nearer and he sang out each state line as they crossed. Georgia, he growled in a Ray Charles moan. They spent the night there, in a no-name motor court, and left before sunrise, quickly reaching South Carolina-"Nothing could be finah!"-followed by the long, slow teases of North Carolina and Virginia, where the only points of interest were, respectively, the lunch stop in Durham and the dancing cigarette packs on the billboards outside Richmond. Then finally Maryland, wonderful Maryland, home sweet home Maryland, which asked for only fifty miles or so, barely an hour back then. Today she had needed almost twice that much time to crawl up the parkway, but traffic was thinning now, up to normal speeds.

I see-.

Hutzler's had been the city's grandest department store, and it marked the Christmas season by setting up an enormous fake chimney with a Santa poised on its ledge, caught in a perpetual straddle. Was he coming or going? She could never decide. She had taught herself to watch for that flash of red, the promise that home was near, the way certain birds told a sea captain that the sh.o.r.e was within reach. It had been a clandestine ritual, not unlike counting the broken stripes as they disappeared under the front wheels of the car, a practice that quelled the motion sickness she never quite outgrew. Even then, she was tight-lipped when it came to certain information about herself, clear about the distinction between eccentricities that might be interesting and compulsive habits that would mark her as odd as, say, her grandmother. Or, to be absolutely truthful, her father. But the phrase had popped out one day, joyful and unbidden, another secret dialogue with herself escaping into the world: "I see Hutzler's."

Her father had gotten the significance instantly, unlike her mother and sister. Her father always seemed to understand the layers beneath what she said, which was comforting when she was really little, intimidating as she got older. The problem was that he insisted on turning her private homecoming salute into a game, a contest, and what had once been hers alone then had to be shared with the entire family. Her father was big on sharing, on taking what was private and making it communal. He believed in long, rambling family discussions, which he called "rap sessions" in the language of the day, and unlocked doors and casual seminudity, although their mother had broken him of that habit. If you tried to keep something for yourself-whether it was a bag of candy purchased with your own money or a feeling you didn't want to express-he accused you of h.o.a.rding. He sat you down, looked straight into your eyes, and told you that families didn't work that way. A family was a team, a unit, a country unto itself, the ones of her ident.i.ty that would remain constant the rest of her life. "We lock our front door against strangers," he said, "but never against each other."

So he seized "I see Hutzler's" for the family good and encouraged everyone to vie for the right to say it first. Once the rest of the family decided to play, that last mile of Beltway had been unbearable in its suspense. The sisters craned their necks, leaning forward in the old lap seat belts, the ones worn only on long trips. That's how things were back then-seat belts for long trips only, no bicycle helmets ever, skateboards made from splintery planks of wood and old roller skates. Pinned by her seat belt, she felt her stomach flip and her pulse race, and for what? For the hollow honor of being the first to say out loud what she had always been the first to think. As with all her father's contests, there was no prize, no point. Since she could no longer be guaranteed victory, she did what she always did: She pretended not to care.

Yet here she was again, alone, guaranteed the win if she wanted it, hollow as that victory would be, and her stomach still flipped, unaware that the store was long gone, that everything around the once-familiar cloverleaf had changed. Changed and, yes, cheapened. The placid dowager that had been Hutzler's was now a tacky Value City. Opposite, on the south side of the highway, the Quality Inn had morphed into one of those storage places. It wasn't possible from this vantage point to see if Howard Johnson's, home of the family's weekly fish-fry suppers, remained at the intersection, but she somehow doubted it. Did Howard Johnson's exist anywhere anymore? Did she? Yes and no.

What happened next transpired in seconds. Everything does, if you think about it. She would say that later, under questioning. The Ice Age happened in a matter of seconds; there were just a lot of them. Oh, she could make people love her if absolutely necessary, and although the tactic was less essential to her survival now, the habit was hard to break. Her interrogators pretended exasperation, but she could tell she was having the desired effect on most of them. By then her description of the accident was breathlessly vivid, a polished routine. She had glanced to the right, eastward, trying to recall all her childhood landmarks, forgetting the old admonition Bridges may freeze first, and felt a strange sensation, almost as if the steering wheel were slipping from her grasp, but the car was actually separating from the road, losing traction, although the sleet had not started and the pavement looked bone dry. It was oil, not ice, she would learn later, left from an earlier accident. How could one control for a coating of oil, invisible in the March twilight, for the inactions or incomplete actions of a crew of men she had never met, would never know? Somewhere in Baltimore, a man sat down to supper that night, unaware that he had destroyed someone else's life, and she envied him his ignorance.

She clutched the steering wheel and pounded on the pedals, but the car ignored her. The boxy sedan slid to the left, moving like the needle on a haywire tachometer. She bounced off the Jersey wall, spun around, slid to the other side of the highway. For a moment it seemed as if she were the only one driving, as if all the other cars and their drivers had frozen in deference and awe. The old Valiant-the name had seemed a good omen, a reminder of Prince Valiant and all that he stood for, back in the Sunday comics-moved swiftly and gracefully, a dancer among the stolid, earthbound commuters at the tail end of rush hour.

And then, just when she seemed to have the Valiant under control, when the tires once again connected to the pavement, she felt a soft thump to her right. She had sideswiped a white SUV, and although her car was so much smaller, the SUV seemed to reel from the touch, an elephant felled by a peashooter. She glimpsed a girl's face, or thought she did, a face with an expression not so much frightened as surprised by the realization that anything could collide with one's neat, well-ordered life at any time. The girl wore a ski jacket and large, cruelly unflattering gla.s.ses, made worse somehow by white fur earm.u.f.fs. Her mouth was round, a red gate of wonder. She was twelve, maybe eleven, and eleven was the same age when-and then the white SUV began its lazy flip-flops down the embankment.

I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, she thought. She knew she should slow down, stop, check on the SUV, but a chorus of honks and squealing brakes rose up behind her, a phalanx of sound that pushed her forward in spite of herself. It wasn't my fault! Everyone should know by now that SUVs were p.r.o.ne to tip. Her mild little nudge could never have caused that dramatic-looking accident. Besides, it had been such a long day and she was so close. Her exit was the next one, not even a mile ahead. She could still merge into the I-70 traffic and continue west to her destination.

But once on the long straightaway toward I-70, she found herself veering right instead of left, toward the sign that read LOCAL TRAFFIC ONLY, to that strange, unfinished road that her family had always called the highway to nowhere. How they had gloried in giving directions to their house. "Take the interstate east, to where it ends." "How can an interstate end?" And her father would triumphantly tell the tale of the protests, the citizens who had united across Baltimore to preserve the park and the wildlife and the then-modest rowhouses that ringed the harbor. It was one of her father's few successes in life, although he had been a minor player-just another signer of pet.i.tions, a marcher in demonstrations. He was never tapped to speak at the public rallies, much as he longed for that role.

The Valiant was making a terrible sound, the right rear wheel sc.r.a.ping against what must be a crushed fender. In her agitated state, it made perfect sense to park on the shoulder and continue on foot, although the sleet had now started and she became aware with each step that something was wrong. Her ribs hurt so that each breath was like a jab with a tiny knife, and it was hard to carry her purse as she had always been instructed-close to the body, not dangling from her wrist, a temptation for muggers and thieves. She hadn't been wearing her seat belt, and she had bounced around inside the Valiant, hitting the steering wheel and door. There was blood on her face, but she wasn't sure where it was coming from. Mouth? Forehead? She was warm, she was cold, she saw black stars. No, not stars. More like triangles twisting and turning, strung from the wires of an invisible mobile.

She had been walking no more than ten minutes when a patrol car stopped alongside her, lights flashing.

"That your Valiant back there?" the patrolman called out to her, lowering the window on the pa.s.senger side but not venturing from the car.

Was it? The question was more complicated than the young officer could know. Still, she nodded.

"You got any ID?"

"Sure," she said, digging into her purse but not finding her wallet. Why, that-She started to laugh, realizing how perfect that was. Of course she had no ID. She had no ident.i.ty, not really. "Sorry. No. I-" She couldn't stop laughing. "It's gone."

He got out of the patrol car and attempted to take the purse to look for himself. Her scream shocked her even more than it did him. There was a fiery pain in her left forearm when he tried to slide the purse past her elbow. The patrolman spoke into his shoulder, calling for a.s.sistance. He pocketed her keys from her purse, walked back to her car, and poked around inside, then returned and stood with her in the sleeting rain that had finally started. He mumbled some familiar words to her but was otherwise silent.

"Is it bad?" she asked him.

"That's for a doctor to say when we get you to the ER."

"No, not me. Back there."

The distant whir of a helicopter answered her question. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. But it wasn't her fault.

"It wasn't my fault. I couldn't control it-but still, I really didn't do anything-"

"I've read you your rights," he said. "The things you're saying-they count. Not that there's much doubt you left the scene of an accident."

"I was going to get help."

"This road dead-ends into a park-and-ride. If you really wanted to help them, you'd have pulled over back there or taken the Security Boulevard exit."

"There's the old Windsor Hills Pharmacy at Forest Park and Windsor Mill. I thought I could call from there."

She could tell that caught him off guard, her use of precise names, her familiarity with the area.

"I don't know of any pharmacy, although there's a gas station there, but-Don't you have a cell phone?"

"Not for my personal use, although I carry one at work. I don't buy things until they work properly, until they're perfected. Cell phones lose their connections and people have to yell into them half the time, so you can't safeguard your privacy. When cells work as well as landlines, I'll buy one."

She heard her father's echo. All these years later, he was in her head, his p.r.o.nouncements as definitive as ever. Don't be the first to purchase any kind of technology. Keep your knives sharp. Eat tomatoes only when they're in season. Be kind to your sister. One day your mother and I will be gone, and you'll be all that each other has.

The young patrol officer regarded her gravely, the kind of awed inspection that good children reserve for those who have misbehaved. It was ludicrous that he could be so skeptical of her. In this light, in these clothes, the rain flattening her short, spiky curls, she probably looked younger than she was. People were always placing her at a full decade below her real age, even on those rare occasions when she dressed up. Cutting her long hair last year had only made her look younger still. It was funny about her hair, how stubbornly blond it remained at an age when most women needed chemicals to achieve this light, variable hue. It was as if her hair resented its years of forced imprisonment under those home applications of Nice'n Easy Sa.s.sy Chestnut. Her hair could hold a grudge as well as she could.

"Bethany," she said. "I'm one of the Bethany girls."

"What?"

"You don't know?" she asked him. "You don't remember? But then I guess you're all of, what-twenty-four? Twenty-five?"

"I'll be twenty-six next week," he said.

She tried not to smile, but he was so much like a toddler claiming two and a half instead of two. At what age do we stop wishing to be older than we are, stop nudging the number up? Around thirty for most, she a.s.sumed, although it had happened to her far earlier. By eighteen she would have done anything to renounce adulthood and be given another chance at childhood.

"So you weren't even born when-And you're probably not from here either, so no, the name wouldn't mean anything to you."

"Registration in the car says it belongs to Penelope Jackson, from Asheville, North Carolina. That you? Car didn't come up stolen when I called the tag in."

She shook her head. Her story would be wasted on him. She'd wait for someone who could appreciate it, who would understand the full import of what she was trying to tell him. Already she was making the calculations that had long been second nature. Who was on her side, who would take care of her? Who was against her, who would betray her?

At St. Agnes Hospital, she continued to be selectively mum, answering only direct questions about what hurt where. Her injuries were relatively minor-a gash to the forehead that required four tiny st.i.tches, which she was a.s.sured would leave no visible scar, something torn and broken in her left forearm. The arm could be stabilized and bandaged for now but would require surgery eventually, she was told. The young patrolman must have pa.s.sed along the Bethany name, for the billing person pressed her on it, but she refused to speak of it again no matter how they poked and prodded. Under ordinary circ.u.mstances she would have been treated and released. But this was far from ordinary. The police put a uniformed patrolman outside her door and told her that she was not free to leave even if the hospital determined it was appropriate. "The law is very clear on this. You must tell us who you are," another cop told her, an older one, from traffic investigation. "If it weren't for your injuries, you'd be in jail tonight." Still she said nothing, although the thought of jail terrified her. To not be free to come and go as she liked, to be held anywhere-no, never again. The doctor entered the name "Jane Doe" on her chart, adding "Bethany?" in parentheses. Her fourth name, by her count, but maybe it was her fifth. It was easy to lose track.

She knew St. Agnes. Or, more correctly, had known it once. So many accidents, so many trips. A calf sliced open when a jar of fireflies was dropped, the shards ricocheting up from the sidewalk and nicking the roundest part. A flyswatter applied to an infected smallpox vaccination with nothing but good intentions. A knee opening like a flower after a fall in the underbrush, revealing the terrifying interior of bone and blood. A shin sc.r.a.ped on the rusty valve of an old tire, a huge inner tube from some tractor or truck, their father's makeshift version of a bouncy castle, obtained and erected in deference to their mother's Anglophilia. The trips to the emergency room had been family affairs, more father-enforced togetherness-terrifying for the injured party, tedious for those who had to tag along, but everyone got Mr. G's soft ice cream afterward, so it was worth it in the end.

This is not the homecoming I imagined, she thought, lying in the dark, allowing self-pity, her old friend, to come for her, envelop her.

And she had imagined returning, she realized now, although not today. Sometime, eventually, but on her own terms, not because of someone else's agenda. Three days ago the hard-won order of her life had jumped the track without warning, as out of her control as that pea-green Valiant. That car-it was as if there were a ghost in the machine all along, nudging her north, past the old landmarks, toward a moment not of her choosing. At the I-70 exit, when it would have been so easy to go west, toward her original destination, and possibly escape detection, the car had turned to the right and stopped on its own. Prince Valiant had brought her most of the way home, trying to trick her into doing what was right. That's why the name had popped out. That, or the head injury, or the events of the past three days, or her anxiety about the little girl in the SUV.

Floating on painkillers, she fantasized about the morning, what it would be like to say her name, her true name, for the first time in years. To answer a question that few people had to think about twice: Who are you?

Then she realized what the second question would be.

PART I.

WEDNESDAY.

CHAPTER 2.

"That your phone?"

The sleep-creased woman staring at Kevin Infante was angry about something, not exactly a first for him. He also wasn't sure of her name, although he was reasonably sure it would come to him in a second or two. Again, not a first.

No, it was the combination-a strange woman and a baleful glare-that made this morning unique in what his sergeant liked to call the annals of Infante, which the boss invariably p.r.o.nounced with a long a sound. If Infante didn't know a woman well enough to remember her name, what could he possibly have done to earn this martyred glare? He usually needed three or four months to inspire this kind of rage in a woman.

"That your phone?" the woman repeated, her voice as tight and dangerous as her expression.

"Yeah," he said, relieved to be starting with an easy question. "Absolutely."

It occurred to him that he should try to find the phone, perhaps even answer it, but the ringing had stopped. He waited for the landline to kick in behind the cell, then remembered he was not in his own bedroom. He fished around on the floor with his left arm, his right one still pinned beneath the woman, and found his trousers on the floor, the phone clipped to the belt. Even as he grabbed it, the phone vibrated in his hand and emitted a shrill chirp, another disgruntled scold.

"Just the office," he said, glancing at the number.

"An emergency?" the woman asked, and if he had been more on his game, he would have lied and said yes, absolutely, that's what it was, then gotten into his clothes and escaped.

Still sleep-fogged, he said, "There are no emergencies in my department."

"I thought you were a cop." He could hear the anger curdling at the edges of her words, the pent-up resentment.

"Detective."

"Same thing, right?"

"Pretty much."

"So don't cops have emergencies?"

"All the time." And this would count as one. "But in my line of work-" He stopped short of identifying himself as a murder police, fearful that she would find it too interesting and want to see him again, cultivate a relationship. There were a lot of cop groupies out there, a fact for which he was normally thankful. "The type of people I work with-they're very patient."

"You got, like, a desk job?"

"You could say that." He had a desk. He had a job. Sometimes he did his job at his desk. "Debbie." He tried not to sound too proud of himself for pulling the name up. "You could say that, Debbie."

His eyes flicked around the room, searching for a clock but also taking in his surroundings. A bedroom, of course, and a reasonably nice one, with arty posters of flowers and what his ex-wife, the more recent one, always called a color scheme, which was supposed to be a good thing, but it never sounded right to Infante. A scheme was a plot, a plan to get away with something. But then a color scheme was part of a trap, too, if you thought about it, the one that began with a too-expensive ring, revolving credit at Shofer's, and a mortgage payment, then ended-twice in his experience so far-in a Baltimore County courtroom, with the woman taking all the stuff and leaving all the debt. The scheme here was pale yellow and green, not in the least objectionable, but it made him feel vaguely nauseous. As he sorted his clothes from hers, he began noticing other odd details about the room, things that didn't quite track. The built-in desk beneath the cas.e.m.e.nt window, the boxy minifridge draped with a cloth, a small microwave on top of that, the pennant above the desk, extolling the Towson Wildcats...f.u.c.k me, he thought. f.u.c.k me.

"So," he said. "What's your major?"

The girl-a real girl, a true girl, a probably-under-twenty-one girl, not that anything over sixteen was off the legal menu, but Infante had some standards-gave him an icy look and crawled over him, wrapping the yellow-and-green top sheet around her. With much conspicuous effort, she pulled a fluffy robe from a hook and arrayed it over herself, allowing the sheet to fall only after belting the robe. Still, he got a quick look and remembered what had brought him there. Lord knows it wasn't the face, although that had probably been more appealing when it wasn't puckered up this way. In the morning light, she was too all-over pale, this Debbie, one of those egg-faced blondes whose eyes disappeared without makeup. She grabbed a bucket from the floor of the closet, prompting a split second of panicky speculation. Was she going to hit him with it? Pour something on his head? But Debbie just huffed out of the room, on her way to the showers. Presumably to wash away any trace of her evening with Kevin Infante. How bad could it have been? He decided not to wait around and find out.

It was still early by college standards, and he was almost out of the dorm before he crossed another student's path, a plump, big-eyed girl who seemed unnerved by such an alien presence. Not just male but suited, older, so obviously not a student or even a teacher.

"Police," he said. "Baltimore County."

She didn't seem to find much comfort in this. "Has something happened?"

"No, just making a routine public-safety check. Don't forget, lock your doors and avoid unlighted areas in parking lots."

"Yes, Officer," she said solemnly.

The March morning was cold, the campus desolate. He found his car in an illegal spot not far from the dorm. He had thought it was an apartment house when he tried to drop her off last night. The evening was coming back to him. He had gone to Souris's, in need of a change from the usual place, Wagner's, where his coworkers went. There had been a gaggle of girls at the end of the bar, and although he'd told himself that he was just coming in for a quick drink, he soon felt compelled to cull one from the herd. He hadn't gotten the best one, but the one he had gotten had been pretty good. Eager to please, at any rate, blowing him in his car on Allegheny Avenue. He drove her back to this dowdy-looking midrise, quiet and hushed at 2:00 A.M. It had been his intention to watch her turn her key in the lock and then beat out a quick good-bye beep on the horn, but she had clearly expected more, so he'd followed her to her room and anted up. He was pretty sure he had made a good show of it before falling asleep. So what was up with the sour puss this morning?

A campus cop was getting ready to stroke his car, but Infante flashed his badge and the guy backed off, although he was clearly itching to argue. Probably the highlight of the poor mope's day, fighting over a ticket. He checked his cell phone-Nancy Porter, his former partner, whispering urgently into the phone, "Where are you?" s.h.i.t, he had missed roll call again. If he wanted to get to work in a reasonably timely fashion, he'd have to choose between a shower and breakfast, a real one that would settle his stomach. He decided he could handle being queasy for a few hours better than he could tolerate his own stink, so he drove to his apartment over in Northwest Baltimore. He could always claim that he had been chasing a lead on the...McGowan case, that was it. The inspiration came to him in the shower, and he stayed there longer than he should have, letting the hot water beat down on him, the night's odors rising up from his pores. He'd been looking for the girl's ex-boyfriend, not the most recent one, or even the one before, but three boyfriends ago. Come to think of it, that wasn't a bad idea. The girl's death, an old-fashioned stab-and-dump in Gunpowder Falls State Park, had a brutality to it that strangers seldom mustered. It hadn't been enough to cut her. The killer had also set her body alight, igniting a small brush fire that had brought fire trucks to the scene, when she otherwise might have languished undiscovered for days, weeks, months. Citizens were always surprised when cops couldn't find a body, but for all the endless development in the Baltimore metro area, there were still acres and acres of raw land. Every now and then a hunter stumbled on a pile of bones and it would turn out to be a vic from five, even ten years ago.

Early in his career, Infante had worked a case like that, one where murder was obvious but the body couldn't be found. The family had been rich and connected, with enough resources to drive the department crazy. When told that the things they wanted-searches, long-shot lab work-would have taken much of the department's budget for the year, they shrugged and said "So?" It was three years before the body showed up, not even ten yards off a state highway on the upper sh.o.r.e, discovered by a shy-bladder type who had walked into the weeds to take a p.i.s.s. Blunt-force trauma, the medical examiner concluded, so it was a murder, all right. But there was nothing more to be gleaned from the body or the scene, and the husband, who had been the primary suspect since the start, was dead by then. The only lingering question in Infante's mind was if the fatal blow had been an accident, another Sat.u.r.day-night fight in a house that had seen no shortage of such battles, or if there had been more intent to it. He'd spent a lot of time with the husband before cancer of the esophagus got him. The husband even came to believe that Infante came around out of friendship or kindness. He put on a good show of grief over his missing wife, and Infante decided that the guy saw himself as the victim. In his mind all he'd done was give her a push, a shove, no harder than any of the other pushes and shoves he'd meted out over the years, only this time she didn't get back up. So hubby picked her up, dumped her in the woods, and spent the rest of his days believing himself innocent. You'd think the wife's family would have been content that he died, fast and ugly at that, but it wasn't enough for them. For some people, it was never enough.

Infante stepped out of the shower. Theoretically, he was only thirty minutes late. But he was almost sick from hunger; and drive-through didn't do it for him. He went to the Bel-Loc Diner, where the waitresses fussed over him, made sure he got his steak-and-eggs exactly the way he liked them, the yolks just this side of runny. He pressed the tines of his fork into them, letting the juice flow over the steak, and wondered once again: What the f.u.c.k did I do to p.i.s.s off Debbie?

"WE GOT A babbling brook of a lunatic at St. Agnes Hospital, saying she knows about an old murder," his sergeant, Lenhardt, said to him. "Go."

"I'm on the McGowan case. In fact, I had to catch someone this morning, before he left for work. That's why I was late."