Land Of The Blind

1

Caroline, go home." Her sergeant interrupts her midstream, although she wasn't getting any closer to explaining why she's let some loon waste the last five hours confessing, or how, at three o'clock Saturday morning, he's still at it, hunched over his second legal pad and his fourth cup of coffee, no end in sight.

"Just go home," her sergeant, Chris Spivey, says again from the other side of the phone. "Get your nut a bed somewhere. We'll roust him Monday morning and he can tell us all about how the aliens probed his ass." Spivey is the first sergeant she's worked for who is younger than she is; at first she found this merely disconcerting, but now he seems like any other boss, officious and rigid, and apparently none too thrilled about getting a phone call at three in the morning. "Caroline, I won't authorize overtime for this."

"I didn't call for overtime," she says. "But what if there's something here?"

"Lock him up. Commit him. Shoot him. I don't care. Just go home."

She sighs and looks back through the window at the Loon. He turns the legal pad over and begins writing on the back of the page, in a small and controlled cursive, the way she's seen delusional people write in the margins of phone books and on countertops. "Okay," she says into the phone.

"What's the matter with you, anyway?" he asks. "Where's your head these days?"

A fair question, that.

She's been checked out, barely functioning, coming to work and sitting at her desk, taking hours to fill out the simplest reports, forgetting phone numbers and names. It's no better at home, where she sits down on the couch and forgets to take off her coat, or sits at the kitchen table, or surfs the Internet until dawn, bidding on things she doesn't need in online auctions: parasols and turntable needles, laser printers and fishing lures. Two nights ago she played chess in a chat room. She hates chess.

Where's your head?

The last few months have felt like someone else's life: surprised at her own behavior, watching silently over her own shoulder, wondering when she started liking bourbon, why she doesn't shower on the weekends anymore, when she started playing chess. It's a symptom of depression, maybe, this feeling of detachment from oneself. Sometimes she retraces her steps, examines the last five months for the moment she began drifting – her mother's death, her boyfriend moving out, the retirement of her best friend and the man she quietly pined away for, her former sergeant, Alan Dupree.

But she came through all of those things. No, this started later, after Caroline interrupted a guy who was about to murder a young hooker – a whisper of a girl named Rae-Lynn Pierce. At some point it dawned on Caroline that in fifteen years as a police officer, this girl, Rae-Lynn, was the only person she'd ever really saved. Maybe there were potential victims of criminals that she arrested, people whose lives were better off because of Caroline's actions, but those were abstractions, shadows. They were certainly not real people that she could point to and name. Rae-Lynn Pierce was real, and she was alive because of Caroline.

That's why, if she had to pick the moment when everything finally went to shit, when she lost focus and found herself dreaming of giving up, it would have to be the day three months ago when she heard that Rae-Lynn was dead, from an untreated case of hepatitis. Six weeks. That's how much time Caroline had given Rae-Lynn Pierce.

After that, Caroline began to lose interest. But it was more than a professional crisis; it was as if she had walked for fifteen years, only to find herself at the gorge of middle age, alone. She began to think of it as exactly that sort of transaction – fifteen years of her life for six weeks of an addict's fuck-ups. She fell asleep in meetings, stared out from her desk, let cases stagnate. Spivey moved her to nights, and her depression got worse, more isolated, darker.

And now this Loon, and she's being what… a psychiatrist? A confessor? Certainly not a cop. What did the Loon ask? Had she ever been responsible for someone's death? Maybe that's why she has let him sit in there for the last five hours, because she knows exactly how he feels, desperate to confess but uncertain what for.

She checks her watch. Ten minutes past three. She stalks across the office, unlocks the door to Interview Two, and steps inside.

"That's it," she says.

He looks up at her and smiles. "I'm finished, Caroline," he says, and she is deflated, as much by the smile and the way her name sounds as by the announcement she's been waiting for all night. His right eye is red, as if he's been crying again.

"Done?" She catches the whiff of letdown in her own voice.

The Loon flexes and unflexes the fingers on his right hand. "Well, not completely, no. But the preliminary part, the setup, you know – the key people. The hard part is done. The context and explanation." He pats the legal pad. "It's all here. All that's left is the details. The recent stuff."

Caroline doesn't quite know what to say. She sits across from him. "Look, I'm sorry, but I can't just sit here all weekend while you work through…" She flips the yellow pages of the legal pad. "… whatever you're working through here. I know this is important to you, but I'm not even supposed to be at work right now."

When he doesn't say anything, she keeps talking. "My sergeant said I've got to send you home. They won't even pay me for this. I'm supposed to be at home. Sleeping."

He just stares.

"See, this isn't how it works."

"I'm sorry, Caroline. I'll get right to it, now. I promise. Thirty minutes."

"No," she says. "You're going to just have to tell me what all this is about."

"I am," he says, and he pats the legal pad. "I am trying to tell you what all this is about." He pulls the patch away and rubs his left eye, but the movement is so fast she can't quite see what the patch is hiding. "It's in here. I'm coming clean."

"I think maybe you need a doctor."

"No," he says. "I'm not crazy. Please. You'll see. Just stay with me here a little bit longer. We've gone this far. Look, if you go home now, I might just drop the whole thing. I know I will. And no one will never know what happened."

He scratches his head and thick waves of hair fall forward, covering the strap to his eye patch for a moment, until he pulls his hand away and the hair falls back, more or less into place. "Please," he whispers. "Help me get this one thing right. I've made a mess of everything else, but this one thing… Please."

"I can't."

"Please."

"No."

"Please."

She looks around the room. "You have to give me something in return."

"Like what?"

"I don't know. A name."

"My name?"

"That'd be a start."

He thinks it over. "I can't. Not yet. You'll contact my friends and family and when this gets out…" He shakes his head.

"Then the victim. The person…" She thinks about the tentativeness of his phrasing earlier. "The person you… did this to."

He covers his mouth and lines form around his good eye.

"Look," Caroline says, "you should know that this is a complete violation of how I'm supposed to do my job." She's leery of admitting as much to him, but she keeps talking. "I'm trusting you here. I need to know this isn't bullshit."

"I'm afraid… it'll get away from me. I'm not ready. Not yet." He looks down at the legal pads in front of him. "Not until I'm done."

"I won't do anything with the name. I'll sit on it until you finish."

"You won't do anything?"

"No."

"I can trust you?"

"You can," she says without thinking about it.

He reaches out and takes her hand. His hand is big and warm and she lets her hand be enveloped; it's been a while. "Really?" he asks. "I can trust you?"

"Yes," she says, and it's true.

He lets go of her hand, sits back in his chair, and stares at her until she feels her own face drift away and he is staring at some point beyond her. "Pete," he says.

"Pete."

"Pete Decker. His name is Pete Decker. The man I… the man who…"

"Decker." She lets a moment pass, but he doesn't say any more. "Okay. Pete Decker. That wasn't so hard, was it?"

"No," he says. "It wasn't."

2

The truth hurts only if you're comforted by lies. That's what Caroline has always believed. She doesn't spend much time deluding herself: believing there is a reason things happen, that Mr. Right will come along, that people will change. She wonders, Is this me – this unleavened cynicism – or is it the job? Could be the job. You have to be a realist to be a cop, otherwise, the shit you see… it blackens your heart.

After Rae-Lynn Pierce died, Caroline forgot that for a few days. She went around re-creating Rae-Lynn's last six weeks, hoping she'd find some meaning there. Maybe Rae-Lynn had saved some child's life. Or reconciled with her family. Six weeks. Forty-two days – six of them spent in drug rehab, before she walked away from that; the rest spent on the street, getting high and fucking strangers for money to get high. Her two-year-old daughter was taken away during those six weeks, and a few days later Rae-Lynn was arrested for soliciting. She spent the night in jail, and four days after that she was found dead, curled around a warm-water drainpipe in an alley behind a Thai restaurant.

No, it was better not to know. Otherwise you find yourself staring at people on the street, wondering when you might attend their deaths. She's tried to joke about it, slough it off, duck behind her old shield of cynicism, but she lacks the strength to hoist that defense, as if the weight of her old self is too much to bear.

Maybe that's why she's letting herself be drawn in now, because this Loon's case is still theoretical and clean, a totally hypothetical crime – the idea of homicide, the idea of confession, of contrition and punishment. Usually this job begins and ends with the corpse: its rigor and stench, hypostatic pools, smallness of an unanimated body. But with no body…

D-E-C-K-E-R, P-E-T-E. She types the letters into the computer to check against local and national crime databases. It occurred to her that the Loon might be lying as soon as he gave her the name, but she could also see that the name Pete Decker wasn't random, that it had meaning, and she could see the Loon was giving her something, and that's all she wanted, she sees now, some excuse to keep listening, to allow the Loon to keep writing. Or maybe to keep from going home. Maybe he could've given her any name and she would've left satisfied that she wasn't being taken in by this guy, that she wasn't being seduced by his line of confession and trust, by the misery in his right eye and the mystery of his left. She wonders for a moment if the Loon's name might not be Pete Decker, but she doesn't think so. He didn't say it that way, not the way you'd say your own name, but like a name that had been in your head for some time, one that you didn't say aloud very often. Like an incantation or a name chanted at a sйance. Like someone you've killed.

On her computer screen, Peter Ralph Decker's Greatest Hits scroll down in front of her: petty theft; auto theft; battery; second robbery; a whole range of assaults – third, second, and first, employing everything from his fists to a roofer's nail gun; two DUI's, two possessions – one with intent to deliver; four probation violations; two noncompliance findings, and a couple of protection orders. And that's just as an adult. He has a nine-count juvenile record that she doesn't even bother with. By her count, he's spent fourteen of the last nineteen years in some kind of correctional facility.

She checks to see if Pete Decker is in the can even now. He's not. In fact, he's just finished his longest stretch – four years on the possession with intent to deliver. She reads the details. Stupid bastard had only been out of prison for two months when the cops stopped his car and found almost a half-kilo of coke in the backseat. Claimed he "found" the drugs outside his apartment. Hard to imagine how that story didn't fly.

Caroline writes down the address that Pete has on file with his probation officer. She finds herself hoping that Pete Decker is the victim in this case. A decent lawyer might manage a case for justifiable homicide or self-defense by doing nothing more than presenting Pete Decker's long record in court. There could even be scenarios in which her Loon was protecting himself, or maybe protecting other people, from the impending violence of this drug dealer Pete Decker.

She jots down Decker's last known and sends the report to the printer. At her desk she grabs another blank legal pad, and continues on to the interview room. She unlocks the door and sticks her head in. The Loon is still bent over the legal pad, mouthing words as he writes them. He looks up, already in midapology.

"I'm sorry, Caroline. I know this is taking too long, but I'm really…"

She tosses the new legal pad before he can finish the sentence.

He catches the pad and smiles. "Thanks," he says. "I'm getting close. Really."

"It's almost six," Caroline tells him. "I'm gonna go out for some breakfast. You want something?"

"Some more coffee would be great. Maybe a cinnamon roll." He rubs his mouth. "I… uh… I wanted to tell you…"

Caroline steps inside and waits.

He looks embarrassed. "That name I gave you?"

"Pete Decker?"

"Right. That's not it. That's not the person…"

"So who is he?"

"Nobody," the Loon says. He's lying. "I just wanted to give you a name. I need to get through this and then I'll tell you everything… I promise. You have to believe me."

"You want black coffee again?"

"Sure. Thank you."

"I'm going to have someone from patrol check in on you. And… I'm gonna need your belt and your shoes."

"My belt and my shoes?"

"I can't leave you in here with anything you might use…"

"Use for what?" She doesn't answer, and it takes a few seconds to register on his face. "You think I'm going to hang myself." He makes it sound like a decent idea.

She just holds out her hand. He removes his belt and shoes and slides them across the table. She looks at the shoes but sees no blood on them. When she looks up he is smiling and she sees it again, that nagging familiarity.

"Are you sure we haven't met?" she asks.

"I'm sure."

"You just… seem familiar."

"Trust me," he says. "I would remember meeting you."

She is embarrassed and slightly confused by how good this makes her feel.

"My name is Clark." He says it with great meaning, perhaps as amends for giving her a phony name for the victim earlier. She has been thinking of him as the Loon, as her Loon, for so long, she has to repeat the name to herself. Clark sticks out his hand and she shakes it. Although Clark isn't the name that seemed to be on the tip of her tongue, she sees right away that he's telling the truth and she decides she's been mistaking him for someone else, that he just has one of those faces.

"Nice to meet you, Clark."

"I wish it were under different circumstances," he says.

She thinks, not half as much as I do.

3

Pete Decker's apartment is on the fourth floor of a seedy building that Caroline knows only because it's across the street from the coffee shop where she and some of the other detectives used to go in the mornings for tea. It is a squat, squalid building at the end of downtown, an old railroad hotel remodeled into flop apartments that house more than their share of criminals and addicts, people in the throes of recovery and teen pregnancy and AIDS, the chronically troubled and luckless. She parks in front of the building and opens the door, climbs the stairs three levels and finds herself in a dark, dank hallway, lit by a single bulb. There are six doors on the fourth floor, profanities scratched into the wood. She reads the graffiti and finds that Tina gives good head, that Joe B. is a motherfucker. None of the doors has a number or a letter. Caroline looks down at her notebook. Pete Decker lives in 4B. It could be any of the six. She checks her watch. Not quite 7:00 A.M. She doesn't have to worry about Pete – if he's even here – skipping out in the morning. As a group, criminals are not early risers.

She leaves the building, happy for the fresh air, crosses three lanes of theoretical traffic, and opens a door into the warm smell of her old coffee shop. She stopped coming in after the barrista – a young bundle of stomach muscles and dreadlocks everyone calls Goose – asked her out one morning.

She walks across the dark floor and smiles at two of the coffee shop regulars, a youngish father and his round, blond, agreeable son, who is torturing a cinnamon roll for information.

"Hey," says the father, who hasn't bothered to learn her name, as she hasn't bothered to learn his; the beauty of coffee shop culture is its sustained surface cordiality, like an office without that irritating work.

"Hey," she says back.

"Haven't seen you here in a while."

"No," she says, and continues to the counter. Luckily, Goose isn't working; the pierced girl behind the counter gives her a warm smile.

"Can I get a twenty-ounce chai tea?" Caroline asks.

"Certainly," the pierced girl says, and the snappiness of this exchange, this entire morning, makes her feel as if something has changed. This is what her life felt like before – normal exchanges with people one step removed from strangers: driving, walking, talking, sitting in a dark coffee shop and indulging in a cup of tea.

She picks out a day-old pastry, pays, and sits at the window, watching Pete Decker's apartment building. No one comes or goes, and she thinks maybe she's missed something – misread his record and the down-and-out address. Ah, but it's early for heavy drug traffic anyway. She's a little groggy, having stayed up all night while Clark the Loon worked on his opus. The tea warms her throat.

She watches the fourth-floor windows, but no lights come on. Just then a car, an old beat-up Honda Civic, pulls up to the curb in front of the building. Caroline grabs her tea and stands.

"See you," says the father as he wipes frosting from his boy's mouth.

"Okay," says Caroline, and she pulls on her gloves and leaves the coffee shop. She jogs across the street just as a young woman steps out of the car. From first glance Caroline sees that the woman is a meth addict, one of those forty-year-old twenty-year-olds that the drug produces, eyes red and deep-socketed, skin sallow and puckered.

The girl sees her coming and her fried nerves go off scattershot; her arm cocks and her lip twitches. "What? What?"

"You live here?" Caroline is friendly, firm, and holds out her badge. "In this building?"

"I didn't do nothing."

"I'm sure you didn't. It's okay. I need to talk to your neighbor."

"Who?"

"Pete."

The girl answers reflexively. "Don't know him."

"Sure you do," Caroline says. "Look, I just need to see if he's okay. Have you seen him in the last few days?"

"No," she says. "Something happen to Pete?"

"I don't know yet."

The girl thinks about it for a moment and relaxes. "I wouldn't mind if somebody finally killed that fucker. He steals everything."

"Will you show me his door? I won't tell him that you did."

The girl shrugs again. "If he ain't dead, I wouldn't want to be the one to wake him up. He got a fuckin' temper, him."

"Oh, I'll be gentle," Caroline says. She follows the girl back up the stairs, into the fourth-floor landing. The girl points at a door and nods solemnly. Caroline nods back and hands the girl her tea, then waits for her to make her way quietly down the stairs.

When she hears the girl's door ease closed two floors below, Caroline smells around the door. It stinks, but she isn't sure if it's that stink. Caroline puts her ear to the door. Nothing. She knocks on the door to Pete Decker's apartment. She rests one hand on the nine-millimeter in her shoulder harness, and with the other reaches for the doorknob. She is surprised when the knob turns and the door opens, and she finds herself staring at an even younger girl, about sixteen, wearing nothing but a flannel shirt.

"Hi," the girl says cheerily.

"Don't answer the fuckin' door," says someone, presumably Pete, who is also presumably alive, in a tangle of blankets on a mattress on the floor. Caroline steps in, past the girl. The apartment consists of this one room, about twelve feet by twelve feet, nothing inside but the mattress and a new thirty-two-inch color television across from it. The walls are chipped and covered with shit and there are bags of chips and cookies all over. There are six people along the walls of the room, boys and girls, teenagers, and they all have the blank eyes and cat-box smell of heavy meth users.

She recognizes Pete from his mug shot. Alone on the mattress, he sits up, pissed off and bare chested. "What the fuck time is it?" Pete stands and he is naked, as skinny as the teenagers in the room – a bantam rooster, hard and small. Quarter-size bruises cover his body. "Don't answer the fuckin' door unless I tell you to!" Pete yells again, and he shoves the sixteen-year-old girl, who looks like an empty flannel shirt as she flies across the room.

Caroline steps toward him, inside the range of his fists. She grabs him by the throat just as he swings at her. She deflects most of the punch, and catches the rest in the neck; she is taller than he expected, and not as easy to move. This is a guy used to hitting down at his women. Caroline gathers herself, tightens her grip on his neck and swings her knee up into his balls. He grunts and slumps, and she pushes him back down on the mattress. He rolls over onto his side, moaning.

"You must be Pete," Caroline says, and shows her badge. She picks up Pete's jeans, feels in them for a weapon, and comes away with a long pocket-knife that she slides into her own pocket.

"Anybody in here eighteen?" she asks the owl-eyed teenagers. "Yeah, I didn't think so. You've all got twenty seconds to get your clothes and get out of here. And if I ever see any of you in here again, you're going to jail."

As Caroline continues to look for weapons, the teenagers scramble into their shirts and shoes, grab their bags of Doritos, and hurry out the door. Only the flannel girl is left. She pulls on a pair of pants and wipes her bloody lip with a white T-shirt. "Where do I go?"

"You his girlfriend?"

"Yeah."

"How old?"

The girl considers lying. "I'm sixteen," she says finally.

Caroline gives her two dollars. "Go to the coffee shop across the street and get yourself a cup of hot chocolate. I'll be over in a minute." The girl leaves and Caroline turns back to Pete, who makes no move to cover himself or his sore testicles.

"Bitch."

I could shoot him, Caroline thinks, and she immediately thinks about investigating her own crime: the trail of witnesses, the barrista, the teenagers, the father with the blond son, the girl who showed Caroline the door; Caroline's handprint on Pete's neck, the police slug in his chest. Maybe she'd confess, ask for three legal pads and some coffee and sit down next to Clark the Loon, drawing a line between all the events in her life and this one crime.

"Pete," she says, "you should get some friends your own age."

"Fuck you."

"You're a lucky man, Pete. I'm not gonna arrest you today."

Finally he pulls the dirty blanket over himself. Caroline walks to the window and looks down on the street. She sees the young flannel girl cross the street, swing around a parking meter, and go into the coffee shop. Caroline turns back to Pete.

"I need some information about a guy named Clark. You know him?"

"No."

Pete Decker is used to having cops ask if he knows someone. "Come on. Think. Clark something. About my age. Mid to late thirties. Dark hair. Good looking. Little over six feet tall. Has an eye patch."

With that last bit of information, Pete Decker sits up in bed and smiles. "Clark? No way. How is he?"

"He's okay. So you do know him?"

"Sure, we was like… best friends when we were kids. You know, little kids. Rode bikes and shit. Before-" He doesn't say before what.

"You know his last name?" she asks.

"Clark? Oh, fuck. Sure. You know. Clark… uh… starts with an M. I used to know it. You know, when we were kids. So how is Clark, man? Still the same?"

Not knowing what he was like before, Caroline isn't sure how to answer.

"Man, I haven't seen Clark in… fuck, years."

"You don't keep in touch with him?"

"Clark? Nah, man." He looks around the one-room apartment. "Yeah, I don't keep in touch with too many people from the old neighborhood, you know."

"Clark have a beef with anyone, someone he might have wanted to hurt?"

"Clark? Nah," he says. "No, everybody liked Clark. He's funny. Smart as shit too. Get all A's and shit. I used to tell him, 'Clark, don't worry about your ol' buddy Pete. You go make something of yourself. Ol' Pete, he'll be fine.' You know why? I used to kind of protect him from bullies 'n' shit. We was tight."

Pete sits up in bed. "Yeah, Clark, he was the kind of guy you always knew would be okay. Played sports and banged all them cheerleaders, even with…" He raises his hand absentmindedly to his own left eye. "… You know, the accident and shit."

"Yeah, his eye. How'd that happen?"

"Oh." Pete looks around nervously, as if he's wondering about the statute of limitations. "Some kind of accident. You know. Kids."

"When did you see Clark last?"

"Huh." Pete thinks. It does not appear to be his strong suit. "Oh. Probably 1979. Yeah. Probably then."

Caroline nods. She's not sure whether to be upset that this has turned out to be nothing, or glad that Clark whose-last-name-starts-with-an-M the Loon told the truth when he said Pete Decker was nobody.

"Okay, Pete," she says, and she crouches in front of him. "In just the last ten minutes, you've committed six felonies. I'm gonna give you a break, but I need you to do some things for me. Four things. Can you do four things for me, Pete?"

"Sure." He sits up, all sunken cheeks and vacant eyes, and she knows he will do nothing, that twenty minutes after she leaves, the teenagers will be back and they will all be smoking crystal and watching Pete's stolen TV. "Anything," he says.

She pulls out her notebook and writes, 1. GIRL. "That girl," she says. "The one you hit. Never see her again. You understand? Send her home to her parents."

"Yeah," he says.

2. TV, she writes. "This morning, you take this TV back where you stole it from."

"Okay," he says.

"Monday morning, you go to your probation officer and tell him that you're using again and you need to get into treatment." She writes, 3. Treatment.

"Good," he says, "I've been thinking that I need some help to…"

She doesn't bother listening.

"And number four. You avoid me. Because if you don't do all four of these things – and we both know you won't – then I'm gonna shoot you in your fucking head. Do you understand?" She writes, 4. Me.

"Yeah," he says.

Caroline rips the page from her notebook, tosses it on the bed, straightens up, and starts for the door.

"Hey." Pete has pulled the blanket up to his neck, suddenly modest. "Will you tell Clark I said hi?"

She's a little unsure what to make of this. "Sure," she says.

"And tell him that if I could, I would've voted for him last time."

And that, of course, is when it hits her. She stops cold at the door to Pete Decker's apartment and closes her eyes. She did vote for him.

4

Clark Anthony Mason works over the third legal pad just as he did the first two, almost in a state of self-hypnosis. Caroline watches him with a new kind of fascination. Tony Mason. No shit. He chews the end of his pen and takes a sip of the coffee she gave him. She didn't say anything when she got back from Pete's, just handed him the coffee and went to write an intelligence report encouraging the drug detectives to go back and visit Pete Decker. She looks in the window of Interview Two. So that's Tony Mason. Now it's obvious: the solid good looks, the weird diction, the politician's bearing. Before, she couldn't see past the dirty clothes, the long hair, and especially the eye patch. She kept running the current version of the Loon through her memory (Who do I know with an eye patch?) rather than trying to picture him without it.

Caroline checks her watch. It's going on nine o'clock Saturday morning. He's been at this almost twelve hours. She walks back to her desk and flips through her Rolodex until she finds the number of a newspaper reporter she nearly dated before remembering that she hates newspaper reporters. She taps out the number and Evan O'Neal answers on the second ring.

"Evan. It's Caroline Mabry. I'm sorry to bother you at home."

"How you been, Caroline?" Evan covered cops back when she was on patrol, but now he's a government reporter.

"Good. I need to run a name past you: Tony Mason."

"The kid who ran against Nethercutt?" Kid. Only in politics does someone in his thirties qualify as a kid. But in truth he had seemed like a kid, standing at the opposite podium against the gray-haired four-term Republican, looking as though, if elected to the House of Representatives, he would act immediately to change the mascot and make Homecoming a formal dance.

"Yeah, that Tony Mason."

"No shit? You seeing him now, Caroline?"

Funny that a cop would call a reporter and the reporter would assume that it was about romance. She's not sure if that says something about her, or Evan, or Tony Mason. She looks up, through the small window of the interview room. "Yeah, as a matter of fact, I am seeing him," she says.

"You get fixed up?"

"Something like that."

Evan is quiet for a moment.

"What is it?" Caroline asks.

"It's just… I don't know… you can do better."

"Yeah," she says. "I'm starting to think that. What do you know about him?"

"Mason? Just that he got thirty-six percent and that was twice as much as anyone expected from such a lamb."

"Lamb?"

"Yeah." Evan shifts the phone. "Nethercutt owns the seat, just like Foley did before him, so the Democrats have to pick their spots, only take a big run every six years or so. The rest of the time, they just throw lambs to slaughter – an old labor tough or a cute young lawyer like Tony Mason. Some political outsider who gets outspent five-to-one and goes home disillusioned and broke."

Caroline writes down the word "lawyer." She's beginning to recall details of the election now, and she wonders if her lax memory has to do with her job, or the funk she's been in, or if the loser in any election just naturally fades from memory that quickly – the Dukakis syndrome. "Wasn't he rich?"

"Mason? Yeah," Evan says. "Cashed out some tech stock and spent all his money trying to get elected. That's the only reason he even got thirty-six percent."

"Do you have a list of his donations?"

"I got his filings at the office. Sure."

"Fax it to me?"

"Monday?"

"Today?"

"It's Saturday, Caroline."

"I know. But you owe me." She gave Evan a tip once about a former police chief who drove around drunk at night, pulling over teenage girls and "frisking" them.

"Okay," Evan says. "But remind me to never go out with a cop."

"Why?"

"I'm just not sure I could pass the background check."

She ignores this. "So does he sometimes go by the name Clark?"

"That's his real name. Clark Anthony Mason. He didn't think the Maxwell House Dems would vote for someone with two last names. And he thought Anthony sounded too professorial or blue blood or something. If you can imagine some kid from the Valley worrying about being too blue blood."

Evan laughs as he remembers. "Boy, that's classic lamb behavior, worrying about the menu while the restaurant burns down."

"What do you mean?" Caroline asked.

"It's just… here's this kid, doesn't look twenty-five years old, all stiff and square, grows up in the Valley and goes off to Seattle, comes home thinking they're just going to hand him a congressional seat. And… Jesus, that eye."

"Yeah, he wears an eye patch," she says. "I don't remember that from the election."

"No, he wore one of those glass eyes, didn't move at all. You got the feeling he sat in front of the mirror until he figured which angle the eye looked straight and not cockeyed. That was the only way he'd face people, straight on, without moving his eye. On his posters, he was always staring right at you. It was a little creepy, especially in the debates. Guy moved like a robot."

Caroline had just assumed he was stiff and liked that about him, that he didn't seem polished. But mostly she voted for him because he was for gun control and Nethercutt wasn't. Over time she'd become a one-issue voter. "I was trying to remember what exactly he ran on…"

"Oh, the usual economic development crap; he was gonna bring high-tech jobs here. 'Course, back then, you couldn't run for dogcatcher without promising you'd bring computer jobs to Spokane. I have to admit, your boy really sold it, though."

"So how did Nethercutt beat him?"

"Mostly by ignoring him. Let the PACs and the issue people run the negative shit: that he was a flaming liberal, that he burned flags and liked Internet porn. And of course there was the Seattle thing."

She vaguely remembers television ads that had knocked Mason for going to college and working in Seattle, ads that accused him of being in the pocket of liberal Seattle power brokers.

"Yeah, that provincial shit is the gold standard in Spokane," Evan says. "We don't trust anyone who doesn't live here and we assume anyone who does live here is stupid."

"You know what he's done since the election?" Caroline asks, and she thinks, I know what he's doing. He's sitting in my interview room, writing his memoirs.

"No idea."

"But he's not still involved in politics?" she asks.

"Mason? Nah. Lambs never run a second time. They go back to their insurance offices, or their teaching jobs at the community college." Evan clears his throat. "So, are you gonna keep going out with the guy?"

"I don't know," Caroline says. She looks up in the window again and sees that Clark is still writing, that his face is shot with hard memories, with misgiving and regret. She leans forward and watches closely. And watching him like this she knows there is a body somewhere. Tell me, Clark. Who did you kill?

Caroline sits back. "Yeah, you're probably right," she says to Evan on the phone. "I can do better."