Land Of The Blind

1

It's the ex-wife. It dawns on Caroline as she reads Clark Mason's bitter divorce records, as it also occurs to her that this nice philosophical, theoretical discussion of crime may in fact refer to an actual crime – messy, banal, and ordinary, a new pile of old shit: Woman bangs everyone but her husband. Takes all the money from the divorce. Remarries before the ink is dry.

So he kills her.

Clark or Tony Mason – whatever he calls himself – why should he be any different from any of the slag-headed, short-tempered men who end up here? Most murderers kill someone close to them, and most murderers are men and most victims women – the unrequited, the girlfriends, the wives and ex-wives, women who spurned or cheated or simply didn't get dinner on the table in time. Caroline had wanted this to be different, wanted him to be different. But that's what happens when you go trolling for meaning in the truth. Fables are for children, parables for priests. All true stories are melodrama. Or noise.

The noise in these divorce papers is deafening. Caroline winces as she flips through the charges and countercharges recounting the three-year matrimony and acrimony of Clark A. and Susan A. Mason: Complainant was unfaithful… Respondent forced complainant to quit her profitable job in Seattle and move to Spokane… Complainant hid joint money in private accounts… Respondent irresponsibly spent couple's savings, mortgaged their home, and liquidated stock to run for Congress… Infidelity… Impotence… Emotional abuse.

From the dissolution papers, Caroline learns that Clark and Susan were married in December 1999 in Seattle and divorced in January 2001 in Spokane. It was his first marriage and her third. There were no children. In 1999 they left Seattle and moved to Spokane, and bought a swanky, sizable house on Manito Country Club – with cash. Caroline can imagine it. Stories like this seem apocryphal in Spokane, because they never happen to anyone from Spokane. It's always a cousin in Seattle… or a friend in the Bay Area.

Clark's story starts like all of those: Guy sells stock holdings right near the high-tech peak. Sells a house in the inflated Seattle market. Pulls a few million from investments and a million more out of a waterfront condo. Comes to Spokane with enough money to buy half of downtown, so it's a cinch to pick up a top-of-the-line $500,000 house abutting the city's best country club – with cash.

That's where this story diverges from the fairy tale. Clark uses the rest of his dough to run for Congress, and when he realizes he's losing, he starts draining the bank account. When that's gone, he mortgages the house. The wife is the kind of woman – Caroline can see her with handled shopping bags climbing into her Lexus outside the Bellevue Nordy's – who doesn't pay attention where the money comes from, as long as her pedicure is paid for. Clark loses the election, of course, and when she finds out he spent all the money, well… the divorce lawyers are called in.

Apparently, there was some kind of settlement in which Clark was supposed to make payments to Susan, because the last court filing – and the probable spark for killing her – is from only a week earlier. Clark has missed a payment (for the second time this year, the papers note) and Susan's lawyer wants the court to garnishee his wages. Caroline can see the whole thing play out. He is served the court papers. He's listed as representing himself (ouch – a lawyer who can't even afford a lawyer). As he reads the court order (over and over) his face tenses up. The woman has cheated on him, bled him dry, and mocked his dream of running for office. He's all full up. So he whacks her.

It's hard for Caroline to admit, but if Clark's ex-wife is dead, then all his talk of contrition and nonsense about "nameless crimes" is just so much rationalization – the sound the guilty make when their mouths move.

Oh, I can name your crime, she thinks. And there's one other thing that worries her. Susan is apparently remarried. When the divorce papers were first filed, she was Susan Ann Hargraves Jennings Larsen Mason – a maiden name and three husbands – but in this last court order she is listed as Susan Ann Hargraves Jennings Larsen Mason Diehl, and Caroline worries for a moment if husband four, Mr. Diehl, is facedown in the same ditch as his new wife.

It also strikes Caroline in a moment of cattiness and self-abuse that this woman – who is her age, thirty-seven – has managed to snag four husbands in the time Caroline has gotten exactly zero.

The Diehls aren't listed in the telephone book, so Caroline checks the reverse directory. Doug Diehl is listed as having a house on Five Mile, a hilltop neighborhood of big, newer homes just north of the city. He's part owner of a Mazda and Ford dealership. No wife is listed, but they have probably just gotten married. Caroline calls Doug Diehl's home number.

"Hello!" Two voices answer together, in a terrible singsong. Caroline can imagine them bent over the answering machine as they recorded this, probably holding hands. "What's the Diehl?" asks the male voice. "We are!" says the female voice. "The real Diehls!" they sing together.

"We're not home right now," she says, "but if you leave a message for Susan-"

"Or Doug," he chimes in. He sounds older than her, and there's just a hint in his flat voice that these are her lines that he's reading.

"-we promise to call you back. So, do we have a Diehl?" she asks.

"We sure do," he says.

Caroline drops the phone into the cradle. "My God," she says aloud. Play that tape in court and Clark might just make a case for justifiable homicide.

She grabs her jacket, and on her way out peeks in the window of Interview Two. Clark Mason is rubbing his eyes, his pen still poised over the legal pad. It's eleven o'clock Saturday morning, fourteen hours since he began confessing. Maybe it's some sort of endurance test, she thinks, for him or for me. Or maybe it's an angle. After all, he is a lawyer. So what, he dresses and acts like a loon because he wants her to get fed up? Wants her to send him home so that later, when he's arrested for killing his ex-wife and her new husband, he can say that he tried to confess, but the police sent him away? It's a stupid idea, but it makes as much, or as little, sense as any of this – as much sense as a guy who wants to make a religious confession to a cop.

The confession has stretched now into its third shift. She tells the new desk sergeant there's a potential witness in Interview Two making a statement, and that if the guy wants to leave, to please call her. The sergeant promises to check on him, but he doesn't look up from the lurid paperback he's reading.

The drive north is quiet and peaceful, the early spring sun melting any last pockets of snow. Spokane lies in a long east-west river valley – pinched, it feels some days – and leaving downtown either to the north or the south takes a person up a progression of short hills blanketed with modest homes. Five Mile is one of the last and most drastic hills, where the houses lose their modesty, a steep three-hundred-foot tree-lined shelf, as if a huge cruise ship had improbably ground ashore at the edge of a city.

Doug and Susan Diehl's grand house is perched on three or four fenced acres on the starboard side of this ship. It is a new home of brick and cedar, three stories, with a massive attached garage that has four progressively larger doors: the smallest for a golf cart, the next two a standard two-car garage, the last door for a big motor home. The grounds are landscaped and fountained, covered in flowers, and there is a horse barn in back. Caroline parks behind an old, beat-up pickup truck with a metallic sign that reads JACK'S STABLE SERVICE. Out of habit, she feels the hood of the truck. It's cold.

The white gravel crunches beneath Caroline's feet. She walks between flower beds to a big, arched front door, rings the bell, and waits. Nothing. She looks inside the window next to the door. The sunken living room is immaculate. White carpeting and white leather furniture and white lamps. It's like heaven. There are no bodies anywhere. That's a good start. She walks around back and sees no sign of anything suspicious, which doesn't prove a thing, of course. Doug and Susan could be in the basement, their heads crushed. The Real Diehls!

Sixty yards behind the house, the barn stands in a field of cut alfalfa. It appears to be new, painted bright red, with a white X on the door. A horse is grazing in the bunchgrass outside it. The barn door swings lazily in the wind. Caroline walks across the backyard toward the barn. Halfway, she bends over and picks up a woman's sandal. She walks through an open gate and keeps walking until she reaches the barn door. The horse looks up, sees her, and looks back over its shoulder, into the barn. Caroline follows its gaze to a bench across from the horse's stable and sees what appears to be Susan Ann Hargraves Jennings Larsen Mason Diehl, very much alive, and very much naked, astride what appears to be Jack of Jack's Stable Service, who looks about twenty and whose cargo pants are bunched up around the ankles of his cowboy boots. Jack must be pretty good at the service he provides in stables, because Susan's eyes are pressed shut and she is grinding her upper teeth into her lower lip. Caroline turns back to the horse, who turns back to her, as if he's going to speak, as if he's been waiting all morning for someone to come along so he could say what's on his mind – Fuckin' humans – and then he goes back to grazing.

She backs away and considers leaving or letting Jack finish his service (according to her fading recollection of such things, they are getting close), but then the answering machine echoes in her head – "We're the real Diehls!" – and she decides she can at least ruin the former Mrs. Mason's day. Caroline steps behind the barn door and knocks on it. The faint rustling sound – which she desperately wishes she'd heard before she looked through the barn door – stops completely now.

Susan whispers, "What was that?"

Caroline knocks again. "Ms. Diehl. Can I talk to you?"

There is a louder rustling now, back into clothes, she presumes. Caroline steps back from the door and waits. After a minute Susan Diehl comes out, wearing very small, very tight, very brand-new blue jeans, a western shirt, and one sandal. Her hair is blond and frosted and even after Jack's service she looks fit to entertain, with a good half-coat of makeup on her sharply featured face. She is tall and bottle-pretty, heavily produced, with vivid green eyes and long legs that go some distance in explaining what a guy like Clark saw in her.

Caroline offers her badge. "I'm Detective Caroline Mabry. With the Spokane Police Department."

Susan flinches. Behind her, a single eye watches through the crack in the barn door. Susan opens her mouth to say something to Caroline, but nothing comes out.

"I need to ask a couple of questions about your ex-husband." When Susan's expression doesn't change, Caroline realizes she's going to have to be more specific. "Clark Mason," she says.

Susan covers her mouth. "Oh my God. What happened?"

"Nothing. I just have some routine questions," Caroline says. "We're just trying to get some information."

Susan's eyes tear up.

Caroline is surprised.

"What did Clark do?" Susan asks. "Is he okay?"

"No, he's fine." Caroline smiles reassuringly. "I just talked to him."

"Oh." Susan reaches up and absentmindedly pulls a piece of straw from her hair. "Oh. Thank God. I worry about him."

"Why?"

"I don't know." Susan looks Caroline up and down, measuring her. They are about the same height, but that's the only similarity, and eventually Susan looks at the ground. "Habit, I guess."

Caroline looks down at Susan's one sandal. She hands her the mate she found in the lawn. Susan drops it in the grass and steps into it without apology.

"How is Clark?" she asks.

"He seems a little troubled," Caroline answers.

"You don't say."

They walk back to the patio. Susan steps inside, pours them each a glass of lemonade in green, stemmed glasses, and with little prompting when she returns, begins telling the story of herself and Clark.

"We started dating when we were sixteen," Susan says. "Clark was my high school sweetheart. We went to the prom together. The whole nine yards." She crosses her legs. Painted toenails.

"But you didn't get married until 1999?"

Susan nods. "We broke up at the end of our senior year. He went to college and acted like a-" She searches for the word. "-beatnik for a while. I married an older guy. Sort of like Doug, but a bit more-" She glances up at the barn. "-attentive. Clark and I lost track of each other. I was living in Seattle in '99. I'd just gotten divorced." She makes eye contact with Caroline. "My second divorce. My ex-husband had been a big political donor, and we were invited to a fund-raiser for some candidates, and I figured just because we were divorced didn't mean I had to lock myself away, so I went. It was at the Seattle Art Museum. There were all sorts of candidates milling about, and I watched one of them work the crowd and I couldn't believe it. It was Clark." She smiles at the memory. "Do you remember the first person you ever really loved, Detective?"

Caroline nods and thinks, not of high school, but of someone far more recent – she's surprised to find that she wants to call him right now.

Susan shrugs. "He swept me off my feet." She looks out to the barn, to where Jack is leading the horse back inside, and then looks down at her painted toenails. "Which is probably not that much of a trick, now that I think about it."

Caroline doesn't know what to say. She sips her lemonade. It is fresh squeezed.

"Our first date, he rented a Jeep Wagoneer and we drove into the mountains." Something about the memory strikes her as funny and Susan looks down at the ground. "We were married within three weeks. It just felt so right."

"And you moved back to Spokane?" Caroline asks.

"It's funny. At the fund-raiser, I just assumed Clark was running in Seattle. It wasn't until I'd agreed to marry him that I even realized that the Fifth congressional was in Spokane. And by then, I was convinced that we were in love."

She shakes her head. "I spent my whole life trying to get out of this place, and now Clark drags me back with him. It was hard. I had a little boutique in downtown Seattle – nothing fancy, second-tier designer wear, last season's misses. But I was happy.

"And it wasn't just me. Clark had big clients and was writing contracts and bringing in business. He was considered a legal expert on high-tech companies." She smiles. "Which, in Seattle, was a pretty good position to be in. And I'm not even talking about the money, which was considerable. We were established. And he throws that all away. Says his name is Tony Mason now and he's running for Congress. Gives up everything, pisses it all away, to come back here."

"Why do you think he wanted it so badly?"

"I don't…" Susan leans forward, holds her glass in both hands and watches the lemonade swirl around the glass. "Actually, I've given that a lot of thought. I took it for granted because Clark always wanted to be in politics. He used to joke that he was president of his incubator. In high school, he ran for everything.

"But I don't think I ever understood just how badly Clark needed it. My therapist says running for office was his way of compensating." She glances sideways and then whispers, "Because of his eye."

Caroline nods. "What happened to his eye?"

"Some kind of accident when he was a kid." She shrugs as if it's not important. "I guess I always thought Clark wanted the power, or the fame, or, you know… to pass laws or govern or even, what… make a better world?" She says the words "better world" like a person might say "flying car." "But he doesn't want that shit. Fame, money. He sure as hell doesn't want power. You know what he wants?"

Caroline shakes her head no.

"He wants people to vote for him. Clark just wants them to pick him."

They are quiet. Susan leans back and crosses her legs, a move so elegant Caroline has to remind herself that only a few minutes ago those legs were riding the help.

"And you didn't want to be a politician's wife."

"No, I was into that part. Go to Washington, D.C., the parties and society there? In a minute. But even if he'd won, that was more than a year away. And when we got to Spokane, it was okay. We got a nice house, joined the Spokane Club and the Manito Country Club. I joined the Junior League. It was fine.

"Then, one day, I was at Nordstrom and I saw a girl from high school. I don't even remember her name, but she remembered mine. Do you remember so-and-so? she says. She's got three kids. So-and-so had an ovary removed. So-and-so works at the Safeway. Jesus – and it was like… My God. I can't live here. I mean, I lived in a two-million-dollar house on Lake Washington. I owned a boutique in Seattle. But here I was, just another stupid girl from the Valley, and no matter what I did, that's all I'd ever be. That's all I can be here." She finishes her lemonade.

"In the meantime, the party abandoned Clark. Sent him over here to run, and then cut off the money to the campaign. He won the primary, but he started out thirty points behind Nethercutt in the general and the people who said they were going to vote for him also would've voted for a potted plant.

"Then the attack ads started running, saying that Clark was a puppet, a Seattle guy coming in to take over Spokane. Clark… he went crazy. He should've given up, or run a cursory race. Even his campaign manager said that. But Clark wouldn't listen. He started spending our money. Without telling me. He sold all the stock – Microsoft, Cisco, everything but one stock: this idiotic Empire Game company that belonged to some guy he knew. He traded in his BMW. Tried to trade in mine. Took out a mortgage on our house. I arrived in Spokane the wife of a millionaire, and when we split up we had four thousand dollars and some stock in this worthless game company."

Caroline finds herself wanting to defend Clark. "In the divorce records, he accused you of having an affair."

Susan's eyes drift closed. Then they snap open, and Caroline sees something like determination behind the eye makeup. "I love Clark. In fact, he might be the only person I ever have loved. So go ahead and judge me if you want, Detective. I don't care. But don't think for a second that you know me. Because you don't."

Jack has finished in the barn and he walks through the gate and sheepishly toward the house. He is older than Caroline first believed, maybe thirty. He is skinny and walks with a limp, and his hair hangs long and greasy in the back. Caroline and Susan both watch him walk up to the house.

"Check's on the table," Susan says to Jack. "I'm sorry-" Again, she doesn't finish.

Jack nods and limps past them. From behind, Caroline can see that his knee seems to bend both forward and sideways and it's not hard to imagine a horse has fallen on that leg. When he goes around the front of the house, Susan stands and watches through the back of the house, her hands on her teardrop hips. Caroline hears the front door open as Susan moves along the house and watches through the back window, maybe to make sure he doesn't steal anything. The front door closes, and when Jack's truck starts, with a choke and a shudder, Susan walks back and resumes her story.

"The night before the election, we finally had it out. We yelled and screamed about all the things we'd done to each other. We each blamed the other for every problem either of us ever had. Grudges from high school. My divorces. His general unhappiness and lost ambition." Susan stares off past the barn. "I was crying; he told me that he'd never loved me. And finally I said, 'Clark, if I'm such a horrible person, if you never loved me, then why did you marry me in the first place?' Do you know what he said?"

Caroline shakes her head slightly.

"He said that he needed a wife, that people wouldn't vote for a bachelor. He said that even in high school, he thought I looked like a politician's wife." She shrugs and meets Caroline's eyes. "So you want to know if I fucked someone else? Yeah. I fucked someone else."

"Who?"

Susan flinches. "It doesn't matter."

"It may be important."

"It's not." She measures Caroline again. "Clark knows I had an affair, but he doesn't know who. I don't want him to know. It doesn't matter now."

"Look," Caroline says. "I'm going to be straight with you, Ms. Diehl. But I'd appreciate it if you didn't say anything to anyone about this. We think Clark might've hurt someone. Maybe even killed someone."

"Clark?" She shakes her head. "No. No way." Then she narrows her eyes and stares at Caroline but doesn't really see her, as if thinking about it.

"So let's say he found out who you were with." Caroline lets it hang in the air. "I'm looking for anyone he might have had a grudge with."

"The only person I ever knew him to hold a grudge against was Tommy Kane."

Caroline writes the name down. "Who's he?"

"Guy from high school. I don't even know what it was about. One day they were best friends; next day they hated each other."

"So what about the man you-" She can't find the word. "Did Clark know him?"

"Yeah. He knew him." She gives it some thought. "Look, I really don't want him dragged into…"

"Hey, if it turns out the guy's alive, I won't tell Clark anything."

Susan stares off toward the barn for a long minute and Caroline stares patiently at her, waiting her out. "Ms. Diehl?"

"I don't… Richard Stanton," she says finally. "His name is Richard Stanton."

Caroline writes the name down. "He lives here?"

She shakes her head. "Seattle."

"Have you talked to him recently?"

"It's been more than a year."

"Phone number?"

"No idea." And she offers no more information, just stares at the ground.

"Anyone else you can think of that Clark might want to hurt?" Caroline stands to leave and Susan stands with her, frowning.

She shakes her head. "Why do you think he hurt someone?"

"It's just… a tip," Caroline lies. "There's probably nothing to it."

Just then something occurs to Susan. "You thought it was me." This strikes her as funny and then, apparently, sad. She reaches for the door and opens it, then leans against it and looks at Caroline. "Clark didn't do whatever it is you're investigating."

"How do you know that?" Caroline asks.

She looks at the floor and a trace of shame fills her eyes. "Because if Clark was capable of it – after what I did to him two years ago – he would've killed me."

2

He sleeps peacefully, slumped over the table in the interview room, his face pressed against the stacked legal pads. Caroline watches Clark Mason through the slim window of the door, wondering if she could pull the pads out without waking him. She can't imagine what could be on all those pieces of paper.

Evan's fax from the newspaper is on the machine. The cover page reiterates that he has better things to do on a Saturday than dig through old files, and that not only does this make them even for the favor she did him, but she is now in his debt. She throws the cover page away and flips through the first pages – which consist of filings with the state and federal election commissions. It includes a list of donations from people and companies, everything from the teachers union to a downtown restaurant to long lists of individual donors. She circles a few, but nothing clicks, although one couple – Michael and Dana Langford – is listed as having donated twenty thousand twice. She writes down their names. Evan has noted on the filings that Clark wouldn't have been required to file records of his own money spent on the campaign.

Also in the fax are news stories from the paper, beginning with the story when Tony Mason launched his candidacy ("A 34-year-old political novice has stepped to the front of a weak field of Democrats trying is a profile and Caroline skims it, sees that Mason grew up in the Valley, that he went to college in Seattle, got his law degree there, and (after a few years company, then landed at a big Seattle law firm, writing contracts and representing high-tech companies. He made a good deal of money. He never left his Spokane roots too far behind, though, and according to the story, he serves on the board of a Spokane computer company called Empire Games.

Clark's teachers expressed no doubt he would one day run for office. "I'm surprised it's taken Tony this long," his old chemistry teacher is quoted as having said. In the picture that accompanies the story, Clark has shorter hair and no eye patch. He must be wearing a glass eye. He is staring straight ahead – lizardlike, as Evan remembered. Susan, much more relaxed in front of the camera, is hanging on Clark's arm. They are in the living room of a big house. Caroline is surprised by the detachment in the story – it offers barely more than the list of contributors – and both the article and the picture seem to her a kind of flat data, devoid of insight. There is a quality to the newspaper stories that intimates that "Tony" Mason is of a certain type – the young, idealistic politician, born to run for something – but this seems overly simplistic, leaves her with no better picture of who he is. His only issue seems to be "getting the technology train to stop in Spokane." She notices that every person who talks about him calls him Tony, and she imagines Clark prepping his friends and acquaintances, instructing them on what to say when the reporters call.

There are small stories about the Democratic primary and about campaign appearances. One story examines "Tony Mason's surprising challenge" of Nethercutt, and reports that his constant hammering of the "technology gap" between Spokane and Seattle has helped him gain twelve points in the polls. Yet he's still ten behind. Even so, Caroline can imagine the momentum he must've felt, and can imagine Clark stepping up to spend more of his money, desperate to get closer.

Then, two weeks before the election, comes another big story, headlined ADS TAINT MASON AS OUTSIDER. The story details an advertising campaign "charging that Tony Mason's strings are being pulled by party insiders from the west side of the state." The story reports that Seattle is about 60 percent Democrat while Spokane is about 60 percent Republican, and quotes television ads in which a deep-voiced announcer reads, "Until a year ago, Clark Mason was a rich Seattle attorney. Do we really want a rich, liberal west-side lawyer representing eastern Washington in Congress? Do we trust Seattle to take care of Spokane?" Apparently the ads never mentioned George Nethercutt, and the Nethercutt campaign denied any involvement. The story lists the sponsors of the ad as a political action committee called "the Fair Election Fund," which came into existence only a few weeks before the ads ran and apparently never cared about the fairness of any other election. In papers filed with the state, the Fair Election Fund is listed as having only two officers. Neither was available to be quoted, and neither had anything to do with the Nethercutt campaign. The ads cost $120,000.

Caroline writes down the names of both officers of the Fair Election Fund: Louis Carver and Eli Boyle.

The last news story is from the day after the election. Mason got more votes than anyone predicted, but he was never really close. The story has him planning to stay in Spokane, and to practice law and work on the computer game company, of which he was part-owner. The story goes on to say that he gave an emotional speech to a small room of supporters, and that he broke down twice. "You can be blinded by the glare from your own dreams," he is quoted as saying.

She jots down the names of the people quoted in the stories, although she isn't looking forward to a repeat of the pointless interviews with Pete Decker and Susan Diehl. When she is done, Caroline puts the news stories and election filings in a drawer in her desk and stares across the Major Crimes office to the door of the interview room. She thinks of Clark Mason sleeping in there, and realizes that she's tired, too.

She pulls a phone book from a drawer in her desk and opens it to the K's. There are three Kanes, Thomas, two Kanes, Tom, and one Tommy Kane. She tries that one.

"Hello."

"Tommy Kane?"

"Yes."

"I'm calling about Clark Mason."

"Look," he says, "I told the person who called last time. I'm not donating money to his goddamn campaign. I didn't vote for him last time and I don't care if he's running for treasurer of hell. I'm not voting for him. You understand? Take me off whatever list you've got there and leave me the hell alone."

Caroline considers correcting him, but she has gotten all the information she needs: Tommy Kane is not dead, and she doesn't really want to get bogged down in some twenty-year-old feud. "I'm sorry," she says. "We won't call again."

She checks her notes from the interview with Susan Diehl and looks for the name of the man she had an affair with – Richard Stanton. She tries the Seattle directory and comes up with six of them.

She looks back across the office, to the interview room. This is crazy. Maybe Susan is right; Clark couldn't kill anyone. After a moment she grabs the extra sandwich she bought, stands and walks to the door, opens it, and steps lightly inside. Clark Mason is breathing deeply; Caroline remembers the last time she watched another person sleep, five months ago, before her boyfriend moved out.

Clark Mason gulps air and shifts a bit. Caroline stands still. When he's breathing regularly again she edges forward and looks down at the third legal pad, open beneath his face. His handwriting is careful and neat, but he is covering most of it and she can only make out bits and pieces. Words are crossed out, entire sentences. She tries to figure out what he's writing about but can only make out that there are people in a hotel room, Clark and someone named Dana.

He stirs just then and Caroline steps back. Clark sits up, yawns, and rubs his hair. "Sorry," he says. "I fell asleep."

"It's okay."

"What time is it?"

"Almost three."

He nods. "Saturday afternoon," he says, not exactly a question. He seems sluggish, slightly disoriented from his short, powerful nap. "I'm sorry."

She shrugs. "You can't quit now. I think you're close to the world record."

He rubs his temples and then looks down at the legal pad. "I can't tell if I was just dreaming or if I'm remembering because of the writing." He looks back at the pages he's written. "It doesn't seem real."

"What you did?" Caroline asks.

"Any of it."

"People always say that," she says. "You'd be amazed how many times I hear that. The first time someone fires a gun they always say it didn't seem real. Watching the person fall. The blood. None of it seems real."

"The blood," he says, as if in agreement.

She waits for him to say more, but he doesn't. He just looks at the sandwich in her hand. He seems groggy.

She slides the sandwich over in front of him. "You like turkey?"

"Mmm. Thanks."

She thinks about just dropping everything she knows on him: his ex-wife, Pete Decker, Tommy Kane, the election. Maybe it would shake loose his confession and get him to abandon this insanity. But she's not really sure what it adds up to. She'd rather wait until she knows more. She watches him unwrap the sandwich. The bottom piece of bread falls in his lap, smearing mayonnaise and diced lettuce all over his pants. It's strangely endearing, watching him try to clean up his pants.

"I shot a guy once," she says.

He looks up. "And you killed him?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"He was coming at me. I thought he had a knife."

"Did he?"

"No," she says. "It turned out he didn't."

"Oh." He looks down at his sandwich.

She waits, to see if her own confession brings out his. But he takes a bite of sandwich instead.

"The reason I bring it up is that I was just thinking about what you said, how the victim wasn't really important, that the action itself is the… what did you call it?"

"The ideal," he says.

"Yeah, yeah." She tries to remember what it was that she wanted to ask him, something about motivation and justification, but it slips away and all she can do is stare, trace him with her eyes, his sharp jawline, the tangle of dark hair, and the strap from his eye patch that drifts in and out of that hair like a boat swamped by waves. "What happened to your eye?"

He says, between bites of sandwich, "BB gun fight. When I was a kid."

She's disappointed, somehow. She'd imagined some great story, the horn of a bull in Pamplona, a spear in New Zealand, but that's the truth of a thing like this. Parents warn you about sticks and BB guns, and when a person loses an eye it's generally because of a stick or a BB gun. Things are entirely what they appear to be, and behind them-

"Can I see it?" she asks.

He hesitates and then lifts the patch. The eyelid leans heavily down on the socket, but she can't see anything else. He lets the patch fall back.

She watches him chew the sandwich and she feels tired all of a sudden, wonders if he'd mind if she laid her head down on the table and surrendered. The afternoon air is thick; it's difficult to hold her head up in it.

"The guy you shot?" he asks finally. "That's the only person you ever killed?"

"Yeah."

"But it's still with you? You still see it."

"Yes. But there are things I feel worse about." She pictures Rae-Lynn, the one she couldn't save, who spent her last six weeks fucking and doping and falling. Caroline bought Rae-Lynn a sandwich like this once; she can still see the tiny girl wolfing it down.

Clark nods. "There aren't even names for some of the crimes we commit."

It hits her like a kick to the side and she wonders for a moment if he can see right through her, to the bone. He is staring at her across the table, that one eye imploring. She would like to dismiss him, to let this whole thing go, pass it on to Sergeant Spivey to deal with Monday morning, and get some sleep. Sleep. But he says things like that and… Jesus. She puts her head down on the table and laughs bitterly.

"What's the matter?" he asks.

"I'm tired, Clark."

Then she feels his hand on the back of her neck, rubbing it, just underneath her hair. His hand is big and warm; the fingers find strands of tension in her neck and shoulders and he pushes, his hand constricting around the back of her neck. Caroline hears herself sigh. Then she pulls away, snaps upright, and stands.

He looks at his own hand, as if it has acted without his knowledge.

She's surprised to hear what's on her mind come out of her mouth. "Did you really kill someone, Clark?"

The question catches him. He looks down at the legal pads and runs his fingers along the pages, as if ordering the words, tidying them up. But sometimes there's nothing you can do. He gives up and his hands go back to his lap. He looks up at her and laughs. "If I hadn't, and if we had met some other way, do you think-?"

She sees the sandwich, the table, the legal pads, the pen, and his hands – a random collection, an idiot's still life.

"Yeah, probably," she says, without a trace of either flattery or flirtation. And when he doesn't say anything else, she turns and leaves.

3

Alone is easy on the weekends. Usually by this time on Saturday afternoons Caroline Mabry has forgotten that other people even exist, and has settled in front of the television or the computer screen, finally at ease with herself after a week of awkwardness at the office. And so it comes as something of a surprise to see all of these people out on a sunny Saturday, hurrying in and out of their cars, into restaurants and shops. Everything seems so compact and tied down for these people: skis racked on top of their cars, children strapped into safety seats in the back. They all seem to be going someplace, the same place – some active, lively, family place – where everything is buckled down and safe. Compared with these people she feels untethered, flapping all over the place as she wanders through downtown Spokane, the melting snow puddled up on the streets beneath her.

Clark Mason's apartment is in Browne's Addition, a 130-year-old neighborhood of decaying mansions and grand family homes, most of them converted into apartments. She parks in front of Clark's building, an old two-story square, split into four apartments. There are four mailboxes on the paint-chipped front porch; she reads that C. Mason lives in A, on the first floor. One of the other mailboxes is covered with skateboarding stickers and another belongs to a girl named Lisa Miller, who has dotted the i's in both her first and last names with crescent moons.

She peers through the window of Clark's apartment. There is no body. No blood. That's good. Or not. She recognizes the style of furniture as early college – ragged couch, bookshelves made from planks and cement blocks. There are books everywhere, and she feels a twinge, remembers his big hand on the back of her neck, and thinks, Great, I finally meet a guy who actually reads and he's either crazy or a murderer. Or both.

She walks around the side of the house and looks in the windows – a small bathroom with a soap-on-a-rope hanging from the shower, a bedroom with an open futon and a row of suits in a small closet – and then negotiates weeds and old lumber to make her way around to the back, where the porch is clear except for a bowl-shaped barbecue grill and a red picnic table. No blood, no feet sticking out of closets. If Clark Mason did kill someone, he didn't do it here.

When she comes back around to the front of the house, there is a man climbing the porch two steps at a time, an older man in slacks and a polo shirt, maybe sixty, dignified looking, with short gray hair and a day's gray beard. Caroline thinks about the skateboard stickers and the crescent moons and guesses the man isn't here to see those tenants. Sure enough, he walks to Clark's door and pounds on it. "Clark!" he yells. "You in there?"

The man turns around and sees her. He has sharp, washed-out blue eyes and that easy quality that attractive older men have. He also has the most drastically cleft chin that she has ever seen, like someone has taken one shot at splitting his head with a maul.

"Excuse me," she says. "Are you looking for Clark Mason?"

"Yes." The man eyes her suspiciously.

Caroline offers her badge. It takes a second to register with him, and when it does, he reaches out and grabs her forearm. "Oh, my God. Is he okay?"

"He's fine."

"Oh, good." He lets go of her arm. "He left a message on my machine yesterday. He sounded horrible. I was worried."

"Are you his father?"

"No." The man regains his dignified air. "I'm…" But he seems unable to tell her exactly what he is. "I was his campaign manager. Are you sure he's okay?"

"He's fine," Caroline says. "He's down at the station."

"Thank God," he says. "I've been calling him the last two days. Finally I just decided to drive over."

"Over?"

"From Seattle. I live in Seattle. Clark tried to reach me yesterday. He sounded so desperate. I was worried that… I don't know… he would commit suicide or something."

"Actually," Caroline says, "he says he killed someone."

The man's jaw drops.

"We found him in an abandoned building, and when we tried to ask him some questions he said he wanted to confess to a homicide."

"Who?"

"He won't say."

"No," he says. "That's not possible. Clark wouldn't hurt a flea."

Caroline extends her hand. "I'm Caroline Mabry. I'm a homicide detective."

"Richard Stanton."

It takes a moment for the name to register, for Caroline to remember Susan Diehl's reticence about the name of the man she was sleeping with when she and Clark were married. When Caroline had asked Susan if Clark knew the man, what had Susan said? Yeah. He knows him. Clark's campaign manager. That is cold.

"Can I talk to him?" Richard Stanton asks.

"He's down at the station, giving his statement. When he's finished, I'll let him know you asked about him."

"Look, there must be some mistake. It's inconceivable that Clark could hurt anyone, let alone kill someone."

"He said he was 'responsible for someone's death.'"

Stanton looks at the ground, concentrating, and then he slaps his head. "Oh, wait. I know what he's talking about. Jesus. That stupid, sweet kid."

Caroline waits.

"I'm sure it's not what you think."

She smiles. "How do you know what I think?"

"He's not a criminal."

"That may be," she says. "But if he is, and if you know something about it and you withhold information from me, then you might be in as much trouble as he is."

Stanton chews his lip, thinks about it. "Let me talk to him. I can straighten all this out in twenty minutes."

"Tell me what this is about and I'll let you talk to him."

They are at an impasse. He regards her, as if measuring her resolve. "I can't. I'm sorry." Stanton looks away. "Can you take him a note?"

"Sure," she says, and offers a page of her notebook and a pen. "Put your phone number on there too."

He writes something, tears the sheet out and folds it, gives it to her.

"I'll have him call as soon as he's finished with his statement."

"Thank you," he says.

"So what happened?" Caroline points to the small apartment. "Guy runs for Congress and ends up in a shithole like this?" She tries to sound conversational. "That's a little weird, isn't it? Did somebody steal all his money?"

But Richard Stanton is spooked and doesn't want to talk anymore. "Look, my loyalty lies with Clark. I don't want to say anything until I talk to him or to his lawyer."

"Sure," Caroline says. "I understand." But something about the word "loyalty" doesn't sit right with her. She says, "I talked to Susan."

He flinches and looks up at her. Caroline keeps her face still, inscrutable.

Stanton doesn't look away, gives her a practiced smile. "How is Susan?"

"She's great," Caroline says. "Frisky as a colt."

Finally, Stanton has to look down. Caroline waves the piece of paper with the note on it. "I'll make sure Clark gets this. I'm sure he'll appreciate your loyalty."

"Thank you," Stanton mumbles. He starts to leave, hesitates, then walks quickly toward a car parked across the street: a BMW 700 series. He presses the keyless entry and the door chimes for him. It strikes Caroline that the candidate's wife seems to be doing pretty well and the candidate's campaign manager seems be doing pretty well. But the candidate himself is living like a freshman. The BMW pulls away.

In her own car, she opens the note. "He was sick. Nothing you could have done," Stanton has written. "Call me. – Richard."

She wads up the note and throws it to the floorboard of her car. Then she pulls out her cell phone and calls the front desk. The sergeant says he just checked on the Loon in Interview Two. "He's still at it."

"Thanks. I'll be back in a little while."

"So what's this about?" the sergeant asks. "What's he writing in there?"

"My resignation," Caroline says.

She hangs up the call and is about to drive back to the cop shop when she looks up and sees the sun at the horizon, maybe twenty minutes from setting. She's been at work now for twenty-eight straight hours. She looks down at the phone in her hand and taps out a number that she knows by heart but hasn't dialed in months.

"Hey," she says when a man answers. "Is this a bad time?"

When he says it isn't, she feels herself slump forward. "Look," she says, "I really need to talk. Is there any way you could meet me for coffee?"

4

Dupree is waiting at the coffee shop, the same place she visited this morning. It feels like a week since she's been here, since she came downtown to see if Pete Decker was dead. The pierced girl is bringing Dupree a cup of coffee. She smiles when she sees Caroline: "Another chai?"

Alan Dupree stands up. He is wearing jeans and a T-shirt beneath a denim jacket. "Hey there." He's a little shorter than she is, and a lot balder. He has softened a bit around the middle since he took retirement from the police department six months ago. Even so, the blue eyes and the easy movement are the same as they've always been, the same as the day she met him thirteen years ago. And when he sits down she feels the old stuff, the sharp attraction in her throat, the desire to forget things she knows to be true.

She clears her throat. "Thanks for coming."

"My pleasure. You saved me from pinochle with the in-laws."

"How's Debbie?" Caroline asks. Dupree and his wife split up for a short time last year, just before Alan retired, and Caroline imagines their resuscitated marriage as tentative in some way, incomplete. Or maybe that's just what she likes to imagine.

"She's good. We're doing fine. She likes me better retired."

"And the kids?"

"They like me too. Staci asked me today what boys use their wieners for."

"Yeah, I've been wondering that myself."

"I told her nobody knows for sure."

"And how's the dark side?" Caroline asks. Since retiring, Dupree has worked as an investigator for a couple of defense lawyers, applying the same knowledge and energy to freeing bad guys that he once used to catch them.

"Great," he says. "The evil one gives great bennies."

Caroline has known other cops who retired and went to work immediately for defense lawyers, splitting from themselves, revolting against the framework that held them in place. She thinks about her own recent crisis and wonders if she could ever work for the other side like that. She doesn't think so.

"I don't think you called me down here to ask what boys do with their wieners."

"Actually…" Caroline tries to smile at his joke, but her eyes are drawn down to the table and her cup of tea.

Dupree reaches out and squeezes her hand. "Are you okay?"

"I don't know," she says. "There's this…" And she starts to call it a case, but she catches herself and suddenly it's all so ridiculous, so unlikely, she has the urge to simply drop it, go home and forget the whole thing. Perhaps she's known all along she was being obsessive and irrational, but it seemed harmless until now, when she can imagine the look of concern on Dupree's face.

"Tell me," he says.

And though she doesn't want to, she's too tired to not talk. She starts slowly, Friday at nine, and she can hear herself pronouncing the right words – Davenport, eye patch, homicide, confession, legal pads, twenty-one hours – but she can tell by the look on Dupree's face that the story is not translating, that he's not getting it – why she'd spend the whole weekend running down the people this guy knows, making sure they're still alive (she thinks it must sound like a normal murder investigation in reverse, starting with the killer and looking for the body). "I know it sounds crazy, Alan, but you can see how I got caught up in this, right?"

He doesn't say anything.

"You think I'm losing it," she says.

"When was the last time you slept, Caroline?"

"I know what you're thinking-"

"When?"

"Night before last."

"Two days without sleep. Are you drinking? Taking something?"

"No." She laughs, or makes that sound anyway; it feels like a cramp in her chest.

"You call Spivey at some point during all of this?"

"Yes," she says. "He told me he wouldn't authorize overtime."

"So you're not even getting paid for your breakdown," Dupree says. "Nice."

She laughs in spite of herself. "Look, this guy did something, Alan. I can feel it."

He is a believer in intuition too, and for the first time, he seems to consider her seriously. Or maybe he's just being nice. "You check girlfriends? Wife?"

"Ex-wife," she says.

"She alive?"

"Oh yeah. In fact, when I saw her, she was full of spunk."

"Who's with the lunatic now?"

"Nobody."

"You left him down there?"

"I can't charge him with anything. But he isn't going anywhere. I took his shoes and his belt."

Dupree looks confused. "He a suicide?"

"Probably not. I just knew he wouldn't go anywhere without his shoes."

For the first time Dupree smiles, and gets that look of pride, the one that used to sustain her. "Look, just send the guy home, Caroline. Before it gets any weirder. Tell Spivey to pick him up Monday and they can start over."

"Okay," she says, to placate him, to drop the subject. "You're right."

He takes a drink of his coffee. "You knew I was going to say that. You brought me down here to ask me something you already knew the answer to?"

"No." The breath catches in her throat.

Dupree just watches her.

"Look," Caroline says. "How many confessions have you heard? A thousand? We arrest a guy inside a house and he confesses to breaking in. Or he confesses that he killed the girl whose blood he happens to be wearing. We can see that. We call it a confession when some asshole describes for us the world we can see with our own fuckin' eyes.

"But this guy today… I mean, did it ever occur to you that there is another kind of confession, maybe a more important kind?

"What I'm trying to say is-" She's frustrated by her inability to communicate to him. "Maybe there's a whole other world, Alan. And maybe it's made up of all the intentions and the things we don't do, the things we don't say. The things we want. Maybe there's a place where all of our ideas go, our desires, and it doesn't matter whether we acted on them or not, in this other world they still have… power."

And finally she looks up at him and she can see that he wants to know, but he can't possibly. How can he when she doesn't even know.

"God, you need to get some sleep," he says quietly.

"Maybe there aren't names for the crimes we commit."

"What the hell does that mean, Caroline?"

"I… I don't know." She closes her eyes and thinks about Clark Mason and the way he uses that word "confession," the purity and freedom of it, the way he seemed to just cut loose, to talk – or to write, actually. "I wanted you and Debbie to split up," she blurts. "I never told you that. I never acted on it. But it's what I wanted."

"Oh, come on, Caroline," Dupree says. "That had nothing to do with it. You can't take responsibility for what happens to other people."

"Did you think when you left Debbie that we would get together?"

His answer catches in his throat. "That wasn't why-"

"Did you think we would get together?"

He looks down at his coffee.

"Then don't tell me it didn't have anything to do with it." She feels herself getting wound up. "Up here, in the world, we collect fingerprints and we make eye contact and we measure blood spatters and interview people who lie to us and we pretend like we don't want each other and that what we're doing has meaning. But what the fuck are we doing? You're with your wife. I'm alone. The dead stay dead. We bag 'em and take 'em away and clean up their blood and so what? We save some girl's life, and we're so busy patting ourselves on the back, we don't even notice that she's been dying since she was twelve. We just move the shit around up here, Alan. We don't change anything. We don't save anyone."

"Who told you we're supposed to save people?"

"Then what?" She cranes her neck.

"We make sure the other guys don't get away with it."

Caroline wants to sleep or to cry, she can't tell which. She looks past Dupree, out the front window of the coffee shop.

"You're tired, Caroline. That's all. You're a little burned out, and you're letting some nutcase get inside your head."

She's ignoring him now, staring out the window and across the street.

"You need to send this guy home. You need to get some sleep. You need-"

Caroline stands and begins walking slowly across the coffee shop.

"Where are you going?" Dupree asks.

She walks to the window and looks out. Across the street, behind the row of parked cars, she can see Pete Decker, wearing jeans and a T-shirt. He is yanking on something – the hair of the young girl who answered the door to Pete's apartment. Pete is dragging her by the hair across the sidewalk, toward the door of the apartment building. Two of the boys who were up in Pete's apartment earlier stand patiently on the sidewalk holding big stereo speakers and watching Pete pull the girl.

Caroline walks out the coffee shop door and begins to cross the street.

The girl says nothing as Pete drags her by the hair. Her face has the placid surface of the recently and frequently stoned. In fact, she doesn't resist at all until they reach the doorway, at which point she spreads her arms and calmly gets hold of the door frame. For a moment, Pete can't get her inside. He flicks at her face with the back of his hand and the girl crumples, and Pete gathers himself to finish dragging her inside when he looks up and sees Caroline striding across the street.

"Oh, hey," he says, and lets go of the girl. She slumps in the doorway.

Caroline reaches the curb without slowing. Pete steps out of the doorway and begins to sprint down the sidewalk, but she has the angle. She gets her arms around his waist and is dragged a few steps as Pete tries to run. He smells like cat piss and onions. He twists and punches at her the way he punched the girl; Caroline feels a weak blow glance off her head, and she slides off his waist and down his legs. He tries to run again, but she's got his ankles and Pete Decker crashes down on the sidewalk. He scurries a few feet with her holding his ankles before she can pull herself up and jump onto his back and crawl up, driving the ball of her kneecap between his shoulder blades. The air goes out of him, but he keeps trying to crawl forward. She grabs the scruff of his hair and pushes his face into the sidewalk. Pete continues to struggle, flailing with his arms and legs. Caroline wonders what the hell is taking Dupree so long.

And it's not until she gets one of his wrists and cranks it, and Pete finally gives up and slumps down on the sidewalk, that she looks up and sees Dupree standing there like a civilian, like a fucking tourist next to the gawkers and the kids with the stolen stereo. They're all staring down at Pete Decker, whose face is jammed into the sidewalk and whose nose and lips are bleeding. And they all have the same look on their faces.

"Jesus, Caroline," Dupree says. "You need to get some sleep."

5

The cold returns at night in Spokane, on just about every night in the winter, even nights like this, when the sun has lied about early spring. At dusk the air loosens, the pooled snow begins to freeze, and the grass shines like it's been sheeted with glass.

Across the street from the coffee shop the patrol officers have arrived. They carry the stolen TV from Pete Decker's apartment, along with plastic baggies filled with pipes and baking soda and allergy medicine and batteries and enough cooked methamphetamine to keep Pete and his young friends stoned until the real spring comes. A handful of people watch from the street. Dupree stands among them self-consciously.

Pete sits quietly on the sidewalk, hands cuffed behind his back, trying to reach the dried blood on his nose with his shoulder. When he sees two cops carrying the stolen TV through the front door, Pete tries to get Caroline's attention. "I was gonna give that back just like you said. You didn't give me much time to finish your list."

The father of the girl has arrived – a big man in work boots – and Caroline sees the girl cower in the lobby of the apartment building. Caroline pulls the father aside and points at Pete. "He's facing assault charges for hitting your daughter," she says, and then shakes her head. "Make sure you keep her safe so she can testify. Okay?"

The father nods.

Caroline shakes her head. "What kind of asshole would hit a girl?"

The father looks down. "I don't know."

"Yeah," Caroline says. "Me neither."

The girl emerges from the building with a patrol cop, and the father opens his passenger door.

From the sidewalk, Pete cranes his neck and tries to laugh. "We was just screwin' around, huh, Amber? Tell the cops we was just screwin' around. Amber?"

Caroline walks over and crouches next to Pete so that her body is between him and the girl. Pete pulls back a bit, but when he realizes she's not going to hit him, he smiles. "You didn't give me very much time."

"No," Caroline says. She continues to fill out her report for the patrol cops.

"I could've used a little more time," Pete says.

"Sorry," she says, without looking up from her report.

Amber leaves with her father. Pete watches their car pull away.

The patrol cops come and stand Pete up. He rises easily; he's comfortable in custody, and the cuffs hang naturally on his wrists.

"Hey, I thought of something," Pete says.

"Yeah?" On the report, Caroline checks boxes for assault, possession of drugs, possession with intent to deliver, possession of stolen goods, and resisting arrest.

"Yeah," Pete says. "You asked if Clark ever had a beef with anyone. There was this one guy when we were kids."

"Tommy Kane?" Caroline asks without looking up.

"I don't know that guy. No, this guy was some kind of queer or something. He and Clark used to get into it at the bus stop. This kid named Eli Boyle."

Caroline ignores him.

"I used to have to break up their fights."

Two patrol cops grab Pete by his arms. "Yeah, I hope that helps you," he says. The patrol cops lead Pete away to the car. "Maybe helps me out too?" They push his head down, but he's done this often enough himself, and he slides easily into the backseat. "Maybe you tell my PO how I'm cooperating, okay? Okay?" The back passenger door closes and Caroline looks up to see Pete Decker settle back comfortably and nod to the cop in the front seat, as if he were Pete's driver. The car pulls away.

Dupree joins her on the sidewalk. "You goin' home now?"

"Yeah," she says. "I'll go down and get what the guy's written so far and tell him we'll pick it up on Monday."

"Good," Dupree says, and he looks down at his shoes. A decade ago, when she first started dreaming the old stuff – running away with him, a small town by a lake, kids – Alan's bald spot was the size of a nickel. Now it is a cantaloupe. She wonders if she has aged as obviously, or with her, if it's mostly inside, if there's a hollow spot, an emptiness that was a nickel and then a cantaloupe, and now is a beach ball.

He looks up from his shoes. "I was thinking about what you were saying. You know, about you and me? About that other world?"

"Forget it." Maybe that's what she's imagining, a place where all her daydreams went, and the people she cared about – all the good things that seemed to be in the future but were now beyond her. She reaches out and squeezes his arm. "I was just talking out of my ass, Alan. I'm just tired. Go home. See your family."

"Yeah, okay." He starts to go. "So are you seeing someone?"

"Mm-hmm," she says. "As a matter of fact, I am."

"That's great. What's his name?"

"Clark," she says.

"What's he do?"

"Lawyer."

Dupree smiles, a parent's reaction upon hearing that a misfit daughter has met a lawyer, a relief to see she's getting her life together. He seems genuinely happy for her. Or relieved that she's not his responsibility anymore.

"That's great, Caroline."

"Yeah. We've been seeing a lot of each other. We talk. It's good."

"Good," he says. He shuffles his feet once, reaches out and gives her a hug that she doesn't return, and starts for his truck. She watches him drive away.

Then she walks to her own car and drives back to the cop shop. She parks in the turnout, figuring she'll send the guy home and be back to her car in ten minutes or so. Inside the cave, the desk sergeant gives her a quick wave. "Good work down there. You can do the paper on Decker on Monday. You should go home. Get some rest."

Dupree has called.

"Yeah," she says. "I'm gonna do that. I just need to get something."

The thought of bed is overpowering. And yet, still, something is nagging at her, a name she keeps seeing and hearing. There is a point of fatigue that brings apathy, and if you can push beyond it, she thinks, another point that brings clarity.

She punches in the code to get into the hallway, and then uses her key card to get into the Major Crimes office. She looks in on Clark; he's still writing, of course, leaning back in his chair now, balancing the legal pad against the edge of the table. She goes to her desk, to straighten up before she kicks Clark out and goes home for what's left of the weekend. She takes the news stories and the list of contributors and is about to throw them in a desk drawer when clarity arrives.

She flips through the news stories until she finds it. The names of the two officers of the Fair Election Fund, the nonprofit PAC that laid out all that money on ads painting Clark Mason as a carpetbagger from Seattle. One of the officers is named Eli Boyle. She flips to the list of donors to Clark's campaign: five thousand dollars from Eli Boyle. So he's giving to the campaign and funding the ad campaign against it.

And what did Pete say: Some kid named Eli Boyle.

She goes to the reverse directory. Eli Boyle lives on Cliff Drive. She thinks of the grand old houses on Cliff Drive, overlooking downtown. The reverse directory also lists Eli Boyle's occupation. Founder, it reads, Empire Games.

That's listed, too, in the donations, for twenty thousand dollars and fifteen thousand dollars. And she finds Empire Games in her notes from the interview with Susan (… sold all the stock except Empire Games…) and in the news story (… he's on the board of directors of a Spokane high-tech company called Empire Games…). She looks up Empire Games in the reverse directory. Its address is the same as Eli Boyle's. She writes it on a sheet of notebook paper, tears it out, and stands. She walks across the room and opens the door to the interview room. "How we doing, champ?"

"Great," says Clark. "I'm almost done."

"Okay," Caroline says.

"What time is it?" he asks.

"Almost eight," she says.

He smiles, that easy smile, and she knows how Susan Diehl must've felt, seeing him after all those years. "I can't tell you how much this means to me," he says. "Your having faith in me like this."

"Okay," Caroline says.

Outside, she is surprised by how dark and cold it has gotten. She starts her car and drives across the river gorge and into downtown, curving along Riverside with a handful of other cars, and makes her way down wide streets built at the turn of the twentieth century for thick lanes of traffic that were long gone by the turn of the twenty-first. The buildings are stout and handsome – marble and brownstone, terra-cotta and brick. This city conceals more than some, its wealth and its power, its alliances and feuds, and even more, its grace. She catches a glimpse of the Davenport Hotel, lit up with construction lights. It's supposed to reopen later this summer. Spokane is old, and it is beautiful like old things are, lit from within by nostalgia and hard times. But so many windows are still dark, so many storefronts vacant. She envies the optimists here, but how can you ignore the taped and painted windows, the boarded doors? How can you not feel like a whole city of people waiting for it to finally be over, a whole city tending a parent's slow death?

She turns on Stevens and heads up the South Hill, once the concentrated prime real estate in Spokane. Cliff Drive is a short row of older houses at the first crest of the hill and Eli's house is at the far west edge, not one of the mansions but a grand home nonetheless, a nice, two-story Tudor style. The lights are off. She parks in front and steps out of her car. From here downtown appears bright and busy, and she can see across the river, across the valley, to the hills that used to frame the north side of the city, until streets and buildings sprawled over those and the next hills too, and the next, where the money has been moving, where Susan Diehl is sitting on white furniture in her own half-million-dollar house on her own ledge, drinking martinis with Mr. Diehl. It's a beautiful view, the lights like liquid coming down those ridges and the clouds set atop the valley, and she envies for a moment this Eli Boyle, with his high-tech money and his political donations and his Tudor house on this point, above all the shit.

Her feet clomp on the wooden porch. No one answers the doorbell. She presses a flashlight against the big picture window to cut the glare and peers inside. The living room is beautiful, dark wooded, with built-in hutches and cabinets, a fireplace, and a grand, curving staircase. But there is no furniture. She looks back to the front yard to see if she's missed a For Sale or a Sold sign, but she hasn't.

She walks along the wood porch to another window and peers in at a dining room, also empty. She walks all the way around the house, to the back, and looks in the kitchen. No appliances. Nothing. From the back porch she looks across the vast lawn. There is a garage, or a carriage house actually, on the side of the house. It is made of stone. River rock. A single set of dark wooden stairs winds its way up to the second floor. There is an apartment on top, or an office. These windows are dark too, but a dull blue light comes from one of the windows, like that of a computer screen.

The cold grass crunches under her feet. A hand-lettered sign on the carriage house reads EMPIRE INTERACTIVE. She shines her flashlight on the sign, then climbs the steps to the second floor and gets a slightly different view of downtown Spokane, with some perspective. From here, you can get it all in your field of vision. That's the thing. It really is a small city when you think about it, a city of coincidence and reoccurrence, of patterns and inescapable reputations. A man has dinner at a table next to his ex-wife in a restaurant he hasn't been to in two years and he shakes his head. "That's Spokane." A woman sees an old boyfriend picking out china with his new girlfriend at the Bon Marché. "That's just Spokane." But don't they also take some measure of security from that, too? Don't they all believe they know everyone here, that they are safe and gentle and good to one another? The devil you know.

She once went six months without a dead body.

But as she reaches the top step she recognizes that faint smell and it breaks her heart a little. Six months. And when she tries the doorknob to the apartment above the carriage house, it turns easily in her hand. Caroline Mabry takes a breath and pushes through the door.