Land Of The Blind

1

The dead guy is lying on his side, as if he's just fallen out of his chair. He is heavyset, with a round face and wire-frame glasses that are still hooked over one of his ears. His thinning red hair is furrowed with perfect comb lines, except around the ears and back, where it curls like a clown's hair. He is wearing blue jeans, the cuffs rolled up, and a gray T-shirt, and he is barefoot, his legs crossed at the ankle, one of his feet wedged into the carpet – toes down. The room is quiet, and lit only by the humming computer above the corpse, its screen saver alternating pictures of Napoleonic soldiers with idyllic sketches of forested lands and two scrolling messages in big bold letters: EMPIRE, MORE THAN A GAME and EMPIRE, MAKE YOUR OWN RULES. She breathes heavy, through her mouth, and the room seems to close around her and the body – a forced, sad intimacy.

Caroline reaches for the light switch but stops herself before disturbing any prints. She removes her flashlight from her belt and shines it down on the body and the carpet. It's a tight weave, so footprints are unlikely unless the killer – who is she kidding – unless Clark tramped through blood on his way out.

Blood. From the doorway she can see it spattered everywhere that her flashlight lands: on the computer keyboard, on the ceiling, on a coffee cup on the desk. The main current of blood is on the floor, and it's been here long enough to have its own history, of flow and desiccation, soaking outward from the body, flooding the forest of carpeting, and finally lapping onto the linoleum in the kitchen, where it dried brown and hard like taffy.

She pulls out her phone, punches in the number for the desk sergeant, but doesn't hit the call button. Not yet. The first rule of a crime scene: Don't do anything that might disrupt evidence. But she's also supposed to check for a pulse, and even though the smell and the gallon of spewed blood don't make that very likely, she can always say later that she wanted to make sure the stiff was… well, stiff.

So she puts her gloves on, slides out of her shoes, and steps carefully into the room, letting the door close behind her.

As she walks toward the dead guy, the beam from her flashlight moves across his body and gives the illusion that he is rolling over to face her. And even though she knows it's a trick of light, of perception, she looks away, raising the flashlight to take in the carriage house apartment. It is so sparsely decorated as to feel temporary. Half the apartment is made up of this small office, which is maybe twelve by twelve. A desk is pushed against one wall. The other walls are lined with bookshelves, and these are covered with fantasy and historical novels, stacks of computer magazines and binders with the word EMPIRE written on them. There's a file cabinet just to the left of the doorway, and she thumbs through some papers on top of it – financial documents, investment reports, quarterly statements. She finds a bottom line on one of them. Balance last period: $45,108.44. Balance this period: $2,062.05. There is also a computer-printed airline ticket for a flight Friday night: Spokane to Seattle, Seattle to Los Angeles, L.A. to Belize. The name on the ticket is Eli Boyle.

Just beyond the desk is the door to the kitchen. The stiff fell to his left, pitching slightly forward, and since Caroline doesn't want to step over the body, she shines the light over him, into the kitchen: boxes of sweetened cereal on the kitchen counter, a tower of dirty bowls in the sink. Next to the kitchen is a bedroom, with a futon and a television on the floor. Just to the left of that is a small bathroom.

Looking around the cozy apartment, Caroline forgets, sniffs once through her nose, and almost vomits. She covers her mouth and nose with one hand, and with the other rummages through her bag until she finds a stick of flavored lip balm. She applies it to her upper lip, and the cherry smell under her nose helps calm her stomach.

When the nausea has passed, she opens her eyes and looks down at the cell phone in her hand, the number for the desk sergeant still on the screen.

She looks around the legs of the desk and the chair but doesn't see the gun anywhere. One time in fifty the shooter will panic and drop the gun where he used it, but not this time. She looks down at the desk: two sips of coffee left in a cup, a brown apple core sitting on top of a book about Web design, sunglasses, another cup with pens and pencils in it. The chair has spun back and away from the desk, as if the stiff stood up too quickly. She tries to imagine how it happened:

He's sitting at the computer. Clark comes in and the stiff stands and turns.

No. He fell facing away from the door. He didn't turn. He was sitting, or standing, at the computer when he was shot. She shines the flashlight on the ceiling again, at a small hole in the drywall surrounded by spattered blood. Right above the desk. Why would he stay at his desk unless he knew the person coming in? Unless he was expecting him? Clark comes up behind the guy and -

But the angle is wrong. According to the blood and the wound, the angle of the shot is almost straight through the head, from the right side up. That means the killer had to come in the door, step to the right, and shoot up. It's more of a suicide angle.

Unless… Clark wants something from the guy at the computer. He nudges the guy at the desk, jams the gun into his cheek, demanding, pressing the barrel into the side of his face. Naturally, the stiff tilts his head to the left, away from the gun. Caroline draws a line with one hand and uses the other to simulate the gun, lining it up to match the chair and the hole in the ceiling. Or maybe the stiff reaches over and knocks the shooter's hand down and the gun points up and goes off. Yes, a struggle. The gun goes off accidentally.

Great. She's inventing scenarios in which Clark Mason is innocent.

Finally, she crouches next to the body.

In the past she's had to search for fatal wounds, but this one is so obvious as to be gaudy: she traces with her flashlight a stark, bone-and-blood gorge running from the man's teeth to the top of his head. The wound on-ramps through his cheek, leaving a ghastly sneer where it uncovers his upper molars, then tunnels behind his cheekbone, bursts forth and takes his right eye, then goes underground again, a thick, straight, dark bruise beneath the dull putty of his forehead until it exits – volcanic, meaty – at the seam of his thinning hairline.

She looks up and shakes her head in sympathy.

The bottom side of the entry wound has a dark burn ring, meaning the gun was right against his head when Clark pulled the trigger. If it wasn't an accident, it was vicious and angry, unimaginable.

The phone number for the desk sergeant is still on her phone.

"Damn," she says aloud. This is all going to get away from her the minute she makes the call. The process will take over. It always does. The place will crawl with cops. The lieutenant will want a briefing, the public information officer will want something for the vultures, the deputy ME will pronounce death (Aren't you being hasty? someone will joke), and the rubber-gloved evidence techs will come in like ants on a Popsicle, securing the crime scene, marking, collecting, and tagging evidence, dusting light switches and telephones and countertops and doorknobs, measuring indentations in the carpet, checking the driveway for tire tracks, the whole thing reduced to a series of photos and spatters and latent prints, too many people moving too fast, making misjudgments and bad decisions, disturbing Caroline's quiet measure of this thing.

Certainly the confession will become moot, a simple confirmation of what they already know, and not what Clark has promised. Meaning? Context? Forget it. There will only be one real question: Where's the gun? Motivation is a nice bow, but that's a package for someone else to wrap: reporters crafting stories, prosecutors choosing between first and second degree, judges reading mitigation reports. Cops don't care what a thing means. Or, more accurately, they don't believe it. They know there's only one reason this shit happens: somebody wanted. Sex, money, revenge, drugs, what does it matter? It's all the same. The first crime is the wanting.

What did you want, Clark?

The courts will need those details. What you wanted (motive), when you wanted it (premeditation), and how you went about getting it (mitigating factors) can make the difference between twenty years and life. And if you wanted something too much and too soon or too often, or went about getting it the wrong way, they might even put you to death. In Washington State, they used to be thoughtful enough to give you a choice: needle, juice, or rope. Needle would be harsh, confining, strapped down like that, a mockery of what that gurney is usually used for, medicated to a darkness that must feel nothing like sleep. But no matter how bad the needle, it's better than the juice. The juice scares her. There is a picture they used to show tight-lipped suspects, a picture from the late fifties of a guy in Georgia whose chair misfired, sparked, and caught, a guy who didn't die until his nuts and armpits burst into flame and he burned from the inside out.

Even so, for Caroline, nothing would be worse than the rope. And not for the reasons that death penalty opponents go on about – the pain and inhumanity of having your neck snap that way, the indignity of shitting and pissing your last moments away. No, what gets her is the fall. She hates those dreams, the ones in which her feet scramble for ground and it's just not there. To have that be her last conscious thought, falling like that – Jesus. That would be unbearable.

What did you want, Clark?

She looks down once more at the phone in her hand. She goes through a mental list of all the rules she's broken this weekend, from the minute Spivey told her to go home. Where does it lead? Finally she raises her thumb and hits the call button.

The desk sergeant's voice shakes her from her tired stupor. "Spokane Police Department. Sergeant Kaye."

"Dennis. It's Caroline Mabry."

"I thought you were going home."

"Actually, I went to interview a potential witness first, and I, uh-" She looks down at the stiff. "I came across a DOA. Gunshot wound."

"No shit. Suicide?"

"Not unless he ate the gun after."

"Got you a homo-cide?"

"Looks like."

"Make and model?"

"White male. Approximately thirty-five to forty. Headshot."

"I'll get some units en route," he asks. "You want me to call Spivey?"

She shines her flashlight from the body to the chair and finally to the computer, where the screen saver has just shifted to a digital soldier holding out a sword, challenging her, preparing to run her through. The soldier fades, replaced by a drawing of pastureland, a rock fence, a flock of sheep, a castle in the distance, and the words EMPIRE: MORE THAN A GAME. Something about the screen saver sticks in her mind.

"Detective," Sergeant Kaye says, "did you want me to call Sergeant Spivey?"

"No," she says. "I already did." It is a big lie, in cahoots with so many smaller ones this weekend. Who knows how much time it will buy? But that's all she wants now, a little more time before this whole thing gets away from her, a little more time for Clark before all of this comes down around him. She bends in closer to the computer and reads the scrolling message of the screen saver: EMPIRE, MAKE YOUR OWN RULES.

At home, her screen saver alternates pictures of mountains from the Northwest. The mountains are relentless; they don't care whether she's composing a sonnet or a grocery list or a suicide note. After five minutes, the mountains rise and cover everything, and the words recede into the black.

"What about your guy in the interview room?" asks Sergeant Kaye. "Is he connected to the DOA? You want us to read him?"

And yet, she reminds herself, beneath the mountains nothing changes. The words are still there; all you have to do is touch a key and the screen comes alive.

"I don't know if he's connected," Caroline says, measuring her words, the lies coming easier now. "Put a guy on the door and I'll talk to him when I get back." She gives Sergeant Kaye the address and hangs up the call. Then she turns off her phone.

Caroline takes a breath, leans over the keyboard, and uses her flashlight to press the space bar. The screen saver disappears and up comes an e-mail program. There is an open message in the inbox from deadeye@empire.com.

Eli-

Don't do anything. I'm coming back there. Don't move. I need to talk to you.

I lied about everything. There is no more money. I'm sorry. For everything.

It's going to be okay.

Clark

Her head falls to her chest and the hope goes out of her. Why not just videotape himself? She's shocked at how badly she wants Clark not to have done this.

Of course there is another world. Just below this one. It is undisturbed. Perfect. Our intentions go there, and the things we can't have. Regrets. Promises. Wishes.

When we dream we are falling, this is where we go.

She leans forward and, with her flashlight, turns the computer screen off. The e-mail fades as the picture pulls in on itself, universe collapsing, and then black. Caroline stares, as if she can't believe she just did that. Okay, she thinks, now you've got some time.

She backs carefully to the door, looks once more at the room, perfect and undisturbed. She can already hear the first siren, still blocks away. She slides her shoes on, backs out the door, and pulls it closed behind her.

2

The dwarf listens intently, but with very little reaction, as Caroline explains that they haven't positively identified the body, but she has every reason to believe that Eli Boyle is lying dead in the small apartment above his garage.

"No shit," says Louis Carver. He shakes his head. "Wow. He actually did it."

Caroline tenses. She's said nothing about Clark Mason. "Who?"

"Eli. He used to talk about it all the time, in this totally detached way, like it was just the most normal thing. We'd be talking about investments or what kind of car to buy and he'd just blurt out, 'I could jump off a bridge.' Or 'What do you think of hanging?' Just out of the blue, like that."

"No," Caroline interrupts. "Eli didn't kill himself. Somebody shot him."

They are on the porch of Louis's house and he's standing in the doorway, holding the screen door open as if she's selling something he doesn't need. He falls back against the door frame. He is about four feet tall, bowlegged and thick through the chest and trunk. He wears khaki pants and a sweatshirt that reads, simply, COLLEGE. His features are pleasant, though slightly crowded. A spit of brown hair covers his forehead; he is graying at the temples. "Eli was murdered?" he asks.

"We think so."

"Who did it?"

"We don't know," Caroline says. It occurs to her that Louis Carver does not seem terribly upset that his old friend and business partner is dead.

She was feeling claustrophobic at Eli's carriage house apartment – watching the evidence techs start to dismantle the room – when she remembered Louis's name from the Fair Election Fund. She got his number from information, apologized for calling at ten o'clock, and asked if she could stop by to talk to him for a minute. She left Eli's house without telling anyone, turned her phone off, and drove here, to this tidy daylight rancher in the Shadle neighborhood, on a street of honest, working-family houses.

"Murdered. No shit," Louis says again.

A short, attractive woman – still, a foot taller than her husband, with ink-black hair – sticks her head around the corner of the doorway. She is wearing flannel pajamas and looks as if she just woke up. "Is everything okay?" Mrs. Carver asks.

"Eli Boyle is dead."

If Louis reacted inscrutably to the news, his wife's face registers outright disdain at hearing Eli's name. "Oh."

"He was murdered," Louis tells his wife.

"That's too bad," she says flatly. A baby begins crying behind her, lost and sleepy. She puts her hand on Louis's shoulder and turns around to go get the baby.

"Do you know if Eli had any family?" Caroline asks.

"No," Louis says. "Just his mom, and she died several years ago."

"Do you remember the last time you saw Eli?" she asks.

"Sure." He rubs his eyes. "Two years ago. November of 2000."

"Before or after the election?"

"After," Louis says, seeming surprised that she knows about the election. "You must've talked to Clark already."

"That's actually one thing I wanted to ask you about. How would you characterize the relationship between Clark Mason and Eli?"

"They're best friends. They-" Louis tries to read her face. "You think Clark had something to do with this? Clark Mason?" He covers his left eye. "One eye? Tall? Occasionally runs for Congress and gets his ass kicked? That Clark Mason?" Louis shakes his head violently. "No way. Clark wouldn't do that. He couldn't. The guy opens the window to let flies out of his house. He spent the last eight years baby-sitting Eli. What reason would he possibly have to kill him?"

Caroline climbs a step, bringing her closer and to eye level with Louis. "Your name was listed with Eli Boyle's as one of two officers in a political action group." She looks down at her notebook even though she knows the name. "The Fair Election Fund? You paid for the ads that called Clark Mason a carpetbagger?"

Louis comes all the way out now and lets the screen door close behind him. "That was a long time ago and we all-" His face is red and his eyes narrow. "Look, I didn't even know…" He lowers his voice. "I just signed where Eli pointed. We had given so much to Clark's campaign that I just assumed we were starting a fund to help him. When I saw in the paper what it was, I was furious. I was a hell of a lot angrier than Clark, if that tells you anything. I sure as shit wouldn't have forgiven Eli for that. But there was Clark, a week later, telling me he couldn't have won anyway. He was actually trying to get me to forgive Eli. He went on about how Eli took all this punishment when they were kids. What a hard childhood Eli had. Finally, I couldn't listen anymore. I said, 'Clark, you're talking to a fucking dwarf here. I'm probably gonna need more than a tough childhood.'"

"And you left Empire right after that?" Caroline asks.

He nods. "Two weeks later. Sold my stock back to Eli at the option price. Walked out the door with about eighty grand and never looked back. If I'd sold a year earlier, before the crash, I could've gotten probably ten times that."

"How many partners were there?" she asks.

"Four minority partners: myself and Clark, Bryan, who was our tech guy, and Michael Langford, this investment and finance guy from the Bay Area. We each had five percent of the shares, and since Bryan and I worked there, we also got salaries. Twenty-nine percent was divided among the investors that Michael brought in. Eli retained the other fifty-one percent. That was Clark's doing, too. Eli was terrified that he was going to lose control of the game, so Clark set it up so that Eli's share of the company could never drop below fifty-one unless Eli sold his stock, which of course he never did."

"So you left Empire because of the Fair Election Fund?"

Louis looks past her. "And I had some real problems with the way Eli ran things." He seems wary of saying more.

"Look," Caroline says, "I'm just trying to figure out who killed your friend. I don't care about anything else. So tell me, why did you leave Empire?"

"Well, for starters, there was no Empire. Not the way we were selling it. Not like it was supposed to be." He leans back and searches for the words. "After we got the money everything was different. We got an office, hired illustrators and writers and coders. Every six months, we'd put on a show for the investors, tell them what they wanted to hear, let them see whatever real progress we'd made. Then we'd fake the rest. They want the game on CD-ROM? We put the preview on CD-ROM. They want it on the Internet? We put the preview on a Web site. They want streaming video, multitexturing, 3-D graphics, photorealistic rendering? Fine. As soon as we finished a presentation, we'd go back to work on the next presentation.

"But the game never played. It didn't work. We kept putting options on the car and hoping the investors wouldn't realize there was no engine. We spent all our time making presentations for the venture capital people, and in the end that's all we produced: presentations. You know the key to getting rich back then?"

Caroline shakes her head no.

"Never finish. Always be six months from shipping. That's when you have the most potential, when you haven't messed up yet. Every year I kept thinking they were going to pull the plug when they realized we didn't have a game, and every year some new idiot stepped forward with another million.

"Meantime, Eli was getting this reputation as a genius, going on and on about the realms and the levels of being, about how people wouldn't play Empire, they would live it. He sounded like some kind of guru. And the game was like a ghost, a rumor. You'd see it referred to in Red Herring and Wired and The Industry Standard, a sentence here or there- 'sources say that when Empire is ready, it will change the entire perception of gaming,' that kind of shit. All the insiders knew about it. Once I read that some company was working on 'an Empire-style interactive game.'" He laughs.

"Eli was so secretive and controlling, that just fed the whole thing, made it seem that much more mysterious and cutting edge. Because the game never appeared, I think it actually got better and better in people's minds. Like a striptease. You show people a glimpse and they put the rest together in their minds. By '98, everyone wanted to license our game, or buy us outright: Microsoft, Sega, Nintendo."

"But you didn't sell?"

"Eli wouldn't even consider it – maybe because he knew there was nothing to sell. And he wouldn't go public, which we needed to do if we were ever going to raise enough capital to really develop the game. And every time he said no, it seemed to increase the demand and the interest by VC investors."

"What did Clark think of all of this?"

"The rest of us wanted to sell – Bryan, me, Michael especially. It drove Michael crazy, especially when Eli started acting so paranoid and insecure. Michael even suggested we have Eli committed at one point. But Clark never wavered in his support for Eli. He was going back and forth between here and Seattle and California, doing legal work for other start-ups, doing real well for himself. But no matter how much money he made, he always came back here and took care of Eli.

"They were like brothers. It was Eli who talked Clark into running for Congress. Clark said that maybe he should go for a smaller office first – city council or state legislator – but Eli told him to go for the whole thing. Paid for half his campaign."

Caroline stares at her notes. Something is missing. "So if it was Eli's idea and he was financing the campaign, why spend the money trying to defeat him?"

"I don't know," Louis says carefully. "I never talked directly to Eli about it."

"But you have an idea?" Caroline asks.

Louis rubs his bottom lip. "At the end of '99 everything was going great. We were making progress on the game. I was even starting to think we might actually have it up and running by the following year. We had offices and a warehouse, fifteen people working for us. It was a year before the election, and Clark went back to Seattle to raise money for his campaign. When he came back he brought that woman with him, and that's when everything seemed to change."

"Susan."

"We went to high school with her – although she'd probably deny it. Clark was completely different after they got married. All of a sudden he's hanging around at the Manito Country Club, acting like one of them. Part of it was the campaign – Clark needed the support of those people, I guess. But to Eli, it was a betrayal. Pure and simple. And if there was one thing that Eli couldn't stand, it was disloyalty. He was always sort of distrustful, but he was getting paranoid. After a while, he even accused me of working with Michael behind his back, trying to sell Empire out from under him."

Before Louis can finish, his wife shows up at the door with a round, red-faced baby boy, maybe three months old. "It's cold, Lou. Why don't you come inside?"

"We're almost finished," Caroline says.

Beaming, Louis opens the door and takes the baby from his wife.

"Oh, Louis," says his wife. "I don't think the detective came here to look at babies." Her hand rests on Louis's shoulder.

"Eighty-fifth percentile," Louis says proudly. The baby pulls his fist to his mouth and starts sucking, and Louis hands him back through the doorway.

When his wife and baby are gone, Louis turns back to Caroline. "That's the other reason I left, right there. I met Ginger about the same time Clark got married. It made Eli crazy. He said I was abandoning him. He had this investigator that he hired every once in a while, and he had the guy follow Ginger because he was convinced she was a plant hired by another game company to steal our secrets. I just laughed. 'Secrets, Eli? What secrets? We don't even have a game.'

"You know what he said? He said, 'Come on, Louis. Why else would she sleep with you? Don't you think she'd rather fuck a normal-size guy?' This was right around the time he spent all that money to defeat Clark. I'd finally had enough of his paranoia and viciousness. So I left. Took a bath on my shares and walked away."

Louis chews on his lip. "There was a time when I would have told you that Eli Boyle was my best friend, when I would've done anything for him. But a few minutes ago… when you told me that he was dead… to be honest? I didn't feel a thing."

"But you don't know any reason why Clark would kill him?"

"Absolutely not."

"Well," she says, "someone had a reason. Did he have enemies, anyone who might have wanted him dead?"

"You could start with about two dozen investors," Louis says. "There's me. Bryan, our old tech guy – Eli drove him out. Michael, the money guy."

Then something occurs to Louis. "You said enemies? That's funny. I only heard Eli use that word once to describe someone. It was 1998, I think. Eli was in his office, reading the paper, this big grin on his face. I asked what was up, and he showed me this little newspaper story about a guy arrested with a bunch of cocaine in his car. Eli said he'd had the investigator find the guy. I said that was quite a coincidence, and Eli gave me the strangest look. Really creepy. You know? Like it was no coincidence.

"'See this?' Eli said. 'This is what I do to my enemies. Remember that.'"

"What did he mean?"

"I wasn't sure I wanted to know."

"Did you know the guy?"

"Oh, sure," says Louis. "We went to high school with him. Mean, wiry asshole, used to terrorize Eli at the bus stop."

3

Pete Decker scowls when he comes into the county jail interview room and sees who has interrupted his sleep. Scraggly haired and yawning, in the jeans and T-shirt that he was wearing this afternoon when Caroline tackled him on the sidewalk, Pete turns back to the guard.

"What'd they do, assign me my own cop?" he asks. Then he turns to Caroline. "You ain't done enough for me today?"

She had a hell of a time convincing the jail commander to let her talk to an inmate late Saturday night, but Caroline finally persuaded him that Pete had vital information in a homicide investigation and that she didn't have time to go through normal channels.

Her cell phone vibrates. She looks down. Spivey. He must've finally been called out to Eli Boyle's house. It won't be long now. Caroline reaches down and turns off her phone.

"I just need to ask you a couple of questions," she tells Pete.

He crosses his arms. "I don't like when you ask me questions."

"You mentioned someone, a guy that Clark used to fight at the bus stop when you were kids."

"Yeah." Pete finally sits down.

"Eli Boyle."

"Yeah, that's him. Weird fuckin' kid."

"When did you see him last?"

Pete shrugs. "I don't know. Twenty years? About the same time I saw Clark the last time." He gestures toward the jail guard standing at the door behind him. "I don't bump into too many people from the old neighborhood."

"Uh-huh." She looks down at her notes from the interview with Louis Carver. "Do you remember anything about your arrest in '98?"

"Did three and some at Walla Walla for that shit. 'Course I remember."

"In the arrest report, you said that you found five hundred grams of cocaine outside your apartment."

He shrugs and tries to smile. "Yeah. That's a good one to try in court, huh? Fuck I was thinking? I found it! Stupid-ass motherfucker."

"So did you?"

"Did I what?"

"Find a half-kilo of cocaine outside your apartment?"

He stares at her and his eyes narrow, as if he's trying to figure her angle. "What the fuck is this-"

"Look, I'm just asking a question."

"Bullshit."

"You don't want to tell me what happened in '98?"

"You're fuckin' with me."

"I'm not."

"You won't believe me."

"I might."

"Okay. You want to know?" He chews his bottom lip. "I'd been out two months, but I was straight. The one good thing about state time is you can get off the shit, you know? You probably don't believe me, but I was pissin' clean those two months."

He looks down at a crudely drawn tattoo on his arm, as if it would finish the story for him. "Had a car, a little apartment downtown, a job washing dishes. Most times that shit don't work for me – goin' straight. It's boring. But Walla Walla changed everything. I hated that place so much, I'd have washed every fuckin' dish in the world to stay out.

"Then one afternoon, I come out of my apartment to go to work, and there's a car parked next to mine. Brand-new fuckin' Mercedes-Benz. Beautiful car. Charcoal-colored ragtop. I mean… we didn't get us a lot of Benzes parked outside my building. Nobody's around and the top and windows are down. No other cars in the alley. So I looked in. I mean, how could I not? Be like some chick sitting topless on your sidewalk, you know? You gotta look. Don't mean nothing. Just means you looked."

He wipes his brow at the memory.

"It was sitting right there in the driver's seat. Half a brick. I never had that much weight myself – not in coke – but I seen guys cut from packages like that. Shit. I don't know if the guy was coming back for it, if it just fell out, if it was a drop. I don't know shit except it's sitting there on the driver's seat, like everything I ever wanted in my life, like someone left it just for me. Like God or something just woke up that day said, 'You know what, Pete, ol' buddy, even assholes deserve a break sometimes.'

"I don't even remember grabbing it. Next thing I know, I'm driving away, checking my rearview mirror, that thing in my lap." He cradles his hands as if holding a baby. He smiles. "I made sure no one was behind me and then I cut a seam and did a line while I was waiting for a red light. Oh! Pure as a hug from your mama. Shit was amazing." He laughs and his eyes roll back. "Best four minutes of my life."

"Four minutes?"

"That's about how long I drove before the cops swarmed me. Uniforms. Four rollers. I figured they was watchin' the Benz, but when I told 'em I found it in that car, they just laughed at me." He shakes his head. "They got a big kick out of that. 'He found it! Motherfucker found it!'

"I said, 'You mean you guys wasn't watchin' that Benz back there?' They just laughed at me. 'What Benz?' they said. I swore so much that's what happened, they drove me back down the alley to check it out. But the car was gone.

"In court, the cops said that some dude had called in, said he saw a guy in a gold Nova driving north on Division with a big bag of coke in his lap. Bang, strike three, judge gives me a fuckin' nickel. You know, I've had bad luck, but to have some fucker call in when I'm doing a line in my own car? That shit's unfair."

Pete shrugs, as if he's bored with his own story. "Yeah, yeah, so poor me, huh? What's this got to do with Eli Boyle?"

Caroline looks down at the Department of Motor Vehicles report for Eli Boyle that she just printed out. She slides it across the table.

Pete picks it up and reads it, his lips moving as he does.

She watches Pete's face as he reads that Eli Boyle has registered only one car in the last four years, a gunmetal gray 1998 Mercedes-Benz SL500 convertible. Pete looks up from the paper, his face blank, as if he can't comprehend this, as if he's never imagined that such patterns could be at play in his life, that he could be subject to such elaborate forces, the shadows, the world beneath this one.

Maybe that's what's going through his head, Caroline thinks, or maybe that's just me. Because all Pete says is, "Motherfucker."

"He hired an investigator to find you," Caroline says. "I guess he knew what time you went to work and he parked there, figuring you wouldn't be able to resist."

Pete shakes his head and reads the DMV report again. "Why?"

"I don't know. I was hoping you could tell me."

"I don't… I don't know," he says quietly. She watches the disbelief on his face become something else, sadness over those lost three years, maybe, or the wonder over whether he could've stayed clean. Then his face changes again, and this new emotion is unmistakable – cheeks reddening, eyes narrowing, lips closing in.

Caroline stands and motions to the guard. She takes the report from Pete. "Listen, I'll put in a word with the prosecutor," she says. "Tell him you helped me. Maybe they'll give you a break."

The guard comes in, but Pete is staring off, miles away.

"Oh, and if you're thinking about paying Eli a visit when you get out," Caroline says, "you're about three days too late."

4

She's lost Clark. Of all the terrible things that could happen now – and there are others – this is the most terrible; Caroline has no idea what to do next. She stands in the doorway of Interview Two and stares, unbelieving, at the empty chair. No legal pads. No pen. No coffee cup. It's as if he were never here. Now that she could finally sit across from Clark and say, Look, I know what happened, there is no Clark to sit across from.

She'd come back to drop the whole thing in his lap that way – Eli Boyle and Pete Decker and Louis Carver, all of it – to tell him that his time was up and his confession was over. Oh, it's over all right. She steps out into the hallway to look for the uniform that Kaye was supposed to post on the door, but there's no one. Fucking Kaye. She begins moving toward the front desk.

"Caroline!"

She turns. Spivey is at the other end of the hall, coming out of the bathroom, wearing jeans and a Mariners sweatshirt, with his cop haircut and that ridiculous caterpillar of a mustache on his thin upper lip. "Where the hell have you been? I've been trying to reach you."

"There was a guy in Interview Two-"

"Mason?"

"Yeah," Caroline says. "You know where he is?"

"I cut him loose."

"What?" She begins stalking toward Spivey. "When?"

"I don't know. Fifteen minutes ago. After I finished questioning him."

"You questioned him?"

Spivey laughs bitterly. "Yeah, that's what we do with witnesses. Remember? We don't throw them in a room and disappear for two days. You want to tell me-"

"You didn't charge him?"

"Who?"

"Mason."

"Charge him with what? Being a fucking nut job?"

"What about the body? Boyle?"

"What are you talking about, Caroline? The suicide you found?"

"Suicide? There was no gun."

"Sure there was. We found it in the lawn, right where Mason said he threw it. Said he freaked out, grabbed the gun, opened the door, and threw it across the lawn. Kept saying he was responsible. But don't worry. I took care of him. Put the fear of God into him, told him we could charge him with evidence tampering if he didn't put down his pen and cooperate."

She falls back against the wall. "Suicide?"

"Yeah, the vic had powder residue all over his fingers. His prints were all over the gun. From the angle, the ME said it had to be self-inflicted. Straight up through his noggin." Spivey puts his forefinger against his cheek, elbow tight against his side, to demonstrate. "We tested Mason's fingers just to be sure. No powder residue. Besides, he's got an alibi. Boyle's neighbors heard a gunshot at four P.M. Friday. Your boyfriend was on an airplane at four. It's all here." He waves a single sheet of paper.

Caroline grabs it and reads. Spivey has typed it up. Clark has signed it.

Statement of Clark A. Mason:

I certify that the following statement is truthful and complete. I arrived at Spokane International Airport at approximately 4:10 P.M. on February 10, 2002, after a personal trip to San Jose, California. Worried about the emotional state of my friend Eli Boyle, I proceeded immediately to his residence on Cliff Drive, whereupon I found Boyle dead, having shot himself in the head with a.38-caliber handgun. Running to the body, I picked up the gun, went outside, and threw it across the lawn. I was nervous and emotionally agitated and I left the scene without notifying authorities. Later, I was approached by Spokane police officers at the Davenport Hotel, and I agreed to tell them what happened.

Clark A. Mason

The statement falls to her side. It's not right.

"So what the hell got into you?" Spivey is not finished lecturing. "Letting that poor wack job sit in here sweating all weekend, convincing himself he's a murderer?"

Caroline ignores him. "The thing he was writing. His statement. Did you read it?"

"Oh, I looked at it – four notebooks of crazy shit about growing up with the dead guy and going to the prom. Listen, you are not a psychiatrist, Caroline, and no matter how much you want to help someone-"

"Where is it?"

"What?"

"The statement. Where is it?"

"He said he wanted you to have it. I put the whole thing on your desk."

Caroline turns away from Spivey, walks into the Major Crimes office, and switches on the light. She finds the four legal pads stacked neatly and begins flipping through the first one, looking for… what? She can feel adrenaline, and for a moment, she forgets that she hasn't slept for two days.

"Listen, Caroline," he says, "I'm serious about this. You really fucked up this weekend. I'm gonna have to write this up, you know."

She sets the first section down and starts flipping the pages of the second legal pad, Clark's handwriting loosening as he gets tired. The words pour over her like water; none of it sticks. Maybe Spivey's right; Clark is crazy.

"I don't know why you didn't just call me," Spivey says, "why you have to make everything so difficult all the time."

She sets the second legal pad down and starts skimming the third. More rambling. She's about to set it down when the last sentence catches her attention. "… the world would be a better and simpler place if Michael Langford were not in it"

"Where's the gun?" she asks without looking up.

"What?"

"The gun. You said you found the gun in the grass. Where is it?"

"On my desk. God damn it, Caroline-"

She brushes past him, reaches for a box of surgical gloves on the counter, and grabs one as she stomps past the cubicles to Spivey's glass-walled office.

He follows her in. "I'm not kidding here, Caroline! You really fucked up-"

She can take no more. "I fucked up?" She spins on her heel and up into his face. "Patrol found this guy on the twelfth floor of a vacant building. Staring out a window."

Spivey shrugs. "So?"

"So before you kicked him loose, did you consider why a depressed guy might go up to the twelfth floor of a vacant building by himself?"

Spivey takes a step back. "Oh."

She turns away, reaches into the plastic bag, and removes the black handgun, an evidence tag wrapped around the trigger guard. "Or did you ask yourself why, when Mason's friend is lying there dead, his first thought is to pick up the gun?" Caroline releases the pin and flips the gun open. She holds it up and stares at Spivey through the empty chambers. "Two," she says.

"What?"

She holds out the gun for him to see. "There are two empty chambers. One slug went through Boyle. So where's the other one?"

It is remarkably quiet in these offices at one-thirty on a Sunday morning. Caroline's eyes drift from Spivey to the gun and finally to the stack of legal pads, on top of which Clark has written, in big block letters, STATEMENT OF FACT.