The Best American Mystery Stories 2004

William J. Carroll, Jr. Height Advantage

From Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine

The thing on its side at the bottom of the wooden-walled hot tub was not human. Whoever it had been, it wasn’t human any longer. Just a brown, shriveled husk, lying in a foot of slimy-black water. Protein for the small animals and insects that had drawn me to look inside.

Nothing now to get upset about.

At least that’s what I was force-feeding my mind to consider as I lowered the folding lid and started breathing again.

Jesus, I thought. Poor Carole...

I felt dizzy with shock and moved away, back toward the bench, where I started to sit, but the odor now was suddenly overwhelming. So much so, I stumbled off the porch, into the cold rain, and walked away from the cabin.

Down to the dry creek where I sat on a large rock and for a moment just breathed.

Good God, I thought. Poor Carole!

After a while, though, the rain came harder, so I moved myself back up onto the covered porch, shivering, and sat on the steps. I still felt dazed and did a bit more deep-breathing, trying to focus on the rain and the thick woods that were all around me, trying to think of something other than what was lying dead only a few feet away. But it wasn’t easy.

After another few minutes, I did start to feel better, and thoughts about what to do next — like calling the police — began to come to me, but I stayed sitting a while longer. There was no hurry now.

Looking up through the trees toward the mountain, lost behind the clouds, brushing my hand at the flies which buzzed my head, wondering where Dirty Hairy had got to and just how “harmless” he really was.

Finally deciding to make the call, I reached into my pocket for my cell phone, but finding the photographs there I brought those out instead and looked them over for a moment.

The photographs I’d taken the day before. Photographs of Carole’s wonderful paintings, the artwork that had brought me there.

I’d first seen the paintings only the day before at Wellman’s Gallery — a tiny art dealership in Pike’s Place Market near the bay.

I was on leave at the time — two weeks worth taken for no reason but that I’d been feeling a little stale around the office, not myself for some reason, grouchy, maybe old. I was sick of the sight of my room at the BOQ. So I’d moved myself off-post.

Up to Seattle and a room in the condo of an out-of-town friend, where I’d been spending my leave thus far, doing not much at all — mostly walking here and there around town, spending a lot of time in coffee shops, reading some, taking pictures. Doing nothing, really — until yesterday.

I was a week into this hard way of life, having just stopped off at a nearby fish market where the prices were just short of astronomical, when I passed by Wellman’s, which hadn’t yet opened, peered inside, and saw the paintings.

Four of them. Large watercolors, prominently arranged. All of them were of various views of Mount Rainier. It was the style that caught my eye — something recognized that clicked in the back of my mind — and then as I stepped closer I saw the name of the artist on a placard in large black letters, CAROLE DORIN, and although the name didn’t match, right beside the placard was the framed photograph of a face that did.

“Carole Dragnich,” I said. “I’ll be damned.”

I stood there a few moments, then went to a phone booth, where a scan of the directory showed no Dorins nor Dragniches at all. Then I went to a bagel stand, grabbed a coffee, and waited for Wellman’s to open.

Remembering Carole Dragnich. Sergeant First Class, United States Army, Retired.

Short, red haired, feisty, and fun to be around. We’d been stationed and teamed together out of the same office at the 30 MI Detachment in Berlin, nearly five years earlier.

And it had been a good match, her and I, while it lasted.

At the time we’d been assigned to NATo’s Counter-Terrorist Division, which in our case meant surveillance of various individuals and groups with subversive or terrorist ties — and, on occasion, long dreary hours of watching streets, doors, and windows.

Spent, in my case, brooding or dozing, but in her case sketching, filling pad after pad with renditions of whatever crossed in front of her bright eyes.

Later finishing in watercolor some of those sketches — most of which I thought, even then, were really very good.

We were friends, though never really close, which was nothing very unusual for people like us. She’d opted for early retirement after her tour in Germany, and we’d lost touch — also nothing unusual.

But we’d been partners, and close enough to make the idea of seeing her again a fun idea, so I decided to try.

Wellman’s opened at nine A.M. I was in the door a minute after, giving the four paintings a close look-over — all bright and lively with color, all priced at fifteen thousand dollars.

Carole, I was thinking, was even better than I remembered.

A young woman clerk eventually approached and offered help.

“These are wonderful,” I said, nodding at the watercolors.

“They certainly are,” she agreed.

“I’d like to get in touch with the artist, but she’s not listed in the Seattle directory. I wonder if you’d know how I might find her.”

“Oh,” she said, “I couldn’t say, really.”

I smiled at her. “Who could?”

She smiled back. “Well the fact is, I’m not sure. Ms. Dorin’s husband is the one who placed these paintings with us, and we do have his number, but I’d feel funny about giving it out.”

“I see.”

“When Ms. Carter, the manager, comes in, she might be able to help.”

“When will Ms. Carter be in?”

“After lunch.”

I looked at my watch. It was 9:05.

“Maybe her agent could help you,” the clerk suggested.

“And her name?”

She excused herself and went away, returning shortly with a business card and saying, “I do know Carole Dorin lives in Washington.”

“Oh?”

“This isn’t her first showing,” she said. “She’s really very hot right at the moment.”

I looked at the card she’d handed me and saw that the office of Jess Collier, Artist Representative, was walking distance from where I was just that moment.

“Well,” I told her. “Thank you.”

“My pleasure,” she replied. “And, if you do find her, let her know she has a big fan here.”

I nodded and looked back at the paintings.

The clerk did too, saying, “I wish I had half the talent she does.”

“Who wouldn’t?” I agreed.

Jess Collier’s office on the thirty-second floor of a very upscale building on Fourth Ave. had a large, mostly empty outer office, carefully carpeted and furnished in gray-black tones, carefully muraled with obscure black-and-white photography, and carefully receptioned by a young, leggy platinum blonde dressed in white and seated at a curved, black-tinted, glass-topped desk.

She doubtfully asked if I had an appointment and seemed relieved to find out I hadn’t, then announced me on the intercom to her boss as if I’d been expected all along. After that she tentatively asked me to have a seat.

Which I took, though a few seconds later a tall woman in a severe black pants suit entered from a short hallway, looked at me, and said, “Mr....?”

“Virginiak,” I said, standing.

She looked expectant. “I’m Jess Collier.”

I gave her my hand to shake, which she did, briefly.

“And how can I help you?” she asked.

“Well,” I told her, “I’m looking for a friend of mine — a client of yours, I think — Carole Dorin?”

She hesitated briefly. “Really?”

“Yes, we were stationed together in Germany some years ago. Actually, I didn’t even know she lived in Washington until an art dealer told me, and I’d like to get in touch with her.”

She thought that over.

Collier was a good looking woman, tall with a long, straight body that her black suit emphasized. She wore burr-cut salt-and-pepper hair on an elegantly shaped head, and had a well-arranged, make-upless face, with a pair of deeply dark blue eyes that just then seemed wary of me.

I said, “If you’re being cautious, I do understand. I could leave my phone number and you could give it to Carole for me.”

Collier smiled slightly. “That’s not the problem,” she said wryly, waving a hand toward the hall behind her. “Please,” she said. “Coffee?”

I told her coffee would be good.

She led me down the short hall into her office, the sight of which once I’d entered made me stop dead in my tracks.

“Whoa,” I said with a laugh.

She saw my face and smiled.

This inner office, done up with huge mirrors and floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over downtown Seattle and most of the rest of the world, gave me the immediate impression of being airborne.

“You’re not going to be sick, are you?” she asked with a laugh. “It’s happened.”

“It’s just a little startling,” I told her,

Adding to the sense of openness, the room was sparingly furnished — a large glass table for a desk, a couple chrome-framed white leather chairs — and that was that.

“You’re bothered by heights?” she asked.

“A little,” I admitted.

She waved me to a chair, which I gratefully took.

“I love the sense of height,” she explained. “The cleanliness of being above everything.”

She could have it, I thought.

Collier took a thin cigar from a pack on her uncluttered desk, lit it, leaned against the edge, and looked at me. “Now, you say you’re a friend of Carole’s?”

“I am,” I told her, “though we haven’t been in touch for some time.”

The door behind me opened then, and I got my coffee in a small china cup on a tiny glass tray.

Collier watched the receptionist quietly leave as I sipped.

“Well,” Collier told me, “The problem is, I don’t know how to get in touch with Carole myself.”

“I see,” I said.

“And frankly,” she added, “I’m a bit concerned.”

I put my cup on the tiny tray, put the tray on her desk, and said, “Concerned?”

She frowned a little. “How well do you know Carole?”

“Well enough to like her. Why are you concerned?”

She sat back in her chair. “A few months ago, Carole gave up her apartment in Seattle and — well — disappeared. I was surprised she hadn’t contacted me because we’d become quite friendly over the past year since her divorce.”

“I didn’t even know she’d been married.”

“Yes,” she said, “for about a year before I met her, but she eventually saw her mistake and got out of it.”

I nodded.

She sighed. “A month ago, her ex-husband placed four watercolors at Wellman’s Gallery for sale on consignment. They comprise a project Carole called Rainier Summer.”

“I saw the exhibit at Wellman’s”

“Yes, and its clearly her best work,” she told me. “Carole and I had no written contract between us, and if she wanted to sell her work by the side of the road, it would be of no legal concern of mine, but my personal concern issues from the fact that it was her ex-husband who delivered the watercolors.”

“I see.”

“Carole’s divorce last year,” Collier continued, “was terribly bitter. At one point she was forced to get a restraining order against the man, so you can understand why I was surprised that she would have him deliver the watercolors.”

“But she kept his name?”

“For business reasons, purely. She started selling her work as Dorin, and kept it that way.”

“And where does he live?”

She frowned. “His name is Phil Dorin,” she said, as if the name pained her to utter. “He has a farm near Eatonville, I think.”

“That’s on the way to Rainier,” I pointed out. “The mountain was Carole’s subject.”

“I know. I called him, thinking — I don’t know — that she might be living there, but he said she wasn’t, and I don’t think, now, she would be living there really.”

“Did Dorin say he knew where Carole was living?”

“He said he didn’t, but I thought he was lying.” Her elegant head shook slightly. “He’s a very disagreeable man.”

“And you haven’t heard from her, since...?”

She frowned, then replied, “I haven’t seen or spoken with Carole since early August.”

“Three months.”

“It’s crossed my mind to call the police, but...”

“But?”

“It’s also crossed my mind that I might be over-dramatizing.” She shrugged slightly. “I tend to do that.”

“What’s that?”

She smiled. “I tend to think the worst. Oh...” She shook her head. “Carole is probably fine. Just happy as a clam, and hopefully at work.” She looked at me, as if to make her statement a question, but I didn’t know the answer.

I didn’t know what to think.

When I left her office a few minutes later, I still didn’t know.

Collier seemed like a grown-up, responsible type, and if she thought she was over-dramatizing her concern for Carole’s disappearance, who was I to disagree.

But along with my disappointment at not being able to see Carole again, I felt a bit unsettled. I would have liked knowing she was all right at least, but I had no idea how to find her.

That put my thinking in a circular pattern, so I decided on a drive down to Redondo to get in some stroll-and-think time walking along the shore, which has straightened out my thoughts in the past — but not today.

After an hour’s walk, I had decided only that I was hungry.

So I grabbed a sandwich at Salty’s, then sat a while out in the sun on a bench at the end of the pier.

I watched an old man at the rail fishing for flounder, watched tugs out in the sound ferrying cargo up from Tacoma, watched some gulls teasing a dog on the beach — landing and waiting for the dog to chase them off, then flapping their way down the beach, waiting for the dog to chase after them again.

Until around three o’clock, when I gave up thinking and drove back to Seattle.

At a stoplight, through some trees and off in the distance, I caught a brief glimpse of Rainier — a smudge of white on the blue horizon.

And that’s when I had the idea

A kind of cart-before-the-horse idea, but it was all I could think of, so I decided to go with it.

I went back to Wellman’s, where the same clerk let me take pictures of Carole’s paintings and even helped me arrange them so my shots were complete.

Afterwards, I dropped them off at an overnight photo lab near my apartment and went home. I put in some phone time with a friend who had access to things not easily accessed, learning that Carole wasn’t even unlisted in the state of Washington.

Phil Dorin was, however, though his phone had been disconnected. But I did get his address.

And then I did nothing, except sit around the apartment, watch the sunset off the rear balcony, and look at a little TV. I went to bed early, but I couldn’t sleep.

A small but persistent sense of anxiety — my unconscious working behind my back — having to do with Carole’s disappearance, naturally, but mixed up with a vague sense of obligation — something owed — kept sleep from me.

I ended up going out for a walk, and getting back to the apartment around two in the morning, where I finally managed maybe two hours’ sleep in the next six, rising around eight A.M.

Groggy, grouchy, but anxious to be on my way and glad of my big idea, which gave me, at least, some plan of action, I put myself in uniform — after a few days of civvies, I usually felt the need to be in uniform — and headed out.

I retrieved my pictures, then pointed my Bronco south and west, toward Eatonville, and made the small town around noon, under very dark, rain-heavy skies.

A coffee shop waitress gave me uncertain directions to the address I’d written down, but after backtracking a few miles and a few wrong turns, I eventually found the farm.

It was on about five acres of cleared land divided by an unpaved road that ran up a hill to where a tiny trailer was parked. Two larger buildings stood back from the trailer, and along with a tractor and two pickups — a rust-finished old Chevy and a newer Ford Ranger — there were the rusted remains littered here and there of other unidentifiable pieces of machinery. A few cattle stood chewing in the field to one side of the drive, and on the other, a dirty white horse was doing the same.

A large mailbox that dangled from a post at the edge of the road had the name DORIN on it, so I turned in. When I got about halfway up the hill, a man emerged from one of the larger buildings and looked me over as I parked, got out, and approached him.

“Mr. Dorin?”

“Uh-huh.”

“My name is Virginiak, and I’m looking for Carole, your ex-wife.”

“That right?” he said with little interest.

Dorin was a big man. Very big. Six-seven, maybe six-eight, three-hundredish, big-chested, with a ponderous beer gut that hung over the top of his dirty blue jeans.

“I was told you might know where I could find her.”

“Oh, yeah?” he replied with even less interest.

He had a big head, topped by sparse, curly brown hair, and his pug-nosed, thin-lipped, wind-burned face, with a couple of squinty, dark eyes peering at me, passed along an unfriendly message.

“Can’t help you,” he told me.

I nodded, but stayed put, watching him look me over, until he finally sneered, turned away, and walked toward the tractor.

I strolled behind him as he climbed onto a wheel, bent down over the engine, and began removing a fan-belt nut.

I said, “Her agent, Jess Collier, says she hasn’t been in touch with Carole for three months.”

“No kidding,” he said.

I watched him slowly work the nut loose, and when he’d finished, he looked at me and asked, “What’s Carole to you?”

“I’m a friend of hers,” I replied. “We were stationed in Germany together.”

He gave me a blank look. “Well, I can’t help you, you know,” he said. He started pulling at the old belt.

The dirty white horse had drifted nosily over to watch us.

“Last month,” I said, “you delivered some paintings of hers to Wellman’s Gallery in Seattle.”

He worked the belt free, tossed it away, and began fitting the new belt over the shafts’ wheels.

“Collier wonders how you came to have them,” I told him.

He snorted.

“She’s thought about notifying the police.”

“That bitch,” he muttered, struggling with the belt. “She never liked me.”

He got the new belt in place, then began replacing the wheel lock, giving me a tired look. “I got work to do,” he said with infinite weariness. “So, why don’t you take a hike?”

I stared at him.

“Okay?” he added.

I said, “How did you get those paintings, Phil?”

He sighed, shook his head, and finished screwing down the wheel lock. “Man don’t hear so good.”

“How did you get those paintings, Phil?”

He paused in his work and blinked at me. “You want trouble?”

I didn’t, but I could have handled some from him. I didn’t like the man. I didn’t say that, though. I just waited.

He stared at me a moment, then climbed up into the tractor saddle and started the engine. The horse, which had wandered close, now pranced quickly away.

I stood by the tractor.

Dorin ran the tractor a moment, then killed the engine and came down, looking at me and saying, “Still here?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. Instead he started up the hill toward the trailer. I followed him.

Halfway there, he looked back at me, grunted, then walked on. I kept pace. A few yards short of the trailer, he stopped, turned, and pointed the wrench he still held toward the highway.

“Get out!” he told me. “I want you off my property — now!”

I looked toward the highway, then back at him. “Where’s Carole?” I asked.

He blinked. I smiled at him.

“I said,” he huffed, with labored breath, “get off my property!”

I stood where I was, watching him.

He brought the wrench he was holding up to his chest and tapped himself gently, saying, “Or maybe you end up with a permanent disability.”

I kept smiling. “Knock it off, Phil.”

He blinked again. “Are you hard of hearing or something? I told you to get the hell off my property!”

I waited.

He raised the wrench slightly. “So help me...”

“That’s enough,” I said.

“I’m warning you...”

“Enough!”

But he drew the wrench back anyway, so I grabbed it out of his hand and pushed him hard away from me, then threw the tool — as violently as I could — against the wall of the trailer, where it slammed so heavily something inside crashed.

Dorin stepped back, looking wild eyed. A man his size wasn’t used to being physically challenged by another, and it amazed him.

“I said, that’s enough,” I reminded him.

“Who the hell do you think you are...”

“Shut up,” I told him, taking a step toward him.

His face had a lot of anger in it then, but all he did was breathe deep and scowl.

“Now,” I said. “I’ll ask you again...”

“I don’t know where the hell she is, okay?”

“So how did you come to have those paintings?”

“I took them as payment,” he snapped.

“Payment for what?”

He took a few more settling-down breaths. “Part of our divorce settlement, okay?”

I watched his eyes and knew he was lying. “When was this, Phil?”

“I don’t know,” he complained. “Around the first of the month, I think.”

“So, she came here to give you the paintings?”

“Right.”

“Even though she had to take a restraining order out on you last year?”

He snorted.

“Didn’t she?”

He flicked his hand as if to wave the past away. “That was different.”

“Was it?”

“She was giving me a hard time, all right?”

I waited.

“She wanted a divorce,” he told me. “So fine. The hell with her, but then she gets this wise-ass lawyer, wants me to sell the farm, give her half — and I said the hell with that.”

“And?”

He smiled a little evil at me. “So I went up to Seattle to see her. Straighten her out a little, that’s all.”

“How did you manage that?”

He shrugged.

“You bring a wrench with you?”

His smile got a bit more evil in it. “I didn’t need no wrench,” he told me. “I know how to straighten women out, they get out of line.” He tried looking cocky. “Wasn’t the first time,” he added.

Right, I thought.

“Know what I mean?”

I knew. I also knew that if I hit him, I’d hit him very hard, and despite his size and height advantage, I’d only have to hit him once, but I’d be wrong no matter how right it would feel.

So I satisfied myself with coming up close, looking up into his face, putting my finger on his chest, and saying, “She better be all right, Phil.”

He looked down at me and saw something in my face that kept him quiet.

“Understand me, Phil?”

I was done talking myself, so I just stood there looking at him a moment, wondering about people and the people they marry, then I turned away and walked back to my truck.

The nosy horse trotted up beside me as I neared the road, probably wanting to make friends, but he got a look at my face, saw the same thing in it that Dorin had seen, and changed his mind.

The drive to Ashford took me back through Eatonville, over an ever-narrowing stretch of highway that finally widened and became bordered by a handful of houses, a coffee shop, grocery store, and a touristy looking thing called the Ashford Trading Post — Hair Care, Guns and Ammo Boutique.

A sign in the window read CABINS TO LET; so I pulled into the drive, parked, got out, went to the door, and found it locked. I knocked, but there was no response.

I went back to my truck, dug out a road map, and with my pictures of Carole’s renditions of Rainier and with an eye up on the mountain itself, tried working out where Carole had to have been to see the view she’d rendered in paint.

If, of course, she’d worked that way at all. But this was my big idea after all, so I tried. Going by what I could see of the mountain from where I stood, I was, in fact, very close, but I needed help.

Which is when I noticed the man.

He was across the road from where I was standing. He’d suddenly appeared from out of the woods — a scraggly-bearded, wild-haired, dilapidated man in an army field jacket and baseball cap. He was looking at me from beside a tree.

“Hello,” I called out to him.

He stared suspiciously back at me.

“I’m a little lost,” I told him, starting across the road, which caused him to jerk suddenly backward, stumble, then fall hard into a ditch.

I hurried over to help him up, but as I approached he whirled around, still on the ground, and stared at me with wild fear in his eyes.

“Take it easy,” I said, holding up both hands. “I just wanted to ask...” But he’d scrambled backward, got to his feet, and ran back up into the woods, casting worried looks over his shoulder as if I might be after him.

Right, I thought.

I went back to my truck and the photographs — still needing help — just as a sky blue pickup skidded off the highway and into the driveway of the trading post.

A chunky young woman with punked-up red hair emerged, holding a two year old in one arm and a small rifle in the other. She had a big grin all over her face.

“Hi,” she said, coming up to me. “You looked lost.”

“Hi,” I said back. “I am.”

“Hi!” the toddler said.

“Dirty Hairy bother you?” the woman asked, pointing with her rifle in the direction the wild-haired man had fled.

“No,” I told her. “I seemed to bother him, though.”

She grinned again. “He’s just curious. Harmless enough,” she assured me. “How can I help you?”

“I’m looking for someone,” I explained. “A friend of mine, named Carole Dorin?”

She frowned and shook her head. “Sorry,” she told me.

“Sorry,” the child echoed.

“She may be using her maiden name — Dragnich?”

The woman’s frown became thoughtful. “Sounds vaguely familiar,” she told me. “She live around here?”

“Might have moved here in the past few months. I have no address for her, and she’s not listed in the phone book.”

She gave it another think-over, then shrugged and shook her head again. “We get a lot of folks here let their cabins. People come and go.”

I said, “My friend’s an artist, and she made these watercolors of Rainier.” I held up the photographs, which the two year old instantly grabbed. “I was wondering,” I went on as they both looked them over, “if you might know where that view of the mountain could be seen.”

“Brown Creek,” the woman said without hesitation. “Runs — or used to run — down below that clear-cut up there.” She pointed the rifle toward the mountain and a barren section of cleared woods. “Course the damn dam dried it up, but that’s the view from the creek, all right.”

“Damdam,” the toddler echoed.

“Damn dam?” I said.

She smiled. “Force of habit, calling it that.” She shifted the child around on her hip. “They dammed the creek up along Eatonville way for the farmers, but just about killed property values down here. Killed my business, anyway.” She shrugged and nodded her head at the picture the toddler was tasting. “Creek’s flowing in this picture, so it must’ve been done before damn dam went in, back the first of September.”

“How far does the creek run?”

“I can help you better than that,” the woman told me. “See that footbridge in the picture?”

“I see it.”

“That’s not far from here at all,” she said, pointing south along the highway. “There’s some cabins down along the edge, both sides. Figure you can ask after your friend there.”

“Okay.”

“There’s a road runs down that way, but you’d have to back-track about seven, eight miles, or you can just keep on the road you’re on a ways, turn left at the little park, and you’ll see that footbridge right there. You can hoof it.”

“Hooffit!” the toddler told me.

“Well,” I told them both, “thank you very much.”

“My pleasure.”

I put away my map and pictures and got inside the truck.

“Hey?” the woman said, leaning down into the window and handing me a business card. “If you need a place to stay the night, I got a great cabin with a view to die for — and a twenty percent discount for military.”

“Bye-Bye!” the child exclaimed.

I drove, as instructed, along the highway “a ways,” then turned left at a small open area with benches and tables onto a narrow dead-end road, until I came to the footbridge, where I parked and started walking. Before I got far, I looked at the dark sky, and trotted back for my raincoat, then started out again across the footbridge spanning the rocky creek bed. Looking further southward, I could judge almost precisely where Carole had to have stood to see that particular view of Rainier, towering over me just to the north. I was just on the other side of the bridge when it began to rain.

A hard, cold rain, and my raincoat offered little protection. It crossed my mind to head back and wait the weather out, but I had a small sense of urgency building inside — planted there, probably, by Collier and cultivated a little by Dorin — so I pushed on.

But as I pushed, I began to get a sense of being observed, and after I’d made a few turns along the road, I happened to glance back and saw a dark, shambling shape, which I took to be a man, dart across the road and disappear into the woods.

Curious Dirty Hairy, I thought.

And then, a bit further on, I caught another glimpse of him, watching me from some distance beside a tree, then pulling back out of sight when he saw me looking back at him.

Harmless Dirty Hairy, I thought.

I walked on through another section of the park to another paved road, then along it, past a few ugly looking trailers and several cabins, where I figured to ask after Carole, if I had had no luck on my own.

Then around a turn that angled close down to the dry creek, I did get lucky.

At least I found her mailbox, with the name DRAGNICH stenciled on the side, and through the rain and thick woods beyond it, I saw the cabin.

Which is when luck stopped.

I’ve always had a sense for things gone bad, and standing there in the rain, peering into the gloom, seeing the dark outline of the cabin through the pines, I knew nothing good was ahead. And when I checked inside the mailbox and found it stuffed with junk mail, a couple of bills, and two issues of American Artist, I didn’t feel any better.

I made my way down a narrow, unpaved driveway, then up to the covered front stair of the large cabin. Beside the stair in a covered box were a half dozen newspapers still rolled in plastic. When I knocked, despite the empty feel of the place, my sense deepened when there was no response.

I looked through a window and saw only the dim outlines of furniture. Then I tried the door, found it locked. I stepped back into the rain and wind and went around to the rear of the cabin. A deep covered porch faced the creek bed. There was a flimsy-looking bench at one end and a large wooden hot tub at the other.

The storm around me picking up steam, I stepped onto the porch, which was a mess of leaves and animal droppings, and looked into the cabin through a sliding-glass door. I saw only the same dim outlines, but I tried the door and was surprised to find it open.

I poked my head inside.

“Hello?” I called out. “Anyone here?!”

There was no answer but the drumming of the rain on the roof.

I stepped into the darkened cabin and took a dreaded breath. There was no scent of death in the air.

“Anyone home?” I shouted. “Hello!”

Still no reply.

The section of the cabin I was in was a living room area. On the left was a compact kitchen and dining room. I found a light switch, which produced no light, but drawing back the curtain over the sliding-glass door gave me enough light to move without knocking into things.

Which I probably would have done because of the mess.

Tables and chairs overturned; drawers pulled out and dumped of their contents; the floor carpeted with various household items, books, newspaper, and assorted junk as if a small tornado had spun into the house.

Damn, I thought, feeling an adrenaline charge.

I moved to the front of the cabin and found a bedroom in the same disordered state, and another room set up as a studio with an easel smashed in a corner amid the remains of various photographic equipment, canvases — some with the start of something on them, some without — crumpled, torn sketches, and photographs of landscapes, of people, of Carole.

I checked the bathroom and all closets, where I found clothes still hanging, and I checked the pantry, which was well stocked, if turned inside out.

But no Carole.

I headed back out onto the porch, wondering what my next move should be, when I caught some movement — peripherally, back up in the thick woods to my right. When I focused I saw Dirty Hairy sitting on the root base of a large tree, looking at me.

Which is when the wind suddenly calmed around me, and flies began buzzing my head, and I heard the clatter of tiny feet scuttling somewhere to my left.

That’s when I finally noticed the fresh wildflowers placed on the hot tub lid, and I smelled the smell I hated, and knew I’d found her.

And it was she — I knew — as soon as I raised the hot tub lid and saw the body. Enough was left of her face and hair to know, and because her wrists and ankles were taped together, I also knew my friend Carole Dragnich had been murdered.

I felt so suddenly tired I just sat there and watched the storm around me. The shock and lack of sleep the night before had combined to knock me out on my feet, so I just stayed put and watched the world grow dark.

Too tired to move. Too tired to think. Too tired to even grieve. I sat there like a uniformed zombie, doing nothing.

Until Dirty Hairy reappeared.

He wasn’t far away at all — down, just across the creek, semi-hunkering behind a large rock, peering at me, a bunch of wildflowers clutched in his hand.

Which got me off my feet quickly.

“Hey!” I called out to him, coming off the porch. “You!”

He hunkered down further as I trotted down to the creek, but then he stood back up and started running.

“Wait a damn minute!” I shouted.

But he didn’t, so I chased him.

In the rain, in the dark, across the rocky creek bed, then up into the woods.

“Wait, dammit!” I shouted. “Come back here!”

But he ran on, and he was fast and afraid and knew where he was going. After about ten minutes of stumbling around in thickening woods, I couldn’t see him anymore, so I gave it up.

Gave it up and went back to the cabin — soaked to the skin, tired, dirty, and miserable — and finally made the call.

Which brought the police — sheriff’s deputies from Eatonville at first, then state police investigators and a forensics crew, and finally the county sheriff himself, a morose but capable-seeming young man named Stender. I told the story of how I’d found Carole about a half dozen times to most of the officers — the rest of that day, and into the night and morning of the next day.

I told them about Carole’s paintings, told them about Jess Collier and her concerns, told them about Phil Dorin and his bad attitude, told them about Dirty Hairy and the wildflowers. Told them everything — over and over — there at the cabin and later, after poor Carole’s body had been removed, at the sheriff’s station in Eatonville.

Until, in the early hours of the next day, they decided to let me go.

By then, around four A.M., I was past exhaustion. I’d had two hours’ sleep in the past forty-eight, and I was running on fumes; so rather than drive all the way back to Seattle, I chanced driving to Ashford and the Ashford Trading Post.

It wasn’t open, naturally, but a small diner was, so I had breakfast and waited.

I dozed over coffee until six, when I called the number on the card that the woman with the red hair had given me. She answered — thank God — and an hour later rented me a cabin.

Small, one room, but with food in the fridge, and a comfortable bed, where I just managed undressing, before sleep overwhelmed me.

I slept the day through, dreamt of nothing, remembered waking up around two A.M. the next morning. I was stiff, sore, hungry enough to eat my shoes, and feeling like death, but after a long hot shower, a few aspirins, some coffee and muffins, I felt human again.

Moving myself and more coffee out onto the back porch, I passed a couple hours sitting on a ratty canvas chair, watching the black mountain above me, framed by a blacker sky, lord it over the world.

And I grieved, finally, at the loss of a friend.

Until dawn, when I realized I wasn’t done catching up on sleep. Despairing of getting my routine to normal any time soon, I went back to bed and slept less soundly this time, with cold-sweat dreams of high places and falling — until my cell phone rang at noon.

It was Sheriff Stender. He said, “Town prosecutor wants to take your deposition tomorrow. Can you be in town?”

Rubbing my face awake, I told him I would be, then asked, “Have you located Dirty Hairy yet?”

“Not yet,” he admitted, “but we got a small army out shagging the eastern foothills.”

“Have you identified him?”

“Oh, sure,” he said. “Name’s actually McGowan — John McGowan — and he’s got a minor record.”

“Oh?”

“Vagrancy, trespass, attempted burglary — no crimes against persons, though. He’s lived up in those woods for years.”

“I see,” I said, first sitting up, then getting up and moving out onto the porch. “Have you spoken with Dorin?”

“Yesterday afternoon, and he’s made a statement.”

“And?”

“Said he didn’t kill her.”

“Really.”

“Well, he has a fair alibi,” he told me. “Date of your friend’s death has been more or less fixed as September fifteenth. There was a newspaper found with her blood on it in the cabin. Later issues were still wrapped and out by the front door.”

“I saw them.”

“Newspaper boy quit delivering after a week, and according to the ME, the condition of the body is consistent with that date of death.”

“So what’s Dorin’s alibi?” I asked, not following him.

“Dorin was arrested for drunk driving by Eatonville sheriff’s men on the fourteenth — a Friday. Drunk driving, resisting arrest — he was jailed and didn’t make bail until Monday, the seventeenth.”

“That’s not ironclad,” I pointed out. “She still might have been killed after that.”

“That’s true.”

“And what did he say about those paintings?”

“Same as he told you,” Stender said. “His ex-wife gave him the paintings as payment for his share of the cabin that he co-owned with her.”

“So he knew where she was all along.”

“He did,” he agreed. “We’re not ruling him out, Mr. Virginiak, he’s got a record for assault against women, and the victim herself made several complaints in the past...”

“That figures.”

“...but right now we’re focused on Dirty Hairy. He’s good in these woods and it’s a big area, but we’ve got dogs and we’ll get him sooner or later.”

“Sounds like you’ve made up your mind, Sheriff.”

“We’ve got his prints — good sets — from inside the cabin, and he knew her body was in that hot tub — those wildflowers didn’t grow on that lid — so what do you think?”

My eyes drifted up to the cloud-shrouded mountain, and I imagined the scene unfolding there.

“Listen,” Stender said thickly.

I listened.

“Reason I called was to let you know,” he spoke with reluctance, then stopped.

“Go on.”

He sighed. “Autopsy was done and the results were leaked, and I didn’t want you to just get it from TV or something—”

I waited.

“It’s not good,” he said.

It wouldn’t be, I thought.

“Both legs and one arm were broken,” he told me. “Skull was fractured. Her nose and cheeks also had fractures.”

“He beat her hard,” I said.

“Thing is,” he went on with more hesitance, “she went into that hot tub alive.”

“What?”

“Couple of fingernails were broken off and there were deep scratches in the wood seat inside the tub, so... well, it’s pretty much certain, that... you know.”

“She drowned?”

He sighed, then said, “Analysis of tissue, lungs, and the condition of her brain makes it almost certain she... boiled.”

“Jesus.”

“There’s a safety breaker, that should have kicked in when the water temp reached a hundred five. It had been forced open...”

“Christ almighty!”

“I know.”

“I didn’t realize...”

“I know.”

Jesus, I thought. Poor Carole.

“Anyway,” he said, “the report was leaked. We got a call from the Times looking for confirmation, and I figured you should be told.”

“I appreciate it.”

“She had no family, apparently, except her ex-husband?” He’d made the statement a question.

“I don’t know anything about any family she might have had,” I told him, then I remembered. “Oh, Jess Collier, her agent, they were friends as well. She needs to be notified.”

“Seattle P.D. talked with her today,” he assured me. “She thinks it was Dorin, by the way.”

Which, alibi or not, was what I still thought.

After hanging up, I sat on the screened porch of my cabin, drinking bad coffee and thinking hard thoughts about Carole’s last minutes alive. Thoughts I didn’t want to think but that came to mind anyway. Around two P.M., which is when I decided I’d need fresh clothes if I were to stay on in Ashford for the rest of the weekend, I decided to drive back up to Seattle that afternoon.

In the same way that thoughts of Carole’s death came uninvited to mind, I turned my eyes toward my truck, parked only a few feet from the screen door, and there was, on the windshield, a shape that didn’t belong. Something...

Rather damp, folded twice, and tucked under the driver’s side wiper with a wildflower on the inside — a charcoal drawing of Dirty Hairy.

Unmistakably him, complete with Mets baseball cap, his eyes wide, staring out from the hair that crowded and obscured the rest of his face. The portrait was unsigned, but the style of it was definitely Carole’s.

Handling it with care I took it back into the cabin, found a plastic trash bag in which to keep it, then grabbed my binoculars and went out again, where I scanned the woods around me, watching for any movement, for almost fifteen minutes.

If Dirty Hairy was near, he was too well hidden, so I gave that up and got out my cell phone to call Stender. He was out, and when I asked to speak with someone who was connected with the investigation, I got a frustrating fifteen-minute runaround. I hung up, deciding there was, after all, no hurry about reporting my find just then.

Thinking that the dampness of the paper suggested it had been left in the early morning rain and that Dirty Hairy — if he was the one who’d left it for me — would by then be long gone. And there was at least a small chance that the portrait I had was not done by Carole.

Besides, in my own mind, Dorin was a far better suspect than Dirty Hairy still, and this was evidence that might close off any other direction the investigation might take.

So for the moment I decided I would get it confirmed that the portrait had been done by Carole — and Jess Collier should be able to do that.

When I got to Seattle, and her office, and showed her the drawing, she did.

“Oh, this is Carole’s, I’m sure,” Collier said.

“I thought so, too.”

We were in her wide-open-spaces office, standing at her desk, with the drawing of Dirty Hairy open on it.

“And he just left it for you?”

“He’d seen me the day I found Carole’s body.”

She sat and sighed raggedly. “It must’ve been horrible.”

“It wasn’t pleasant,” I agreed.

She looked at me, her eyes red-rimmed but hard, and shook her head. “That... bastard!”

I knew whom she meant. “Apparently, Dorin has an alibi.”

She frowned, so I explained, and she saw the problem as I had.

“That newspaper business means nothing. He could’ve still killed her when he got out of jail. The fact that newspapers dated later than the sixteenth hadn’t been looked at may only mean Carole hadn’t been home, for God’s sake!”

“They haven’t ruled Dorin out as a suspect, but they are focusing on Dirty Hairy.”

“Well, he certainly looks like a crazed killer,” she said, looking down at the drawing. “Does he have a name?”

“John McGowan,” I replied. “He has a minor police record, but nothing violent.”

She studied the drawing a moment longer, then tears started falling. “Charcoal was becoming Carole’s forte,” she told me hoarsely. “The last work she brought to me was a charcoal sketch.”

“Oh?”

She nodded, dabbing her eyes with tissue, then stood and stepped over to a mirrored cabinet and pressed a corner of the door. When it opened, she slid out an unframed canvas sketch, which she stood on her desk.

“It might be the best she ever did,” she said thickly.

It was a sketch of the mountain, viewed from the creek bed outside Carole’s cabin, drawn on a much better day than when I had stood there. Rainier was full up and clear in the sky beyond the trees, the wooden footbridge, and the dry creek bed, that lay like a rocky carpet thrown down to where Carole had to have been.

I pointed to the broad split stone at the base of footbridge. “The detail is wonderful.”

“She always knew,” Collier agreed, “just what belonged and what didn’t.” She shook her head, adding thickly, “I’m taking this home — I’ll never sell it.” She faced me then, and her teary, angry eyes glittered. “I want to kill him, Mr. Virginiak. I really, really do.”

She meant Dorin, of course, and I could understand her. Carole Dragnich had been her friend as well as her client, and wanting her killer’s death was the least she could do.

I felt something along the same lines, I suppose, and after taking my sketch and leaving her, after picking up my clothes at my condo, and then on the road back to Ashford, in the driving rain and growing dark, I did what I could to see Jess Collier’s wish come true.

I focused my thoughts on seeing that Carole’s killer was arrested and convicted. The death penalty was alive and well in Washington State, and the arrest and conviction of such a crime would almost certainly make the killer a candidate for the hangman.

And because Carole Dragnich had been my friend, it was the least I could do.

But by the time I hit Eatonville — probably the result of having seen my own anger at Phil Dorin reflected in the angry eyes of Jess Collier — I had given Dorin and what I knew of him a lot of thought and decided he was probably not the killer after all.

His alibi aside, despite his brutish, bullying behavior and the fact I didn’t like him, he hadn’t struck me as the kind of person who would go to the lengths that were taken to perform Carole’s murder.

If she’d been merely beaten to death, that would be one thing, but she was intentionally boiled alive, the act of a careful sadist or a psychotic, neither characterization consistent with the impression I had of Dorin.

By the time I’d reached Ashford, that realization turned my thoughts toward Dirty Hairy and the evidence I had of a connection between him and Carole that the police didn’t know existed. As I turned down the lane to my cabin, I decided to call Stender as soon as I got inside.

But just as I came to a stop in the open area in front of my cabin, I saw a dark figure sprinting away from the screened porch and my headlights picked up the startled face of Dirty Hairy.

Getting out my cell phone and pressing 911, I used the searchlight on the side of the Bronco to follow him as he darted across the footbridge, then headed north on the paved road on the other side. I reversed my truck, spun out of the drive and with the phone to my ear — listening to a tape giving me options — I drove south very fast to the bridge half a mile away.

Pressing 2 on the phone to report a police emergency, I sped over the bridge, squealed a right-hand turn, and fishtailed the Bronco, heading north.

Getting the speed up to seventy, my eyes scanning left and right, looking for Dirty Hairy’s dark shape among all the others in the woods on either side, I listened to another taped voice tell me that my call would be answered in the order received and to please hold...

Which is when I spotted him, high up along a ridge to my left — just as a logging truck pulled out in front of me from the right, causing me to curse, brake, skid, and swerve off the road, then backwards, down an embankment, where I heard a loud thump, before I came to a stop in a muddy ditch.

My heart pounding in my chest, cold sweat forming inside my clothes, I was looking at a dark prostrate form lying in the gully a few feet ahead of me — the thump I’d heard. I got out a flashlight, finally, and stepped out of the truck into the dark on weak legs, and walked back to see what I’d hit.

I was so afraid of what I would find, I actually cried a little when I saw it. A large raccoon — dead as dead gets.

The driver of the logging truck appeared shortly. Because my cell phone was smashed and because I wanted to follow Dirty Hairy, I told him to get the state police, explained who I was and what I was doing, then I left him.

I got into my raincoat and started up the side of the steep hill, my flashlight sweeping the woods ahead.

At the top of the ridge was a thicket of black hawthorn — the point where I’d last seen him. I went down along the other side, slip-sliding over a carpet of dead, wet leaves, stopping every hundred feet or so to scan the area as far as the beam of my flashlight could illuminate, then going on.

Up and down over another ridge, into thicker woods of pine skirted by dense alder — thinking I’d lost him and starting to think of heading back to the highway — when I saw him.

He was high in the woods to my left, staring down at me until my flash picked him up, then he scampered away. I went on, coming to where I’d seen him at the base of a cliff, a dead-end triangle of rock where there was no place to go but up.

So I did. I stepped up easily at first over a natural stairway of rock, until it became steeper and I started having second thoughts. Although I couldn’t see in the dark, I had to be a hundred feet or so above the base, and I really had a problem with heights.

But I went on, using my hands now, to haul myself upward over the rock face of the cliff, until I came to a narrow ledge that was just wide enough to sit on.

I rested for a moment, scanning with my flash along the ledge, seeing nothing. Then, standing on nervous knees, I started sidling along the ledge, watching carefully now and thinking I’d accidentally cornered him, which might make him suddenly brave — until I came to the cave.

It was actually more of a deep indenture under a broad overhang of rock. Stooping down from the side, I let my flashlight explore first, picking up in the light a variety of trash, bedding, clothing, boxes, et cetera, but not Dirty Hairy, as far as I could see. But this was his home.

So I went in, carefully, bent over low, watching the shadows for movement, but seeing none, coming, finally, to the deepest point, where he’d built a semi-permanent campsite. There was a stone fireplace, a large, mostly rotten mattress, various cooking items, canned food, plastic bottles of water, trash bags filled with clothing, assorted books and magazines piled here and there.

And photographs.

Spilling mostly from old yellowed envelopes onto a large, flat stone that he used as a table, on which there was also a small kerosene lamp, which I lit, then looked the photographs over.

Most of them were of people I didn’t know, but in one newer envelope were a dozen or so banded together, all of Carole while she still lived — some nude, some not.

One of the photos was taken as she sat on a rock by the full flowing creek by her cabin.

Which caused me, finally, to realize something that I’d known already, and gave me a chill that had nothing to do with the fact that I was cold and wet.

Which is when Dirty Hairy came home.

The kind of anger I felt then, and for the rest of that night, was a rage so cold that its memory now causes a kind of nausea — as if it were a virus my body, once infected, remembers and recoils from.

A rage that was quiet, but hard as ice. A rage I held onto for nearly twelve hours, till the next morning.

When I knocked on the door to Jess Collier’s apartment — on floor forty of a newish Bellevue condo — she came to the door after only a second or so, as if she’d been just on the other side expecting me, but she seemed surprised to see me.

“Mr. Virginiak?”

“Ms. Collier,” I said. “I’m sorry for coming so early, but I needed to speak with you.”

“You look terrible,” she told me opening the door wider. “Please come in.”

I stepped inside saying, “I’ve been up all night.”

“It looks like it,” she told me. “Would you like some coffee?”

“No thank you.”

She turned and led me into a large, spare, expensively furnished living room, which opened onto a large wrap-around balcony. “I was just about to get ready for work,” she said, waving me to a gray leather loveseat. “Please sit down.”

Which I did, looking the room over.

I’d expected artworks on her walls, but like her office there was only glass — huge sliding-glass doors, bracketed by floor-to-ceiling mirrors. With the doors open the effect was of being outside.

“Are you sure I can’t get you coffee?”

I told her no.

Wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, lighting a long thin cigar, she still was a handsome woman, but she didn’t look as good to me then as she had when I first met her.

I said, “I found Dirty Hairy last night.”

“You did?” She perched herself on the arm of the sofa and waved a hand toward the Times on the coffee table between us. “There’s nothing in the paper about it.” She frowned at me. “Has he admitted to killing Carole?”

“No,” I told her. “He didn’t kill anyone.”

“I see.”

“He doesn’t exactly play life with a full deck, but he told me that he and Carole were friends — and I believe him.”

“Really?”

“He’s not a bad guy, actually. He’d stolen some pictures from the cabin. Pictures of Carole, mostly nudes. He’d taken them because he’d been embarrassed for her and didn’t want them to be seen by others.”

“Really.”

“He’s a Gulf War vet and saw a little more than he could handle, and he’s taking a vacation from the world, he told me.”

The wind was blowing the balcony’s curtains in around her, so she got up and pulled them back a bit, then reperched herself.

“He wanted to come forward with what he knew, but he’s had a bad history with police, so he’d been afraid,” I said. “When he saw me in uniform the other day, he figured I might listen to what he had to say, and he had a lot to tell me.” I looked at my watch. “He’ll be turning himself in to the state police in a few minutes,” I added, “so we haven’t got a lot of time.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” I told her with reluctance, “something’s bothering me.”

She frowned and shrugged.

I said, “Did you bring that charcoal drawing of Rainier home with you as you said?”

“Yes.”

“May I see it?”

“Sure,” she said, then got up, went to a desk, and from behind it, took out the drawing.

I stood and went over to look at it, saying, “And you did say that Carole delivered this drawing to you in early August, I believe?”

“Yes,” she agreed, laying the drawing down and walking back to the sofa and coffee table, where she opened a briefcase that was on it and removed a small piece of paper, which she handed to me. “I brought this to the police officers who questioned me yesterday. They asked me when it was that I last saw her, and I found this copy of the receipt I gave her.”

“Something wrong?” she asked.

I stared at her.

“What is it?”

“The creek is dry in the drawing.”

“I beg your pardon.”

I looked at her.

“Yes?”

I said, “The creek in the drawing — Brown Creek — wasn’t dammed until September first.”

She frowned sharply.

“That split stone at the base of the footbridge was well below the waterline, and under the footbridge itself, and could not have been seen before the creek was dammed.” I frowned back at her. “She couldn’t have drawn this before September first.”

Her frown became thoughtful. “Carole...” she began, then smiled. “Carole had an artist’s imagination, Mr. Virginiak. She could’ve done the drawing earlier. At any time, actually...”

“No,” I told her. “There’s too much detail there. I’ve seen that creek bed, and the rock arrangement is precisely the same as in the drawing.”

Collier gave me a long look, gave her cigar a puff, then hugged herself. “So what’s the problem?”

I folded the receipt I held and put it in my pocket, saying, “The creek was dry when she did the drawing, so she couldn’t have given it to you in August.” I watched her eyes watching me. “Which makes you a liar, Jess.”

Which didn’t prompt a denial.

Instead she frowned at me for a long moment, looking for some sign of stupidity in my face, which she wasn’t going to find. Then finally she sighed and turned away, went back to the sofa, stubbed out her thin cigar, lit another, and smiled at me, saying, “You’re very clever.”

Jesus, I thought.

“So?” she said, sitting back. “Why is it that we have so little time?”

“Because,” I explained, “the police will be coming for you, and I thought we needed to talk before your arrest.”

“My arrest?” She affected amusement at the idea. “That receipt means nothing. In fact, I now seem to recall it was September fifth that Carole delivered the drawing to me.” She shrugged easily. “I wrote an eight instead of a nine — so what?”

“But you did kill Carole,” I told her.

She considered me for a moment, then said, “Take off your shirt.”

I did as she asked, to show her that I was wearing no wire, then she said, “Would you care to know why?”

Collier blew smoke and began to inspect the back of her hand in a casual way. “Carole betrayed me,” she said with coldness. She glanced at me. “After all that I’d done for her, she betrayed me.”

She sat back easily and said, “I found her, you realize. Selling her artwork from a park bench, for next to nothing.”

What was killing, I thought, but the ultimate betrayal.

She said, “I saw her talent, but her technique was naive. I advised her. I taught her to be all that she could be. I arranged her first showings. I became her friend. And when she finally had enough of that idiot she’d married, I was with her, giving my support every moment.”

“I loved her,” Collier told me, in a flat monotone.

“Did you?”

She nodded. “Carole was confused about her sexuality, but I knew, and eventually brought the true woman out of her, even though she resisted.” She frowned slightly. “Then last summer she... went away. Said she needed space. Went to live in that cabin, didn’t even call. I found her and... we reconciled, I thought, but then...” She shrugged. “She chose in the end to reject her true self — and me.” She smiled ruefully. “Well, I couldn’t have that, now, could I?”

I said nothing.

“It was very painful to me, Mr. Virginiak, and I don’t do pain very well — I really don’t.”

“So,” I said, finding my voice again. “You killed her.”

“Oh it wasn’t that simple.” She puffed hard on her little cigar. “Carole needed to be punished before dying.” She blew smoke, and her mad eyes glittered at me.

Right, I thought.

“I admit that when I went there that day, I was a bit out of control. We argued and I hit her very hard with the poker, and at first I thought she was dead — until I saw she wasn’t. And I’ll tell you something else,” she said breathlessly. “Breaking her legs gave me great pleasure, and then, after I’d put her in the tub, watching her struggle so desperately, hearing her scream as she realized what was happening” — she smiled — “I enjoyed it very much.”

“Of course, you did,” I said.

She smiled almost impishly at me. “Does that sound strange to you, Mr. Virginiak?”

“You’re not going to get away with this, Jess.”

She smiled. “That receipt is hardly evidence, and I could just deny what I’ve told you. There’s no evidence I was ever even at that cabin.”

“McGowan saw you there,” I told her.

Her smile flatlined.

“That’s what he’s telling the police now.”

She thought about that, then tried, “A half-witted wild man, Mr. Virginiak?”

I shook my head at her with certainty. “He described you perfectly, Jess, and if you told the police that you’d never been to the cabin, they will know you lied.”

She sighed with a sense of weary capitulation.

“And, there is the receipt,” I went on, “which catches you in another lie, and if the police know what to look for — and I’ll be sure they will — enough evidence will be found. Fingerprints, fiber evidence.” I pointed to the newspaper and the headline: POLICE HUNT FOR HOT TUB KILLER. “You’ll hang in the end, or opt for injection, or more likely, prison, forever, but you won’t get away with this, Jess.”

She looked then as thoughtful as she should.

I said, “You haven’t really thought this through, have you?”

She said carefully, “Do you think, Mr. Virginiak, that a sane person would have done what I did?”

I didn’t, but said nothing.

“I mean, I must have been insane to have done this to poor Carol, mustn’t I?” She considered her line of thought, then blew smoke, and smiled. “A hospital is more likely than prison, don’t you think?”

I kept silent, watching her closely.

She only smiled that little inhuman smile at me.

And, I finally sat back, and felt all my own humanity slip away.

“That’s exactly what I was thinking before I arrived here, actually,” I said, watching her closely, trying to fix the right advantage. “When you say hospital, you do realize that means the state facility at Tillicum?”

She shrugged.

“I’ve seen the place,” I told her. “They’re very chemically oriented, there.”

“Are they?”

“Thorazine, Prozac, Serone, Zoloft — they’ll mix you nice little cocktails, so you’ll feel very little for the few years you’ll be there.”

“Sounds lovely,” she told me, adding with a disbelieving frown. “Did you say years?”

“Oh, I’m sure we’re talking years, Jess.”

She looked at her watch, as if tired of me.

“You really are quite psychotic, you know, and not smart enough to hide it.”

She looked doubtful.

“You boiled a woman alive,” I told her. “Beat her with a poker — broke her arms and legs, then boiled her alive — and there’s no remorse in you.”

She looked less doubtful.

“No remorse, no regret — just a pathetic sense of having done yourself justice because another woman dumped you?” I laughed. “You are insane, Jess.”

“Really.”

“Yes,” I said, smiling a little more inhumanity at her. “It’s not what you’ve done, though, as much as it is what you are — so you’ll be at Tillicum a long time.”

She tried looking bored again, but couldn’t quite pull it off.

“But the drugs will be a big help,” I went on. “And what you’re able to feel, you won’t really mind.”

She sighed and I watched again for the advantage.

“You’ll barely notice waking in your bed, soaked in your own urine.” I shrugged. “Happens when you’re doped past caring, as you surely will be.”

Her lips pressed together slightly, but that hadn’t yet rocked her.

“You won’t mind having no one to talk with except brain-fried drug addicts, schizophrenics, and a few psychopaths like yourself.”

She brushed an ash from her sweatshirt.

“You may even get used to the hands of the guards, as they move you from one room to the next.”

She only looked at me.

“Do you mind being handled, Jess?”

She stayed silent.

“Well, you’ll be handled a lot, so you’ll get used to it. You may even get to like it — just as you may come to enjoy the very close confinement.”

Her eyes moved — fractionally — toward the opened door to the balcony.

Yes, I thought.

“You’ll have your own cell,” I told her. “A full eight-by-eight — very cozy.”

She started to gently bite the inside of her lip, and I could almost smell her sudden fear.

My advantage, I thought.

It made me feel good.

I got up, moved to the patio door, and drew the curtain open a bit more, and looked at her. “You like high places, don’t you Jess?”

She rubbed her arm and looked away.

I smiled. “I don’t mind telling you that I don’t, but you like being high up — the cleanliness of being above everything? Above the corruption?” I shook my head. “You’ll miss that feeling of openness and height for a while, but then...” I drew the curtain closed. “...there’s a certain sense of security and comfort in being caged.”

A vein began to prominently throb along her throat.

“It won’t be as if you’re entombed, though it may feel that way at first.”

She scratched her neck idly.

“It won’t be as if you were buried alive.”

She looked up at me with sharp irritation.

“It won’t be as bad as you think...”

“If you’re trying to frighten me, think again.”

“You’re frightening yourself,” I told her. “I’m just telling you how it will be.”

“You’re exaggerating.”

“Am I?”

She put her thin cigar out and lit another.

“If I’m boring you, I could call the police now.”

She swallowed and whispered, “Do what you like.”

I watched her think for a moment, then I put my hands in my pockets and moved around the room, coming to rest facing a large mirror.

“The thing about being in custody, Jess, is that your options become so limited.”

She was quiet.

“Yes,” I said, watching myself. “Once you’re in custody, you’ll stay in custody — there will be no bail for you.”

In the mirror I saw her looking up at me with doubt in her face.

I laughed at her. “You’re insane, Jess — and it shows, right there in your face. You’re a danger, to others and to yourself, and they will not let you go.”

And she believed me. She swallowed fear, looked away.

I looked back at my own face, and wondered who I was.

I said, “Fellow I knew once in San Diego was arrested for dealing drugs.”

Something about my eyes was different, I thought.

“He knew he was facing a lot of jail time, and he knew he could never do that time, but he wasted the little time he had before he was arrested.”

Something vaguely dead about them.

I turned and waited for her own dead eyes to come up to mine.

“The problem,” I explained, “was that, once he had been arrested, his options were so limited.”

She frowned up at me.

“He had the advantage of being sane, but they watch people closely because suicide makes cops look bad, uncaring or something, so that all he could think of in the end was to bite through the arteries in his own wrist.

“You’re out of your mind, and they’ll be watching you every minute, so...” I shrugged, letting her fill in the blanks.

The wind ruffled the balcony curtain.

I waited a moment more, then retrieved my hat and said, “McGowan will have already told the state police what he knows and what I’ve told him to say. It will take a while to sort out, but my guess is the Seattle police will be here shortly. If not, I’ll give you an hour before I call them myself.”

Her look was blank.

“I’ll be across the street,” I told her, nodding toward the open balcony.

She said nothing. Neither did I.

I rode the elevator down to the lobby, stopping only to ask the security guard the time — six fifteen A.M.

I jaywalked across the highway to a coffee shop where I took a seat along the front window, which had a full view of the parking lot of Jess Collier’s building, and ordered coffee and a bagel to have while I waited.

I was watching the road outside fill with morning rush-hour traffic, hoping McGowan had managed all right with the state police, wondering if the Seattle P.D. would arrive.

And thinking hard, cold, unforgiving thoughts that seem to come easier the older I get. I had no second thoughts whatsoever.

And she took nearly the full hour.

Doing what, I never knew, but at 7:05, having paid for my coffee, and thinking I’d have to call the police about Collier after all, I saw someone running.

He tore across the street from the parking lot to the front of Collier’s building, where he opened the door and shouted something inside. Then the security guard came out and both ran back to the parking lot, looking up.

Which is when I left the coffee shop, and although I couldn’t see the parking lot well from that vantage point, I stayed standing where I was.

I didn’t see her fall.

But despite the noise of the traffic around me, the sound of her body slamming down, forty stories, through the roof of a parked car, came through to me loud and clear.

And it sounded as final as it should.