Redheads

Dedication

This one’s for you, Maria.

Chapter One

At least once a day, Chris Wilcox got the idea there was a place he could go, an old familiar house, and if he walked into it, he would find the life he thought he’d lost. This vision was crowded with friends, their voices a blur of toasts and cheers, and at its center was Cheryl, waiting for him.

Most of all, and always, there was Cheryl.

The idea might flood into his mind at any point—while driving a rented car through a strange city, or reading a newspaper clipping about a murdered girl, or cleaning his handgun after shooting all morning at paper silhouettes—and the image would possess him so forcefully he could actually feel Cheryl’s arms around him, the warm press of her breasts against his chest. He would pull to the side of the road, or put the news clipping down, or stare at the Glock as though he’d accidentally shot a hole in the ceiling. He thought there must be some maze of streets he’d never found, some twist in the roads that would fold back through time and space to that house, where everything was the way it ought to be. He just didn’t know how to get there.

But as soon as the idea took hold of him, it tore itself away. He was full of bewildered hope and then he was simply alone in a foreign city with his file of newspaper stories and the weight of the gun tugging in its shoulder holster, the dry whisper of snowflakes hitting the windshield of his rented car. He’d grip the steering wheel and close his eyes, biting down on his tongue to wake himself from the dream he hoped he was living.

Of course it never worked.

There was no such house, no Cheryl with her cheeks flushed from wanting him. He’d leveled the house and sold the vacant lot. Cheryl hadn’t drawn a breath in six years and would never be more than a memory; the taste of wine in his mouth was nothing but his own blood.

Chapter Two

July 2010

The dead girl’s apartment was easy to spot. It was the only one on the third floor with dark windows. All the others blazed with light, and no wonder: the newspaper didn’t have all the details, but had printed the worst. Chris followed the boardwalk around the side of the converted cotton warehouse. Her four windows faced the ship channel between Galveston and Pelican Islands. That was probably a factor. These things always happened close to the ocean.

Chris had flown to Houston from Honolulu that morning to break into this girl’s apartment. It was another marker on a trail that began with Cheryl and twisted through thirty-six other homes and apartments and rented rooms, and disappeared into the darkness ahead. He had spent the entire flight hoping something in the apartment would light the way.

He said the girl’s name aloud, just to give her another breath of life.

Allison Clayborn.

She’d lived in Galveston just two years, doing research for a green energy company called Gulf Solar. Three days a week, she taught an engineering class at Rice University. She’d grown up somewhere in central Texas.

Chris could picture her as a teenager in the scrubby Texas hills, riding in the back of a pickup truck with her red hair blowing back, the sun lighting the freckles splashed on her otherwise white shoulders.

He could picture her in a white lab coat, looking at a spreadsheet on her laptop and chewing on the end of a pencil.

He could also picture her dead.

She would have had lovely breasts, and they would have been cut off or cut up, and possibly cooked if she had a cast iron skillet in her kitchen. He hadn’t seen the coroner’s report yet, but he knew her liver would be gone. If she’d fought—if she’d scratched and clawed—her fingertips would be missing from the first knuckle. Her breasts and liver would have been taken to feed some kind of sick hunger, but the fingertips, he thought, were taken for a different purpose: to keep the police from finding the killer’s DNA under Allison’s nails. But Chris knew other places to look for that.

Her condo faced Harbor Street, where a few giant live oak trees cast wide shadows from sidewalk to sidewalk. The entrance was an ornate cast iron gate framed by gas lamps. Behind the gate, stone steps led through an archway to paired oak doors. He walked to the gate, taking out his bump key. The lock was a Yale pin tumbler no different than the latch on the front doors of most suburban houses. It wouldn’t be a problem.

Chris fit his mechanical bump key into the lock, pulled the spring-loaded trigger three times to knock the vertical tumbler pins clear of the lock cylinder, and twisted the plug with a small torsion wrench. The lock opened in less than five seconds. It took his breath away to think how unguarded Allison’s life had been. Or Cheryl’s, or the lives of the thirty-six others he’d found.

He passed through the front gate and up the steps. Standing in the gas-lit entryway, he opened the oak door and went into the elevator lobby. The lift was a brass cage that rose through the center of a staircase. The stairs were dark wood with heavy railings, padded down the center in a long stripe of red carpet. He climbed to the third floor and found the door marked 304. There were no sounds. At the end of the hallway a polished wooden chair sat before the windowsill. No policeman sat guard in the chair. He saw no security cameras. An official seal was taped along the length of the doorjamb, and an orange sign was fastened in the center of the door with the Galveston Police Department emblem and
DO NOT ENTER BY ORDER OF LAW
in large red print.

The last forensic team had sliced the seal in half with a razor and hadn’t replaced it. The police were done with the apartment. But the cut seal was still there, so the cleaners hadn’t come. He thought about that for a moment. The timing was critical because the cleaners would destroy what he was looking for. He was already wearing latex gloves, so he simply bumped Allison’s lock, stepped quickly inside her home, and shut the door behind him.

Chapter Three

Chris paid a private investigator in Honolulu eighty thousand dollars a year to watch every newspaper in the world for one kind of story. Mike Nakamura did this on the Internet, where his computer ran a constant sweep, searching out the right combination of words, translating articles into English, ceaselessly hunting for the particular terms which Mike and Chris were always refining. Chris knew the job didn’t take more than an hour or two of Mike’s time in any given day. Mostly, he was paying Mike to stay quiet. They both knew where this was leading.

The approach was limited, but was the best they could do. They were drawing a line forward from the few points they could find since Cheryl’s murder. Chris knew the Internet was a repository of the present, diminishing in value the further he wanted to probe the past. It was practically useless to search for something that didn’t happen in the United States in the last ten years.

Still, the search produced results.

It was how Chris first learned about Allison Clayborn.

Two and a half days after she was killed, and less than twenty-four hours before he broke into Allison’s apartment, Chris was on his boat, moored in Kaneohe Bay. A thousand feet from the edge of his own backyard. Chris watched Mike’s truck turn off the road and ease down the steep driveway. Then Mike was a shadow in the moonlight, crossing the broad lawn that sloped from the back of Chris’s house to the dock.

They always met aboard
Sailfish
to talk about the project.

When Mike came astern in the spare kayak, Chris was waiting for him on the swim platform. They pulled the kayak onto the teak platform and took the four steps up the transom to the deck.

“You doing okay?”

“Yeah,” Chris said. “Let’s get below. Rain’s gonna come harder in a minute.”

They crossed the cockpit and stepped through the companionway into the cabin. Chris shut the hatch behind them and handed Mike a dry dish towel from the galley.

“Thanks.”

“You found one?”

“Two, actually.”

“Okay.”

He went to the wet bar opposite the galley and pulled a beer out of the fridge.

“Drink?”

“Still got that scotch?”

He poured Mike two fingers of Talisker, and they took the drinks to the salon table and sat opposite each other.

“Let’s see them, then.”

Mike pulled a small waterproof case from his pocket, flipped it open, and slid a USB drive into his palm. He handed it to Chris.

“Besides these two, how many others?” Chris asked.

“That fit the basic search? Maybe fifty.”

“Jesus. It’s not even a full moon.”

“I know,” Mike said. “It happens like that sometimes. Some other days are even worse.”

He sipped his drink. Chris pulled the laptop computer from its drawer, plugged in the USB drive, and began to read.

The first article was a murder in San Diego.

Neighbors on the top floor of a five-story walk-up on Seaward Street had complained to the manager about a smell that had been getting worse. It was summertime and it had been over a hundred degrees for three straight days, but even the people lucky enough to own air conditioners were sleeping with their windows open to flush out the stench seeping through their walls. After a day, the manager finally investigated, and decided the smell was coming from a unit on the fifth floor. He knocked, but nobody answered.

He shuffled back to his office on the ground floor and looked up the name of the renter: Caroline Borden. The manager called, but she didn’t pick up. A day later, he finally called 9-1-1.

The officers found Caroline Borden dismembered and stuffed into her oven. The oven racks were leaning against the wall, to make room. The oven had been left on broil, but an electrical short stopped its progress no more than an hour into the job. Then the oven cooled to room temperature—over a hundred degrees—and stayed like that until the neighbors complained about the smell.

In the dish drain next to the sink, the police found a hack saw, a long serrated bread knife, and a good-sized pair of pliers, each of which had been thoroughly washed and set to dry.

There was a photograph of Caroline embedded in the newspaper article. Maybe a glamour shot from a strip club’s entrance, cropped to print in a newspaper. Caroline was looking directly into the camera, her left forearm resting atop her head. Her hair was spread across a white pillowcase; she had a shy smile. Her shoulders were bare and below them everything was cropped out. She had gray-green eyes and coppery-red hair that stopped just below her chin.

Chris stopped reading.

“You do any other research on the San Diego story?”

“Standard follow-up. She had two drug arrests in the last year. Most recent was two weeks ago. Released without charges.”

“Maybe someone thought she cut a deal,” Chris said.

“Maybe.”

“What was the drug?”

“Drugs—plural,” Mike said. “Crystal meth. Heroin. Some designer stuff.”

“Where’s Seaward Street?”

“Nine blocks from the ocean. Industrial area, close to the wharves.”

“Anything else?”

“Some aliases came up, maybe stage names. Carrie Bourbon. Celesté Bourdaine. There was a strip club in Tacoma where she might’ve worked a few months last summer.”

Chris clicked her picture again. She was a redhead and fit the basic pattern. But this didn’t feel right, even though she’d finished up in an oven. He imagined she’d run away from home and had been doomed since that day.

He closed the story again and took a sip from his beer.

“See if you can add a new filter to the program. Take out anything involving drugs.”

“That could cut it down by a lot.”

“It should.”

“You could miss one.”

“Let’s just see how that works for a while,” he said. He didn’t think he’d miss any. Drugs had never been a factor.

“Okay.”

“Pour yourself another scotch if you want.”

The next story, from the
Houston Chronicle
, was Allison. The last murder Chris was sure of had been in Vancouver, and that had been eight months earlier, in November of 2009. There had been many others before that, always separated by uncertain spans of time and distance. Houston and San Diego were equally plausible as next locations. Many things could be arranged into a pattern by a patient-enough observer. Chris was finding one, but it was out of focus. He had spent years at this navigation table trying to plot these few points.