The Prettiest Feathers (12 page)

I arrived at Sarah Sinclair’s house just after 7:00
A.M.
, several minutes ahead of the technicians, police photographer, and medical examiner. The door was open; Robert was sitting in a chair near the body, looking shell-shocked.

As soon as I saw the carnage on the floor, I walked toward him. He stood up and met me halfway. Without a word, we were in each other’s arms, and I could feel his tears hot on my neck.

Both carotid arteries sliced open—as if the killer knew exactly where to cut to ensure success. It would have taken her less than two minutes to die, not necessarily from the
blood loss, but because the bridge was out. No more oxygen could get to her brain.

Sarah Sinclair was prettier dead than alive. Alive, she wore that uptight, tense expression so many thin, humorless women have.

But dead, she looked serene—at peace. It didn’t hurt that she was dressed up for a date. Long white dress. Her gleaming dark hair in an up-do. Wineglasses beside a half-filled decanter on a nearby table. A cassette in the tape player, with the player turned on, and the song—“Fear Loves This Place”—playing over and over. And candles burned down to puddles of wax.

I had wished this woman dead a dozen times, though not lately. It was about three years earlier when things heated up between Robert and me. He was still married, and he’d just buried his infant daughter. He took Liza’s death in silence at first, pretending that nothing was different, that nothing of any significance had happened.

He was back beside me in the cruiser the day of the funeral, just a few hours after Liza was put to rest. He showed up for roll call that night just like always, and when we were alone, doing our first tour through the combat zone, he started talking about a missing fourteen-year-old we were looking for. His own daughter was dead, but all he could talk about was someone else’s kid—how we had to find her before some pervert or pimp did.

It went like that for weeks, then, gradually, he opened up, telling me about Liza. He talked about going into her room just before dawn, intending to check on her and maybe touch her head or kiss her, but finding her lifeless instead, already gone, without even a tear on her cheek. He said she was just lying there in her crib, looking like maybe she was dreaming. But there was something about the stillness of her eyelids that alerted him and made him check her vitals.

I was surprised when Robert began offering those unsolicited peeks into his personal life, especially since they also
involved his inner life. He had an aversion to intimacy, a need to always appear macho. I had never liked him much until he began talking to me, trusting me, telling me about Liza.

Once he got used to saying sweet things about his daughter, he started bad-mouthing his wife. Until then he had hardly ever mentioned Sarah. Most people meeting him for the first time assumed that he was single. It was as if his wife had no role in his life, no connection to anything he considered essential—although, to tell the truth, there wasn’t much besides police work that mattered to him.

But when Liza died, Robert became obsessed with finding a place to lay the blame—and it was Sarah’s misfortune to be the most convenient shelf.

I didn’t discourage him from lashing out at Sarah. I thought sometimes that I should have. But as soon as Robert started opening up, showing me that softer side of him, the side that spoke so tenderly about his daughter, her tiny fingers and intelligent eyes, all my thoughts of him as a boorish, sexist oaf were transformed into desire. A kind of attraction that required me to act, to make some kind of move in his direction, to find out if he was feeling the same thing I was.

“So what are we going to do about this?” I asked him one night as we neared the end of our shift.

“About what?”

“The chemistry. This need to touch.”

“It isn’t going to happen,” he said, and then he was silent.

I felt like a fool, like maybe I had only imagined his interest in me. But even while I was thinking that, I knew it wasn’t so. I couldn’t be that wrong about a signal as strong as the one he had been sending.

After we clocked out, he tried hurrying to his car, walking fast, several feet ahead of me. But I caught up with him and said, “Look, I’m not stopping off for a beer with you guys tonight. I’m going home.”

By then I had gotten ahead of him and managed to block his path, forcing him to look at me. “I’m going to take a
shower and go to bed,” I told him. “You can join me or you can go home.”

He tried to get around me, but I stayed right in his face. “But if you do go home,” I told him, “I don’t ever want to hear another word about your wife.”

He maneuvered around me as if I were an annoying obstacle, and nothing more. I wasn’t even certain if he had heard me.

But he followed me home.

A few months later we arrived at that same point most illicit lovers reach. When, after making love, the pain of parting started to outweigh the pleasure of being together, I knew that it was time for an ultimatum. I hated feeling like I needed a commitment. I could almost hear Robert thinking, “Right. Typical female.”

But I did it anyway, and was stunned by his response: “Of course I’ll tell her,” he said.

I had steeled myself for rejection. But there he was, telling me that we were going to be together. Or so I thought. I should have listened more carefully. He had said that he’d
tell
Sarah about us, and that was exactly what he meant.

After his announcement, he made no move to leave her—he might still be there if she hadn’t finally thrown him out. She was classy about it; wrote me a polite little note inviting me to come over and help him pack.

Robert didn’t wait for my help. A day later he showed up at my apartment with a carload of survivalist magazines, hunting equipment, clothes, and seven or eight guns. It wasn’t the joyful moment that I had imagined it would be. Then, about six months after his divorce was final, he returned to Sarah. Although their reunion wasn’t permanent, the damage it did to me was. Things were never the same between us again.

For the most part, we ended up like all other cops who are thrown together for eight hours every workday. We got on
each other’s nerves, ran out of things to say, and served as living proof that familiarity really can breed contempt. The only difference between us and them was that we also slept together from time to time. But it got to where it wasn’t happening very often, and when it did, we were barely able to look each other in the eye afterward. So it ended.

What was left was friendship—the indestructible kind that comes from going through a war together. Although the battles we fought were on the streets, not in some slimy jungle, they were just as deadly, and had forged a strong bond between us.

S
arah is dead.

I can barely think those words, let alone say them. But there are three more words that are even worse: Sarah was murdered.

Hours before it happened, I was sitting in my car a block away from her house, watching the front of the building. No one went in; no one came out.

I was on my own time, and in my own car, so I reached into the Styrofoam cooler on the floor in front and grabbed another beer. Of course, it wouldn’t have made any difference if I’d been on duty, in uniform and in a patrol unit. When I want a brew, I have one. They know what to do with their procedure manual.

Sarah always said I had a drinking problem. She was wrong. Only time I ever had problems was when I didn’t drink.

For Sarah, life was always a problem, drunk or sober. Who was the guy who said you should never sleep with a woman whose problems are bigger than your own? I should
have listened to him. I knew the minute I met her she was crazy in the head. Depressed. It wasn’t just a mood. It was her whole way of looking at the world. I put enough of her stories together over the years to figure out that she had been abused, and it had left her feeling worthless. But then the clouds would shift and she’d be all smiles and energy, like she’d grown up with the Brady Bunch. I never knew when I walked in the door who I’d find in the house—the happy Sarah, or the suicidal one. After a while I quit wondering or even caring.

It’s a funny thing about marriage. You marry a woman and divorce her, but you never really quit thinking of her as your wife. There’s a tie there, something you can’t quite cut. At least that’s the way it was with Sarah and me. When she told me she was seeing someone, it hit me hard. I didn’t even know at first what that feeling was, but then I realized it was jealousy.

When I questioned Sarah about the shootings, I knew as soon as she started talking about this Wolf character that she was involved with him. I could see it in her eyes. The storm clouds lifted. The sun came out. She looked happy, at least as happy as a woman like Sarah can ever be.

The alley incident wasn’t the only thing I wanted to talk to Sarah about that day. She knew that I was looking into some murders that I thought might be connected—young women with nothing in common except that they died violently. There weren’t many, but more than a precinct our size generally racks up in the space of a year or two. We also had several women listed as missing, most of them not the type to just walk away from their lives. They had good jobs, husbands or lovers, solid reputations. It didn’t make sense.

I showed up at Sarah’s kitchen door late one night, blubbering about all the dead women littering the city. It was the drunkest I’d been in weeks. She let me in, made me some coffee, and listened to me go over what I knew about each case. She hated that shit. But that night she listened, and when I got to the Maxine Harris case, she recognized the
victim’s name. She said Harris had been in the store and had even sold some of her used books to Harry, Sarah’s sleazebag boss. Just a few days before she died, Sarah had discovered one of them among her own collection—a book of poems that she had brought home from the store. Maxine Harris’s name was right there on the bookplate. Sarah said that some of the lines in one of the poems were highlighted in yellow.

I wanted to see that book. On Saturday, the day before she died, I stopped by her place to get it. She wasn’t there, so I parked a short distance from the house and watched—for what, I’m not sure. Maybe I thought Wolf would show up. I’d been wanting to get a look at him, to see if my hunch was right. I would have bet a year’s wages that he’d be a dead ringer for Alan Carver.

Sarah came home alone. I pulled into the driveway behind her and helped her carry some packages into the house. She acted pleased to see me, but there was something about her manner that bothered me. She seemed agitated or excited, like someone who is expecting something to happen. Someone waiting for something special.

That’s how she was toward the end, waiting for Liza to be born. Spacey. Kind of drifting around in her head—loopy, even. When I saw that same look in her eyes again, I knew that it was somehow tied up with Wolf and how she felt about him. It worried me because I knew the guy was a liar. Maybe worse.

When I told her that I had come for the book, she went straight to her coffee table to get it, but it wasn’t there. I could see that upset her. She said it had been there just a few hours earlier, and she hadn’t moved it. I could tell that she was concerned, that she really believed that someone must have taken it, but I chalked it up to her frame of mind. When we were married I had seen her do a lot of crazy things, like putting the ice cream away in the cupboard or pouring milk on her pancakes. I thought she’d probably find the book about two minutes after I walked out the door.

That’s why I went back over to her place last night. I
wanted to see if she had located it yet. When I arrived, Sarah’s car was in the driveway, but the house was dark. “Probably out somewhere with her undersecretary,” I told myself.

I went back to my apartment, had a few beers, watched the tube, and took a nap. There was no use calling her. She always let that damn answering machine pick up her calls, even when she was at home. So, a little before midnight, I drove back over to her place to see if she was there. The house was still dark. Either she was asleep or she was out somewhere.

I kept checking back throughout the night, but the story was always the same. Then, on my fifth swing past the house, I glanced up at the porch and saw that the front door was standing wide open.

No lights on in the house. Door open. No signs of life. Something was very wrong.

I got out of the car and crossed the street, pulling my 9 millimeter as I crept up the front steps.

I stood close to the doorway with my back against the front of the house and listened. Dead silence.

A quick glance around. The place seemed deserted, so I stepped inside.

I used to call it “Sarah’s museum”—a living room filled with antiques, books, and furniture that looked like it would shatter if you brushed against it. Plants to the right of the door, pictures on the wall to the left, and more antiques—small things—on a shelf next to the pictures. A strange, raucous song played softly on the tape machine. The place felt eerie, but that was nothing new.