besides Anna Kat’s death that snapped her, including her family history and the long, cold winter. These didn’t help, in any case. Returning from work one evening, walking from the garage in the lengthening daylight, Davis noticed her digging in the backyard. After watching a minute, he saw she had already turned over most of the sod in the back, leaving two large rectangles of soil with a narrow walkway of grass separating them. She had to have been up to this for days.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Digging,” Jackie said, not unpleasantly.
Over the next month, she planted obsessively. Flowers and vegetables and even small trees filled the rectangles. To Davis, there seemed no order to it, but clearly there was in her mind. She had an electrician install a floodlight over the back deck, and before bed she would sit at the window in their room and stare down attentively, hand at her chin, as if the backyard were a giant chessboard. Sometimes she seemed pleased, but more often it made her despondent. “No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No!” she’d cry, punching herself just above the knee. Davis would ask her what was wrong and she’d be unable to say. He’d suggest, gently, that she should see a therapist if the garden was causing her so much stress. Then she’d seem all right for a couple of days, hardly mentioning the garden. Then she’d be back in the mud, in her black, knee-high pullover boots and her thick, striped gloves and her sunglasses and baseball cap.
In May, she dug it all up and started over, transferring the plants she could save and basically creating a mirror image of the original, flipping the entire thing on the axis of grass in the middle. Ultimately, she found this configuration even more offensive, and she dug it up again in July and again in September, and on the morning of the first, unexpected frost in early November, Davis found her on the kitchen floor, arms around her knees, sobbing.
The psychiatrist (too late for a psychologist, Davis said) prescribed antidepressants and they seemed to help through the winter. She still seemed cold to Davis, but of course she could have been exacting retribution for the weeks and months he had ignored her when she was calling out to him in the semaphore of odd behavior.
Just before Christmas, almost a year after Anna Kat had been taken from them, Davis asked the detective if the police would return their daughter’s things when they no longer needed them for evidence. Later, wondering why he asked, he supposed he felt helpless, maddened by the investigative inertia. For God’s sake, somebody, do something! Pull Anna Kat’s clothes from the evidence room! Examine the bloodstains. Maybe for ten minutes, you’ll be thinking about her.
Jackie’s therapist suggested she return to the garden in the spring. Her attitude toward it would be some measure of her improvement, a yardstick by which the doctor could adjust the dose as well as the combinations of medicine, psychiatric pharmacology being an inexact science, she told them (Davis managed to hold back a sarcastic reply). Jackie still spent most of her days there, but she seemed to enjoy it. June came and went and she hadn’t replanted even a single bulb.
In his basement office, Davis kept binders and files with notes about his family history. At the Kane County flea market he bought an old library card catalog for $325 (haggled down from $380), and he flipped over the yellowed bibliographic three-by-fives, filling the blank backs of the cards with information about twenty-seven hundred close and distant relatives. Davis had ancestors fighting in every war back to the Revolution, and long-ago uncles who farmed six of the thirteen colonies. He had a grandfather’s grandparents who traveled the world by chartered sail, and great-great-great-greats who never dared a day’s walk from the pile of dirty blankets in which they’d been born. He had relations in silent movies, aunts who’d written children’s books, and in this room he made connections between them – lines drawn from every twice-removed to every in-law to every stepdaughter and illegitimate son. Six different branches of his family tree grew like ivy across the blue walls, and in their comforting shade he trapped himself for hours and hours and hours. More than that since AK’s murder.
Davis had a distant cousin (for lack of a more descriptive phrase) who had been an outlaw in Missouri. None of his dead relatives fascinated him more, although information on Will Denny’s life was hard to come by, and what there was of it was at best half legend. Even his exact position on the Moore family tree was in doubt. Denny sardonically referred to himself in letters as a filius populi, a legal euphemism literally meaning “son of the people,” and used by courts and churches and genealogists in place of the more colloquial “bastard.” Denny’s mother was Davis’s great-aunt several times over, but the name of his father was a mystery, and Davis had long conceded that the statute of limitations had run out on the solution.
Through persistence and the Internet, Davis found a collector in Saint Louis who owned a photo of Denny, taken toward the end of his life. The collector allowed Davis to copy it, and the grainy, glossy reproduction hung in a frame by the door in the basement office. Silver-haired Will Denny grinned out from his daguerreotype. He wore an expensive high-collared suit, a carefree old-timer of sixty years or so with plenty of money and the freedom to spend it on stud poker and liquor and whores. His hands were thick, and his face used and pale and friendly. Davis always imagined a boisterous crew of associates just outside the frame that day – hangers-on, apostles, some drunk. Denny posed with a black tie, a long rifle, a muscular dog, and a new hat hanging on the high back of his chair.
Staring at it these days, Davis found it difficult to embrace the romantic myths he once held about his outlaw cousin. Denny, a fugitive for most of his life, seemed to have too much in common now with the faceless beast who had swallowed Davis’s daughter.
He had often wondered what people in Will Denny’s time – good, moral people, not criminals – would think of the work Davis did at the clinic, if you could make them even imagine it.
But now he wondered what Denny would do, if a devil had done to his daughter what a devil had done to Anna Kat.
If you could make Denny even imagine it.
– 12 -
Eighteen months after the murder, the detective told Davis (still calling twice a week) that he could pick up Anna Kat’s things. “This doesn’t mean we’re giving up,” he said. “We have the evidence photographed, the DNA scanned. Phone ahead and we’ll have them ready.” Like a pizza, Davis thought.
“I don’t want to see them,” Jackie said.
“You don’t have to,” he told her.
“Will you burn the clothes?” He promised he would.
“Will they ever find him, Dave?” He shook his head, shrugged, and shook his head again.
He imagined a big room with rows of shelves holding boxes of carpet fibers and photos and handwriting samples and taped confessions, evidence enough to convict half the North Shore of something or other. He thought there would be a window and, behind it, a chunky and gray flatfoot who would spin a clipboard in front of him and bark, “Shine heah. By numbah fouwa.” Instead, he sat at the detective’s desk and the parcel was brought to him with condolences, wrapped in brown paper and tied with fraying twine.
He took it to his office at the clinic, closed the door, and cut the string with a pair of long-handled stainless steel surgical scissors. The brown postal paper flattened into a square in the center of his desk, and he put his hands on top of the pile of clothes, folded but unwashed. He picked up her blouse and examined the dried stains, both blood and the other kind. Her jeans had been knifed and torn from her body, ripped from the zipper through the crotch and halfway down the seams. Her panties were torn. Watch, ring, earrings, gold chain (broken), anklet. There were shoes, black and low-heeled, which they must have found near the body. With a shudder, Davis remembered those bare mannequin feet.
There was something else, too.
Inside one of the shoes: a small plastic vial, rubber-stoppered and sealed with tape. A narrow sticker ran down the side with Anna Kat’s name and a bar code and the letters UNSUB written in blue marker, along with numbers and notations Davis couldn’t decipher. “UNSUB,” he knew, stood for “unidentified subject,” which was the closest thing he had to a name for his enemy.
He recognized the contents, however, even in such a small quantity.
It was the milky-white fuel of his practice, swabbed and suctioned from inside his daughter’s body. A portion had been tested, no doubt – DNA mapped – and the excess stored here with the rest of the meager evidence.
