Hanging Time

stirring it with a plastic stick, as if somehow he could mix it enough to get it right.

Until last spring, when Emma was kidnapped and April Woo was the detective on the case, he had known next to nothing about the world of police and perpetrators. He read and wrote scholarly texts about the kinds of pathology that incapacitated people, not made them killers. He didn’t like sadistic films; he never read crime fiction. Now he was at the precinct again, this time studying photographs of what looked like two ritual killings the police wanted him to explain. Once again he felt out of his element.

During his career he had hospitalized and cared for very sick people. He had seen many kinds of tragedy. But dealing with many troubled people over the years, Jason had never felt personally touched by evil. Now he knew firsthand what it was like to have the most sadistic kind of madness directed right at someone he loved. He touched his hand to his forehead, as if to blot out the images in the photographs.

Sometimes the mysterious connectedness of disparate events overwhelmed him. Until last spring, the last thing he thought he’d ever do was to work with the police on a homicide case. Yet he had discovered over and over in his life that it was not possible to walk away from extraordinary events unchanged. Everything that happened opened a new door, a path to another dimension. He was not surprised that this kind of horror had found its way back to his door again, and unknowingly he had let it in.

“How is Camille’s boyfriend doing?” Jason asked.

“He’s in intensive care,” Sanchez answered. “It doesn’t look like he’ll be able to contribute much for a long time.”

“And you think a dog was at the murder scene?”

“We have evidence a dog was there,” April answered.

“Can you determine which dog it was by the hair sample you have?”

Sanchez shook his head. “No, but teeth are like fingerprints. No two sets are the same, even in animals. If the bite mark on Rachel Stark’s ankle matches the teeth of one of the dogs, we’ll have something.”

“But you don’t have both dogs yet.”

“No. We have Camille’s. She’ll have to give us permission to make a mold of the dog’s teeth.”

Jason kept shaking his head. He wasn’t sure of the ethics of this situation. Milicia was his patient. When he called Charles to put off their meeting, Charles indicated to him Milicia felt betrayed and would not speak to Jason again under any circumstances.

At the moment she was upstairs, refusing to say anything and demanding to see a lawyer. Camille and her dog had been brought in and were waiting in another room to see him.

Without thinking, Jason swallowed some of the cold, oversweetened coffee, trying to digest the situation. They had found the possessions of one of the murdered girls in Bouck’s basement. They had to establish whether or not Bouck ever dressed in Camille’s clothes, whether he took the dog out on his own. If he had any other hiding places, like for shoes and maybe a red wig. They needed to know if anybody else, like Milicia, had a key to Bouck’s building. They needed samples of Milicia’s and Camille’s handwriting to test against the guest book. They were looking for a blouse missing from The Last Mango.

The police needed Camille to answer all these questions for them, and they weren’t able to get anywhere with her asking her themselves. Great. Was he violating a patient’s confidentiality by interviewing her sister about the sister’s possible involvement in a couple of homicides? He looked at the crime-scene photos again, one by one. Again he thought it was a fine line, but he wouldn’t be crossing it.

He swallowed down the rest of the coffee. It was almost all milk and hardly tasted of coffee at all. Somehow being there he felt he was in the middle of a war. It occurred to him that it was always like this in a police station. A state of emergency every day. He pushed the pictures away.

April, seeing that he was finished, collected the pictures and all the material.

“How do you think she’d respond to a video camera?” she asked.

“I think it would be a terrible distraction. Do you really need it?” Jason was alarmed by the prospect of himself with a murder suspect on tape. “Isn’t the recorder enough?”

“She may not be competent to give her permission anyway,” Mike pointed out.

“Fine, we’ll go with the recorder. Are you ready?”

Jason tossed the coffee cup in the wastebasket. He noted that the basket had been emptied since the night before. Yes, he guessed he was ready.

70

Camille let the woman blue wall pet Puppy’s head on her second trip to the police station. The policewoman sat in the back seat with her. The other officer drove the car.

“That’s a cute dog,” the policewoman said.

It was okay to pet, but Camille wouldn’t let her take the dog in her arms. Just because she hadn’t let Milicia in the building didn’t mean she was all right. Camille was sure she was going to jail. She shivered uncontrollably. A vibration deep inside of her wouldn’t let up. It was coming true, just like Milicia said.

Whenever Bouck wrapped her up tight, buckled the straps so she couldn’t move, and put her in the room upstairs that was hers, he told her this would be her future if she didn’t have him to protect her. He told her that where she’d go, other people would own her body. They could touch her all the time, any way they wanted. And she wouldn’t be able to stop them.

Without Bouck to protect her, Camille was afraid even to breathe. Every time she inhaled, it felt like a gasp. Don’t let it happen again.

“What’s this, Milicia?” Camille was wearing their mother’s long black velvet dress with the lace top. It had a funny smell—sour vomit, sweet perfume, powder. The dress was so long, it trailed on the floor. Milicia said she looked stupid. The lipstick on Camille’s face was all crooked. She couldn’t seem to get it right. Then she saw the Tampax on the dressing table and picked it up.

Milicia laughed. “It’s for the bleeding, stupid. Don’t you know anything?”

Camille examined it, feeling the thin paper over hard cardboard tube. “What do you do with it?”

“Pull up that stupid dress and I’ll show you.”

“But I don’t have any blood.”

“You will.”

The blood on the floor in Bouck’s hall was a different color in the morning light. It had dried and didn’t smear anymore when Camille touched it. That morning after the police sent Milicia away, Camille squatted on the floor for a long time, tracing the dark spatters on the stairway and the wall. Bouck didn’t call. The vibration in her body made her sure he was dead, and she was starting to spin out of control.

He told her, “Guns are great.” Sometimes he held one of them between his legs while he watched her put on her clothes. Girl Dressing While Artist Watches. Just like a Renoir. He told her how to do it, sat in his chair with a gun on his lap, watching. Sometimes he groaned and made other noises, then said she was the one out of control. Made her take a pill, wrapped her up, and buckled her into herself so the furies were contained. Then he went out late at night, heavily armed with his guns, looking for a fight.

Camille could see a fight on the floor in the hallway. She could tell Bouck hadn’t won. He told her bullets came in light loads and heavy loads. Sometimes he took them out of their boxes to show her. Different kinds of bullets made different kinds of holes in the human body. Sometimes he let her hold one of the guns, but never when it had bullets in it. He was afraid she might shoot.

Guns weren’t so great. She touched the dried blood on the floor again, trying to connect it with Bouck. She couldn’t do it. The blood was like rust. It wasn’t alive anymore.

The blue wall in the front seat talked to the blue wall sitting beside her and Puppy in the back seat. Then the one in the front talked on the radio like a taxi driver.

More storm clouds gathered in Camille’s head. She didn’t listen to what they were saying.

In the police station, a different blue wall told her she could sit down at the table.