'Don't apologize for them. They can change.'
'Many do. The ones that don't spend ugly lives wallowing through inner poisons and never seem to be happy or grow into anything remotely worthwhile. Their hate-diluted lives seem ample punishment for the venom they squirt into the world. Still, it's a damn shame on all sides.'
She thought for a moment, and pointed an elegant finger at a storefront bakery down the street. 'Grab a cup of coffee?'
We made introductions on the walk to the bakery. I learned Christell Olivet-Toliver was the editor and publisher of the News Beat I gave her my impressions without giving away too many of my facts.
'Let me get this straight,' she said, stirring sugar into steaming coffee. 'You're not totally convinced it was the white-power types last night?'
'I'm just saying immediately I start poking into the NewsBeafs personal ads you get burnt down. Coincidence fascinates me.'
She cocked an eyebrow. 'Is it the headless murders that you're investigating?'
'Without going into details, yes.'
'What do you need from me?'
'Basically, how the personals work.'
She cradled a ceramic mug in her violinist hands. 'Let's say you want to run an ad. All you do is write your ad, and e-mail it to the News Beat We assign your ad a code number and run it. If someone, let's say Muffy Duffy, wants to respond '
'I could never hit it off with someone named Muffy.'
She flipped a stir stick at me. 'Hortense goes to the personals section of our Web site and e-mails a response. Our computer system directs it to your assigned number.'
'How does one pay?'
'Our personals are like a club, there's a small fee both ways. Pay online, or mail a check or money order to our office.'
'Doesn't sound secure, especially using check or plastic.'
'There's no way the public can know who's placing an ad or responding.
People trust us, and we don't violate that trust.'
I wagged a skeptical finger. 'But computers will be computers; I'll bet somewhere in its innards is a record of the electronic addresses of the respondents. I imagine a tech type could dig them out.'
'Maybe. With a court order' she jabbed a long thumb at the charred building 'and the computer.'
'Everything's gone?'
She smiled sadly. 'Ashes to ashes and all that.'
So much for the personals. I switched gears. 'Anyone strange hanging around lately?'
'White-power types? Skinheads? Tattooed bubba boys. Like that? The other cops already asked me. I see weird characters all the time.'
'Anyone set off alarms?'
She tented her hands and her fingertips tapped together like butterfly wings drying in the sun. 'Just one little thing. Two days ago I saw a car parked across the street from the office. I had taken the trash out about a half hour earlier and I saw the same car going down the alley as well.'
'What kind of car?'
'A Jaguar. XJ series. With the three-seventy horsepower Super V-eight aad the long wheelbase.'
I gave her a look.
'Hey, even us tree-hugging, ball-busting, feminazi communist anarchists can dream.'
'Your titles on the paper's masthead?'
She sighed. 'From my mail.'
'How much did you see of the driver?'
'I only saw it side-on and it had the deep window tinting. Nothing.'
'Plates?'
'I looked at it for a half second and thought about it for two. Then something else grabbed my thoughts and…' Her hands made flyaway motions.
'You recalled the car because it's your dream machine?' 'Partly. But there's nothing across the street from us but a second-hand clothing shop and a busted-down Laundromat. The car didn't belong. It was just a tiny wrong note.'
Wrong note, wrong note… Ms. Olivet-Toliver's words echoed in my head all the rest of the day and on the way home. They pursued me through the stand-up fueling from a bowl of cold red beans and rice, and out to the deck, where I propped my feet on the rail. The sun was fading and several beachcombers sifted the surf with their little white nets.
Watching them sift, I slowly realized Abraham Lincoln's message: This case was discordant.
Discordant. The wrong notes, maybe. Or the right notes played incorrectly, something awry in timing or interpretation. I've always been attuned to discord, sensitized, perhaps, so that even slight akilters can be measured.
Something about this case had been out of true from the first moment I laid eyes upon the topless corpse of Jerrold Nelson. It was not so much the incongruity of the body lacking a head that tilted my psychic equilibrium, but rather the lack of expression in the crime or the scene. If the motive was, as Squill sold and resold at every opportunity, vengeance killing, where was the vengeance, the anger? Not in the textbook-precise removal of the head, nor the time-consuming inscriptions on the flesh. Both seemed more the work of a ghoulish accountant than a hate-charged spree killer or ritual-driven murderer.
And if so, where was the sense of spree, of abandonment to savage and wanton destruction?
The more I thought, the stronger my sense of dischord grew.
I grew up attuned to discord, my child's antennae sifting the air for the subtle vibrations that presaged violent change, much as seismologists use lasers and mirrors to measure hair's-breadth motion between mountains. We all want warning before the earthquake strikes.
I learned to want it more than most.
Truth be told, my first memory is of a kind of earthquake. I had no warning and no one outside of our house felt it. Though it was twenty-fours years ago, I remember the event with a clarity unmarred by time, perhaps even sharpened by its passage.
It's night. I rise from bed and walk in dreamlike detachment through a narrow gray corridor that seems to span miles. Ahead is a black square set into the wall that reaches to the sky. It is the hall of our house outside of Birmingham, and it is gray with moonlight through glass and the dark square is the doorway to my brother Jeremy's room. Screaming pours from the dark square.
I am six and my brother Jeremy is twelve.
I stand at the threshold and listen quietly, knowing somehow I must not enter. I need to visit the bathroom and, continuing down the hall, pass my mother's room. She is a seamstress specializing in wedding dresses. My mother sits at her sewing machine as white fabric flows through it like liquid. Her hands are motionless above the cloth and her eyes are focused on sewing. The high whine of the sewing machine mutes the grunts and shrieks from down the hall. A floorboard creaks beneath me and she turns. Her eyes are wide and wet and she speaks, not knowing that I will remember her words, keep them forever.
'I know it's wrong,' she hisses through clenched teeth. 'But he works so hard. He's a professional man, an engineer. Who would think that someone like me could marry an ' A scream slices down the hall like a scythe. My mother's brow furrows and for a moment her hands fly out of control like startled sparrows.
'And what could I ever do anyway?'
Mother contains her hands and turns back to her sewing but becomes still and her head droops. White fabric covers her lap like a deflated ghost. She whispers, Go back to bed, it will be quiet soon…
At an age when most children are learning to handle a bicycle, I became a student of the transformations that preceded these events, every two or so months at first, then with accelerating frequency. It seemed I could feel the air in the house charge with negative particles that gathered in force and intensity until discharging in a night of black lightning. I learned to take shelter at the first hint of the gathering storm, to hide in my treehouse in the woods, or in the backseat of the car at night. After the storm's passage I would seep back inside, antennae
