The conversation was brief. He voiced formulaic words of sympathy; then he asked Leila Dollie if she had ever met Mrs. Hill. Yes, she had met Susan Hill, more than once. Two Susans? The coincidence count was higher than in a cheap paperback.
He wanted to know if she was close to a computer with e-mail. She was. He e-mailed her a JPEG of Susan Ford’s mug shots from his laptop. She received and opened the mail while he was still on the line.
“That’s Mrs. Hill,” said Leila Dollie. She sounded confused. “Does this have something to do with my mother’s death?”
Deep in his gut Zondi knew that it did. He just didn’t know what.
“No, we’re running a background check on the Hills.” He was ready to end the call when he tried one more question. “You don’t perhaps know where I could find Mrs. Hill, do you?”
“Well, the last I heard she was at Gardens Clinic.”
“She’s sick?”
“No, she’s about to have a baby.”
Zondi thanked her and sat there in the car, his mind alive with loose ends like snakes fleeing a mountain fire.
Susan Burn lay on the bed in the delivery room, being prepared for the cesarean section. Her gynecologist, a sandy-haired man in his forties who had worked as hard on his bedside manner as his golf game, was clearly used to dealing with a succession of mothers-to-be for whom the cosmetic risk of the cesarean section was the major issue. In a city of beaches and health clubs, an abdomen that looked like an early Frankenstein movie wasn’t desirable.
He started going into detail about how the lower midline abdominal incision-the bikini cut-would heal, leaving nothing but a hairline scar, which, with the diligent application of tissue oil, would disappear completely.
This was the last thing on her mind, but she nodded appreciatively.
Then the anesthetist arrived to do the epidural. Susan had asked to be awake during the cesarean; even though she wasn’t going to push the baby out the way she had Matt, she still wanted to witness that first moment of her daughter’s life.
The anesthetist was beefy, with hands like a plumber, but he proved to be gentle and reassuring. He asked her to roll onto her side and lifted her smock. He rubbed anesthetic liquid on her lower spine and then inserted a very fine needle. All the while he was humming a tune. Susan eventually recognized it as the old Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” She almost laughed but stopped herself, frightened that the needle would snap in her spine.
When the anesthetic started to numb her skin, the humming man approached with a much larger and more intimidating needle. Susan closed her eyes, and she allowed herself to remember when her daughter had been conceived.
It had been after the gambling trouble, as it had become known by her and Jack. After he had come clean, fessed up, she’d allowed him to whisk her off for a weekend to a hut in the Sierras. Just the two of them, Matt left behind in the care of her sister.
It had been an idyllic weekend. Hiking during the hot days, lying in front of a fire as the coolness of the night crept into the hut. They had made love in front of the fire. It was corny, cheesily romantic, and she had loved every minute of it. And she’d loved Jack more than she ever had. She’d opened her heart to him again, and that was the night they made this child.
When they went down the mountain, back to the sprawl of L.A. below, she felt a renewed optimism. Okay, so a bad thing had happened. But they had worked it out. They had cut the cancer from their lives and healed their marriage.
All was well.
Of course he had gambled again. And then came Milwaukee and that terrifying phone call when he demanded that she and Matt meet him in Florida. She had heard something in his voice that made it impossible to argue. So she’d dropped the dog off with her sister and driven with her son to the airport.
They never went home again.
Life became a succession of transit lounges and passports doled out like playing cards, the man she’d married becoming as strange as the names that stared up at her from the fake passports.
The anesthetist was trickling the anesthetic into her spine. There was a moment when the catheter touched a nerve and produced a brief tingling sensation down one leg; then she felt a not unpleasant numbness from the waist down.
There was something reassuring in handing herself over to this process, suspending her own volition, letting others chart the course.
She allowed herself to enjoy this lull. She knew that it wouldn’t last for long.
They were deep in the Flats now, driving into Paradise Park. Benny Mongrel reached over the back of the seat once again and lifted the blanket off Barnard. His breathing was shallow and labored, but he was still alive.
Benny Mongrel was a connoisseur of pain. As others in the Cape could roll a glass of wine over their tongue and wax lyrical about its provenance and subtlety, so he knew exactly how to appreciate the effects of the pain he was administering.
And he knew that he had caused the fat man more pain than any of his other victims. Even if the results, initially at least, were less dire than some of his previous exercises. The fat cop’s limbs were still connected to his torso, his tongue still lay in his mouth, and his organs were still encased by muscle, fat, and skin. But the relentless insertion of the wrapped blade, piercing each layer of epidermis, moving through subcutaneous fat and flesh, finding nerve ends and connective tissue, had built to a greater symphony of pain than he had ever inflicted on any one body.
The fat man had taken it for an extraordinary amount of time. It had amazed Benny Mongrel. Looking at Barnard, he’d made the quick assessment that, stripped of his badge and his gun, he was nothing but an overgrown fat boy with no spine. He’d expected him to talk as soon as he was shown the blade. But each time the duct tape was pulled from his face, the fat cop had repeated the same two words, fuck youse, as if they were a prayer.
Then the fat man had seemed to pass over into a world not quite connected with the brutal reality of Burn’s garage. He closed his eyes. He spoke a name or two, then gave voice to a babble that sounded to Benny Mongrel like the crap that some of the happy-clappys in prison had produced when talking to their gods.
That’s when Benny Mongrel had thought that he had lost him, that whatever information the fat man had about the missing white boy was gone forever. Benny Mongrel had been ready to unwrap the blade and draw it, once and for all, across that fat throat. Let the American do what he liked. But one of those eyes, like a fly in a plate of prison porridge, had flickered open and fixed itself on Benny Mongrel. And the voice had wheezed out of the chest like the last gasp of a cheap accordion.
“You wanna boy?” It took Benny Mongrel a moment to understand. Then he nodded. “Then I’ll tell you. Jus’ to shut them up.”
“Who?”
“The dead fuckers.”
Barnard had given him an address in Paradise Park. Benny Mongrel knew the ghetto block; he had once killed a man in one of those cramped apartments on Tulip Street. Remembered it well as Burn stopped the Ford in the shadow of a wall with thug life sprayed across it.
Benny Mongrel wasn’t completely sure why he’d even agreed to come on this trip. He could’ve finished things in the garage and walked away. But no, he was here. Maybe this was how things were meant to end. He had started it, and now he had to see it through.
As he was about to get out of the car, Burn passed him the. 38. Benny Mongrel shook his head. He had no use for gunut Burn thrust it at him. “Take it.”
Benny Mongrel checked that the safety was on and jammed it into the belt of his jeans. Then he opened the rear door of the Ford and aimed a kick at the shape that lay on the seat like a beached and bloodied whale.
The three men walked up the stairs. The watchman went first, then Barnard, stumbling, still wrapped in the blanket. Burn brought up the rear. He held the Mossberg close to his leg, hiding it as best he could. Barnard was mumbling, delirious, his great body racked by bouts of shivering. His boots left bloody footprints on the stairs that stank of piss.
They came to a corridor, open to the wind, which chose that moment to gust and blind them with a blast of
