whatever outfit would use him. The mother, Suzanne, was a drunk and a meth addict-a whore, too, when she needed money for the drugs. Otherwise, she worked in the local Hoffman's department store from time to time.
The kids, Mary and Olivia, were thirteen and ten.
The neighbors said Mary took care of her little sister. She played mother to her, made sure she ate, made sure she got to school most days. She took Olivia to their room and hid there with her when the parents fought. The parents fought a lot, the neighbors said. Suzanne brought men to the house when her husband was out-long-haired, tattooed toughs in the drug trade. Charles suspected what was going on, and that's what started the fighting. The police had been called in once or twice to break it up.
No one was very surprised when Suzanne woke up dead one morning. She was supposed to go to work that day, and her girlfriend found her body when she came to pick her up. 'It was like a broken watermelon, her head; stuff all over the pillow,' the girlfriend told the papers. Everyone said it was shocking, but no one was very surprised.
The husband and daughters were thought missing at first. There was some talk about a drug deal gone sour, a kidnapping, and so on. But it turned out the girls were standing outside Olivia's elementary school, unharmed, waiting patiently for the doors to open. Their father had dropped them off there just before dawn. Then he'd driven away. The police found his pickup later that evening. He himself was never seen again. The children didn't seem to know what had happened.
Weiss gripped the wheel, peered into the night. The Taurus pushed through the spattering rain. Weiss thought about the Graves family, Charles and Suzanne, Mary and Olivia. After a while this thing happened to him, this thing that was always happening. He began to live through the story as if he were in someone else's mind. It was strange. It just came over him. It was part of that weird Weissian knack of his, that knack of knowing who people were, knowing what they would do. He found himself feeling his way through the past as if he had been there, as if he had been Charlie Graves-Charlie Graves who became Andy Bremer-an odd-jobbing lowlife who hammer-killed his junkie wife and became a prosperous churchgoing family man. Weiss could feel how the one kind of man always lived inside the other somehow, the family man lived inside the lowlife all along. Maybe Charlie Graves didn't know it at first. He married Suzanne and, at first, it was all right. But if Suzanne was anything like her half sister, she was a seething, vicious bitch. Savage to her husband, making fun of him when he was down. Smacking the kids around. Drunk, drugged. Bringing the tattooed drug dealers into her house and trading with them, a ride inside her for some booze, some coke, some meth. Charlie could've lived with it, maybe, Weiss felt. Lived with it or just skipped out and left it behind. But there was this other man inside him, this better man. And this man, this Andy Bremer, looked out through Charlie's eyes and saw his kids, his daughters. He saw the looks on their faces. He saw ashes and powder on the living-room rug and half-eaten food on the sofa. He smelled the sex stench of strangers, his wife's perfume. And those looks-even in his sleep, he saw those looks on the two girls' faces. It wasn't enough just to leave. He had to get free. He had to get them all free and he had no money and no place to go and he couldn't even think with the bitch screaming at him the minute he came through the door…
The rain thundered down on the Taurus and the thunder rolled and the desert lay invisible at every window. Weiss's right hand closed tight on the steering wheel, but he felt the wooden handle of the clawhammer in his hand.
Afterward, when the hammer slipped from his fingers, there would've been nothing left for Charlie Graves but the shabby reality of the thing: his wife's crushed skull, the brains on the pillow, the splayed female body, which he had known. And the girls, the two little girls, huddled together in one of their beds, clinging to each other against the horrible noises from the next room, wide-eyed when he opened the door and the wedge of light fell on them, on the looks on their faces…
By then Charlie Graves was gone, was dead, as dead as his wife. He had killed himself killing her. He went through the rest of it like an animated corpse. He hurried his daughters out of the house, drove them to the elementary school in the predawn dark, turning the steering wheel, pressing the pedals mechanically. He left them at the schoolhouse door with a monotone good-bye. And he drove away and kept driving, the life of Charlie Graves falling from him like rotten flesh with every mile, until he reached California and was Andy Bremer at last.
Weiss let him go. He turned in his mind back to the children. The two girls in the school doorway. Fatherless, motherless, alone. Mary took care of Olivia. She always had, that's how she was. Even later, even after she became the whore Julie Wyant, Weiss had heard she was still like that. She had an otherworldly air of tenderness about her-that's what made lonely middle-aged men fall in love with her, that and the otherworldly beauty of her face.
So she took care of Olivia. But then Olivia was taken away. The state, Child Protective Services, foster homes: the two girls were separated. That's why Mary Graves 'went bad, ran off,' as Adrienne Chalk put it. That's why she became the whore Julie Wyant. She needed to make enough money to save her sister from the system, take care of her, put her through school so she could become a counselor or psychologist or whatever she was. Julie would not have left her sister behind. She would've gone on taking care of her as long as she could. Weiss didn't know how he knew this, but he knew it.
And that's why he knew what he had to do.
He was coming to the end of his search. Olivia was out there. In Phoenix, up ahead, where the lightning touched down. It had taken Weiss and his instincts to get this close to her-that's why the killer had hung back till now, stayed out of it, trailed behind him like a cloud of dust. But now that she was found, the rest would be easy. If anyone knew where Julie was, Olivia did, her sister did. There was nothing to keep the specialist from questioning her himself.
Weiss gripped the wheel, peered through the windshield. Pushed the Taurus on through the downpour.
It was time to meet with him, to meet with the killer. There was no other way to protect Olivia. It was time to talk with the specialist face-to-face. Just as he had in his dreams last night. Just as he had in his nightmares.
He drove on. He crossed through the rain into Arizona. He thought about the Graves family. He thought about his dreams. He knew what he had to do.
He had to meet the Shadowman.
25.
In the morning Sissy stepped out of her building and found Bishop waiting for her. Later she would tell me what happened between them, and that would become part of the story. But for now I was standing at the window of her apartment, watching. I saw Bishop there, three stories below. He was sitting astride his motorcycle at the curb, idling in the no-parking zone just outside the door. He was wearing his aviator shades and his ironic smile. He had the collar of his leather jacket turned up. His helmet was hanging on the handlebars. His sandy hair moved in the biting wind that funneled up the narrow street behind him.
When I saw him, when I saw Sissy approach him, I felt a stab of what I thought was disapproval. It was easy to disapprove of Bishop after all he'd done. It was easy to tell yourself you were a better man than he was. But in my case, I don't really think it was disapproval at all. I think I was jealous of him. The words Emma had spoken to me hung from my heart like an anchor. I want a man I can look up to and admire. Don't come back until you are one. It was the harshest thing anyone had said to me in my young life, harsher still coming from her, whom I loved. I was jealous of Bishop because I couldn't imagine any woman ever saying anything like that to him. He treated women like toys. He treated almost everyone like garbage. He was violent and reckless, and he didn't give much of a damn about anything. But I could not imagine a woman saying to him what Emma had said, and whatever he had that made that true, I wanted to have it as well.
I told myself I disapproved of him, but that was a lie. I wanted to be more like him.
Anyway, that was me, upstairs, watching from the window. Down on Jackson Street, Bishop caught Sissy's eye. He lifted his chin to her. He waited while she walked toward him. She was wearing a long blue overcoat, a woolen cap with blue stripes. Like all her outfits, it was schoolgirl stuff. She wore leather gloves and kept her hands clasped in front of her. She got a frown on her lips when she saw Bishop, like a prim eight-year-old girl watching some boys get muddy.
