'Yes? Sure. But…'
'But at night, he can become himself.'
Peter spoke first, his voice filled with a kind of admiration. 'So,' he said with a little laugh, 'it turns out that just as I suspected, C-Bird sees.'
Francis shrugged a little and smiled, thinking that he was getting a compliment and recognizing in some deep and unfamiliar recess that he had very rarely ever been paid any sort of compliment during any of his twenty-one years on the planet. Criticism, complaints, and underscoring his obvious and persistent inadequacy had been what he had known on a pretty steady basis up to that point. Peter leaned across and gave him a little punch on the arm. 'You're going to make a terrific cop yet, Francis,' he said. 'A little odd- looking, perhaps, but a dandy one, nevertheless. We'll need to get you a bit more of an Irish brogue, and a much bigger stomach and puffy red cheeks and a nightstick to swing around and a penchant for doughnuts. No, an addiction to doughnuts. But we'll get you there, sooner or later.'
Then he turned to Lucy, and said, 'This gives me an idea.'
She, too, was smiling, because, Francis thought, it wasn't hard to find the absurd portrait of the irrepressibly skinny Francis as the burly beat cop fairly amusing. 'An idea would be good, Peter,' she said in reply. 'An idea would be excellent.'
Peter remained quiet, but for a moment he moved his hand in front of him, like a conductor in front of a symphony, or perhaps a mathematician trying out a formula in the air in front of him, lacking a blackboard on which to scribble numbers and equations. Then he pulled up a chair, reversing it, so that he was sitting backward on it, which, Francis thought, gave his posture and his ideas some urgency, as he spoke.
'We have no physical evidence, right? So that's not a road we can take. And we have no help, especially from the local cops who processed the crime scene, investigated the murder, and arrested Lanky, right?'
'Right,' Lucy said. 'Right. And right again.'
'And we don't really believe, despite what Gulp-a-pill and Mister Evil have said, that they're gonna help much, right?'
'Right again. I think it's clear that they're probably trying to decide what approach creates the least problem.'
'True. Not hard to picture the two of them sitting in Gulp-a-pill's office, with Miss Luscious taking notes, doping out the least amount they can do to cover their butts in every conceivable direction. So, in fact, we don't have much going for us right now. In particular, an obvious and fruitful starting point.'
Peter was alive with ideas. Francis could see him electric.
'What is any investigation?' he said rhetorically, looking squarely at Lucy. 'I've done them, you've done them. We take this solid, stolid, sturdy, determined approach. Collect this bit of evidence and add it to that. Build a picture of the crime brick by brick. Every detail of a crime, from inception to conclusion, gets fit into a rational framework to provide an answer. Isn't that what they taught you in the prosecutor's office? So that the steady accumulation of provable items eliminates everyone except the suspect? Those are the rules, right?'
'I know that. You know that. But your point, exactly, is what?'
'What makes you think the Angel doesn't know that, too?'
'Okay. Yes. Probably. And?'
'So, what we need to do is turn everything upside down.'
Lucy looked a little askance. But Francis saw what Peter was driving at.
'What he's saying,' Francis said carefully, 'is we shouldn't play by any rules.'
Peter nodded. 'Here we are, in this mad place, and you know what will be impossible, Lucy?'
She didn't reply.
'What will be impossible is if we try to impose the reasonableness and the organization of the outside world in here. This place is mad, so what we need is an investigation that reflects the world here. One that fits. Tailor what we do to the place we're in. When in Rome, so to speak.'
'And what would be the first step?' Lucy asked. It was clear that she was willing to listen, but not sign on immediately.
'Exactly what you imagined,' Peter said. 'We interrogate people. You question them in here. Start out all nice and official and by the book. And then turn up the pressure. Accuse people unreasonably. Misrepresent what they say. Turn their paranoia back on top of them. Do as much wrong and irresponsible and outrageous as you can. Unsettle everyone. It will make this place stand on its ear. And the more that we disrupt the ordinary process of this hospital, the less likely the Angel will feel safe.'
Lucy nodded. 'It's a plan. Maybe not much of one, but it's a plan. Although I can't see Gulptilil going along with it.'
'Screw him,' Peter said. 'Of course he won't. And neither will Mister Evil. But don't let that stand in your way.'
She seemed to think hard for a moment, then laughed. 'Why not?' And then she turned to Francis. 'They won't let Peter in on any questioning I do. Too much baggage comes with him. But you're different, Francis. I think you should be the one to sit in. It'll be you and Evans or the big round doctor, himself, because he's demanding someone be there, and those are the ground rules that Gulptilil set. We create enough smoke, and maybe we'll see some fire.'
No one, of course, saw what Francis saw, which were the dangers in this approach. But he kept quiet, shushed all the voices within him who were nervous and filled with doubts, and simply bent his shoulders to the course that was created.
Sometimes in the spring, after I'd been released from the Western State Hospital and after I'd settled into my little town, when I went up to the fish ladder to my job helping out the wildlife agency counting returning salmon, I would spot the silvery, shimmering shadows of fish and wonder whether they understood that the act of returning to the place where they were spawned, in order to renew the cycle of existence, was going to cost them their lives. With my notebook in hand, I counted fish, often fighting off the urge to warn them somehow. I wondered whether they had some deep, genetic impulse that informed them that returning home would kill them, or whether it was all a deception that they willingly went along with, the desire to mate being so strong that it covered up the inevitability of death. Or were they like soldiers, given an impossible and obviously fatal command, who decide that sacrifice is more important than life?
My hand would shake, sometimes, as I made marks on my counting sheet. So much death passing by in front of me. We get it all wrong, sometimes. That which seems filled with danger, like the great wide ocean, is actually safe. That which is familiar and recognized, like home, is in truth far more threatening.
Light seemed to fade around me, and I stepped back from the wall, over to the living room window. I could feel the room behind me crowding with memories. There was an evening breeze, just a small breath of warmth. We are all defined by the dark, I thought. Anyone can portray anything in the daylight. But it is only at night, after the world has closed in, that our true selves come out.
I could no longer tell whether I was exhausted or not. Lifting my eyes, I surveyed the room. It was interesting to me to see myself alone and knowing that it wouldn't last. They would all crowd in on me, sooner or later. And the Angel would be back. I shook my head.
Lucy, I remembered abruptly, had drawn up a list of nearly seventy-five names. Those were the men she wanted to see.
Lucy drew up a list of some seventy-five inmates from throughout the Western State Hospital that seemed to have the potential for killing within them. They were all men who had shown overt hostility toward women, whether it was blows thrown in a domestic-type dispute, threatening language, or obsessive behavior, where they had focused on a female neighbor or family member, and blamed them for their madness. She still secretly clung to the notion that the murders were, at their core, sex crimes. The current thinking in the criminal justice world was that all sex crimes were crimes of violence first, and sexual release a distant second. It didn't make sense to her to discard everything that she had learned from the moment she had been victimized
