Land Of The Blind

The Loon flexes and unflexes the fingers on his right hand. 'Well, not completely, no. But the preliminary part, the setup, you know – the key people. The hard part is done. The context and explanation.' He pats the legal pad. 'It's all here. All that's left is the details. The recent stuff.'

Caroline doesn't quite know what to say. She sits across from him. 'Look, I'm sorry, but I can't just sit here all weekend while you work through…' She flips the yellow pages of the legal pad. '… whatever you're working through here. I know this is important to you, but I'm not even supposed to be at work right now.'

When he doesn't say anything, she keeps talking. 'My sergeant said I've got to send you home. They won't even pay me for this. I'm supposed to be at home. Sleeping.'

He just stares.

'See, this isn't how it works.'

'I'm sorry, Caroline. I'll get right to it, now. I promise. Thirty minutes.'

'No,' she says. 'You're going to just have to tell me what all this is about.'

'I am,' he says, and he pats the legal pad. 'I am trying to tell you what all this is about.' He pulls the patch away and rubs his left eye, but the movement is so fast she can't quite see what the patch is hiding. 'It's in here. I'm coming clean.'

'I think maybe you need a doctor.'

'No,' he says. 'I'm not crazy. Please. You'll see. Just stay with me here a little bit longer. We've gone this far. Look, if you go home now, I might just drop the whole thing. I know I will. And no one will never know what happened.'

He scratches his head and thick waves of hair fall forward, covering the strap to his eye patch for a moment, until he pulls his hand away and the hair falls back, more or less into place. 'Please,' he whispers. 'Help me get this one thing right. I've made a mess of everything else, but this one thing… Please.'

'I can't.'

'Please.'

'No.'

'Please.'

She looks around the room. 'You have to give me something in return.'

'Like what?'

'I don't know. A name.'

'My name?'

'That'd be a start.'

He thinks it over. 'I can't. Not yet. You'll contact my friends and family and when this gets out…' He shakes his head.

'Then the victim. The person…' She thinks about the tentativeness of his phrasing earlier. 'The person you… did this to.'

He covers his mouth and lines form around his good eye.

'Look,' Caroline says, 'you should know that this is a complete violation of how I'm supposed to do my job.' She's leery of admitting as much to him, but she keeps talking. 'I'm trusting you here. I need to know this isn't bullshit.'

'I'm afraid… it'll get away from me. I'm not ready. Not yet.' He looks down at the legal pads in front of him. 'Not until I'm done.'

'I won't do anything with the name. I'll sit on it until you finish.'

'You won't do anything?'

'No.'

'I can trust you?'

'You can,' she says without thinking about it.

He reaches out and takes her hand. His hand is big and warm and she lets her hand be enveloped; it's been a while. 'Really?' he asks. 'I can trust you?'

'Yes,' she says, and it's true.

He lets go of her hand, sits back in his chair, and stares at her until she feels her own face drift away and he is staring at some point beyond her. 'Pete,' he says.

'Pete.'

'Pete Decker. His name is Pete Decker. The man I… the man who…'

'Decker.' She lets a moment pass, but he doesn't say any more. 'Okay. Pete Decker. That wasn't so hard, was it?'

'No,' he says. 'It wasn't.'

2

THE TRUTH HURTS

The truth hurts only if you're comforted by lies. That's what Caroline has always believed. She doesn't spend much time deluding herself: believing there is a reason things happen, that Mr. Right will come along, that people will change. She wonders, Is this me – this unleavened cynicism – or is it the job? Could be the job. You have to be a realist to be a cop, otherwise, the shit you see… it blackens your heart.

After Rae-Lynn Pierce died, Caroline forgot that for a few days. She went around re-creating Rae-Lynn's last six weeks, hoping she'd find some meaning there. Maybe Rae-Lynn had saved some child's life. Or reconciled with her family. Six weeks. Forty-two days – six of them spent in drug rehab, before she walked away from that; the rest spent on the street, getting high and fucking strangers for money to get high. Her two-year-old daughter was taken away during those six weeks, and a few days later Rae-Lynn was arrested for soliciting. She spent the night in jail, and four days after that she was found dead, curled around a warm-water drainpipe in an alley behind a Thai restaurant.

No, it was better not to know. Otherwise you find yourself staring at people on the street, wondering when you might attend their deaths. She's tried to joke about it, slough it off, duck behind her old shield of cynicism, but she lacks the strength to hoist that defense, as if the weight of her old self is too much to bear.

Maybe that's why she's letting herself be drawn in now, because this Loon's case is still theoretical and clean, a totally hypothetical crime – the idea of homicide, the idea of confession, of contrition and punishment. Usually this job begins and ends with the corpse: its rigor and stench, hypostatic pools, smallness of an unanimated body. But with no body…

D-E-C-K-E-R, P-E-T-E. She types the letters into the computer to check against local and national crime databases. It occurred to her that the Loon might be lying as soon as he gave her the name, but she could also see that the name Pete Decker wasn't random, that it had meaning, and she could see the Loon was giving her something, and that's all she wanted, she sees now, some excuse to keep listening, to allow the Loon to keep writing. Or maybe to keep from going home. Maybe he could've given her any name and she would've left satisfied that she wasn't being taken in by this guy, that she wasn't being seduced by his line of confession and trust, by the misery in his right eye and the mystery of his left. She wonders for a moment if the Loon's name might not be Pete Decker, but she doesn't think so. He didn't say it that way, not the way you'd say your own name, but like a name that had been in your head for some time, one that you didn't say aloud very often. Like an incantation or a name chanted at a sйance. Like someone you've killed.

On her computer screen, Peter Ralph Decker's Greatest Hits scroll down in front of her: petty theft; auto theft; battery; second robbery; a whole range of assaults – third, second, and first, employing everything from his fists to a roofer's nail gun; two DUI's, two possessions – one with intent to deliver; four probation violations; two noncompliance findings, and a couple of protection orders. And that's just as an adult. He has a nine-count juvenile record that she doesn't even bother with. By her count, he's spent fourteen of the last nineteen years in some kind of correctional facility.

She checks to see if Pete Decker is in the can even now. He's not. In fact, he's just finished his longest stretch – four years on the possession with intent to deliver. She reads the details. Stupid bastard had only been out of