She looks around the legs of the desk and the chair but doesn't see the gun anywhere. One time in fifty the shooter will panic and drop the gun where he used it, but not this time. She looks down at the desk: two sips of coffee left in a cup, a brown apple core sitting on top of a book about Web design, sunglasses, another cup with pens and pencils in it. The chair has spun back and away from the desk, as if the stiff stood up too quickly. She tries to imagine how it happened:
No. He fell facing away from the door. He didn't turn. He was sitting, or standing, at the computer when he was shot. She shines the flashlight on the ceiling again, at a small hole in the drywall surrounded by spattered blood. Right above the desk. Why would he stay at his desk unless he knew the person coming in? Unless he was expecting him? Clark comes up behind the guy and -
But the angle is wrong. According to the blood and the wound, the angle of the shot is almost straight through the head, from the right side up. That means the killer had to come in the door, step to the right, and
Unless…
Great. She's inventing scenarios in which Clark Mason is innocent.
Finally, she crouches next to the body.
In the past she's had to search for fatal wounds, but this one is so obvious as to be gaudy: she traces with her flashlight a stark, bone-and-blood gorge running from the man's teeth to the top of his head. The wound on-ramps through his cheek, leaving a ghastly sneer where it uncovers his upper molars, then tunnels behind his cheekbone, bursts forth and takes his right eye, then goes underground again, a thick, straight, dark bruise beneath the dull putty of his forehead until it exits – volcanic, meaty – at the seam of his thinning hairline.
She looks up and shakes her head in sympathy.
The bottom side of the entry wound has a dark burn ring, meaning the gun was right against his head when Clark pulled the trigger. If it wasn't an accident, it was vicious and angry, unimaginable.
The phone number for the desk sergeant is still on her phone.
'Damn,' she says aloud. This is all going to get away from her the minute she makes the call. The process will take over. It always does. The place will crawl with cops. The lieutenant will want a briefing, the public information officer will want something for the vultures, the deputy ME will pronounce death (Aren't you being hasty? someone will joke), and the rubber-gloved evidence techs will come in like ants on a Popsicle, securing the crime scene, marking, collecting, and tagging evidence, dusting light switches and telephones and countertops and doorknobs, measuring indentations in the carpet, checking the driveway for tire tracks, the whole thing reduced to a series of photos and spatters and latent prints, too many people moving too fast, making misjudgments and bad decisions, disturbing Caroline's quiet measure of this thing.
Certainly the confession will become moot, a simple confirmation of what they already know, and not what Clark has promised. Meaning? Context? Forget it. There will only be one real question: Where's the gun? Motivation is a nice bow, but that's a package for someone else to wrap: reporters crafting stories, prosecutors choosing between first and second degree, judges reading mitigation reports. Cops don't care what a thing means. Or, more accurately, they don't believe it. They know there's only one reason this shit happens: somebody wanted. Sex, money, revenge, drugs, what does it matter? It's all the same. The first crime is the wanting.
The courts will need those details. What you wanted (motive), when you wanted it (premeditation), and how you went about getting it (mitigating factors) can make the difference between twenty years and life. And if you wanted something too much and too soon or too often, or went about getting it the wrong way, they might even put you to death. In Washington State, they used to be thoughtful enough to give you a choice: needle, juice, or rope. Needle would be harsh, confining, strapped down like that, a mockery of what that gurney is usually used for, medicated to a darkness that must feel nothing like sleep. But no matter how bad the needle, it's better than the juice. The juice scares her. There is a picture they used to show tight-lipped suspects, a picture from the late fifties of a guy in Georgia whose chair misfired, sparked, and caught, a guy who didn't die until his nuts and armpits burst into flame and he burned from the inside out.
Even so, for Caroline, nothing would be worse than the rope. And not for the reasons that death penalty opponents go on about – the pain and inhumanity of having your neck snap that way, the indignity of shitting and pissing your last moments away. No, what gets her is the fall. She hates those dreams, the ones in which her feet scramble for ground and it's just not there. To have that be her last conscious thought, falling like that – Jesus. That would be unbearable.
She looks down once more at the phone in her hand. She goes through a mental list of all the rules she's broken this weekend, from the minute Spivey told her to go home. Where does it lead? Finally she raises her thumb and hits the call button.
The desk sergeant's voice shakes her from her tired stupor. 'Spokane Police Department. Sergeant Kaye.'
'Dennis. It's Caroline Mabry.'
'I thought you were going home.'
'Actually, I went to interview a potential witness first, and I, uh-' She looks down at the stiff. 'I came across a DOA. Gunshot wound.'
'No shit. Suicide?'
'Not unless he ate the gun after.'
'Got you a homo-cide?'
'Looks like.'
'Make and model?'
'White male. Approximately thirty-five to forty. Headshot.'
'I'll get some units en route,' he asks. 'You want me to call Spivey?'
She shines her flashlight from the body to the chair and finally to the computer, where the screen saver has just shifted to a digital soldier holding out a sword, challenging her, preparing to run her through. The soldier fades, replaced by a drawing of pastureland, a rock fence, a flock of sheep, a castle in the distance, and the words EMPIRE: MORE THAN A GAME. Something about the screen saver sticks in her mind.
'Detective,' Sergeant Kaye says, 'did you want me to call Sergeant Spivey?'
'No,' she says. 'I already did.' It is a big lie, in cahoots with so many smaller ones this weekend. Who knows how much time it will buy? But that's all she wants now, a little more time before this whole thing gets away from her, a little more time for Clark before all of this comes down around him. She bends in closer to the computer and reads the scrolling message of the screen saver: EMPIRE, MAKE YOUR OWN RULES.
At home, her screen saver alternates pictures of mountains from the Northwest. The mountains are relentless; they don't care whether she's composing a sonnet or a grocery list or a suicide note. After five minutes, the mountains rise and cover everything, and the words recede into the black.
'What about your guy in the interview room?' asks Sergeant Kaye. 'Is he connected to the DOA? You want us to read him?'
And yet, she reminds herself, beneath the mountains nothing changes. The words are still there; all you have to do is touch a key and the screen comes alive.
'I don't know if he's connected,' Caroline says, measuring her words, the lies coming easier now. 'Put a guy on the door and I'll talk to him when I get back.' She gives Sergeant Kaye the address and hangs up the call. Then she turns off her phone.
Caroline takes a breath, leans over the keyboard, and uses her flashlight to press the space bar. The screen saver disappears and up comes an e-mail program. There is an open message in the inbox from [email protected].
Eli-
Don't do anything. I'm coming back there. Don't move. I need to talk to you.
