Kali looked suddenly deflated, as if she’d been left physically smaller when her excitement seeped out. “Is it time to go home now?”
Faye knew that their exciting afternoon had to be over sometime, but she was happy to be able to tell Kali that they weren’t finished quite yet. “Did you forget? The river.”
A short walk later, they were standing in Tom Lee Park, looking at a breathtaking amount of water fleeing to the Gulf of Mexico. Faye judged that it wasn’t quite a mile wide, but it was close. She knew that it carried a full load of the sediment that earned it the name “The Muddy Mississippi,” but it looked more blue than brown. From their vantage point on the bluff, the river looked almost peaceful. Ripples covered its surface, but they were so gentle that they gave no indication of the unimaginable power beneath.
Faye considered saying all of these things to Kali, but trimmed it back to one obvious statement. “I told you it was big.”
Then she showed Kali the monument to Tom Lee, an African-American man who had rescued thirty-two survivors of a wrecked steamboat in 1925 in his small boat, despite not knowing how to swim. They settled onto a bench nearby, taking a little time just to watch the river roll. Its elemental power led Faye’s thoughts to life and death. From there, they went straight to Frida.
The river put Faye in mind of Frida’s killer. It was deadly in and of itself. The river didn’t seize its victims out of hatred. They merely found themselves sucked into whirlpools because drowning people is what rivers do. Why was that her impression of the killer?
Maybe it was because Frida’s murder site seemed like an odd place for a woman to be killed out of passion. It was her impression that women who were killed by lovers died in their homes and at their jobs and as they went about their daily business. Frida’s ex-husband certainly knew her comings and goings, so it seemed like this would have been Linton’s approach. Mayfield, too, could easily know Frida’s routine. Faye had seen him strolling down her street just the day before.
If the murderer was Armand, then he had kept Frida out all night and killed her at the end of their date. If so, then the murder site made a strange kind of sense. Perhaps Frida had refused to invite him into her house and he had lost his temper, dragging her into the woods and killing her in a fit of rage. But how did that explain the carefully dug grave? Either it had been dug before he took Frida out or else he’d somehow acquired a shovel. Since he would have been physically dragging Frida to her fate, he couldn’t have had a shovel in his hand, so it would have had to have been waiting for him by the creek.
No matter what suspect she considered, the grave and the shovel that had dug it argued against a crime of passion. They argued for premeditated murder by someone who had already chosen the spot where he would bury her.
As someone who dug for a living and occasionally encountered buried bodies, Faye found that she couldn’t quit thinking about Frida’s meticulously dug grave, straight-sided and square-cornered. Those square corners spoke of murder committed by a cold-blooded someone who was simply doing what killers do. Faye believed to her core that Frida’s murderer had no more remorse than the Mississippi and he had no more of a soul. He was a man who was practiced at killing, a man who would jump at the chance to do it again.
She stretched an arm along the back of the bench. It didn’t touch Kali but it encircled her. Maybe her motive was to comfort Kali, but Faye felt more inclined to protect her. The river didn’t care much about what happened to little girls.
After a time, Kali squinted upriver at Mud Island, sitting well off the river’s east bank.
“It don’t look so far to that island. I got a lot of experience wading in the creek. I think I could walk there. What do you think, Faye?”
Faye started sputtering things like, “It’s farther than it looks,” and “Deep! It’s deep!” and “You can’t imagine what the currents are like,” until Kali started to laugh and couldn’t stop.
“I’m not stupid, Faye. You’re a real smart person, but you need to learn how to know a joke when you hear one,” she said. And then she laughed some more.
The disappearance of his prey was disorienting. It knocked his mind into an unfamiliar groove. Or perhaps the mounting panic wasn’t unfamiliar, but he had successfully held himself together for a long time. With occasional outpourings of fear and rage, he had managed himself quite well, and he was proud of it, but frustrations like these brought out the unwelcome thoughts. They brought out the voices. His father’s voice was a roaring thing that told him he was no good and never would be. His mother’s voice was a tenuous screaming that reminded him of the times his father wielded his belt on both mother and child.
His hands were shaking and that wasn’t good. He jammed them in his pockets and stood on Union Avenue, wondering where all the security cameras were.
A series of big potted streetside shrubs showed that the city had put some effort into beautification. He chose one and stood close, practically hugging it, while pretending to talk on his phone. Bush, phone, and hat would obscure his identity on surveillance videos and he liked that.
Where were they? He had asked the universe for a sign. When this opportunity had presented itself, he’d believed that the response had been, “Kill them both,” but maybe
