“I didn’t. You just showed up.”
“Then thanks for not kicking me out.”
“I haven’t had the chance to kick you out. I still might.”
It’s the first time I’ve smiled in weeks. Books looks great. Fit and relaxed. Happy. The jerk. Isn’t he supposed to be miserable after our breakup?
“Are you still a coffee snob?” I ask.
Now he smiles, a little, grudgingly. Lots of memories there. Even on a government employee’s salary, he always sprang for the good stuff, ordering Italian beans over the Internet. “Of course,” he says. “Are you still a neurotic pain in the ass with a big heart?”
That’s a fair assessment. Books knows me better than anybody. Still, the small talk between us is awkward, forced. I might as well cut to the chase.
“I need your help,” I tell him.
6
“NO,” BOOKS says, shaking his head furiously. “No way, Em.”
“I want you to hear me out on this one, Books.”
“No, thanks.”
“You’ve never heard anything like this.”
“As I said, or think I said out loud, no thank—”
“This one gets my vote as the most evil prick in the entire history of the world. I’m not exaggerating for effect, Books.”
“I’m not interested. I’m not. I’m not,” he repeats, as if trying to convince himself.
We’re in the warehouse next to his store, surrounded by books stacked on tables or sorted on shelves. I found a small space on one of the tables, where I stacked up fifty-three case files for his review. “It’s all right there,” I say. “Just read it.”
Books runs a hand through his sandy hair. It’s longer these days, bangs hanging over his forehead and curls in the back, now that he’s a private citizen. He paces in a circle while he collects his thoughts.
“I don’t work for the Bureau anymore,” he says.
“You could come back for this,” I answer. “They never wanted you to leave.”
“This is more an ATF assignment, anyway—”
“Then we’ll do a joint task force—”
“This is not my problem, Em!” He swipes at a table and knocks a stack of paperbacks to the floor. “You know how hard this is for me, to have you suddenly show up like this? And to ask me for help? This isn’t fair.” He jabs a finger at me. “This is not fair.”
He’s right. It’s not fair. But this isn’t about fair.
Books stands there for about two minutes, hands on his hips, shaking his head. Then he looks over at me. “Dickinson shut you down?”
“Yes, but not on merit. He never even read the files. You know the Dick.”
Books allows for that. “And did you tell him why you care about this?” he asks.
“It’s obvious why I care. A man is killing—”
“That’s not what I mean, Em, and you know it.” He walks toward me now. “Does Dickinson know that your sister died in a fire of suspicious origin eight months ago in Peoria, Arizona?”
“That has nothing to do with this.”
“Ha!” A mock laugh, hands flying up. “This has nothing to do with it!”
“It doesn’t. Whether my sister was one of the victims or not doesn’t change the fact that a serial—”
Books doesn’t want to hear it. He waves me off, la-la-la-I’m-not-listening.
“Emmy, I’m sorry about Marta. You know I am. But—”
“If you’re sorry, then you’ll help me.” As soon as I say the words, even I realize I’ve crossed a line. Books has moved on with his life. He’s done being a special agent. He sells books for a living now.
I put up my hands. “Strike that last comment,” I say. “I shouldn’t have come here, Books. I’m…I’m sorry.”
I walk out the same way I came in, without a word from my former fiancé.
7
* * *
“Graham Session”
Recording # 2
August 22, 2012
* * *
I love the smell of fresh flowers in the evening. It’s such a summer-unique smell, isn’t it? It makes this whole bedroom feel…what’s the word…new. New and fresh. Fresh paint on the walls, pink with lemon accents. That bed is new, too, a queen-size bed with an old-fashioned canopy—is that like what you had when you were a little girl, Joelle? Was this a congratulatory present from Mom and Dad on the new townhouse, the new start on life?
Oh, never mind. I’m afraid Joelle can’t talk right now.
The rest of this is positively quaint. The antique vanity, probably dusted off and hauled up from the parents’ basement. A nice reading chair. Best of all, the makeshift nightstand, straight out of a college dorm room, two milk crates stacked, with a small alarm clock and that vase of fresh lilies.
A girl on a budget, with some taste but not yet the money to showcase it. A starter townhouse for a girl starting a professional life.
I wish I could take a picture of this room and show it to you, because this, right here, is the essence of America, the essence of hope, of starting small but dreaming big things. Joelle Swanson had grand plans. She dreamed of taking her criminal justice degree and becoming a big crime-fighter, maybe first a cop but someday the FBI or even the covert world of the CIA. Impressive stuff. Big things!
Anyway, I’d like to take a photograph for you, but I don’t see how that will work later, how it would fit in with my narrative. I’d be too afraid you’d look at the pictures and ignore my words. I’m sure a psychiatrist would say that I limit these sessions to my oral testimony because I want to control every aspect of it; I only want you to know what I let you know, to see what I let you see.
It’s true that this mode of communication has its limitations. You can’t smell what I smell, that palpable odor pumped out through the glistening sweat on their skin. You can’t see that desperate terror, the dilated pupils, quivering lips, the sheet-white color their skin turns when they realize that their worst nightmare has come true. You can’t hear the sounds of a plaintive cry, a weepy, panicked, breathless plea forced out through a full throat. You simply cannot experience what I’m feeling.
So I will do my best to help you. I will do my best to teach you.
[Editor’s note: sounds of a woman coughing in the background.]
Oh, look who’s waking up. I guess that means I have to bid you adieu.
Hmmm. I wonder if this is too much, too fast with you. Maybe you need to get to know me better first, before I let you see what I do up close like this. Maybe I need to dance cheek to cheek with you first, wine-and-dine you, tell you some anecdotes, show you what I find funny and scary, my likes and dislikes.
Maybe I should tell you why I do what I do.
Why I pick who I pick.
Why I’m so damn good at it.
I have so many things to tell you. But let’s take this slowly. We’ll get there. By the time I’m done, you’re going to understand me. You’re going to find common ground with me.
Heck, you may even like me.
And some of you will want to be me.
[END]
8
I POP awake, gasping for air, the dancing flames on the ceiling receding to a dark, quiet room. I wipe sweat from my eyes with the comforter and shake away the remnants of the familiar nightmare, only this time with a twist: this time, the person in the bed wasn’t me. This time, the person in the bed was prettier than me, smarter than me, braver than me. This time, the person in the bed was Marta.
My sister has made the occasional cameo in the dream, basically the same dream as when I’m the one about to be burned alive, only she doesn’t scramble for the window like I do. She sucks in her breath and lets the flames race along the comforter until they lick her and swallow her whole.
I’m sure I won’t be able to go back to sleep. I never can. I’ve taken to an early bedtime, early for me, anyway—ten o’clock usually—knowing that sometime between two and four in the morning, I’ll be engulfed in flames, then
up for the day.
So I put on some coffee and boot up my laptop. The breaking-news e-mails come at all hours of the night, so I’ll have plenty to keep me busy.
I make the mistake of passing a mirror and looking at my reflection. Not a pretty sight. The first signs of gray in my locks, and I’m too stubborn to color my hair, too proud to succumb to modern technology’s answer to female aging, which is to change yourself in every way possible, to hide your flaws. I put on minimal makeup and shower most days and brush my hair and figure I’ve done enough. No wrinkle creams or hair coloring or push-up bras for this gal. I’m supposed to be impressing someone with this attitude, aren’t I? So far, no line has formed to congratulate me.
You’re your own worst enemy, Marta always said to me. You don’t need anyone to torment you because you do it to yourself. Marta was, in many ways, the polar opposite of me. Fun-loving when I was brooding. Glamorous when I was granola. Waving pom-poms and cheering on the football team while I was joining the PETA protest of the slaughterhouse outside of town. Partying on Friday nights with the popular crowd while I had my nose in one of the classics or some book on statistics.
She was two inches shorter than me, had darker and silkier hair, and wore a cup size larger than me. How two girls born within the space of eight minutes could be so different was anyone’s guess.
“Damn, I miss you, girl,” I say to nobody in the kitchen. I can’t even say that line without an acknowledgment to her; it was what she always said to me at the end of our phone calls, her patented sign-off, when we were across the country from each other during college, or when she went off to grad school in Arizona while I, for some reason nobody could figure out, joined the G, the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
I still remember her reaction to the news that I was signing up with the FBI. Her face read stunned, confused, like she’d heard it wrong, a left-wing protester joining the establishment, but her words came out softer. If it makes you happy, it makes me happy. That was the other thing she always harped on with me, happiness. Just be happy, Em. Are you happy? It’s okay to want to be happy.
Coffee’s done. I carry a mug into the second bedroom and start scrolling through the usual websites and checking e-mail. Nothing I see immediately raises the hair on my neck. A single-family home up in flames in Palo Alto, no casualties. A fire in a subsidized-housing complex in Detroit, several believed dead. A chemical plant ablaze outside Dallas. No, no, and no.
But this one might be interesting, a fire that happened only hours ago in a place called Lisle, Illinois. A stand-alone townhouse. A single victim.
Her name is Joelle Swanson.
9
* * *
“Graham Session”
Recording # 3
August 23, 2012
* * *
The Day After. Not unlike a hangover, the comedown after an overly indulgent night. I’m lying in bed, talking to you with this handheld digital voice recorder, staring at the photograph of Joelle Swanson I took last night after we ended things, and which I printed out on my color printer. She was a fighter, I’ll give her that. All that blood, all that pain, and yet she still fought for her life at the end. Sometimes, I just don’t understand people.
I know, I know, I told you I don’t take photographs—but I do take one of each victim at the end of the encounter. Can’t a fellow keep a souvenir?
Anyway—good morning! I try to start each day with the sunrise roundup at five in the morning. No better source for car crashes, murders, other incidents of ill tidings. Especially on a day like today, the quote, unquote Day After, the news is required viewing. Here, I’m pulling up the video clip on the website right now…here it is:
“A house fire claimed the life of a woman in suburban Lisle overnight. Twenty-three-year-old Joelle Swanson, a recent graduate of Benedictine University, was killed when a fire erupted in her townhouse bedroom in the early hours of Wednesday morning. Authorities say the cause of the blaze was a lit candle that tipped over by her bedside. They do not suspect foul play.
“Well, coming up next in sports, the NFL season is just around the corner, but a labor dispute will keep the referees—”
Enough. Click that right off. I wish you could have seen the footage of the ink-black smoke billowing out of the rooftop of Joelle’s townhouse. I love that word, billowing, one of those words that really only applies in one context. Does anything else besides smoke ever billow? They also had a sanitized photograph of Joelle that must have come from her recent graduation yearbook, posed and air-brushed. I prefer my photo of her; it has more character, more scars, more life.
By the way, I’m aware that it’s strategically indefensible to retain photographs of my victims. Yes, I know, if I were caught, this would be a blow-by-blow tour of what I’ve done, better than a signed confession. What can I say? I need these photographs. I’m willing to be reckless on this one point. If it makes you feel better, I stash my collage between pages 232 and 233 of my mother’s old Betty Crocker Cookbook, right next to the recipe for ground-beef lasagna. (Yes, it was a deliberate, if gory, choice.)
Ooooh, you’re thinking. His mother. The first mention of his mother occurs during the third session, at three minutes and seventeen seconds. Is there some significance to the time? Is 317 their street address growing up? Was her birthday March 17? Did she sexually abuse him 3 + 17 times?
Okay, I might as well tell you: my mother made me dress up like Little Bo Peep when I was a child, and it’s haunted me ever since. After I killed her with a machete, I vowed to mutilate all beautiful young blond women with whom I came into contact to rid myself of that horror. But it DOESN’T MAKE THE NIGHTMARES GO AWAY!
Just kidding. I know, I didn’t sell that very well. Didn’t have my heart in it. Maybe I’ll tell you about my mother sometime. Maybe I won’t.
I need to get ready for work now. Big day planned. I have one more adventure planned, at least, before Labor Day.
[END]
10
I SPEND the morning like I’ve spent every morning the last several months, sitting in my office (also known as my mother’s second bedroom), combing through research and data. Because I’m on suspension, I don’t have access to NIBRS—the National Incident-Based Reporting System. But NIBRS is useless to me, anyway; it only collects information on fires classified as arson. If they’re deemed accidental, or even “suspicious” in origin, they never make it to NIBRS. And my guy is making the fires look accidental.
Which means he’s staying totally off the radar. The locals aren’t reporting these fires to the Feds, and they aren’t talking to each other.
Which leaves me with the utterly unscientific method of setting up alerts on sites like Google and YouTube, then monitoring websites and message boards devoted to firefighting and arson, and getting breaking-news reports from local news websites. There are fires involving the loss of human life every day in this country, intentional or accidental, and whether they are reported to federal law enforcement or not, they at least make the local news in that area. So I’m inundated on a daily basis with news of fires, 99 percent of which is irrelevant, but all of which I have to review to make sure one of them isn’t the needle in the haystack.
It’s late afternoon now. I’ve spent hours huddled over this laptop and chasing down leads. I made one inquiry about the fire in Lisle, Illinois, but the cop there hasn’t called me back yet.
My smartphone buzzes. Speak of the devil. I assume it’s the cop, but after a day of solitary confinement, I’d happily chat up a telemarketer selling me life insurance.
I set my cell to speakerphone and call out a hello.
“Ms. Dockery, it’s Lieutenant Adam Ressler, Lisle PD.”
“Yes, Lieutenant. Thanks for the return call.”
“Ms. Dockery, could you clarify for me your status? Are you with the FBI?”
This is my problem. I’m not. It would be bad enough that I’m a research analyst, not a special agent—some locals will only talk to agent
s—but I’m not even a research analyst right now. When they look up my authorization code, they always find mine, so they know I am who I say I am, but the problem is that there’s no clearance level next to that code.
“I’m on temporary leave with the Bureau,” I answer, “working on a special assignment.”
A lawyer would call that a technically accurate statement. It just so happens that the FBI has nothing to do with this “special assignment,” which in fact I have “assigned” to myself. Basically, I’m a girl on suspension who is doing something completely on her own. But I made it sound a little better than that without lying.
Usually this works—to a point. I manage to fall on the spectrum somewhere between a random citizen or nosy reporter and an actual law enforcement officer. So I get answers to generally harmless questions, minimally sufficient for my purposes but not enough to give me the full picture I would prefer.
“Well, okay, why don’t we see what you need,” he says, meaning he’ll answer some questions and not others. “You were calling about Joelle Swanson?”
“That’s right, Lieutenant. The fire from three nights ago.”
This is all I know so far: Joelle Swanson, age twenty-three, resided at a new townhouse at 2141 Carthage Court in Lisle, Illinois, a suburb roughly twenty-five miles outside Chicago. She lived alone. She was a recent graduate of Benedictine University and was working in their admissions office. She was single, no kids, not even a boyfriend. She died in the fire overnight, in the early hours of August twenty-second. No sign of foul play, according to the local fire chief.
“What was the cause?” I ask the lieutenant.
“A burning candle,” he says. “Looks like it was on a desk and fell over onto the carpet. Between the carpet and some newspapers lying around and the polyurethane mattress, the whole bedroom went up real fast. The victim was burnt to toast right there on the bed.”