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Authors: Scott Thornley
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was more or less in line with the stairs. He walked to the point opposite the bottom of the steps. Squatting down, he peered beneath the surface. Sure enough, there was a groove in the sandbar; it had been softened by the wavelets but was still a distinct V. He drove the stick into the sand just beyond the waterline to mark the spot. He took the camera out of his pocket and framed several shots of the V, checking each time to make sure it registered. It did, but because of the glare off the surface, only faintly. He rolled his pant legs above his knees and waded into the water several feet beyond the groove. “Fucking freezing,” he muttered. With the sun at his back he framed several more shots; the V was now more apparent.
Vertesi looked down at his feet in the water, all greeny blue, the minnows racing around him. He was losing the feeling in his toes. He waded a few yards over, parallel to the shore, then came out of the water. Up and down the beach in either direction there was no sign of life, and other than a sail going by on the horizon, there was no sign of life on the water. He thought it weird, but then, considering it was a weekday in the middle of June, maybe not.
He sat on the stairs to let his feet dry and made his notes—all of his observations and random thoughts, just as MacNeice had taught him—before wiping the sand off his feet, putting his socks and shoes on and climbing the stairs. Stankovics was dozing at the wheel of the patrol car.
Too many doughnuts
, Vertesi thought to himself, as he got in the car and drove off towards the next cottage down the lake.
SEVEN
—
D RIVING ALONG K ING , which ran west parallel to Main, MacNeice thought about the statement that this killing made. In an age of bombs, assault rifles, IEDs and an endless variety of automatic pistols, who’d go to the trouble of creating a syringe and then use something as crude as battery acid to erase someone’s brain … and why? That was it, he realized. Lydia Petrescu had been erased, just like wiping out a computer’s hard drive—the shell still intact but the device empty and useless. Who was this message intended for?
He’d spent the rest of the afternoon fielding telephone calls, the first of which was from DC Wallace, wanting to know if there was anything new to report. He told him about the tentative identification of Lydia Petrescu and about her father and the weapon. Following that conversation, his phone began ringing with requests from the media for interviews. He could hearin the reporters’ voices the familiar frenzy that always surrounded a homicide, but he reminded them that Deputy Chief Wallace was the media contact; he had no information to report beyond what they’d been given by his senior officer.
Slipping the Chevy into the spot reserved for Marcello’s father behind his old friend’s restaurant, MacNeice looked at the time on the dash—6:23 p.m. He turned off the ignition but left the switch on Auxiliary, as he needed to decompress before he ate. He reached over to the glove compartment and took out the wallet of CDs, flipping through till he found
Lush Life
. Slipping the CD into the player, he put the case back in the glove compartment; as he did so he remembered the cummings. He lifted the place-marker ribbon and opened the book to the page he knew was waiting like an old friend, or a pusher of pain—over time it had been both. He looked down and spoke the words that greeted him there: “I carry your heart, I carry it in my heart.”
No one could remove Kate from him, no one could erase her. Lydia Petrescu had undoubtedly left memories with her family as well as the voice-mail message with her playing in the background, but something made his insides ache at the thought of her being erased from within in an instant. The idea that the attack had obliterated her talent—the thing that he imagined she loved doing most of all—seemed the point of her death. She was beautiful, but the
Vertesi looked down at his feet in the water, all greeny blue, the minnows racing around him. He was losing the feeling in his toes. He waded a few yards over, parallel to the shore, then came out of the water. Up and down the beach in either direction there was no sign of life, and other than a sail going by on the horizon, there was no sign of life on the water. He thought it weird, but then, considering it was a weekday in the middle of June, maybe not.
He sat on the stairs to let his feet dry and made his notes—all of his observations and random thoughts, just as MacNeice had taught him—before wiping the sand off his feet, putting his socks and shoes on and climbing the stairs. Stankovics was dozing at the wheel of the patrol car.
Too many doughnuts
, Vertesi thought to himself, as he got in the car and drove off towards the next cottage down the lake.
SEVEN
—
D RIVING ALONG K ING , which ran west parallel to Main, MacNeice thought about the statement that this killing made. In an age of bombs, assault rifles, IEDs and an endless variety of automatic pistols, who’d go to the trouble of creating a syringe and then use something as crude as battery acid to erase someone’s brain … and why? That was it, he realized. Lydia Petrescu had been erased, just like wiping out a computer’s hard drive—the shell still intact but the device empty and useless. Who was this message intended for?
He’d spent the rest of the afternoon fielding telephone calls, the first of which was from DC Wallace, wanting to know if there was anything new to report. He told him about the tentative identification of Lydia Petrescu and about her father and the weapon. Following that conversation, his phone began ringing with requests from the media for interviews. He could hearin the reporters’ voices the familiar frenzy that always surrounded a homicide, but he reminded them that Deputy Chief Wallace was the media contact; he had no information to report beyond what they’d been given by his senior officer.
Slipping the Chevy into the spot reserved for Marcello’s father behind his old friend’s restaurant, MacNeice looked at the time on the dash—6:23 p.m. He turned off the ignition but left the switch on Auxiliary, as he needed to decompress before he ate. He reached over to the glove compartment and took out the wallet of CDs, flipping through till he found
Lush Life
. Slipping the CD into the player, he put the case back in the glove compartment; as he did so he remembered the cummings. He lifted the place-marker ribbon and opened the book to the page he knew was waiting like an old friend, or a pusher of pain—over time it had been both. He looked down and spoke the words that greeted him there: “I carry your heart, I carry it in my heart.”
No one could remove Kate from him, no one could erase her. Lydia Petrescu had undoubtedly left memories with her family as well as the voice-mail message with her playing in the background, but something made his insides ache at the thought of her being erased from within in an instant. The idea that the attack had obliterated her talent—the thing that he imagined she loved doing most of all—seemed the point of her death. She was beautiful, but the
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