Every spring on the Northwood Garden Walk, a guide from the historical society described the process contractors followed when building a new home within town limits. An ordinance prohibited construction of any new house if a computer in the assessor’s office found it to be “in excess of fifteen percent similar” to an existing house. To gain approval, the architect’s drawings were scanned and the locations of rooms, sizes of door frames, and placements of stairs were checked against every home in town. Minutes later, a number emerged with recommended changes ensuring the unique nature of each Northwood residence.
The Finns’ gigantic Victorian-style home had scored 1.3 percent on the assessor’s scale. No alterations necessary. Spanning two generous lots, it was much larger than it looked from the sidewalk, with much of the interior space hidden in turns and angles not visible on the outside unless seen from overhead. Terry hired a pilot and a photographer to fly over the neighborhood and snap such a picture so he could show it to befuddled friends who marveled at the roominess inside. “It’s like Dr. Who’s Tardis,” Terry liked to say. Martha still didn’t know what he meant by that, despite his attempts to explain. She laughed and called him “geek.”
Davis parked across the street, having passed by it once, lost in thought, wondering if this was a good idea, to violate the see-without-being-seen policy he had maintained since Justin’s birth. He palmed the toy, which Jackie had been kind enough to intercept and wrap when she saw him heading out the door with it.
“What’s so special about this boy?” she asked.
“They’re all special,” he replied, and she casually added this to the list of secrets he kept from her.
“Dr. Moore,” Martha Finn said when the door was open only a crack. “What a surprise! We must have the healthiest house on the block today between the two of you.”
“The two of us?” Davis wondered quietly before noticing Dr. Burton in the living room across the foyer. He took a long, stiff step inside and Martha shut the door. “Hello, Joan,” he said.
Joan tilted her head and her new black bob angled away from her face as if the part in her hair were a hinge. “Davis!” she said. “What are you doing here?” She recognized right away how condescending that was and regretted it. “I mean…”
“I always like to pay our kids a visit on their first birthday,” he lied. He had made such calls occasionally over the years, but never since Joan had joined the practice. She let it pass.
“Thank you so much.” Martha, short and thin, all residual signs of pregnancy burned away power-walking, took the toy truck (a little advanced for Justin, she’d tell her husband later, but nice) wrapped in shiny red paper. “Can I get you something to drink? Terry’s at the store getting some things for the party later.”
“Party?” Joan asked, kneeling down to watch Justin pick at the wrapping of her gift, a developmental contraption of letters and cubes and zoo animals and plastic rings, each deliberately too big for a trachea. “How fun.”
“Mostly our friends, of course, not his,” Martha said. “Wine and mimosas. Fruit and cheese platters. Too much talk about work and baseball.”
“He looks good.” Joan grinned and shook her hair in his face. “Robust.”
Standing at the edge of the carpet, Davis studied the boy. He had watched him several times from his car, following Martha discreetly when she took Justin to Costco or the park. He looked like any other kid then, and like any other kid now, his red overalls stenciled with birthday pudding handprints. Justin lifted a giraffe to his forehead and made a curious, grown-up face. When Joan and his mom laughed, he did it again.
Davis tried to imagine AK’s killer at one year – a different house, a different mom, a different time, a different toy – making a face exactly like this. He thought about AK at that age, already having acquired the big green eyes and high cheekbones she would keep through adolescence. Her laugh on the old videos was a close relation to her teenage giggle, and her polite stubbornness was hardwired in the womb. Now he tried, but couldn’t extrapolate a killer from these pudgy little hands and thin blond hair.
Minutes later, outside, at the door to Joan’s Spyder, she asked, “Do you have an hour?”
“Jackie’s got dinner at five.”
“That’s more than an hour.”
“I suppose it is.”
Marty’s was close to the train, and did a fair six o’clock business during the week. The Sunday crowd, lined up around the bar, heads angled at a spring training Cubs game, was sparser. Over whiskeys on the rocks and a table tent advertising hot-and-spicy chicken wings, Joan asked Davis how he was doing.
“How am I? Fine.”
“What’s with the birthday visit?”
“Just a whim.”
“Uh-huh. How’s Jackie?”
“She’s fine.”
“That’s not what I’ve heard.”
Goddamn, Joan. Subtle like a frying pan to the temple.
“What have you heard?”
“Are you having an affair with Martha Finn?”
Davis coughed a half-swallowed sip of whiskey into his glass. “What?”
“It fits. You show up at her house on the kid’s birthday, conveniently when her husband is out of the house. I ran into Gregor exactly the same way a few years back when he was diddling that one, you know, Sante Gramatica. Remember?” She started whispering, one sentence too late. “Anyway, it’s okay with me if you are. I just wanted to make sure you were discreet.” She paused to assess how her speech was coming off and might have decided it sounded thick with ulterior motives because she added, “For the sake of the practice.”
He laughed, and it looked natural to her. She relaxed.
“Sorry. I thought I had to ask. Professionally.”
“If I had a nickel for every time someone thought I was having an affair…,” Davis said.
Without even a grin, Joan put a dime on the table and slid it in front of him. “So things with Jackie are good?”
“I didn’t say that.” He shrugged, surprised at his own candor, having been put on edge by Joan’s directness. “AK would have graduated from Illinois this June.”
“I know.”
“With the exception of her – episode – a few years back, Jackie’s handled it better than me, and that’s put a strain on things at home. She’s been able to move on in many ways, but I just can’t stop thinking about Anna Kat. Every day, I remember a new thing. By the time I’m sixty, I’ll have replayed every second of AK’s life in my head. Reincarnated her in carbon copy. Repeated every move she made right up to the end.”
“Do you think that’s healthy?”
“I’m sure it’s not. It’s like I have to live her life for her because she’s not here to do it herself. And it’s not just her. I spend more time in the basement with my dead relatives than I do upstairs with my own wife. I’m an asshole.”
Joan frowned for a long moment, then ordered two more drinks with a gesture. “Can I tell you a story?” she asked.
Passing through the revolving doors of the medical center into the Houston night, Joan felt like she was swimming in steaming black liquid. Hair went limp across her scalp. Blouse adhered to her skin. She didn’t sweat; the city sweated on her.
When she arrived from the Bay Area for her residency in January, she found Houston more hospitable than she expected. There were decent bookstores and an active theater community and a good symphony (not that she ever attended). The people were friendly (although most folks she met were, like her, from elsewhere) and the winter days pleasant when it wasn’t pouring rain. The summer nights were something else, however. In the summer, it was like breathing coffee.
This neighborhood on the southwest side of the nation’s fourth-largest city was the site of a de facto evacuation every night at six. It was empty now except for the hospital and a few gated apartment complexes and the Taco Cabana down the street, where insomniacs and night-shifters sat at tiny, unbalanced Formica squares and paired hastily made fajitas with cold bottles of Dos Equis. Right now she was more tired than hungry.
Across the street, into the parking garage, Joan took long, swift steps with locked knees. Sleepiness aside, she felt hyperaware in the lonely fluorescent-lit concrete cavern.
When she’d parked here, seventeen hours ago, there were minivans so tight to either side that it strained muscles in her thighs just to climb out of the car. Now her used Taurus was an orphan, almost completely alone on level eight.
Joan didn’t pick the man up until he was twenty yards from her and closing. He might have crossed over from level seven, heading up. He looked to be in his thirties, but might have been a hard-living twenty-something. He wore a wedding ring – or a ring on that finger anyway – and he had a hoop in his left ear.
“Miss? Miss? I’m really embarrassed about this, but my car got towed and I’m just three dollars and seventy-five cents short of the fee. Is there any way you can help me out?”
Joan’s hand went into her purse, where her thumb found a folded-up five and her pinky sought out a lighter-sized canister of pepper spray. She watched him walk toward her. He wore an open blue windbreaker, presumably to ward off a sudden shower, and his striped shirt was tucked into acid-washed jeans. Low on his forehead he had an Astros cap, but not one with the current logo. His auburn facial hair reflected a few days of neglect, but wasn’t organized into anything you could call beard or mustache.
In his left hand he had a thick ring of keys. Among them, she glimpsed one of those frequent-shopper discount cards from a large chain grocery. Later, she’d wonder why she found that detail so benign.
She grabbed the five.
The fist with the keys struck Joan across the cheek and she yelped as she fell into the car door. He grabbed her by the hair and twisted her head back and forth while ripping the purse off her shoulder. He pulled a gun from the rear of his waistband and pressed it above her ear like he wanted it to stick there by itself.
“Get in the fucking car and drive,” he growled, pushing her into the driver’s seat and throwing her own keys on the floor mat, where she had to grope for them. As he hurried to the passenger side, she never thought about running, never presumed she could outpace him.
He directed her down, out of the unmanned garage, and east on Bellaire, then northeast on Main, away from the med center toward downtown.
“Do you have a family?” His voice was cold and hard to understand, like a robot mumbling.
She nodded, trying to keep the tremble in her hands away from her voice. “Parents. Brothers. Not around here.”
“I mean kids,” he said testily, waving the gun at her in a hammer motion.
She shook her head. He didn’t say why he wanted to know, exactly. “You have to take care of your own,” he said.
“What?” She wondered right away why she was asking him questions that could encourage or antagonize him, or both.
“No one else matters,” he said in a dreamy, drunken octave one register higher than he likely intended. “Your son. Your mom. Your goddamned fucking wife.” He ordered her east on Memorial. “Where do you live?” he asked.
“Sugarland,” she said.
He bisected her purse, opened her wallet, and lifted her license to read it in the passing streetlights. “Liar,” he said, and leaned his head indifferently against the window.
They didn’t drive far, to an empty lot surrounded by office buildings. In six hours there would be five thousand people within screaming radius. Just now, there was no one.
He grabbed her hair again. “Get in back.”
Pinning her to the bench seat with his knees and the barrel of his gun, he searched casually through the rest of her purse, filling his pockets with cash, a cell phone, and gum. Then he doused her face with her own pepper spray – mercifully, in a way, she thought, as it allowed her to focus on the pain in her eyes, instead of the horror below.
And it gave her an excuse to cry, which, in those dark, awful, vulnerable moments when she imagined that such a thing as this could happen, she had sworn she would never do.
“Jesus. Joan. I didn’t know.”
“Because I didn’t want you to know.”
“Why?”
“Because you’d look at me like that.”
“Sorry.”
“Stop it.”
“So why are you telling me now?”
“Because I think you need someone to talk to. I thought it might help open you up if you knew I was a” – she started to say survivor – “that I had been through it. I don’t pretend to know what Anna Kat went through. But in the moments before it happened, behind the wheel of that car, I imagined the worst happening to me. Imagined my life ending with a bullet, or a knife. In just a few instants I became resigned to it. But I survived it. Like you. The way you survived an assassin’s gun. And you survived Anna Kat’s attack. Or you will. But you need to talk about it, Davis. It’s been a long time.”
“I just don’t think it’s fair,” Davis said, reaching his hand inside his jacket to finger the old wound through his cotton dress shirt. “For different reasons – insane reasons – people wanted us both dead, but somehow I lived and she died.”
Joan tilted her glass against her lips and let a piece of ice slide inside her mouth. It melted there while she waited for the sentimental tone of the conversation to dissipate. “You’ve been sleepwalking at work ever since it happened. That’s why I was so surprised to see you at the Finns’ today. That’s the sort of gesture I’d expect from the old Dr. Moore.”
“Maybe I’m coming around,” Davis said. He forced a smile.
“Maybe. Have you ever talked to anybody? A professional?”
“Jackie and I have seen a marriage counselor off and on.”
“Has it helped?”
“Hard to say. We’re still married, sort of.”
“Well, you can always call me, you know, if you’re still having trouble. Especially at work. I have a sympathetic ear regarding matters of the office.”
“Has Gregor or Pete said anything to you? About me?”
“Not in four years. They asked how I thought you might be holding up, between the shooting and AK. Nothing since.”
Davis peered into his glass. “The guy who attacked you. Why did he say that?”
“Why did he say what?”
“That bit about ‘your son, your mom, your wife.’ What was the point of that, you think?”
“My shrink told me he was trying to explain himself. Apologize. Make excuses. He knew what he was doing was wrong, and he was trying to put blame somewhere. Maybe that’s right. I don’t know.”
“Did they ever catch him?”
“Nope.”
“Do you think you’d know him if you saw him again?”
“I used to think so. It’s been ten years now. He’s changed. My memory of him has changed. I think I’ve aged him in my head, so he’s always that much older than me. I’m not sure the guy up here” – she tapped her head – “looks much like the real asshole anymore.”
“Do you still feel helpless? Like you just have to do something, anything?”
“Do anything? For what?”
“To find this guy. To make him feel what you felt.”
“That’s exactly the rapist’s point, Davis. I can’t make him feel what I felt. I could shoot him dead and he’d still have me trumped. You know the movies where there’s this really evil bad guy, who does horrible, unspeakable shit? And in the end, the good guy, the cop or whoever, turns the tables on him at the last minute and kills him? Pushes him out a window, or chops him up in a boat propeller, or whatever? I hate that. I hate it when the bad guy dies. I think it’s much worse to have to live with what you’ve done.”
“Yeah,” Davis said. “Well, I live every day with what he’s done.” The “he” Davis meant, of course, was Anna Kat’s killer, but to Joan that man and the Houston rapist were the same: faceless, nameless evil.
“Evil takes up space,” she said. “When the men who commit it – and it’s mostly men, you know; we can have that discussion another day – when the men who commit evil die, it creates a vacuum, and somebody else gets sucked into it. Killing the evildoer doesn’t kill the evil. Another takes his place. Evil is a physical constant. Like gravity. The best we can do is to try to keep ourselves and the ones we love on the right side.”
“Our moms, our sons, our wives,” Davis repeated. “You know what I really struggle with? Not who so much as why. I mean, I want AK’s killer to be punished, but he could be one of thousands of interchangeable punks and monsters and assholes. I hate the thought that there was no reason for it. No motive. That AK died just because some ex-con passing through town needed to scratch an itch. I wouldn’t even need to know his name if I could just see into his eyes and try to understand why he did it. Why it had to happen.”
“Would that really be enough?” Joan asked skeptically.
“I don’t know,” Davis said. “What if you really could fight it? Fight evil. Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you have to? At any cost?”
She reached out and touched his arm between his elbow and wrist. “Some prices are too high, Davis.”
He said nothing, but didn’t agree.