It was
late, but Harris called anyway. She answered on the second ring, alert.
Tracy was used to late night calls.
“A
second ring? You must have been out like a light,” he said.
“Ha
ha. You know what time it is here?”
“Yeah.”
Harris
rolled over on the hotel mattress, lying on his back; Polaroids and
papers from the file cascaded off the bed and added to the others already
on the gaudy, threadbare carpet.
He
couldn’t shut his eyes. If he shut his eyes while talking to her,
he would picture her and that would be too much to bear. So Harris looked
at the ceiling. It was the only part of the room not covered in death.
“Catch
him yet?” she asked.
“If
that was the case, we’d be having this talk in person.”
“Nope,”
she said quickly. “We’d be fucking.”
“Jesus...”
“I’m
horny.”
“Stop.
You’re killing me.”
Tracy
laughed suddenly and brightly. “That’s for waking me up,”
she said. “You need to talk about it?”
Flashes
of the house came to him, both stark images from the flashbulbs of the
photos, and the reality. He’d been there this afternoon. Harris
eyed the empty paper sacks on the floor. He had to stop by a liquor
store on his way back here.
Mrs.
Sanders had been carved up and divided amongst the good china, the rest
of the family slumped in chairs around the dining room table, utensils
stapled to their palms.
“I
couldn’t burden you with it,” he said.
“Why
should you carry it all? I can handle it.”
His
head lolled to the right, the bottle of Bombay on the night-stand was
empty, tipped over onto its side.
No
more escape.
“This
one ... it’s bad. I mean, they’re all bad, but ... fuck. I
think they were alive for most of it.”
A
pause, then, “But you don’t know for sure?”
“Not
all the reports are back yet. It’s still early. I’ll know
in a couple of hours,” he said, then quieter, “yeah ... I’m
sure they were still alive ... ”
“You’ll
get him. You always get them.”
There
were tears in his eyes. Harris couldn’t feel the gin anymore.
“Tell
me why I do this. I don’t think I can do this anymore. I can’t
live with this anymore.”
“You
do it because few people can and it needs to be done. You do it because
you can’t not do it. You do it because, when it’s over and
you’ve caught him, you can come home to me.”
He
was listening to her, concentrating on breathing slowly and going over
blood-spatter patterns all at once.
Tracy
kept talking him up, he kept remembering how to breath and he kept scrutinizing
evidence.
Sometime
later, he realized he needed sleep; it would still be there in an hour
or two. Most likely, it would still be there in his dreams.
“Thanks,
babe,” he said, letting the fatigue show in his voice. “Sometimes
it’s hard.”
“I
know. You want me to talk you to sleep?”
“Yeah.”
Ten
minutes later, she heard the change in his breathing and hung up the
phone as softly as she could.
Harris
woke up two hours later to the dial tone in his ear, replaced the receiver,
and, refreshed, got to work.
