In the background was the building I’d just left. The news crew must have showed up moments after I drove away.
I pressed OFF. Robin sat down next to me.
We touched glasses. I said, “Cheers.”
I endured ten more minutes of togetherness. Then I told her I was sorry, picked up the file, and left.
Wounds.
Fissures. Real ones.
It was well after midnight. Robin had been asleep for over an hour and I was pretty sure she hadn’t heard when I’d left the bed and made my way to the office.
I’d started with the file, but she’d come after me. Convincing me to bathe with her, take a walk, a long walk. Drive into Santa Monica for an Italian dinner. Come home and play Scrabble, then gin, then sit side by side in bed collaborating on the crossword puzzle.
“Like normal folks,” I said, when she said she was sleepy.
“Acting. Genius.”
“I love you—and see, I said it without making love first.”
“Hey, a new pattern.
What do you mean?
Saying it before. How nice.” She reached for me.
Now here I was, throwing on a robe, making my way through the dark house, feeling like a burglar.
Back in the office. Switching on the green-shaded desk lamp and casting a hazy beam on the file.
The room was cold. The house was cold. The robe was old terry cloth, worn to gauze in spots. No socks. The chill took hold in the soles of my feet and worked its way up to my thighs. Telling myself that was appropriate for the task at hand, I drew the file close and untied the string.
Fusco had spared no detail in his study of Grant Rushton/ Michael Burke.
Everything neat, organized, subheaded, three-hole-punched. The detached precision of postmortem reports, the weights and measures of degradation.
Page after page of crime-scene description—Fusco’s summaries and analyses as well as some of the original police reports. The agent’s prose was more erudite than the typically stilted cop-write, but still far from Shakespeare. He seemed to like dwelling on the nasty stuff, or maybe that was my fatigue and the cold talking.
I stuck with it, found myself entering a state of hyper-awareness as I sucked up page after page of small print, photographs, crime-scene Polaroids. Autopsy shots. The beautiful, hideous, lurid hues of the human body imploded, debased, exploited like a rain forest. Sternum-cracking, face-peeling, skin-flaying, all in the name of truth. The framing of flesh-tunnels in three-by-five universes, blossoming orchids of ruptured viscera, rivers of hemoglobin syrup.
Dead faces. The look. Extraction of the soul.
A realization strobed my brain: Mate would’ve liked this.
Had he sensed what was happening to him?
I returned my eyes to the pictures. Women—things that had once been women—propped up against trees. A page of abdominal close-ups, gashes and gapes on skin transmuted to plum-colored shapes sketched on gray paper. Precisely excised wounds. The geometry.
The chill found my chest. Inhaling and letting the breath out slowly, I studied the shapes and tried to recall the death shots of Mate that Milo had showed me up on Mulholland.
Craving equivalence between all of this and the concentric squares engraved in Mate’s flabby white belly.
Some concordance, I supposed, but once again Milo was right. Lots of killers like to carve.
Skin art…
Where was Donny Salcido Mate, self-proclaimed
Rembrandt of the flesh? The Anatomy Lesson. Let us carve and learn.
Let us carve Daddy? ‘Cause we hate Daddy but want to be him? The art of death … Why couldn’t it be him? It should be him.
Then I thought of Guillerma Mate, the way she’d stood at the closet of that dingy little motel room, frozen, as I asked about her only child. Maybe faith was its own reward, but still, hers had to be a lonely life: a single mom, abandoned by her husband, disappointed by her only child.
She prayed regularly, offered thanks.
Casting her eye upon some grand world to come, or had she truly found peace? Her bus trip to L.A. said she hadn’t.
Richard and his kids, Guillerma and her boy.
Alone, everyone alone.
CHAPTER 23
THREE HOURS INTO Thursday.