Body Language

Alexandra looked over at Lawton, who was pouring more syrup on his pancakes. There was syrup spilling over the edge of his plate, pooling on the table.

‘Look, I’m not having a goddamn affair. I like to hit golf balls, and I like Delvin. Why is it that all of a sudden I can’t spend a little free time with a buddy?’

She rubbed hard at a crusty spot on the rim of the sink.

‘Just be home before nine, okay? I need to be at work early tonight. There’s stuff piled up from the lab.’

‘The Bloody Rapist strikes again, huh? Guy kills somebody, next day the goddamn overtime starts.’

‘I don’t have a whole lot of choice. It’s my job.’

‘You’ve got choices, Alex. You’re just making the wrong ones.’

She turned to face him. She kept her voice under control.

‘Is that supposed to be some kind of warning?’

‘Take it any way you want. But get one thing straight – I’m not going to keep doing this, baby-sitting your old man. Spending every night listening to his babble. I didn’t sign on for that.’

Measuring her breath, she leaned her hip against the stove.

‘Is that right? And what did you sign on for, Stan? Just the good times?’

Stan wouldn’t hold her gaze. He busied himself with his newspaper.

‘I’ve had enough of this. It isn’t right. Guns and shit. You said it was going to be temporary, him living here. A couple of weeks and you’d find a place for him. That’s what you said, Alex. I remember plain as day. It’s the only reason I agreed in the first place.’

‘Those places are horrible, Stan. I looked at half a dozen and I wouldn’t leave a dog in any of them.’

‘Well, then you’re damn well going to have to keep on looking, Alex. Because this isn’t working out.’

‘I can’t do that to him, Stan. Stick him in one of those sterile, hopeless places. He’s my father.’

‘No, he’s not. Not anymore. He’s some five-year-old kid with slobber on his chin.’

He was about to say something more when Lawton pushed back his chair.

‘Hands in the air, Frank Sinatra. Get ’em up and there won’t be any trouble.’

He had his pistol out again. Rising slowly to his feet, using his left hand to steady his aim.

‘Dad, now stop it. Come on, listen to me.’

‘Up in the air, where I can see them. And you, young lady, over by the fridge. Hands up, as well.’

‘Fuck this,’ Stan said, and started toward the dining room.

‘Freeze, you bastard.’

Stan kept going and Alexandra’s father lifted the pistol and fired a warning shot into the ceiling. A slab of plaster fell to the floor and milky dust clouded the room. He fired again, gouging a hole in the wall above the doorway.

Stan was on his knees in the dining room, hands above his head.

‘Jesus Christ! Alex, goddamn it. Do something.’

‘When I say freeze, I mean freeze, punk.’

Alexandra stepped in front of her father. The pistol pointed at her heart.

She took a breath, edged close to him, tried to intercept his eyes. Very quietly, she hummed the first few notes of the wedding march, hearing the shiver in her voice, but going ahead with it. Eyes on her father’s eyes, watching them slowly unlock, drift away from the felon he saw beyond her shoulder. His mouth opening as Alexandra stepped closer, singing the notes again, a little louder.

The pistol sagged, came slowly down. Her father took a long breath and looked up at the ceiling as if searching for the laughing gull trapped in the big sanctuary. She slipped the pistol out of his hand and hooked her arm through his and propelled him forward toward the dining room.

Stan was on his feet, fists at his side. His mouth was twisted and his face purple. There were muscles quivering in his cheeks, as if he were chewing on roofing nails.

‘Goddamn it, Alex, the bastard could’ve killed me.’

‘You’re okay, Stan. Everything’s fine.’

‘Where’d he get those goddamn bullets?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Jesus H. Christ. One of the neighbors hears gunshots over here, calls the police … I could lose my fucking job.’

‘All right, all right.’

She went back to the wedding march, her arm looped through her father’s, leading him down that long aisle of memory.

‘I don’t need this shit,’ Stan said. ‘Not today. Not any day. He’s out of here. I’m not arguing about it anymore. When I come home today, that’s it. He better be packed. You’re going to have to decide, Alex, who you want to live with, your husband or that half-wit.’

4 (#ulink_bb4935ed-1f74-57e6-9aaa-b6e293b0933b)

After Stan left, Alex got Lawton into a pair of khakis and a short-sleeved plaid shirt, then settled him in front of a morning news show.

In the bedroom while she straightened the quilt and fluffed the pillows, she listened to the television in the next room, a reporter detailing the background of the latest victim of the Bloody Rapist. A paralegal with a prestigious downtown firm. Recently divorced, the woman had moved to Miami only the month before. Her family back in Baltimore had warned her that Miami was too dangerous, but she’d come anyway. ‘She believed the travel posters,’ her brother snarled.

When the TV cut to a commercial, Alex went to her closet, took her fanny pack down, and strapped it on. Stepping into a slash of sunlight, she withdrew the photographs and held them up to the light, four twisted hieroglyphs. Gasper, Hear No Evil, the Swatter, Floater. Studying them carefully one by one, as if in that harsh morning sun she might glimpse the crucial detail she had overlooked before.

It was a violation of department rules, bringing home evidentiary material. But she couldn’t help herself. Dan Romano was right, of course: This case was troubling her, disturbing her already-restless sleep. Time after time, she would jerk awake, the answer in her mind, but as she fetched for it, the image faded, staying just beyond her reach, some insistent warning signal that continued to elude her.

Over the last few weeks, she had slipped the photographs one by one into her pouch and now carried them with her everywhere, sneaking them out when she was alone, staring at them, focusing, trying to identify that intangible detail that was prickling silently on the edge of her awareness. The answer was in the photographs – she was certain of it – somewhere in the austere, brightly lit images. Some key, some revelation. At times, she had begun to feel like there was even something larger at stake than solving this particular case, that if only she could see the detail she’d been missing, she would have, as well, the solution to her own unending grief.

These women were not swingers or risk takers. They’d wanted no more or less than anyone else, but in their understandable hunger for love, each of them had opened their doors and admitted the same man into their homes, a man whose savagery must have come clear to them only in the last seconds of their lives.

It was herself Alexandra saw in those photographs. Her naked form repositioned with such hideous care. Eighteen years had passed since she had risen out of her body and hovered high overhead, a loose cloud of energized gas, escaping from the physical self. And even though over those long years she had gradually reoccupied her body, it was never the same again. The fit was wrong. Some inexpressible unease plagued her still. Even the years of martial-arts training – the stretching, the conditioning the deep awareness of her own body’s strengths and limitations – had not enabled her to achieve the wholeness that had once been so natural. She had been driven out of her own body and had never fully returned, and that part of her that still drifted free seemed at times to take up temporary residence in the very victims she photographed.

Staring at their images, Alex could become those women on the unyielding floors of their apartments. As cold and lifeless, as vacant and remote. Those women who had departed now, leaving behind only their latent images, silver-halide crystals in a chemical emulsion adhering to a flat white page.