into jeans and a blouse before remembering the bloody bottle that must have left some residue inside the backpack. I’d have to throw the backpack in the washing machine for a second run.
When I grabbed it off the counter I felt the bit of resistance inside and remembered the envelope. I glanced over at Carlo, who had settled into his chair with the copy of a life of Ludwig Wittgenstein he’d been reading. “If you want me I’ll be checking e-mail, Perfesser.”
He nodded, lost in philosophy. I went into my office, sat down on the swivel chair at the desk, pulled the envelope out, and looked inside, hoping to find something that would identify the man who had assaulted me.
What I drew out of the envelope was an unlabeled DVD disk on top of a photograph printed off a color computer on plain paper.
Probably porn, I thought, and put the DVD aside to look at the photograph. In the first moment I don’t know what I saw. For the first moment my mind failed to register anything at all other than that, kind of a cerebral short circuit. Then I registered an unpretentious neighborhood street, neat sidewalks, graveled yards. Sage in bloom, like a burning bush consumed with lavender flame. A woman with white hair pinned up. After that I was aware of a muscle twitching once, hard, at the corner of my mouth.
I was staring at a photograph of myself.
Once the shock passed of seeing myself, and understanding that the attack in the wash could not have been just a coincidence, I looked at the image for details. The clothes were what I’d been wearing the evening before when we walked the dogs. I had taken a long shower to get the smell of the medical examiner’s office out of my skin and put on that red T-shirt. Someone had driven by and taken my picture without my being aware. I wracked my brain for a memory of the white van going by, but there was none. Our tidy middle-class subdivision was small, if two cars went by it was a busy evening. I would have remembered a crummy white van. And I would have remembered a driver who looked like the man I killed.
I picked up the DVD that I had discounted as just porn and inserted it into my computer. While it loaded, I got up to close the door to my office. The DVD was a short clip, just the news report from the night before about catching Lynch and about my involvement in the Route 66 murders. And there for that brief second was my face on the computer, the formal picture in my black suit taken on the occasion of my retirement from the Bureau.
I thought of the man I had just killed, whom I had never seen before today. There was no way he could have seen the newscast the evening before and taken the picture within two hours of it. Someone had to know about me before then, and know where I lived. And then I thought of his words that I thought were preposterous bravado just before his final attack: “Yer dead.” Maybe he wasn’t talking about doing it himself. Maybe he was talking about the person who hired him, and how it wasn’t over.
I played over the entire scene in my head, from his observing me from his truck to my accidentally puncturing his femoral artery and losing whatever chance I had to find out more from him. Was this connected to the capture of Floyd Lynch and my involvement in the Route 66 case, or was it a grand coincidence? No, I returned to the idea that someone would have had to know about me more in advance of the news report to track me down to that wash. No coincidence.
And even if it was, for safety’s sake I needed to treat it as an assassination attempt. In asking the man in the wash where the bodies were, I had been asking the wrong question, and now he was too dead to give me the answer to the right question—who sent you?
I tracked back over the events in the wash, the way he liked older women, the way he broke their bones. But nothing clicked. Coming up blank on everything except for the certainty that there was something I did not yet know and that not knowing was dangerous.
There is a peculiar feeling at times like this. The closest