once, so did phrases such as inexplicable brutality, unwarranted use of force, died in excruciating pain. After long years of positive press, the local paper, it seemed, had finally turned against her. Not that she could blame them, not with the protests and public outcry, not with the state police involved. The photograph they’d chosen told the tale. Standing on the courthouse steps and peering down, she looked cold and aloof. It was the high cheekbones and deep eyes, the fair skin that looked gray in newsprint.
“Angel of death. Jesus.”
Tossing the paper in the backseat, she started the car and worked her way out of the bad parts of town, driving past the marbled courthouse and the fountain at the square, then toward the college, where she slipped like a ghost past coffee shops and bars and loud, laughing kids. After that she was in the gentrified section, moving past condo lofts and art galleries and renovated warehouses turned into brewpubs and day spas and black box theaters. Tourists were on the sidewalks, some hipsters, a few homeless. When she found the four-lane that led past the chain restaurants and the old mall, she drove faster. Traffic was thinner there, the people’s movements smaller and more subdued. She tried the radio, but the talk channels were boring and none of the music fit. Turning east, she followed a narrow road through scattered woods and subdivisions with stone-columned entrances. In twenty minutes she was outside the city limits. In another five, she started climbing. When she reached the top of the mountain, she lit another cigarette and stared out at the city, thinking how clean it looked from above. For a moment, she forgot the girl and the basement. There were no screams or blood or smoke, no broken child or irredeemable mistakes. There was light and there was dark. Nothing gray or shadowed. Nothing in between.
Stepping to the edge of the mountain, she looked down and tried to find some reason for hope. No charges had been filed. She wasn’t looking at prison.
Not yet …
Spinning the cigarette into the blackness, she called the girl for the third time in as many days. “Channing, hey, it’s me.”
“Detective Black?”
“Call me Elizabeth, remember?”
“Yeah, sorry. I was asleep.”
“Did I wake you? I’m sorry. My mind these days.” Elizabeth pressed the phone against her ear and closed her eyes. “I lose track of time.”
“It’s okay. I’m taking sleeping pills. My mom, you know.”
There was a rustling sound, and Elizabeth pictured the girl sitting up in bed. She was eighteen years old, a doll of a girl with haunted eyes and the kind of memories no child should have. “I was just worried about you.” Elizabeth squeezed the phone until her hand ached and the world stopped spinning. “With all that’s going on, it helps to know you’re okay.”
“I sleep mostly. It’s only bad when I’m awake.”
“I’m so sorry, Channing.…”
“I didn’t tell anybody.”
Elizabeth grew suddenly still. Warm air rolled up the mountain, but she felt cold. “That’s not why I called, sweetheart. You don’t—”
“I did like you asked, Elizabeth. I didn’t tell a soul what really happened. I won’t. I wouldn’t.”
“I know, but…”
“Does the world go dark for you, sometimes?”
“Are you crying, Channing?”
“It goes a little gray for me.”
The voice broke, and Elizabeth could picture the girl’s bedroom in her parents’ big house across town. Six days ago Channing vanished off a city street. No witnesses. No motive beyond the obvious. Two days after that, Elizabeth led her, blinking, from the basement of an abandoned house. The men who’d taken her were dead—shot eighteen times. Now, here they were: midnight, four days later, and the girl’s room was still pink and soft and filled with all the possessions of childhood. If there was a message there, Elizabeth couldn’t find it. “I shouldn’t have called,” she said. “It was selfish of me. Go back to sleep.”
The line hissed.
“Channing?”
“They ask what happened, you know. My parents. The counselors. They ask all the time, but all I say is how you killed those men and how you saved me and how I felt joyful when they died.”
“It’s okay, Channing. You’re okay.”
“Does that make me a bad person, Elizabeth? That I was joyful? That I think eighteen bullets was not enough?”
“Of course not. They deserved it.”
But the girl was still crying. “I see them when I close my eyes. I hear the jokes they told between times. The way they planned to kill me.” Her voice broke again, and the