TERRY WHITE is an associate professor at a regional campus of Kent State University in Ashtabula, Ohio, where he was born and raised. He is married to Judy and has three children, his best creative work to date. He has two hardboiled characters: a Chinese-American FBI agent named Annie Cheng and a drunken existentialist P. I. named Thomas Haftmann. Haftmann's most recent appearance is in the March issue of Hardboiled.
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PART 1

Suffering: The First Noble Truth of Buddha

Chapter 1

The music in her head was all cello and violins, protracted strains of sorrow and hope. The dead girl in front of her was fourteen, maybe fifteen. The breasts just beginning to bud. She traced one ligature crease at the ankle with a fingertip. The skin at the wrists had raised angry welts like ant tracks where the killer had tied her hands behind her back and she had struggled against the cords. The long black hair covering her face in repose was something–perhaps a signature. Maybe not. She stepped aside to let the photographer get a high-angle shot.

She stood up and brushed specks of dirt from her khakis.

"Chinese," said Det. James O’Keefe looming up beside her. "One of your people." He wore the same rumpled brown suit he’d worn when she saw him last week.

"She’s mine in any case, Jimmy,’ she said with barely a glance at him. "She’s over the line. Your county’s a good two hundred yards that way." Jimmy blinked into the sun and rotated on his heels to look where she was pointing. He reminder her of a circus bear.

"Yep, I see. County Line Road is yonder over the ridge of trees. Fucking A. Doesn’t mean that F.B.I. fuckwit isn’t going to put us both on it, so don’t get your hopes up there, ace detective Cheng of the Mounties."

"Are you done?" he grunted at the photographer. He stooped down at the corpse and brushed her hair lightly off her face. "Look, Annie, somebody put lipstick on the little pig after he bashed in her face."

"She’s just a girl, James." It wasn’t his hardness that bothered her but the fact that he didn’t come to the crime scene prepared, didn’t have his cop mask on and had to go through this little ritual of steeling himself for the sight that irked her. She hated other people involving her in their own melodramas.

"Get her out of the dirt, God damn it," O’Keefe ordered the M.E.’s ambulance men standing off under a tree out of the wind and stamping their feet to keep warm watching the cops go about their business. "Are you fucking smoking on a crime scene, asshole?" O’Keefe’s face was dark with blood. Annie touched his sleeve, annoyed, and motioned him off to the side. They walked toward a grove of cherry trees just beginning to bloom. She thought of a poem she had read as a girl about their leaves as white as snow. It was about time, the need to go into the woods to watch the cherry trees fill up with snow-white leaves while the poet still could. He tore the latex gloves off his hands and stuffed them into his pockets.

"Fucking fuck and fuck," said O’Keefe. "Fuck me. Fucking Dead Body Found on a Saturday is going to fuck up my weekend royally."

"Are you done?" she asked calmly, waiting for his display of tantrum to subside.

He looked at her, the flat, cold look a cop gives a malefactor. "Yeah, I’m done."

She gathered herself, shaped the words, their order. Order was everything.

"She’s one of them. A Strawberry Girl. All the signs are in place. It’s organized mayhem and on display. She’s really fresh. The forensics will clinch it."

"Scruggs was all rotten meat. There’s not much to compare to this one. You’re reaching."

"Booth didn’t think so," she said calmly.

O’Keefe laughed. "Shit, you’re so desperate to get into something splashy like a serial killer investigation, you’d have told the F. B. I. anything."

He was right and she knew it but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

"So OK, better roll on it. Call your Agent Booth. Time to begin the beguine." Something he always said but she never knew what he meant by it.

She watched him kick clods of dirt out of the grooved tracks of the bottoms of his shoes. A big man, awkward, tough, veteran of homicides, had seen his share of torn bodies pulled from car wrecks, motorcycle accidents where limbs looked as if they had been macerated and chewed on, had pulled his share of floaters from swollen creeks and the river, the tiny glistening bodies of children or the elderly who had wandered off in an Alzheimer’s haze and found themselves thrashing about in deep water. Lots of death even in a placid rural county where most of the excitement was focused on the madcap antics of teenagers and alcohol or drugs. The steady thwack of boot heel against bark was another way of letting it off, getting rid of the dark demons who nibbled at the corners of your mind when you wanted to sleep after the carnage and the reports were all written and filed. His face was hard and the jawline had a golf-ball sized lump where he concentrated on the task.

She had a moment herself when she first came up on the body. The yellow tape was already up. Fortunately the hiker recognized the shallow grave and didn’t disturb the scene too much.

But it got to her nonetheless. The eyes and skin, the facial contours. The black hair at first made her think Puerto Rican or Mexican, maybe Salvadoran. There were plenty of illegals this far north. Those who had come to pick the grapes for Welch’s and the wineries stayed and somehow dodged the half-hearted efforts of I.N.S. to round them up. Now they had children and like every emigré to America had somebody back home who went ahead and signaled the rest of the clan to come up to join them, escape the poverty of the homeland. She used a stick to move a strand of hair from her face and then there was no doubt that she had been born in China, too, and here they were now together, dead and onlooker united in a far country but only one had a passport to the new country this girl was visiting.

An hour later at the station house she typed up her notes for the first report, glanced at her watch, the last of her mementos of her union with Reggie, and tapped out a trip finder from a search engine on the Internet. Agent Booth had given her directions over the phone to the Federal Building downtown off Ninth. She sent the directions to the printer.

An hour later on Interstate 90 in slow traffic, she realized she was going to be late for the meeting. She had taken the South Marginal Road exit off instead of following Memorial Shoreway all the way downtown. Millimaki had thrown a city map on her desk when she went to fetch the printout. "Those Internet directions are as fucked up as a Chinese wedding"–his favorite dig to her–as he rolled the cigar around in his mouth to make the point to stay in the farthest lane from Dead Man’s Curve. "You’re on that, you got to get off at Playhouse Square and go right, come back to Ninth. Got it?"

She overcorrected her Mazda on a skid coming round the city’s biggest parking lot going way too fast for the 15 m.p.h. sign on the building’s corner and took a patch of rubber from the curbside front tire. Straightened out, she pointed toward the Amtrak station sign hoping to get an access road running parallel to the five-lane highway, but it was hopeless. The road ended in the Amtrak parking lot and she got out in disgust to take her bearings. The wind howling down from Canada across Lake Erie made her gasp for breath and suck up frigid air. Yesterday’s bizarre thaw had made possible the body’s discovery. Now it was back to winter.

Immense pewter clouds formed overhead like ink poured into water. The wind whipped the plaid scarf off her shoulder and sent it flying up in the air onto the station tracks. She debated a half-second whether she should fetch it and decided not to. She thought of the snotty little sales clerk at the mall who had sold it to her yesterday with her patter about accessorizing. Clothes and makeup were a daily nuisance.

The shimmering ball of lemon sun was much too feeble to push light through the black heaps of cumulonimbus making it disappear every few seconds like a magician’s hand with a coin. Across the Shoreway loomed the new Browns stadium, a monolithic disc exposed to the icy mallet of wind. The Science Center was just beyond that, overlooking the frozen harbor, and the Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame, a gaudy glass and chrome triangular creature fashioned by I. M. Pei, citizen of Hong Kong, the heart of the Asian-American’s diaspora. Anne had been raised by Mainland China to think of Hong Kong as decadent yet to every Chinese youth it was as desirable as the bough of fruit that withdrew from Tantalus’ outstretched hand in that book of myths she and Li Feng used to read.

She shivered. She returned to her car and slipped getting into it and went down so hard she thought her pelvic bone had cracked and just avoided slamming her head. She lay there gathering herself tightly until the first wave of pain coiled and passed on. She was dazed but all right; it was manageable. She heard the whistle of a train and felt the absurd humiliation of a hundred passengers destined for Chicago staring at her prone body from their sleepers and coach seats–a small, disheveled Chinese-looking woman lying on the pavement in a parking lot in Cleveland, Ohio. She struggled to her feet swathed in a thrumming pain down her right side from her hip to her ankle. She started up the car, and giving way to a burst of vexation, she punched the accelerator and fishtailed all the way out of the lot and cleared the cyclone fence gate by inches.

She backtracked down South Marginal to the East 55^th Street exit. By the time she spotted the massive red FREE sculpture, a Cold War relic, glazed in ice directly across from the Federal Building’s parking lot, the meeting had been underway for twenty minutes. By the time she located the right conference room, it was thirty-five minutes past the starting time. Scarfless and windblown, her cheeks crimson rosettes, limping slightly from her pratfall, she blanked her mind and prepared herself to walk into a room full of male cops and avoid looking like the ditzy female unable to find her way in the big city. She was unprepared for the silence that met her when, turning at too sharp an angle because of her bruised hip, she sent a pyramid of stacked coffee cups on a sideboard clattering across the floor. Some of the faces swiveled to take her in, creased with varying expressions of amusement, annoyance, or surprise. The speaker at the front of the room cut his eyes to her and she met his gaze. She noticed a single other woman in the room where the speaker and another man were standing, one apparently the FBI liaison from Akron who organized the task force, Agent Edwin I. Booth, as he had introduced himself to her on the phone; the other a stranger, much taller and bigger, dressed casually but rumpled. The smaller man up front with silver hair flicked his fingers toward her in a papal gesture to come in and ignore the cups she had stooped to replace onto the table.

"Detective Sergeant Cheng from Jefferson Sheriff’s, I assume. Gentlemen, she found the body. I’ve asked her to join the team."

A slim blonde woman in a navy blue skirt and cream blouse, de rigeur business attire of the professional woman, handed her a stapled sheaf of papers which she accepted Chinese fashion with both hands. The woman’s red lips parted in a smile that Anne felt was more mirth than solidarity, but she relaxed a fraction to smile back at the woman. Grateful for the distraction, she pretended to look over the papers as the dapper man resumed his talk. She could barely read a word owing to her discomfort. Donbraye turned on her heel and walked back to the table where the piles of papers in manila were arranged in neat stacks. She noted how the men’s heads swiveled a notch to track her oscillating hips. She was remarkably pretty, feminine and Anne burned again with the old unhappiness of her conscious plainness. She raised her eyes to take in the Slavic features of Donbraye’ face from the gentle slope of forehead to those high-planed cheekbones–more like a Han’s than a Caucasian influence sculpting her but the woman’s blue eyes had a gimlet coldness to them that undermined her perfection.

The silver-haired man was still droning in his flat Midwestern accent before Anne had fully switched on her linguistic monitor to decode the sounds her brain sent her. She had escaped the rural poverty of China because of her brilliance with language, a talent that had once been her misery as she suffered for years at the hands of an envious language teacher in Nanjing. American idioms sometimes baffled her. She still possessed the slight braying Pittsburgh accent marriage to Reggie Wu had imposed upon her. She saw Agent Booth button his charcoal suit coat and gesture toward her. Her heart thrilled inside her chest with that mix of joy and sorrow she had felt back in the woods. She had been angling to get onto this investigation once Shynicka Langton’s decomposed body turned up in Jimmy’s county last year.

She learned that Cleveland homicide had access to the F.B.I.’s profiling apparatus as early as September 1988, but their bureau didn’t start looking for similarities until 1993. By then, seventeen women had turned up as dead bodies found. Fifteen in vacant lots on the East Side. All but two were black females between fourteen and forty-one. More than half were found nude. Twelve had been beaten severely in the face and head. Nearly all had drug problems or arrests, many were active street hookers. Two others were found in Garfield Heights and East Cleveland. No similarities besides the obvious ones. Forensics was a dead end in every case.

Booth added that PCR analysis wouldn’t exist until late 1995, so any semen or saliva samples Violent Crimes might have hung on to or filed with cold cases would still be usable in a match. Degradable evidence was destroyed per procedure after ten years in those days, but some of it might have been lost in storage or misfiled. A few sighs erupted at the thankless task of rummaging around dirty warehouses and cold case files in storage. "It’s still possible we can do mitochondrial testing if we get a suspect."

Agent Booth gave her the opportunity to speak about her finding the latest strawberry. "Now we haven’t confirmed her as a prostitute yet," he said. "But this is a real chance to get some fresh evidence. Whores are targets of opportunity. It doesn’t take a serial killer running amok to rack up a body count in little time."

Booth peppered her with questions she could not answer. Then he turned to address his men: "We traded info, we checked NCIC, we sent hair and fibers to Columbus and Quantico labs. Many of you men know Elizabeth Bhargava, Cuyahoga County Coroner, the best M.E. in the state, bar none. She posted every one of the victims. Kondru kept the cases warm, but the long and short is that Cleveland P. D. failed to resolve them."

The young state trooper asked how many were closed.

"None," said Booth. "Not one."

Someone from the back asked whether the statements made on Larry King Live last month by Jesse Jackson were responsible for the initiation of the task force.

Someone else heard the Reverend Al Sharpton was coming to town because Cleveland was not taking any interest in dead whores. "He called them ‘marginalized women’ on TV," said a cop.

A sandy-haired man with a bald patch on his head in the next seat leaned toward the detective on her right and cupped a hand to his companion’s ear to baffle the sound: "Sharpton’s a greasy fuck in a shit chute. When his race beeper goes off, he’s spun and pointed in the right direction." He and I worked narcotics on the East Bureau Buy Team between ‘85 and ‘89 before I went to homicide."

Booth recovered: "Lieutenant Meldrum doesn’t believe anything was missed in the old investigations that would warrant calling in the FBI. I know some of you men have worked with the bureau before."

Booth’s voice resonated with passion. "I initiated this task force after Shynicka Langton’s body turned up last year just across the state line in Pennsylvania. That made three similar killings and dumpings since 1994, all black women with crack addictions. It’s time to stop this. I need your experience, I need each of you in this room."

Fervor is contagious, Anne thought, sensing the quickening in the room like a pack’s scent of a prey animal. Heads were bowed as the session returned to the mundane business of fact-gathering. More reports were read while pens scraped across pages.

Booth looked at her. "He’s using your backyards to dump the new victims."

Physically he reminded her of her mentor, a great homicide cop once named Andy Przytyk who had a hard time retiring and ate his gun two winters ago when he lost a terrible bout against booze, a wife with Alzheimer’s, and cabin fever during a blizzard.

The meeting settled into its mundane business of assigning tasks, exchanging business cards. Booth deferred to a coroner’s investigator. Besides the fact of manual strangulation of a Chinese-American girl.

"Larynx was crushed," Booth calmly noted, glancing down at the autopsy pages. "She was beaten in the face. Because of skin slippage and decomposition, we missed this in Scruggs and Mayweather. Langton’s nose cartilage was pulp and her left cheek was caved in. This guy really likes to hit them in the face." The words seemed so abstract yet so devastating to femininity–a woman’s face. The rest of her was decorative but the face–she looked around for the Donbraye woman but she was the lone female in the room.

A pair of silver-framed bifocals dangled from a chain around Booth’s neck. He set them on the bridge of his nose and made a face at the report in front of him. "Bhargava’s report says here . . . let me see, the right tibia fractured, uh, possibly postmortem." Off went the spectacles with a theatrical touch.

"Despite the expert opinion of Lieutenant Meldrum, whom I respect, we have a serial killer who has been at work for a long time, maybe as long as ten years, perhaps even as long as the earliest of the Strawberry killings."

There was some shuffling of feet as they absorbed this pronouncement. A few nods, some indications of doubt here and there.

One of the younger detectives asked, "Could this guy be a copycat killer? Say a new guy working in the tracks of the first killings. "

Booth mused aloud. "I have no doubt he or they are getting more violent with each victim."

Booth continued to address the group: "Understand that this task force isn’t going to degenerate into a jurisdictional squabble with other agencies. We’re small and we’re going to stay that way. That how the Green River Killer got away with it for so many years. Four hundred cops gathering information and the guy is right under their noses dumping bodies three times a week while they had his name buried in their files from day one."

He shot his cuffs and nodded at the tall man in civilian dress beside the trooper. "We asked the Pennsylvania state police in Meadville if they wanted in, but they’re going to monitor progress through our Painesville barracks. Corporal Salo, who is crime unit supervisor, and Trooper Hardee will work liaison in case his next one crosses state lines. We also have the best forensic entomologists and psychologists in the country to call on. Columbus C.I.B. has been apprised of this meeting and their labs will give us priority if another body turns up."

Shynicka Lynea Langton, 33, had a wilder side than the three previous victims. Formerly a dancer at several topless clubs on Brookpark and the Flats, she went by Peaches, Cassey, Chanté, Layla, and once at an off-tourist place in Put-in-Bay, Sandusky, she billed herself as "Brown Sugar." She had worked for an outcall escort service called Adoring Angels, did some phone acting, which included a brief stint as a cyber leg model, a fetish of Internet voyeurs, and finally did some freelance hooking on Brookpark Road, which was full circle and the end of the road because by then she was a full-blown, no-holes-barred crack whore. They found succinic acid, high levels of ammonia, lactic acid, and histamines in her bloodstream along with cocaine.

Cheng admired Booth’s salesmanship, a graceful retourné to their investigative skills and less play to Quantico’s forensic psychologists. She mused, I am the affirmative action member of the team, this constant burr to her self-esteem no matter how dramatically she had clawed her way up the ladder for respect from men.

Booth’s voice dripped honey: "We’ve got three possibilities. Let’s take the obvious first. Several killers, all very lucky to escape detection or eyewitnesses, who got away with killing all these women over a span of almost two decades. As all of you know by now, Byrd, Scruggs, and Langton last year were all dumped outside East Cleveland in your counties. The others had all been left in open places and vacant lots, badly hidden, none displayed. Some of the women were left nude, some with clothes hiked up. Almost all had cocaine or heroin in their systems. They died soon after getting high. The methodology suggests marginalized women in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the last three accompanied their killers in a car. They were driven to their sites."

He paused to look about the room.

Booth resumed: "Second theory, several killers and one recent killer, all black males, the last three the work of a true serial, somebody who might or might not be connected to one or more of the Cleveland murders. I spoke to Lieutenant Godollei-Jones of Cleveland P. D. yesterday. She tells me that between 1990 and 1996 Cleveland police investigated an average of one hundred fifty-six murders yearly. That plunges to eighty-six murders annually since 1996. Their clearance rate is highest in the state except for Columbus, much better than Chicago’s

or Detroit’s, slightly better than most cities of comparable size and where women like these are prone to violence and their communities are less than forthcoming to help investigators.

"But that’s a lot of stress on a department of a dozen, fourteen detectives, all backing up each other’s cases. Booth heightened his scholarly tone: "‘From the claw we infer the lion.’ One killer doing them all. But there are problems with this. First, Rhonda Byrd was found in a creek bed off Clay Street in Ashtabula County in 1981. Alyssa Mayweather’s body turned up in a ditch off Clay Street in December 1994 near Thompson in Geauga County. The distance between the places where hunters found Mayweather is less than a quarter mile from Byrd’s body. That links the earliest known Strawberry murder to one of the most recent."

Booth let that last sentence hang fire in the room: the thought of a serial killer operating that long was unique because they were caught, they died, or were stopped by imprisonment for other crimes. They did not have careers that lasted a quarter of a century.

Trooper Ahola said, "Happens all the time in Mahoning Valley," a jibe at rogue congressman James Traficant and his mob-busting, off-the-cuff tirades on C-SPAN during his trial in Cleveland for racketeering and bribery.

A few men snorted at the reference to the Youngstown rackets and its Murdertown reputation manifested by a dozen reckless mob slayings in the last decade.

"There’s a bigger problem with this angle," said Booth.

Geno Scarcella, a detective pal of Jimmy’s from Kirtland, interjected in a voice too high-pitched for his girth. O’Keefe loved to imitate "Scar" and his semi-literate vocabulary. "Yeah, uh, the problem is that Detective Cheng’s report that you put into our files is shambolic in parts. It says here ‘Victim seen getting into a taxi driven by a white man.’ She then says a store clerk at a Dairy Mart in Orwell identified him. Stopped to buy beer and cigarettes."

"So what’s the problem, G. G., you dumb wop?" The exasperated voice must have come from a close friend or partner because the insult barely raised the timbre of his squeaky voice by a hair.

"How does this, uh, Cheng know the guy was a taxi driver? Could be a guy pretending to be a taxi driver."

Booth answered first. "When the report was faxed to our Akron office, we checked and rechecked every taxi cab outfit in Cleveland."

Scarcella’s voice rose even higher: "What about Akron, other cab companies?"

"No luck," said Booth. "For one thing, the turnover for cabbies is second only to roustabouts at the county fair. Good number of them are drifters, dopers, felony skippers. No qualifications or references needed. A high percentage are illegal immigrants carrying fake green cards. Seventeen of the four-hundred fifty-three applications of one company in Canton were Haitians. Not many people are willing to drive a cab after midnight in any big city. It’s a mess to sort out. Since Detective Cheng made the connection between Scruggs and the today’s victim, I’ll let her fill you in."

"We know JoVanna–"

"Louder," said a couple men up front. "Can’t hear you." Someone guffawed.

She cautioned herself against the natural tendency of her voice to roam from rising flat, high tones to the falling ones that caused people to label her speech as sing-song or "Chinese." Like most professional women, she aimed for an unnaturally low pitch to give the male auditors her "credibility" voice, as she explained to Reginald once when he had complained that she sounded like a cat growling with its back arched.

"JoVanna Scruggs got into a white cab right from her apartments–" she glanced down at her notebook–"around four o’clock on February 22, 1992. The Verbena Valley Estates is a public housing project–"

It was a depressingly familiar story to all the men in the room. Except for cab drivers, the only white men who would have been seen at the Estates were paramedics or police officers. She was a mother of four children, all between five years and twelve years. She often left them alone for days at a time because of her crack addiction. Sometimes her mother would watch them but mostly one or the other of her older children would look out for the younger ones. On two occasions, in 1987 and in1990, her children were taken from her, the last time for a period of three months until she petitioned the courts for their return.

She wondered if Booth had run them through Langton’s history while she had been driving around looking for the building. She flipped pages ahead.

"Scruggs was found near the bottom of an embankment along Meade-Hollow Road, which is just east of Route 534 in Hartsgrove Township. Detective O’Keefe and I believe that someone threw her out of a car because a tree stump kept her body from tumbling all the way down the embankment."

Several questions were tossed at her randomly about the male companion.

"White, about six feet to six-three, broad-built, ‘chunky,’ according to the store clerk, between 40 to 50 years old. He stood at the back of the store. Childress didn’t see him well enough. Hair was hidden under a dark blue or black watchcap," she said.

She quoted from memory what old Emmett Childress had said about the woman during her questioning. "‘Dirty-looking, strong body odor, unkempt’ (She remembered asking Childress several times what the word was that he kept muttering under his stale breath until finally she inferred unkempt, not uncapped). She had to pull each word from his lined, weathered face as if she were asking him to swallow razor blades. He wore lifelong failure in his face and twisted hands, in the gray lines around his mouth.

"What did he purchase, Mister Childress?"

"Beer and cigarettes."

"What kind of beer, Mister Childress?"

"Hunh?"

"What kind of beer?"

"Busch."

"What size?"

"Hunh?"

"What size bottle did he buy the beer in?"

"Forty-ounce."

"What kind of cigarettes, please?"

He mumbled something that sounded like mall burrow.

"Would you repeat that, please?"

"Marlboros."

"Did he buy a carton?"

"No, two packs a filter-tip Marlboros."

–and so forth. It was all mumbled from his rank breath with his arms crossed in front of him. She noticed the crisscrossing of tiny blue veins transparent to the second knuckle bone. His fly was undone and there were stains on his trousers.

Anne remembered how elderly rural man’s disapproval of a young black female, obviously a city woman in her looks and speech, perhaps high already. Jabbing his words into her notebook, she knew he was seeing his own biased image of JoVanna Scruggs. Her photo showed big oval eyes and white toothy smile. A pretty 28-year-old woman in the prime of life–except that she had a crack cocaine addiction and was running out of time. Childress: Niggers is dirty, wore perfume to cover up her Jezebel smell, but I knowed she was a whore. This evoked a last sad memory of walking out the door, hearing word Gook hit her in the back like a blow from his fist.

She looked around the room at the faces and held every man’s gaze. "We assumed she might have been familiar with her killer."

A cop in back asked her who authorized her to dig around on a case that was "a hell of a long way out of her jurisdiction."

"No one," she stated. "I called Cleveland P. D. and they thanked me but I felt there was some connection to the Strawberry Girls.

Actually a gruff voice answering her enquiry at the Homicide Bureau had told her to mind her own fucking business and added a "lady" to the expletive. She would not give up. She called the Plain Dealer and spoke to a woman named Maxine McVay. It was McVay who filled her in on the history of the Strawberries–a skein of dead black women going back to the 1970s.

"Detective Cheng, when was the body found?"

"A turkey hunter found her body the morning of February twenty-third."

Booth stepped to the front. "You have your assignments. I will be calling each of you in the next few days to see how we can pool our information more effectively. I intend to be on-task myself," he noted; "I’ll keep NCIC updated. If you have anything in your areas, get it to me without hesitation. My cell phone is always on. Think like a team but keep an open mind. The case officers weren’t looking for a single killer. I don’t want to see the word serial in any memoranda. That’s it. ‘Stand not upon the order of your going. Just go.’"

Shakespeare, she knew. A gossamer strand of memory ticked her from her brick schoolhouse in Nanjing.

As the men stood up to leave and chat with one another, she noticed that Booth was quick to get the attention of the black officer to appease him. She felt alone in the room, chagrined that none of the men waited for an introduction to her. They were scooping manila files stuffed with papers and tucking them under their arms.

She saw Booth speak briefly to his female assistant and he, too, left the room. She was staring absently, unaware, when the woman approached with long strides that emphasized her long, shapely legs and whispering fabric of her skirt.

She felt her face burn. Donbraye flashed a smile that was anything but the fake professional smile Anne was used to seeing and giving out. She was attracted to faces, and she instinctively warmed to this woman’s high cheekbones and eyes that turned up slightly at the corners and made her think of her wizened Manchurian great-grandmother.

"Detective Chang, is it? That was quite a flamboyant entrance this morning. Edwin asked me for your business card. He would like you to wait here for him, if you wouldn’t mind." Annie reached into her purse and drew a card with her old address. She wrote her new motel phone number above her Columbus precinct address and extended it to the woman, unconsciously but formally with both hands. The woman’s smile grew wider and she absorbed Anne’s face with the smile intact. The woman’s nails were long and blood-red like her lipstick. Anne blushed at the inspection.

"That is Cheng, please, Miss–"

"Donbraye, Sienna Donbraye-Eaves, actually. Pleased to meet you, Detective Cheng." They shook hands and Annie felt her hand squeezed by the small tapered fingers with surprising firmness. She was aware of the woman’s delicate perfume for the first time in a room full of the masculine fragrances of cologne, aftershave, and shoe polish.

My friends call me Sia," she said. "I was born in Siena, Italy," she laughed. "My parents delayed the honeymoon and I drew my first breath as an American in a youth hostel overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. My husband’s name is Eaves, but I don’t use it–too many vowels, my friends told me." Her white teeth and beautifully planed face really made her a stunning woman. Anne told her it was a pretty name, that it reminded her of American tourists trying to get their tongues around the Chinese word for Yes, X’ie. The woman’s demeanor belied the gimlet eyes probing her face. It was like being in China in a room full of prominent men who could disrobe a woman without scruple. Intuition told her Sia Donbraye was highly intelligent, not merely a pretty factotum.

"Yes, if you would wait a moment, he’ll be right with you." She turned like a dancer in a glissade and was riffling through a stack of manila files at a nearby table. Anne saw her frown in concentration, high cheek bones prominent, but her stretch across the table to reach a file was deliberately provocative–what a woman might do on purpose to make a man look at her bottom. Jimmy O’Keefe walked into the room finishing the last bite of an éclair; he waved to her with a big grin and exaggerated smack of the lips at either the sweet or the view Sia Donbraye was presenting.

"That’s a fine-looking woman, yessirree Bob," he said. "What’s up, nice to see you, too, and all that."

"Damn it, James, I have a grudge to pick with you. You never said this assignment was going to involve serial killers in Cleveland."

"Bone to pick, my dear, and that’s tough titty. I told you we’re not just a bunch of hillbillies up here. We have us real live serial killers."

She punched him in his arm hard enough to make him drop the rest of the éclair he was about to pack in. He laughed. "Ouch, I said the boogeyman word, didn’t I? That’s what we both get for answering a fuckin’ Code 7."

O’Keefe swallowed the last of his donut and said low enough for her ears only. "This is the last thing I want to get tangled up with right now, believe me. I still don’t know how that young prick Falberjamian got out of this. Congrats, by the way."

"For what?"

"Clearing more homicides in five years than any detective in Columbus’ history," he said. "It’s in this month’s newsletter, you know that shitty little thing we get every month, Top Cop–the fuck’s the name of it? Little notice in the back. They misspelled your name, though."

She had declined the invitation to drive down for the annual banquet to pick up her plaque and put up with the smarmy hypocrites who assisted her transfer. Better to make the clean break, she thought.

"You men gossip worse than women," she laughed at him.

"I heard that Lebanese city solicitor–what’s his name? He’s thinking of indicting you," O’Keefe said. "Not enough they got you kicked out and internally exiled to a shittier county than mine." She could not tell if this was Jimmy ragging her or whether it were true.

She liked O’Keefe. Since she and Reg ended their relationship last October, she was friendless, still adjusting to living alone. In one of the strangest coincidences of her life, it was he who had guided her to his friend Reggie Wu and ultimately at the end of the chain to her first posting as beat cop, then detective after years of study and effort driven by her insane work ethic when her marriage to Reggie disintegrated. She had worked her cases so hard that she became oblivious to everything. Her fanaticism was first praised; then it became problematic. Her unmatched string of felony arrests of blacks aggravated the city’s badly deteriorating relationship between blacks and whites, especially inner-city merchants and ghetto blacks. When a Cincinnati officer shot a black youth fleeing a felony arrest made national headlines and spurred three days of martial law in the wake of riots, the racial fuse in Columbus was lit by proxy and she found herself in bad odor for the very arrest record that had her praised in the in-house magazine O’Keefe referred to.

She was deemed "insensitive" by the brass after making more felony arrests in a year than any officer in the city’s history. Morale had collapsed and white officers were transferring out as the city uncoiled with a seething race hatred that exposed the chancre of racism long suppressed. She was indifferent to it all until a coalition of blacks suggested a transfer of Detective Cheng would help smooth things in the black community. They tried to get her to back off on some of her cases but she made it impossible and when she was told that a lawsuit was forthcoming by a partnership among a top defense attorney, a black activist and a journalist for the city’s biggest paper where her name was smeared in his column after every incident involving a cop and an African-American.

"How’s old Reg doing?" He asked it casually enough but Annie sensed he was wary of treading on sensitive ground.

"I spoke to him four months ago. He sounded fine." He was drunk, shouting abrasive, hurtful words to her and then plunging into a maudlin, self-pitying whine. It was then she knew she had made the right decision to leave him.

But he heard the slight hesitation in her voice and dropped it. "So what do you think of our prospects, huh? Better catch him before August because that’s when I pull the plug."

She realized that Sia Donbraye was staring at her from the front of the room. "I didn’t hear anything tonight that makes me think this is going to be a–what do you call it?–slammer, slam–"

"Dunk. Christ, Annie. For a Chinese whizzkid, you’re hopeless. What the Cleveland boys used to call a whodunit."

Despite her flair for languages, slang was always out of reach by the time she got to it. "So what did I miss in the beginning?"

"Not much."

O’Keefe looked like a tame grizzly in a suit, all wrinkles and creases, shirt tail bubbled out from the belt from constant squirming. He might be fifty but he was worn down by the cop’s aging process, the accelerated decrepitude of seeing too many people act with stupidity or inhumanity for too long. The reddish-gold hair of youth was down to a last gasp of brass at the scalp as if it couldn’t generate enough color to the tips. Some receding at the temples, she noted, where a vein ticked. It was only Reggie who had the secret of eternal youth, no matter how much debauchery he inflicted on himself. She saw in O’Keefe how differently the years piled up for them all. She was thinking of an old Nanjing saying about time and years when she heard O’Keefe call her.

"Why did Millimaki try to keep me off this task force?"

O’Keefe shrugged his shoulders, grunted. "He’ll try to ruin you. Don’t trust him. That station’s been so corrupt it’s unfixable. It’s like some fucking dot of an island in the South Seas that’s been conquered by every band of ruffians to come sailing along. First it was Cleveland mafia. They got kicked out. Then the Erie mob came in, Nicky St. Angelo and Joey Fratanello’s people. Youngstown kicked them out and took over a few years ago. The whole town is so mobbed up with gambling and drug money that even Traficant wouldn’t walk the streets there. Wait’ll you see the Strip in summer–more goddamned teenaged hookers than Hollywood and Vine."

Anne knew she was going to have it rough while she adjusted to Jefferson-on-the-Lake, a fast-paced resort town in summer with over two million tourists passing through, mostly drunk college kids and biker groups from three states. In the winter it blended into a spot on the map in the biggest rural county in Ohio and became invisible–just another Mayberry, USA. But for half the year it bloated with big-city problem like Cleveland or Erie, all exacerbated by the drug and youth culture that had made it a summer mecca for the drug culture.

"Somebody must have hated you real bad to send you there, my girl," he mused. "‘Scar’ calls it a moolie shithole now that the Pagans have staked a claim to the Strip."

She had been given a handout that morning by SWAT team leader Mitchell Brown on the Pagan Motorcycle Club of San Diego. "Hey, Mook," a patrolman smirked and winked as she walked past. "Wait’ll the tourists see our new detective." They were drinking coffee outside the day-watch room as she walked past. "I’ve got an extra-large egg roll for her, take-out or home delivery," Brown said and grabbed his crotch. The men fawned over him; he was the precinct womanizer, but his leering malice was over-the-top and she pegged him as trouble.

She also knew she could outwork anyone, always had. She was driven to perfect. Her success meant that she was given more assignments and she seemed ever to make people either shun her altogether as an isolated workaholic or make people go out of their way to make her prove her worth. A month before she left town and resettled, an older female detective took her aside and scolded her for hurting the reputation of all women cops by overdoing it.

"Just take it easy," she said. "Do your job." When she countered with "that’s all she was trying to do," the woman called her a "cunt," a name she had never heard a woman use to another woman until then. She avoided her from then on but she often felt the woman’s cold eyes boring into her at squad meetings, and she knew from furtive looks and stares that precinct gossip had made everyone else aware of it too.

The merest flicker of smile. Then he turned and walked away.

Booth walked over and put a smile on his face. "Walk me," he said, "to the elevator."

She looked back to see Donbraye gathering up papers and folders. Her blue eyes reminded her of the female detective in Columbus. Her nervousness on the new job, her fatigue from the sudden relocation was making her judgment suspect.

Tinny highbrow music inside the elevator–a Schumann piano quintet.

Booth’s smile to her was like a baby’s with gas on its stomach. She was never bothered by silence in close proximity with others, but Americans were different that way, she noticed, garrulous, fearing a social gaffe if someone weren’t dinning in your ear at every opportunity. Afraid of the privacy of one’s own space like youth with boomboxes and walkman radios plugged into their inner ear canals.

He steered her toward a sofa near the plate glass overlooking Ninth Street traffic. "I have something important for you to do on this task force."

She turned to see if he were placating her for this morning’s contretemps. His face gave away nothing but a man used to people listening to him. Silver hair a vanity, she thought, a little too long for a man his age but expensively styled and the suit was charcoal with subtle pinstripes.

He said, "I want you to investigate a member of the team and I want you to do it more carefully than anything you’ve ever done in your life."

Annie stifled a surge of hot fear: "I am not used to doing anything in my work carelessly."

"Yes, I have heard that. I’ve studied your file. I’ve spoken to people. I know that you follow through. I wouldn’t be asking if it weren’t critically important to this investigation."

"Am I permitted to decline the assignment?"

"Yes. All I ask is that you forget this conversation when we replace you."

"I will hear it. My chief–"

"Your chief is to know as little as possible. Keep him happy. Bust all the teenagers on dope you have over there. Cite all the jaywalkers–whatever it is that you’re going to be doing up there. But he is to know nothing whatsoever about what this investigation is doing or your part in it. Ever. Is that crystal clear?"

"What is it that you want me to do?"

"Cleveland had more than twenty years to review his cases."

"There’s a feeling from higher up that they’re doing damage control if this goes sideways and it turns out there’s a white serial killer slaying black women. The public will say the police establishment that’s running this city with a token black commander to stay out of affirmative action trouble has been covering up a scandal for two decades."

She reminded him of his promise in the room. "I thought you said you were going to keep politics out of the investigations."

"It isn’t that simple. This is getting bigger and uglier by the day. It’s turning political and then we’re going to be stumbling around in one another’s way under the scrutiny of the papers and the media. We need to get as far as we can as fast as we can before they start pissing inside the tent."

She felt the blood surging in her veins but she kept herself calm. "Who do I see first?"

"Meldrum. Then the Cleveland shrink, Matrooshian. Let O’Keefe handle most of the field work in Geauga and Ashtabula."

"What does James–Detective O’Keefe know of this?"

"He knows nothing and that’s how it stays. Keep your own counsel on how much you have to reveal."

"Jimmy is a good cop as well as my friend, Agent Booth. I’ve known him for years."

"Was a good cop, Cheng. He’s an overweight burnout on the way to a pension. I wanted his partner, but Geauga wouldn’t release him to the task force so they stuck me with O’Keefe."

"I don’t like investigating without background. I won’t know what I’m looking for." She was hot, edgy, her stomach boiled with acid burn.

"Your cover is that you’re investigating the investigation from 1981 when Rhonda Byrd’s body turned up through the last of the Cleveland dump jobs. It’s not just a cover story, Cheng, it’s routine in cold cases."

"Does this Matrooshian have some special qualification for profiling in such cases?"

"If you’re asking why the FBI would use a third-rate shrink when the Behavioral Sciences Unit is world-famous for psychological profiles, it’s because I want to hear what he has to say."

"I must ask you why again. It seems so unorthodox–"

"It’s enough to know now that I want to know, Detective." His dark brown eyes seemed to smoke from their sockets. "We have to know what Cleveland did or we’re going to reinvent the wheel. We haven’t the luxury of time here." She watched him finger his silk tie.

"Do you believe a ‘frustrated, middle-aged’ black male is the man we’re looking for?"

"Perceptively put, Detective. Let’s assume that for the time being. It’s a peg to begin hanging things from. I know he’s in Northeast Ohio. I have a hunch he’s not living in Cleveland. The body-dumping in rural counties is telling me. I can feel him out there."

"Chief Millimaki must have informed you I am new to the precinct, which means I am new to my colleagues and their ways."

"I’m not even remotely interested in your learning curve, Cheng. What I need for this is someone new, in fact. A fresh pair of eyes. Someone who can think outside the box. Someone who isn’t worried about the third rail of race and politics all the time."

Thinking in boxes, third rails–she despised this torrent of business slang.

"Watch your drive home. The weather reports say Route 90 is slick with black ice," he said and was gone. She thought he might have winked at her. She watched the elevator doors close on him.

The abrupt dismissal was another unpleasant shock to her system. Her stomach grumbled from lack of food, and she shivered from the draft in the corridors. She craved a glass of warm milk. Three thermoses of cold coffee and an unappealing tray of cheese Danish were all she saw left from the conference, now approaching two in the afternoon.

Outside the wind off the lake was a slashing whipcord funneled by the cavernous buildings surrounding Terminal Tower and lower Ninth Street. She tugged her coat tighter around her ears and headed toward her car. The engine cranked hard, turned over on the third try. Reggie shrugged when her lawyer asked for the car in the settlement; he was indifferent to mechanics. Cars were transportation like camels to a Berber. Give them just enough to keep them going and get new ones when they died. She made a right on Ninth at the light and rolled down the exit to join the stream of cars. The bitter cold banished from the car; he would trade a new car that did not have good heat or a/c for one that had its chassis eaten away with road salt. The sun was high enough to catch and light the tops of the Chrysler building and Terminal Tower. She found the middle lane and set the cruise control so that her mind could be free. She glanced up only when she saw a trio of males crossing the steel-caged walkway above the freeway at MLK Drive. There were no rocks lying about that wouldn’t stick to a hand and tear the skin away.

She thought of the massive glaciers five miles high moving down from the pole to scoop out ground deep enough to leave behind Lake Erie. Translucent skyscrapers. She thought of the hard angles of Pei’s glasswork Hall of Fame by the lakeshore darting refracted light all across the harbor. No harmony there, not a sky designed to meet an upturned roof as in the pagodas of her homeland. In this strange, fast-moving landscape of her adopted country, she was as out of kilter in her moral world as the small rock dropped from a teenager’s hand onto traffic below that smashed a windshield and turned a human face to red pulp. She admired Americans for their guilelessness and their hospitality, but she had learned to fear their impulsive, often dangerous, sensibilities that swept over them in a flash. They were like giant-sized children, half-adults not yet willing to grow up.

She thought of O’Keefe as a big shambling boy, an aging puer aeternus Americanus, whose blunt, coarse words belied an open-hearted honesty.

By the time she finished xeroxing her fourth incident report for filing, she was well into her caseload and had decided the order of events planned for the next day. She had not given a thought to the task force meeting until Chief Millimaki stopped by her desk to ask how it went.

He asked a few questions but seemed indifferent. She watched him light his foul-smelling cigar and stand there for long moments wreathed in coils of blue smoke before moving on to his office.

The bar was cold and full of smoke. She had already sneezed and was feeling the ache in her neck muscles. Her period was starting and she was miserable with cramps but she held on and made sure to smile and talk to everyone who stopped by to congratulate her on making detective third. These people were her support system and backup. She did not want to get off on the wrong foot. Millimaki was gesturing at Mookie Brown with a stubby forefinger held just in front of his chest the same way her piano teacher Mr. Liu from Xi’an used to do. Annie looked at the bar mirror and was grateful that the distance was too great or the mirror too dirty to show her back her asymmetrical face. She had not much resistance left and that would have finished her. Any reflection triggered the same memory: her father’s face contorted with worry, squeezing her hand while the American-educated doctor in the clinic spoke quietly in his mix of medical jargon and slangy Shanghaiese to her father. Raised in Beijing, he still spoke with that accent and could not understand the physician so they spelled out letters on each other’s hands like children.

Her reverie is jolted from her by a loud male voice piped over a handheld microphone–a station house cop named Boomhower mugging it up as emcee: "All right now, ladies and germs, let’s give it up for Marcia, Justice, Delphine, and Goldie!"

Several female cops groaned, but these are drowned by the male cheers as four women in phosphorescent thongs high-stepped forward onto a small raised platform jutting several feet from the far end of the bar. A blue spot light cut a bar of light diagonally from the ceiling to the dancer’s pole. The din in the room subsided as heads tracked the girls, local talent apparently. Annie could not see well from her seat at the bar. One girl’s thong was electrified yellow cut to her skin for a walk round the stage designed to exaggerate the jiggle; her long her legs scythed in front of her as men cheered. Once, she lifted a leg for a drunk detective to kiss her foot. He put the end of her foot, black toenails and all, into his mouth as if her were devouring her foot in a parody of cannibalism. The two black girls gyrated to a machine-gun blast of rap from a small stereo system behind the bar. The decibel level made the bass thump from the hoofers.

One of the white girls gave an insouciant tug at one tanned breast and caused it to slip free. Every male eye in the place caressed her anatomy. She turned gracefully like a swan’s neck coming up and with one hand whipped off the bikini. There was silence in the din before the raucous hooting and whistling erupted into a crescendo of noise and applause. On the barstool next to Annie, a female cop who had been pounding down boilermakers actually gasped. The dancer stood rigid just for that one frozen moment. Cops-turned-voyeurs locked on to her tan lines at the apex of her legs. This one had to be Goldie, she thought: long white-blonde peroxide hair and a sallow unintelligent face with a dark pubic thatch trimmed into a neat Mohawk.

She looked out among the audience in mock surprise at the cheers and turned on her heel, her rump cheeks jiggling with muscle flexing to draw more hoots and whistles. The other white girl was doing an old-fashioned bump-and-grind. Sacral dimples winked in the shadows above hips ideal for making babies. Nude dancing was illegal everywhere on the Strip, and everywhere it was flouted because of the summer trade dollars, the Lake’s money faucet.

Veteran vice cop Stevie Schroeder hoisted a shot glass at a table with buddies Romero, Toensing, and rookie Kenneth Moritsugu like a priest raising a goblet of wine during transubstantiation of High Mass. Clapping, whistles drowned out most of the rapper’s lyrics, a bass-thumping descant of promised violence in a hail of hot lead from his nine that obscenely segued to hot projectiles from his other gun: "On your knees, bitch, for my nine-inch wad."

Noise erupts from behind her. Shattering glass, shouts, stamping of feet. A fight breaks out somewhere close by. At the bar but she could not see above the heads and backs of males moving like a herd toward the action. Two station-house cops, weight-lifters, threw their bodies forward into the melée, but she could not see much. Then someone had Mitchell Brown by the upper arm and was leading him off; his face was twisted in fury and blood dripping down his chin from a nasty cut over his eyebrow. Two more cops had another big cop’s arms pinned behind him and were bending him across a stool when the three men went down in a heap.

Then, as suddenly as the violence, the braying laughter of males at drink. She saw the wave of bodies part.

She watched his disappearing shape frame itself in the black doorway and then he was gone. Li Feng had written the carefully censored words of grief to her elder sister in America. The news was weeks old now but it stabbed her keenly each time she recalled the words in Li Feng’s delicate hand. She looked up and realized that Tico was staring intently at her. Later, she thought that weariness had taken down her guard. She does not know why she would say to a perfect stranger something that she locked so deep inside that only one other person in the world shared her grief over it.

She looked and him and said, "I think hell is knowing your father died alone in a freezing cell without so much as a blanket for warmth."

In the bar mirror, cracked and dirty and pasted over with advertising decals and slogans she saw enough of her face staring back accentuating and (she thought) magnifying the two halves of a face already alien in a land obsessed with beauty. "That’s how he sees me," she thought. She turned from the mirror toward the soft, slurry accents of Tico. "It’s sweet," she said. Cool, minty with a sweet aftertaste.

"Got a just a teeny bit of vermouth in it," Tico said. "Nice and sweet. A lady drink."

She heard Tico mutter something in idiomatic Spanish and walk toward the end of the bar.

She was destined, it seemed, to keep correcting her English everywhere she moved. First, from a Samoan teaching English to Chinese-Americans in San Francisco; then from a Wiccan midwife in Chicago, on to Pittsburgh, where again the language acquired new sounds and dimensions to, most recently, Columbus, where one of her academy instructors was from Alabama, a second from Minnesota, and her shooting instructor–an ex-Air Borne Ranger from Texas who had produced the strangest accented English of all. She saw Tico glance at her beneath his darkly intense eyebrows and walk casually back to the kitchen.

She stopped at the door, turned, and headed for the kitchen. She might not get a second chance to redeem her career from the doldrums.

She saw him standing there looking abstractly, doing nothing, just standing still. She approached him, extending her hand. "I did not greet you formally. I am sorry. My name is Cheng, I’m a detective third at the station." He took her hand into his own large one, gave it a quick one-two shake in a surprisingly gentle way.

Annie asked: "What was the fight about?"

"Ah, that wasn’t no fight. Now, see my boy use’ to be a real fighter. You heard a Ray ‘Boom- Boom’ Mancini from Youngstown?"

"No, I’m afraid I haven’t. Did he defeat this Boom-Boom?" She noticed Tico nervously stepping from side-to-side and his tone was too loud.

"Naw, he just help train him. You know, like practice? Mancini was a champion."

"Does your son live with you?"

"He helps me out in the summer. You see, this place is jumpin’ with people." There was something behind Gutierrez’ eyes she could not read.

Annie smiled through her ragged exhaustion. "Well, it looked like a real fight to me."

He lowered his voice to a rumbling whisper she could barely make out.

"Naw, dat’s Mitch being his usual asshole self. He and dat other cop don’ like each other mut in the din around her. "Mitch and his wife, Linda–her father used to pick grapes for Debevec. She and Mitch, word around here is dey got a short-eye thing going on with some teenagers at the trailer park. The other cop, he gets in Mitch’s face over it."

Short-eye . . . sex with kids.

"How much do I owe you for the drink back there?" she asked.

"On the house."

"What do you call it?"

"Iss call’ a Green Goddamn," he said.

She found out why when her boiling guts awoke her at two in the morning and she flew out of bed to get to the toilet before her bowels spasmed. Her menstrual cramps were aggravating the flux and for long minutes she sat there dozing off until the next bout racked her intestines. At dawn she awoke still on the toilet, very cold, her spine stiff and her backside ringed with indentations from the toilet seat. Looking down, she saw her ankles ringed with fleas from the infested bathroom rug she had meant to throw out the day she arrived but forgot in her haste to dress yesterday morning. Their stinging bites rippled her flesh all the way up to her neck as if someone had shaken her skin like a blanket. But there were no tears of anger or rage because she had given that up long ago. She stood up calmly, flushed the toilet behind her, and opened the bathroom window to clean out the foulness of the room. Bitter wind raked her face until her eyes watered. The tea kettle’s hissing distracted her from a reverie. Her mind refocused on the image her brain was trying to slip back into its hidden compartment, the one reserved for images unseen, things imagined, too horrible to be seen. She saw her sick, emaciated father in prison garb clutching the frozen bars of the five-by-three cell, lifting himself on his stick arms to face the searing winds racing across Beijing from the Gobi.

She saw him, over and over, in the hellish replay of the mind’s obsession–his hands were cracked and aching from the freezing cold. He held himself up as long as possible until his aching arms gave out and he fell back into the stinking pool of his own feces . . . He would do this until dawn, if he could, when the guards were lax. Do it until the raw wind sapped his last reservoir of strength and blew whatever contagion aloft into his screaming lungs so that he could get ill and die sooner.

She thought of her Chinese-American ex-husband, the pampered darling of forensic psychologists. Reggie with his many dilettantish passions, glib tongue, never faithful to any theory or woman long. She imagined her replacement fawning at his feet and it wrenched her heart. She could not recall herself clearly in the mindless throes of first love, but she scorned herself more than Reggie’s treachery for her weakness. His words of love were written on the skin of a bubble.

That night as she lay in bed listening to the wind off the Lake whip snow into drifts and the curled water pound the shoreline, she heard a voice from the past crawl around inside her brain, a voice from long, long ago . . .

She might make a full recovery. Nerve roots, ganglia, and spinal cord–it might be that the sensitized lymphocytes have done the business in the demyelination in peripheral nerves, yes? She has symmetric muscle weakness and lower motor neuron paralysis consistent with Guillain-Barré. It begins in the lower extremities and moves upward to the upper extremities. We must hope that she is one of the lucky ones. . .

She was a little girl. She heard all over again the shuffling sounds and coughs from the thirty or forty people in the grubby room next door waiting for their acupuncture treatment. She recalled how the doctor had cupped her face in his hand and tilted it toward the light. Her father gave him five hundred yuan because it is a custom and outside he bought her three red and white balloons from a stall in the market. The air was clean and fresh, washed by winds from the East China Sea. Her heart knew even then that a corner has been turned. She was upset on the ride home. Her father scolds her for embarrassing him in public, but the fear she will have to leave China, her mother and father, Li Feng, is excruciating and she behaves childishly the rest of the day, but her father does not scold her now; instead he is silent, grim, staring and smoking. She feels that anguish of someone who has shamed her family.

Then out of the dark of the room while winter lightning backlit the curtains like cheap stage lighting she saw a face peering in at her from a gap where the curtain had rucked up along the sill. The hair was drenched and the face illumined by the lightning flashes. It was an ovoid face, young and Chinese. As if imprinted behind her eyeballs, she saw her own face and eyes staring at her from outside the window. She leapt from the bed and fumbled her Sig out her purse on the table on the way to the door and yanked it open. The girl was gone. She stood in her nightdress, windblown, frigid, the gun’s laser sight stabbing red lines outward into the blackness of a Northern night sky.

She stumbled back to bed shivering, ashamed, forlorn that a nightmare, a mere dream had coaxed her out of bed. She conjured up the face that had for a moment so shocked her and recalled the eyes with tiny clods of black dirt in the corners of her eyes. How foolish, she thought. A wayward, disheveled teen runaway or a prostitute straying from the Strip was not an infrequent occurrence in high summer. Her house abutted the busiest corner of the resort town. But it was the darkest time of the year and she knew that the girl from the half-frozen grave had summoned her, yet she felt anything but a Nemesis.

Annie Cheng, a woman at the midpoint of life, a veteran of homicides and more mindless cruelty than she could recall in sixteen years of cop work in the Midwest, had felt something she hadn’t felt since she was a young woman. She could not put a name to it but it was an icy knowledge that made her oblivious to the blood dripping from her hand where the slide of the Sig Sauer had caught the web-like fold of skin at the base of her thumb.

Copyright© 2005 Terry White

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