Blvd. of Blood

Book 2, chapters 1–3

Continued from here. Table of contents for ease of navigation here. For pete’s sake, don’t start here; this is Book 2! Start at Book 1!

(The story so far: Colin Lang, respectable actuary at Radcliffe Worth Partners, has contrived the perfect plan to perpetrate some kind of horrible massacre in four months. He has recruited Bernie Feldstein, local idiot, to help him. The police have no clue, except that someone has started tweeting threats; only Patrolman John Oberman takes them seriously.)

Book II: A Nice Place to Visit

“I hear him, and shake hands with him; and we talk, and walk, and dine, and so on; but I don’t believe it. Nothing is real.”
•Dickens, David Copperfield (1850).

1.

In retrospect, it certainly looked like the greatest risk Colin Lang had taken—the greatest risk he’d taken in decades, in fact—was suggesting a stranger might assist him in murder. This was the kind of thing you always ask yourself when you read it in the papers—“Wife Slain by Husband, Mistress”—who brought it up? Who said, “Baby, I love you, and now we have to kill (my/your) wife”?

Few people would call Colin audacious, but he had husbanded his audacity—a rainy day fund, perhaps. He understood, as an actuary, risk. Inviting your mistress to a murder was a high risk, in the sense that she might leave in a huff; she might turn you in for attempted conspiracy. This Bernard Feldstein—what was he going to do in a huff? For the first week after they met, Colin’s most suspicious activity had been buying a white board, or showing a newfound fondness for Dickens. If the cops were going to come, they’d’ve come before he’d done anything even slightly dodgy. It wasn’t much of a risk.

He sat on his living room couch, thinking, as he so often did. The early morning sun was coming through the bay window, lighting up a thin white curtain. He was thinking about the plan. Somewhere along the line he’d decided that, given the sunk costs of his Christmas text, it would look less suspicious if he asked Carol out for a New Year’s Eve at some local “watering hole” (as he’d called it) than if he’d ghosted her. It would have been suspicious, surely, if he’d looked too preoccupied to kiss her at midnight. Everything had flowed naturally over the next few weeks, and here it was middle of January and he hadn’t even had time to look up what streets in Cottinend had garbage pickup on Wednesday. There was so much to do and he hadn’t been doing it.

Was this, he wondered, the actual risk? Bringing a relative stranger into his house, again and again, a distraction, just as he should be focusing on the upcoming Incident?

To the side he heard a footstep on the stair. “Oh, there you are,” said Carol.

“I was just about to make us coffee,” he said.

2.

He was gone when she woke up that morning, but it was, of course his house. He could hardly be sneaking away. She rolled out of bed and dressed in the essentials—no socks, no bra. The bedroom was spare, to be sure, she thought. There was a photo of his mother (he’d explained) on the dresser, and that was the only decoration. She walked over and picked up the photo, as one does. Then she looked over her shoulder. It was just so weird, to own so little. But then Colin was weird. When she looked at him, it was clear, always, that he was thinking of something, something profound or (she groped for the word) essential. It made other men look trivial, or childish.

She was still looking over her shoulder as she put the photo down. Only after she had opened a drawer, by touch and at random, did she turn back to see what she’d revealed. It was a collection of boxers, so she closed the drawer as quickly as she could without slamming it. She wasn’t looking to be a pervert.

Nevertheless, she tried another drawer, and another. A collection of folded sweaters meant nothing, even when she ran her hands underneath them to see if they hid a secret stash of weed or pornography. But the next drawer…

It was almost empty, but there inside were—she had to flop it over to see—one, no two identical black zippered denim coveralls, neatly folded. They looked unlike anything Colin would ever wear, and Carol could not resist picking them up. There was more underneath—a dark, plaid scarf and a blue baseball cap. They looked unworn.

There was something so uncharacteristic about the drawer that it felt almost obscene. And yet if this was Colin’s terrible secret—could anything be more bland? Probably they were gifts, perhaps from an aunt, he had decided never to wear.

But…two pairs of coveralls?

Carol quickly refolded the coveralls, closed the drawer and, after a moment to compose herself, went to wander the house in search of its owner.

3.

Every police who stayed on the job long enough got assigned a trademark. Take Davis: She had once come to a battery scene down by a sump; the perp had fled; she caught a bunch of mosquitos in a baggie and gave them to the detectives, encouraging them to have the bugs sampled for DNA. She figured that whoever the assailant was, his blood had to be in at least some of those mosquitos, and they could use the DNA to identify him. They’d just laughed at her. Maybe it was a stupid idea and maybe it was a good idea before its time. But after that everyone called her Bug Lady or Mosquito Girl or even (somewhat more cleverly) Skeeter Davis. That was her trademark forever.

John Oberman’s trademark, he had always believed, had been removing the starter relays from suspicious vehicles so that persons of interest couldn’t just hop in and drive away. First thing he did when he got a call was show up and start popping hoods. It was his signature move. But he was beginning to suspect that the other officers believed he had a different trademark.

“Did you find the computer killer yet?” Lepage asked Oberman in the coffee room. “I know you’re obsessed with that hacker shit.”

How could Oberman convince some of these dinosaurs that using the internet was, in fact distinct from hacking?

And here was the thing: Every week or so @CottinendKing would post something threatening. If Oberman really was into “hacker shit” or “cyber shit” or whatever they were accusing him of, maybe he’d know what to do about it.

“im blow up all this shit town body parts flin then whose sory huh” [sic].

“Flin?” Campbell asked when Oberman showed him his phone.

“Flying, I assume,” said Oberman.

“You should know, you’re the nerd shitlord,” Campbell said, lighting a cigarette.

“How do you even know the word shitlord?” Oberman asked.

“I use Facebook, of course” Campbell sniffed.

Who was @CottinendKing? Oberman tried contacting Twitter, but they wanted a warrant before they’d do absolutely anything. He tried getting a warrant, but was told no.

“People trash talk on the Internet,” Smith told him dismissively. “You of all people should know that.”

“This guy could live in France for all we know,” Police Chief Wanamaker explained. “There’s zero reason to think it’s our business, and less than zero to think it’s your business.” And a little later, a lot less kindly, “Get off your hobby horse, Oberman,” the Chief said. “Just drop it.”

But of course it wasn’t his hobby horse. They just said it was his hobby horse, again and again, as though that made it true. His hobby horse was supposed to be starter relays.

“It’s too vague,” Campbell explained. “No one will do anything without a credible threat. This is just ‘some time maybe in the future’ blah blah.”

The next day: “i comin for u pussyboy april 10” [sic].

Oberman lay in bed, not sleeping, although he was a man who needed a lot of sleep. He had always needed a lot of sleep. His girlfriend probably would have been sleeping, had Oberman’s tossing let her.

“Tabitha,” he said—and this, too, kept her from sleeping—“let’s say there was a case…”

“You have cases now?”

“No. No, I mean hypothetically. If I thought a crime was being committed and everyone said there was no crime being committed…”

“Everyone like the judge?”

“No. No, I mean, like, say, a serial killer. If there were a couple of unsolved murders…”

Tabitha sat up. “There’s a serial killer on the loose?”

“Honest, this is hypothetical. But say I see the connection between the murders…”

“A connection only you can see? Oh, Johnny.” She lay back down and rolled over away from him.

“But it’s just that everyone else blows it off.”

“Don’t be a jackass, Johnny, and go to sleep.”

And of course he wanted to go to sleep. But instead he got up and brought his phone downstairs. And in the middle of the night, standing in his living room where no girlfriends could overhear, Oberman called the Sp!der.

(Continued next week)