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Left behind on the porch, Noah Heath stood, still wringing his hands, only half-listening as the chief, inside the door, detailed the killings to the mayor. Heath didn’t care about the chief, the mayor, or the dead children, or the dead Alex Sand. He did care about Alex Sand’s money. Sand had been about to cough up a hundred thousand or possibly a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to his latest Heart/Twin Cities project, called Home Streets, but hadn’t yet signed the check.
Heath’s mind was churning: Would Sand’s wife, Margaret Cooper, honor that commitment? Would she go for the one-fifty? Might she go for more, as a way to honor her husband? God knows the family had enough money; she could drop a solid mil without noticing it. Unfortunately, Sand had mentioned that her interests tended to run toward the arts, rather than the poor.
But fuck Sand. Sand was dead. Fuck the children. The children were dead. They couldn’t do anything for him at all. He had to find a way to get to Margaret Cooper.
He had his back against the wall of the house, and he slowly sank down it, until he was sitting on the porch floor, where he began to weep. Nothing faked about it, the tears were running freely down his face.
My money! My money! How can this happen to me?
The mayor came out of the house and saw Heath on the floor, was touched. He bent and patted Heath on the shoulder and said, “C’mon, Noah. C’mon. There’s nothing more to do here.”
Heath wailed, “Not Alex. Not Alex, oh, those poor, poor kids....”
3
Two weeks passed.
Sand’s wife, Margaret Cooper, had been taken back to the house the day after the shootings to see what, if anything, was missing. There were a few things missing that the cops didn’t know about. Three laptops, one belonging to Alex Sand, the other two belonging to the kids, were gone. So were three iPhones.
She couldn’t see anything else of significance and the sight of the blood puddles on the floor drove her nearly to collapse. She staggered, wailing, clinging to her girlfriend’s shoulder. The cops got her out of the place.
A crime clean-up specialty company was brought in to clean the Persian carpet and the floor where the bloodstains had soaked in, and to patch eight bullet holes. That required the wood floors to berefinished, and the walls to be repainted. The technology was good enough that no sign of the crimes remained.
At the end of the two weeks, Cooper returned to the house, along with her friend, Ann Melton, at whose house she’d been staying with the baby. They did a quick walk-through, then went back out to the car and brought in some collapsed moving boxes, with packaging tape, and two suitcases.
Melton was charged with cleaning out the kitchen cupboards and the refrigerator. Most of the contents would go in the garbage, with the rest of it being moved to Melton’s, where Cooper would stay for as long as she wished: she could not, at that point, stay overnight in her own house, Cooper thought.
Cooper dragged the two empty suitcases up the stairs, and down to the master bedroom, where she’d begin packing her own clothing. Alex Sand’s clothing was all still hanging in their closet, and when she stepped inside, she could smell him.
She turned her head away, waited for a beat, then began pulling her own clothing out, laying it on the bed. She opened the closet safe, took out several pieces of jewelry, and closed it again. Got cosmetics, toothpaste, deodorant, facial creams and miscellaneous medications from the bathroom.
When the first suitcase was full, she began towing it down the hall to the staircase. The door was open on Arthur’s bedroom and as she passed it, she glanced inside and saw Arthur sitting at his desk looking at a computer screen. Her son turned and looked at her....
The vision hit her like a thunderclap and she staggered back from the door; Arthur vanished.
She’d been warned about the hallucinations. Many people hadthem: maybe most, after the death of a loved one, or even of a close but unloved one. They were called bereavement hallucinations and were the result of a well-known brain process. They were probably the origin of the belief in ghosts.
They were powerful and Cooper sank to the floor and began sobbing, her husband and children running through her memories. She was aware of Melton running up the stairs but couldn’t stop crying, and when Melton asked, “What happened?” she said, “I saw Art. Oh, my God, I saw Art sitting there. He looked at me.”
—
Another week passed.The days got shorter and colder, and there were snow flurries on a couple of cold nights, but the snow hadn’t stuck. Not yet.
Lucas found stories about the Sand murders in the papers every day during the first week, three times during the second, and once during the third, because there was nothing new to report. Like all dead people, the Sands were receding into the past.
He talked to Russo twice a week, and got the same response every time: nothing new, except a growing feeling of desperation. Politicians did not like the idea that one of their class could be murdered, with no one caught, and the pressure was cranking up.
Then one morning Lucas woke late, yawned, rolled over and looked at the clock: 10:15. He lay in bed, half asleep, checking for any untoward body signals, found nothing alarming, got up, glanced out the window—cloudy, wet, but not actually raining.
He felt a touch of nonspecific foreboding, but then, he often did, and when recalled later, it turned out to be the precognition of a broken toaster or stubbed toe. Weather had gone to work at six a.m.,her usual time, and the kids to school an hour and a half later. He could hear Ellen in the kitchen, cleaning up breakfast dishes.
Instead of taking two showers, one right away, another after he got back from his run, he scratched his gut, yawned again, went into the dressing room, fished out an old gray sweat suit, pulled on his running shoes, got his cane, just in case, and headed out to the street. He’d tied a string to the cane so he could loop it over his back, out of the way, like a rifle.
His leg was improving. An inch at a time, but when you get enough inches...
He jogged north on the bike path along Mississippi River Boulevard, walked a bit, started jogging again, taking it easy. Weather had gotten him Hoka trail-runners with soles like marshmallows, to absorb impact. While he was still weeks away from his usual workout, at least he was out there. Maybe by Christmas...
He’d gotten to the northern end of his loop, a mile and a half out, when Virgil Flowers called. “Where are you?”
