? ? ?
After my early class, I walk down from the law school to the Chicago Title & Trust Building and make it there by ten. Once in the lobby with my Starbucks, I insert the SIM card and power on my green phone. I text:
And how are we this morning?
She replies quickly:
Well, hello, stranger
It’s become her standard start. My response:
Stranger? I don’t think I can be any stranger than I already am.
She replies:
Then how about: hello tall, dark and handsome
That brings a smile to my face. I’m not that tall, my hair is not all that dark, and “handsome” is overstated, but that’s good. I’m even willing to overlook that she didn’t use the Oxford comma. My phone vibrates again:
You’re not strange you’re enigmatic
Nice of her to say so. But no, I’m strange. My phone vibrates again:
I like your darkness. I like being your light.
I breathe out a sigh. At least one thing’s going right in my life.
21
Tuesday, August 30
This is a joyous, thrilling ride, but the end is a cliff. Is this what it feels like to be addicted to a drug, to ingest something because nothing in the present is so important as the feeling that pill or powder gives you, even while you know that the course you’re on will lead to destruction? You do it anyway, because you No, it’s not enough to say that “you do it, anyway”—you not only do it but you want nothing more than to do it, you embrace self-demolition over all else. Does that mean, perhaps, that was the point of it all along, the self-destruction, but you can’t be honest enough with yourself to admit it, so you wrap it up in something superficially and temporarily pleasurable like the high from a pill?
I mean, if the point really is self-destruction, why not save everyone the time and just find a knife or a gun and end it all? You don’t do that, do you? No, because it’s not the end you want but the suffering, the pain, the decline, the growing ruin as your body breaks down or your bank account empties or you fail those you love, you want to see yourself slowly degrade. You want to punish yourself.
Is that what I’m doing with you? Are you my addiction, Lauren? Am I punishing myself, allowing myself to get wrapped up in you again and knowing that you’ll just leave me again? Am I barreling toward a cliff?
Sometimes I feel that way, when I’m lying in bed at night, thinking about what we’re doing and where we’re headed, plagued with this sense of disbelief that anything like this could be real. I question your love. I question your commitment. I convince myself that you will wake up one day, ask yourself what is so great about me, and not like the answer.
If that happens, I don’t know what I’ll do. Nothing else in my life makes sense right now but you.
22
Jane
“Okay, let’s hear it,” says Chief Ray Carlyle, popping into the conference room they’ve commandeered at the station. He’s been back in town for ninety minutes, stopping first at the Betancourt house, where Jane took him around and updated him.
Sergeant Jane Burke looks up, blinks, adjusts her eyes. Age thirty-seven, she’s always had excellent vision and only recently flirted with the idea of getting cheaters for close-up reading. After spending the last forty-five minutes going over transcripts of text messages from the pink phone found in Lauren Betancourt’s house, she’s wishing she had some right now.
Outside the conference room, the house is buzzing. All hands on deck. All twelve patrol officers currently on duty are coordinating with the Major Crimes forensic team, four of the six sergeants in-house, the chief and deputy chief giving this their undivided attention as well. Most of Jane’s job now, she realizes, will simply consist of managing all these people.
“Lauren’s burner phone only texted with one other phone,” she says. “No calls. Just texts. Well, a few missed calls just before Halloween, but otherwise—just texts.”
“So the phones had a specific purpose.”
“Very,” says Sergeant Andy Tate. “Like we thought. These two were having an affair.”
“No names, I take it?”
“That would be too easy.” Jane flips a stack of the printouts to him. “They were very careful. Careful in all ways. They texted each other twice a day, at ten in the morning and eight at night. Occasionally, they’d miss a text session, but when they did text, it was only at those designated times.”
Chief Carlyle nods. “It worked for them, those times. They had to be free of their spouses. Or at least Lauren did. Who knows if her special guy was married?”