“Don’t look at me. This is up to Ruth. That’s really why I’m here. She’s briefing us all in ten.”
“Right,” Jessica said. “Shit, she’s going to put me on leave, isn’t she?”
“She should. Send you on a secret vacation until we catch whoever’s doing this. That’s what you’d do if you were her, right?”
“I guess so,” Jessica said, standing up, getting her phone from her desk. “Where was he shot?”
“Matthew Beaumont? In the back, apparently. He didn’t see it coming.”
“I just spoke with him yesterday. Jesus. I guess this is real.”
Together they walked to Ruth Jackson’s office.
4
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 9:48 A.M.
Jay woke up in a filthy mood, the memories of his failed audition two days earlier fresh in his mind. He felt hungover, a dull headache behind his eyes, and he counted his drinks from the night before. A few light beers at his local bar, then two—or was it three?—hefty vodka rocks back in his apartment. He’d been on Craigslist, hunting through the personals for someone he could fuck, or, preferably, fuck up. He’d even messaged for a while with some straight-up prostitute, negotiating fees. She’d stopped writing him after he asked her what it would cost for him to fuck her from behind and then punch her in the kidneys. That had been the highlight of his evening, picturing her face when she received that message, but even then, he’d been thinking about the woman at the Brentwood Country Mart who he’d followed back to her apartment in Koreatown. Maybe he really should pay her a visit. He’d been thinking that last night, and he was thinking that again this morning. He found her on Instagram and scrolled through her pictures, thinking that they looked like every other Instagram feed from every other hot piece of ass. There she was curled up with a book to show everyone how smart she was. And there she was drinking prosecco with her girlfriends at brunch. And, of course, there were about three hundred pictures of her in a bikini because that’s all she really wanted to show the world. Look at this body, and don’t you wish you could fuck it. That’s what it was all about, and he’d love to take her down a notch, or maybe two.
He put the phone down for a moment, and the dream he’d had the night before swam up briefly into his consciousness. It was a recurring dream, one he’d had for as long as he could remember. He’d killed someone and he needed to hide the body, and he was terrified of getting caught. Or else he’d already hidden the body but he knew it was going to be found. He tried hard to unpick the strands of last night’s dream, wondering who he’d killed. Was it the blonde from Brentwood? He didn’t think so. It had probably been Olivia Bauer, his high school girlfriend, the girl he’d lost his virginity to, and it wasn’t the first dream in which he’d beaten her to death and hidden her in Eel Pond, that swampy, shallow pretend lake in the shitty town in New Hampshire he’d grown up in. No, he’d had that dream before, and it was always the same; he kept trying to weigh her down under the green surface of the pond by covering her body with rocks, but she kept bobbing back up to the surface.
He’d had that dream so many times he sometimes believed it was real.
Except for teaching a spin class at the gym from eleven to noon, Jay had a free day ahead of him. He did some push-ups, made himself a smoothie, then watched some porn without allowing himself to masturbate, not even touching himself. It was painful, but kind of invigorating at the same time. When he got bored with that, he checked his phone and saw that he had a voice mail message from a number he didn’t recognize. It had been left the day before, and he assumed it was a sales call, but decided to listen to it just in case it had something to do with a job. Turned out to not be a sales call, but a Jessica Winslow from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, wanting him to call her back as soon as possible. His stomach twisted with a feeling of rage and fear. Jesus, was it that email he’d sent last night to that slut on Craigslist? That couldn’t be it. She probably heard that stuff all the time, and besides, there was no way his account could be traced back to him. Also, he just realized, he’d gotten the phone call from the FBI yesterday afternoon and he’d sent the message on Craigslist last night. He relaxed a little. Still, that wasn’t the first message of that kind he’d sent from his account. Maybe he should delete it, just in case, scrub his laptop.
He listened to the message again, trying to read her tone of voice. He couldn’t tell a thing. It was probably nothing, hopefully nothing. Either way, he decided he didn’t want to call her back. No matter what she had to say, it wasn’t something he wanted to hear. He erased the message.