She did not need anything specific from Ansel Packer. She never approached him, never announced her presence. Her wanting had no logic, no reason—she only needed to see. To watch. As strip malls turned to rows of old, crumbling houses, Saffy flicked a cloud of ash out the window and pictured her desire like a playground carousel, rusty and aging, turning endlessly.
When she arrived at the little yellow house, the morning had bloomed into a hot summer day. Saffy parked at the curb. She flipped open her notebook, took a long inhale, and squinted out at the scene.
Everything looked different now that Jenny had left. The grass was too long, the potted plants were dead, the porch held a scattering of muddy men’s shoes. It had taken three visits, over the last nine months, before Saffy called the hospital, discovering the obvious. Texas, the receptionist said. She got a new job down there.
Jenny was gone.
Saffy had only spoken to Jenny that one time outside the hospital, thirteen years ago—when she remembered that botched interview, the way she’d bumbled, she filled with a tenderness for her younger self. She had been a baby investigator then, so hopeful, so tactless. Over the following decade, on days off and empty weekends, Saffy had watched Jenny grow in increments. She’d seen bottles of wine overflowing the recycling bin, reality shows blaring from the television, how Jenny and Ansel spent their nights separately, Jenny in the living room, Ansel in the garage. She had once seen Jenny’s sister—uncanny, the similarity—visiting with two children. Jenny had laughed as she buckled the little boy into his car seat.
Now, the house looked distinctly abandoned, though Ansel’s truck was parked diagonally in the driveway. The string lights had fallen from the porch, drooping across the fence, and the cherry-print curtains hung lopsided in the kitchen window. The car engine grumbled as a familiar frustration washed through Saffy’s gut. Stupid, to have come. There was nothing here. Saffy wanted to cry, her own impracticality like a bad glance in the mirror. She was about to turn around, to force herself home, when she heard the creak of the screen door.
Ansel stepped outside in a pair of heavy work boots, his jeans spattered with plaster. He wore a thinning T-shirt, yellow in the armpits, rising with the faint outline of a beer belly. Ansel’s hair was receding, horn-rimmed glasses perched sweaty on his nose. Saffy sat straighter, curious, as he hefted his body into the cab of his pickup.
Saffy waited a beat, as he backed out of the driveway. She wished for a pack of gum—the cigarettes had turned bitter in her throat, dry and scratchy.
If there was one thing Saffy had learned on the job, it was this: Men like Ansel did not abide vulnerability. They could not stand it.
*
There were patterns, of course. There were tendencies, similarities, character profiles sketched by the FBI. Saffy and her investigators had pigeonholed many of their suspects this way—the gymnastics coach who groomed the quiet girls, the rapist who attended every town hall to hear his own crimes repeated, the ex-marine who beat his first wife, beat his second wife, killed his third. But Saffy credited her success to the knowledge: for every criminal who fit a stereotype, there were dozens who didn’t. Every brain was different in its deviance—human hurt manifested in select, mysterious ways. It was a matter of finding the trigger point, the place where pain had landed and festered, the soft spot in every hard person that pushed them to violence. Saffy knew it was a matter of learning those intricacies, of trying to understand, an act that felt intolerably intimate. Unbearably human. Sometimes, like a twisted form of love.
*
In the decade Saffy had been tailing Ansel Packer, she had never seen him leave that little Vermont town. She had followed him to the supermarket. She’d shadowed him to work at the furniture store, to the bar down the block. Once, she’d followed him to a backyard barbecue, where he’d sat at a picnic table, nursing a beer while Jenny chattered with her friends.
Now, Saffy waited for a turn signal or a brake light—but Ansel drove on. He steered north, around Lake Champlain and across the New York border, past Miss Gemma’s house and up toward Lake Placid. By the time Ansel finally turned off the highway, hours had passed and Saffy’s bladder felt near to bursting. They had landed back in Troop B territory—a little town Saffy knew peripherally. Tupper Lake, New York.
Finally, a weekend off, Kristen had teased over the phone a few nights ago. What are you getting up to, Captain? Kristen’s son’s soccer game was this morning, the championship play-offs, and Saffy would be missing it without explanation. She thought of the Saturday she should have wanted: orange slices at halftime, a pile of toy trucks on a picnic blanket, ice cream on the way home.