Velocity

he still say that?” Ozgard asked.
    “He still does.”
    “He’s a prick. He covered it with this goofy charm, but he’s a prick, all right.”
    “So he was all over you, and then he just faded away.”
    “The whole investigation faded away. Judi was gone like she’d never existed. Zillis dropped out of school at the end of that year, his sophomore year. I never saw him again.”
    “Well, he’s here now,” Billy said.
    “I wonder where he’s been in between.”
    “Maybe we’ll find out.”
    “I hope you find out.”
    “I’ll be back to you,” Billy said.
    “Any hour on this one, anytime. You have tin in your blood, Deputy?”
    Billy didn’t get it for a moment, and then he almost forgot who he was supposed to be, but he came back with the right answer: “Yeah. My dad was a cop. He was buried in his uniform.”
    “My dad and my grandfather,” Ozgard said. “I’ve got so much tin in my blood it rattles in my veins, I don’t even need the badge for people to know what I am. But Judith Kesselman, she’s in my blood as bad as the tin. I want her to be at rest with some respect, not just… not just dumped somewhere. Christ knows, there’s not much justice, but there has to be some in this case.”
    After hanging up, Billy could not for a moment move from the edge of the bed. He sat staring at Lanny, and Lanny seemed to stare at him.
    Ramsey Ozgard was in life, all the way in the tides, swimming, not treading carefully along the shore. Immersed in the life of his community, committed to it.
    Billy had heard the detective’s commitment coming down the line from Denver, as fresh to the senses as if the two of them had been in the same room. Hearing it, Billy had been stung by the realization of how complete his own withdrawal had been. And how dangerous.
    Barbara had begun to reach him; then vichyssoise. Life packed a clever one-two punch: cruelty and absurdity.
    He was in the tides now, but not by choice. Events had thrown him in deep, swift water.
    The weight of twenty years of guarded emotions, of studied avoidance, of defensive reclusiveness, encumbered him. Now he was trying to learn to swim again, but a riptide seemed to be sweeping him farther from any community, toward greater isolation.
     
     
     

Chapter 50
     
    As though he knew where he would be going, down the lava tube without benefit of mourners or memorial, Lanny didn’t want to be wrapped.
    The shooting had not taken place in this room, so no blood or brains stained the walls or furniture. Because he wanted Lanny to vanish in such a way that would engender the most uncertainty and therefore would not instigate an immediate and intense homicide investigation, Billy hoped to keep everything clean.
    From the linen closet, he fetched an armload of fluffy towels. Lanny still used the same detergent and fabric softener that Pearl had used. Billy recognized the distinctive, clean fragrance.
    He draped the towels over the arms and the back of the chair in which the cadaver sat. If anything remained to be spilled from the exit wound in the back of the skull, the carefully layered towels would catch it.
    He had brought from home a plastic bag used as a liner for small bathroom waste cans. Avoiding the filmy protuberant eyes, he pulled the bag over the dead man’s head and with adhesive tape sealed it as best he could around the neck—further insurance against a spill.
    Although he knew that no one could be driven mad by grisly work, knew that the horror came after the madness, not before, he wondered how much more he could traffic with the dead before his every dream, if not his waking hours, would be a howling bedlam.
    Lanny came out of the chair onto the tarp readily enough, but then he became uncooperative. He lay on the floor in the position of a man sitting in a chair; and his legs couldn’t be pulled straight.
    Rigor mortis. The corpse was stiff and would largely remain so until decomposition advanced far enough to soften the tissues that rigor mortis made rigid.
    Billy had no idea how long that would be. Six hours, twelve? He couldn’t wait around to see.
    He struggled to wrap Lanny in the tarp. At times the dead man’s resistance seemed conscious and stubborn.
    The final package was awkward but adequately sealed. He hoped the rope handle would hold.
    The towels were spotless. He folded them and returned them to the linen closet.
    They didn’t seem to smell as good as they had earlier.
    Lanny to the head of the stairs