The Sniper's Wife(9)

His heart rate didn’t increase, he made no gesture or comment, he showed no emotion whatsoever as he recreated in his head the scene that had left such a signature. He could almost see Mary’s body sprawled across the couch, and the paramedics doing whatever they routinely did to bodies they had no real intention of reviving.

He’d seen too much of this kind of thing to do anything other than look at it clinically.

He crossed over to the last room in the apartment, noticing as he did that the window overlooked a fire escape and a dark alleyway below, and that the light seeping through it came from an assortment of apartments across the way.

He was now looking into a small bedroom, the darkest corner yet, especially with him filling the doorway. Its one narrow window had been blocked with a colorful poster and jammed shut with a wad of old subway Metro cards. But the lingering odor in here, even tainted by what was behind him, was fresher, cleaner, and faintly scented by intimate memories of a bright-eyed, smiling, happy young woman.

He returned to the living room window, drew down the paper shade for privacy, and began turning on lights.

This should have resulted in a jarring contrast: a place of misery cloaked in darkness, revealed in brittle brightness as even worse than imagined. Instead, the reverse proved true. What Willy discovered was a poor, rundown, seedy little apartment enhanced by paint and colorful fabrics, highlighted by fake flowers and cheerful calendar pictures. The mask couldn’t hide the reality of the setting, but the attempt had been heartfelt and thorough, and by and large successful. The mess covering the couch stood out not as confirmation of the lifestyle echoed throughout the rest of the building and the neighborhood, but in gruesome contrast to Mary’s concerted efforts to make this hole a home.

Willy made a second survey, still not touching anything, carefully placing his feet. The apartment was far from tidy, although the mess had clearly been made by others: the bedroom drawers had been rifled, the nearby desktop pawed over, the closets opened and their contents disturbed. All signs of a typical police search. Somewhere in here, the detectives who’d caught this case had found Mary and Willy’s divorce papers in their pursuit of a next-of-kin, and, he assumed, had removed them and any other relevant records and items of value for safekeeping. What they’d left behind was the miniature version of a passing army’s pillaging.

But as with any army, what had been taken were things of specific worth, here relating to identity and research and to closing a case quickly. Left behind was the rest, details of a life interrupted in midcourse, and the very items Willy Kunkle most wanted to peruse.

He returned to the kitchen, scattering all but the most brazen of the roaches, and began reacquainting himself with his ex-wife from the outside in, starting with her eating habits. Using his pocketknife or grabbing things by their edges, he opened drawers, doors, and cabinets and took inventory.

What he found didn’t fit the usual profile of a junkie. The standard binge items heavy in sugar or fat were missing, the lopsidedness of a larder composed solely of canned soup and frozen dinners was also absent. Instead, he was left with an economical and healthily varied assortment, neatly sorted and arranged. He closed the last cabinet softly, leaned up against the doorjamb, and gazed out into the living room again for a moment’s careful reflection. A process born of instinct but without particular purpose now shifted gears with this finding. He began thinking like an investigator.

He crossed over to the bedroom, knowing the living room would hold the least, although perhaps the most subtle, information.

He started with the bed. It was disturbed, but only slightly, as if the person sleeping in it had just gotten up. Otherwise, its bottom corners and far side were tucked in, indicating the habitual tidiness he remembered of Mary in her prime, and he could tell from the single pillow and the way the night table and reading light were arranged that she was used to sleeping alone. Pushing his nose against the sheets to close off the odor from the room next door, Willy found they were also clean, and smelled faintly of detergent.

He checked beneath the bed. The floor was free of dust, and all he saw was a small, empty suitcase and a pair of well-worn slippers, neatly arranged.

Next came the closet. Again, he was struck by the same sense of order that had ruled the kitchen. There were no clothes on the floor, the few shoes were lined up, the odds and ends found in every closet were either stacked on the overhead shelf or hidden away in several small cardboard boxes. He checked their contents and found only belts, gloves, rolled-up pantyhose, hair clips, and an assortment of other mundane items. He went through the two purses he also unearthed and the pockets of every coat, jacket, and pair of pants. All he located were a few neighborhood grocery receipts, an old movie stub, and several more expired Metro cards, which he placed in a small stack along with the other Metro stubs he now extracted from the window jamb.