On a couple of pages, the margins had a drawing.A little cow, well-executed in ballpoint pen.The spots were not dots; they were small finger-stabs of ink like wounds.
She made tea.She drank it cold.She ate a slice of hard pizza.She washed both hands in the kitchen sink and looked at the dirty water and had the thought she always had: if only there was a way to wash a mind.
She returned to the book, because she might as well.Flipped on, one page, two, three…
Isaiah: ‘and he laid the fire upon my mouth.’
She stopped.
The sensation was not memory exactly but something nearer to it, like a dream you have had so many times you can recite it.She knew that phrase like she knew her slippers.She went to her shelf and pulled down the file-topped box that was the first Commandments case, the one that had begun in flames in a church, with a man she saw in the corner of her eye when she woke sometimes and refused to turn her head for fear that the corner might be real.
She flipped through until the page fell open in her hands.Isaiah.Margin note:burned mouth = purified speech.
Except — and here was the problem — those words had never been public.Despite there being unhelpful leaks, the encrypted quotes left with the bodies had never made it into the press.They were not in the op-eds that asked if America had fallen in love with religion again as long as it had a knife in its hand.Those were inside phrases.The kind you only knew if you were part of the investigation.Or… Or what?
She returned to the journal.
Joshua: ‘and it may be a witness between us.’
Malachi: ‘and I will come to you in judgement.’
Then purpled margins, where at some point water had spilled onto the paper and dried into a map of an archipelago, and again, under the stain, the phrase that turned her body colder than the room:
Spotted calf.
This is nothing though, she told herself.This is a man playing cut-up with language, like William Burroughs, like a freshman with a crush on Kerouac.This is a phrase that exists in the Bible because of Jacob, because of goats, because of early animal husbandry, because a man made a deal with a crooked uncle and won.Coincidence is not conspiracy.If you want a word badly enough, you can find it in the dictionary.Like those Ten Commandments, Jacob pops up here and there, two, maybe three thousand years later: him and his fabulous coat and his jealous brothers.
Except Robert Denton, Cox’s pupil had called Kate that, kneeling on her chest in a house that smelled of detergent and rot, when the knife nicked her collarbone and left a white scar like chalk.Spotted calf.Because of her freckles.He had said it with a sort of admiration that was worse than hate.She had known, even as the blood ran warm down to her waistline, that the nickname would be the thing.Not the wound.Not the fear.The word.It would follow her, lay down beside her when she slept.Something she’d never forget.
But still… the Ten Commandments, a few, often quoted biblical quotes, a chance coincidence… It was possible. It was not the time to overreact.No need to assume some line of continuity from Cox to Gadd, or vice versa, or both ways.
“Okay,” she said again, because that seemed to help.
She turned the page.
The first series of murders had cleaved to the First Commandment — jealousy of gods, worship of the wrong.The second series had moved to the next — idol worship in the art world.The third had been a perversion of reverence, making God into a brand on dead skin.In each case, the crime scenes had been furnished with quotations: heavily encrypted, the first time around, she remembered that cracking them had been a case all of its own.
Thinner on the ground in the second case, perhaps because Cox was incarcerated, and he had farmed the killings out to a disciple.Perhaps he was a mistrustful employer.According to her notes, there had only been one quote. St.Paul’s Letter to the Romans.‘The wages of sin are death.’She looked for it in Gadd’s journal, and it was there.There amidst the nonsense.
She made a list of all the quotations that had accompanied the crime scenes.At some point, she fell asleep at her desk, waking in the quietest hours and falling into bed.
On Saturday afternoon, she took a shower, stood with her head against the tiles, and thought about Topju.He had been brave.Or foolish.Or both.She should call him.She should say: I am sorry I made you part of this.She should ask: did Cox ever get visitors?Cox?Could he have taken his white sermon across a table with plastic chairs and handed it to a man whose smaller, neat handwriting had recorded it all, in the midst of his own mental tornadoes?
She did not call him.
Instead, she went back to the start of the journal and she made a tick every time she spotted a quotation, another tick if it was on her list from the various crime scenes.The task got harder over time, because Gadd’s handwriting deteriorated to the point where each word turned into a headache.She wondered, idly, what caused it.Medication, perhaps?Something taken, at any rate, whether a doctor was involved or not.
Despite the deteriorating script, Gadd’s writing could be exact when it wanted to be.She could see the transitions; she could almost date them by sanity.There were mornings, apparently, even in a place where night was turned off by a switch, where he had woken to clarity and written earnest paragraphs about God’s justice, and the problem of evil.
But then the spell would break and he would pick at the margin like someone worrying a wound while thinking of something else.A list of birds native to the Eastern seaboard.A line from Whitman half-remembered, turning into a different one he liked better, or a lyric by the Ronettes.An almost exquisite drawing of a woman’s hand.
She thought, briefly, of the forgery case Winters had thrown her at to teach her obedience.She’d glanced at the files.The lawyers’ elaborate signatures.The maps with the boundary lines.She wasn’t exactly having a blast with her current task, but the thought of moving onto the next one filled her with leaden exhaustion. She wondered, suddenly, if Gadd’s journal could be an elaborate forgery itself, something cooked up by Cox to convince her that he was everywhere, all the time.It was possible.So possible that she stopped work for the day and went for a run on the beach.
She returned to it refreshed on Sunday, but squinting at Gadd’s deteriorating cuneiform gave her such a bad headache that she had to lie in bed for several hours.She ate nothing at all until ten p.m.and then she ate too fast and hated herself.And then she forgave herself, because there were better things to hate.
By eleven-thirty in the evening, she was on her knees on the carpet with the notebook open and the journal open and her own case file spread like a map and she confirmed, finally, how the river ran.
Psalm 106.1 Corinthians 10:19.Romans 1:23.Revelation 17.Proverbs 6:16.
