Sliver Of Truth

I remembered Max’s parade of call girls, women I had always naively thought were his girlfriends. A man like that, so damaged inside, my mother had said once of him, can’t really love. At least he was smart enough to know it. Did she know how much worse it really was? She couldn’t have. She couldn’t.

In the file there’d been a list-a kind of time line. I’d quickly passed it over because I didn’t understand it. I realized now with horror what it was. I slipped myself away from Dylan and went over to the pile of our things on the chair. The file was there beneath my bag. I sat cross-legged on the floor and opened it in my lap, flipped through its leaves until I found what I was looking for. It was a time line, apparently compiled by the FBI’s Serial Crimes Division in cooperation with Interpol, of a list of women found murdered, perpetrator unknown, organized by date and geographic location. It started in Michigan in the ghettos surrounding Michigan State, where Max went to college. Four women, streetwalkers, were found over the four-year period Max resided in that area. One: Emily Watson, seventeen, found in an alleyway beneath some bags of trash behind a Chinese restaurant. Two: Paris Cole, twenty-one, found beneath a bridge over the Detroit River. Three: Marcia Twinning, sixteen, found in a drug den in downtown Detroit. Four: Elsie Lowell, twenty-three, found in an empty lot, her body partially burned. The list went on. Women in New York, New Jersey, London, Paris, Cairo, Milan-around the country and around the world-with two things in common: the brutality of a beating death and the fact that Max was in the area around the time of their murders. Young women, lost women, walking the streets, fallen upon by a predator and left like trash. I noticed that the list ended the year Max died.

I felt my stomach churn, even as my mind clouded with a thousand questions. What did it mean precisely that these deaths corresponded with Max’s passage through the world? Surely you could compile a list like this for almost anyone. People were murdered every day in a thousand different ways all over the globe. And if, in fact, there was any real evidence that he’d murdered these women or that he’d been involved in criminal enterprise with any of the people in the photographs, why wasn’t he ever arrested? Why wasn’t he ever charged? They didn’t seem to have any difficulty finding and following him.

“You want to talk about some of that?” Dylan asked from the bed, startling me.

“No,” I said. “I’m tired of talking.” I felt as if we’d been talking for days.

There was so much I didn’t know and didn’t understand, so many things that didn’t make sense with the information I had. And I always had Jake in the back of my mind. Where was he? What had happened to him? How much of our life together was a lie, a fabrication on his part to be close enough to me to know if Max was still alive? How much of what was in this file did Jake already know? I thought of his own file he’d shown me, the one that had disappeared after the last time we made love. I wished I had paid more attention to what was in there.

I heard Dylan sit up and crack his back. He issued a low groan and I turned to look at him; he was clearly in pain. Looking at him made me think of Jake again. They were such different men but driven by the same desire to find my father. It was weird, karmic in a way. I knew there was a lesson for me to learn here, but I was miles away from understanding. He rested his gaze on me and I felt an odd wash of attraction and guilt. I looked away.

“What do you want to do?” he said softly.

“I need some clothes. I can’t go clubbing like this,” I said, looking down at my pilled blue sweater and ugly, too-tight jeans. I’d unzipped them to spare my injury any additional discomfort, but I couldn’t very well go running around London with my pants open.

Lisa Unger

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