Notes on an Execution(61)

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.

Instead, she was here, shifting uncomfortable as they reached the north edge of Tupper Lake. Ansel’s truck stopped briefly at a gas station, then pulled up in front of a residence: a house painted a bright bubblegum blue. As Ansel lumbered from his car, Saffy squinted closer.

It was a restaurant. A laminated menu sat in the window, and a little wrought-iron sign hung over the door, rusted red, barely visible.

The Blue House.

It was nearly noon, and Saffy desperately needed to pee. She shouldn’t do this—it wasn’t smart, it wasn’t reasonable, and it certainly wasn’t good police work. But Saffy knew that she would follow him inside. She had staked her career on this concept, had proven herself right time and again: Everyone had secrets. Everyone lived in some form of hiding.

Saffy, too. She was seeing a therapist now, a woman named Laurie who worked from the second floor of an outdated office building. Laurie kept a box of tissues on the coffee table and a soothing collection of potted plants on the windowsill. They talked mostly about Saffy’s work, the horrors she witnessed every day: women beaten to death in their beds, children starved and chained in basements, overdose after overdose. Often, Saffy tried to change the subject, to discuss her new home renovation—she’d recently gutted her kitchen, with Kristen’s help—or her dating woes, the men who flitted in and out of her life, rarely holding her interest. She told Laurie about the folder of recipes she kept propped on the kitchen windowsill; Rajasthani dishes she’d spent hours Googling, laal maas and dal baati, ordering the ingredients to be delivered in the mail. But Laurie always circled back to the job. The atrocity of Saffy’s every day. What draws you to this work? Laurie liked to ask, her brow crinkled with good intention. What part of your child self feels at home in trauma?