Sacrificial Ground by Thomas H. Cook Page B

yellow dress. She seemed like a spot of light in the surrounding green. “You know, Frank,” he said softly, “there’s nothing like the past to make the future look like hell.”

9
    â€œI t was murder, Caleb,” Frank said determinedly, as he and X Caleb made their way through the lunchtime crowds on Peachtree Street. The great towers loomed over them, a thousand small suns winking in a thousand separate mirrors. The heat rose from the street in steamy waves and rippled upward.
    Caleb swabbed his face with a red handkerchief. “With malice aforethought,” he said. He pocketed the handkerchief and elbowed his way around a strolling couple. “You know what tipped me off? The way he dumped her. You don’t do that to someone you care about.” He shook his head. “My daddy was full of shit, but I remember that when he was laid out in his coffin, my mother reached over and straightened that poor bastard’s tie.”
    They reached the small, treeless park at the center of the city. It was made of cement blocks, with little triangles of closely cropped grass. A large lunchtime crowd of clerks and office workers was munching sandwiches. A few scattered derelicts elbowed their way through the crowds, and to the far end of the park, a small area had been taken over by poor, unemployed men who slouched about in fishnet shirts and drank beer from cans wrapped in paper bags.
    â€œThe heat don’t make them nicer,” Caleb said with a small, thin smile. He sat down on one of the few wooden benches and patted it softly. “Take a load off, Frank.”
    Frank sat down. “Headquarters would love it to be an accidental death,” he said.
    â€œFuck them,” Caleb said. He swabbed his neck again. “They got a low attitude about life, and they always have. Top floor’s black now, but nothing else has changed. There’s only one rule: cover your ass.”
    Frank watched the long line of barely moving traffic that circled the park: taxis, delivery vans, private cars, and here and there a bicycle that whizzed by everything else. For an instant, he felt a strange envy for the men and women on their bikes, for everything that seemed less stranded and bogged down.
    â€œThey don’t see the bigger thing,” Caleb said, “the top brass. It makes them crazy ’cause they don’t.” He crammed the handkerchief in his coat pocket. “So you get this murder and then that one and then the one after that.” He shook his head. “Things blur.”
    â€œNot much of a way around that, though, Caleb,” Frank said.
    â€œI know one,” Caleb said. “You got to do a trick in your mind. You got to think that every murder is the first one that ever was.” His eyes shifted over to Frank. “In every one, there’s some little thing that strikes you,” he added. “I saw a little boy who’d been murdered once. His big brother had shot him. He was laying on the floor, and there was a little toy pistol still in his hand. That did it for me, that little pistol. I kept thinking about it, and in the end, it was all I needed to track that son-of-a-bitch brother down.”
    Frank nodded slowly.
    â€œNow with Angelica, it’s her hair,” Caleb said, “the way it was all laid out around her head. Just like a gold fan.”
    Frank looked at him unbelievingly. “You think about that? About her hair?”
    â€œYeah,” Caleb said. “It’s what keeps the fire going in me.”
    Frank turned away and looked at the stream of traffic again. He could not think of small things to sustain him, as Caleb did. For him, it was just the opposite. Instead of a toy pistol, a fan of hair, such small, incidental things, he sensed something infinitely large which lived in the darkest quarters of the city or swept out like a prairie wind across barren, dust-covered fields. It was something which fed on the