The Shining Girls

Harper ^{12 JUNE 1993}

He steps into the early evening 12 June 1993, the date displayed in the post office window. It’s only three days since he killed Catherine. He is pushing up against the edge of things. He already knows where to find Mysha Pathan. It’s printed clearly on the last remaining totem. Milkwood Pharmaceuticals.

The company is on the other side of town, deep in the West Side. A long, squat, gray building. He sits inside the window of a Dominos in the strip mall across the way, picking at the stringy cheese, and watches and waits, observing how the parking lot is mostly empty on a Saturday night, how the security guard is bored and keeps stepping out to have a cigarette, carefully disposing of the butts in one of the yellow fliptop trash cans at the side of the building. How he uses the tag around his neck to swipe himself back into the building.

He could wait. Until she comes out. Take her at home or en route. He could break into her car. The compact blue one that is the only one left, parked right next to the entrance. Hide in the back seat. But he is feeling edgier than ever, the headache burrowing through his skull and down into his spine. It has to be done now.

At 11 p.m., when the pizza place closes, he walks round the building, a slow circuit, timed to coincide with the guard’s smoke break.

‘Do you have the time?’ he says, walking up to him fast, already unfolding his knife one-handed, hidden behind the swish of his coat. The guard is alarmed by Harper’s pace, but the question is so innocuous, so ordinary, that he automatically looks down at his wrist and Harper stabs the blade into his neck and yanks it across, shearing through the muscle and tendons and arteries, at the same time spinning the man around so that the gush of blood splatters over the cans and not on him. He kicks him behind his knees so that he topples forward between the trash cans, which Harper pulls forward to hide the body. He snags the security tag and wipes the blood off on the man’s pants. The whole thing takes less than a minute. The guard is still gurgling slightly as Harper walks towards the glass doors to swipe the keycard.

He takes the stairs, up through the empty building to the fourth floor, letting the feeling lead him, like a memory, past rows of locked doors, until he comes to Lab Six, which is standing open, waiting for him. A single light is on inside, above her workbench. She has her back to him, singing loudly and badly, half-dancing to the tinny music leaking from the earphones half-tucked under her headscarf: ‘All That She Wants’. She’s pulverizing leaves and then delicately transferring bits of the mush with some kind of plastic syringe to conical tubes filled with a golden liquid.

It’s the first time he has had no understanding of the context. ‘What are you doing?’ he says, loud enough to be heard over the music. She jumps and fumbles the earphones off.

‘Oh my God. I’m so embarrassed. How long have you been watching me? Oh jeez. Wow. I thought I was the only one in the building. Um. Who are you?’

‘The new security guard.’

‘Oh. You’re not wearing a uniform.’

‘They didn’t have my size.’

‘Right,’ she says, nodding tightly to herself. ‘So, um, I’m working on seeing if I can grow a drought-resistant strain of tobacco, based on a protein from a flower in Namibia that can resurrect itself. I spliced in the gene and I’ve been growing the tobacco for a month, and now I’m checking to see if the protein I’m looking for is in there.’ She carries the conical tubes over to a flat gray machine the size of a suitcase and opens the flap to insert them into the tray. ‘Pop it in the Spectrophotometer for analysis…’ She taps at the controls and the machine starts whirring. ‘And if the protein has been expressed successfully, then the substrate will turn blue.’ She smiles at him, pleased. ‘Did I explain that well enough? Because we’ve got a group of tenth graders coming in next week and – oh.’ She’s seen the knife. ‘You’re not a security guard.’

‘No. And you’re the last one. I have to finish it. Don’t you see?’

She tries to move so that there is a bench between them, scanning for things she could throw at him, but he has already cut her off. He has become efficient. He does what he needs to. He punches her in the face to get her down. He ties her wrists with the cords of her earphones because he has left his binding wire behind at the House. He stuffs her headscarf in her mouth to muffle her screaming.

But there is no one to hear her and it takes her a long time to die. He tries to be more elaborate to make up for the lack of joy this brings him. He unspools her intestines in a spiral around her. He cuts out her organs and places them on the desk where she was working under the lamplight. He stuffs tobacco leaves in the gaping wounds, so it looks as if the plants are growing out of her body. He pins the Pigasus badge to her lab coat. He hopes it will be enough.

He washes off in the women’s bathroom, soaking his coat and stuffing his blood-soaked shirt into the feminine hygiene products disposal bin. He pulls a lab coat over his bloodied jacket and walks out of the building, wearing her name-badge turned around so that the ID is obscured.

By the time he is done, it is four in the morning and there is a different security guard, standing behind the desk, looking baffled and talking into his radio. ‘I told you, I already checked the men’s bathroom. I don’t know where—’

‘Well, good night,’ Harper says cheerfully, walking out straight past him.

‘Good night, sir,’ the guard says, distracted, registering only the coat and the badge and raising his hand in automatic greeting. The uncertainty kicks in a second later, because it’s really late and how come he didn’t recognize the guy and where the hell is Jackson? That will shift to crushing guilt in five hours’ time when he is sitting at the police station, reviewing the pharma lab’s security-camera footage, after the young biologist’s body has been discovered, and he realizes that he let her killer walk right out past him.

Upstairs in the lab, a bloom of blue is spreading through the gold in the conical tubes.