Darkfall

I

The next morning, the first thing Rebecca said to Jack Dawson was, “We have two stiffs.”

“Huh?”

“Two corpses.”

“I know what stiffs are,” he said.

“The call just came in.”

“Did you order two stiffs?”

“Be serious.”

“I didn't order two stiffs.”

“Uniforms are already on the scene,” she said.

“Our Shift doesn't start for seven minutes.”

“You want me to say we won't be going out there because it was thoughtless of them to die this early in the morning?”

“Isn't there at least time for polite chit-chat?” he asked.

“No.”

“See. the way it should be… you're supposed to say. “Good morning, Detective Dawson.” And then I say. “Good morning, Detective Chandler.” Then you say. “How're you this morning?” And then I wink and say—”

She frowned. “It's the same as the other two, Jack. Bloody and strange. Just like the one Sunday and the one yesterday. But this time it's two men. Both with crime family connections from the sound of it.”

Standing in the grubby police squad room, half out of his heavy gray overcoat, a smile incompletely formed, Jack Dawson stared at her in disbelief. He wasn't surprised that there had been another murder or two. He was a homicide detectives; there was always another murder. Or two. He wasn't even surprised that there was another strange murder; after all, this was New York City. What he couldn't believe was her attitude, the way she was treating him — this morning of all mornings.

“Better put your coat back on,” she said.

“Rebecca—”

“They're expecting us.”

“Rebecca, last night—”

“Another ward one,” she said, snatching up, her purse from the top of a battered desk.

“Didn't we—”

“We've sure got a sick one on our hands this time,” she said' heading for the door. “Really sick.”

“Rebecca—”

She stopped in the doorway and shook her head. “You know what I wish sometimes?”

He stared at her.

She said, “Sometimes I wish I'd married Tiny Taylor. Right now, I'd be up there in Connecticut, snug in my all-electric kitchen, having coffee and Danish, the kids off to school for the day, the twice-a-week maid taking care of the housework, looking forward to lunch at the country club with the girls…”

Why is she doing this to me? he wondered.

She noticed that he was still half out of his coat, and she said, “Didn't you hear me, Jack? We've got a call to answer.”

“Yeah. I—”

“We've got two more stiffs.”

She left the squad room, which was colder and shabbier for her departure.

He sighed.

He shrugged back into his coat.

He followed her.

II

Jack felt gray and washed out, partly because Rebecca was being so strange, but also because the day itself was gray, and he was always sensitive to the weather. The sky was flat and hard and gray. Manhattan's piles of stone, steel, and concrete were all gray and stark. The bare-limbed trees were ash-colored; they looked as if they had been severely scorched by a long-extinguished fire.

He got out of the unmarked sedan, half a block off Park Avenue, and a raw gust of wind hit him in the face. The December air had a faint tomb-dank smell. He jammed his hands into the deep pockets of his overcoat.

Rebecca Chandler got out of the driver's side and slammed the door. Her long blond hair streamed behind her in the wind. Her coat was unbuttoned; it flapped around her legs. She didn't seem bothered by the chill or by the omnipresent grayness that had settled like soot over the entire city.

Viking woman, Jack thought. Stoical. Resolute. And just look at that profile!

Hers was the noble, classic, feminine face that seafarers had once carved on the prows of their ships, ages ago, when such beauty was thought to have sufficient power to ward off the evils of the sea and the more vicious whims of fate.

Reluctantly, he took his eyes from Rebecca and looked at the three patrol cars that were angled in at the curb. On one of them, the red emergency beacons were flashing, the only spot of vivid color in this drab day.

Harry Ulbeck, a uniformed officer of Jack's acquaintance, was standing on the steps in front of the handsome, Georgian-style, brick townhouse where the murders had occurred. He was wearing a dark blue regulation greatcoat, a woolen scarf, and gloves, but he was still shivering.

From the look on Harry's face, Jack could see it wasn't the cold weather bothering him. Harry Ulbeck was chilled by what he had seen inside the townhouse.

“Bad one?” Rebecca asked.

Harry nodded. “The worst. Lieutenant.”

He was only twenty-three or twenty-four, but at the moment he appeared years older; his face was drawn, pinched.

“Who're the deceased?” Jack asked.

“Guy named Vincent Vastagliano and his bodyguard, Ross Morrant.”

Jack drew his shoulders up and tucked his head down as a vicious gust of wind blasted through the street. “Rich neighborhood,” he said.

“Wait till you see inside,” Harry said. “It's like a Fifth Avenue antique shop in there.”

“Who found the bodies?” Rebecca asked.

“A woman named Shelly Parker. She's a real looker. Vastagliano's girlfriend, I think.”

“She here now?”

“Inside. But I doubt she'll be much help. You'll probably get more out of Nevetski and Blaine.”

Standing tall in the shifting wind, her coat still unbuttoned, Rebecca said, “Nevetski and Blaine? Who're they?”

“Narcotics,” Harry said. “They were running a stakeout on this Vastagliano.”

“And he got killed right under their noses?” Rebecca asked.

“Better not put it quite like that when you talk to them,” Harry warned. “They're touchy as hell about it. I mean, it wasn't just the two of them. They were in charge of a six-man team, watching all the entrances to the house. Had the place sealed tight. But somehow somebody got in anyway, killed Vastagliano and his bodyguard, and got out again without being seen. Makes poor Nevetski and Blaine look like they were sleeping.”

Jack felt sorry for them.

Rebecca didn't. She said, “Well, damnit, they won't get any sympathy from me. It sounds as if they were screwing around.”

“I don't think so,” Harry Ulbeck said. “They were really shocked. They swear they had the house covered.”

“What else would you expect them to say?” Rebecca asked sourly.

“Always give a fellow officer the benefit of the doubt,” Jack admonished her.

“Oh, yeah?” she said. “Like hell. I don't believe in blind loyalty. I don't expect it; don't give it. I've known good cops, more than a few, and if I know they're good, I'll do anything to help them. But I've also known some real jerks who couldn't be trusted to put their pants on with the fly in front.”

Harry blinked at her.

She said, “I won't be surprised if Nevetski and Blaine are two of those types, the ones who walk around with zippers up their butts.”

Jack sighed.

Harry stared at Rebecca, astonished.

A dark, unmarked van pulled to the curb. Three men got out, one with a camera case, the other two with small suitcases.

“Lab men're here,” Harry said.

The new arrivals hurried along the sidewalk, toward the townhouse. Something about their sharp faces and squinted eyes made them seem like a trio of stilt-legged birds eagerly rushing toward a new piece of carrion.

Jack Dawson shivered.

The wind shook the day again. Along the street, the stark branches of the leafless trees rattled against one another. That sound brought to mind a Halloween-like image of animated skeletons engaged in a macabre dance.

III

The assistant medical examiner and two other men from the pathology lab were in the kitchen, where Ross Morrant, the bodyguard, was sprawled in a mess of blood, mayonnaise, mustard, and salami. He had been attacked and killed while preparing a midnight snack.

On the second floor of the townhouse, in the master bathroom, blood patterned every surface, decorated every corner: sprays of blood, streaks of it, smears and drops; bloody handprints on the walls and on the edge of the tub.

Jack and Rebecca stood at the doorway, peering in, touching nothing. Everything had to remain undisturbed until the lab men were finished.

Vincent Vastagliano, fully clothed, lay jammed between the tub and sink, his head resting against the base of the toilet. He had been a big man, somewhat flabby, with dark hair and bushy eyebrows. His slacks and shirt were blood soaked. One eye had been torn from its socket. The other was open wide, staring sightlessly. One hand was clenched; the other was open, relaxed. His face, neck, and hands were marked by dozens of small wounds. His clothes had been ripped in at least fifty or sixty places, and through those narrow rents in the fabric, other dark and bloody injuries could be seen.

“Worse than the other three,” Rebecca said.

“Much.”

This was the fourth hideously disfigured corpse they'd seen in the past four days. Rebecca was probably right: There was a psychopath on the loose.

But this wasn't merely a crazed killer who slaughtered while in the grip of a psychotic rage or fugue. This lunatic was more formidable than that, for he seemed to be a psychopath with a purpose, perhaps even a holy crusade: All four of his victims had been in one way or another involved in the illegal drug trade.

Rumors were circulating to the effect that a gang war was getting underway, a dispute over territories, but Jack didn't put much faith in that explanation. For one thing, the rumors were… strange. Besides, these didn't look like gangland killings. They certainly weren't the work of a professional assassin; there was nothing clean, efficient, or professional about them. They were savage killings, the product of a badly, darkly twisted personality.

Actually, Jack would have preferred tracking down an ordinary hit man. This was going to be tougher. Few criminals were as cunning, clever, bold, or difficult to catch as a maniac with a mission.

“The number of wounds fits the pattern,” Jack said.

“But they're not the same kind of wounds we've seen before. Those were stabbings. These definitely aren't punctures. They're too ragged for that. So maybe this one isn't by the same hand.”

“It is,” he said.

“Too soon to say.”

“It's the same case,” he insisted.

“You sound so certain.

“I feel it.”

“Don't get mystical on me like you did yesterday.”

“I never.”

“Oh, yes, you did.”

“We were only following up viable leads yesterday.”

“In a voodoo shop that sells goat's blood and magic amulets.”

“So? It was still a viable lead,” he said.

They studied the corpse in silence.

Then Rebecca said, “It almost looks as if something bit him about a hundred times. He looks… chewed.”

“Yeah. Something small,” he said.

“Rats?”

“This is really a nice neighborhood.”

“Yeah, sure, but it's also just one big happy city, Jack. The good and the bad neighborhoods share the same streets, the same sewers, the same rats. It's democracy in action.”

“If those're rat bites, then the damned things came along and nibbled at him after he was already dead; they must've been drawn by the scent of blood. Rats are basically scavengers. They aren't bold. They aren't aggressive. People don't get attacked by packs of rats in their own homes. You ever heard of such a thing?”

“No,” she admitted. “So the rats came along after he was dead, and they gnawed on him. But it was only rats.

Don't try to make it anything mystical.”

“Did I say anything?”

“You really bothered me yesterday.”

“We were only following viable leads.”

“Talking to a sorcerer,” she said disdainfully.

“The man wasn't a sorcerer. He was—”

“Nuts. That's what he was. Nuts. And you stood there listening for more than half an hour.”

Jack sighed.

“These are rat bites,” she said, “and they've disguised the real wounds. We'll have to wait for the autopsy to learn the cause of death.”

“I'm already sure it'll be like the others. A lot of small stab wounds under those bites.”

“You're probably right,” she said.

Queasy, Jack turned away from the dead man.

Rebecca continued to look.

The bathroom door frame was splintered, and the lock on the door was broken.

As Jack examined the damage, he spoke to a beefy, ruddy-faced patrolman who was standing nearby. “You found the door like this?”

“No, no, Lieutenant. It was locked tight when we got here.”

Surprised, Jack looked up from the ruined door. “Say what?”

Rebecca turned to face the patrolman. “Locked?”

The officer said, “See, this Parker broad… uh, I mean, this Miss Parker… she had a key. She let herself into the house, called for Vastagliano, figured he was still sleeping, and came upstairs to wake him. She found the bathroom door locked, couldn't get an answer, and got worried he might've had a heart attack. She looked under the door, saw his hand, sort of outstretched, and all that blood. She phoned it in to 911 right away. Me and Tony — my partner — were the first here, and we broke down the door in case the guy might still be alive, but one look told us he wasn't. Then we found the other guy in the kitchen.”

“The bathroom door was locked from inside?” Jack asked.

The patrolman scratched his square, dimpled chin.

“Well, sure. Sure, it was locked from inside. Otherwise, we wouldn't have had to break it down, would we? And see here? See the way it works? It's what the locksmiths call a 'privacy set.” It can't be locked from outside the bathroom.”

Rebecca scowled. “So the killer couldn't possibly have locked it after he was finished with Vastagliano?”

“No,” Jack said, examining the broken lock more closely. “Looks like the victim locked himself in to avoid whoever was after him.”

“But he was wasted anyway,” Rebecca said.

“Yeah.”

“In a locked room.”

“Yeah.”

“Where the biggest window is only a narrow slit.”

“Yeah.”

“Too narrow for the killer to escape that way.”

“Much too narrow.”

“So how was it done? “

“Damned if I know,” Jack said.

She scowled at him.

She said, “Don't go mystical on me again.”

He said, “I never.”

“There's an explanation.”

“I'm sure there is.”

“And we'll find it.”

“I'm sure we will.”

“A logical explanation.”

“Of course.”

IV

That morning, something bad happened to Penny Dawson when she went to school.

The Wellton School, a private institution, was in a large, converted, four-story brownstone on a clean, tree-lined street in a quite respectable neighborhood. The bottom floor had been remodeled to provide an acoustically perfect music room and a small gymnasium. The second floor was given over to classrooms for grades one through three, while grades four through six received their instruction on the third level. The business offices and records room were on the fourth floor.

Being a sixth grader, Penny attended class on the third floor. It was there, in the bustling and somewhat overheated cloakroom, that the bad thing happened.

At that hour, shortly before the start of school, the cloakroom was filled with chattering kids struggling out of heavy coats and boots and galoshes. Although snow hadn't been falling this morning, the weather forecast called for precipitation by midafternoon, and everyone was dressed accordingly.

Snow! The first snow of the year. Even though city kids didn't have fields and country hills and woods in which to enjoy winter's games, the first snow of the season was nevertheless a magic event. Anticipation of the storm put an edge on the usual morning excitement.

There was much giggling, name-calling, teasing, talk about television shows and homework, joke-telling, riddle-making, exaggerations about just how much snow they were supposed to be in for, and whispered conspiracy, the rustle of coats being shed, the slap of books on benches, the clank and rattle of metal lunchboxes.

Standing with her back to the whirl of activity, stripping off her gloves and then pulling off her long woolen scarf, Penny noticed that the door of her tall, narrow, metal locker was dented at the bottom and bent out slightly along one edge, as if someone had been prying at it. On closer inspection, she saw the combination lock was broken, too.

Frowning, she opened the door — and jumped back in surprise as an avalanche of paper spilled out at her feet. She had left the contents of her locker in a neat, orderly arrangement. Now, everything was jumbled together in one big mess. Worse than that, every one of her books had been torn apart, the pages ripped free of the bindings; some pages were shredded, too, and some were crumpled. Her yellow, lined tablet had been reduced to a pile of confetti. Her pencils had been broken into small pieces.

Her pocket calculator was smashed.

Several other kids were near enough to see what had tumbled out of her locker. The sight of all that destruction startled and silenced them.

Numb, Penny crouched, reached into the lower section of the locker, pulled out some of the rubbish, until she uncovered her clarinet case. She hadn't taken the instrument home last night because she'd had a long report to write and hadn't had time to practice. The latches on the black case were busted.

She was afraid to look inside.

Sally Wrather, Penny's best friend, stooped beside her. “What happened?”

“I don't know.”

“You didn't do it?”

“Of course not. I… I’m afraid my clarinet is broken.”

“Who'd do something like that? That's downright mean.”

Chris Howe, a sixth-grade boy who was always clowning around and who could, at times, be childish and obnoxious and utterly impossible — but who could cute because he looked a little like Scott Baio — crouched next to Penny. He didn't seem to be aware that something was wrong. He said, “Jeez, Dawson, I never knew you were such a slob.”

Sally said, “She didn't—”

But Chris said, “I'll bet you got a family of big, grody cockroaches in there, Dawson.”

And Sally said, “Oh, blow it out your ears, Chris.”

He gaped at her in surprise because Sally was a petite, almost fragile-looking redhead who was usually very soft-spoken. When it came to standing up for her friends, however, Sally could be a tiger. Chris blinked at her and said, “Huh? What did you say?”

“Go stick your head in the toilet and flush twice,” Sally said. “We don't need your stupid jokes. Somebody trashed Penny's locker. It isn't funny.”

Chris looked at the rubble more closely. “Oh. Hey, I didn't realize. Sorry, Penny.”

Reluctantly, Penny opened the damaged clarinet case. The silver keys had been snapped off. The instrument had also been broken in two.

Sally put a hand on Penny's shoulder.

“Who did it?” Chris asked.

“We don't know,” Sally said.

Penny stared at the clarinet, wanting to cry, not because it was broken (although that was bad enough), but because she wondered if someone had smashed it as a way of telling her she wasn't wanted here.

At Wellton School, she and Davey were the only kids who could boast a policeman for a father. The other children were the offspring of attorneys, doctors, businessmen, dentists, stockbrokers, and advertising executives. Having absorbed certain snobbish attitudes from their parents, there were those in the student body who thought a cop's kids didn't really belong at an expensive private school like Wellton. Fortunately, there weren't many of that kind. Most of the kids didn't care what Jack Dawson did for a living, and there were even a few who thought it was special and exciting and better to be a cop's kid than to have a banker or an accountant for a father.

By now, everyone in the cloakroom realized that something big had happened, and everyone had fallen silent.

Penny stood, turned, and surveyed them.

Had one of the snobs trashed her locker?

She spotted two of the worst offenders — a pair of sixth-grade girls, Sissy Johansen and Cara Wallace — and suddenly she wanted to grab hold of them, shake them, scream in their faces, tell them how it was with her, make them understand.

I didn't ask to come to your damned school. The only reason my dad can afford it is because there was my mother's insurance money and the out-of-court settlement with the hospital that killed her. You think I wanted my mother dead just so I could come to Wellton? Cripes. Holy crimes! You think I wouldn't give up Wellton in a snap if I could only have my mother back? You creepy, snot-eating nerds! Do you think I'm glad my mother's dead, for God's sake? You stupid creeps! What's wrong with you?

But she didn't scream at them.

She didn't cry, either.

She swallowed the lump in her throat. She bit her lip. She kept control of herself, for she was determined not to act like a child.

After a few seconds, she was relieved she hadn't snapped at them, for she began to realize that even Sissy and Cara, snotty as they could be sometimes, were not capable of anything as bold and as vicious as the trashing of her locker and the destruction of her clarinet. No.

It hadn't been Sissy or Cara or any of the other snobs.

But if not them… who?

Chris Howe had remained crouched in front of Penny's locker, pawing through the debris. Now he stood up, holding a fistful of mangled pages from her textbooks. He said, “Hey, look at this. This stuff hasn't just been torn up. A lot of it looks like it's been chewed.”

“Chewed?” Sally Wrather said.

“See the little teeth marks?” Chris asked.

Penny saw them.

“Who would chew up a bunch of books?” Sally asked.

Teeth marks, Penny thought.

“Rats,” Chris said.

Like the punctures in Davey's plastic baseball bat.

“Rats?” Sally said, grimacing. “Oh, ynck.”

Last night. The thing under the bed.

“Rats…”

“… rats…”

“… rats.”

The word swept around the room.

A couple of girls squealed.

Several kids slipped out of the cloakroom to tell the teachers what had happened.

Rats.

But Penny knew it hadn't been a rat that had torn the baseball bat out of her hand. It had been… something else.

Likewise, it hadn't been a rat that had broken her clarinet. Something else.

Something else.

But what?

V

Jack and Rebecca found Nevetski and Blaine downstairs, in Vincent Vastagliano's study. They were going through the drawers and compartments of a Sheraton desk and a wall of beautifully crafted oak cabinets.

Roy Nevetski looked like a high school English teacher, circa 1955. White shirt. Clip-on bow tie. Gray vee-neck sweater.

By contrast, Nevetski's partner, Carl Blaine, looked like a thug. Nevetski was on the slender side, but Blaine was stocky, barrel-cheated, slab-shouldered, bullnecked. Intelligence and sensitivity seemed to glow in Roy Nevetski's face, but Blaine appeared to be about as sensitive as a gorilla.

Judging from Nevetski's appearance, Jack expected him to conduct a neat search, leaving no marks of his passage; likewise, he figured Blaine to be a slob, scattering debris behind, leaving dirty pawprints in his wake. In reality, it was the other way around. When Roy Nevetski finished poring over the contents of a drawer, the floor at his feet was littered with discarded papers, while Carl Blaine inspected every item with care and then returned it to its original resting place, exactly as he had found it.

“Just stay the hell out of our way,” Nevetski said irritably. “We're going to pry into every crack and crevice in this fuckin' joint. We aren't leaving until we find what we're after.” He had a surprisingly hard voice, all low notes and rough edges and jarring metallic tones, like a piece of broken machinery. “So just step back.”

“Actually,” Rebecca said, “now that Vastagliano's dead, this is pretty much out of your hands.”

Jack winced at her directness and all-too-familiar coolness.

“It's a case for Homicide now,” Rebecca said. “It's not so much a matter for Narcotics any more.”

“Haven't you ever heard of interdepartmental cooperation, for Christ's sake?” Nevetski demanded.

“Haven't you ever heard of common courtesy?”

Rebecca asked.

“Wait, wait, wait,” Jack said quickly, placatingy. “There's room for all of us. Of course there is.”

Rebecca shot a malevolent look at him.

He pretended not to see it. He was very good at pretending not to see the looks she gave him. He'd had a lot of practice at it.

To Nevetski, Rebecca said, “There's no reason to leave the place like a pig sty.”

“Vastagliano's too dead to care,” Nevetski said.

“You're just making it harder for Jack and me when we have to go through all this stuff ourselves.”

“Listen,” Nevetski said, “I'm in a hurry. Besides, when I run a search like this, there's no fuckin' reason for anyone else to double-check me. I never miss anything.”

“You'll have to excuse Roy,” Carl Blaine said, borrowing Jack's placating tone and gestures.

“Like hell,” Nevetski said.

“He doesn't mean anything by it,” Blaine said.

“Like hell,” Nevetski said.

“He's extraordinarily tense this morning,” Blaine said. In spite of his brutal face, his voice was soft, cultured, mellifluous. “Extraordinarily tense.”

“From the way he's acting,” Rebecca said, “I thought maybe it was his time of the month.”

Nevetski glowered at her.

There's nothing so inspiring as police camaraderie, Jack thought.

Blaine said, “It's just that we were conducting a tight surveillance on Vastagliano when he was killed.”

“Couldn't have been too tight,” Rebecca said.

“Happens to the best of us,” Jack said, wishing she'd shut up.

“Somehow,” Blaine said, “the killer got past us, both going in and coming out. We didn't get a glimpse of him.”

“Doesn't make any goddamned sense, “ Nevetski said, and he slammed a desk drawer with savage force.

“We saw the Parker woman come in here around twenty past seven,” Blaine said. “Fifteen minutes later, the first black-and-white pulled up. That was the first we knew anything about Vastagliano being snuffed. It was embarrasing. The captain won't be easy on us.”

“Hell, the old man'll have our balls for Christmas decorations.”

Blaine nodded agreement. “It'd help if we could find Vastagliano's business records, turn up the names of his associates, customers, maybe collect enough evidence to make an important arrest.”

“We might even wind up heroes,” Nevetski said, “although right now I'd settle for just getting my head above the shit line before I drown.”

Rebecca's face was lined with disapproval of Nevetski's incessant use of obscenity.

Jack prayed she wouldn't chastise Nevetski for his foul mouth.

She leaned against the wall beside what appeared to be (at least to Jack's unschooled eye) an original Andrew Wyeth oil painting. It was a farm scene rendered in intricate and exquisite detail.

Apparently oblivious of the exceptional beauty of the painting, Rebecca said, “So this Vincent Vastagliano was in the dope trade?”

“Does McDonald's sell hamburgers?” Nevetski asked.

“He was a blood member of the Carramazza family,” Blaine said.

Of the five mafia families that controlled gambling, prostitution, and other rackets in New York, the Carramazzas were the most powerful.

“In fact,” Blaine said, “Vastagliano was the nephew of Gennaro Carramazza himself. His uncle Gennaro gave him the Gucci route.”

“The what?” Jack asked.

“The uppercrust clientele in the dope business,” Blaine said. “The kind of people who have twenty pairs of Gucci shoes in their closet.”

Nevetski said, “Vastagliano didn't sell shit to school kids. His uncle wouldn't have let him do anything that seamy. Vince dealt strictly with show business and society types. Highbrow muckety-mucks.”

“Not that Vince Vastagliano was one of them,” Blaine quickly added. “He was just a cheap hood who moved in the right circles only because he could provide the nose candy some of those limousine types were looking for.”

“He was a scumbag,” Nevetski said. “This house, all those antiques — this wasn't him. This was just an image he thought he should project if he was going to be the candyman to the jet set.”

“He didn't know the difference between an antique and a K-Mart coffee table,” Blaine said. “All these books. Take a closer look. They're old textbooks, incomplete sets of outdated encyclopedias, odds and ends, bought by the yard from a used-book dealer, never meant to be read, just dressing for the shelves.”

Jack took Blaine's word for it, but Rebecca, being Rebecca, went to the bookcases to see for herself.

“We've been after Vastagliano for a long time,” Nevetski said. “We had a hunch about him. He seemed like a weak link. The rest of the Carramazza family is as disciplined as the fuckin' Marine Corps. But Vince drank too much, whored around too much, smoked too much pot, even used cocaine once in a while.”

Blaine said, “We figured if we could get the goods on him, get enough evidence to guarantee him a prison term, he'd crack and cooperate rather than do hard time. Through him, we figured to finally lay our hands on some of the wiseguys at the heart of the Carramazza organization.”

Nevetski said, “We got a tip that Vastagliano would be contacting a South American cocaine wholesaler named Rene Oblido.”

“Our informant said they were meeting to discuss new sources of supply. The meeting was supposed to be yesterday or today. It wasn't yesterday—”

“And for damned sure, it won't happen today, not now that Vastagliano is nothing but a pile of bloody garbage.” Nevetski looked as if he would spit on the carpet in disgust.

“You're right. It's screwed up,” Rebecca said, turning away from the bookshelves. “It's over. So why not split and let us handle it?”

Nevetski gave her his patented glare of anger.

Even Blaine looked as if he were finally about to snap at her.

Jack said, “Take your time. Find whatever you need.

You won't be in our way. We've got a lot of other things to do here. Come on, Rebecca. Let's see what the M.E."s people can tell us.”

He didn't even glance at Rebecca because he knew she was giving him a look pretty much like the one Blaine and Nevetski were giving her.

Reluctantly, Rebecca went into the hall.

Before following her, Jack paused at the door, looking back at Nevetski and Blaine. “You notice anything odd about this one?”

“Such as?” Nevetski asked.

“Anything,” Jack said. “Anything out of the ordinary, strange, weird, unexplainable.”

“I can't explain how the hell the killer got in here,” Nevetski said irritably. “That's damned strange.”

“Anything else?” Jack asked. “Anything that would make you think this is more than just your ordinary drug-related homicide?”

They looked at him blankly.

He said, “Okay, what about this woman, Vastagliano's girlfriend or whatever she is…”

“Shelly Parker,” Blaine said. “She's waiting in the living room if you want to talk to her.”

“Have you spoken with her yet?” Jack asked.

“A little,” Blaine said. “She's not much of a talker.”

“A real sleazebag is what she is,” Nevetski said.

“Reticent,” Blaine said.

“An uncooperative sleazebag.”

“Self-contained, very composed,” Blaine said.

“A two-dollar pump. A bitch. A scuz. But gorgeous.”

Jack said, “Did she mention anything about a Haitian? ”

“A what?”

“You mean… someone from Haiti? The island?”

“The island,” Jack confirmed.

“No,” Blaine said. “Didn't say anything about a Haitian.”

“What fuckin' Haitian are we talking about?” Nevetski demanded.

Jack said, “A guy named Lavelle. Baba Lavelle.”

“Baba?” Blaine said.

“Sounds like a clown, “ Nevetski said.

“Did Shelly Parker mention him?”

“No.”

“How's this Lavelle fit in?”

Jack didn't answer that. Instead, he said, “Listen did Miss Parker say anything to you about… well… did she say anything at all that seemed strange?”

Nevetski and Blaine frowned at him.

“What do you mean?” Blaine said.

Yesterday, they'd found the second victim: a black man named Freeman Coleson, a middle-level dope dealer who distributed to seventy or eighty street pushers in a section of lower Manhattan that had been conferred upon him by the Carramazza family, which had become an equal opportunity employer in order to avoid ill-feeling and racial strife in the New York underworld. Coleson had turned up dead, leaking from more than a hundred small stab wounds, just like the first victim on Sunday night. His brother, Darl Coleson, had been panicky, so nervous he was pouring sweat. He had told Jack and Rebecca a story about a Haitian who was trying to take over the cocaine and heroin trade. It was the weirdest story Jack had ever heard, but it was obvious that Darl Coleson believed every word of it.

If Shelly Parker had told a similar tale to Nevetski and Blaine, they wouldn't have forgotten it. They wouldn't have needed to ask what sort of “strange” he was talking about.

Jack hesitated, then shook his head. “Never mind. It's not really important.”

If it's not important, why did you bring it up?

That would be Nevetski's next question. Jack turned away from them before Nevetski could speak, kept moving, through the door, into the hall, where Rebecca was waiting for him.

She looked angry.

VI

Last week, on Thursday evening, at the twice-a-month poker game he'd been attending for more than eight years, Jack had found himself defending Rebecca. During a pause in the game, the other players — three detectives: Al Dufresne, Witt Yardman, and Phil Abrahams — had spoken against her.

“I don't see how you put up with her, Jack,” Witt said.

“She's a cold one,” all said.

“A regular ice maiden,” Phil said.

As the cards snapped and clicked and softly hissed in all's busy hands, the three men dealt out insults:

“She's colder than a witch's tit.”

“About as friendly as a Doberman with one fierce damned toothache and a bad case of constipation.”

“Acts like she don't ever have to breathe or take a piss like the rest of humanity.”

“A real ball-buster,” Al Dufresne said.

Finally Jack said, “Ah, she's not so bad once you know her.”

“A ball-buster,” all repeated.

“Listen,” Jack said, “if she was a guy, you'd say she was just a hard-nosed cop, and you'd even sort of admire her for it. But 'cause she's a hard-nosed female cop, you say she's just a cold bitch.”

“I know a ball-buster when I see one,” all said.

“A ball-crusher,” Witt said.

“She's got her good qualities,” Jack said.

“Yeah?” Phil Abrahams said. “Name one.”

“She's observant.”

“So's a vulture.”

“She's smart. She's efficient,” Jack said.

“So was Mussolini. He made the trains run on time.”

Jack said, “And she'd never fail to back up her partner if things got hairy out there on the street.”

“Hell's bells, no cop would fail to back up a partner,” Al said.

“Some would,” Jack said.

“Damned few. And if they did, they wouldn't be cops for long.”

“She's a hard worker,” Jack said.. “Carries her weight.”

“Okay, okay,” Witt said, “so maybe she can do the job well enough. But why can't she be a human being, too?”

“I don't think I ever heard her laugh,” Phil said.

Al said, “Where's her heart? Doesn't she have a heart?”

“Sure she does,” Witt said. “A little stone heart.”

“Well,” Jack said, “I suppose I'd rather have Rebecca for a partner than any of you brass-plated monkeys.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah. She's more sensitive than you give her credit for.”

“Oh, ho! Sensitive!”

“Now it comes out! “

“He's not just being chivalrous.”

“He's sweet on her.”

“She'll have your balls for a necklace, old buddy.”

“From the look of him, I'd say she's already had 'em.”

“Any day now, she'll be wearing a brooch made out of his—”

Jack said, “Listen, you guys, there's nothing between me and Rebecca except—”

“Does she go in for whips and chains, Jack?”

“Hey, I'll bet she does! Boots and dog collars.”

“Take off your shirt and show us your bruises, Jack.”

“Neanderthals,” Jack said.

“Does she wear a leather bra?”

“Leather? Man, that broad must wear steel.”

“Cretins,” Jack said.

“I thought you've been looking poorly the last couple months,” all said. “Now I know what it is. You're pussy-whipped, Jack.”

“Definitely pussy-whipped,” Phil said.

Jack knew there was no point in resisting them. His protestations would only amuse and encourage them. He smiled and let the wave of good-natured abuse wash over him, until they were at last tired of the game.

Eventually, he said, “Alright, you guys have had your fun. But I don't want any stupid rumors starting from this. I want you to understand there's nothing between Rebecca and me. I think she is a sensitive person under all those callouses. Beneath that cold-as-an-alligator pose she works so hard at, there's some warmth, tenderness. That's what I think, but I don't know from personal experience. Understand?”

“Maybe there's nothing between you two,” Phil said, “but judging by the way your tongue hangs out when you talk about her, it's obvious you wish there was.”

“Yeah,” all said, “when you talk about her, you drool.”

The taunting started all over again, but this time they were much closer to the truth than they had been before. Jack didn't know from personal experience that Rebecca was sensitive and special, but he sensed it, and he wanted to be closer to her. He would have given just about anything to be with her — not merely near her; he'd been near her five or six days a week, for almost ten months — but really with her, sharing her innermost thoughts, which she always guarded jealously.

The biological pull was strong, the stirring in the gonads; no denying it. After all, she was quite beautiful.

But it wasn't her beauty that most intrigued him.

Her coolness, the distance she put between herself and everyone else, made her a challenge that no male could resist. But that wasn't the thing that most intrigued him, either.

Now and then, rarely, no more than once a week, there was an unguarded moment, a few seconds, never longer than a minute, when her hard shell slipped slightly, giving him a glimpse of another and very different Rebecca beyond the familiar cold exterior, someone vulnerable and unique, someone worth knowing and perhaps worth holding on to. That was what fascinated Jack Dawson: that brief glimpse of warmth and tenderness, the dazzling radiance she always cut off the instant she realized she had allowed it to escape through her mask of austerity.

Last Thursday, at the poker game, he had felt that getting past Rebecca's elaborate psychological defenses would always be, for him, nothing more than a fantasy, a dream forever unattainable. After ten months as her partner, ten months of working together and trusting each other and putting their lives in each other's hands, he felt that she was, if anything, more of a mystery than ever….

Now, less than a week later, Jack knew what lay under her mask. He knew from personal experience. Very personal experience. And what he had found was even better, more appealing, more special than what he had hoped to find. She was wonderful.

But this morning there was absolutely no sign of the inner Rebecca, not the slightest hint that she was anything more than the cold and forbidding Amazon that she assiduously impersonated.

It was as if last night had never happened.

In the hall, outside the study where Nevetski and Blaine were still looking for evidence, she said, “I heard what you asked them — about the Haitian.”

“So?”

“Oh, for God's sake, Jack!”

“Well, Baba Lavelle is our only suspect so far.”

“It doesn't bother me that you asked about him,” she said. “It's the way you asked about him.”

“I used English, didn't I?”

“Jack—”

“Wasn't I polite enough?”

“Jack—”

“It's just that I don't understand what you mean.”

“Yes, you do.” She mimicked him, pretending she was talking to Nevetski and Blaine: “Has either of you noticed anything odd about this one? Anything out of the ordinary? Anything strange? Anything weird?”

“I was just pursuing a lead,” he said defensively.

“Like you pursued it yesterday, wasting half the afternoon in the library, reading about voodoo.”

“We were at the library less than an hour.”

“And then running up there to Harlem to talk to that sorcerer.”

“He's not a sorcerer.”

“That nut.”

“Carver Hampton isn't a nut,” Jack said.

“A real nut case,” she insisted.

“There was an article about him in that book.”

“Being written about in a book doesn't automatically make him respectable.”

“He's a priest.”

“He's not. He's a fraud.”

“He's a voodoo priest who practices only white magic, good magic. A Houngon. That's what he calls himself.”

“I can call myself a fruit tree, but don't expect me to grow any apples on my ears,” she said. “Hampton's a charlatan. Taking money from the gullible.”

“His religion may seem exotic—”

“It's foolish. That shop he runs. Jesus. Selling herbs and bottles of goat's blood, charms and spells, all that other nonsense—”

“It's not nonsense to him.”

“Sure it is.”

“He believes in it.”

“Because he's a nut.”

“Make up your mind, Rebecca. Is Carver Hampton a nut or a fraud? I don't see how you can have it both ways.”

“Okay, okay. Maybe this Baba Lavelle did kill all four of the victims.”

“He's our only suspect so far.”

“But he didn't use voodoo. There's no such thing as black magic. He stabbed them, Jack. He got blood on his hands, just like any other murderer.”

Her eyes were intensely, fiercely green, always a shade greener and clearer when she was angry or impatient.

“I never said he killed them with magic,” Jack told her. “I didn't say I believe in voodoo. But you saw the bodies. You saw how strange—”

“Stabbed,” she said firmly. “Mutilated, yes. Savagely and horribly disfigured, yes. Stabbed a hundred times or more, yes. But stabbed. With a knife. A real knife. An ordinary knife.”

“The medical examiner says the weapon used in those first two murders would've had to've been no bigger than a penknife.”

“Okay. So it was a penknife.”

“Rebecca, that doesn't make sense.”

“Murder never makes sense.”

“What kind of killer goes after his victims with a penknife, for God's sake?”

“A lunatic.”

“Psychotic killers usually favor dramatic weaponsbutcher knives, hatchets, shotguns…”

“In the movies, maybe.”

“In reality, too.”

“This is just another psycho like all the psychos who're crawling out of the walls these days,” she insisted. “There's nothing special or strange about him.”

“But how does he overpower them? If he's only wielding a penknife, why can't his victims fight him off or escape?”

“There's an explanation,” she said doggedly. “We'll find it.”

The house was warm, getting warmer; Jack took off his overcoat.

Rebecca left her coat on. The heat didn't seem to bother her any more than the cold.

“And in every case,” Jack said, “the victim has fought his assailant. There are always signs of a big struggle. Yet none of the victims seems to have managed to wound his attacker; there's never any blood but the victim's own. That's damned strange. And what about Vastagliano-murdered in a locked bathroom?”

She stared at him suddenly but didn't respond.

“Look, Rebecca, I'm not saying it's voodoo or anything the least bit supernatural. I'm not a particularly superstitious man. My point is that these murders might be the work of someone who does believe in voodoo, that there might be something ritualistic about them. The condition of the corpses certainly points in that direction. I didn't say voodoo works. I'm only suggesting that the killer might think it works, and his belief in voodoo might lead us to him and give us some of the evidence we need to convict him.”

She shook her head. “Jack, I know there's a certain streak in you..”

“What certain streak is that?”

“Call it an excessive degree of open-mindedness.”

“How is it possible to be excessively open-minded? That's like being too honest.”

“When Darl Coleson said this Baba Lavelle was taking over the drug trade by using voodoo curses to kill his competition, you listened… well. you listened as if you were a child, enraptured.”

“I didn't.”

“You did. Then the next thing I know, we're off to Harlem to a voodoo shop!”

“If this Baba Lavelle really is interested in voodoo, then it makes sense to assume that someone like Carver Hampton might know him or be able to find out something about him for us.”

“A nut like Hampton won't be any help at all. You remember the Holderbeck case?”

“What's that got to do with—”

“The old lady who was murdered during the seance? ”

“Emily Holderbeck. I remember.”

“You were fascinated with that one,” she said.

“I never claimed there was anything supernatural about it.”

“Absolutely fascinated.”

“Well, it was an incredible murder. The killer was so bold. The room was dark, sure, but there were eight people present when the shot was fired.”

“But it wasn't the facts of the case that fascinated you the most,” Rebecca said. “It was the medium that interested you. That Mrs. Donatella with her crystal ball. You couldn't get enough of her ghost stories, her so-called psychic experiences.”

“So?”

“Do you believe in ghosts, Jack?”

“You mean, do I believe in an afterlife?”

“Ghosts.”

“I don't know. Maybe. Maybe not. Who can say?”

“I can say. I don't believe in ghosts. But your equivocation proves my point.”

“Rebecca, there are millions of perfectly sane, respectable, intelligent, level-headed people who believe in life after death.”

“A detective's a lot like a scientist,” she said. “He's got to be logical.”

“He doesn't have to be an atheist, for God's sake!”

Ignoring him, she said, “Logic is the best tool we have.”

“All I'm saying is that we're on to something strange.

And since the brother of one of the victims thinks voodoo is involved—”

“A good detective has to be reasonable, methodical.”

“-we should follow it up even if it seems ridiculous.”

“A good detective has to be tough-minded, realistic.”

“A good detective also has to be imaginative, flexible,” he countered. Then, abruptly changing the subject, he said, “Rebecca, what about last night?”

Her face reddened. She said, “Let's go have a talk with the Parker woman,” and she started to turn away from him.

He took hold of her arm, stopped her. “I thought something very special happened last night.”

She said nothing.

“Did I just imagine it?” he asked.

“Let's not talk about it now.”

“Was it really awful for you?”

“Later,” she said.

“Why're you treating me like this?”

She wouldn't meet his eyes; that was unusual for her. “It's complicated, Jack.”

“I think we've got to talk about it.”

“Later,” she said. “Please.”

“When?”

“When we have the time.”

“When will that be?” he persisted.

“If we have time for lunch, we can talk about it then.”

“We'll make time.”

“We'll see.”

“Yes, we will.”

“Now, we've got work to do,” she said, pulling away from him.

He let her go this time.

She headed toward the living room, where Shelly Parker waited.

He followed her, wondering what he'd gotten himself into when he'd become intimately involved with this exasperating woman. Maybe she was a nut case herself. Maybe she wasn't worth all the aggravation she caused him. Maybe she would bring him nothing but pain, and maybe he would come to regret the day he'd met her. At times, she certainly seemed neurotic. Better to stay away from her. The smartest thing he could do was call it quits right now. He could ask for a new partner, perhaps even transfer out of the Homicide Division; he was tired of dealing with death all the time, anyway. He and Rebecca should split, go their separate ways both personally and professionally, before they got too tangled up with each other. Yes, that was for the best. That was what he should do.

But as Nevetski would say: Like hell.

He wasn't going to put in a request for a new partner.

He wasn't a quitter.

Besides, he thought maybe he was in love.

VII

At fifty-eight, Nayva Rooney looked like a grandmother but moved like a dockworker. She kept her gray hair in tight curls. Her round, pink, friendly face had bold rather than delicate features, and her merry blue eyes were never evasive, always warm. She was a stocky woman but not fat. Her hands weren't smooth, soft, grandmotherly hands; they were strong, quick, efficient, with no trace of either the pampered life or arthritis, but with a few callouses. When Nayva walked, she looked as if nothing could stand in her way, not other people and not even brick walls; there was nothing dainty or graceful or even particularly feminine about her walk; she strode from place to place in the manner of a no-nonsense army sergeant.

Nayva had been cleaning the apartment for Jack Dawson since shortly after Linda Dawson's death. She came in once a week, every Wednesday. She also did some babysitting for him; in fact, she'd been here last evening, watching over Penny and Davey, while Jack had been out on a date.

This morning, she let herself in with the key that Jack had given her, and she went straight to the kitchen. She brewed a pot of coffee and poured a cup for herself and drank half of it before she took off her coat. It was a bitter day, indeed, and even though the apartment was warm, she found it difficult to rid herself of the chill that had seeped deep into her bones during the six-block walk from her own apartment.

She started cleaning in the kitchen. Nothing was actually dirty. Jack and his two young ones were clean and reasonably orderly, not at all like some for whom Nayva worked. Nonetheless, she labored diligently, scrubbing and polishing with the same vigor and determination that she brought to really grimy jobs, for she prided herself on the fact that a place positively gleamed when she was finished with it. Her father — dead these many years and God rest his soul — had been a uniformed policeman, a foot patrolman, who took no graft whatsoever, and who strived to make his beat a safe one for all who lived or toiled within its boundaries. He had taken considerable pride in his job, and he'd taught Nayva (among other things) two valuable lessons about work: first, there is always satisfaction and esteem in a piece of work well done, regardless of how menial it might be; second, if you cannot do a job well, then there's not much use in doing it at all.

Initially, other than the noises Nayva made as she cleaned, the only sounds in the apartment were the periodic humming of the refrigerator motor, occasional thumps and creaks as someone rearranged the furniture in the apartment above, and the moaning of the brisk winter wind as it pressed at the windows.

Then, as she paused to pour a little more coffee for herself, an odd sound came from the living room. A sharp, short squeal. An animal sound. She put down the coffee pot.

Cat? Dog?

It hadn't seemed like either of those; like nothing familiar. Besides, the Dawsons had no pets.

She started across the kitchen, toward the door to the dining alcove and the living room beyond.

The squeal came again, and it brought her to a halt, froze her, and suddenly she was uneasy. It was an ugly, angry, brittle cry, again of short duration but piercing and somehow menacing. This time it didn't sound as much like an animal as it had before.

It didn't sound particularly human, either, but she said, “Is someone there?”

The apartment was silent. Almost too silent, now. As if someone were listening, waiting for her to make a move.

Nayva wasn't a woman given to fits of nerves and certainly not to hysteria. And she had always been confident that she could take care of herself just fine, thank you. But suddenly she was stricken by an uncharacteristic twinge of fear.

Silence.

“Who's there?” she demanded.

The shrill, angry shriek came again. It was a hateful sound.

Nayva shuddered.

A rat? Rats squealed. But not like this.

Feeling slightly foolish, she picked up a broom and held it as if it were a weapon.

The shriek came again, from the living room, as if taunting her to come see what it was.

Broom in hand, she crossed the kitchen and hesitated at the doorway.

Something was moving around in the living room. She couldn't see it, but she could hear an odd, dry paper, dry-leaf rustling and a scratching-hissing noise that sometimes sounded like whispered words in a foreign language.

With a boldness she had inherited from her father, Nayva stepped through the doorway. She edged past the tables and chairs, looking beyond them at the living room, which was visible through the wide archway that separated it from the dining alcove. She stopped beneath the arch and listened, trying to get a better fix on the noise.

From the corner of her eye, she saw movement. The pale yellow drapes fluttered, but not from a draft. She wasn't in a position to see the lower half of the drapes, but it was clear that something was scurrying along the floor, brushing them as it went.

Nayva moved quickly into the living room, past the first sofa, so that she could see the bottom of the drapes. Whatever had disturbed them was nowhere in sight. The drapes became still again.

Then, behind her, she heard a sharp little squeal of anger.

She whirled around, bringing up the broom, ready to strike.

Nothing.

She circled the second sofa. Nothing behind it. Looked in back of the armchair, too. Nothing. Under the end tables. Nothing. Around the bookcase, on both sides of the television set, under the sideboard, behind the drapes. Nothing, nothing.

Then the squeal came from the hallway.

By the time she got to the hall, there wasn't anything to be seen. She hadn't flicked on the hall light when she'd come into the apartment, and there weren't any windows in there, so the only illumination was what spilled in from the kitchen and living room. However, it was a short passageway, and there was absolutely no doubt that it was deserted.

She waited, head cocked.

The cry came again. From the kids' bedroom this time.

Nayva went down the hall. The bedroom was more than half dark. There was no overhead light; you had to go into the room and snap on one of the lamps in order to dispel the gloom. She paused for a moment on the threshold, peering into the shadows.

Not a sound. Even the furniture movers upstairs had stopped dragging and heaving things around. The wind had slacked off and wasn't pressing at the windows right now. Nayva held her breath and listened. If there was anything here, anything alive, it was being as still and alert as she was.

Finally, she stepped cautiously into the room, went to Penny's bed, and clicked on the lamp. That didn't burn away all the shadows, so she turned toward Davey's bed, intending to switch on that lamp, as well.

Something hissed, moved.

She gasped in surprise.

The thing darted out of the open closet, through shadows, under Davey's bed. It didn't enter the light, and she wasn't able to see it clearly. In fact, she had only a vague impression of it: something small, about the size of a large rat; sleek and streamlined and slithery like a rat.

But it sure didn't sound like a rodent of any kind. It wasn't squeaking or squealing now. It hissed and. gabbled as if it were whispering urgently to itself.

Nayva backed away from Davey's bed. She glanced at the broom in her hands and wondered if she should poke it under the bed and rattle it around until she drove the intruder out in the open where she could see exactly what it was.

Even as she was deciding on a course of action, the thing scurried out from the foot of the bed, through the dark end of the room, into the shadowy hallway; it moved fast. Again, Nayva failed to get a good look at it.

“Damn,” she said.

She had the unsettling feeling that the critter — whatever in God's name it might be — was just toying with her, playing games, teasing.

But that didn't make sense. Whatever it was, it was still only a dumb animal, one kind of dumb animal or another, and it wouldn't have either the wit or the desire to lead her on a merry chase merely for the fun of it.

Elsewhere in the apartment, the thing shrieked, as if calling to her.

Okay, Nayva thought. Okay, you nasty little beast, whatever you may be, look out because here I come. You may be fast, and you may be clever, but I'll track you down and have a look at you even if it's the last thing I do in this life.

I

They had been questioning Vince Vastagliano's girlfriend for fifteen minutes. Nevetski was right. She was an uncooperative bitch.

Perched on the edge of a Queen Anne chair, Jack Dawson leaned forward and finally mentioned the name that Darl Coleson had given him yesterday. “Do you know a man named Baba Lavelle?”

Shelly Parker glanced at him, then quickly looked down at her hands, which were folded around a glass of Scotch, but in that unguarded instant, he saw the answer in her eyes.

“I don't know anyone named Lavelle,” she lied.

Rebecca was sitting in another Queen Anne chair, legs crossed, arms on the chair arms, looking relaxed and confident and infinitely more self-possessed than Shelly Parker. She said, “Maybe you don't know Lavelle, but maybe you've heard of him. Is that possible?”

“No,” Shelly said.

Jack said, “Look, Ms. Parker, we know Vince was dealing dope, and maybe we could hang a related charge on you—”

“I had nothing to do with that!”

“-but we don't intend to charge you with anything—”

“You can't!”

“-if you cooperate.”

“You have nothing on me,” she said.

“We can make life very difficult for you.”

“So can the Carramazzas. I'm not talking about them.”

“We aren't asking you to talk about them,” Rebecca said. “Just tell us about this Lavelle.”

Shelly said nothing. She chewed thoughtfully on her lower lip.

“He's a Haitian,” Jack said, encouraging her.

Shelly stopped biting her lip and settled back on the white sofa, trying to look nonchalant, failing. “What kind of neese is he?”

Jack blinked at her. “Huh?”

“What kind of neese is this Lavelle?” she repeated.

“Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese…? You said he was Asian.”

“Haitian. He's from Haiti.”

“Oh. Then he's no kind of neese at all.”

“No kind of neese at all,” Rebecca agreed.

Shelly apparently detected the scorn in Rebecca's voice, for she shifted nervously, although she didn't seem to understand exactly what had elicited that scorn. “Is he a black dude?”

“Yes,” Jack said, “as you know perfectly well.”

“I don't hang around with black dudes,” Shelly said, lifting her head and squaring her shoulders and assuming an affronted air.

Rebecca said, “We heard Lavelle wants to take over the drug trade.”

“I wouldn't know anything about that.”

Jack said, “Do you believe in voodoo, Ms. Parker?”

Rebecca sighed wearily.

Jack looked at her and said, “Bear with me.”

“This is pointless.”

“I promise not to be excessively open-minded,” Jack said, smiling. To Shelly Parker, he said, “Do you believe in the power of voodoo?”

“Of course not.”

“I thought maybe that's why you won't talk about Lavelle — because you're afraid he'll get you with the evil eye or something.”

“That's all a bunch of crap.”

“Is it?”

“All that voodoo stuff-crap.”

“But you have heard of Baba Lavelle?” Jack said.

“No, I just told you—”

“If you didn't know anything about Lavelle,” Jack said, “you would've been surprised when I mentioned something as off-the-wall as voodoo. You would've asked me what the hell voodoo had to do with anything. But you weren't surprised, which means you know about Lavelle.”

Shelly raised one hand to her mouth, put a fingernail between her teeth, almost began to chew on it, caught herself, decided the relief provided by biting them was not worth ruining a forty-dollar nail job.

She said, “All right, all right. I know about Lavelle.”

Jack winked at Rebecca. “See?”

“Not bad,” Rebecca admitted.

“Clever interrogational technique,” Jack said. “Imagination.”

Shelly said, “Can I have more Scotch?”

“Wait till we've finished questioning you,” Rebecca said.

“I'm not drunk,” Shelly said.

“I didn't say you were,” Rebecca told her.

“I never get potted,” Shelly said. “I'm not a lush.”

She got up from the sofa, went to the bar, picked up a Waterford decanter, and poured more Scotch for herself.

Rebecca looked at Jack, raised her eyebrows.

Shelly returned and sat down. She put the glass of Scotch on the coffee table without taking a sip of it, determined to prove that she had all the will power she needed.

Jack saw the look Shelly gave Rebecca, and he almost winced. She was like a cat with her back up, spoiling for a fight.

The antagonism in the air wasn't really Rebecca's fault this time. She hadn't been as cold and sharp with Shelly as it was in her power to be. In fact, she had been almost pleasant until Shelly had started the “neese” stuff. Apparently, however, Shelly had been comparing herself with Rebecca and had begun to feel that she came off second-best. That was what had generated the antagonism.

Like Rebecca, Shelly Parker was a good-looking blonde. But there the resemblance ended. Rebecca's exquisitely shaped and harmoniously related features bespoke sensitivity, refinement, breeding. Shelly, on the other hand, was a parody of seductiveness. Her hair had been elaborately cut and styled to achieve a carefree, abandoned look. She had flat wide cheekbones, a short upper lip, a pouting mouth. She wore too much makeup. Her eyes were blue, although slightly muddy, — dreamy; they were not as forthright as Rebecca's eyes. Her figure was too well developed; she was rather like a wonderful French pastry made with far too much butter, too many eggs, mounds of whipped cream and sugar; too rich, soft. But in tight black slacks and a purple sweater, she was definitely an eye-catcher.

She was wearing a lot of jewelry: an expensive watch; two bracelets; two rings; two small pendants on gold chains, one with a diamond, the other with what seemed to be an emerald the size of a large pea. She was only twenty-two, and although she had not been gently used, it would be quite a few years before men stopped buying jewelry for her.

Jack thought he knew why she had taken an instant disliking to Rebecca. Shelly was the kind of woman a lot of men wanted, fantasized about. Rebecca, on the other hand, was the kind of woman men wanted, fantasized about, and married.

He could imagine spending a torrid week in the Bahamas with Shelly Parker; oh, yes. But only a week. At the end of a week, in spite of her sexual energy and undoubted sexual proficiency, he would most certainly be bored with her. At the end of a week, conversation with Shelly would probably be less rewarding than conversation with a stone wall. Rebecca, however, would never be boring; she was a woman of infinite layers and endless revelations. After twenty years of marriage, he would still find Rebecca intriguing.

Marriage? Twenty years?

God, just listen to me! he thought, astonished. Have I been bitten, or have I been bitten?

To Shelly, he said, “So what do you know about Baba Lavelle?”

She sighed. “I'm not telling you anything about the Carramazzas.”

“We're not asking for anything about them. Just Lavelle.”

“And then forget about me. I walk out of here. No phony detention as a material witness.”

“You weren't a witness to the killings. Just tell us what you know about Lavelle, and you can go.”

“All right. He came from nowhere a couple months ago and started dealing coke and smack. I don't mean penny ante stuff, either. In a month, he'd organized about twenty street dealers, supplied them, and made it clear he expected to expand. At least that's what Vince told me. I don't know first-hand 'cause I've never been involved with drugs.”

“Of course not.”

“Now” nobody but nobody deals in this city without an arrangement with Vince's uncle. At least that's what I've heard.”

“That's what I've heard, too,” Jack said dryly.

“So some of Carramazza's people passed word to Lavelle to stop dealing until he'd made arrangements with the family. Friendly advice.”

“Like Dear Abby,” Jack said.

“Yeah,” Shelly said. She didn't even smile. “But he didn't stop like he was told. Instead, the crazy nigger sent word to Carramazza, offering to split the New York business down the middle, half for each of them, even though Carramazza already has all of it.”

“Rather audacious of Mr. Lavelle,” Rebecca said.

“No, it was smartass is what it was,” Shelly said. “I mean, Lavelle is a nobody. Who ever heard of him before this? According to Vince, old man Carramazza figured Lavelle just hadn't understood the first message, so he sent a couple of guys around to make it plainer.”

“They were going to break Lavelle's legs?” Jack asked.

“Or worse,” Shelly said.

“There's always worse.”

“But something happened to the messengers,” Shelly said.

“Dead?”

“I'm not sure. Vince seemed to think they just never came back again.”

“That's dead,” Jack said.

“Probably. Anyway, Lavelle warned Carramazza that he was some sort of voodoo witch doctor and that not even the family could fight him. Of course, everyone laughed about that. And Carramazza sent five of his best, five big mean bastards who know how to watch and wait and pick the right moment.”

“And something happened to them, too?” Rebecca asked.

“Yeah. Four of them never came back.”

“What about the fifth man?” Jack asked.

“He was dumped on the sidewalk in front of Gennaro Carramazza's house in Brooklyn Heights. Alive. Badly bruised, scraped, cut up — but alive. Trouble was, he might as well have been dead.”

“Why's that?”

“He was ape-shit.”

“What? “

“Crazy. Stark, raving mad,” Shelly said, turning the Scotch glass around and around in her long-fingered hands. “The way Vince heard it, this guy must've seen what happened to the other four, and whatever it was it drove him clear out of his skull, absolutely ape-shit.”

“What was his name?”

“Vince didn't say.”

“Where is he now?”

“I guess Don Carramazza's got him somewhere.”

“And he's still… crazy?”

“I guess so.”

“Did Carramazza send a third hit squad?”

“Not that I heard of. I guess, after that, this Lavelle sent a message to old man Carramazza. “If you want war, then it's war.” And he warned the family not to underestimate the power of voodoo.”

“No one laughed this time,” Jack said.

“No one,” Shelly confirmed.

They were silent for a moment.

Jack looked at Shelly Parker's downcast eyes. They weren't red. The skin around them wasn't puffy. There was no indication that she had wept for Vince Vastagliano, her lover.

He could hear the wind outside.

He looked at the windows. Snowflakes tapped the glass.

He said, “Ms. Parker, do you believe that all of this has been done through… voodoo curses or something like that?”

“No. Maybe. Hell, I don't know. After what's happened these last few days, who can say? One thing I believe in for sure: I believe this Baba Lavelle is one smart, creepy, badass dude.”

Rebecca said, “We heard a little of this story yesterday, from another victim's brother. Not so much detail as you've given us. He didn't seem to know where we could find Lavelle. Do you?”

“He used to have a place in the Village,” Shelly said.

“But he's not there any more. Since all this started going down, nobody can find him. His street dealers are still working for him, still getting supplies, or so Vince said, but no one knows where Lavelle has gone.”

“The place in the Village where he used to be,” Jack said. “You happen to know the address?”

“No. I told you, I'm not really involved in this drug business. Honest, I don't know. I only know what Vince told me.”

Jack glanced at Rebecca. “Anything more?”

“Nope.”

To Shelly, he said, “You can go.”

At last she swallowed some Scotch, then put the glass down, got to her feet, and straightened her sweater. “Christ, I swear, I've had it with wops. No more wops. It always turns out bad with them.”

Rebecca gaped at her, and Jack saw a flicker of anger in her eyes, and then she said, “I hear some of the neese are pretty nice guys.”

Shelly screwed up her face and shook her head.

“Neese? Not for me. They're all little guys, aren't they?”

“Well,” Rebecca said sarcastically, “so far you've ruled out blacks, wops, and neese of all descriptions. You're a very choosy girl.”

Jack watched the sarcasm sail right over Shelly's head.

She smiled tentatively at Rebecca, misapprehending, imagining that she saw a spark of sisterhood. She said, “Oh, yeah. Hey, look, even if I say so myself, I'm not exactly your average girl. I've got a lot of fine points. I can afford to be choosy.”

Rebecca said, “Better watch out for spies, too.”

“Yeah?” Shelly said. “I never had a spic for a boyfriend. Bad?”

“Sherpas are worst,” Rebecca said.

Jack coughed into his hand to stifle his laughter.

Picking up her coat, Shelly frowned. “Sherpas? Who're they?”

“From Nepal,” Rebecca said.

“Where's that?”

“The Himalayas.”

Shelly paused halfway into her coat. “Those mountains?”

“Those mountains,” Rebecca confirmed.

“That's the other side of the world, isn't it?”

“The other side of the world.”

Shelly's eyes were wide. She finished putting on her coat. She said, “Have you traveled a lot?”

Jack was afraid he'd draw blood if he bit his tongue any harder.

“I've been around a little,” Rebecca said.

Shelly sighed, working on her buttons. “I haven't traveled much myself. Haven't been anywhere but Miami and Vegas, once. I've never even seen a Sherpa let alone slept with one.”

“Well,” Rebecca said, “if you happen to meet up with one, better walk away from him fast. No one'll break your heart faster or into more pieces than a Sherpa will. And by the way, I guess you know not to leave the city without checking with us first.”

“I'm not going anywhere,” Shelly assured them.

She took a long, white, knit scarf from a coat pocket and wrapped it around her neck as she started out of the room. At the doorway, she looked back at Rebecca.

“Hey… uh… Lieutenant Chandler, I'm sorry if maybe I was a little snappy with you.”

“Don't worry about it.”

“And thanks for the advice.”

“Us girls gotta stick together,” Rebecca said.

“Isn't that the truth!” Shelly said.

She left the room.

They listened to her footsteps along the hallway.

Rebecca said, “Jesus, what a dumb, egotistical, racist bitch!”

Jack burst out laughing and plopped down on the Queen Anne chair again. “You sound like Nevetski.”

Imitating Shelly Parker's voice, Rebecca said, “Even if I say so myself, I'm not exactly your average girl. I've got a lot of fine points.” Jesus, Jack! The only fine points I saw on that broad were the two on her chest! “

Jack fell back in the chair, laughing harder.

Rebecca stood over him, looking down, grinning. “I saw the way you were drooling over her.”

“Not me,” he managed between gales of laughter.

“Yes, you. Positively drooling. But you might as well forget about her, Jack. She wouldn't have you.”

“Oh?”

“Well, you've got a bit of Irish blood in you. Isn't that right? Your grandmother was Irish, right?” Imitating Shelly Parker's voice again, she said, “Oh, there's nothing worse than those damned, Pope-kissing, potato-sucking Irish.”

Jack howled.

Rebecca sat on the sofa. She was laughing, too. “And you've got some British blood, too, if I remember right.”

“Oh, yes,” he said, gasping. “I'm a tea-swilling limey, too.”

“Not as bad as a Sherpa,” she said.

They were convulsed with laughter when one of the uniformed cops looked in from the hallway. “What's going on?” he asked.

Neither of them were able to stop laughing and tell him.

“Well, show some respect, huh?” he said. “We have two dead men here.”

Perversely, that admonition made everything seem even funnier.

The patrolman scowled at them, shook his head, and went away.

Jack knew it was precisely because of the presence of death that Shelly Parker's conversations with Rebecca had seemed so uproariously funny. After having encountered four hideously mutilated bodies in as many days, they were desperately in need of a good laugh.

Gradually, they regained their composure and wiped the tears from their eyes. Rebecca got up and went to the windows and stared out at the snow flurries. For a couple of minutes, they shared a most companionable silence, enjoying the temporary but nonetheless welcome release from tension that the laughter had provided.

This moment was the sort of thing Jack couldn't have explained to the guys at the poker game last week, when they'd been putting Rebecca down. At times like this, when the other Rebecca revealed herself — the Rebecca who had a sly sense of humor and a gimlet eye for life's absurdities — Jack felt a special kinship with her. Rare as those moments were, they made the partnership work able and worthwhile — and he hoped that eventually this secret Rebecca would come into the open more often. Perhaps, someday, if he had enough patience, the other Rebecca might even replace the ice maiden altogether.

As usual, however, the change in her was short-lived.

She turned away from the window and said, “Better go talk with the M.E. and see what he's found.”

“Yeah,” Jack said. “And let's try to stay glum-faced from now on, Chandler. Let's show them we really do have the proper respect for death.”

She smiled at him, but it was only a vague smile now.

She left the room.

He followed.

II

As Nayva Rooney stepped into the hall, she closed the door to the kids' bedroom behind her, so that the rat — or whatever it was — couldn't scurry back in there.

She searched for the intruder in Jack Dawson's bedroom, found nothing, and closed the door on that one, too.

She carefully inspected the kitchen, even looked in cupboards. No rat. There were two doors in the kitchen; one led to the hall, the other to the dining alcove. She closed them both, sealing the critter out of that room, as well.

Now, it simply had to be hiding in the dining alcove or the living room.

But it wasn't.

Nayva looked everywhere. She couldn't find it.

Several times she stopped searching just so she could hold her breath and listen. Listen…. Not a sound.

Throughout the search, in all the rooms, she hadn't merely looked for the elusive little beast itself but also for a hole in a partition or in the baseboard, a breach big enough to admit a largish rat. She discovered nothing of that sort.

At last, she stood in the archway between the living room and the hall. Every lamp and ceiling light was blazing. She looked around, frowning, baffled.

Where had it gone? It still had to be here — didn't it?

Yes. She was sure of it. The thing was still here.

She had the eerie feeling that she was being watched.

III

The assistant medical examiner on the case was Ira Goldbloom, who looked more Swedish than Jewish. He was tall, fair-skinned, with hair so blond it was almost white; his eyes were blue with a lot of gray speckled through them.

Jack and Rebecca found him on the second floor, in the master bedroom. He had completed his examination of the bodyguard's corpse in the kitchen, had taken a look at Vince Vastagliano, and was getting several instruments out of his black leather case.

“For a man with a weak stomach,” he said, “I'm in the wrong line of work.”

Jack saw that Goldbloom did appear paler than usual.

Rebecca said, “We figure these two are connected with the Charlie Novello homicide on Sunday and the Coleson murder yesterday. Can you make the link for us? ”

“Maybe.”

“Only maybe?”

“Well, yeah, there's a chance we can tie them together,” Goldbloom said. “The number of wounds… the mutilation factor… there are several similarities. But let's wait for the autopsy report.”

Jack was surprised. “But what about the wounds? Don't they establish a link?”

“The number, yes. Not the type. Have you looked at these wounds?”

“At a glance,” Jack said, “they appear to be bites of some kind. Rat bites, we thought.”

“But we figured they were just obscuring the real wounds, the stab wounds,” Rebecca said.

Jack said, “Obviously, the rats came along after the men were already dead. Right?”

“Wrong,” Goldbloom said. “So far as I can tell from a preliminary examination, there aren't any stab wounds in either victim. Maybe tissue bisections will reveal wounds of that nature underneath some of the bites, but I doubt it. Vastagliano and his bodyguard were savagely bitten. They bled to death from those bites. The bodyguard suffered at least three torn arteries, major vessels: the external carotid, the left brachial, and the femoral artery in the left thigh. Vastagliano looks like he was chewed up even worse.”

Jack said, “But rats aren't that aggressive, damnit. You just don't get attacked by packs of rats in your own home.”

“I don't think these were rats,” Goldbloom said. “I mean, I've seen rat bites before. Every now and then, a wino will be drinking in an alley, have a heart attack or a stroke, right there behind the garbage bin, where nobody finds him for maybe two days. Meanwhile, the rats get at him. So I know what a rat bite looks like, and this just doesn't seem to match up on a number of points.”

“Could it have been… dogs?” Rebecca asked.

“No. For one thing, the bites are too small. I think we can rule out cats, too.”

“Any ideas?” Jack asked.

“No. It's weird. Maybe the autopsy will pin it down for us.”

Rebecca said, “Did you know the bathroom door was locked when the uniforms got here? They had to break it down.”

“So I heard. A locked room mystery,” Goldbloom said.

“Maybe there's not much of a mystery to it,” Rebecca said thoughtfully. “If Vastagliano was killed by some kind of animal, then maybe the thing was small enough to get under the door.”

Goldbloom shook his head. “It would've had to've been real small to manage that. No. It was bigger. A good deal bigger than the crack under the door.”

“About what size would you say?”

“As big as a large rat.”

Rebecca thought for a moment. Then: “There's an outlet from a heating duct in there. Maybe the thing came through the duct.”

“But there's a grille over the duct,” Jack said. “And the vents in the grille are narrower than the space under the door.”

Rebecca took two steps to the bathroom, leaned through the doorway, looked around, craning her neck. She came back and said, “You're right. And the grille's firmly in place.”

“And the little window is closed,” Jack said.

“And locked,” Goldbloom said.

Rebecca brushed a shining strand of hair from her forehead. “What about the drains? Could a rat come up through the tub drain?”

“No,” Goldbloom said. “Not in modern plumbing.”

“The toilet?”

“Unlikely.”

“But possible?”

“Conceivable, I suppose. But, you see, I'm sure it wasn't just one animal.”

“How many?” Rebecca asked.

“There's no way I can give you an exact count. But… I would think, whatever they were, there had to be at least… a dozen of them.

“Good heavens,” Jack said.

“Maybe two dozen. Maybe more.”

“How do you figure?”

“Well,” Goldbloom said, “Vastagliano was a big man, a strong man. He'd be able to handle one, two, three rat-size animals, no matter what sort of things they were. In fact, he'd most likely be able to deal with half a dozen of them. Oh, sure, he'd get bitten a few times, but he'd be able to take care of himself. He might not be able to kill all of them, but he'd kill a few and keep the rest at bay. So it looks to me as if there were so many of these things, such a horde of them, that they simply overwhelmed him.”

With insect-quick feet, a chill skittered the length of Jack's spine. He thought of Vastagliano being borne down onto the bathroom floor under a tide of screeching rats — or perhaps something even worse than rats. He thought of the man harried at every flank, bitten and torn and ripped and scratched, attacked from all directions, so that he hadn't the presence of mind to strike back effectively, his arms weighed down by the sheer numbers of his adversaries, his reaction time affected by a numbing horror. A painful, bloody, lonely death. Jack shuddered.

“And Ross, the bodyguard,” Rebecca said. “You figure he was attacked by a lot of them, too?”

“Yes,” Goldbloom said. “Same reasoning applies.”

Rebecca blew air out through clenched teeth in an expression of her frustration. “This just makes the locked bathroom even more difficult to figure. From what I've seen, it looks as if Vastagliano and his bodyguard were both in the kitchen, making a late-night snack. The attack started there, evidently. Ross was quickly overwhelmed. Vastagliano ran. He was chased, couldn't get to the front door because they cut him off, so he ran upstairs and locked himself in the bathroom. Now, the rats — or whatever — weren't in there when he locked the door, so how did they get in there?”

“And out again,” Goldbloom reminded her.

“It almost has to be plumbing, the toilet.”

“I rejected that because of the numbers involved,” Goldbloom said. “Even if there weren't any plumbing traps designed to stop a rat, and even if it held its breath and swam through whatever water barriers there were, I just don't buy that explanation. Because what we're talking about here is a whole pack of creatures slithering in that way, one behind the other, like a commando team, for God's sake. Rats just aren't that smart or that… determined. No animal is. It doesn't make sense.”

The thought of Vastagliano wrapped in a cloak of swarming, biting rats had caused Jack's mouth to go dry and sour. He had to work up some saliva to unstick his tongue. Finally he said, “Another thing. Even if Vastagliano and his bodyguard were overwhelmed by scores of these… these things, they'd still have killed a couple — wouldn't they? But we haven't found a single dead rat or a single dead anything else — except, of course, dead people.”

“And no droppings,” Goldbloom said.

“No what?”

“Droppings. Feces. If there were dozens of animals involved, you'd find droppings, at least a few, probably piles of droppings.”

“If you find animal hairs—”

“We'll definitely be looking for them,” Goldbloom said. “We'll vacuum the floor around each body, of course, and analyze the sweepings. If we could find a few hairs, that would clear up a lot of the mystery.” The assistant medical examiner wiped one hand across his face, as if he could pull off and cast away his tension, his disgust. He wiped so hard that spots of color actually did rise in his cheeks, but the haunted look was still in his eyes. “There's something else that disturbs me, too. The victims weren't… eaten. Bitten, ripped gouged… all of that… but so far as I can see, not an ounce of flesh was consumed. Rats would've eaten the tender parts: eyes, nose, earlobes, testicles…. They'd have torn open the body cavities in order to get to the soft organs. So would any other predator or scavenger. But there was nothing like that in this case. These things killed purposefully, efficiently, methodically… and then just went away without devouring a scrap of their prey. It's unnatural. Uncanny. What motive or force was driving them? And why?”

IV

After talking with Ira Goldbloom, Jack and Rebecca decided to question the neighbors. Perhaps one of them had heard or seen something important last night.

Outside Vastagliano's house, they stood on the sidewalk for a moment, hands in their coat pockets.

The sky was lower than it had been an hour ago. Darker, too. The gray clouds were smeared with others that were soot-dark.

Snowflakes drifted down; not many; they descended lazily, except when the wind gusted, and they seemed like fragments of burnt sky, cold bits of ash.

Rebecca said, “I'm afraid we'll be pulled off this case.”

“You mean… off these two murders or off the whole business?”

“Just these two. They're going to say there's no connection.”

“There's a connection,” Jack said.

“I know. But they're going to say Vastagliano and Ross are unrelated to the Novello and Coleson cases.”

“I think Goldbloom will tie them together for us.”

She looked sour. “I hate to be pulled off a case, damnit. I like to finish what I start.”

“We won't be pulled off.”

“But don't you see? If some sort of animal did it…”

“Yes?”

“Then how can they possibly classify it as murder?”

“It's murder,” he said emphatically.

“But you can't charge an animal with homicide.”

He nodded. “I see what you're driving at.”

“Damn.”

“Listen, if these were animals that were trained to kill, then it's still homicide; the trainer is the murderer.”

“If these were dog bites that Vastagliano and Ross died from,” Rebecca said, “then maybe you might just be able to sell that theory. But what animal — what animal as small as these apparently were — can be trained to kill, to obey all commands? Rats? No. Cats? No. Gerbils, for God's sake?”

“Well, they train ferrets,” Jack said. “They use them for hunting sometimes. Not game hunting where they're going after the meat, but just for sport, 'cause the prey is generally a ragged mess when the ferret gets done with it.”

“Ferrets, huh? I'd like to see you convince Captain Gresham that someone's prowling the city with a pack of killer ferrets to do his dirty work for him.”

“Does sound far-fetched,” Jack admitted.

“To say the least.”

“So what does that leave us with?”

She shrugged.

Jack thought about Baba Lavelle.

Voodoo?

No. Surely not. It was one thing to propose that Lavelle was making the murders look strange in order to frighten his adversaries with the threat of voodoo curses, but it was quite something else to imagine that the curses actually worked.

Then again… What about the locked bathroom? What about the fact that Vastagliano and Ross hadn't been able to kill even one of their attackers? What about the lack of animal droppings?

Rebecca must have known what he was thinking, for she scowled and said, “Come on. Let's talk to the neighbors.”

The wind suddenly woke, breathed, raged. Spitting flecks of snow, it came along the street as if it were a living beast, a very cold and angry wind.

V

Mrs. Quillen, Penny's teacher at Wellton School, was unable to understand why a vandal would have wrecked only one locker.

“Perhaps he intended to ruin them all but had second thoughts. Or maybe he started with yours, Penny dear, then heard a sound he couldn't place, thought someone was coming, got frightened, and ran. But we keep the school locked up tight as a drum at night, of course, and there's the alarm system, too. However did he get in and out?”

Penny knew it wasn't a vandal. She knew it was something a whole lot stranger than that. She knew the trashing of her locker was somehow connected with the eerie experience she'd had last night in her room. But she didn't know how to express this knowledge without sounding like a child afraid of boogeymen, so she didn't try to explain to Mrs. Quillen those things which, in truth, she couldn't even explain to herself.

After some discussion, much sympathy, and even more bafflement, Mrs. Quillen sent Penny to the basement where the supplies and spare textbooks were kept on well-ordered storage shelves.

“Get replacements for everything that was destroyed, Penny. All the books, new pencils, a three-ring notebook with a pack of filler, and a new tablet. And don't dawdle, please. We'll be starting the math lesson in a few minutes, and you know that's where you need to work the hardest.”

Penny went down the front stairs to the ground floor, paused at the main doors to look through the beveled glass windows at the swirling puffs of snow, then hurried back the hall to the rear of the building, past the deserted gymnasium, past the music room where a class was about to begin.

The cellar door was at the very end of the hallway.

She opened it and found the light switch. A long, narrow flight of stairs led down.

The ground-floor hallway, through which she'd just passed, had smelled of chalk dust that had escaped from classrooms, pine-scented floor wax, and the dry heat of the forced-air furnace. But as she descended the narrow steps, she noticed that the smells of the cellar were different from those upstairs. She detected the mild limerich odor of concrete dust. Insecticide lent a pungent note to the air; she knew they sprayed every month to discourage silverfish from making a meal of the books stored here. And, underlying everything else, there was a slightly damp smell, a vague but nonetheless unpleasant mustiness.

She reached the bottom of the stairs. Her footsteps rang sharply, crisply on the concrete floor and echoed hollowly in a far corner.

The basement extended under the entire building and was divided into two chambers. At the opposite end from the stairs lay the furnace room, beyond a heavy metal fire door that was always kept closed. The largest of the two rooms was on this side of the door. A work table occupied the center, and free-standing metal storage shelves were lined up along the walls, all crammed full of books and supplies.

Penny took a folding carry-all basket from a rack, opened it, and collected the items she needed. She had just located the last of the textbooks when she heard a strange sound behind her. That sound. The hissingscrabbling-muttering noise that she had heard last night in her bedroom.

She whirled.

As far as she could see, she was alone.

The problem was that she couldn't see everywhere. Deep shadows coiled under the stairs. In one corner of the room, over by the fire door, a ceiling light was burned out. Shadows had claimed that area. Furthermore, each unit of metal shelving stood on six-inch legs, and the gap between the lowest shelf and the floor was untouched by light. There were a lot of places where something small and quick could hide.

She waited, frozen, listening, and ten long seconds elapsed, then fifteen, twenty, and the sound didn't come again, so she wondered if she'd really heard it or only imagined it, and another few seconds ticked away as slowly as minutes, but then something thumped overhead, at the top of the stairs: the cellar door.

She had left the door standing open.

Someone or something had just pulled it shut.

With the basket of books and supplies in one hand, Penny started toward the foot of the stairs but stopped abruptly when she heard other noises up there on the landing. Hissing. Growling. Murmuring. The tick and scrape of movement.

Last night, she had tried to convince herself that the thing in her room hadn't actually been there, that it had been only a remnant of a dream. Now she knew it was more than that. But just what was it? A ghost? Whose ghost? Not her mother's ghost. She maybe wouldn't have minded if her mother had been hanging around, sort of watching over her. Yeah, that would have been okay. But, at best, this was a malicious spirit; at worst, a dangerous spirit. Her mother's ghost would never be malicious like this, not in a million years. Besides, a ghost didn't follow you around from place to place. No, that wasn't how it worked. People weren't haunted. Houses were haunted, and the ghosts doing the haunting were bound to one place until their souls were finally at rest; they couldn't leave that special place they haunted, couldn't just roam all over the city, following one particular young girl.

Yet the cellar door had been drawn shut.

Maybe a draft had closed it.

Maybe. But something was moving around on the landing up there where she couldn't see it. Not a draft. Something strange.

Imagination.

Oh, yeah?

She stood by the stairs, looking up, trying to figure it out, trying to calm herself, carrying on an urgent conversation with herself:

— Well, if it's not a ghost, what is it?

— Something bad.

— Not necessarily.

— Something very, very bad.

— Stop it! Stop scaring yourself. It didn't try to hurt you last night, did it?

— No.

— So there. You 're safe.

— But now it's back.

A new sound jolted her out of her interior dialogue. Another thump. But this was different from the sound the door had made when it had been pushed shut. And again: thump! Again. It sounded as if something was throwing itself against the wall at the head of the stairs, bumping mindlessly like a summer moth battering against a window.

Thump!

The lights went out.

Penny gasped.

The thumping stopped.

In the sudden darkness, the weird and unsettlingly eager animal sounds rose on all sides of Penny, not just from the landing overhead, and she detected movement in the claustrophobic blackness. There wasn't merely one unseen, unknown creature in the cellar with her; there were many of them.

But what were they?

Something brushed her foot, then darted away into the subterranean gloom.

She screamed. She was loud but not loud enough. Her cry hadn't carried beyond the cellar.

At the same moment, Mrs. March, the music teacher, began pounding on the piano in the music room directly overhead. Kids began to sing up there. Frosty the Snowman. They were rehearsing for a Christmas show which the entire school would perform for parents just prior to the start of the holiday vacation.

Now, even if Penny could manage a louder scream, no one would hear her, anyway.

Likewise, because of the music and singing, she could no longer hear the things moving in the darkness around her. But they were still there. She had no doubt that they were there.

She took a deep breath. She was determined not to lose her head. She wasn't a child.

They won't hurt me, she thought.

But she couldn't convince herself.

She shuffled cautiously to the foot of the stairs, the carry-all in one hand, her other hand out in front of her, feeling her way as if she were blind, which she might as well have been.

The cellar had two windows, but they were small rectangles set high in the wall, at street level, with no more than one square foot of glass in each of them. Besides, they were dirty on the outside; even on a bright day, those grimy panes did little to illuminate the basement. On a cloudy day like today, with a storm brewing, the windows gave forth only a thin, milky light that traveled no more than a few inches into the cellar before expiring.

She reached the foot of the stairs and looked up.

Deep, deep blackness.

Mrs. March was still hammering on the piano, and the kids were still singing about the snowman that had come to life.

Penny raised one foot, found the first step.

Overhead, at the top of the stairs, a pair of eyes appeared only a few inches above the landing floor, as if disembodied, as if floating in the air, although they must have been attached to an animal about the size of a cat. It wasn't a cat, of course. She wished it were. The eyes were as large as a cat's eyes, too, and very bright, not merely reflective like the eyes of a cat, but so unnaturally bright that they glowed like two tiny lanterns. The color was odd, too: white, moon-pale, with the faintest trace of silvery blue. Those cold eyes glared down at her.

She took her foot off the first step.

The creature above slipped off the landing, onto the highest step, edging closer.

Penny retreated.

The thing descended two more steps, its advance betrayed only by its unblinking eyes. Darkness cloaked its form.

Breathing hard, her heart pounding louder than the music above, she backed up until she collided with a metal storage shelf. There was nowhere to turn, nowhere to hide.

The thing was now a third of the way down the stairs and still coming.

Penny felt the urge to pee. She pressed back against the shelves and squeezed her thighs together.

The thing was halfway down the stairs. Moving faster.

Overhead, in the music room, they had really gotten into the spirit of Frosty the Snowman, a lilt in their voices, belting it out with what Mrs. March always called “gusto.”

From the corner of her eye, Penny saw something in the cellar, off to the right: a wink of soft light, a flash, a glow, movement. Daring to look away from the creature that was descending the stairs in front of her, she glanced into the unlighted room — and immediately wished she hadn't.

Eyes.

Silver-white eyes.

The darkness was full of them. Two eyes shone up at her from the floor, hardly more than a yard away, regarding her with a cold hunger. Two more eyes were little farther than a foot behind the first pair. Another four eyes gleamed frostily from a point at least three feet above the floor, in the center of the room, and for a moment she thought she had misjudged the height of these creatures, but then she realized two of them had climbed onto the worktable. Two, four, six pair of eyes peered malevolently at her from various shelves along the far wall. Three more pair were at floor level near the fire door that led to the furnace room. Some were perfectly still; some were moving restlessly back and forth; some were creeping slowly toward her. None of them blinked. Others were moving out from the space under the stairs. There were about twenty of the things: forty brightly glowing, vicious, unearthly eyes.

Shaking, whimpering, Penny tore her own gaze away from the demonic horde in the cellar and looked at the stairs again.

The lone beast that had started slinking down from the landing no more than a minute ago had now reached the bottom. It was on the last step.

VI

Both to the east and to the west of Vincent Vastagliano's house, the neighbors were established in equally large, comfortable, elegantly furnished homes that might as well have been isolated country manors instead of townhouses. The city did not intrude into these stately places, and none of the occupants had seen or heard anything unusual during the night of blood and murder.

In less than half an hour, Jack and Rebecca had exhausted that line of inquiry and had returned to the sidewalk. They kept their heads tucked down to present as small a target as possible to the wind, which had grown steadily more powerful. It was now a wicked, icy, lashing whip that snatched litter out of the gutters and flung it through the air, shook the bare trees with almost enough violence to crack the brittle limbs, snapped coattails with sharp reports, and stung exposed flesh.

The snow flurries were falling in greater numbers now. In a few minutes, they would be coming down too thick to be called flurries any more. The street was still bare black macadam, but soon it would boast a fresh white skin.

Jack and Rebecca headed back toward Vastagliano's place and were almost there when someone called to them. Jack turned and saw Harry Ulbeck, the young officer who had earlier been on watch at the top of Vastagliano's front steps; Harry was leaning out of one of the three black-and-whites that were parked at the curb. He said something, but the wind ripped his words into meaningless sounds. Jack went to the car, bent down to the open window, and said, “Sorry, Harry, I didn't hear what you said,” and his breath smoked out of him in cold white plumes.

“Just came over the radio,” Harry said. “They want you right away. You and Detective Chandler.”

“Want us for what?”

“Looks as if it's part of this case you're working on.

There's been more killing. More like this here. Maybe even worse… even bloodier.”

VII

Their eyes weren't at all like eyes should be. They looked, instead, like slots in a furnace grate, providing glimpses of the fire beyond. A silver-white fire. These eyes contained no irises, no pupils, as did human and animal eyes. There was just that fierce glow, the white light from within them, pulsing and flickering.

The creature on the stairs moved down from the last step, onto the cellar floor. It edged toward Penny, then stopped, stared up at her.

She couldn't move back even one more inch. Already, one of the metal shelves pressed painfully across her shoulder blades.

Suddenly she realized the music had stopped. The cellar was silent. Had been silent for some time. Perhaps for as long as half a minute. Frozen by terror, she hadn't reacted immediately when Frosty the Snowman was concluded.

Belatedly she opened her mouth to scream for help, but the piano started up again. This time the tune was Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, which was even louder than the first song.

The thing at the foot of the stairs continued to glare at her, and although its eyes were utterly different from the eyes of a tiger, she was nevertheless reminded of a picture of a tiger that she'd seen in a magazine. The eyes in that photograph and these strange eyes looked absolutely nothing alike, yet they had something in common: They were the eyes of predators.

Even though her vision was beginning to adjust somewhat to the darkness, Penny still couldn't see what the creatures looked like, couldn't tell whether they were well-armed with teeth and claws. There were only the menacing, unblinking eyes, adance with white flame.

In the cellar to her right, the other creatures began to move, almost as one, with a single purpose.

She swung toward them, her heart racing faster than ever, her breath caught in her throat.

From the gleam of silvery eyes, she could tell they were leaping down from the shelves where they'd perched.

They're coming for me.

The two on the work table jumped to the floor.

Penny screamed as loud as she could.

The music didn't stop. Didn't even miss a beat.

No one had heard her.

Except for the one at the foot of the stairs, all the creatures had gathered into a pack. Their blazing eyes looked like a cache of diamonds spread on black velvet.

None of them advanced on her. They waited.

After a moment she turned to the stairs again.

Now, the beast at the bottom of the stairs moved, too. But it didn't come toward her. It darted into the cellar and joined the others of its kind.

The stairs were clear, though dark.

It's a trick.

As far as she could see, there was nothing to prevent her from climbing the stairs as fast as she could.

It's a trap.

But there was no need for them to set a trap. She was already trapped. They could have rushed her at any time. They could have killed her if they'd wanted to kill her.

The flickering ice-white eyes watched her.

Mrs. March pounded on the piano.

The kids sang.

Penny bolted away from the shelves, dashed to the stairs, and clambered upward. Step by step she expected the things to bite her heels, latch onto her, and drag her down. She stumbled once, almost fell back to the bottom, grabbed the railing with her free hand, and kept going. The top step. The landing. Fumbling in the dark for the doorknob, finding it. The hallway. Light, safety. She slammed the door behind her. Leaned on it. Gasping.

In the music room, they were still singing Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

The corridor was deserted.

Dizzy, weak in the legs, Penny slid down and sat on the floor, her back against the door. She let go of the carry-all. She had been gripping it so tightly that the handle had left its mark across her palm. Her hand ached.

The song ended.

Another song began. Silver Bells.

Gradually, Penny regained her strength, calmed herself, and was able to think clearly. What wet those hideous little things? Where did they come from? What did they want from her?

Thinking clearly wasn't any help. She couldn't come up with a single acceptable answer.

A lot of really dumb answers kept occurring to her, however: goblins, gremlins, ogres…. Cripes. It couldn't be anything like that. This was real life, not a fairy tale.

How could she ever tell anyone about her experience in the cellar without seeming childish or, worse, even slightly crazy? Of course, grown-ups didn't like to use the term “crazy” with children. You could be as nuts as a walnut tree, babble like a loon, chew on furniture, set fire to cats, and talk to brick walls, and as long as you were still a kid, the worst they'd say about you — in public, at least — was that you were “emotionally disturbed, “ although what they meant by that was “crazy.” If she told Mr. Quillen or her father or any other adult about the things she had seen in the school basement, everyone would think she was looking for attention and pity; they'd figure she hadn't yet adjusted to her mother's death. For a few months after her mother passed away, Penny had been in bad shape, confused, angry, frightened, a problem to her father and to herself. She had needed help for a while. Now, if she told them about the things in the basement, they would think she needed help again. They would send her to a “counselor,” who would actually be a psychologist or some other kind of head doctor, and they'd do their best for her, give her all sorts of attention and sympathy and treatment, but they simply wouldn't believe her — until, with their own eyes, they saw such things as she had seen.

Or until it was too late for her.

Yes, they'd all believe then—when she was dead.

She had no doubt whatsoever that the fiery-eyed things would try to kill her, sooner or later. She didn't know why they wanted to take her life, but she sensed their evil intent, their hatred. They hadn't harmed her yet, true, but they were growing bolder. Last night, the one in her bedroom hadn't damaged anything except the plastic baseball bat she'd poked at it, but by this morning, they had grown bold enough to destroy the contents of her locker. And now, bolder still, they had revealed themselves and had threatened her.

What next?

Something worse.

They enjoyed her terror; they fed on it. But like a cat with a mouse, they would eventually grow tired of the game. And then…

She shuddered.

What am I going to do? she wondered miserably. What am I going to do?

VIII

The hotel, one of the best in the city, overlooked Central Park. It was the same hotel at which Jack and Linda had spent their honeymoon, thirteen years ago. They hadn't been able to afford the Bahamas or Florida or even the Catskills. Instead, they had remained in the city and had settled for three days at this fine old landmark, and even that had been an extravagance. They'd had a memorable honeymoon, nevertheless, three days filled with laughter and good conversation and talk of their future and lots of loving. They'd promised themselves a trip to the Bahamas on their tenth anniversary, something to look forward to. But by the time that milestone rolled around, they had two kids to think about and a new apartment to get in order, and they renegotiated the promise, rescheduling the Bahamas for their fifteenth anniversary. Little more than a year later, Linda was dead. In the eighteen months since her funeral, Jack had often thought about the Bahamas, which were now forever spoiled for him, and about this hotel.

The murders had been committed on the sixteenth floor, where there were now two uniformed officers — Yeager and Tufton — stationed at the elevator alcove. They weren't letting anyone through except those with police ID and those who could prove they were registered guests with lodgings on that level.

“Who were the victims?” Rebecca asked Yeager. “Civilians?”

“Nope,” Yeager said. He was a lanky man with enormous yellow teeth. Every time he paused, he probed at his teeth with his tongue, licked and pried at them. “Two of them were pretty obviously professional muscle.”

“You know the type,” Tufton said as Yeager paused to probe again at his teeth. “Tall, big hands, big arms; you could break ax handles across their necks, and they'd think it was just a sudden breeze.”

“The third one,” Yeager said, “was one of the Carramazzas.” He paused; his tongue curled out, over his upper teeth, swept back and forth. “One of the immediate family, too.” He scrubbed his tongue over his lowers. “In fact—” Probe, probe. “-it's Dominick Carramazza.”

“Oh, shit!” Jack said. “Gennaro's brother?”

“Yeah, the godfather's little brother, his favorite brother, his right hand,” Tufton said quickly, before Yeager started to answer. Tufton was a fast-spoken man with a sharp face, an angular body, and quick movements, brisk and efficient gestures. Yeager's slowness must be a constant irritant to him, Jack thought. “And they didn't just kill him. They tore him up bad. There isn't any mortician alive who can put Dominick back together well enough for an open-casket funeral, and you know how important funerals are to these Sicilians.”

“There'll be blood in the streets now,” Jack said wearily.

“Gang war like we haven't seen in years,” Tufton agreed.

Rebecca said, “Dominick…? Wasn't he the one who was in the news all summer?”

“Yeah,” Yeager said. “The D.A. thought he had him nailed for—”

When Yeager paused to swab his yellowed teeth with his big pink tongue, Tufton quickly said, “Trafficking in narcotics. He's in charge of the entire Carramazza narcotics operation. They've been trying to put him in the stir for twenty years, maybe longer, but he's a fox. He always walks out of the courtroom a free man.”

“What was he doing here in the hotel?” Jack wondered.

“I think he was hiding out,” Tufton said.

“Registered under a phony name,” Yeager said.

Tufton said, “Holed up here with those two apes to protect him. They must've known he was targeted, but he was hit anyway.”

“Hit?” Yeager said scornfully. He paused to tend to his teeth and made an unpleasant sucking sound. Then: “Hell, this was more than just a hit. This was total devastation. This was crazy, totally off the wall; that's what this was. Christ, if I didn't know better, I'd say these three here had been chewed, just chewed to pieces.”

The scene of the crime was a two-room suite. The door had been broken down by the first officers to arrive. An assistant medical examiner, a police photographer, and a couple of lab technicians were at work in both rooms.

The parlor, decorated entirely in beige and royal blue, was elegantly appointed with a stylish mixture of French provincial and understated contemporary furniture. The room would have been warm and welcoming if it hadn't been thoroughly splattered with blood.

The first body was sprawled on the parlor floor, on its back, beside an overturned, oval-shaped coffee table. A man in his thirties. Tall, husky. His dark slacks were torn. His white shirt was torn, too, and much of it was stained crimson. He was in the same condition as Vastagliano and Ross: savagely bitten, mutilated.

The carpet around the corpse was saturated with blood, but the battle hadn't been confined to that small portion of the room. A trail of blood, weaving and erratic, led from one end of the parlor to the other, then back again; it was the route the panicked victim had taken in a futile attempt to escape from and slough off his attackers.

Jack felt sick.

“It's a damned slaughterhouse,” Rebecca said.

The dead man had been packing a gun. His shoulder holster was empty. A silencer-equipped.38 pistol was at his side.

Jack interrupted one of the lab technicians who was moving slowly around the parlor, collecting blood samples from various stains. “You didn't touch the gun? ”

“Of course not,” the technician said. “We'll take it back to the lab in a plastic bag, see if we can work up any prints.”

“I was wondering if it'd been fired,” Jack said.

“Well, that's almost a sure thing. We've found four expended shell casings.”

“Same caliber as this weapon?”

“Yep.”

“Find any of the loads?” Rebecca asked.

“All four,” the technician said. He pointed: “Two in that wall, one in the door frame over there, and one right through the upholstery button on the back of that armchair.”

“So it looks as if he didn't hit whatever he was shooting at,” Rebecca said.

“Probably not. Four shell casings, four slugs. Everything's been neatly accounted for.”

Jack said, “How could he have missed four times in such close quarters?”

“Damned if I know,” the technician said. He shrugged and went back to work.

The bedroom was even bloodier than the parlor. Two dead men shared it.

There were two living men, as well. A police photographer was snapping the bodies from every angle. An assistant medical examiner named Brendan Mulgrew, a tall, thin man with a prominent Adam's apple, was studying the positions of both corpses.

One of the victims was on the king-size bed, his head at the foot of it, his bare feet pointed toward the headboard, one hand at his torn throat, the other hand at his side, the palm turned up, open. He was wearing a bathrobe and a suit of blood.

“Dominick Carramazza,” Jack said.

Looking at the ruined face, Rebecca said, “How can you tell?”

“Just barely.”

The other dead man was on the floor, flat on his stomach, head turned to one side, face torn to ribbons. He was dressed like the one in the parlor: white shirt open at the neck, dark slacks, a shoulder holster.

Jack turned away from the gouged and oozing flesh. His stomach had gone sour; an acid burning etched its way up from his gut to a point under his heart. He fumbled in his coat pocket for a roll of Tums.

Both of the victims in the bedroom had been armed. But guns had been of no more help to them than to the man in the parlor.

The cadaver on the floor was still clutching a silencer equipped pistol, which was as illegal as a howitzer at a presidential press conference. It was like the gun on the floor in the first room.

The man on the bed hadn't been able to hold on to his weapon. It was lying on the tangled sheets and blankets.

“Smith & Wesson.357 Magnum,” Jack said. “Powerful enough to blow a hole as big as a fist right through anyone in its way.”

Being a revolver instead of a pistol, it wasn't fitted with a silencer, and Rebecca said, “Fired indoors, it'd sound like a cannon. They'd have heard it from one end of this floor to the other.”

To Mulgrew, Jack said, “Does it look as if both guns were fired?”

The M.E. nodded. “Yeah. Judging from the expended shell casings, the magazine of the pistol was completely emptied. Ten rounds. The guy with the.357 Magnum managed to get off five shots.”

“And didn't hit his assailant,” Rebecca said.

“Apparently not,” Mulgrew said, “although we're taking blood samples from all over the suite, hoping we'll come up with a type that doesn't belong to one of the three victims.”

They had to move to get out of the photographer's way.

Jack noticed two impressive holes in the wall to the left of the bed. “Those from the.357?”

“Yes,” Mulgrew said. He swallowed hard; his Adam's apple bobbled. “Both slugs went through the wall, into the next room.”

“Jesus. Anyone hurt over there?”

“No. But it was a close thing. The guy in the next room is mad as hell.”

“I don't blame him,” Jack said.

“Has anyone gotten his story yet?” Rebecca asked.

“He may have talked to the uniforms,” Mulgrew said, “but I don't think any detectives have formally questioned him.”

Rebecca looked at Jack. “Let's get to him while he's still fresh.”

“Okay. But just a second.” To Mulgrew, Jack said, “These three victims… were they bitten to death?”

“Looks that way.”

“Rat bites?”

“I'd rather wait for lab results, the autopsy—”

“I'm only asking for an unofficial opinion,” Jack said.

“Well… unofficially… not rats.”

“Dogs? Cats?”

“Highly unlikely.”

“Find any droppings?”

Mulgrew was surprised. “I thought of that, but it's funny you should. I looked everywhere. Couldn't find a single dropping.”

“Anything else strange?”

“You noticed the door, didn't you?”

“Besides that.”

“Isn't that enough?” Mulgrew said, astonished. “Listen, the first two bulls on the scene had to break down the door to get in. The suite was locked up tight — from the inside. The windows are locked from the inside, too, and in addition to that, I think they're probably painted shut. So… no matter whether they were men or animals, how did the killers get away? You have a locked room mystery on your hands. I think that's pretty strange, don't you?”

Jack sighed. “Actually, it's getting to be downright common.”

IX

Ted Gernsby, a telephone company repairman, was working on a junction box in a storm drain not far from Wellton School. He was bracketed by work lights that he and Andy Carnes had brought down from the truck, and the lights were focused on the box; otherwise, the man-high drainage pipe was filled with cool, stagnant darkness.

The lights threw off a small measure of heat, and the air was naturally warmer underground than on the windswept street, although not much warmer. Ted shivered. Because the job involved delicate work, he had removed his gloves. Now his hands were growing stiff from the cold.

Although the storm drains weren't connected to the sewer system, and although the concrete conduits were relatively dry after weeks of no precipitation, Ted occasionally got a whiff of a dark, rotten odor that, depending on its intensity, sometimes made him grimace and sometimes made him gag. He wished Andy would hurry back with the circuit board that was needed to finish the repair job.

He put down a pair of needle-nose pliers, cupped his hands over his mouth, and blew warm air into them. He leaned past the work lights in order to see beyond the glare and into the unilluminated length of the tunnel.

A flashlight bobbled in the darkness, coming this way. It was Andy, at last.

But why was he running?

Andy Carnes came out of the gloom, breathing fast. He was in his early twenties, about twenty years younger than Ted; they had been working together only a week.

Andy was a beachboy type with white-blond hair and a healthy complexion and freckles that were like waterspots on warm, dry sand. He would have looked more at home in Miami or California; in New York, he seemed misplaced. Now, however, he was so pale that, by contrast, his freckles looked like dark holes in his face. His eyes were wild. He was trembling.

“What's wrong?” Ted asked.

“Back there,” Andy said shakily. “In the branch tunnel. Just this side of the manhole.”

“Something there? What?”

Andy glanced back. “They didn't follow me. Thank God. I was afraid they were after me.”

Ted Gernsby frowned. “What're you talking about?”

Andy started to speak, hesitated, shook his head. Looking sheepish, yet still frightened, he said, “You wouldn't believe it. Not in a million years. I don't believe it, and I'm the one who saw it!”

Impatient, Ted unclipped his own flashlight from the tool belt around his waist. He started back toward the branch drain.

“Wait!” Andy said. “It might be… dangerous to go back there.”

“Why?” Ted demanded, exasperated with him.

“Eyes.” Andy shivered. “That's what I saw first. A lot of eyes shining in the dark, there inside the mouth of the branch line.”

“Is that all? Listen, you saw a few rats. Nothing to worry about. When you've been on this job a while, you'll get used to them.”

“Not rats,” Andy said adamantly. “Rats have red eyes, don't they? These were white. Or… sort of silvery. Silvery-white eyes. Very bright. It wasn't that they reflected my flashlight. No. I didn't even have the flash on them when I first spotted them. They glowed. Glowing eyes, with their own light. I mean… like jack-o'-lantern eyes. Little spots of fire, flickering. So then I turned the flash on them, and they were right there, no more than six feet from me, the most incredible damned things. Right there!”

“What?” Ted demanded. “You still haven't told me what you saw.”

In a tremulous voice, Andy told him.

It was the craziest story Ted had ever heard, but he listened without comment, and although he was sure it couldn't be true, he felt a quiver of fear pass through him. Then, in spite of Andy's protests, he went back to the branch tunnel to have a look for himself. He didn't find anything at all, let alone the monsters he'd heard described. He even went into the tributary for a short distance, probing with the beam of his flashlight. Nothing.

He returned to the work site.

Andy was waiting in the pool of light cast by the big lamps. He eyed the surrounding darkness with suspicion. He was still pale.

“Nothing there,” Ted said.

“A minute ago, there was.”

Ted switched off his flashlight, snapped it onto his tool belt. He jammed his hands into the fur-lined pockets of his quilted jacket.

He said, “This is the first time you've been sub-street with me.”

“So?”

“Ever been in a place like this before?”

Andy said, “You mean in a sewer?”

“It's not a sewer. Storm drain. You ever been underground? ”

“No. What's that got to do with it?”

“Ever been in a crowded theater and suddenly felt… closed in?”

“I'm not claustrophobic,” Andy said defensively.

“Nothing to be ashamed of, you know. I've seen it happen before. A guy is a little uncomfortable in small rooms, elevators, crowded places, though not so uncomfortable that you'd say he was claustrophobic. Then he comes down here on a repair job for the first time, and he starts feeling cramped up, starts to shake, gets short of breath, feels the walls closing in, starts hearing things, imagining things. If that's the case with you, don't worry about it. Doesn't mean you'll be fired or anything like that. Hell, no! They'll just make sure they don't give you another underground assignment; that's all.”

“I saw those things, Ted.”

“Nothing's there.”

“I saw them.”

X

Down the hall from the late Dominick Carramazza's hotel suite, the next room was large and pleasant, with a queen-size bed, a writing desk, a bureau, a chest of drawers, and two chairs. The color scheme was coral with turquoise accents.

Burt Wicke, the occupant, was in his late forties. He was about six feet tall, and at one time he'd been solid and strong, but now all the hard meat of him was sheathed with fat. His shoulders were big but round, and his chest was big, and his gut overhung his belt, and as he sat on the edge of the bed, his slacks were stretched tight around his hammy thighs. Jack found it hard to tell if Wicke had ever been good-looking. Too much rich food, too much booze, too many cigarettes, too much of everything had left him with a face that looked partly melted. His eyes protruded just a bit and were bloodshot. In that coral and turquoise room, Wicke looked like a toad on a birthday cake.

His voice was a surprise, higher pitched than Jack expected. He had figured Burt Wicke to be slow-moving, slow-talking, a weary and sedentary man, but Wicke spoke with considerable nervous energy He couldn't sit still, either. He got up from the bed, paced the room sat down in a chair, bolted up almost at once, paced, all; the while talking, answering questions — and complaining. He was a non-stop complainer.

“This won't take long, will it? I've already had to cancel one business meeting. If this takes long, I'll have to cancel another.”

“It shouldn't take long,” Jack said.

“I had breakfast here in the room. Not a very good breakfast. The orange juice was too warm, and the coffee wasn't warm enough. I asked for my eggs over well, and they came sunny-side up. You'd think a hotel like this, a hotel with this reputation, a hotel this expensive, would be able to give you a decent room service breakfast. Anyway, I shaved and got dressed. I was standing in the bathroom, combing my hair, when I heard somebody shouting. Then screaming. I stepped out of the bathroom and listened, and I was pretty sure it was all coming from next door there. More than one voice.”

“What were they shouting?” Rebecca asked.

“Sounded surprised, startled. Scared. Real scared.”

“No, what I mean is — do you remember any words they shouted?”

“No words.”

“Or maybe names.”

“They weren't shouting words or names; nothing like that.”

“What were they shouting?”

“Well, maybe it was words and names or both, but it didn't come through the wall all that distinctly. It was just noise. And I thought to myself: Christ, not something else gone wrong; this has been a rotten trip all the way.”

Wicke wasn't only a complainer; he was a whiner. His voice had the power to set Jack's teeth on edge.

“Then what?” Rebecca asked.

“Well, the shouting part didn't last long. Almost right away, the shooting started.”

“Those two slugs came through the wall?” Jack asked, pointing to the holes.

“Not right then. Maybe a minute later. And what the hell is this joint made of, anyway, if the walls can't stop a bullet?”

“It was a.357 Magnum,” Jack said. “Nothing'll stop that.”

“Walls like tissue paper,” Wicke said, not wanting to hear anything that might contribute to the hotel's exoneration. He went to the telephone that stood on a nightstand by the bed, and he put his hand on the receiver. “As soon as the shooting started, I scrambled over here, dialed the hotel operator, told her to get the cops. They were a very long time coming. Are you always such a long time coming in this city when someone needs help?”

“We do our best,” Jack said.

“So I put the phone down and hesitated, not sure what to do, just stood listening to them screaming and shooting over there, and then I realized I might be in the line of fire, so I started toward the bathroom, figuring to hole up in there until it all blew over, and then all of a sudden, Jesus, I was in the line of fire. The first shot came through the wall and missed my face by maybe six inches. The second one was even closer. I dropped to the floor and hugged the carpet, but those were the last two shots — and just a few seconds later, there wasn't any more screaming, either.”

“Then what?” Jack asked.

“Then I waited for the cops.”

“You didn't go into the hall?”

“Why would I?”

“To see what happened.”

“Are you crazy? How was I to know who might be out there in the hall? Maybe one of them with a gun was still out there.”

“So you didn't see anyone. Or hear anything important, like a name?”

“I already told you. No.”

Jack couldn't think of anything more to ask. He looked at Rebecca, and she seemed stymied, too. Another dead end.

They got up from their chairs, and Burt Wicke — still fidgety, still whining — said, “This has been a rotten trip from the beginning, absolutely rotten. First, I have to make the entire flight from Chicago sitting next to a little old lady from Peoria who wouldn't shut up. Boring old bitch. And the plane hit turbulence like you wouldn't believe. Then yesterday, two deals fall through, and I find out my hotel has rats, an expensive hotel like this—”

“Rats?” Jack asked.

“Huh?”

“You said the hotel has rats.”

“Well, it does.”

“You've seen them?” Rebecca asked.

“It's a disgrace,” Wicke said. “A place like this, with such an almighty reputation, but crawling with rats.”

“Have you seen them?” Rebecca repeated.

Wicke cocked his head, frowned. “Why're you so interested in rats? That's got nothing to do with the murders.”

“Have you seen them?” Rebecca repeated in a harsher voice.

“Not exactly. But I heard them. In the walls.”

“You heard rats in the walls?”

“Well, in the heating system, actually. They sounded close, like they were right here in these walls, but you know how those hollow metal heating ducts can carry sound. The rats might've been on another floor, even in another wing, but they sure sounded close. I got up on the desk there and put my ear to the vent, and I swear they couldn't've been inches away. Squeaking. A funny sort of squeaking. Chittering, twittering sounds. Maybe half a dozen rats, by the sound of it. I could hear their claws scraping on metal… a scratchy, rattly noise that gave me the creeps. I complained, but the management here doesn't bother attending to complaints. From the way they treat their guests, you'd never know this was supposed to be one of the finest hotels in the city.”

Jack figured Burt Wicke had lodged an unreasonable number of vociferous, petty complaints prior to hearing the rats. By that time, the management had tagged him as either a hopeless neurotic or a grifter who was trying to establish excuses for not paying his bill.

Having paced to the window, Wicke looked up at the winter sky, down at the street far below. “And now it's snowing. On top of everything else, the weather's got to turn rotten. It isn't fair.”

The man no longer reminded Jack of a toad. Now he seemed like a six-foot-tall, fat, hairy, stumpy-legged baby.

Rebecca said, “When did you hear the rats?”

“This morning. Just after I finished breakfast, I called down to the front desk to tell them how terrible their room service food was. After a highly unsatisfactory conversation with the clerk on duty, I put the phone down — and that's the very moment when I heard the rats. After I'd listened to them a while and was positively sure they were rats, I called the manager himself to complain about that, again without satisfactory results. That's when I made up my mind to get a shower, dress, pack my suitcases, and find a new hotel before my first business appointment of the day.”

“Do you remember the exact time when you heard the rats?”

“Not to the minute. But it must've been around eight-thirty.”

Jack glanced at Rebecca. “About one hour before the killing started next door.”

She looked troubled. She said, “Weirder and weirder.”

XI

In the death suite, the three ravaged bodies still lay where they had fallen.

The lab men hadn't finished their work. In the parlor, one of them was vacuuming the carpet around the corpse. The sweepings would be analyzed later.

Jack and Rebecca went to the nearest heating vent, a one-foot-by-eight-inch rectangular plate mounted on the wall, a few inches below the ceiling. Jack pulled a chair under it, stood on the chair, and examined the grille.

He said, “The end of the duct has an inward-bent flange all the way around it. The screws go through the edges of the grille and through the flange.”

“From here,” Rebecca said, “I see the heads of two screws.”

“That's all there are. But anything trying to get out of the duct would have to remove at least one of those screws to loosen the grille.”

“And no rat is that smart,” she said.

“Even if it was a smart rat, like no other rat God ever put on this earth, a regular Albert Einstein of the rat kingdom, it still couldn't do the job. From inside the duct, it'd be dealing with the pointed, threaded end of the screw. It couldn't grip and turn the damned thing with only its paws.”

“Not with its teeth, either.”

“No. The job would require fingers.”

The duct, of course, was much too small for a manor even a child — to crawl through it.

Rebecca said. “Suppose a lot of rats, a few dozen of them, jammed up against one another in the duct, all struggling to get out through a ventilation grille. If a real horde of them put enough pressure on the other side of the grille, would they be able to pop the screws through the flange and then shove the grille into the room, out of their way?”

“Maybe,” Jack said with more than a little doubt.

“Even that sounds too smart for rats. But I guess if the holes in the flange were too much bigger than the screws that passed through them, the threads wouldn't bite on anything, and the grille could be forced off.”

He tested the vent plate that he had been examining. It moved slightly back and forth, up and down, but not much.

He said, “This one's pretty tightly fitted.”

“One of the others might be looser.”

Jack stepped down from the chair and put it back where he'd gotten it.

They went through the suite until they'd found all the vents from the heating system: two in the parlor, one in the bedroom, one in the bath. At each outlet, the grille was fixed firmly in place.

“Nothing got into the suite through the heating ducts,” Jack said. “Maybe I can make myself believe that rats could crowd up against the back of the grille and force it off, but I'll never in a million years believe that they left through the same duct and somehow managed to replace the grille behind them. No rat — no animal of any kind you can name — could be that welltrained, that dexterous.”

“No. Of course not. It's ridiculous.”

“So,” he said.

“So,” she said. She sighed. “Then you think it's just an odd coincidence that the men here were apparently bitten to death shortly after Wicke heard rats in the walls.”

“I don't like coincidences,” he said.

“Neither do I.”

“They usually turn out not to be coincidences.”

“Exactly.”

“But it's still the most likely possibility. Coincidence, I mean. Unless…”

“Unless what?” she asked.

“Unless you want to consider voodoo, black magic—”

“No thank you.”

“-demons creeping through the walls—”

“Jack, for God's sake!”

“-coming out to kill, melting back into the walls and just disappearing.”

“I won't listen to this.”

He smiled. “I'm just teasing, Rebecca.”

“Like hell you are. Maybe you think you don't put any credence in that kind of baloney, but deep down inside, there's a part of you that's—”

“Excessively open-minded,” he finished.

“If you insist on making a joke of it—”

“I do. I insist.”

“But it's true, just the same.”

“I may be excessively open-minded, if that's even possible—”

“It is.”

“-but at least I'm not inflexible.”

“Neither am I.”

“Or rigid.”

“Neither am I.”

“Or frightened.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“You figure it.”

“You're saying I'm frightened?”

“Aren't you, Rebecca?”

“Of what?”

“Last night, for one thing.”

“Don't be absurd.”

“Then let's talk about it.”

“Not now.”

He looked at his watch. “Twenty past eleven. We'll break for lunch at twelve. You promised to talk about it at lunch.”

“I said if we had time for lunch.”

“We'll have time.”

“I don't think so.”

“We'll have time.”

“There's a lot to be done here.”

“We can do it after lunch.”

“People to interrogate.”

“We can grill them after lunch.”

“You're impossible, Jack.”

“Indefatigable.”

“Stubborn.”

“Determined.”

“Damnit.”

“Charming, too,” he said.

She apparently didn't agree. She walked away from him. She seemed to prefer looking at one of the mutilated corpses.

Beyond the window, snow was falling heavily now. The sky was bleak. Although it wasn't noon yet, it looked like twilight out there.

XII

Lavelle stepped out of the back door of the house. He went to the end of the porch, down three steps. He stood at the edge of the dead brown grass and looked up into the whirling chaos of snowflakes.

He had never seen snow before. Pictures, of course. But not the real thing. Until last spring, he had spent his entire life — thirty years — in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and on several other Caribbean islands.

He had expected winter in New York to be uncomfortable, even arduous, for someone as unaccustomed to it as he was. However, much to his surprise, the experience had been exciting and positive, thus far. If it was only the novelty of winter that appealed to him, then he might feel differently when that novelty eventually wore off, but for the time being, he found the brisk winds and cold air invigorating.

Besides, in this great city he had discovered an enormous reservoir of the power on which he depended in order to do his work the infinitely useful power of evil. Evil flourished everywhere, of course, in the countryside and in the suburbs, too, not merely within the boundaries of New York City. There was no shortage of evil in the Caribbean, where he had been a practicing Bocor—a voodoo priest skilled in the uses of black magic — ever since he was twenty-two. But here, where so many people were crammed into such a relatively small piece of land, here where a score or two of murders were committed every week, here where assaults and rapes and robberies and burglaries numbered in the tens of thousands — even hundreds of thousands — every year, here where there were an army of hustlers looking for an advantage, legions of con men searching for marks, psychos of every twisted sort, perverts, punks, wife-beaters, and thugs almost beyond counting—this was where the air was flooded with raw currents of evil that you could see and smell and feel — if, like Lavelle, you were sensitized to them. With each wicked deed, an effluvium of evil rose from the corrupted soul, contributing to the crackling currents in the air, making them stronger, potentially more destructive. Above and through the metropolis, vast tenebrous rivers of evil energy surged and churned. Ethereal rivers, yes. Of no substance. Yet the energy of which they were composed was real, lethal, the very stuff with which Lavelle could achieve virtually any result he wished. He could tap into those midnight tides and twilight pools of malevolent power; he could use them to cast even the most difficult and ambitious spells, curses, and charms.

The city was also crisscrossed by other, different currents of a benign nature, composed of the effluvium arising from good souls engaged in the performance of admirable deeds. These were rivers of hope, love, courage, charity, innocence, kindness, friendship, honesty, and dignity. This, too, was an extremely powerful energy, but it was of absolutely no use to Lavelle. A Houngon, a priest skilled at white magic, would be able to tap that benign energy for the purpose of healing, casting beneficial spells, and creating miracles. But Lavelle was a Bocor, not a Houngon. He had dedicated himself to the black arts, to the rites of Congo and Petro, rather than to the various rites of Rada, white magic. And dedication to that dark sphere of sorcery also meant confinement to it.

Yet his long association with evil had not given him a bleak, mournful, or even sour aspect; he was a happy man. He smiled broadly as he stood there behind the house, at the edge of the dead brown grass, looking up into the whirling snow. He felt strong, relaxed, content, almost unbearably pleased with himself.

He was tall, six-three. He looked even taller in his narrow-legged black trousers and his long, well-fitted gray cashmere topcoat. He was unusually thin, yet powerful looking in spite of the lack of meat on his long frame. Not even the least observant could mistake him for a weakling, for he virtually radiated confidence and had eyes that made you want to get out of his way in a hurry. His hands were large, his wrists large and bony. His face was noble, not unlike that of the film actor, Sidney Poitier. His skin was exceptionally dark, very black, with an almost purple undertone, somewhat like the skin of a ripe eggplant. Snowflakes melted on his face and stuck in his eyebrows and frosted his wiry black hair.

The house out of which he had come was a three-story brick affair, pseudo-Victorian, with a false tower, a slate-roof, and lots of gingerbread trim, but battered and weathered and grimy. It had been built in the early years of the century, had been part of a really fine residential neighborhood at that time, had still been solidly middle-class by the end of World War Two (though declining in prestige), and had become distinctly lower middle-class by the late 70s. Most of the houses on the street had been converted to apartment buildings. This one had not, but it was in the same state of disrepair as all the others. It wasn't where Lavelle wanted to live; it was where he had to live until this little war was finished to his satisfaction; it was his hidey hole.

On both sides, other brick houses, exactly the same as this one, crowded close. Each overlooked its own fenced yard. Not much of a yard: a forty-by-twenty-foot plot of thin grass, now dormant under the harsh hand of winter. At the far end of the lawn was the garage, and beyond the garage was a litter-strewn alley.

In one corner of Lavelle's property, up against the garage wall, stood a corrugated metal utility shed with a white enamel finish and a pair of green metal doors. He'd bought it at Sears, and their workmen had erected it a month ago. Now, when he'd had enough of looking up into the falling snow, he went to the shed, opened one of the doors, and stepped inside.

Heat assaulted him. Although the shed wasn't equipped with a heating system, and although the walls weren't even insulated, the small building — twelve-foot by-ten — was nevertheless extremely warm. Lavelle had no sooner entered and pulled the door shut behind him than he was obliged to strip out of his nine-hundred dollar topcoat in order to breathe comfortably.

A peculiar, slightly sulphurous odor hung in the air. Most people would have found it unpleasant. But Lavelle sniffed, then breathed deeply, and smiled. He savored the stench. To him, it was a sweet fragrance because it was the scent of revenge.

He had broken into a sweat.

He took off his shirt.

He was chanting in a strange tongue.

He took off his shoes, his trousers, his underwear.

Naked, he knelt on the dirt floor.

He began to sing softly. The melody was pure, compelling, and he carried it well. He sang in a low voice that could not have been heard by anyone beyond the boundaries of his own property.

Sweat streamed from him. His black body glistened.

He swayed gently back and forth as he sang. In a little while he was almost in a trance.

The lines he sang were lilting, rhythmic chains of words in an ungrammatical, convoluted, but mellifluous mixture of French, English, Swahili, and Bantu. It was partly a Haitian patois, partly a Jamaican patois, partly an African juju chant: the pattern-rich “language” of voodoo.

He was singing about vengeance. About death. About the blood of his enemies. He called for the destruction of the Carramazza family, one member at a time, according to a list he had made.

Finally he sang about the slaughter of that police detective's two children, which might become necessary at any moment.

The prospect of killing children did not disturb him. In fact, the possibility was exciting.

His eyes shone.

His long-fingered hands moved slowly up and down his lean body in a sensuous caress.

His breathing was labored as he inhaled the heavy warm air and exhaled an even heavier, warmer vapor.

The beads of sweat on his ebony skin gleamed with reflected orange light.

Although he had not switched on the overhead light when he'd entered, the interior of the shed wasn't pitch black. The perimeter of the small, windowless room was shrouded in shadows, but a vague orange glow rose from the floor in the center of the chamber. It came out of a hole about five feet in diameter. Lavelle had dug it while performing a complicated, six-hour ritual, during which he had spoken to many of the evil gods-Congo Savanna, Congo Maussai, Congo Moudongue — and the evil angels like the Zandor, the Ibos “je rouge,” the Petro Maman Pemba, and Ti Jean Pie Fin.

The excavation was shaped like a meteor crater, the walls sloping inward to form a basin. The center of the basin was only three feet deep. However, if you stared into it long enough, it gradually began to appear much, much deeper than that. In some mysterious way, when you peered at the flickering light for a couple of minutes, when you tried hard to discern its source, your perspective abruptly and drastically changed, and you could see that the bottom of the hole was hundreds if not thousands of feet below. It wasn't merely a hole in the dirt floor of the shed; not anymore; suddenly and magically, it was a doorway into the heart of the earth. But then, with a blink, it seemed only a shallow basin once more.

Now, still singing, Lavelle leaned forward.

He looked at the strange, pulsing orange light.

He looked into the hole.

Looked down.

Down…

Down into…

Down into the pit.

The Pit.

XIII

Shortly before noon, Nayva Rooney had finished cleaning the Dawson's apartment.

She had neither seen nor heard anything more of the rat — or whatever it had been — that she had pursued from room to room earlier in the morning. It had vanished.

She wrote a note to Jack Dawson, asking him to call her this evening. He had to be told about the rat, so that he could arrange to have the building superintendent hire an exterminator. She fixed the note to the refrigerator with a magnetic plastic butterfly that was usually used to hold a shopping list in place.

After she put on her rubber boots, coat, scarf, and gloves, she switched off the last light, the hall light. Now, the apartment was lit only by the thin, gray, useless daylight that seemed barely capable of penetrating the windows. The hall, windowless, was not lit at all. She stood perfectly still by the front door for more than a minute — listening.

The apartment remained tomb-silent.

At last, she let herself out and locked the door behind her.

A few minutes after Nayva Rooney had gone, there was movement in the apartment.

Something came out of Penny and Davey's bedroom, into the gloomy hallway. It merged with the shadows. If Nayva had been there, she would have seen only its bright, glowing, fiery white eyes. It stood for a moment, just outside the door through which it had come, and then it moved down the hall toward the living room, its claws clicking on the wooden floor; it made a cold angry, hissing noise as it went.

A second creature came out of the kids' room. It, too, was well-hidden by the darkness in the apartment, just a shadow among shadows — except for its shining eyes.

A third small, dark, hissing beast appeared.

A fourth.

A fifth.

Another. And another…

Soon, they were all over the apartment: crouching in corners; perching on furniture or squirming under it; slinking along the baseboard; climbing the walls with insectile skill; creeping behind the drapes; sniffing and hissing; scurrying restlessly from room to room and then back again; ceaselessly growling in what almost sounded like a guttural foreign language; staying, for the most part, in the shadows, as if even the pale winter light coming through the windows was too harsh for them.

Then, suddenly, they all stopped moving and were motionless, as if a command had come to them. Gradually, they began to sway from side to side, their beaming eyes describing small arcs in the darkness. Their metronomic movement was in time with the song that Baba Lavelle sang in another, distant part of the city.

Eventually, they stopped swaying.

They did not become restless again.

They waited in the shadows, motionless, eyes shining.

Soon, they might be called upon to kill.

They were ready. They were eager.

I

Captain Walter Gresham, of Homicide, had a face like a shovel. Not that he was an ugly man; in fact, he was rather handsome in a sharp-edged sort of way. But his entire face sloped forward, all of his strong features pointing down and out, toward the tip of his chin, so that you were reminded of a garden spade.

He arrived at the hotel a few minutes before noon and met with Jack and Rebecca at the end of the elevator alcove on the sixteenth floor, by a window that looked down on Fifth Avenue.

“What we've got brewing here is a full-fledged gang war,” Gresham said. “We haven't seen anything like this in my time. It's like something out of the roaring twenties, for God's sake! Even if it is just a bunch of hoods and scumbags killing one another, I don't like it. Absolutely won't tolerate it in my jurisdiction. I spoke with the Commissioner before I came over here, and he's in full agreement with me: We can't go on treating this as if it were just an ordinary homicide investigation; we've got to put the pressure on. We're forming a special task force. We're converting two interrogation rooms into a task force headquarters, putting in special phone lines and everything.”

“Does that mean Jack and I are being pulled off the case?”

“No, no,” Gresham said. “I'm putting you in charge of the task force. I want you to head back to the office, work up an attack plan, a strategy, figure out everything you'll need. How many men — both uniforms and detectives? How much clerical support? How many vehicles? Establish emergency liaisons with city, state, and federal drug enforcement agencies, so we don't have to go through the bureaucracy every time we need information. Then meet me in my office at five o'clock.”

“We've still got work to do here,” Jack said.

“Others can handle that,” Gresham said. “And by the way, we've gotten some answers to your queries about Lavelle.”

“The phone company?” Jack asked.

“That's one of them. They've no listed or unlisted number for anyone named Baba Lavelle. In the past year, they've had only two new customers named Lavelle. I sent a man around this morning to talk to both of them. Neither is black, like your Lavelle. Neither of them knows anyone named Baba. And neither of them made my man the least bit suspicious.”

Driven by a sudden hard wind, snow grated like sand across the window. Below, Fifth Avenue briefly vanished beneath whirling flakes.

“What about the power company?” Jack asked.

“Same situation,” Gresham said. “No Baba Lavelle.”

“He might've used a friend's name for utility connections.”

Gresham shook his head. “Also heard back from the Department of Immigration. No one named Lavelle — Baba or otherwise — applied for any residency permit, either short-term or long-term, in the past year.”

Jack frowned. “So he's in the country illegally.”

“Or he's not here at all,” Rebecca said.

They looked at her, puzzled.

She elaborated: “I'm not convinced there is a Baba Lavelle.”

“Of course there is,” Jack said.

But she said, “We've heard a lot about him, and we've seen some smoke…. But when it comes to getting hold of physical evidence of his existence, we keep coming up empty-handed.”

Gresham was keenly interested, and his interest disheartened Jack. “You think maybe Lavelle is just a red herring? Sort of a… paper man behind which the real killer or killers are hiding?”

“Could be,” Rebecca said.

“A bit of misdirection,” Gresham said, clearly intrigued. “In reality, maybe it's one of the other mafia families making a move on the Carramazzas, trying to take the top rung of the ladder.”

“Lavelle exists,” Jack said.

Gresham said, “You seem so certain of that. Why?”

“I don't know, really.” Jack looked out the window at the snowswept towers of Manhattan. “I won't pretend I've got good reasons. It's just… instinct. I feel it in my bones. Lavelle is real. He's out there somewhere.

He's out there… and I think he's the most vicious, dangerous son of a bitch any of us is ever going to run up against.”

II

At Wellton School, when classes on the third floor recessed for lunch, Penny Dawson wasn't hungry. She didn't even bother to go to her newly assigned locker and get her lunchbox. She stayed at her desk and kept her head down on her folded arms, eyes closed, pretending to nap. A sour, icy ball lay lead-heavy in the pit of her stomach. She was sick — not with any virus, but with fear.

She hadn't told anyone about the silver-eyed goblins in the basement. No one would believe she'd really seen them. And, for sure, no one would believe the goblins were eventually going to attempt to kill her.

But she knew what was coming. She didn't know why it was happening to her, of all people. She didn't know exactly how it would happen or when. She didn't know where the goblins came from. She didn't know if she had a chance of escaping them; maybe there was no way out. But she did know what they intended to do to her. Oh, yes.

It wasn't merely her own fate that worried her. She was scared for Davey, too. If the goblins wanted her, they might also want him.

She felt responsible for Davey, especially since their mother had died. After all, she was his big sister. A big sister had an obligation to watch over a little brother and protect him, even if he could be a pain in the neck sometimes.

Right now, Davey was down on the second floor with his classmates and teachers. For the time being, at least, he was safe. The goblins surely wouldn't show themselves when a lot of people were around; they seemed to be very secretive creatures.

But what about later? What would happen when school was out and it was time to go home?

She didn't see how she could protect herself or Davey.

Head down on her arms, eyes closed, pretending to nap, she said a silent prayer. But she didn't think it would do any good.

III

In the hotel lobby, Jack and Rebecca stopped at the public phones. He tried to call Nayva Rooney. Because of the task force assignment, he wouldn't be able to pick up the kids after school, as planned, and he hoped Nayva would be free to meet them and keep them at her place for a while. She didn't answer her phone, and he thought perhaps she was still at his apartment, cleaning, so he tried his own number, too, but he didn't have any luck.

Reluctantly, he called Faye Jamison, his sister-in-law, Linda's only sister. Faye had loved Linda almost as much as Jack himself had loved her. For that reason he had considerable affection for Faye — although she wasn't always an easy person to like. She was convinced that no one else's life could be well-run without the benefit of her advice. She meant well. Her unsolicited counsel was based on a genuine concern for others, and she delivered her advice in a gentle, motherly voice even if the target of her kibitzing was twice her age. But she was nonetheless irritating for all of her good intentions and there were times when her soft voice seemed, to Jack, as piercing as a police siren.

Like now, on the telephone, after he asked if she would pick up the kids at school this afternoon, she said, “Of course, Jack, I'll be glad to, but if they expect you to be there and then you don't show, they're going to be disappointed, and if this sort of thing happens too often, they're going to feel worse than just disappointed; they're going to feel abandoned.”

“Faye—”

“Psychologists say that when children have already lost one parent, they need—”

“Faye, I'm sorry, but I don't really have time right now to listen to what the psychologists say. I—”

“But you should make time for just that sort of thing, dear.”

He sighed. “Perhaps I should.”

“Every modern parent ought to be well-versed in child psychology.”

Jack glanced at Rebecca, who was waiting impatiently by the phones. He raised his eyebrows and shrugged as Faye rattled on:

“You're an old-fashioned, seat-of-the-pants parent, dear. You think you can handle everything with love and cookies. Now, of course, love and cookies are a part of it, but there's a whole lot more to the job than—”

“Faye, listen, nine times out of ten, I am there when I tell the kids I will be. But sometimes it isn't possible. This job doesn't have the most regular hours. A homicide detective can't walk away in the middle of pursuing a hot lead just because it's the end of his shift. Besides, there's a crisis here. A big one. Now, will you pick up the kids for me?”

“Of course, dear,” she said, sounding slightly hurt.

“I appreciate it, Faye.”

“It's nothing.”

“I'm sorry if I sounded… abrupt.”

“You didn't at all. Don't worry about it. Will Davey and Penny be staying for dinner?”

“If it's all right with you—”

“Of course it is. We love having them here, Jack. You know that. And will you be eating with us?”

“I'm not sure I'll be free by then.”

“Don't miss too many dinners with them, dear.”

“I don't plan to.”

“Dinnertime is an important ritual, an opportunity for the family to share the events of the day.”

“I know.”

“Children need that period of tranquility, of togetherness, at the end of each day.”

“I know. I'll try my best to make it. I hardly ever miss.”

“Will they be sleeping over?”

“I'm sure I won't be that late. Listen, thanks a lot, Faye. I don't know what I'd do without you and Keith to lean on now and then; really, I don't. But I've got to run now. See you later.”

Before Faye could respond with more advice, Jack hung up, feeling both guilty and relieved.

A fierce and bitter wind was stored up in the west. It poured through the cold gray city in an unrelenting flood, harrying the snow before it.

Outside the hotel, Rebecca and Jack turned up their coat collars and tucked their chins down and cautiously negotiated the slippery, snow-skinned pavement.

Just as they reached their car, a stranger stepped up to them. He was tall, dark-complexioned, well-dressed. “Lieutenant Chandler? Lieutenant Dawson? My boss wants to talk to you.”

“Who's your boss?” Rebecca asked.

Instead of answering, the man pointed to a black Mercedes limousine that was parked farther along the hotel driveway. He started toward it, clearly expecting them to follow without further question.

After a brief hesitation, they actually did follow him, and when they reached the limousine, the heavily tinted rear window slid down. Jack instantly recognized the passenger, and he saw that Rebecca also knew who the man was: Don Gennaro Carramazza, patriarch of the most powerful mafia family in New York.

The tall man got in the front seat with the chauffeur, and Carramazza, alone in the back, opened his door and motioned for Jack and Rebecca to join him.

“What do you want?” Rebecca asked, making no move to get into the car.

“A little conversation,” Carramazza said, with just the vaguest trace of a Sicilian accent. He had a surprisingly cultured voice.

“So talk,” she said.

“Not like this. It's too cold,” Carramazza said. Snow blew past him, into the car. “Let's be comfortable.”

“I am comfortable,” she said.

“Well, I'm not,” Carramazza said. He frowned. “Listen, I have some extremely valuable information for you. I chose to deliver it myself. Me. Doesn't that tell you how important whisks? But I'm not going to talk on the street, in public, for Christ's sake.”

Jack said, “Get in, Rebecca.”

With an expression of distaste, she did as he said.

Jack got into the car after her. They sat in the two seats that flanked the built-in bar and television set, facing the rear of the limousine, where Carramazza sat facing forward.

Up front, Rudy touched a switch, and a thick Plexiglas partition rose between that part of the car and the passenger compartment.

Carramazza picked up an attache case and put it on his lap but didn't open it. He regarded Jack and Rebecca with sly contemplation.

The old man looked like a lizard. His eyes were hooded by heavy, pebbled lids. He was almost entirely bald. His face was wizened and leathery, with sharp features and a wide, thin-lipped mouth. He moved like a lizard, too: very still for long moments, then brief flurries of activity, quick darlings and swivelings of the head.

Jack wouldn't have been surprised if a long, forked tongue had flickered out from between Carramazza's dry lips.

Carramazza swiveled his head to Rebecca. “There's no reason to be afraid of me, you know.”

She looked surprised. “Afraid? But I'm not.”

“When you were reluctant to get into the car, I thought—”

“Oh, that wasn't fear,” she said icily. “I was worried the dry cleaner might not be able to get the stink out of my clothes.”

Carramazza's hard little eyes narrowed.

Jack groaned inwardly.

The old man said, “I see no reason why we can't be civil with one another, especially when it's in our mutual interest to cooperate.”

He didn't sound like a hoodlum. He sounded like a banker.

“Really?” Rebecca said. “You really see no reason? Please allow me to explain.”

Jack said, “Uh, Rebecca—”

She let Carramazza have it: “You're a thug, a thief, a murderer, a dope peddler, a pimp. Is that explanation enough?”

“Rebecca—”

“Don't worry, Jack. I haven't insulted him. You can't insult a pig merely by calling it a pig.”

“Remember,” Jack said, “he's lost a nephew and a brother today.”

“Both of whom were dope peddlers, thugs, and murderers,” she said.

Carramazza was startled speechless by her ferocity.

Rebecca glared at him and said, “You don't seem particularly grief-stricken by the loss of your brother. Does he look grief-stricken to you, Jack?”

Without a trace of anger or even any excitement in his voice, Carramazza said, “In the fratellanza, Sicilian men don't weep.”

Coming from a withered old man, that macho declaration was outrageously foolish.

Still without apparent animosity, continuing to employ the soothing voice of a banker, Carramazza said, “We do feel, however. And we do take our revenge.”

Rebecca studied him with obvious disgust.

The old man's reptilian hands remained perfectly still on top of the attache case. He turned his cobra eyes on Jack.

“Lieutenant Dawson, perhaps I should deal with you in this matter. You don't seem to share Lieutenant Chandler's… prejudices.”

Jack shook his head. “That's where you're wrong. I agree with everything she said. I just wouldn't have said it.”

He looked at Rebecca.

She smiled at him, pleased by his support.

Looking at her but speaking to Carramazza, Jack said, “Sometimes, my partner's zeal and aggressiveness are excessive and counterproductive, a lesson she seems unable or unwilling to learn.”

Her smile faded fast.

With evident sarcasm, Carramazza said, “What do I have here — a couple of self-righteous, holier-than-thou types? I suppose you've never accepted a bribe, not even back when you were a uniformed cop walking a beat and earning barely enough to pay the rent.”

Jack met the old man's hard, watchful eyes and said “Yeah. That's right. I never have.”

“Not even one gratuity—”

“No.”

“-like a free tumble in the hay with a hooker who was trying to stay out of jail or—”

“No.”

“-a little cocaine, maybe some grass, from a pusher who wanted you to look the other way.”

“No.”

“A bottle of liquor or a twenty-dollar bill at Christmas.”

“No.”

Carramazza regarded them in silence for a moment, while a cloud of snow swirled around the car and obscured the city. At last he said, “So I've got to deal with a couple of freaks.” He spat out the word “freaks” with such contempt that it was clear he was disgusted by the mere thought of an honest public official.

“No, you're wrong,” Jack said. “There's nothing special about us. We're not freaks. Not all cops are corrupt. In fact, not even most of them are.”

“Most of them,” Carramazza disagreed.

“No,” Jack insisted. “There're bad apples, sure, and weak sisters. But for the most part, I can be proud of the people I work with.”

“Most are on the take, one way or another,” Carramazza said.

“That's just not true.”

Rebecca said, “No use arguing, Jack. He has to believe everyone else is corrupt. That's how he justifies the things he does.”

The old man sighed. He opened the attache case on his lap, withdrew a manila envelope, handed it to Jack. “This might help you.”

Jack took it with more than a little apprehension.

“What is it?”

“Relax,” Carramazza said. “It isn't a bribe. It's information. Everything we've been able to learn about this man who calls himself Baba Lavelle. His last-known address. Restaurants he frequented before he started this war and went into hiding. The names and addresses of all the pushers who've distributed his merchandise over the past couple of months — though you won't be able to question some of them, any more.”

“Because you've had them killed?” Rebecca asked.

“Maybe they just left town.”

“Sure.”

“Anyway, it's all there,” Carramazza said. “Maybe you already have all that information; maybe you don't; I think you don't.”

“Why're you giving it to us?” Jack asked.

“Isn't that obvious?” the old man asked, opening his hooded eyes a bit wider. “I want Lavelle found. I want him stopped.”

Holding the nine-by-twelve envelope in one hand, tapping it against his knee, Jack said, “I'd have thought you'd have a much better chance of finding him than we would. He's a drug dealer, after all. He's part of your world. You have all the sources, all the contacts—”

“The usual sources and contacts are of little or no use in this case,” the old man said. “This Lavelle… he's a loner. Worse than that. It's as if… as if he's made of… smoke.”

“Are you sure he actually exists?” Rebecca asked. “Maybe he's only a straw man. Maybe your real enemies created him in order to hide behind him.”

“He's real,” Carramazza said emphatically. “He entered this country illegally last spring. Came here from Jamaica by way of Puerto Rico. There's a photograph of him in the envelope there.”

Jack hastily opened it, rummaged through the contents, and extracted an eight-by-ten glossy.

Carramazza said, “It's an enlargement of a snapshot taken in a restaurant shortly after Lavelle began operating in what has been traditionally our territory.”

Traditionally our territory. Good God, Jack thought, he sounds as if he's some British duke complaining about poachers invading his fox-hunting fields!

The photo was a bit fuzzy, but Lavelle's face was sufficiently distinct so that, henceforth, Jack would be able to recognize him if he ever saw him on the street. The man was very black, handsome — indeed, striking — with a broad brow, deepset eyes, high cheekbones, and a wide mouth. In the picture he was smiling at someone who wasn't within the camera's field. He had an engaging smile.

Jack passed the picture to Rebecca.

Carramazza said, “Lavelle wants to take away my business, destroy my reputation within the fratellanza, and make me look weak and helpless. Me. Me, the man who has controlled the organization with an iron hand for twenty-eight years! Me!”

Finally, emotion filled his voice: cold, hard anger. He went on, spitting out the words as if they tasted bad.

“But that isn't the worst of it. No. You see, he doesn't actually want the business. Once he's got it, he'll throw it away, let the other families move in and carve it up among themselves. He just doesn't want me or anyone named Carramazza to have it. This isn't merely a battle for the territory, not just a struggle for control. For Lavelle, this is strictly a matter of revenge. He wants to see me suffer in every way possible. He intends to isolate me and hopes to break my spirit by robbing me of my empire and by killing my nephews, my sons. Yes, all of them, one by one. He threatens to murder my best friends, as well, anyone who has ever meant anything to me. He promises to kill my five precious grandchildren. Can you believe such a thing? He threatens little babies! No vengeance, regardless of how justified it might be, should ever touch innocent children.”

“He's actually told you that he'll do all of those things?” Rebecca asked. “When? When did he tell you?”

“Several times.”

“You've had face-to-face meetings?”

“No. He wouldn't survive a face-to-face meeting.”

The banker image had vanished. There was no veneer of gentility now. The old man looked more reptilian than ever. Like a snake in a thousand-dollar suit. A very poisonous snake.

He said, “This crudball Lavelle told me these things on the phone. My unlisted home number. I keep having the number changed, but the creep gets the new one every time, almost as soon as it's installed. He tells me… he says… after he has killed my friends, nephews, sons, grandkids, then… he says he's going to… he says he's going to…”

For a moment, recalling Lavelle's arrogant threats, Carramazza was unable to speak; anger locked his jaws; his teeth were clenched, and the muscles in his neck and cheeks were bulging. His dark eyes, always disturbing, now shone with a rage so intense, so inhuman that it communicated itself to Jack and sent a chill up his spine.

Eventually, Carramazza regained control of himself. When he spoke, however, his voice never rose above a fierce, frigid whisper. “This scum, this nigger bastard, this piece of shit—he tells me he'll slaughter my wife, my Nina. Slaughter was the word he used. And when he's butchered her, he says, he'll then take my daughter from me, too.” The old man's voice softened when he spoke of his daughter. “My Rosie. My beautiful Rosie, the light of my life. Twenty-seven, but she looks seventeen. And smart, too. A medical student. Going to be a doctor. Starts her internship this year. Skin like porcelain. The loveliest eyes you've ever seen.” He was quiet for a moment, seeing Rosie in his mind's eye, and then his whisper became harsh again: “Lavelle says he'll rape my daughter and then cut her to pieces, dismember her… in front of my eyes. He has the balls to say such things to me!” With that last declaration, Carramazza sprayed spittle on Jack's overcoat. For a few seconds, the old man said nothing more; he just took deep, shuddering breaths. His talonlike fingers closed into fists, opened, closed, opened, closed. Then: “I want the bastard stopped.”

“You've put all your people into the search for him?” Jack asked. “Used all your sources?”

“Yes.”

“But you still can't find him.”

“Nooo,” Carramazza said, and in the drawing — out of that one word, he revealed a frustration almost as great as his rage. “He's left his place in the Village, gone to ground, hiding out. That's why I'm bringing this information to you. You can put out an APB now that you've got his picture. Then every cop in the city will be looking for him, and that's a lot more men than I've got. You can even put it on the TV news, in the papers, and then virtually everyone in the whole damned city will have an eye out for him. If I can't get to him, then at least I want you to nail him and put him away. Once he's behind bars…”

“You'll have ways of reaching him in prison,” Rebecca said, finishing the thought to which Carramazza would not give voice. “If we arrest him, he'll never stand trial. He'll be killed in jail.”

Carramazza wouldn't confirm what she had said, but they all knew it was true.

Jack said, “You've told us Lavelle is motivated by revenge. But for what? What did you do to him that would make him want to exterminate your entire family, even your grandchildren?”

“I won't tell you that. I can't tell you because, if I did, I might be compromising myself.”

“More likely incriminating yourself,” Rebecca said.

Jack slipped the photograph of Lavelle back into the envelope. “I've been wondering about your brother Dominick.”

Gennaro Carramazza seemed to shrivel and age at the mention of his dead brother.

Jack said, “I mean, he was apparently hiding out, in the hotel here, when Lavelle got to him. But if he knew he was targeted, why didn't he squirrel himself away at his own place or come to you for protection? Under the circumstances, no place in the city would be as safe as your house. With all this going down, surely you must have a fortress out there in Brooklyn Heights.”

“It is,” the old man said. “My house is a fortress.” His eyes blinked once, twice, slow as lizard eyes. “A fortress — but not safe. Lavelle has already struck inside my own house, in spite of the tight security.”

“You mean, he's killed in your house—”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“Ginger and Pepper.”

“Who're they?”

“My doggies. A matched pair of papillons.”

“Ah.”

“Little dogs, you know.”

“I'm not really sure what they look like,” Jack said.

“Toy spaniels,” Rebecca said. “Long, silky coats.”

“Yes, yes. Very playful,” Carramazza said. “Always wrestling with each other, chasing. Always wanting to be held and petted.”

“And they were killed in your house.”

Carramazza looked up. “Last night. Torn to pieces. Somehow — we still don't know how — Lavelle or one of his men got in, killed my sweet little dogs, and got out again without being spotted.” He slammed one bony hand down on his attache case. “Damnit, the whole thing's impossible! The house is sealed tight! Guarded by a small army!” He blinked more rapidly than he had done before, and his voice faltered. “Ginger and Pepper were so gentle. They wouldn't bite anyone. Never. They hardly even barked. They didn't deserve to be treated so brutally. Two innocent little creatures.”

Jack was astounded. This murderer, this geriatric dope peddler, this ancient racketeer, this supremely dangerous poisonous lizard of a man, who had been unable or unwilling to weep for his dead brother, now seemed on the verge of tears over the slaying of his dogs.

Jack glanced at Rebecca. She was staring at Carramazza, half in wide-eyed wonder, half in the manner of someone watching a particularly loathsome creature as it crawled out from under a rock.

The old man said, “After all, they weren't guard dogs. They weren't attack dogs. They posed no threat. Just a couple of adorable little toy spaniels…”

Not quite sure how to handle a maudlin mafia chieftain, Jack tried to get Carramazza off the subject of his dogs before the old man reached that pathetic and embarrassing state of mind on the edge of which he now teetered. He said, “Word on the street is that Lavelle claims to be using voodoo against you.”

Carramazza nodded. “That's what he says.”

“You believe it?”

“He seems serious."?

“But do you think there's anything to this voodoo business? “

Carramazza didn't answer. He gazed out the side window at the wind-whipped snow whirling past the parked limousine.

Although Jack was aware that Rebecca was scowling at him in disapproval, he pressed the point: “You think there's anything to it?”

Carramazza turned his face away from the window.

“You mean, do I think it works? A month ago, anybody asked me the same thing, I'd have laughed, but now…”

Jack said, “Now you're wondering if maybe…”

“Yeah. If maybe…”

Jack saw that the old man's eyes had changed. They were still hard, still cold, still watchful, but now there was something new in them. Fear. It was an emotion to which this vicious old bastard was long unaccustomed.

“Find him,” Carramazza said.

“We'll try,” Jack said.

“Because it's our job,” Rebecca said quickly, as if to dispel any notion that they were motivated by concern for Gennaro Carramazza and his blood-thirsty family.

“Stop him,” Carramazza said, and the tone of his voice was the closest he would ever come to saying “please” to an officer of the law.

The Mercedes limousine pulled away from the curb and down the hotel driveway, leaving tracks in the quarter-inch skin of snow that now covered the pavement.

For a moment, Jack and Rebecca stood on the sidewalk, watching the car.

The wind had abated. Snow was still falling, even more heavily than before, but it was no longer winddriven; the lazy, swirling descent of the flakes made it seem, to Jack, as if he were standing inside one of those novelty paperweights that would produce a neatly contained snowstorm anytime you shook it.

Rebecca said, “We better get back to headquarters.”

He took the photograph of Lavelle out of the envelope that Carramazza had given him, tucked it inside his coat.

“What're you doing?” Rebecca asked.

He handed her the envelope. “I'll be at headquarters in an hour.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Two o'clock at the latest.”

“Where are you going?”

“There's something I want to look into.”

“Jack, we've got to set up the task force, prepare a—”

“You get it started.”

“There's too much work for one—”

“I'll be there by two, two-fifteen at the latest.”

“Damnit, Jack—”

“You can handle it on your own for a while.”

“You're going up to Harlem, aren't you?”

“Listen, Rebecca—”

“Up to that damned voodoo shop.”

He didn't say anything.

She said, “I knew it. You're running up there to see Carver Hampton again. That charlatan. That fraud.”

“He's not a fraud. He believes in what he does. I said I'd get back to him today.”

“This is crazy.”

“Is it? Lavelle does exist. We have a photo now.”

“So he exists? That doesn't mean voodoo works!”

“I know that.”

“If you go up there, how am I supposed to get to the office? “

“You can take the car. I'll get a uniform to drive me.”

“Jack, damnit.”

“I have a hunch, Rebecca.”

“Hell.”

“I have a hunch that… somehow… the voodoo subculture — maybe not any real supernatural stuff — but at least the subculture itself is inextricably entwined with this. I have a strong hunch that's the way to approach the case.”

“Christ.”

“A smart cop plays his hunches.”

“And if you don't get back when you promise, if I'm stuck all afternoon, handling everything myself, and then if I have to go in and face Gresham with—”

“I'll be back by two-fifteen, two-thirty at the latest.”

“I'm not going to forgive you for this, Jack.”

He met her eyes, hesitated, then said, “Maybe I could postpone seeing Carver Hampton until tomorrow

“If what?”

“If I knew you'd take just half an hour, just fifteen minutes, to sit down with me and talk about everything that happened between us last night. Where are we going from here?”

Her eyes slid away from his. “We don't have time for that now.”

“Rebecca—”

“There's a lot of work to do, Jack!”

He nodded. “You're right. You've got to get started on the task force details, and I've got to see Carver Hampton.”

He walked away from her, toward the uniforms who were standing by the patrol cars.

She said, “No later than two o'clock!”

“I'll make it as fast as I can,” he said.

The wind suddenly picked up again. It howled.

IV

The new snow had brightened and softened the street. The neighborhood was still seedy, grimy, litter-strewn, and mean, but it didn't look half as bad as it had yesterday, without snow.

Carver Hampton's shop was near the corner. It was flanked by a liquor store with iron bars permanently fixed over the display windows and by a shabby furniture store also huddled behind bars. Hampton's place was the only business on the block that looked prosperous, and there were no bars over its windows, either.

The sign above the door contained only a single word: Rada. Yesterday, Jack had asked Hampton what the shop's name signified, and he had learned that there were three great rites or spiritual divisions governing voodoo. Two of those were composed of evil gods and were called Congo and Petrol The pantheon of benevolent gods was called the Rada. Since Hampton dealt only in substances, implements, and ceremonial clothing necessary for the practice of white (good) magic, that one word above the door was all he needed to attract exactly the clientele he was looking for — those people of the Caribbean and their descendants who, having been transplanted to New York City, had brought their religion with them.

Jack opened the door, a bell announcing his entrance, and he went inside, closing out the bitter December wind.

The shop was small, twenty feet wide and thirty deep. In the center were tables displaying knives, staffs, bells, bowls, other implements, and articles of clothing used in various rituals. To the right, low cabinets stood along the entire wall; Jack had no idea what was in them. On the other wall, to the left of the door, there were shelves nearly all the way to the ceiling, and these were crammed full of bottles of every imaginable size and shape, blue and yellow and green and red and orange and brown and clear bottles, each carefully labeled, each filled with a particular herb or exotic root or powdered flower or other substance used in the casting of spells and charms, the brewing of magical potions.

At the rear of the shop, in answer to the bell, Carver Hampton came out of the back room, through a green bead curtain. He looked surprised. “Detective Dawson! How nice to see you again. But I didn't expect you'd come all the way back here, especially not in this foul weather. I thought you'd just call, see if I'd come up with anything for you.”

Jack went to the back of the shop, and they shook hands across the sales counter.

Carver Hampton was tall, with wide shoulders and a huge chest, about forty pounds overweight but very formidable; he looked like a pro football lineman who had been out of training for six months. He wasn't a handsome man. There was too much bone in his slablike forehead, and his face was too round for him ever to appear in the pages of Gentleman's Quarterly; besides, his nose, broken more than once, now had a distinctly squashlike appearance. But if he wasn't particularly good looking, he was very friendly looking, a gentle giant, a perfect black Santa Claus.

He said, “I'm so sorry you came all this way for nothing.”

“Then you haven't turned up anything since yesterday?” Jack asked.

“Nothing much. I put the word out. I'm still asking here and there, poking around. So far, all I've been able to find out is that there actually is someone around who calls himself Baba Lavelle and says he's a Bocor.”

“Bocor? That's a priest who practices witchcraftright? “

“Right. Evil magic. That's all I've learned: that he's real, which you weren't sure of yesterday, so I suppose this is at least of some value to you. But if you'd telephoned—”

“Well, actually, I came to show you something that might be of help. A photograph of Baba Lavelle himself.”

“Truly?”

“Yes.”

“So you already know he's real. Let me see it, though. It ought to help if I can describe the man I'm asking around about.”

Jack withdrew the eight-by-ten glossy from inside his coat and handed it over.

Hampton's face changed the instant he saw Lavelle. If a black man could go pale, that was what Hampton did. It wasn't that the shade of his skin changed so much as that the gloss and vitality went out of it; suddenly it didn't seem like skin at all but like dark brown paper, dry and lifeless. His lips tightened. And his eyes were not the same as they had been a moment ago: haunted, now.

He said, “This man!”

“What?” Jack asked.

The photograph quivered as Hampton quickly handed it back. He thrust it at Jack, as if desperate to be rid of it, as if he might somehow be contaminated merely by touching the photographic image of Lavelle. His big hands were shaking.

Jack said, “What is it? What's the matter?”

“I know him,” Hampton said. “I've… seen him. I just didn't know his name.”

“Where have you see him?”

“Here.”

“Right in the shop?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Last September.”

“Not since then?”

“No.”

“What was he doing here?”

“He came to purchase herbs, powdered flowers.”

“But I thought you dealt only in good magic. The Rada.”

“Many substances can be used by both the Bocor and the Houngon to obtain very different results, to work evil magic or good. These were herbs and powdered flowers that were extremely rare and that he hadn't been able to locate elsewhere in New York.”

“There are other shops like yours?”

“One shop somewhat like this, although not as large. And then there are two practicing Houngons—not strong magicians, these two, little more than amateurs, neither of them powerful enough or knowledgeable enough to do well for themselves — who sell the stuff of magic out of their apartments. They have considerable lines of merchandise to offer to other practitioners. But none of those three have scruples. They will sell to either the Bocor or the Houngon. They even sell the instruments required for a blood sacrifice, the ceremonial hatchets, the razor-edged spoons used to scoop the living eye from the skull. Terrible people, peddling their wares to anyone, anyone at all, even to the most wicked and debased.”

“So Lavelle came here when he couldn't get everything he wanted from them.”

“Yes. He told me that he'd found most of what he needed, but he said my shop was the only one with a complete selection of even the most seldom-used ingredients for spells and incantations. Which is, of course true. I pride myself on my selection and on the purity of my goods. But unlike the others, I won't sell to a Bocor—if I know what he is. Usually I can spot them. I also won't sell to those amateurs with bad intentions, the ones who want to put a curse of death on a motherin-law or cause sickness in some man who's a rival for a girl or a job. I'll have none of that. Anyway, this man, this one in the photograph—”

“Lavelle,” Jack said.

“But I didn't know his name then. As I was packaging the few things he'd selected, I discovered he was a Bocor, and I refused to conclude the sale. He thought I was like all the other merchants, that I'd sell to just anyone, and he was furious when I wouldn't let him have what he wanted. I made him leave the shop, and I thought that was the end of it.”

“But it wasn't?” Jack asked.

“No.”

“He came back?”

“No.”

“Then what happened?”

Hampton came out from behind the sales counter. He went to the shelves where the hundreds upon hundreds of bottles were stored, and Jack followed him.

Hampton's voice was hushed, a note of fear in it: “Two days after Lavelle was here, while I was alone in the shop, sitting at the counter back there, just reading — suddenly, every bottle on those shelves was flung off, to the floor. All in an instant. Such a crash! Half of them broke, and the contents mingled together, all ruined. I rushed over to see what had happened, what had caused it, and as I approached, some of the spilled herbs and powders and ground roots began to… well, to move… to form together… and take on life. Out of the debris, composed of several substances, there arose… a black serpent, about eighteen inches in length. Yellow eyes. Fangs. A flickering tongue. As real as any serpent hatched from its mother's egg.”

Jack stared at the big man, not sure what to think of him or his story. Until this moment, he had thought that Carver Hampton was sincere in his religious beliefs and a perfectly level-headed man, no less rational because his religion was voodoo rather than Catholicism or Judaism. However, it was one thing to believe in a religious doctrine and in the possibility of magic and miracles — and quite another thing altogether to claim to have seen a miracle. Those who swore they had seen miracles were hysterics, fanatics, or liars. Weren't they? On the other hand, if you were at all religious — and Jack was not a man without faith — then how could you believe in the possibility of miracles and the existence of the occult without also embracing the claims of at least some of those who said they had been witness to manifestations of the supernatural? Your faith could have no substance if you did not also accept the reality of its effects in this world. It was a thought that hadn't occurred to him before, and now he stared at Carver Hampton with mixed feelings, with both doubt and cautious acceptance.

Rebecca would say he was being excessively open-minded.

Staring at the bottles that now stood on the shelves, Hampton said, “The serpent slithered toward me. I backed across the room. There was nowhere to go. I dropped to my knees. Recited prayers. They were the correct prayers for the situation, and they had their effect. Either that… or Lavelle didn't actually intend for the serpent to harm me. Perhaps he only meant it as a warning not to mess with him, a slap in the face for the way I had so unceremoniously ushered him out of my shop. At any rate, the serpent eventually dissolved back into the herbs and powders and ground roots of which it was composed.”

“How do you know it was Lavelle who did this thing?” Jack asked.

“The phone rang a moment after the snake… decomposed. It was this man, the one I had refused to serve. He told me that it was my prerogative, whether to serve him or not, and that he didn't hold it against me. But he said he wouldn't permit anyone to lay a hand on him as I'd done. So he had smashed my collection of herbs and had conjured up the serpent in retaliation. That's what he said. That's all he said. Then he hung up.”

“You didn't tell me that you'd actually, physically thrown him out of the shop,” Jack said.

“I didn't. I merely put a hand on his arm and… shall we say… guided him out. Firmly, yes, but without any real violence, without hurting him. Nevertheless, that was enough to make him angry, to make him seek revenge.”

“This was all back in September?”

“Yes.”

“And he's never returned?”

“No.”

“Never called?”

“No. And it took me almost three months to rebuild my inventory of rare herbs and powders. Many of these items are so very difficult to obtain. You can't imagine.

I only recently completed restocking these shelves.”

“So you've got your own reasons for wanting to see this Lavelle brought down,” Jack said.

Hampton shook his head. “On the contrary.”

“Huh?”

“I want nothing more to do with this.”

“But—”

“I can't help you any more, Lieutenant.”

“I don't understand.”

“It should be clear enough. If I help you, Lavelle will send something after me. Something worse than the serpent. And this time it won't be just a warning. No, this time, it'll surely be the death of me.”

Jack saw that Hampton was serious — and genuinely terrified. The man believed in the power of voodoo. He was trembling. Even Rebecca, seeing him now, wouldn't be able to claim that he was a charlatan. He believed.

Jack said, “But you ought to want him behind bars as much as I do. You ought to want to see him broken, after what he did to you.”

“You'll never put him in jail.”

“Oh, yes.”

“No matter what he does, you'll never be able to touch him.”

“We'll get him, all right.”

“He's an extremely powerful Bocor, Lieutenant. Not an amateur. Not your average spellcaster. He has the power of darkness, the ultimate darkness of death, the darkness of Hell, the darkness of the Other Side. It is a cosmic power, beyond human comprehension. He isn't merely in league with Satan, your Christian and Judaic king of demons. That would be bad enough. But, you see, he is a servant, as well, of all the evil gods of the African religions, which go back into antiquity; he has that great, malevolent pantheon behind him. Some of those deities are far more powerful and immeasurably more vicious than Satan has ever been portrayed. A vast legion of evil entities are at Lavelle's beck and call, eager to let him use them because, in turn, they use him as a sort of doorway into this world. They are eager to cross over, to bring blood and pain and terror and misery to the living, for this world of ours is one into which they are usually denied passage by the power of the benevolent gods who watch over us.”

Hampton paused. He was hyperventilating. There was a faint sheen of perspiration on his forehead. He wiped his big hands over his face and took several slow deep breaths. He went on, then, trying to keep his voice calm and reasonable, but only half succeeding.

“Lavelle is a dangerous man, Lieutenant, infinitely more dangerous than you can ever comprehend. I also think he is very probably mad, insane; there was definitely a quality of insanity about him. That is a most formidable combination: evil beyond measure, madness, and the power of a masterfully skilled Bocor.”

“But you say you're a Houngon, a priest of white magic. Can't you use your power against him?”

“I'm a capable Houngon, better than many. But I'm not in this man's league. For instance, with great effort, I might be able to put a curse on his own supply of herbs and powders. I might be able to reach out and cause a few bottles to fall off the shelves in his study or wherever he keeps them — if I had seen the place first, of course. However, I wouldn't be able to cause so much destruction as he did. And I wouldn't be able to conjure up a serpent, as he did. I haven't that much power, that much finesse.”

“You could try.”

“No. Absolutely not. In any contest of powers, he would crush me. Like a bug.”

Hampton went to the door, opened it. The bell above it rang. Hampton stepped aside, holding the door wide open.

Jack pretended not to get the hint. “Listen, if you'll just keep asking around—”

“No. I can't help you any more, Lieutenant. Can't you get that through your head?”

A frigid, blustery wind huffed and moaned and hissed and puffed at the open door, spraying snowflakes like flecks of spittle.

“Listen,” Jack said. “Lavelle never has to know that you're asking about him. He—”

“He would find out!” Hampton said angrily, his eyes wide open as the door he was holding. “He knows everything — or can find it out. Everything.”

“But—”

“Please go,” Hampton said.

“Hear me out. I—”

“Go.”

“But—”

“Go, get out, leave, now, damnit, now!” Hampton said in a tone of voice composed of one part anger, one part terror, and one part panic.

The big man's almost hysterical fear of Lavelle had begun to affect Jack. A chill rippled through him, and he found that his hands were suddenly clammy.

He sighed, nodded. “All right, all right, Mr. Hampton. But I sure wish—”

“Now, damnit, now!” Hampton shouted.

Jack got out of there.

V

The door to Rada slammed behind him.

In the snow-quieted street, the sound was like a rifle blast.

Jack turned and looked back, saw Carver Hampton drawing down the shade that covered the glass panel in the center of the door. In bold white letters on the dark canvas, one word was printed: CLOSED.

A moment later the lights went out in the shop.

The snow on the sidewalk was now half an inch deep, twice what it had been when he had gone into Hampton's store. It was still coming down fast, too, out of a sky that was even more somber and more claustrophobically close than it had been twenty minutes ago.

Cautiously negotiating the slippery pavement, Jack started toward the patrol car that was waiting for him at the curb, white exhaust trail pluming up from it. He had taken only three steps when he was stopped by a sound that struck him as being out of place here on the wintry street: a ringing telephone. He looked right, left, and saw a pay phone near the corner, twenty feet behind the waiting black-and-white. In the uncitylike stillness that the muffling snow brought to the street, the ringing was so loud that it seemed to be issuing from the air immediately in front of him.

He stared at the phone. It wasn't in a booth. There weren't many real booths around these days, the kind with the folding door, like a small closet, that offered privacy; too expensive, Ma Bell said. This was a phone on a pole, with a scoop-shaped sound battle bending around three sides of it. Over the years, he had passed a few other public telephones that had been ringing when there was no one waiting nearby to answer them; on those occasions, he had never given them a second glance, had never been the least bit tempted to lift the receiver and find out who was there; it had been none of his business. Just as this was none of his business. And yet… this time was somehow… different. The ringing snaked out like a lariat of sound, roping him, snaring him, holding him.

Ringing…

Ringing…

Insistent.

Beckoning.

Hypnotic.

Ringing…

A strange and disturbing transformation occurred in the Harlem neighborhood around him. Only three things remained solid and real: the telephone, a narrow stretch of snow-covered pavement leading to the telephone, and Jack himself. The rest of the world seemed to recede into a mist that rose out of nowhere. The buildings appeared to fade away, dissolving as if this were a film in which one scene was fading out to be replaced by another. The few cars progressing hesitantly along the snowy street began to… evaporate; they were replaced by the creeping mist, a white-white mist that was like a movie theater screen splashed with brilliant light but with no images. The pedestrians, heads bent, shoulders hunched, struggled against the wind and stinging snow; and gradually they receded and faded, as well. Only Jack was real. And the narrow pathway to the phone. And the telephone itself.

Ringing…

He was drawn.

Ringing…

Drawn toward the phone.

He tried to resist.

Ringing…

He suddenly realized he'd taken a step. Toward the phone.

And another.

A third.

He felt as if he were floating.

Ringing…

He was moving as if in a dream or a fever.

He took another step.

He tried to stop. Couldn't.

He tried to turn toward the patrol car. Couldn't.

His heart was hammering.

He was dizzy, disoriented.

In spite of the frigid air, he was sweating along the back of his neck.

The ringing of the telephone was analogous to the rhythmic, glittering, pendulum movement of a hypnotist's pocketwatch. The sound drew him relentlessly forward as surely as, in ancient times, the sirens' songs had pulled unwary sailors to their death upon the reefs.

He knew the call was for him. Knew it without understanding how he knew it.

He picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

“Detective Dawson! I'm delighted to have this opportunity to speak with you. My good man, we are most definitely overdue for a chat.”

The voice was deep, although not a bass voice, and smooth and elegant, characterized by an educated British accent filtered through the lilting patterns of speech common to tropical zones, so that words like “man” came out as “man.” Clearly a Caribbean accent.

Jack said, “Lavelle?”

“Why, of course! Who else?”

“But how did you know—”

“That you were there? My dear fellow, in an offhanded sort of way, I am keeping tabs on you.”

“You're here, aren't you? Somewhere along the street, in one of the apartment buildings here.

“Far from it. Harlem is not to my taste.”

“I'd like to talk to you,” Jack said.

“We are talking.”

“I mean, face-to-face.”

“Oh, I hardly think that's necessary.”

“I wouldn't arrest you.”

“You couldn't. No evidence.”

“Well, then—”

“But you'd detain me for a day or two on one excuse or another.”

“No.”

“And I don't wish to be detained. I've work to do.”

“I give you my word we'd only hold you a couple of hours, just for questioning.”

“Is that so?”

“You can trust my word when I give it. I don't give it lightly.”

“Oddly enough, I'm quite sure that's true.”

“Then why not come in, answer some questions, and clear the air, remove the suspicion from yourself?”

“Well, of course, I can't remove the suspicion because, in fact, I'm guilty,” Lavelle said. He laughed.

“You're telling me you're behind the murders?”

“Certainly. Isn't that what everyone's been telling you? “

“You've called me to confess?”

Lavelle laughed again. Then: “I've called to give you some advice.”

“Yeah?”

“Handle this as the police in my native Haiti would handle it.”

“How's that?”

“They wouldn't interfere with a Bocor who possessed powers like mine.”

“Is that right?”

“They wouldn't dare.”

“This is New York, not Haiti. Superstitious fear isn't something they teach at the police academy.”

Jack kept his voice calm, unruffled. But his heart continued to bang against his rib cage.

Lavelle said, “Besides, in Haiti, the police would not want to interfere if the Bocor's targets were such worthless filth as the Carramazza family. Don't think of me as a murderer, Lieutenant. Think of me as an exterminator, performing a valuable service for society. That's how they'd look at this in Haiti.”

“Our philosophy is different here.”

“I'm sorry to hear that.”

“We think murder is wrong regardless of who the victim is.”

“How unsophisticated.”

“We believe in the sanctity of human life.”

“How foolish. If the Carramazzas die, what will the world lose? Only thieves, murderers, pimps. Other thieves, murderers, and pimps will move in to take their place. Not me, you understand. You may think of me as their equal, as only a murderer, but I am not of their kind. I am a priest. I don't want to rule the drug trade in New York. I only want to take it away from Gennaro Carramazza as part of his punishment. I want to ruin him financially, leave him with no respect among his kind, and take his family and friends away from him, slaughter them, teach him how to grieve. When that is done, when he's isolated, lonely, afraid, when he has suffered for a while, when he's filled with blackest despair, I will at last dispose of him, too, but slowly and with much torture. Then I'll go away, back to the islands, and you won't ever be bothered with me again. I am merely an instrument of justice, Lieutenant Dawson.”

“Does justice really necessitate the murder of Carramazza's grandchildren?”

“Yes.”

“Innocent little children?”

“They aren't innocent. They carry his blood, his genes. That makes them as guilty as he is.”

Carver Hampton was right: Lavelle was insane.

“Now,” Lavelle said, “I understand that you will be in trouble with your superiors if you fail to bring someone to trial for at least a few of these killings. The entire police department will take a beating at the hands of the press if something isn't done. I quite understand. So, if you wish, I will arrange to plant a wide variety of evidence incriminating members of one of the city's other mafia families. You can pin the murders of the Carramazzas on some other undesirables, you see, put them in prison, and be rid of yet another troublesome group of hoodlums. I'd be quite happy to let you off the hook that way.”

It wasn't only the circumstances of this conversation — the dreamlike quality of the street around the pay phone, the feeling of floating, the fever haze — that made it all seem so unreal; the conversation itself was so bizarre that it would have defied belief regardless of the circumstances in which it had taken place. Jack shook himself, but the world wasn't jarred to life like a stubborn wristwatch; reality didn't begin to tick again.

He said, “You actually think I could take such an offer seriously?”

“The evidence I plant will be irrefutable. It will stand up in any court. You needn't fear you'd lose the case.”

“That's not what I mean,” Jack said. “Do you really believe I'd conspire with you to frame innocent men?”

“They wouldn't be innocent. Hardly. I'm talking about framing other murderers, thieves, and pimps.”

“But they'd be innocent of these crimes.”

“A technicality.”

“Not in my book.”

Lavelle was silent for a moment. Then: “You're an interesting man, Lieutenant. Naive. Foolish. But nevertheless interesting.”

“Gennaro Carramazza tells us that you're motivated by revenge.”

“Yes.”

“For what?”

“He didn't tell you that?”

“No. What's the story?”

Silence.

Jack waited, almost asked the question again.

Then Lavelle spoke, at last, and there was a new edge to his voice, a hardness, a ferocity. “I had a younger brother. His name was Gregory. Half brother, really. Last name was Pontrain. He didn't embrace the ancient arts of witchcraft and sorcery. He shunned them. He wouldn't have anything to do with the old religions of Africa. He had no time for voodoo, no interest in it. His was a very modern soul, a machine-age sensibility. He believed in science, not magic; he put his faith in progress and technology, not in the power of ancient gods. He didn't approve of my vocation, but he didn't believe I could really do harm to anyone — or do good, either, for that matter. He thought of me as a harmless eccentric. Yet, for all this misunderstanding, I loved him, and he loved me. We were brothers. Brothers. I would have done anything for him.”

“Gregory Pontrain…” Jack said thoughtfully. “There's something familiar about the name.”

“Years ago, Gregory came here as a legal immigrant.

He worked very hard, worked his way through college received a scholarship. He always had writing talent even as a boy, and he thought he knew what he ought to do with it. Here, he earned a degree in journalism from Columbia. He was first in his class. Went to work for the New York Times. For a year or so he didn't even do any writing, just verified research in other reporters' pieces. Gradually, he promoted several writing assignments for himself. Small things. Of no consequence. What you would call 'human interest' stories. And then—”

“Gregory Pontrain,” Jack said. “Of course. The crime reporter.”

“In time, my brother was assigned a few crime stories. Robberies. Dope busts. He did a good job of covering them. Indeed, he started going after stories that hadn't been handed to him, bigger stories that he'd dug up all by himself. And eventually he became the Times' resident expert on narcotics trafficking in the city. No one knew more about the subject, the involvement of the Carramazzas, the way the Carramazza organization had subverted so many vice squad detectives and city politicians; no one knew more than Gregory; no one. He published those articles—”

“I read them. Good work. Four pieces, I believe.”

“Yes. He intended to do more, at least half a dozen more articles. There was talk of a Pulitzer, just based on what he'd written so far. Already, he had dug up enough evidence to interest the police and to generate three indictments by the grand jury. He had the sources, you see: insiders in the police and in the Carramazza family, insiders who trusted him. He was convinced he could bring down Dominick Carramazza self before it was all over. Poor, noble, foolish, brave little Gregory. He thought it was his duty to fight evil wherever he found it. The crusading reporter. He thought he could make a difference, all by himself. He didn't understand that the only way to deal with the powers of darkness is to make peace with them, accommodate yourself to them, as I have done. One night last March, he and his wife, Ona, were on their way to dinner…”

“The car bomb,” Jack said.

“They were both blown to bits. Ona was pregnant. It would have been their first child. So I owe Gennaro Carramazza for three lives — Gregory, Ona, and the baby.”

“The case was never solved,” Jack reminded him. “There was no proof that Carramazza was behind it.”

“He was.”

“You can't be sure.”

“Yes, I can. I have my sources, too. Better even than Gregory's. I have the eyes and ears of the Underworld working for me.” He laughed. He had a musical, appealing laugh that Jack found unsettling. A madman should have a madman's laugh, not the warm chuckle of a favorite uncle. “The Underworld Lieutenant. But I don't mean the criminal underworld, the miserable cosa nostra with its Sicilian pride and empty code of honor. The Underworld of which I speak is a place much deeper than that which the mafia inhabits, deeper and darker. I have the eyes and ears of the ancient ones, the reports of demons and dark angels, the testimony of those entities who see all and know all.”

Madness, Jack thought. The man belongs in an institution.

But in addition to the madness, there was something else in Lavelle's voice that nudged and poked the cop's instincts in Jack. When Lavelle spoke of the supernatural, he did so with genuine awe and conviction; however, when he spoke of his brother, his voice became oily with phony sentiment and unconvincing grief. Jack sensed that revenge was not Lavelle's primary motivation and that, in fact, he might even have hated his straight-arrow brother, might even be glad (or at least relieved) that he was dead.

“Your brother wouldn't approve of this revenge you're taking,” Jack said.

“Perhaps he would. You didn't know him.”

“But I know enough about him to say with some confidence that he wasn't at all like you. He was a decent man. He wouldn't want all this slaughter. He would be repelled by it.”

Lavelle said nothing, but there was somehow a pouting quality to his silence, a smoldering anger.

Jack said, “He wouldn't approve of the murder of anyone's grandchildren, revenge unto the third generation. He wasn't sick, like you. He wasn't crazy.”

“It doesn't matter whether he would approve,” Lavelle said impatiently.

“I suspect that's because it isn't really revenge that motivates you. Not deep down.”

Again, Lavelle was silent.

Pushing, probing for the truth, Jack said, “So if your brother wouldn't approve of murder being done in his name, then why are you—”

“I'm not exterminating these vermin in my brother's name,” Lavelle said sharply, furiously. “I'm doing it in my own name. Mine and no one else's. That must be understood. I never claimed otherwise. These deaths accrue to my credit, not to my brother's.”

“Credit? Since when is murder a credit, a character reference, a matter of pride? That's insane.”

“It isn't insane,” Lavelle said heatedly. The madness boiled up in him. “It is the reasoning of the ancient ones, the gods of Petro and Congo. No one can take the life of a Bocor's brother and go unpunished. The murder of my brother is an insult to me. It diminishes me. It mocks me. I cannot tolerate that. I will not! My power as a Bocor would be weakened forever if I were to forego revenge. The ancient ones would lose respect for me, turn away from me, withdraw their support and power.” He was ranting now, losing his cool. “Blood must flow. The floodgates of death must be opened. Oceans of pain must sweep them away, all who mocked me by touching my brother. Even if I despised Gregory, he was of my family; no one can spill the blood of a Bocor's family and go unpunished. If I fail to take adequate revenge, the ancient ones will never permit me to call upon them again; they will not enforce my curses and spells any more. I must repay the murder of my brother with at least a score of murders of my own if I am to keep the respect and patronage of the gods of Petro and Congo.”

Jack had probed to the roots of the man's true motivation, but he had gained nothing for his efforts. The true motivation made no sense to him; it seemed just one more aspect of Lavelle's madness.

“You really believe this, don't you?” Jack asked.

“It's the truth.”

“It's crazy.”

“Eventually, you will learn otherwise.”

“Crazy,” Jack repeated.

“One more piece of advice,” Lavelle said.

“You're the only suspect I've ever known to be so brimming over with advice. A regular Ann Landers.”

Ignoring him, Lavelle said, “Remove yourself from this case.”

“You can't be serious.”

“Get out of it.”

“Impossible.”

“Ask to be relieved.”

“No.”

“You'll do it if you know what's good for you.”

“You're an arrogant bastard.”

“I know.”

“I'm a cop, for God's sake! You can't make me back down by threatening me. Threats just make me all the more interested in finding you. Cops in Haiti must be the same. It can't be that much different. Besides, what good would it do you if I did ask to be relieved? Someone else would replace me. They'd still continue to look for you.”

“Yes, but whoever replaced you wouldn't be broadminded enough to explore the possibility of voodoo's effectiveness. He'd stick to the usual police procedure, and I have no fear of that.”

Jack was startled. “You mean my open-mindedness alone is a threat to you?”

Lavelle didn't answer the question. He said, “All right. If you won't step out of the picture, then at least stop your research into voodoo. Handle this as Rebecca Chandler wants to handle it — as if it were an ordinary homicide investigation.”

“I don't believe your gall,” Jack said.

“Your mind is open, if only a narrow crack, to the possibility of a supernatural explanation. Don't pursue that line of inquiry. That's all I ask.”

“Oh, that's all, is it?”

“Satisfy yourself with fingerprint kits, lab technicians, your usual experts, the standard tools. Question all the witnesses you wish to question—”

“Thanks so much for the permission.”

“-I don't care about those things,” Lavelle continued, as if Jack hadn't interrupted. “You'll never find me that way. I'll be finished with Carramazza and on my way back to the islands before you've got a single lead. Just forget about the voodoo angle.”

Astonished by the man's chutzpa, Jack said, “And if I don't forget about it?”

The open telephone line hissed, and Jack was reminded of the black serpent of which Carver Hampton had spoken, and he wondered if Lavelle could somehow send a serpent over the telephone line, out of the earpiece, to bite him on the ear and head, or out of the mouthpiece, to bite him on the lips and on the nose and in the eyes…. He held the receiver away from himself, looked at it warily, then felt foolish, and brought it back to his face.

Lavelle said, “If you insist on learning more about voodoo, if you continue to pursue that avenue of investigation… then I will have your son and daughter torn to pieces.”

Finally, one of Lavelle's threats affected Jack. His stomach twisted, knotted.

Lavelle said, “Do you remember what Dominick Carramazza and his bodyguards looked like—”

And then they were both talking at once, Jack shouting, Lavelle maintaining his cool and measured tone of voice:

“Listen, you creepy son of a bitch—”

“-back there in the hotel, old Dominick, all ripped up—”

“-you stay away from—”

“-eyes torn out, all bloody?”

“-my kids, or I'll—”

“When I'm finished with Davey and Penny—”

“-blow your fuckin' head off!”

“-they'll be nothing but dead meat—”

“I'm warning you—”

“-dog meat, garbage—”

“-I'll find you—”

“-and maybe I'll even rape the girl—”

“-you stinking scumbag!”

“-'cause she's really a tender, juicy little piece. I like them tender sometimes, very young and tender, innocent. The thrill is in the corruption, you see.”

“You threaten my kids, you asshole, you just threw away whatever chance you had. Who do you think you are? My God, where do you think you are? This is America, you dumb shit. You can't get away with that kind of stuff here, threatening my kids.”

“I'll give you the rest of the day to think it over. Then, if you don't back off, I'll take Davey and Penny. And I'll make it very painful for them.”

Lavelle hung up.

“Wait!” Jack shouted.

He rattled the disconnect lever, trying to reestablish contact, trying to bring Lavelle back. Of course, it didn't work.

He was gripping the receiver so hard that his hand ached and his muscles were bunched up all the way to the shoulder. He slammed the receiver down almost hard enough to crack the earpiece.

He was breathing like a bull that, for some time, had been taunted by the movement of a red cape. He was aware of his own pulse throbbing in his temples, and he could feel the heat in his flushed face. The knots in his stomach had drawn painfully tight.

After a moment, he turned away from the phone. He was shaking with rage. He stood in the falling snow, gradually getting a grip on himself.

Everything would be all right. Nothing to worry about. Penny and Davey were safe at school, where there were plenty of people to watch over them. It was a good, reliable school, with first-rate security. And Faye would pick them up at three o'clock and take them to her place; Lavelle couldn't know about that. If he did decide to hurt the kids this evening, he'd expect to find them at the apartment; when he discovered they weren't at home, he wouldn't know where to look for them. In spite of what Carver Hampton had said, Lavelle couldn't know all and see all. Could he? Of course not. He wasn't God. He might be a Bocor, a priest with real power, a genuine sorcerer. But he wasn't God. So the kids would be safe with Faye and Keith. In fact, maybe it would be a good idea for them to stay at the Jamison apartment overnight. Or even for the next few days, until Lavelle was apprehended. Faye and Keith wouldn't mind; they'd welcome the visit, the opportunity to spoil their only niece and nephew. Might even be wise to keep Penny and Davey out of school until this was all over. And he'd talk to Captain Gresham about getting some protection for them, a uniformed officer to stay in the Jamison apartment when Jack wasn't able to be there. Not much chance Lavelle would track the kids down. Highly unlikely. But just in case…. And if Gresham didn't take the threat seriously, if he thought an around-the-clock guard was an unjustified use of manpower, then something could be arranged with the guys, the other detectives; they'd help him, just as he'd help them if anything like this ever fell in their direction; each of them would give up a few hours of off-duty time, take a shift at the Jamisons'; anything for a buddy whose family was marked; it was part of the code. Okay. Fine. Everything would be all right.

The world, which had strangely receded when the telephone had begun to ring, now rushed back. Jack was aware of sound, first: a bleating automobile horn, laughter farther along the street, the clatter-clank of tire chains on the snowy pavement, the howling wind. The buildings crowded in around him. A pedestrian scurried past, bent into the wind; and here came three black teenagers, laughing, throwing snowballs at one another as they ran. The mist was gone, and he didn't feel dizzy or disoriented any longer. He wondered if there actually had been any mist in the first place, and he decided the eerie fog had existed only in his mind, a figment of his imagination. What must have happened was… he must have had an attack of some kind; yeah, sure, nothing more than that.

But exactly what kind of attack? And why had he been stricken by it? What had brought it on? He wasn't an epileptic. He didn't have low blood pressure. No other physical maladies, as far as he was aware. He had never experienced a fainting spell in his life; nothing remotely like that. He was in perfect health. So why?

And how had he known the phone call was for him?

He stood there for a while, thinking about it, as thousands of snowflakes fluttered like moths around him.

Eventually he realized he ought to call Faye and explain the situation to her, warn her to be certain that she wasn't followed when she picked up the kids at Wellton School. He turned to the pay phone, paused. No. He wouldn't make the call here. Not on the very phone Lavelle had used. It seemed ridiculous to suppose that the man could have a tap on a public phone — but it also seemed foolish to test the possibility.

Calmer — still furious but less frightened than he had been — he headed back toward the patrol car that was waiting for him.

Three-quarters of an inch of snow lay on the ground. The storm was turning into a full-fledged blizzard.

The wind had icy teeth. It bit.

VI

Lavelle returned to the corrugated metal shed at the rear of his property. Outside, winter raged; inside, fierce dry heat made sweat pop out of Lavelle's ebony skin and stream down his face, and shimmering orange light cast odd leaping shadows on the ribbed walls. From the pit in the center of the floor, a sound arose, a chilling susurration, as of thousands of distant voices, angry whisperings.

He had brought two photographs with him: one of Davey Dawson, the other of Penny Dawson. He had taken both photographs himself, yesterday afternoon, on the street in front of Wellton School. He had been in his van, parked almost a block away, and he had used a 35-mm Pentax with a telephoto lens. He had processed the film in his own closet-size darkroom.

In order to put a curse on someone and be absolutely certain that it would bring about the desired calamity, a Bocor required an icon of the intended victim. Traditionally, the priest prepared a doll, sewed it together from scraps of cotton cloth and filled it with sawdust or sand, then did the best he could to make the doll's face resemble the face of the victim; that done, the ritual was performed with the doll as a surrogate for the real person.

But that was a tedious chore made even more difficult by the fact that the average Bocor—lacking the talent and skills of an artist — found it virtually impossible to make a cotton face look sufficiently like anyone's real countenance. Therefore, the need always arose to embellish the doll with a lock of hair or a nail clipping or a drop of blood from the victim. Obtaining any one of those items wasn't easy. You couldn't just hang around the victim's barbershop or beauty salon, week after week, waiting for him or her to come in and get a hair cut. You couldn't very well ask him to save a few nail clippings for you the next time he gave himself a manicure. And about the only way to obtain a sample of the would-be victim's blood was to assault him and risk apprehension by the police, which was the very thing you were trying to avoid by striking at him with magic rather than with fists or a knife or a gun.

All of those difficulties could be circumvented by the use of a good photograph instead of a doll. As far as Lavelle knew, he was the only Bocor who had ever applied this bit of modern technology to the practice of voodoo. The first time he'd tried it, he hadn't expected it to work; however, six hours after the ritual was completed, the intended victim was dead, crushed under the wheels of a runaway truck. Since then, Lavelle had employed photographs in every ceremony that ordinarily would have called for a doll. Evidently, he possessed some of his brother Gregory's machine-age sensibility and faith in progress.

Now, kneeling on the earthen floor of the shed, beside the pit, he used a ballpoint pen to punch a hole in the top of each of the eight-by-ten glossiest Then he strung both photographs on a length of slender cord. Two wooden stakes had been driven into the dirt floor, near the brink of the pit, directly opposite each other, with the void between them. Lavelle tied one end of the cord to one of the wooden stakes, stretched it across the pit, and fastened the other end to the second stake. The pictures of the Dawson children dangled over the center of the hole, bathed in the unearthly orange glow that shone up from the mysterious, shifting bottom of it.

Soon, he would have to kill the children. He was giving lack Dawson a few hours yet, one last opportunity to back down, but he was fairly sure that Dawson would not relent.

He didn't mind killing children. He looked forward to it. There was a special exhilaration in the murder of the very young.

He licked his lips.

The sound issuing from the pit — the distant susurration that seemed to be composed of tens of thousands of hissing, whispering voices — grew slightly louder when the photographs were suspended where Lavelle wanted them. And there was a new, disquieting tone to the whispers, as well: not merely anger; not just a note of menace; it was an elusive quality that, somehow, spoke of monstrous needs, of a hideous voracity, of blood and perversion, the sound of a dark and insatiable hunger.

Lavelle stripped out of his clothes.

Fondling his genitals, he recited a short prayer.

He was ready to begin.

To the left of the shed door stood five large copper bowls. Each contained a different substance: white flour, corn meal, red brick powder, powdered charcoal, and powdered tennis root. Scooping up a handful of the red brick powder, allowing it to dribble in a measured flow from one end of his cupped hand, Lavelle began to draw an intricate design on the floor along the northern flank of the pit.

This design was called a veve, and it represented the figure and power of an astral force. There were hundreds of veves that a Houngon or a Bocor must know. Through the drawing of several appropriate veves prior to the start of a ritual, the priest was forcing the attention of the gods to the Oumphor, the temple, where the rites were to be conducted. The veve had to be drawn freehand, without the assistance of a stencil and most certainly without the guidance of a preliminary sketch scratched in the earth; nevertheless, though done freehand, the veve had to be symmetrical and properly proportioned if it were to have any effect. The creation of the veves required much practice, a sensitive and agile hand, and a keen eye.

Lavelle scooped up a second handful of red brick powder and continued his work. In a few minutes he had drawn the veve that represented Simbi Y-An-Kitha, one of the dark gods of Petro:

He scrubbed his hand on a clean dry towel, ridding himself of most of the brick dust. He scooped up a handful of flour and began to draw another veve along the southern flank of the pit. This pattern was much different from the first.

In all, he drew four intricate designs, one on each side of the pit. The third was rendered in charcoal powder. The fourth was done with powdered tennis root.

Then, careful not to disturb the veves, he crouched, naked, at the edge of the pit.

He stared down.

Down…

The floor of the pit shifted, boiled, changed, swirled, oozed, drew close, pulsed, receded. Lavelle had placed no fire or light of any kind inside the hole, yet it glowed and flickered. At first the floor of the pit was only three feet away, just as he had made it. But the longer he stared, the deeper it seemed to become. Now thirty feet instead of three. Now three hundred. Now three miles deep. Now as deep as the center of the earth itself. And deeper, still deeper, deeper than the distance to the moon, the stars, deeper than the distance to the edge of the universe.

When the bottom of the pit had receded to infinity, Lavelle stood up. He broke into a five-note song, a repetitive chant of destruction and death, and he began the ritual by urinating on the photographs that he had strung on the cord.

VII

In the squad car.

The hiss and crackle of the police-band radio.

Headed downtown. Toward the office.

Chain-rigged tires singing on the pavement.

Snowflakes colliding soundlessly with the windshield. The wipers thumping with metronomic monotony.

Nick Iervolino, the uniformed officer behind the wheel, startled Jack out of a near-trance: “You don't have to worry about my driving, Lieutenant.”

“I'm sure I don't,” Jack said.

“Been driving a patrol car for twelve years and never had an accident.”

“Is that right?”

“Never even put a scratch on one of my cars.”

“Congratulations.”

“Snow, rain, sleet — nothing bothers me. Never have the least little trouble handling a car. It's a sort of talent. Don't know where I get it from. My mother doesn't drive. My old man does, but he's one of the worst you've ever seen. Scares hell out of me to ride with him. But me — I have a knack for handling a car. So don't worry.”

“I'm not worried,” Jack assured him.

“You sure seemed worried.”

“How's that?”

“You were grinding the hell out of your teeth.”

“Was I?”

“I expected to hear your molars start cracking apart any second.

“I wasn't aware of it. But believe me, I'm not worried about your driving.”

They were approaching an intersection where half a dozen cars were angled everywhichway, spinning their tires in the snow, trying to get reoriented or at least out of the way. Nick lervolino braked slowly, cautiously, until they were traveling at a crawl, then found a snaky route through the stranded cars.

On the other side of the intersection, he said, “So if you aren't worried about my driving, what is eating at you?”

Jack hesitated, then told him about the call from Lavelle.

Nick listened, but without diverting his attention from the treacherous streets. When Jack finished, Nick said, “Jesus Christ Almighty!”

“My sentiments exactly,” Jack said.

“You think he can do it? Put a curse on your kids? One that'll actually work?”

Jack turned the question back on him. “What do you think?”

Nick pondered for a moment. Then: “I don't know. It's a strange world we live in, you know. Flying saucers, Big Foot, the Bermuda Triangle, the Abominable Snowman, all sorts of weird things out there. I like to read about stuff like that. Fascinates me. There're millions of people out there who claim to've seen a lot of truly strange things. Not all of it can be bunk — can it? Maybe some of it. Maybe most of it. But not all of it. Right?”

“Probably not all of it,” Jack agreed.

“So maybe voodoo works.”

Jack nodded.

“Of course, for your sake, and for the kids, I hope to God it doesn't work,” Nick said.

They traveled half a block in silence.

Then Nick said, “One thing bothers me about this Lavelle, about what he told you.”

“What's that?”

“Well, let's just say voodoo does work.”

“Okay.”

“I mean, let's just pretend.”

“I understand.”

“Well, if voodoo works, and if he wants you off the case, why would he use this magic power of his to kill your kids? Why wouldn't he just use it to kill you? That'd be a lot more direct.”

Jack frowned. “You're right.”

“If he killed you, they'd assign another detective to the case, and it isn't too likely the new man would be as open-minded as you are about this voodoo angle. So the easiest way for Lavelle to get what he wants is to eliminate you with one of his curses. Now why doesn't he do that — supposing the magic works, I mean?”

“I don't know why.”

“Neither do I,” Nick said. “Can't figure it. But I think maybe this is important, Lieutenant. Don't you?”

“How?”

“See, even if the guy's a lunatic, even if voodoo doesn't work and you're just dealing with a maniac, at least the rest of his story — all the weird stuff he told you — has its own kind of crazy logic. It's not filled with contradictions. Know what I mean?”

“Yes.”

“It hangs together, even if it is bullshit. It's strangely logical. Except for the threat against your kids. That doesn't fit. Illogical. It's too much trouble when he could just put a curse on you. So if he has the power, why doesn't he aim it at you if he's going to aim it at anyone?”

“Maybe it's just that he realizes he can't intimidate me by threatening my own life. Maybe he realizes the only way to intimidate me is through my kids.”

“But if he just destroyed you, had you chewed to pieces like all these others, then he wouldn't have to intimidate you. Intimidation is clumsy. Murder is cleaner. See what I mean? “

Jack watched the snow hitting the windshield, and he thought about what Nick had said. He had a hunch that it was important.

VIII

In the storage shed, Lavelle completed the ritual. He stood in orange light, breathing hard, dripping sweat. The beads of perspiration reflected the light and looked like droplets of orange paint. The whites of his eyes were stained by the same preternatural glow, and his well-buffed fingernails also gleamed orange.

Only one thing remained to be done in order to assure the deaths of the Dawson children. When the time came, when the deadline arrived for Jack Dawson and he didn't back off as Lavelle wanted, then Lavelle would only have to pick up two pair of ceremonial scissors and cut both ends of the slender cord from which the photographs hung. The pictures would fall into the pit and vanish in the furnacelike glow, and then the demonic powers would be set loose; the curse would be fulfilled. Penny and Davey Dawson wouldn't have a chance.

Lavelle closed his eyes and imagined he was standing over their bloody, lifeless bodies. That prospect thrilled him.

The murder of children was a dangerous undertaking, one which a Bocor did not contemplate unless he had no other choice. Before he placed a curse of death upon a child, he had better know how to shield himself from the wrath of the Rada gods, the gods of white magic, for they were infuriated by the victimization of children. If a Bocor killed an innocent child without knowing the charms and spells that would, subsequently, protect him from the power of the Rada, then he would suffer excruciating pain for many days and nights. And when the Rada finally snuffed him out, he wouldn't mind dying; indeed, he would be grateful for an end to his suffering.

Lavelle knew how to armor himself against the Rada. He had killed other children, before this, and had gotten away with it every time, utterly unscathed. Nevertheless, he was tense and uneasy. There was always the possibility of a mistake. In spite of his knowledge and power, this was a dangerous scheme.

On the other hand, if a Bocor used his command of supernatural machinery to kill a child, and if he got away with it, then the gods of Petro and Congo were so pleased with him that they bestowed even greater power upon him. If Lavelle could destroy Penny and Davey Dawson and deflect the wrath of Rada, his mastery of dark magic would be more awesome than ever before.

Behind his closed eyelids, he saw images of the dead, torn, mutilated bodies of the Dawson children.

He laughed softly.

In the Dawson apartment, far across town from the shed where Baba Lavelle was performing the ritual, two dozen silver-eyed creatures swayed in the shadows, in sympathy with the rhythm of the Bocor's chanting and singing. His voice could not be heard in the apartment, of course. Yet these things with demented eyes were somehow aware of it. Swaying, they stood in the kitchen, the living room — and in the dark hallway, where they watched the door with panting anticipation. When Lavelle reached the end of the ritual, all of the small beasts stopped swaying at exactly the same time, at the very instant Lavelle fell silent. They were rigid now. Watchful. Alert. Ready.

In a storm drain beneath Wellton School, other creatures rocked back and forth in the darkness, eyes gleaming, keeping time with Lavelle's chants, though he was much too far away to be heard. When he ceased chanting they stopped swaying and were as still, as alert, as ready to attack as were the uninvited guests in the Dawson apartment.

IX

The traffic light turned red, and the crosswalk filled with a river of heavily bundled pedestrians, their faces hidden by scarves and coat collars. They shuffled and slipped and slid past the front of the patrol car.

Nick Iervolino said, “I wonder…”

Jack said, “What?”

“Well, just suppose voodoo does work.”

“We've already been supposing it.”

“Just for the sake of argument.”

“Yeah, yeah. We've been through this already. Go on.”

“Okay. So why does Lavelle threaten your kids? Why doesn't he just put a curse on you, bump you off, forget about them? That's the question.”

“That's the question,” Jack agreed.

“Well, maybe, for some reason, his magic won't work on you.”

“What reason?”

“I don't know.”

“If it works on other people — which is what we're supposing — then why wouldn't it work on me?”

“I don't know.”

“If it'll work on my kids, why wouldn't it work on me?”

“I don't know. Unless… well, maybe there's something different about you.”

“Different? Like what?”

“I don't know.”

“You sound like a broken record.”

“I know.”

Jack sighed. “This isn't much of an explanation you've come up with.”

“Can you think of a better one?”

“No.”

The traffic light turned green. The last of the pedestrians had crossed. Nick pulled into the intersection and turned left.

After a while, Jack said, “Different, huh?”

“Somehow.”

As they headed farther downtown, toward the office they talked about it, trying to figure out what the difference might be.

X

At Wellton School, the last classes of the day were over at three o'clock. By three-ten, a tide of laughing, jabbering children spilled through the front doors, down the steps, onto the sidewalk, into the driving snow that transformed the gray urban landscape of New York into a dazzling fantasyland. Warmly dressed in knitted caps, earmuffs, scarves, sweaters, heavy coats, gloves, jeans, and high boots, they walked with a slight toddle, arms out at their sides because of all the layers of insulation they were wearing; they looked furry and cuddly and well-padded and stumpy-legged, not unlike a bunch of magically animated teddy bears.

Some of them lived near enough and were old enough to be allowed to walk home, and ten of them piled into a minibus that their parents had bought. But most were met by a mother or father or grandparent in the family car or, because of the inclement weather, by one of those same relatives in a taxi.

Mrs. Shepherd, one of the teachers, had the Dismissal Watch duty this week. She moved back and forth along the sidewalk, keeping an eye on everyone, making sure none of the younger kids tried to walk home, seeing that none of them got into a car with a stranger. Today, she had the added chore of stopping snowball battles before they could get started.

Penny and Davey had been told that their Aunt Faye would pick them up, instead of their father, but they couldn't see her anywhere when they came down the steps, so they moved off to one side, out of the way. They stood in front of the emerald-green wooden gate that closed off the service passageway between Wellton School and the townhouse next door. The gate wasn't flush with the front walls of the two buildings, but recessed eight or ten inches. Trying to stay out of the sharp cold wind that cruelly pinched their cheeks and even penetrated their heavy coats, they pressed their backs to the gate, huddling in the shallow depression in front of it.

Davey said, “Why isn't Dad coming?”

“I guess he had to work.”

“Why?”

“I guess he's on an important case.”

“What case?”

“I don't know.”

“It isn't dangerous, is it?”

“Probably not.”

“He won't get shot, will he?”

“Of course not.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I'm sure,” she said, although she wasn't sure at all.

“Cops get shot all the time.”

“Not that often.”

“What'll we do if Dad gets shot?”

Immediately after their mother's death, Davey had handled the loss quite well. Better than anyone had expected. Better than Penny had handled it, in fact. He hadn't needed to see a psychiatrist. He had cried, sure; he had cried a lot, for a few days, but then he had bounced back. Lately, however, a year and a half after the funeral, he had begun to develop an unnatural fear of losing his father, too. As far as Penny knew, she was the only one who noticed how terribly obsessed Davey was with the dangers — both real and imagined — of his father's occupation. She hadn't mentioned her brother's state of mind to her father, or to anyone else, for that matter, because she thought she could straighten him out by herself. After all, she was his big sister; he was her responsibility; she had certain obligations to him. In the months right after their mother's death, Penny had failed Davey; at least that was how she felt. She had gone to pieces then. She hadn't been there when he'd needed her the most. Now, she intended to make it up to him.

“What'll we do if Dad gets shot?” he asked again.

“He isn't going to get shot.”

“But if he does get shot. What'll we do?”

“We'll be all right.”

“Will we have to go to an orphanage?”

“No, silly.”

“Where would we go then? Huh? Penny, where would we go? ”

“We'd probably go to live with Aunt Faye and Uncle Keith.”

“Yuch.”

“They're all right.”

“I'd rather go live in the sewers.”

“That's ridiculous.”

“It'd be neat living in the sewers.”

“Neat is the last thing it'd be.”

“We could come out at night and steal our food.”

“From who — the wings asleep in the gutters?”

“We could have an alligator for a pet!”

“There aren't any alligators in the sewers.”

“Of course there are,” he said.

“That's a myth.”

“A what?”

“A myth. A made-up story. A fairytale.”

“You're nuts. Alligators live in sewers.”

“Davey—”

“Sure they do! Where else would alligators live?”

“Florida for one place.”

“Florida? Boy, you're flake. Florida!”

“Yeah, Florida.”

“Only old retired coots and gold-digging bimbos live in Florida.”

Penny blinked. “Where'd you hear that?”

“Aunt Faye's friend. Mrs. Dumpy.”

“Dumphy.”

“Yeah. Mrs. Dumpy was talking to Aunt Faye, see. Mrs. Dumpy's husband wanted to retire to Florida, and he went down there by himself to scout around for a place to live, but he never came back 'cause what he did was he ran off with a gold-digging bimbo. Mrs. Dumpy said only old coots and a lot of gold-digging bimbos live down there. And that's another good reason not to live with Aunt Faye. Her friends. They're all like Mrs. Dumpy. Always whining, you know? Jeez. And Uncle Keith smokes.”

“A lot of people smoke.”

“His clothes stink from the smoke.”

“It's not that bad.”

“And his breath! Grody!”

“Your breath isn't always like flowers, you know.”

“Who'd want breath like flowers?”

“A bumblebee.”

“I'm no bumblebee.”

“You buzz a lot. You never shut up. Always buzzbuzz-buzz.”

“I do not.”

“Buzzzzzzzzzz.”

“Better watch it. I might sting, too.”

“Don't you dare.”

“I might sting real bad.”

“Davey, don't you dare.”

“Anyway, Aunt Faye drives me nuts.”

“She means well, Davey.”

“She… twitters.”

“Birds twitter, not people.”

“She twitters like a bird.”

It was true. But at the advanced age of almost-twelve, Penny had recently begun to feel the first stirrings of comradeship with adults. She wasn't nearly as comfortable ridiculing them as she had been just a few months ago.

Davey said, “And she always nags Dad about whether we're being fed well.”

“She just worries about us.”

“Does she think Dad would starve us?”

“Of course not.”

“Then why's she always going on and on about it?”

“She's just… Aunt Faye.”

“Boy, you can say that again!”

An especially fierce gust of wind swept the street, found its way into the recess in front of the green gate. Penny and Davey shivered.

He said, “Dad's got a good gun, doesn't he? They give cops really good guns, don't they? They wouldn't let a cop go out on the street with a half-ass gun, would they?”

“Don't say 'half-ass.”

“Would they?”

“No. They give cops the best guns there are.”

“And Dad's a good shot, isn't he?”

“Yes.”

“How good?”

“Very good.”

“He's the best, isn't he?”

“Sure,” Penny said. “Nobody's better with a gun than Daddy.”

“Then the only way he's going to get it is if somebody sneaks up on him and shoots him in the back.”

“That isn't going to happen,” she said firmly.

“It could.”

“You watch too much TV.”

They were silent for a moment.

Then he said, “If somebody kills Dad, I want to get cancer and die, too.”

“Stop it, Davey.”

“Cancer or a heart attack or something.”

“You don't mean that.”

He nodded emphatically, vigorously: yes, yes, yes; he did mean it; he absolutely, positively did. “I asked God to make it happen that way if it has to happen.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, frowning at him.

“Each night. When I say my prayers. I always ask God not to let anything happen to Dad. And then I say, “Well, God, if you for some stupid reason just have to let him get shot, then please let me get cancer and die, too. Or let me get hit by a truck. Something.”

“That's morbid.”

He didn't say anything more.

He looked at the ground, at his gloved hands, at Mrs. Shepherd walking her patrol — everywhere but at Penny. She took hold of his chin, turned his face to her. Tears shimmered in his eyes. He was trying hard to hold them back, squinting, blinking.

He was so small. Just seven years old and not big for his age. He looked fragile and helpless, and Penny wanted to grab hold of him and hug him, but she knew he wouldn't want her to do that when they might be seen by some of the other boys in his class.

She suddenly felt small and helpless herself. But that wasn't good. Not good at all. She had to be strong for Davey's sake.

Letting go of his chin, she said, “Listen, Davey, we've got to sit down and talk. About Mom. About people dying, why it happens, you know, all that stuff, like what it means, how it's not the end for them but maybe only the beginning, up there in Heaven, and how we've got to just go on, no matter what. “Cause we do. We've got to go on. Mom would be very disappointed in us if we didn't just go on. And if anything happened to Dad — which nothing is going to happen to him — but if by some wild chance it did, then he'd want us to go on, just the way Mom would want. He'd be very unhappy with us if we—”

“Penny! Davey! Over here!”

A yellow cab was at the curb. The rear window was down, and Aunt Faye leaned out, waved at them.

Davey bolted across the sidewalk, suddenly so eager to be away from any talk of death that he was even glad to see his twittering old Aunt Faye.

Damn! I botched it, Penny thought. I was too blunt about it.

In that same instant, before she followed Davey to the taxi, before she even took one step, a sharp pain lanced through her left ankle. She twitched, yelped, looked down — and was immobilized by terror.

Between the bottom of the green gate and the pavement, there was a four-inch gap. A hand had reached through that gap, from the darkness in the covered serviceway beyond, and it had seized her ankle.

She couldn't scream. Her voice was gone.

It wasn't a human hand, either. Maybe twice the size of a cat's paw. But not a paw. It was a completely although crudely-formed hand with fingers and a thumb.

She couldn't even whisper. Her throat was locked.

The hand wasn't skin-colored. It was an ugly, mottled gray-green-yellow, like bruised and festering flesh. And it was sort of lumpy, a little ragged looking.

Breathing was no easier than screaming.

The small gray-green-yellow fingers were tapered and ended in sharp claws. Two of those claws had punctured her rubber boot.

She thought of the plastic baseball bat.

Last night. In her room. The thing under the bed.

She thought of the shining eyes in the school basement.

And now this.

Two of the small fingers had thrust inside her boot End were scraping at her, digging at her, tearing, gouging.

Abruptly, her breath came to her in a rush. She gasped, sucked in lungsful of frigid air, which snapped her out of the terror-induced trance that, thus far, had held her there by the gate. She jerked her foot away from the hand, tore loose, and was surprised that she was able to do so. She turned and ran to the taxi plunged inside, and yanked the door shut.

She looked back toward the gate. There was nothing unusual in sight, no creature with small claw-tipped hands, no goblin capering in the snow.

The taxi pulled away from Wellton School.

Aunt Faye and Davey were talking excitedly about the snowstorm which, Faye said, was supposed to dump ten or twelve inches before it was done. Neither of them seemed to be aware that Penny was scared half to death.

While they chattered, Penny reached down and felt her boot. At the ankle, the rubber was torn. A flap of it hung loose.

She unzippered the boot, slipped her hand inside, under her sock, and felt the wound on her ankle. It burned a little. When she brought her hand out of the boot, there was some blood glistening on her fingertips.

Aunt Faye saw it. “What's happened to you, dear?”

“It's okay,” Penny said.

“That's blood.”

“Just a scratch.”

Davey paled at the sight of the blood.

Penny tried to reassure him, although she was afraid that her voice was noticeably shaky and that her face would betray her anxiety: “It's nothing, Davey. I'm all right.”

Aunt Faye insisted on changing places with Davey, so she would be next to Penny and could have a closer look at the injury. She made Penny take off the boot, and she peeled down the sock, revealing a puncture wound and several scratches on the ankle. It was bleeding, but not very much; in a couple of minutes, even unattended, it would stop.

“How'd this happen?” Aunt Faye demanded.

Penny hesitated. More than anything, she wanted to tell Faye all about the creatures with shining eyes. She wanted help, protection. But she knew that she couldn't say a word. They wouldn't believe her. After all, she was The Girl Who Had Needed A Psychiatrist. If she started babbling about goblins with shining eyes, they'd think she was having a relapse; they would say she still hadn't adjusted to her mother's death, and they would make an appointment with a psychiatrist. While she was off seeing the shrink, there wouldn't be anyone around to keep the goblins away from Davey.

“Come on, come on,” Faye said. “Fess up. What were you doing that you shouldn't have been doing?”

“Huh?”

“That's why you're hesitating. What were you doing that you knew you shouldn't be doing?”

“Nothing,” Penny said.

“Then how'd you get this cut?”

“I… I caught my boot on a nail.”

“Nail? Where?”

“On the gate.”

“What gate? ”

“Back at the school, the gate where we were waiting for you. A nail was sticking out of it, and I got caught up on it.”

Faye scowled. Unlike her sister (Penny's mother), Faye was a redhead with sharp features and gray eyes that were almost colorless. In repose, hers was a pretty enough face; however, when she wanted to scowl, she could really do a first-rate job of it. Davey called it her “witch look.”

She said, “Was it rusty?”

Penny said, “What?”

“The nail, of course. Was it rusty?”

“I don't know.”

“Well, you saw it, didn't you? Otherwise, how'd you know it was a nail?”

Penny nodded. “Yeah. I guess it was rusty.”

“Have you had a tetanus shot?”

“Yeah.”

Aunt Faye peered at her with undisguised suspicion. “Do you even know what a tetanus shot is?”

“Sure.”

“When did you get it?”

“First week of October.”

“I wouldn't have imagined that your father would think of things like tetanus shots.”

“They gave it to us at school,” Penny said.

“Is that right?” Faye said, still doubtful.

Davey spoke up: “They make us take all kinds of shots at school. They have a nurse in, and all week we get shots. It's awful. Makes you feel like a pin cushion. Shots for mumps and measles. A flu shot. Other stuff. I hate it.”

Faye seemed to be satisfied. “Okay. Just the same, when we get home, we'll wash that cut out really good, bathe it in alcohol, get some iodine on it, and a proper bandage.”

“It's only a scratch,” Penny said.

“We won't take chances. Now put your boot back on, dear.”

Just as Penny got her foot in the boot and pulled up the zipper, the taxi hit a pothole. They were all bounced up and thrown forward with such suddenness and force that they almost fell off the seat.

“Young man,” Faye said to the driver, even though he was at least forty years old, her own age, “where on earth did you learn to drive a car?”

He glanced in the rearview mirror. “Sorry, lady.”

“Don't you know the streets of this city are a mess?”

Faye demanded. “You've got to keep your eyes open.”

“I try to,” he said.

While Faye lectured the driver on the proper way to handle his cab, Penny leaned back against the seat, closed her eyes, and thought about the ugly little hand that had torn her boot and ankle. She tried to convince herself that it had been the hand of an ordinary animal of some kind; nothing strange; nothing out of the Twilight Zone. But most animals had paws, not hands. Monkeys had hands, of course. But this wasn't a monkey. No way. Squirrels had hands of a sort, didn't they? And raccoons. But this wasn't a squirrel or a raccoon, either. It wasn't anything she had ever seen or read about.

Had it been trying to drag her down and kill her? Right there on the street?

No. In order to kill her, the creature — and others like it, others with the shining silver eyes — would have had to come out from behind the gate, into the open, where Mrs. Shepherd and others would have seen them. And Penny was pretty sure the goblins didn't want to be seen by anyone but her. They were secretive. No, they definitely hadn't meant to kill her back there at the school; they had only meant to give her a good scare, to let her know they were still lurking around, waiting for the right opportunity….

But why?

Why did they want her and, presumably, Davey, instead of some other kids?

What made goblins angry? What did you have to do to make them come after you like this?

She couldn't think of anything she had done that would make anyone terribly angry with her; certainly not goblins.

Confused, miserable, frightened, she opened her eyes and looked out the window. Snow was piling up everywhere. In her heart, she felt as cold as the icy, windscoured street beyond the window.