Nocturnal

A Hospital Visit

Chief Amy Zou stared down at Jebediah Erickson. He looked so much older than the last time she’d seen him. Of course, that had been twenty-six years ago, when he’d left the asylum.

The asylum that she’d sent him to.

Amy had once been a snot-nosed rookie who knew better than the older cops. She and Rich had put the pieces together, connecting the symbols to the silver arrowheads, tracking down Alder Jessup, quietly building a case against Jebediah Erickson even as her superiors tried to shut her up, tried to get her to back off. They’d even promoted her to inspector as a form of hush money. She’d taken the promotion, but hadn’t stopped — at the time, she thought it poetic justice that she used her new power to further her efforts. She’d found the right judge to hear her case. She’d lined up the right person in the DA’s office.

Back then, Erickson hadn’t been some old man in a hospital bed, bandaged, loaded with tubes leading into his nose, his arm. Back then he’d been death personified. Just looking into those remorseless eyes had made her cross herself.

Now, he just seemed old. Scars covered his arms, his neck, his chest. Nasty scars, too — long, curving things that must have required hundreds of stitches. This man was a warrior. The scars told the story of his battles.

“Goddamit, Bryan,” she said. “You don’t know what you’ve done.”

She should have fired Bryan and Pookie sooner. Pookie couldn’t let something like this go. The Blake Johansson situation had proved that — if Pookie smelled crooked cops, he went after them. Maybe she should have switched him to Internal Affairs years ago.

If she had told Pookie and Bryan the truth about Erickson, about the monsters, would those guys have pursued the case anyway? Based on their track records, she’d assumed they would have done exactly that. And how could she hold it against them? They had done exactly the same thing she had done.

When her efforts put Erickson in the loony bin, how many people had died from her stubbornness?

More important, how many people would die now, because of Bryan’s?

This wasn’t the first time Erickson had been out of commission. He’d been injured twice before that she knew of, but both times he’d left the hospital the very next day. This time, however, he didn’t look like he was going anywhere. Was he just old, or was there something else?

Hopefully he would recover soon … before Marie’s Children realized that they could once again kill at will.